The Infinity Brigade #3, Stone Breaker

by Andrew Beery

  It was at this point that we finally got to see that fancy black Ashtoreth armor in action. The side of the colony ship we were attempting to gain access to opened up and a good thirty of the buggers marched out in nice orderly lines. It was an impressive display, if a little foolhardy in as much as this was an active combat zone and marching all pretty-like was an easy way to attract bullets.

  I suspect the Gators wanted to impress us with the capabilities of their armor. In fairness, it was reasonably tough stuff. Our kinetics just bounced off of the interlocking plated armor.

  “Now isn’t that some pretty window dressing,” JJ said over the comms. “I like what that shade of black does for them. Can we think maybe about getting our armor in black next time… I mean it does kind of make a statement… Here I am… I’m big and I’m bad.”

  “Can it JJ,” I said. “Let’s see what it takes to punch a hole in it. Unleash some hurt on those guys.”

  I could almost hear the smile light up JJ’s face. “My pleasure AG… It’s Clobberin’ Time!”

  I have to give my guys credit. When I ask them to ‘unleash some hurt’ they tend to comply with a certain degree of… enthusiasm. It wasn’t long before the pretty lines of black Ashtoreth armor were in a state of disarray.

  After a few minutes I knew why they had not deployed the armor earlier. Our newer Stark suits are like a second skin. Operating them is no more difficult than walking… but even so, you have to be careful not to overpower simple gestures or actions… things like running or swinging a rifle up to fire could become dangerous without proper care and training.

  The extra speed and strength tends to confuse the senses and can cause a soldier to over compensate. The result can be hilarious to watch and exhausting for the inexperienced soldier.

  It seemed the Ashtoreth armor was even worse to use for the uninitiated. It looked like the systems required more training to use then our original Starks… which had been little more than robotic shells. Those suits had required months of training before we even dared to activate the weapons systems.

  Initially, the Ashtoreth armor appeared to repel our normal kinetic rounds. Unfortunately for them, our fusion powered suits could crank up the energy profile of our kinetics considerably. At about 80%, we finally started seeing some results. Rather than hitting the black armor and simply knocking the Gators over… our rounds started shattering the overlapping ceramic plates.

  What this meant was their new weapons could hurt us… and our weapons could hurt them. In my mind, defective though my mind might be, a certain order had been restored to the universe.

  The fact that both sides in our little struggle had access to resurrection technology… a technology that effectively made us immortal… served to change the dynamics of war in a way I felt was antithetical to the realities of war.

  War was supposed to be a horrible thing that inflicted damage to both the living and their legacy. That was why and how you learned to avoid it. Despite being a damn good Marine, I’d always felt the best wars were the ones you could avoid fighting.

  All that said… this was a war we were fighting, and I intended to win it. The Ashtoreth could not be allowed to continue enslaving other races… and they could not be allowed to continue to infiltrate and destroy the Galactic Coalition of Planets.

  Ultimately, winning would come down to which side used their assets to greatest advantage. In my mind, that was us. We were the ones with all the aces.

  If you are going to fight someone it’s better to be on the side that had a few aces up their sleeves. Trust me. I’ve been in situations where I was out gunned and undermanned for the operation at hand. It bites the big one. I don’t like biting the big one.

  The Gators had advantages in terms of position; time to prepare; access to resources on site and sheer number. We had the Infinity Brigade. Overall, the power balance was in our favor. While it was true that we had borrowed regeneration technology from the Ashtoreth, we had extended it. Our version of the tech included constantly refreshed and up-to-date memory engrams… and every marine was registered for replication once they entered boot camp.

  The Gators, on the other hand, relied on periodic memory updates. And the number of Gators that got access to regeneration technologies was extremely limited.

  That meant that our soldiers learned from their experiences in the battlefield every time they bought the Big-D. Whereas the few Gators that were allowed access to the bio-gens, kept stepping back in time… at least as far as their memories were concerned.

  This simple fact changed the way that the Infinity Brigade fought. Absent the bio-gens my men, as well as Admiral Kimbridge, would never have allowed me to be on the frontline. Admiral Kimbridge still wasn’t a fan of my being directly exposed to enemy fire as my death, however temporary, would mean I would be incommunicado for a few hours while my new body was built, and my memory engrams implanted.

  The only reason I got away with it at all was the two-fold argument I made every time she brought the subject up. First, I was more effective when I had my own God-given mark-one optics on site and second… I was simply following her long-established example of leading from the trenches.

  “Sergeant Peters,” I yelled.

  “Yes, Sir” came the immediate response. I could tell from his heavy breathing that whatever he was up to, he was working hard at it.

  “I’m sending you a map of the power conduits feeding those guns. Number four has been damaged. If your guys can lob a couple of well-placed mortars in their general direction we might get lucky and take one of them out.”

  “Can do sir. My infrared is showing a considerable amount of heat being generated by the lines feeding emplacements two and three. We may get lucky there too and see the whole left flank go down.”

  “That would be nice. Coordinate with the RRT and have your boys and gals ready to take advantage of any opening that we get. The sooner we break this nut open the sooner we can get out of this mud.”

  The RRT was our rapid response team. They were special trained and equipped to move fast and hit hard. What they couldn’t do, because they didn’t carry a lot of ordinance, was to hold a position for long once they had taken it. This was why it was essential to get Peter’s heavier armed Fast Response Team in behind them as soon as possible. Between the two groups they could hold virtually any position long enough to get our heavies in place.

  Because my mind is verifiably defective, and I get easily distracted at times, I stopped to ponder the Corps love of three-letter-acronyms… or TLAs. I had organized my marines into three major classes of fighters. Our RRT, FRT and HATs or heavy assault teams. If the first two groups were the strike and fangs of the snake… the HATs were the constricting crushers.

  You didn’t want to mess with any one of them but once the heavies had you… you best be writing that farewell letter to mom.

  I had Hiller re-suit in a modified RRT stark and lead the RRT. I figured he earned it given that he got most of his men fragged. That was another oddity of the Infinity Brigade… getting your marines fragged was not the serious offense it used to be. The Big-D just wasn’t what it used to be. It reminded me of my Sunday school as a kid on Mars. “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”

  It turned out handing the RRT to Hiller was a stroke of genius. The man was seriously pissed that his previous team had been hit so hard. Nothing in God’s universe is more dangerous than a pissed off marine… a lesson the Gators were about to learn.

  I watched as Hiller attacked the damaged Point Defense Gun. He flew a drone in front of the thing and had it project a hologram of an advancing marine… giving the Gators the finger. It was a little thing, but sometimes it’s the little things that add the necessary flourish to get a job done.

  Now normally the Gators would have scanned the hologram and realized it was a decoy, but we had been blasting the hell out of them for the better part of an hour and they were beginning to get careless. They took the bai
t and blasted the hell out of the hologram. The finger stayed extended.

  It’s likely, at this point, that the Gators realized they had been played… but physics being what they are… they simply had no way of recharging their gun fast enough to stop Hiller and the RRT from rushing their position.

  That didn’t mean they didn’t try. Some bright guy on their side decided to push the power conduits as far as he could. The result was quite spectacular but ultimately disappointing, I’m sure, for the Ashtoreth soldiers manning the gun. I suppose it’s possible that some of them survived the overload… but I doubt it.

  Once the Gator’s defensive parameter was breached, I led my heavies on a flanking maneuverer that brought us up behind the other gun emplacements. We wiped them out pretty quickly.

  I took a round in my left shoulder. It hurt like a mother until my medical nanites could handle the situation. I don’t mind pain… unless it’s my own. Then it tends to piss me off. Did I mention how dangerous a pissed off marine can be?

  ***

  Processing Unit Two-One-One-Six signaled his brethren. He had located a populated world. There was no indication that the Ashtoreth had been there but there seemed to be a large mix of races populating three of the moons. One of these races included the race identified to be humans. As humans had been known to have had contact with the Ashtoreth, a determination was made. All three moons would be cleansed.

  Chapter 10: Hello Your Kingship… How’s Your Day Going?

  “Stop farting around and blow the damn thing open,” I yelled.

  I was still irritated at taking a round in my shoulder. The wound was plugged with a sterilizing foam that my suit’s AI had injected. My medical nanites were repairing the damage, but it itched like hell. With all the advancements they had built into the Starks over the years, the one thing you cannot do is scratch an itch… clearly an engineering flaw.

  We were at what I assumed was the main cargo bay of our target. The access panel was confusing as hell and seemed to be deactivated. I would have asked Mak to help us out, but my newest lieutenant and friend had just got to experience his first Big-D. I have to hand it to the Gator. He went out with a bang… even JJ was impressed. I checked my AI’s chronometer. He should be coming out of a pickle jar on the Yorktown any time now.

  As if he knew what I had been thinking, JJ came forward to blow the door, but I waved him off. I wasn’t that desperate yet. The one thing I had learned in this life was that JJ and explosives were a bad combination… for both sides. Ultimately, I had Sergeant Peters do the deed. The boy had taken the task of blowing things up to an artform. If I hadn’t thought the task an impossible one, I might have ordered JJ to take lessons from Peters.

  A perfect marine-size hole was blown through the door with minimal collateral damage. Hiller’s RRT was through before the debris from the shaped charge had even had a chance to settle. I followed right behind them. In truth, I’d have led the charge… that defective brain thing again… but with my bum shoulder even I had to admit I wasn’t the smartest choice to go through first.

  The space was massive and there seemed to be a large amount of earth-moving equipment. I suppose that made sense given the size and scope of the subterranean space we had been fighting in.

  Several shots rang out but because of the echoes and machinery, I was having trouble locating where they were coming from. My AI was still doing a forensic analysis of the sound patterns when Hiller pushed me hard enough to sending me flying a good ten feet in the air. I’d have given him a piece of my mind, but I watched his body get riddled with about twenty kinetic rounds. He was dead before his corpse hit the ground. I guess I’ve give him a buy on roughing up a superior officer.

  My arm whipped around and fired off a tight burst. It caught the offending Gator straight between the eyes. I don’t know if this was one of the Gator’s that had access to the Ashtoreth regen tech, but I hoped so, because his previous husk wasn’t going to be doing him any good anymore.

  “McKinsey, work your way around to the left. See if you can’t get a better angle on those defenders.”

  “Roger that, Sir”

  I waved JJ over. “We need to put some pressure on these guys, so the Sergeant can move his men to the left. Can you create some noise and get their attention?”

  JJ simply nodded.

  That, in and of itself, should have been a clue… but I was distracted by an intense itch in my shoulder that had suddenly gotten worse thanks to being manhandled by Commander Hiller. I think, in hindsight, I might have been guilty of wording my order poorly… especially knowing the impulsive nature of the man I was speaking to. Such are the fortunes of war.

  JJ had his team crank their rifles up to 110%. Given the nuclear power-packs our suits carried… that was a lot of juice to use to push a kinetic round down a barrel. Given enough time, that type of abuse was known to slag a rifle. I’m pretty sure JJ was well-aware of this little fact but the chance to go all-out in chaos-mode, even for a few minutes, was too great a temptation for a guy like Lieutenant Hammond.

  Twenty marines started spraying the massive cargo bay with a steady stream of ultra-high-speed depleted uranium rounds. The heavy earth-moving equipment in the bay had never been intended to absorb that much punishment. I have to admit… it was impressive. I imagined it was like swinging a scythe to cut down wheat. Sadly, this wheat shattered and sent diamond-hard shards in all directions.

  This wasn’t much of a problem for my marines as our starks could handle quite a bit of abuse. Sadly, the same was not true of the lightly armored Gators that had been unlucky enough to be in the hanger with us.

  I had wanted to capture a few of them to get an idea of what we might be facing as we moved deeper into the ship. Unfortunately, the only two that survived wouldn’t be talking to anybody soon. I detailed a couple of my men to carry the wounded Ashtoreth out to our forward aid station.

  Sergeant McKinsey walked over to my position. Our stark suits could be configured to overlay a real-time, ghosted image of person’s face on their helmets. This was how I could see the look of confusion on the man’s face. By the time Lieutenant Jeremy James Hammond had gotten done getting the attention of the Gators… there were no Gators left.

  “Don’t sweat it Sergeant,” I said with a disgusted shake of my head and a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “The fault was mine. I wasn’t specific enough. On the bright side, last time JJ used a tactical nuke… so I guess we can say he’s learning restraint.”

  ***

  Twenty minutes later, and quite a bit deeper into the bowels of the ship…after an untold number of running fire fights, we finally gained access to a working computer console. The Gators had been shutting them down as they retreated from our advancing position. They had correctly anticipated our need to get better intel on the layout of the ship. It was designed to carry over thirty thousand souls. Finding a handful of royals in a space that big, with the two hundred marines I had on hand, was daunting.

  Having secured the terminal, I called for my secret weapon. I was placing a lot of hope on the bet that our resident super-hacker, Lieutenant Jon Robison, was going to be able to break into the Ashtoreth systems and get us the intel we needed.

  Jon was a strange bird. I suspect it was a result of an unusual youth. He had cut his space legs on a clipper-class transport when he was little more than a teenager. The clippers were old sublight ships that resembled ancient ocean-going submarines rather than modern spacecrafts. They were small, crowded and tragically underpowered. These realities forced a number of compromises on the crews of such ships.

  Clippers did not feature the robust safety systems normal to modern starships. To reduce the chance of fires and extend life support systems, oxygen levels were kept at a bare minimum. Humans typically like a respectable 20 to 21 percent oxygen to inert gas mix. Fires begin to happen spontaneously when numbers exceed 22 percent. Clippers kept the mix closer to 14 percent. The human body can reasonably tolerate and function…
but there were side effects.

  Low O2, warm bunking to save cabin space, limited shower facilities to conserve water recycling demands, dehydrated food… all served to shape the character of a man in strange and peculiar ways.

  Sometimes, the result was a man that could adapt and overcome any obstacle to accomplish the mission. Sometimes, the result was a man who had a permanent case of ocular proctitis or more commonly, a crappy outlook on life. Sometimes, you ended up with an odd mix of the two. A man capable of overcoming any obstacle but still finding a way to focus on the fertilizer and not the flower. Jon was this last, but tempered with an odd sense of humor that recognized and embraced his ‘unusual’ world view.

  He made a hell of a marine and had picked up some impressive hacking skills along the way. He tied into the computer interface we had located and in a few minutes, he and Yorky were attempting to breach the Ashtoreth layered security.

  I had no doubt Jon would get the job done. The real question was how long would it take him?

  I hedged my bets and sent six teams to secure the shuttle bay and the five access ports we had identified. Our ENOs had located them along the exterior of the ship. As part of their function, the ENOs had tagged each one. Although our teams didn’t have deck layouts they followed these tracking beacons left by the ENOs.

  Two things happened simultaneously. Jon slapped the wall and declared proudly that he and Yorky had complete access to the Ashtoreth systems and second, my comm-link started buzzing. Charlie squad had run into twenty of those black clad Ashtoreth armored troops. They seemed to be escorting a party of six towards one of those aforementioned exits.

  “Charlie, engage lightly. If that is the royal party, we need them alive to order a stand down.”

  “Roger that, Sir” came the crisp response.