Star Crusades Nexus: The Third Trilogy

by Michael G. Thomas

  “Tessuk?”

  The alien warrior turned about completely to look at Jack and lifted the corner of his mouth up. The translator caused a slight pause in his voice, but it wasn’t enough to spoil the flow or intent.

  “Correct.”

  He then nodded back toward where they had all started.

  “General Gun has given orders for us to move off the mountain and back to the edge of the city. NHA regiments are holding a line two hundred meters wide in front of the Three Sisters. You will join us?”

  Jack thought he heard a question, but the one thing the translator circuits had a problem with was intonation. Even so, Jack was just a private, and all he could do was to go where he was told. Sergeant Stone was now back on his feet and moved to the fallen Thegn. He looked back to Jack.

  “We’ve heard about these ones already. According to the last reports, these are a low level command unit, one to give a degree of autonomy to the local ground troops.”

  Jack was surprised to hear this.

  “I’ve not heard this, Sergeant.”

  The man smiled at his response.

  “Well, now you have.”

  Tessuk pointed at the bodies.

  “Our own information matches this. We know their forces are only partially autonomous. They rely upon Biomechs to command their armies, with command nodes providing a link in the chain of command.”

  “We call them Cores.”

  Tessuk looked back to Sergeant Stone.

  “With this commander dead, their attacking force will fall back on their basic programming. That is until they receive new orders.”

  “So why are the last few heading back?”

  A screaming sound of a low-velocity howitzer round whizzed overhead and vanished off far into the city ruins. Dozens more followed, as the myriad of gun systems fitted around the mountain put down heavy gunfire onto the lower ground around it.

  “Because they’re regrouping for another attack,” said Jack.

  Tessuk nodded feverishly in agreement.

  “Yes, General Gun said an attack was imminent. Follow me, we have a pre-prepared position at the Three Sisters with more of my brothers.”

  There was no further discussion, and the small group of marines and aliens abandoned the position they’d fought so hard to defend and moved back around the slope. As they filed away, a large platoon of fresh Helion conscripts took their place. Jack looked at them as they went past and only then realized they carried just one thermal weapon between two. He grabbed one and stopped him, a short, scrawny looking man. His clothing was covered in a torn robe, and he wore a homespun covering on his head. His face was covered in a civilian respirator designed for workers in the deep core mining installations.

  “What are you doing here? Where’s the NHA?”

  The Helion moved his right arm in an odd circular gesture and moved on.

  “Private, they are the Ghosts,” said Tessuk.

  Jack watched another two move closely by before paying any more attention to the Khreenk commander. Both of these carried a box of ammunition, but it was the group following that truly stunned him. They were juveniles, teenagers to his eyes, and they wore nothing military other than poor quality quilted jackets and hats. On their shoulders they carried sticks with a cylindrical device attached.

  “And those?”

  Tessuk lifted his arms up as if not understanding Jack’s words.

  “Those with experience and training are using guns provided by the Animosh. The juveniles, well, they lack the training or the equipment to fight with our weapons. The lances are something we helped them construct.”

  Jack raised an eyebrow and his cheek twitched.

  “You did what?”

  Jana put her hand on Jack’s shoulder but looked equally outraged.

  “You’ve helped build weapons, for children?”

  Tessuk looked to her and nodded.

  “Of course. The Helion population of this ruined city is small, and we’re using their resources to the best of our ability. The juveniles are quick in a fight and knowledgeable of the terrain.”

  He called to one of the young women who looked a teenager. After exchanging a few words, she handed her weapon to Tessuk. It was roughly two meters long and consisted of a simple hollow shaft to which a small device was affixed. Tessuk pointed to the tip.

  “This lance is designed to be a single use device. The user simple stabs at their foe, and this charge will send a shaped warhead directly ahead.”

  Jack shook his head in horror, yet Tessuk continued his explanation.

  “The materials are easily available from the mining supplies and allow even an untrained child to help in this fight. In the last assault, a team of civilians brought down an Eques walker on their own.”

  Jack lifted his hand to his face and wiped his brow.

  “And how many made it back?”

  Tessuk did his best to smile, but the translator was unable to hide its synthetic, inhuman voice from him.

  “My friend, the Biomechs will kill every one of us. They do not recognize male or female, soldier or civilian. Children die the same as the rest of us. They are an asset, an expendable asset, and one we have to use if we want to live.”

  He tried to smile, but the alien expression came out more like a grimace.

  “When this is over, they can always make more!”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The origins of Spartan were always a mystery, with little to differentiate him from the myriad of other troubled men and women that joined the Marine Corps. Over time there were rumors that his parents had been killed, and the orphaned boy had grown up a variety of children’s homes. Some information obtained in the War from the criminals on Prometheus collaborated this part of the story. Only those deep inside Alliance Intelligence had any real idea where had had come from, and even then, only in fragments. What little evidence of his past was destroyed long before the Uprising even began. It took the war with the Biomechs to bring the truth to the surface, a truth that even Spartan had never known.

  The Rise of Spartan

  The West Bank, Old Spascia City, Spascia

  The images displaying on every marine’s visor overlays was a shocking scene. In previous wars this kind of information would have been kept quiet for days, perhaps even years. The imagery from the drones showed the damage caused by the initial atomic strikes on four cities. They were small and lightly populated with much lower structures than on the Helion capital world.

  Not any more though.

  Fires burned in a hundred places, and long columns of refugees moved away from the ruins. There were other cities still controlled by the New Helion Army, but Jack doubted any of these survivors would be heading to Old Spascia City. The ruins were barely habitable before the siege. After a month of continuous combat, the place was nothing more than a shell.

  Why do they even want this place now?

  Jack trudged on, his feet lifting and dragging in time with the other marines as they trudged over the rocks and down to where the four landing pads remained.

  “I can’t believe they did it,” said Jana, for what must have been the tenth time.

  Jack looked in her direction but found it hard to speak. The shock of what he’d just seen had simply stunned him. Corporal Frewyn walked in front of them and heard Jana speak.

  “It was gonna happen. Just be glad it hasn’t happened here.”

  Jack shook his head miserably.

  “We could be next.”

  They moved past a group of civilians who were arguing with a squad of NHA soldiers. After what almost sounded like the early stages of a fight, the group of civilians split up, the oldest taking a young child in the direction of the mountain. The others were directed back to the bridges.

  Innocent or guilty, we’re all in hell now, he thought.

  All were protected by a pair of large tracked vehicles that had been modified with metallic rods extending upwards like giant spikes. Even as they moved
alongside them, the two on the nearest platform started their engines and drove to one side. Seconds later an Alliance Cobra shuttle rushed in and landed. As soon as it touched down, the doors lifted up, and a squad of marines jumped in. The craft wasted no time in getting airborne, and the tracked mobile barrier vehicles moved back into position.

  “Nothing will land there without permission,” Jana said, doing her best to sound confident.

  Jack wasn’t the only one that could see the cables running around the flanks of the platform, or the burned shapes at key points in the foundations. He suspected they were connected to hidden charges designed to tear the platforms apart in an emergency. Sergeant Stone spotted him looking and pointed to the nearest cable.

  “You noticed, huh? They’re the last resort. If it looks like this place is under a full-scale assault, and they might secure the pad, well, then we set off the charges.”

  He stopped and looked back at the rest of the squad marching in single file. He then leaned in to Jack, as though sharing some great secret.

  “The trouble is if we blow them, we consign our resupply to parachute drops. Our ships can hide up there, but if they can’t land,” he shrugged, “No landing pads, no reinforcements, no heavy weapons, and no chance of evacuation.”

  They moved on past the pad and to the edge of the chasm. Even since they’d crossed the last time it had changed. The drop to the bottom was much too far down to see. It reminded him of images of Martian canyons, yet here the rocks were razor sharp and deadly to man and machine alike. The bridge was wide, easily big enough to drive a pair of Marine Corps Bulldogs along the entire length. Engineers had erected barriers every fifty meters to create a chicane effect to reduce access and drop speeds of anything making its way across. A female marine laughed from further ahead where she supervised a quadruple barreled flak gun.

  “Look, Helion air cover. That’s not something you see every day, is it?”

  Jack looked up and watched the crescent-shaped aircraft scream overhead. It was fast and from this far away appeared more streamlined and advanced, but it didn’t make it far before a pair of missiles had launched from inside the city and raced up to reach it. A series of dull thuds rumbled from the mountain that loomed ever present.

  “Wild Weasel runs,” Sergeant Stone said to anybody that was listening.

  Jana looked to Jack for an explanation, one he would quite happily have kept to himself. She watched persistently though until he relented.

  “It’s a special type of mission performed by fighters to force them to use their ground-to-air weapon systems. Now our artillery will hit their launch sites and take out the missiles systems.”

  “Isn’t that dangerous for the pilots?”

  Jack raised his eyebrows in mock surprise.

  “Uh, yeah.”

  Another pair of Helion fighters moved in, but this time they arced downwards and opened fire with wing-mounted rockets. These were not the precision munition usually associated with the Helions. Instead they were simple fin stabilized rockets that made a screaming sound as they loosed off to strike the ground. One explosion after another rocket the site that had already been pounded by artillery.

  “Oh, man, they do not want to be down there!” said one of the marines.

  On they moved, making slow progress over the bridge. It seemed to take an age, but it did give Jack the opportunity to turn his mind to something else. The chasm.

  “Why did they build the city right here?” Jana asked.

  Jack contemplated just shaking his head, but for some reason it was a question to which he actually had an answer for. During their retreat from Eos, he’d spent some considerable time studying the planets of Helios. Partially out of interest, but primarily to keep his mind occupied and away from the horrors of what he’d seen. These alien worlds contained so much he had never even heard of before, yet so much felt familiar. The roads, the vehicles, even the basic infrastructure had something that made him feel at home.

  “Before the last war, this chasm was all water, right up to the edge of the city. Look, right there.”

  He pointed off to the east, in the direction they were currently heading, and picked out the cliff edge.

  “Look at the top fifty meters. Notice the discoloration?”

  Jana nodded. She opened her mouth to speak, but Sergeant Stone lifted his hand.

  “Make way marines!”

  A trio of Bulldog Mobile Gun vehicles approached, and the marines moved to the side of the bridge to let them pass. They were identical to the standard issue marine vehicle, apart from the large turret-mounted weapon. They were effectively wheeled tanks, each one a potent addition to the Marine Corps arsenal. As soon as they were past, the marines went back into the open space and continued their march.

  “The colors show where the level of the water used to be. The dams were destroyed in the last war, and the water rerouted to starve out the city.”

  “Why didn’t they repair the dams?”

  Jack looked to her and then to the city where shells continued to fall directly in front of them. It was strange for him as they advanced from the safety of their mountain stronghold and back across the river. The horizon was like something from a horror story. Thick columns of smoke rose up high, and fires burned in a hundred places. It was possible even at this distance to make out the tracer trails from a thousand different weapons.

  “Jack?”

  He looked back to her.

  “What?”

  “The dams, Jack, remember?”

  Jana looked exasperated, but it had little effect on him. Every step they took over the bridge took them a step closer to the Spascia Meatgrinder, as it was becoming known.

  “You know, for every ten marines we send back over these bridges, only half come back.”

  Jana sighed and shook her head in annoyance.

  “I do know, Jack. I’ve been here as long as you. Now, those dams.”

  “Okay, okay. The dams are massive affairs. Why would the Helion authorities pay to rebuild them just to provide water to a dead city?”

  He took another few steps before muttering so low only she could hear it.

  “Nobody really cares about this city, not even the Helions.”

  They continued over the bridge in silence, but some of the other marines spoke to their comrades. There was a clear distinction between those that had recently joined the unit, and the most seasoned marines that had already seen weeks of combat. The newest spoke the loudest. They finally made it to the other side and on into the ruins of the city. The unit had increased to two under strength marine platoons with just a single squad from Jack’s original unit. He counted them twice, confirming to himself that there were in fact just sixty-nine marines.

  “Food?” asked somebody nearby.

  Jack looked to his right, then his left where he saw a child of perhaps five or six years old. It was a Helion, with the facial markings of one of the Zathee families. It was a girl, her arm in a sling and cuts to her face. She extended her hand out and spoke again.

  “Food.”

  The accent was thick, and it was clear to him she’d been schooled in the one word. He moved on past, not knowing what to say. He had no food on him at present and just a small quantity of water stored within the spaced armor of his PDS equipment. He looked over to Jana who just shook her head.

  “Logistics will be through later with trucks. They’ll get what they need then. We need what we have left for the fight. You know that, Jack.”

  He took another dozen steps and looked back to see the girl saying the same thing to the other marines; all with no offers of help or food.”

  “Marines, there they are!” Sergeant Stone shouted.

  Jack could sense something close to pride in his voice, and he pointed at the dark black shapes ahead of them. It wasn’t easy to make them out due to the mixture of dust and black smoke that seemed to be everywhere now. Only when the flashes from ground burst occurred could their shapes be seen.<
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  “Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your new home for the next week. The Hotel Three Sisters!”

  It was a joke, and a poor one at that. They moved the last few hundred meters to what had become the single most significant part of the defenses in the old city. Even while the battle continued on in almost all directions, the Alliance engineers had been busy expanding and improving the defenses. Jack looked back from his position outside the walls and to the mountain. The bridges were now fully obscured by the dust and smoke, but he could just make out the shape of an Alliance Mauler dropping down to land.

  “This way,” said the Sergeant.

  Jack looked back and watched the double-layered metallic door lift up on a pair of thick metal chains with a clanking sound. The entrance was big enough for a pair of Bulldogs to park next to each other. Even as it moved up, he could see four Alliance RAMs, each surrounded by sandbags and scanning the new arrivals for signs of the enemy. The gun mounts tracked from left to right, flashing green to signify they had passed the test.

  “This place is completely different.”

  Jana nodded in agreement.

  “You can say that again. I thought it was just an air defense installation. Three towers to cover the main approaches?”

  Jack looked up at the nearest of the towers and then to the right where the next was almost four hundred meters away.

  “I’d say this has changed.”

  Sergeant Stone heard them, waited to the side, and flagged them on.

  “This is now the Spascia Fortress, the last bastion protecting the bridges. If this place falls, we’ll be forced to blow the bridges and fall back to the mountain.”

  Inside was a hive of activity, and they passed scores of people busily preparing for the inevitable massive assault. It took considerable time to get through the layered defenses and past the triple layer of walls, barbed wire, and bunkers to yet another series of barricades. Jack tried to look confident, but Jana noticed the change in his mood.