Sergeant Vaughn sneered. “What? On Shitworld? What the hell are you thinking, girl? Not much chance of that, Brighteyes. Plenty of dead livestock around, though. How about a nice putrid steak? You like blue meat?”
“Only Spum. The only edible blue meat.”
“We could try to find a carcass that wasn’t completely rancid yet,” Trevor Lakota said.
“No, thanks, guys. I appreciate the thought, but with this stench, I probably couldn’t choke it down. Hey, there’s Abraham and Aztec, back from HQ. Over here, guys!”
Naero started to doze off even more.
Someone placed something cold up near her head. She could see it frosting her face shield and registering on her reads.
Even through her helmet, she made out the familiar and beloved shape of an icy fourpak of Jett, right next to her helmet.
Naero sat up and put a hand on it. So nice and cold, even through her gloves.
Then she noticed that 2nd Platoon was up and standing all around her.
She unsealed her mask.
Surprisingly, the air inside the jump ship wasn’t that bad at all. Then she cracked open a borbble, and smelled something even more heavenly.
Steaks did in fact get handed back from the mess hall.
A fat, juicy steak came Naero’s way, a bit salty, but juicy and good as she tore into its steamy texture with her hands and teeth.
“We sent a special request all the way up the chain to General Walker himself,” Anaconda said. “When it came in, Luca Abraham and Kesha Aztec had to go to HQ and fetch it all back when the time was right. Our mess hall started cooking the steaks immediately. And we got this place filtered out and scented, so that we could relax a bit and chow in it. In your honor, N.”
Naero’s cheeks were so bloated on both sides that she could hardly talk. “I’m speechless, guys. I might even cry a bit.”
“And hey, N,” Acer Adams said. “Good news. In honor of your birthday, my calendar’s free, and I can pleasure you all night tonight. I’ve got thirty millimeters of hot, hard joy with your name on it, and you can ride me and scream all night.”
“Haisha, Acer,” Naero said. “What the hell, man? Did both of your goddam hands go numb at the same time? Again?”
Everyone in 36 roared with laugher.
“Seriously, my friend,” she went on. “You ought to get that situation checked out on the double. Might be a nasty, repetitive stress injury or crippling nerve damage, in your case.”
She yanked a borbble free and then was stricken. It felt too light.
One of her precious borbbles of Jett…was already empty.
“Aztec, Abraham…what the hell is this? What’s the deal?”
Naero pointed to one of the borbbles in panic–completely empty with the cap still sealed.
She held it up and turned it around.
A neat and clean blaster hole had been shot right through it.
Aztec shrugged. “Sorry, N. It must have taken a hit through my pak, when we were on our way back during the end of the assault. I thought something was wet and sticky down my rig.”
Abraham laughed. “Buck up, Brighteyes. At least three of ’em made it through the lines.”
Naero looked at the empty and sniffed. “Now I know I’m going to cry.”
That night Naero sat up with Chime Fox and a few others–Bessa Jackson, Pete Cooper, and Deb Steiner–listening to Chime’s story about her and Jonny’s family. How everyone but their great granny Fari had been killed off by the wars.
“That’s where Jonny and I got our love of books,” Chime said. “You know, we were left alone a lot. As the oldest, I more or less raised Jonny and myself through books, and the people we met inside them. We’d play this game where we could close our eyes and pretend to go right into the different worlds of all of those stories. It was fun while we could make it last, but we always came back to being just two orphan Spacer runts, bopping around in a beat-up old merchant ship run by a half-crazed old lady.”
Chime sighed.
“Sounds terrible…and fun,” Naero said.
Chime laughed sadly. “It was all that. Yet we missed everyone. We were still old enough to miss all of those people in our family who had loved us.”
Naero sighed. “Some don’t even get that much, Chime.”
Chime was getting sleepy. Her friends all looked at their resident booknut and smiled at her. “I know,” she said. “I’m grateful, and so is Jonny.”
Naero took a slug of poteen, with her Jett all gone. “So, I know Jonny wants a little merchant ship after the war, for himself and your greatgran. What do you want, Chime?”
Chime fluttered her pretty brown eyes and smacked her pink lips. She gestured weakly with her hands. “What I’d really like is to fill a merchant ship full of books and go peddle them all over the Alpha Quadrant and beyond, wherever it takes me. Maybe I could even shanghai some authors and whisk them away on some book tours. That would be so awesome.”
“That sounds pretty nice,” Bessa said.
“I agree,” Pete added. He was always tapping away on his pad in the background doing something, maybe playing a vidgame.
Naero nodded. “Give it a shot, Chime. But what about romance?”
Chime rolled her eyes. She was very cute, even if she was a bit of a kook.
“I don’t know, N. I surely do want some handsome guy to love my socks off, but I’m a lot to put up with, you know? And he’d have to deal with all of my books, and my mania. How am I going to find a guy like that?”
Naero shrugged. “All you can do is try, I guess.”
Chime shrugged and started to drift off. “I guess so.”
In another minute, Chime Fox was breathing peacefully.
She didn’t look so crazy now. In fact, for a young devil dog Marine, she looked sweet and innocent for once. Like a pretty little orphan girl one might find asleep in an alley, in a sad story or some fairy tale.
After everyone else filtered off, Naero carried her friend back to the bunks and tucked Chime in. She caught Trevor Lakota glancing up at her where he still sat up awake, carefully sharpening the keen edges on his knives. He smiled and nodded to Naero.
9
Guta-8 was fully engaged by the invaders when Bravo deployed. Once more, the population of eighteen billion was locked in combat with the ruthless Ejjai, in a life-and-death struggle across the surface of the entire world.
Guta-8 was mostly a Pietto world of tiny mining people. Piettos were a sentient, humanoid, spacefaring race who were only thirty to sixty millimeters tall. They were small, but incredibly fierce for their size, especially when their homeworld was threatened.
They swarmed on the invaders, fighting them to a standstill. And that was saying something. It said a great deal about the courage and tenacity of the diminutive Piettos.
They were the masters of small microweapons, needlers, and microbombs. Their weapons were small, scaled to their size, but they still packed a sizeable, lethal punch.
For every Ejjai who landed on Guta-8, a thousand Piettos came against them to defend their world.
The enemy was forced to retreat under such an onslaught, and finally sent large tank formations, meks, and mass stunner ships to knock out large sections of the frontlines and the gigacities. They dropped the locals in droves and multitudes.
Even such valor as that of the little people could not hold out forever against superior tech and ruthlessness.
The Ejjai gathered them up in baskets and collection haulers while they were still alive and helpless, and dumped them into the meatships. The invaders heated pits of fat and oil with flame guns and incendiary grenades, and callously feasted on deep fried locals.
It was a grim thing indeed for the drop troops come down and see so many of those small skeletons, strewn haphazardly behind the enemy in their wake. Just like chicken bones.
The only way to stop the Ejjai was to exterminate them to the last. General Walker and Bravo Command developed a new strategy to cr
ush the invaders as fast as possible.
A lightning-wave assault should weaken and confuse the invaders and get their attention. Then an even larger assault upon their rear areas should rake them viciously, and reduce their numbers and technology. That would leave the remaining slashers open and exposed to the vengeance of the local forces to flood over the enemy before they could even catch their breath. The Piettos yearned to be able to finish the job, liberate their world, and have their vengeance.
Every MCL present went in hot with their units, under orders to use all of their powers and abilities–to exhaust themselves, if need be–in order for the twin attacks to succeed. It was a one-two punch designed to knock out the enemy hard and fast, with the least loss of life for the defenders.
Naero fought at point with 36.
Every Marine pulled out all of the stops, loaded up heavy, and went in hard, hot, and fast. They carried double loads and even dispersal drop pods that could be jettisoned when empty.
Marine stealth craft filled the air and began the show, taking out key invader positions.
Next, Marine starfighters and fighter bombers blotted out the sky and dominated the air. Then lines of cloaked Bravo Marines on gravwings, heavy with smartbombs and drop pods of seeker ordnance, went in next.
The combat grid lit up with countless prioritized targets of opportunity, organized on their profiles. Those targets were wiped off the combat grid just as cleanly as they were wiped off the field and the face of Guta-8.
In seconds, the gigacity capital of Allonorah was lit up like daylight itself, ablaze with war and the fiery fury of the Spacer Marines.
Naero screamed at top speed, leading 36 into the teeth of the fray.
Her sense of warning suddenly spiked.
Up ahead, several Marine starfighters dropped from the sky. She raised a priority alarm. Something was happening.
Om, what is it? What’s the enemy doing?
An ion pulse EM wave. The biggest I’ve ever seen. They must have triggered it under the capital!
Naero shouted over her links across all channels, “Incoming EM pulse. Uncloak and max your shields to these flux patterns as the pulse wave hits. They’ll go down, but your suits and weapons won’t be burned out and lose power. Do it now! Mark, in three seconds!”
The EM knockout wave hit, exactly three seconds later.
36 and many other units maxed their shields and avoided the EM pulse burnout. They lost their shields, but the fixers that survived could eventually bring more shield pods back up or online.
They still had a job to do. Shields or no shields.
The Marines pursued their objectives, dispersing their smartbombs on their objectives at hand.
Behind them, Ejjai positions and targeting blips vanished off the combat grid in large sections, and the gigacity lit up once more.
Few invaders could survive a firestorm such as that.
On to their next objectives, as their shields slowly came back online.
Multiple enemy autogun emplacements cut lose from the city high points and buildings at several level.
First Leftenant Yaeden Adams led them against those sheets of death and caught a burst dead on. The autoguns blasted her and her armor to pieces.
Just like that, she was gone.
Shetanna dodged in, cutting down several of the guns and their crews, scything them in half as she went.
Fixers went in, and at Om’s direction, reduced many of the heavy gun emplacements to useless scrap.
Time. Time was essential. The wrath of the Marine assault did not let up. Ejjai lay eradicated behind them in concentric rings, exposing the enemy defensive patterns.
The enemy responded by marshaling all of their forces, unleashing every bit of firepower they had, and rushing their reserves to the front as it continued to collapse in toward them.
The Marines were rolling up their lines faster than the enemy could bring up fresh forces to support them.
By the time the main assault completed neutralizing their objectives, they had pounded more than half of the gigacity, and all of their ordnance was depleted.
Bravo drew their primary weapons, swept in lower, and drove the assault forward at close range. Another bright line of firefights punched into the enemy-held parts of the capital, continuing to press and reduced vast numbers of the invaders each second.
In a one-on-one, up-front fight, the slashers were simply no match for the Spacer Marines. And the enemy lived in abject fear of the Marine MCLs and shit themselves when the Spacer Mystics appeared, because that meant death in all manner of creative ways.
Naero spotted fresh lines of Ejjai, scrambling to set up more autoguns in an attempt to hold back the tide.
Shetanna whirled and wheeled into them, extending her katanas, sweeping and banking through them, hewing them in half as she passed among them. She unleashed clouds of pea-sized unstable Chaos energy. Microexplosions blasted Ejjai reinforcements in a wide swath.
Bravo charged in, guns blazing, overlapping their firing profiles and catching the enemy before they could reset their lines and their weapons.
The enemy defenses suddenly buckled and collapsed almost entirely in that area.
36 and other available units of Marines poured through that breach to exploit it, bringing devastation and death with them on a wide scale for the invader.
In a last-ditch effort to survive, a fleet of enemy destroyers rose up over the gigacity from the enemy’s rear areas furthest behind them, configured in ground assault mode. They began strafing everything in sight, whether friend and foe.
A direct link cut in from HQ, from Major Luna herself. “Naero, General Walker is ordering you and every MCL present to hit those destroyers with everything you’ve got. They will decimate our people on the ground, and you Mystics are the only ones who can take out entire warships like that in short order. Destroy as many as you can!”
“We’ll do our best, sir. But that’s fifty warships and only about a score of us. Get the Navy in on this. Break half of our forward wave off and have them board those warships and disable them. If our people are going to go down, at least let them go down against those ships that are going to kill them anyway.”
“Copy that. We’re on it, Maeris. Now just follow orders, before those strafing ships wipe out everyone. Do what you can to slow them down!”
“On my way to engage as ordered, sir. Over and out.”
Silence.
Then a moment later, General Walker himself cut in over all the available links. “All forward elements–divert from original plan and board the enemy ground attack ships and divert them away from the city at all costs. Put fire on them. Take them down, Bravo!”
Hundreds of Marines soared up, swarming at each destroyer as the strafing ships came on.
Naero was already getting tired, reaching the limits of her Cosmic and Mystic energies and abilities.
Om, help me any way you can; we have to push it.
Conserve your energies and use them sparingly, N. Think and fight smart. Make it count. I’ll give you everything we can muster up.
Thanks, Om.
She remembered something insane Danner had done when they fought.
Naero swept over the lead destroyer and attacked the aft section of the ship with a shearing plane of Chaos energy.
She neatly sliced off the warship’s engines.
The lead destroyer crashed straight down and exploded over the enemy held sections of the city.
Next, she scythed her way into the destroyer on the immediate right, and severed the power core.
That ship nosed down and cooked off.
She raced over to the next on the left, transported right into the bridge itself, and cut down the command staff. Marines rushed in to take control of the vessel, and continue the fight with the enemy on board.
Naero knew how to command a ship. She quickly took charge of the vessel and overrode the security with teknomancing.
She lifted the ship a bit h
igher, and swept back over the left flank formation, pounding the line of destroyers with her batteries as she passed over them.
Marines cheered.
MCLs on the right flank helped capture a ship and did the same on the right.
Major Luna cut in once more. “MCLs, there are still too many enemy warships. Focus on capturing the bridge of each vessel. Then turn control of the ships over to the Marines, and move on quickly to the next.”
Despite their best efforts, several destroyers scattered out of the original formation and began their ground attacks. They annihilated everything beneath them.
“Dammit, Bravo,” Luna commanded. “Take down those ships!”
Naero dragged herself toward one, already close to blacking out.
One destroyer suddenly exploded. Naero got caught by part of the blast and hurtled through the air.
She heard Om speaking. Gravwing damaged. Can’t reactivate. Fixer net racing up to catch us. Must keep us from impacting.
Whether she liked it or not, she was at her limits and beyond. This battle was effectively over for Shetanna. She had done all that she could do, and there just wasn’t anymore juice.
She was more or less a spectator as 36 and the other Marine units rallied around.
Her own Marines caught her and carried her, handing her off, shielding and protecting her with their very lives.
No foe got anywhere near her without getting gutted and shredded to death.
Naero never lost consciousness. She smiled and allowed her people to protect and care for her. She listened to the flow of battle over her links.
Bravo and the MCLs took down the rest of those destroyers, as command launched their next attack from the enemy’s rear.
The local forces of the Piettos got their wish for vengeance, later that night. By morning, the battle for the capital gigacity and the planet was all but over.
In the aftermath of the battle, battered and exhausted but triumphant, 36 went back to their dropship for a breather.
It was another Fifthday, and that meant Chat Night again.
Gabe Patton bragged about how much fun he and his gal Devin Scott, a Marine from another Bravo Company, had on their last few days together. Penelope Valmont showed some vids of herself and her husband, Calvin Cooper, and their two-year-old son Louis on her last visit with them. When Penny cried, several people cried with her.
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