Naero's War: The Citation Series 2: The High Crusade

by Mason Elliott

  Bravo went in to blast the enemy to perdition. And they did so at one hundred to one odds, a hundred thousand Bravo Command Marines against ten million Ejjai.

  The Spacer Navy sped one hundred fleets–five thousand warships, to back them up on this one key engagement.

  It was very possible for the tide to turn in the enemy’s favor.

  The invader might use its numbers to hold out against the best that the Spacers had to offer.

  Shetanna helped lead the coordinated assaults against the meatships and cloneships. They had to be put out of business fast, or the Alliance would never overtake the enemy’s expanding numbers. Destroying those factory ships became an absolute priority.

  Invader clone production had to be stopped for any of their goals and plans to succeed.

  Every MCL available worked closely with their attached units to see those ops through.

  Shetanna and 36 haunted the invaders like destroying ghosts and phantoms until the enemy lived in terror of them. They hunted the meatships and cloneships down with a vengeance with cloaked ordnance, mines, and fusion neutron charges that were nearly impossible to detect until they detonated.

  And then it was too late. That was the idea.

  Cloaked fixers could ferry in tons of ordnance to the advancing Marine raiders, who also went in loaded down with gear and weapons to accomplish their tasks.

  It took ten hours to prepare one of the largest initial assaults on meatships and cloneships, key communications centers, and command and control. All of these were targeted across a wide expanse of the dark battlefield by most of the Marine units who were not already engaged.

  At the twelfth hour of the watch, over one third of the enemy’s existing cloneships and meatships exploded and were reduced to dust and burning wreckage.

  That was the signal for the main assault to begin.

  Up in the low clouds, the naval fleets targeted and kept up a steady bombardment of the invader within an expanding ring of fire and death.

  Nothing that was of the invader escaped that ring alive.

  Bravo appeared in great numbers wherever the enemy least expected them–even at the enemy’s very center–at the heart of its power and vast numbers.

  They took the foe by the throat and shot them full of big glowing holes until the startled invaders stopped twitching.

  The enemy had fully expected massive attacks around their dug-in perimeter, but not deep within what they had thought to be their most secure core.

  Bravo proved to the invaders that the Marines could attack at will, wherever and whenever they chose, with impunity. Marine raiding parties, led by their amazing MCLs, continued to methodically attack and destroy the meatships and cloneships on the hour, striking wherever those vile craft could be located. And the hunt continued.

  In the open battlefields, Marines continued to march forward in rapidly advancing formations of heavily armed troops in powered armor, meks, gravtanks, and Marine ground support gunships, starfighters, and fighter bombers.

  Even large units could suddenly smash through the enemy, appearing as if by sorcery, unleashing precise interlocking and overlapping waves of combined arms, direct and indirect fire upon the stunned enemy positions.

  Most Ejjai were dead before they even had a chance to react, so sudden did the Marines unleash sheer hell upon the foe.

  Right after many attacks began, the cowardly Ejjai were often cut down as they fled, abandoning their positions, even when fighting back might have still given them a chance at victory.

  The invader never wanted a fair fight. They wanted to butcher helpless civilians. They didn’t have the stomach for a stand-up fight in many instances.

  That was their worst flaw of all, as the Marines saw it.

  The invaders had no honor whatsoever. They were completely devoid of it. The concept did not even seem to exist among them.

  They might fight out of spite or hatred, but that was it. They fought only to destroy. They couldn’t fight for each other. They didn’t give a damn about the clone invader next to them.

  They flung their own wounded into the spinning processing blades of the meatships and laughed at them while they did so.

  Naero had seen Ejjai wound the troops next to them to slow them down, so that they could get away for a few seconds longer. There was base, self-preservation instinct, and nothing more.

  How could any force, however numerous, hope to achieve victory, when they meant nothing, to themselves or even to each other? When they fought and killed and died for no worthwhile reason?

  The invaders were a plague unleashed on humanity. Huge swaths of them were being systematically eradicated on numerous worlds at every passing minute. And the Alliance, led by the Spacer Marines, was the cure. The Marines often saw themselves as if they were antibodies defending humanity as a whole, eradicating the invaders as if they were germs or viruses of a deadly illness or infection.

  In the battles in the black, when the foe did return fire, they more or less pinpointed their positions on the combat grid and helped Bravo plan their next coordinated attack. The enemy fired in panic, knowing that they were about to die. They poured direct and indirect fire in all directions, hoping beyond hope to eventually hit something. At times they got lucky and did.

  Often they hit their own troops, damaging each other in their terror. Some enemy units could wipe each other out, each thinking that they were firing at the Marines.

  In some battles, very quickly, the disorder and chaos among the undisciplined invaders was nearly complete. The Marines timed their assault wavers and coordinated them precisely. They organized the combat grid and modified it on the fly, directing and guiding its unrelenting flow.

  New units swept in, conducted the ops, and then swept forward or back out to regroup and hit another vital target nearby. Some units needed to rest and resupply themselves before their next turn on the line.

  The Bravo Marines sustained these withering attacks on the invader in ways that were precise and relentless.

  Shetanna and 36 pulled back to their rally points and turned aside briefly to watch several more enemy meatships and cloneships detonate behind them. They had been moving constantly, setting charges, and attacking for many hours straight in the combat zone.

  The order came down finally. All of the them could withdraw to make room for fresh teams to go forward, and take a well-deserved breather.

  Naero marveled that they did not see any of the locals in the rearward areas. Intel and the Alliance had done their work very well this time, and these sectors were clear and secure.

  In many areas, the brave Piettos had offered to fight if they could only be armed.

  If there were any locals in the area left to fight. Many times there weren’t. General Walker considered the Piettos to be a very valiant people, despite their small size. He always considered and granted their brave requests when and where possible.

  Naero soon learned that this time, the Alliance had decided that it would be best for the locals to simply take shelter in rearward areas, so as to stay out of the way.

  That allowed the determined Marines to go in, confident that there were no locals in the way. They could take the fight directly to the enemy and do what the Marines did best.

  As General Walker put it, in his more or less exact words, Bravo Command was there “to blast the living shit out of the Ejjai invaders, and rip the screaming heads off of these assholes who so richly deserved and required to have such done to them, with all speed and dispatch.”

  Shetanna and 36 continued to make their way back, leaving nothing but burning death and terror in her wake.

  At one point, they spotted three companies of Marines on a crested hill and vale, engaging at least two thousand Ejjai troops and armor sweeping up the slope.

  As one, the heads of almost every Marine snapped to Shetanna, and awaited her orders.

  She knew what they wanted.

  Orders be damned. They were here. They wanted to go help
those other Marines who were already fully engaged and fighting so courageously.

  They could see the weaknesses that they could exploit in the enemy formations from where they stood.

  Shetanna sent several holos of herself on fixers into the enemy formations to confuse them and draw their fire.

  Shetanna ordered an attack of opportunity and sent their supporting action up the chain to show up on the grid.

  By then, 36 was helping those Marines turn the tables on their attackers.

  The Dark Angel of Death tore through the enemy center, bloodred swords arcing and slicing in flashes and gouts of scarlet fire and lightning. She unleashed a full spread of Cosmic attacks, gutting the leaders of the attack and hollowing out their heavy weapons formations.

  After she passed through, more reinforcements arrived, and the specters of Bravo trained hundreds of E-88 mini-guns on the enemy and ripped them to bloody shreds.

  After the smoke cleared, there was nothing left of the enemy counterattack but burning chunks and lots of Ejjai corpses.

  Bravo cloaked and proceed on to their next objective.

  36 kept on heading back to rest.

  Naero passed by a sizzling, burning frozen meatblock, blasted all the way here from the explosion of one of the meatships they had taken down earlier. She and her Marines stared at it in fascination and horror, even though they had seen them countless times.

  Anyone could still make out the twisted, chopped-up pieces of little local Pietto bodies, packed together and making up that sick cube. Like little dolls and skeletons, pressed and frozen together in fear.

  This was the enemy. And what the Marines felt for the invaders was beyond even what could be called hate.

  There was no word for it.

  This was what the enemy was, what they did, and what they wanted to do to humanity, and with all life that they encountered.

  This was why the invaders had to die, as quickly and as soon as such could be achieved. Nothing would be able to return to any sense of normalcy until that reality was made true.

  There could be no Ejjai. The entire race had to be eradicated as if it had never existed.

  The shock and disgust at just watching that one meatblock sizzle and burn brought it all home to them. Why they were fighting, and what it was they were fighting for.

  The end of shit like this.

  What they were fighting against.

  Shetanna snarled and lifted one hand, reducing the vile cube to ash with Cosmic fire.

  Yet the stench of it was still in the air like a cloud, like the stink of death and misery of all the hundreds of invaded worlds. And that putrid cloud clung to them and stained them all.

  On Pixie-6, it took the Marines eight long days of nonstop fighting to completely exterminate and slaughter the massive hordes of the Ejjai that were hurled against them.

  Shettana personally selected eight invader generals and admirals who had been captured, gagged them, and bound them in chains and shackles. Once General Walker approved her request, these enemy officers were sent on a small ship to the next world Bravo was heading for.

  They carried a message to all of the invaders. To let them know what had happened in the black on Pixie-6.

  To let the enemy know what to expect, very shortly.

  Bravo Command, Shetanna, and the Alliance were coming for them, head on and ready to take them down.

  And there was no power in the universe that could prevent that, or save the invader’s worthless existence, from the wrath and the sure vengeance of the Spacer Marines.

  13

  The Gort-6 system had a population of barely fifteen million. But it was a botworld, where all sorts of bots were developed and tried out before being shipped out for sale to various markets.

  Unfortunately, that also included drone attack/defense systems and other warbots.

  Even though the invaders attacked Gort-6 with only four fleets, they had been onworld for almost two months–during which time they had killed off more than a third of the local, mostly Naivatch, population, hunted the others wherever they hid, and also seized control of most of the 2.3 billion bots on the planet.

  Only twenty percent of those bots were originally built for war, but the others could also be programmed to fight and kill, or at the very least get in the way as they attempted to cause harm. The sheer number of them made for a bizarre and extremely dangerous and unpredictable situation.

  The Ejjai invader could sit back and laugh, waiting behind a sea of bots shielding them, and snipe at the Marines at will. While the Marines were forced to fight and slog their way through billions of pissed-off bots, reprogrammed to combat anything living that came near that wasn’t Ejjai.

  If the Marines couldn’t get at the invaders, they couldn’t take them out. What was worse, the enemy made certain that all of the bots they unleashed on the planet were randomly AI-adapted to various kill and attack modes.

  The bots all operated independently. Therefore, there was no off switch, abort, or kill switch on the bot hordes. No central command or any way to shut the bots down in large numbers. Unlike in countless stupid vids, all fail-safes and safety protocols were off. There was no convenient self-destruct or deactivation code for the robot armies.

  Available EMP attacks would take out the military equipment of the defenders as well as the bots. The Alliance was stuck. These bots would continue to attack and try to kill the defenders, even after all of the invaders were destroyed.

  Granted, only the actual military drones and warbots constituted a real tactical threat. At first the Marines and the Navy focused on dealing with them as priority targets. But it quickly became apparent that the vast numbers of the other normal bots were a huge obstacle as well.

  Shetanna and her strike teams from 36 focused on locating batches of the actual invaders directing and controlling the bot hordes. They either took out the invaders, or painted them on the main combat grid for other primary forces to take down.

  At first the Marines found it rather comical to enter a gigacity area and have service bots, waiter and waitress bots, cookbots, janitorial and sanitation bots, and store clerkbots come at them with low level firearms or even knives and clubs.

  The Alliance sent in clouds of fixers to deactivate or dismantle the bots into inert components and scrap.

  In one illicit area, hundreds of sexbots flooded out of buildings to charge the defender lines with automatic weapons and grenades. They had to be dealt with swiftly and cut down.

  Then there were suicide bots that simply tried to get close enough to the defenders and detonate the explosives rigged up inside of them.

  After the first casualties, all of the jokes and the laughter ceased, as soon as the Marines and the civies suffered wounded and KIAs.

  More waves of modified fixers were brought down from the Navy and sacrificed in order to take out hundreds of thousands of bot bombers, some of which had gravitics and could fly. The silent ones were the most deadly.

  Leave it to Om to finally come up with a viable solution. Due to flaws in the invader programming, the bots did not attack Ejjai…or other bots. Therefore, a specially modified fixer went with each Marine and projected a masking, camouflage signal that made the Marines appear to be either Ejjai or other bots.

  Such protection improved the situation dramatically.

  The invader countered by remotely detonating suicide bots and many explosive charges set all over the city.

  In the end, the sheer number of bots continued to be a hindrance and complicated the combat situation.

  Yet they were a definite distraction, an obstacle. The battle for Gort-6 could not be won until the enemy invaders were hunted down and killed.

  Naero and the hunter-killer teams proceeded to do just that, and kept it up as the actual number of invaders onworld deteriorated.

  They managed to break into one of the bot construction factories where the female Ejjai shocktroops and their smaller, male tech counterparts were scurrying around
, reprogramming and planting explosives inside a few thousand more suicide bots.

  Grenades, explosive needles, demolition charges, and rockets brought the entire operation crashing down on the enemy’s heads. The resulting multiple explosions sealed the deal.

  Reports from long-range recon scouts stated that a large group of invaders was passing through some service and sewage tunnels, trying to reach a hidden pocket of enemy ships. The Ejjai were preparing to flee.

  The Navy already positioned itself up in the black to intercept and take out any of the cowards who attempted to get away.

  Meanwhile, Shetanna went down to drive a good portion of the slashers into a waiting deathtrap that 36 had prepared for them.

  A small, cloaked squad maintained several unit shield barriers in front of either her or a projected holo of Shetanna.

  All Naero had to do was appear menacing and advance on the foe. The slashers were already terrified out of their minds wherever the Dark Angel of Death appeared. They shot and fought with each other in their panic to escape from Shetanna’s wrath.

  All the Marines needed to do was keep their trap set, and just wait for the terrified Ejjai to more or less leap right into it.

  Gort-6 was fully pacified, one day later.

  Mission accomplished, the Marines loaded back up into their dropships and returned to their fleet carriers and other transports to depart that system for their next objective.

  Then Naero received an alert from Om.

  N, several strange disturbances in the fixer clouds. None of these scans or readings make any sense.

  What do we have, Om? Some other kind of enemy stealth or phaze attack?

  Not sure yet. Trying to track and filter multiple pings.

  Naero closed her eyes and teknomanced with Om, adding her abilities and senses with his, reaching out through the various fixer nebulae in all of their configurations.

  Om, let’s try a vesper flea attack, and then an infestation strategy.

  Got it. Tag, envelope, and then reveal.

  Okay. We’ve got something forming. Looks like…hundreds of small ships. Haisha! What configuration are these? No jump drives. They’re not starships.