Unknown design and origin. But they must be enemy craft.
What are they doing? Where are they heading? Is there some kind of pattern? Spy craft? Are they scanning our fleets? Maybe they’re sabotage vessels?
They’re rather large for that, but they could be remote drones of some kind. Why not just send in cloaked missiles or bombships? No atomics on board, other than cloaked power cores. Silent alerts going to Fleet Command and Intel.
Naero’s heart froze the instant she perceived what they were.
They’re phazed boarding craft, Om. Like nothing we’ve ever seen before. And the enemy’s swarming on General Walker’s Flagship, The Iwo Jima.
They’re attempting to kill Walker and take out our command and control.
And right before the crucial Spacer Grand Conclave was set to begin. Was that just a coincidence as well?
“Major Luna,” Naero cut in over the links. “Priority One Negative Alert Red, I say again, Alert Red. Company 36 MCL Maeris reporting. Hundreds of inbound, phazed enemy boarding craft are slipping in and coating The Iwo Jima. They will most likely attack any second. I know that you and first and second platoons are already on board. Secure General Walker and all command officers. Prepare to repel boarders. Make ready for heavy assaults by phazed enemy troop waves. Institute Intel Vesper protocols.”
Intense enemy jamming disrupted all coms suddenly, as even the fleet ships were cut off from each other. As a further distraction, a dozen new enemy strike fleets and fighter waves jumped in to keep the Navy busy.
Explosions and fires suddenly rocked The Iwo Jima, taking out her power core, propulsion, and jump drives. She floated helpless in the big black.
All while hundreds of assault craft appeared along the flagship’s length, injecting their lethal cargo of attackers and assassins at the same time.
Their officer’s were already fighting and in harm’s way with the first two platoons of 36. Naero called up First Sergeant Samuel Gordon and Gunnery Sergeant Peyton Valmont. Then they woke up Second Leftenant Holly Mitsubishi and she joined their link instantly, checking the sitrep.
“Top, Gunny, Holly–you’re scanning the sitch. I have our dropship en route to dock and board the Flagship The Iwo Jima in seconds, near the bridge and command quarterdecks. Platoons three, four, and five are geared up and ready to fight, on my orders. More help is right behind us, seconds away.”
“Good work, N,” Gordon said, “by their own initial reports, the flagship is engulfed in heavy fighting on almost every level. They need us in there fast.”
Naero nodded. “Copy that, Top. I’ll take 3rd Platoon, you take 4th in, and Gunny, you take 5th. I want our most experienced people at the head of this. Holly, I know you’re normally a combat field officer, but we desperately you to stay behind and run–”
“Already on it, N. I’m up and hot on the combat grid. 36 won’t go in blind. Linking with stealth fixers on scene. Coordinate your three assault entry points on these three key locations and fight your way to the officer’s quarters, the bridge, and General Walker’s state room and command quarters. Lock and load Marines. Green to hit the mix in thirty-seconds. Mark.”
Naero, there’s something odd being reported about some of the enemy Ejjai boarding troops. Many of them are larger, and more powerful than any other Ejjai troops we have met before.
More Ejjai mutants, Om? Naero switched into full-on Shetanna mode, racing to join 3rd Platoon at the insertion tubes.
It appears so. Early stealth fixer genetic scans show them to be some kind of Ejjai sterodans, hyped up on strength and speed mods.
Great, Om. We’ve fought sterodans before. Let’s kill these jacked up slashers all the same. They bleed. They die.
At the last instant, Shetanna split up their available meks evenly throughout all three platoons. Their extra might would help counter the new Ejjai freaks.
They went in blasting and fighting on gravwings in zero-G.
3rd Platoon entered near the officer and command staff quarter decks. On board Marines already had their hands full attempting to repel hundreds of invading troops.
One of the Ejjai sterodan mutants, a misshapen beast over two meters tall grabbed her and attempt to smash her against the hull of the battleship.
Shetanna stunned the creature with a mind blast and drove it back. She severed one huge, hulking arm with her right katana and then opened her third eye.
Three scarlet Chaos beams drilled out of her eyes and bored out the mutant horror’s face and skull, leaving only a glowing shell of sizzling meat and bone.
She cut off the left arm and finally broke free of the huge corpse.
If there were many more of these creatures on board, they were going to cause a lot of havoc. She saw at least four more from where she floated.
These mutants could take an immense amount of damage before they went down. And they were stronger than even the meks.
The Marines swarmed on them, cutting them to pieces with autoguns, miniguns, and multiple explosives.
They were still heavily engaged when platoons four and five reported that they were meeting heavy resistance trying to reach their objectives and were falling back with other Marine units to regroup.
More enemies seemed to pour in from the boarding craft outside.
Yet more Marine units arrived each second, swarming on the flagship inside and out. The battleship rocked, twisted, and shook, shuddering with the effects of heavy fighting all throughout its length.
Shetanna needed to break the stalemate here fast so that they could move on.
She pierced one of the freaks with Chaos spikes and detonated them, blasting it to pieces, and even sending Marines in shielded combat armor flying. But they’d survive being kicked around.
Another with several ravening mutant heads was ripping through a Marine’s combat armor, trying to devour her. The gungirl did her best to hold it off. She stabbed at the monster’s horrid faces with an energy blade and unloaded her pulse carbine into its torso.
The abomination ignored blaster fire being pumped into its massive body, and continued to lash out, knocking other Marines away while it still tried to gnaw on the one.
Jonny Fox charged up and shot the freak with his microgrenade machine pistol but was also sent flying.
Shetanna dove in and then swept up, impaling both of her Chaos blades into the mutant’s thick, hunched back. Then she ignited twin blasts of scarlet lightning up through the creature, shredding it’s upper body into ash and charred fragments.
The hulking legs flopped lifeless to either side, and the battered Marine and her damaged armor fell away, into the arms of her comrades.
It was Chime. 36 pulled her back.
Another Ejjai mutant launched itself off the hull and came at Shetanna, hurling grenades. Shetanna intercepted the grenades in Chaos shield spheres that absorbed the blasts and shattered like glass, but contained the force of the explosions.
Shetanna screamed. Her sonic attack rammed the mutant back into the hull with heavy crunching sounds. Then a series of arcing Chaos blades shot out in waves from her swords, and sliced the thing into gushing slabs of meat and disrupting armor and ordnance. Even the hull of the battleship itself was damaged, deep gouges raked into its impossibly hard surface.
By then, most of the enemy were dead, including all of the big mutants. Shetanna called out to Sergeant Python Wilde. He just finished stomping his armored boot down on an Alpha Ejjai and blasting its head off.
“Python. 3rd Platoon. Let’s move forward and press into the mix. Other Marine fireteams are coming up behind us to help secure these areas. Our Platoons Four and Five are bogged down and need our assistance. Let’s give it to them!”
“You heard our MCL. Fight forward Marines, and drive on hot and hard. Our buddies need us. So, let’s go!”
They arrived at the area around the bridge, mired in another heavy firefight. Both sides were actually packed in too tight. The enemy had made the mistake of stuffing the cor
ridors too full.
Now they were crammed too tight with dead, wounded, and troops still struggling for anyone to get through.
“I’m going in along the ceiling,” Shetanna told her Marines. “On my signal, blow open the outer hull walls throughout the length of this entire corridor. Coordinate that with the troops outside. Tell them to use cutting charges.”
“Sir…N,” Python objected. “You’ll be caught in multiple blasts. You could be wounded, killed, and sucked out into space!”
“Python, just do it. Follow my orders. I’ll be all right. This isn’t suicide. Trust me. I know what I’m doing.”
She shield herself as best she could, and shot in upside down along the ceiling. Sizzling red Chaos katanas sliced through and pierced skulls, and jabbed down into open mouths and throats. Ejjai blood geysered.
Om helped by dropping and dispensing microbombs and float-seeker mines onto the packed enemies. Any trapped Marines in the log jam would still survive out in space.
Shetanna gave the signal.
Marines inside and out ripped open that section of the battleship hull like a tin can, using a rocking series of shaped charges.
Almost instantly, the congested knot of enemies–most dead or dying from Shetanna’s sweep–were quickly sucked out into the black. Marines waited to retrieve any of their own. Any Ejjai were sent spinning on their way, and shot up for good measure.
Fixers raced in to put up containment fields and automatically started repairing the damage.
The blockage jam was now free.
Shetanna dropped down and raced forward, cutting down more foes on her way toward the bridge and the heavy fighting there.
Another of the hulking mutants tried to grab her.
Shetanna jerked its entire right arm free from its shoulder socket and kicked the monstrosity in the head several times in the flashing space of a second, crushing its face. Then she ripped up through the groin with her right katana and sliced the freak into two halves from hip to shoulder.
The Dark Angel of Death swept through the boiling maelstrom of its blood in zero-G. She concentrated with her third eye, targeting multiple attackers.
Streaking threads of Chaos force pierced a score of Ejjai, transfixing them in sudden agony with their mouths open and gasping.
Those glowing red lines expanded into impaling rods and then detonated, shredding the enemy forward position. Marines charged in behind Shetanna’s relentless advance, gunning the remaining enemy down at close range.
Finally they reached the bridge proper. The crew and their Marines held their position behind the last blast wall barrier. Enemy phaze troops penetrated that barrier. Other foes set charges, fired weapons, or mutants used energy weapons to slice at the blast screens in order to cut them down.
The bridge crew and defenders fought against almost a hundred foes.
Reinforcements of heavy Marines and meks surrounded the attackers in a circle of blazing death and came at them head on. Heavy weapons barked and scorched back and forth, shields disrupted, and the majority of the fighting was within two meters or less.
Shetanna cloaked herself and then concentrated. First she put up a ring of dense Chaos energy around the bridge defensive perimeter. With all of her Mystic might, she clenched her fists and tightened the ring inward, sweeping dozens of Ejjai off their feet and crushing them into the bridge blast screen. Those heavy blast screens buckled and cracked, but so did the foes smashed into them.
She reversed the ring, transforming it into a scything blade of scarlet energy slicing outward. She had to disperse it just as the right instant to avoid hurting any Marines. But the spinning blade of raw force cut down another third of the Ejjai from behind.
Shetanna left the last third of the enemy to the advancing Marines.
She transported into the bridge itself and phazed.
Phazed enemy troops positioned themselves all about the crew and defenders, preparing to kill all of the Spacers within. While they remained phazed, they were invisible and invulnerable to the defender’s weapons.
Yet that did not protect them from Shetanna.
An orb of glowing chaos energy expanded rapidly in the grinning maws of seventeen Ejjai. The orbs quickly shattered their skulls from within, bursting outwards.
Then she caused the spheres to implode. Seventeen corpses in phaze armor topple over onto their backs.
The blast barrier went down, and Shetanna rejoined First Sergeant Sam Gordon and 4th Platoon. He held a mini-gun in his right arm, but his armored left arm looked crushed and slack.
“One of those mutants shattered my left arm,” he noted. “Come on. Gunny Valmont just told me they’re outnumbered and fighting beside General Walker and some of his staff in the General’s state rooms!”
They shot forward, the rest of Platoons three and four behind them. “I’m with you, Top. But while we race over there let me biomance that arm of yours.”
Sam nodded. “I’d be obliged. I’ve never had any Mystic healing before.”
Shetanna grinned. “Well enjoy it. And by the way, it’s probably going to hurt like bloody hell.”
“Go for it, N. I’m a grunter, not a screamer.”
She biomanced the crushed bones and torn ligaments and tissues back to usefulness.
Sam did quite a bit of grunting, wincing, and sweating as she did so, but he was right. He sure wasn’t a screamer.
He worked his repaired left arm, still wincing a bit. “Haisha! Almost as good as new. Now lets gut these bitches!”
Dead and wounded Spacers and Ejjai lay strewn all about the corridors and large chambers around the general’s quarters.
Any Ejjai who still twitched got shot in the face and head.
Naero and the Marines could both hear and scan signs of heavy fighting still taking place deep within. One large conference room, like a small arena, was piled up with mostly enemy dead and wounded. The walls and the hull were pockmarked with heavy blasts and multiple explosions.
As they finally reached General Walker’s private quarters, all hell broke loose.
The hull buckled and then burst with multiple explosions from within. As the chamber exploded at several points along its length. Some foes were sucked out into space before the containment fields snapped up.
From the scans, over a hundred enemy attackers–almost a third of them the huge mutants, were doing their best to take down the General and his defenders, including Gunny Valmont and 5th Platoon.
Gunny had a large, two-handed energy sword in his hands, like the ones Naero’s father had once dueled with. He was doing his best to defend the general’s back, cutting down any foes who tried to attack the general from behind.
But General Walker, never one to hold back in any fight, was a terror to keep up with.
In fact, Naero was suddenly staggered at the sight of Walker completely enraged and let loose on the foe like one possessed. In his custom battle armor, he wore two enormous energy gauntlets on his big hands, powered by a small fusion power core on his back.
Those powered gauntlets glowed orange and yellow, and backed by Big Jim Walker’s massive thews, they could rip through almost anything.
To prove that very fact, Walker waded into dozens of the packed mutants, matching them strength for strength and more. His large, energized fingers melted into their shrieking, screaming faces as he crushed their skulls and ripped their heads from their necks.
He tore a duranadium support beam free of the battleship and swung it in wide circles, clearing some room to fight and crushed the slashers with it. He flung crushed and shattered bodies away all around him.
The other mutants still rushed in to close with him, attempting to drag him down.
Walker came straight at them. He fought and battled them in close, hand-to-hand. Any who saw it would remember that fight for the rest of their lives.
Those glowing, energized gauntlets froze into and tore through armor and flesh. Walker tore the mutants to pieces like some kind of ma
chine. He ripped into torsos, crushed and tore out hearts and lungs, snapped spines. He tore their guts out. Within seconds he had slaughtered nearly a score of them.
In the face of such ferocity, even the big mutants broke and fled in terror from Walker, some of them coming right at Shetanna.
Anything to get away from those ripping, tearing energy gauntlets.
Shettana used Cosmic attacks and her blades to cut down half a dozen who foolishly thought that they had any chance to escape through her.
General Walker trampled and slew all the others, rapidly stalking and dragging them down.
Then Walker shut down his gauntlets, went back among his fallen defenders, and tenderly picked up the body of what looked to be a young female Marine. From the looks of the body, she had been repeatedly stabbed from behind, and her right arm and leg had been torn off, most likely by one of the mutants.
Then Naero saw the young Marine’s face and understood the general’s great wroth.
It was Walker’s daughter, Captain Taillara, who had served with great distinction as one of his closest aides. She was clearly a casualty from the intense and chaotic fighting that had erupted during the attack.
Her mighty father had avenged his beloved child as best he could, exacting a terrible vengeance upon the assassins.
Still, in the midst of all of that carnage, the great man held Taillara’s broken body close to himself, and broke down and wept.
Every Spacer present knelt down and mourned with their great leader.
Six stunned Ejjai sterodan mutants suddenly rose up out of a mass of tangled bodies where they had been clubbed down, shaking their huge heads, snarling and laughing.
Scores of Marines lifted their humming, glowing weapons, hot to cut them down.
“Hold your fire!” Walker roared.
“Don’t worry,” Shetanna told him. “I’ll take them.”
Before she could summon her katanas, Walker shoved his daughter’s lifeless body into Naero’s arms.
“See to my girl, Naero. I’ll deal with these monsters. They’re mine.”
Naero's War: The Citation Series 2: The High Crusade Page 16
