Yet it had one thing that made it an a valuable oddity. The planet was the greatest known and almost sole source of the rare pseudo-element of Thelluria.
Thelluria was one of the rarest Cosmic substances in the galaxy–next to something called Ur-metal. Thelluria could be used by psyons and even non-psyons to either enhance or defend against psyonic abilities and powers.
Perhaps that was in part why the troubles began.
The enemy invasion forces were not especially numerous or any fiercer than any others that 36 and Bravo had faced.
Yet strange, inexplicable events began to occur during the course of several battles.
In one instance, a hundred local defenders and about the same number of Ejjai suddenly doubled over, dizzy and unable to go on fighting.
The only other weird thing was that an Ejjai corpse had been found missing its head. Not impossible, in a war zone, but it appeared that the enemy had gone out of the way to take the head themselves, and leave the body for some reason.
The very next day, several hundred troops at the front of a heated battle grew overcome with nausea and had to either retreat, or be carried off.
There was no scanned evidence of nerve gas or any biological agents present in the air. No one could figure out what was causing these strange, mass effects.
Then later that same day, in another gigacity nearby, thousands of defenders at the front were stricken and passed out, going into some kind of paralysis or induced coma.
This was not the work of mass stunners, which could be detected and countered quite readily. Nor, again, was it any biological or nerve gas agents.
More defenders poured in to defend the stricken.
They too fell victim to the same affliction.
For the time being, no more troops were sent into that area.
Yet strangely enough, neither did the invaders rush in to attack the helpless troops lying on the ground.
Why would they hold back? They never had before.
The enemy was obviously causing this, and knew something that the Alliance didn’t. Suspicions grew among the MCLs and pointed to a possible link to psyonics. But the Ejjai had never shown any psyonic talents before, and had never been known to be psyonic in any way.
Psyonics usually required higher sentient brain functions to be present. The bestial, uplifted Ejjai were barely sentient.
Shetanna volunteered to sneak in cloaked and investigate with only a small, secret guard of one Marine Company–36.
An initial scan found hundreds of dead Ejjai shock troops in a single troop transport that had been shot down and crashed. The anomaly was that each of those troops wore helmet liners of precious, Thellurian alloy. The Ejjai were shielding their own troops against mass psyonic attacks.
Another unit came in from Intel to collect the bodies, and especially the never-before-seen helmet liners.
As soon as Shetanna and 36 continued on further into the area in question, Marines began to complain about feeling uncomfortable, suffering nausea and feeling dizzy.
A wave of special Intel fixers were sent in, and coated all of their armors in a Thellurian spolymer designed to resist and block out psyonic waves, powers, and abilities. Being a Mystic herself, Naero sensed bizarre pulses and bursts of strange, intense Cosmic and psyonic energy. Yet it was very fleeting, freaky, and disconcerting.
She could shield and protect herself, but there was no way to track it yet.
Once the psyonic-blocking spolymers were applied to 36, the disabling effects were greatly lessened, and the sortie could proceed with its investigation.
Naero and Om attempted to zero in on the strange psyonic energies at work, but they seemed very unstable and hard to pin down. And at first they seemed to emanate from one direction, and then another.
Finally she decided to call in several Marine starfighter strafing and bombing runs on the areas in question. She specifically warned HQ and the Navy that the pilots should be given the same Thellurian spolymer protections against mass psyonics.
The strafing runs came down quickly, crisscrossing the enemy side of that section of the front lines.
After they passed over, a cloaked enemy starship, of a type and designation never encountered before, disrupted and crashed to the ground deeper behind enemy lines.
Shetanna and 36 immediately pursued that strange ship, trying to reach the crash site, feeding Intel and HQ all the data that they could along the way.
Not only had the strange vessel given off wild psyonic signatures, but both Naero and Om thought that they had seen some kind of psyonic projector arrays deployed on the underside.
When they reached where the ship had gone down, it was not on fire and had not exploded. But smoke or steam did escape through several vents and tears in the hull, and burst hatches from the crash. Shetanna led her team closer.
The vessel itself was round and squat like a thick pill, armored with several odd-looking hatches.
They quickly attempted a full scan from the outside before trying to go in. Other enemy forces could converge on the scene at any second.
Om notified her about the fixer scans. N, as we suspected, that ship is loaded with high quantities of Thellurian alloy in any number of concentrations, and configured with many different types of arrays and psyonic projectors.
Basically, the entire ship was a psyonic generator that could focus psyonic force. It was a weapon.
And a very powerful weapon at that, N. You and the others must be very careful. But the design of this weapon requires a natural source of psyonic energy. Machines, robots, and tek cannot be psyonic on their own. This generator steps up psyonic force many times over–
I got it, Om. There must be powerful enemy psyonic users on board somewhere to fuel this weapon, whether they are Ejjai or some other alien race.
The ship has been disabled and cannot fly, but the psyonic projector arrays are still active.
Copy that.
They approached the strange starship to enter within. Scanners and fixers picked up the signatures of small arms fire on board.
Some kind of firefight was taking place inside.
Between who? No other Alliance unit was even near that ship.
Who were the invaders fighting? Each other?
Without warning, a furious psyonic blast rocked the ship and everything around it within five klicks, on a magnitude never recorded before. The psyonic waves passed through everything.
Several Marines cried out, despite their protections, and collapsed. Blood streamed from their eyes, mouths, ears, and noses. They had to be floated back to the lines on their gravwings.
Naero and the rest of 36 who could go on, proceeded to close in and gain access to the ship.
Inside, sporadic fire could still be detected up ahead and on several levels.
Shetanna and the Marines performed a direct assault, taking down the Ejjai with direct fire and grenades.
The strange thing was that many of the Ejjai they encountered seemed to have been fleeing, fighting to get away from something, and had terrified looks on their faces when they stumbled into the Marines.
Finally Naero and her team were inside the ship and made their way through about half of it.
Another massive wave of psyonic power, this time telekinetic, ripped through the damaged craft, tearing the hull and supports apart. Fleeing Ejjai troops shrieked and cried out further within.
More Marines dropped and had to be floated out.
Yet another mindblast struck. This time, they suffered a direct casualty. Maurice James, a young Marine with budding telepathic abilities, collapsed without a word. When the medics reached him, his helmet was full of bloody mush.
James had taken a direct psyonic spike, and his skull had exploded. Death had most likely been instantaneous.
Naero could sense the powerful source of the psyonic attacks, dead ahead of them now. It lurked within the core of the ship that the rest of the Ejjai were trying to flee from.
She d
idn’t want to lose anyone else, so she transported right to the source to face it down and destroy it, on her own.
She was in a central psyonic collection chamber, lined with Thellurian step-up rods to gather and intensify psyonic powers.
The first thing she did was race around the chamber, destroying as many of the rods as she could with her Chaos swords. Ejjai dead lay piled up in heaps and scattered in ones and twos. Half of them had been trying to fight their way out of the chamber and escape.
Most had not made it, and like James, their heads had burst open, or their bodies had been telekinetically ripped open and twisted in extremely creepy ways.
Naero heard strange gurgling, chortling sounds as she continued to race around the room, taking down the psyonic collectors.
As she came around a large shielded pod, she beheld two male Ejjai being contained in Thellurian alloy cages.
Hideous psyonic mutants, perhaps grown or developed in some lab.
One was clearly dead, shot up full of holes.
Unfortunately, the other creature was still very much alive, and enraged.
The Ejjai had been trying to kill the mutants and cut off their knots of multiple heads sprouting from their broad, warped necks. So many heads that the mutants could hardly hold them up, they were so top heavy.
The remaining psyonic mutant was wounded and furious, but it hadn’t spotted her or become aware of her yet. The damn thing had so many heads that its shriveled, atrophied body could hardly move around.
Each ravening head itself, no matter what various size, was swollen with a distended, blue-violet glowing brain that pulsed with its throbbing black veins and blood flow. The glowing brains were so large that some of the heads did not have eyes.
A psyonic freak–a monster–created by equally sick and twisted minds. These were their enemies. Once more, the Ejjai could not have created such an abomination on their own.
Who was helping them do these things?
Shetanna ignited her katanas and swept in at the thing to take it out.
At last it became aware of her, and her intent.
Psyonic force waves drilled Shetanna back into the shattered hull.
Three times she tried to fight her way back in against those waves of force.
Three times the mutant flung her back.
Glowing tentacles of naked psyonic power lashed out like lightning, wrapped around her, and dragged her toward the mutant’s working, gibbering jaws.
Shetanna fought back, chopping and hacking at her bonds, but her swords simply passed through them like ghosts.
If she was going to survive and defeat this thing, she had to engage it on a psyonic level.
Marines broke in and opened fire on the mutant, but it shielded itself against their attacks and sought to entangle them all in hundreds of glowing psyonic tendrils.
Shetanna allowed the creature to draw her closer, putting up a show of struggling in vain.
She impaled it on scores of jagged spears of psyonic Chaos energy, once she was close enough. Then, once the mutant dropped her and the others and stopped attacking, for good measure, she severed all of the still glowing heads off at the thick neck.
After the Marines saw to the body of Maurice James, Company 36 sure had a tale to tell that night.
Word filtered down that overall, the war as a whole was going well. Bravo Command was still the tip of the spear, but even they could only fight on about ten percent of the invaded worlds.
They couldn’t be everywhere at once. All of the other Spacer Marine Battle Groups had their hands full on many other worlds, more or less doing the same thing–gutting the invaders. But the Alliance forces and even more and more Corps world forces continued to back them up.
Bravo had plenty to keep them busy, and like most frontline fighting units, they focused on that. Occasionally stories would filter down through the ranks about units facing down similar challenges and threats, or even something new to look out for.
Then there was new gear. All Marines loved their tek.
The 3rd Command Death Eyes were the first to integrate the new phaze rifles throughout their units. The Razor Princes, and princesses, of 6th Command tested new powered suits of combat armor with built in energy blades. The 8th Command Star Walkers implemented the latest gravwings, and advanced microdrone droppods.
They were all kept fighting at the front as it continued to advance, but behind the scenes, there was always good camaraderie and healthy competition between all of the different Spacer Marine battle groups.
A few days later, after the wake, the next Seventhday brought the special dance night beatdown between many Marine units and groups based at the company level, including 36.
They made use of a huge WebBall arena ship.
Company after company sent in their best stompers to do their thing and wow the crowds with their skills and athletic prowess. Some groups were as small as twenty. Others had as many as fifty or sixty dancer.
Then the entire arena shook and shuddered. A full two hundred Marines from Bravo Company 36 marched in dressed in full white parade uniforms. Their MCL Shetanna flashed in, appearing to lead them.
As they danced, their nanosuits melted around their taut bodies from uniforms into tight, flashing and shining dance costumes.
Naero’s costume was so skimpy she didn’t quite understand why she simply wasn’t doing her routines naked. Her gungirls had helped design the lurid thing, and she took their word that it throcked.
They defied gravity, and in zero-G, the entire arena began to spin.
Shetanna summoned intricate glowing platforms, levels, and steps of glowing, transparent red Chaos energy out of nowhere for 36 to perform on and within. She and her Marines danced and flipped through the air. Holograms and light show beams highlighted and featured the hottest acts and dance routines.
For the finale, Shettana shot into the air and seemed to explode like a tremendous living skyrocket, and vanished within an explosion of light and a deafening boom as all the lights went out.
When the lights came back on, all of the units gathered there were left dumbstruck and speechless. Shetanna and Bravo had completely disappeared. Then the crowd exploded in thunderous cheering, went wild, and nearly tore the arena down.
Once things settled back down, other acts came on and made feeble attempts to compare. But everyone present already knew who had won the competition.
28
At Eldratha-2, humanity finally had the invaders on the run. But the Ejjai grew increasingly more desperate and destructive, doing everything they could to cause maximum damage, no matter what happened to their own forces.
The Spacer Navy and Intel neutralization fixer clouds had their hands full–speaking figuratively, since fixers did not have actual hands. Alliance dampening fields kept the invaders from simply blanketing the remaining worlds in atomics and cosmicide devices.
By now, the Corps fleets that had been crippled by the enemy were finally coming back online to assist in a major way, refitted and ready to fight once again. They became a major factor in the High Crusade, near the very end. Their numbers alone made a big difference against a final push on the part of the enemy to flood the Corps worlds with invading hordes.
For once, Spacers and landers–all of humanity–hunted the invading forces down with a vengeance and crushed them, wherever they could be found.
Besides that, working with the lander worlds became much easier with local lander fleets working side by side with the Spacers. As the Spacer forces penetrated deeper into the worlds of Corps space, old hatreds and prejudices, long egged on by the Corps, died hard. Spacer forces still came under fire at times from populations they were fighting to rescue from the Ejjai invaders.
Yet once everyone fully cooperated and coordinated their efforts together to defeat and destroy the invaders, everyone could agree on that much. There were far fewer incidents of prejudice and outright aggression against Spacers.
The local populations
quickly learned the value of having the Spacers as their allies.
The Spacer military put the Ejjai down hard and fast, better than anyone else. And that saved lives and shortened the terrible war.
Spacers grudgingly began to be seen as avenging heroes, even on Corps worlds where the Ejjai did not invade.
And the various vid incarnations of Shetanna became a galactic phenomena. Nearly every sentient race had their own version of the legend in every form of media available.
There was even a hilarious Silesian variant of the Dark Angel of Death who grunted and cursed a lot, told rude jokes, and liked to fart at key times during all of the excitement. The frogs loved it.
Naero saw one of the vids and couldn’t get past Shetanna having a pulsing throatbag and coming up with creative ways to tell the Ejjai how to dine on her bodily waste products.
In many instances, however, on Corps worlds that had remained cut off by the invasion, it became better to send in some of the lander forces first, especially the heavily populated megacities where the focus was on trying to evacuate people in advance of enemy pushes and attacks.
Some of those lander populations still weren’t used to large numbers of heavily armed Spacers suddenly showing up in their cities.
But the new evacuation strategy also saved countless lives. By the time the enemy did strike, they often found entrenched, well-organized Spacer Alliance forces ready to blanket them in waves of destroying fire.
This amounted to a huge surprise for the invaders, when they were expecting to butcher helpless civilians in yet another frenzied orgy of bloodletting.
On a few occasions, the massed lander forces were so enraged that they actually requested that the Spacers hold back in supporting roles, and let them cut the enemy down.
They wanted payback for what the Ejjai had done to their various peoples, and were determined to get it.
The Spacers didn’t mind taking a breather here or there, and were always at hand if the enemy got tricky and tried to turn the tables.
Naero's War: The Citation Series 2: The High Crusade Page 27
