Terracom Inception

UM-3/Avalon

Kray cried out involuntarily as Harley dodged an incoming, incandescent energy stream and slipped in the mud, a by-product of the rain from the storm that had come in fast on the wind rolling down from the Northern Sea. Harley dropped him onto his left side, where the exposed meat of an open wound overwhelmed the synthetic endorphins Kray had injected, a reminder of the same bombardment that had pulped Rosie and scrapped her HISS gun, cut Lt. Swift in half, and buried the 1st Sergeant in fallen rubble. All they found of Sigis, the 1st Sergeant’s nodie, was his damaged node-pack.

Kray rolled onto his stomach and looked as Harley trained his weapon toward the base of the hill and squeezed off shots that dropped several shadows less than 12 meters away. “There's so feking many of them,” He called and swapped a fresh magazine of 5mm hypersonics into his rifle. As an afterthought he added, “If I ever meet any of those engineers, I’m going to pour C-seventy (: A liquid/gel explosive compound) down his throat and blow his ass into high orbit!”

The engineers had crossed the bridge to safety before the demolishing charges they set had taken it down. With some effort Kray raised his helmet mike to his lips and said, “Charlie company... this is two actual… fall back by squad to the hill top. Give them some covering fire. We’ll try to hold them here.”

Kinetic artillery, firing guided munitions from far to the north, had gotten some hits, destroying several of the alien grav-vehicles gathering around the base of the hill they seemed unable to climb. In the light of the burning vehicle shells, he watched 40 men moving out towards the rendezvous point he’d designated, muzzles flashed behind the retreat as the wounded, too critically injured to move, engaged the things, buying their friends time to escape. Resistance broke down as the small pockets of maimed and dying men were overrun.

Their ground troops worked in close coordination with their anti-grav vehicles, as if on electronic leashes, when the GV’s got knocked out, they fell under command of the next nearest vehicle or scattered. Kray scraped off the mud caked over the face of his Krono-Tek and checked the time that had elapsed since the mission began. “Five hours, my ass! We’ve been here for almost twelve. Where the hell is that support?”

“Hey, Alvin, check it out,” Harley said and used his compact rifle as a pointer. The sky on the western horizon was glowing mother-of-pearl pink behind clouds that still lingered from the evening storm. A spark of fire appeared as the sun touched the dark horizon. Dawn had come and the long night was over. “We made it.”

“I guess I owe you fifty. You can collect when we both get to Hell.”

Harley snorted and said, “I think we’re already there.” He pulled a red-striped Vortex grenade off his belt and set the timer, then shouted, “Fire in the hole!” Five seconds after he tossed it away, the earth beneath them shook as the powerful charge exploded, a reminder of how close the alien assaulters were to their tenuous position. Kray could hear several nearly-ultrasonic screams from close by. At least the things could die.

40 rounds left. He thought and jammed the carbon-fiber magazine back into his M-32. I’ll have to wait till they get close so I don’t miss. He’d decided that he would save the last round for himself when there was another blast and a GV broke open, spewing an orange fireball into the sky.

There was a momentary lapse in the firing as the things stopped and turned to watch the armored hulk burn. The ones standing upright were immediately cut down by high energy HISS bursts that easily burned through the resin armor that the more numerous of the two species mounted as a natural defense. The smaller ones were man-sized but less evolved looking, each with a loping gait

“Got about a half dozen of ‘em looking when that GV blew,” Harley shouted over his shoulder. “They’re pulling back to the bottom of the hill. It looks like they’re waiting for orders or something.” He snapped his rifle to his shoulder and squeezed off several shots.

“What the hell? We don’t have any missiles left,” Kray thought out loud. The directed energy weapons the alien vehicles mounted had destroyed the few that had been fired at them while in flight. “Our HISS guns aren’t enough to knock one of those vehicles down.”

Just as welcome but more perplexing was a second explosion. Another GV crashed to earth as the anti-gravity field it generated flickered out. Kray dropped his data visor and engaged the Starlight setting, then he swept the battlefield from horizon to horizon, he found what he was looking for on the third pass.

“Harley, have a look to the southwest and tell me what you see,” Kray said and pointed at what he’d found. The corporal lowered his own visor and looked off in that direction.

"Sweet Mary," Harley said. A thin platter rested on top of a narrow pole, thee type of telescoping scanner array mounted on the backs of AS-3 Arapaho attack skimmers, raised to give the pilot and weapons control computer an electronic look at the battlefield while still keeping the ship itself concealed. It had had taken the technicians 12 hours to get them unpacked and in the air. “It’s about goddamn time they got here.”

The rise of the hill the gunship hovered behind was backlit by the signature of a rocket motor firing. After launch it initiated a steep climb and disappeared. Seconds later another GV exploded, the flash momentarily overloaded his helmet sensors, causing his display to flare, when it returned there were still dozens of GV’s left untouched.

“There’s got to be more of them around,” Kray said as from behind them came a high-pitched, mechanical whine, the sound of a large turbine engine gathering rpm’s. “If there is, it’s the first piece of good news I’ve heard since this whole disaster started. Is there anything coming in through the node?”

Harley shook his head and said, “Negative, it’s all quiet, but I think our visitors are regrouping. I think they’re gonna make a rush. I only got eighty rounds left.”

Kray pulled the magazine from his own weapon and tossed it toward Harley. “Make them count.”

They had no way to communicate with the gunships… the tactical nodepack that Harley had dragged along was damaged, hit in the attack that killed nodie Sigis. It could receive traffic but not send it. Each NorCom soldier was tagged with an IFF transponder that the gunship pilot could use to sort friend from foe. Something crested the hill behind them, bathing them in the intense beam of a powerful searchlight, like the glory of salvation.

“Yeah, bay-bee!” Harley screamed at it and thrust out a clenched fist.

Kray clenched his teeth and turned over, the effort causing the pain in his side to flare, but he did not care. Instead, he laughed with relief at the sight of an Arapaho gunship adorned with the livery of the 2nd Aviation Battalion, one of the three units that made up 4th Brigade of the NorCom 10 Division. The cavalry had arrived to collect its own.

The weapons pylons on the ship were loaded down with anti-personnel weapons: twin 20mm auto-cannons on each inboard store and pods carrying eighteen 5-inch self-guided rockets on each outboard. The pilot gave him a thumbs-up as the pilot increased power and set the skimmer to its grisly work. The four auto-cannons poured a combined 2400 rounds per minute into the things clustered around the hill. The ones hit directly by 20-mm shells exploded into wet chunks.

“Pinkish green mist! Awoo!” Harley shouted and ducked as a stream of plasma from a GV scorched the rocks beside his head. The skimmer made four passes over the hillside, cannon-shells and rockets sending up fountains of mud and rock, leaving reams of ruptured and still forms.

“Charlie two actual, this is Pegasus lead, come in.” The sound from the node-pack startled Harley as he was taking aim. He hefted it close to where Kray laid prone. “Charlie two actual, please respond.”

Kray nearly screamed at the thing in frustration that he could not.

“Charlie two actual, if you cannot respond then be advised we are inbound with twelve birds. ETA, seven minutes. Pull back and find a suitable LZ, pop smoke on terminal approach, out.”

“Charlie company. This is two actual,” Kray said as he pulled his boom mike closer. The pain in his side was momentarily forgotten. “Fall back to the top of the hill in stages for ex-fill.”

There was a small clearing among the rocks that, at first glance, could accommodate something the size of a troop skimmer, maybe even two, it would suffice for their purposes. Leaning heavily on Harley as they moved toward it, Kray counted few more than twenty in the group that had once been two hundred.

“Charlie two actual, this is Pegasus lead, on terminal approach.”

Rucksacks were dumped on end. All eyes were on the last man as he shook out his load; there was a small clank as a smoke grenade fell out onto the rocks, and after a brief scramble to retrieve it, the grenade was released into the middle of the clearing. Dampened by the wet haze from a night of rain, the thick red smoke it produced hung lazily at waist level.

Harley put on the Mk. 5 visor and scanned the area, pointing off down the length of the mist-shrouded canyon, when the node alerted him to contacts. The sound of approaching engines was obscured by the resonance of battle and by the wind pushing along the thunderheads.

"ADF fighters inbound!" He shouted as new information came in through the node-pack. Kray's eyes, drawn to movement, found aircraft coming at them framed by the smoking remnants of the demolished bridge, a brace of F/A-300's plowing through haze, weapons-pylons heavy with clusters of ordinance.

"Eat CBU, bastards!" Elroy yelled as the F/A-300's screeched overhead. The ADF had finally gotten into the act and produced some air support. The engine noise changed as the fighters dropped their payloads. They were clear and gone before the bombs start exploding. Another two F/A-300's rocketed in to replace them. The noise that suddenly overwhelmed all others was that of strings of firecrackers exploding, thousands upon thousands of them, like those that should have been popping off to celebrate Founder's Day.

"Here they come!" Doc shouted and pointed out something beneath the ruined span. "They're bringing a super-gaggle in!"

There was a group of UC-11 Fury's flying in stacked formation towards them. The tactic was usually for inserting troops; skimmers darting in under the cover of artillery, air strikes, and naval gunnery if it could be laid on, would have an assault force on the ground before the last round of supporting fire had landed. The node-pack went active again. “Charlie two actual, Pegasus lead has eyes on red smoke, coming in now, make sure your men are clear.”

The line of skimmers came in low and fast, hugging the curves in the chasm wall, banking around islands of rock sprouting up from the ravine floor. The fuselages of the VTOL craft were drab gray and slick. The aluminum skin covering each was installed in sheets riveted to oblong Duralite frames. A ten-panel plexiglass canopy sloped down into their bulging noses. The pilot in the left seat of the lead ship wore a white flight helmet and watched them out of panel #3, then his lips moved. "Pegasus lead calling Charlie two actual. We have you in sight."

Mud spattered out and the scattered patches of tube-grass flattened down as UC-11 alight. Doors behind the nose-mounted FLIR pod opened and the front landing strut dropped out. The tail ramp was down before the engine pods at the ends of the stubby wings stopped generating lift.

"Hurry up, dammit!" Someone, the crew chief, was off the loading ramp and running towards them before the UC-11 settled into the mud. Another UC-11 settled behind it in the impossibly small patch that was left.

"How many do you have?" The crew chief said as he threw an arm around Kray and helped drag him towards the open cargo bay. "We can only take eight per ship."

"Tw-twenty-six," Kray muttered. "What took you guys so long?"

"Count 'em off, corporal." The crew chief said as he pulled Kray into the skimmer and laid him down. The LZ erupted with noise and light as the UC-11's making slow circles overhead added suppressing fire from their waist guns to the melee. A plasma stream shot up from behind the rise and narrowly missed a Fury banking around for an attack run.

Kray could hear Harley counting men as he accepted an auto-injector filled with synthetic endorphins and jabbed it into his thigh muscle. Exhausted, he leaned back against the wall of the cargo compartment and closed his eyes, in too much pain to sleep. He was roused by a firm shake. Harley looked down on him with angry tears in his eyes.

“They made two more landings, Sergeant. I heard it come in over the node," He said and dropped his head into his hands. "We couldn't contain them. They’re pounding the hell out of us from orbit.”

Kray closed his eyes again and absorbed the heat blasting out of the floor ducts into his face. He desperately wanted the blissful unconscious of slumber, but visions of the dead bodies they have left behind kept it from him, and the drying mud on his face was making his skin itch. His stomach dropped out as the skimmer lifted into the air.

“Excuse me, sir, but where are we going?” Harley shouted to be heard over the engines and the wind whistling through the open cargo bay.

“To Freeport,” The crew-chief said. “Our primary was the medical center at Little Springs but they’re taking fire from orbit. Freeport’s already been hit but they got a mobile hospital set up in a secure location.”

Why did it have to be war? Kray thought and tried to succumb to sleep.

***

SOL-3/Earth

Kinkaid’s flagship was the USS Challenger, a Fast-class heavy cruiser like the Saratoga was an icon of a bygone age but upgraded with the latest weapons and technology: ROC hepacs, new engines, blocks of bolt-on RAM armor, Starhorse transit drives, Barracuda A.I.’s. Kinkaid smiled when he saw it through the window of their transfer shuttle and, to the delight of the Challenger captain, proclaimed the ship to be “one tough hombre.” Once aboard and strapped into acceleration couches, they had rocketed away from Mars at maximum power, four G’s of thrust for six straight hours.

All Kinkaid would tell her when she asked was that his presence was requested for “consultations.” The trip from had taken half the usual time, thanks to three separate refuelings by waiting SOLCorp shuttles, Challenger had nearly emptied her tanks again before the blue Earth glowed outside the viewport of Jena’s stateroom.

“They don’t need to tell me what they want to consult me about,” Kinkaid said as their shuttle broke away from the cruiser and dropped earthward, angling for the NorCom military spaceport outside London. He lifted a hand and turned the palm upward, imitating the sorts of diplomats he’d been forced to deal with for five, non-consecutive decades. “Thank you so much for coming, Admiral. We’re sure that you can see the benefits of a one world government and we feel con-fi-dent that you’ll see the wisdom in supporting our plan.” He let the hand drop with a disgusted sigh. “And on and on.”

“What makes you think that they’re planning another shot at the one world?” Jena said as Kinkaid tightened his harness straps down. “It’s been tried before, twice so far, and it’s failed each time. It doesn’t make sense to try it again.”

“It’s the Atlas twelve incident,” Kinkaid said and closed his eyes, folding his hands in his lap. “And the EuroCon collapse, and Transterran, and the whole, wretched EuroCon system. The game is up for them. All they’ve been doing for the last twenty years is negotiating for the best terms of surrender. It gives everyone involved what they want: the NorCom gets to design a world government according to it’s own rules, the EuroCon gets help with the Atlas twelve cleanup and a stable political system. The trade cartels and the Pan Pacific Alliance get the elimination of trade barriers. It seems everyone’s a winner.”

“Seems?”

“The same differences and petty rivalries that brought the last two world governments remain with this attempt. Much better conditions existed in the past, even with that, the one world has always failed.”

EuroCon airspace was closed to NorCom traffic so they were forced to take transport from London to Geneva, boarding a grav-lev as the late afternoon continued its decent toward its rendezvous with the western horizon. The high-speed train, carrying NorCom delegates to the potential world government, would deliver them before the next dawn.

“The EuroCon economic structure had been in place for 200 years, their markets intermingled since the emergence of the single European currency, and after that, the unified network of banks and corporations that had turned the blend of 1st world and 3rd world nations into a worldwide powerhouse. The military arm of that same economy was a product of much older agreements, specifically NATO, and as that mutual defense agreement grew to encompass the continent, the roles of traditional allies were diminished to irrelevance.”

“America was pressured out of NATO,” Jena said. “After that it became the EuroCon.”

Kinkaid agreed. “Although the new organization was more than happy to retain the command-and-control infrastructure that had largely been financed by American taxpayers.”

Jena closed the text file her datapad had been reading through when the grey, rain-soaked Kent countryside flashing past her peripheral vision began to slow. The mag-lev train that carried Kinkaid, who sat beside her in the aisle-seat, and his entourage away from the Wellington Spaceport was approaching the demilitarized zone separating NorCom territory from EuroCon… British side of the Channel Tunnel at Dover.

Heavy, crew-served, anti-vehicle weapons and HISS guns were emplaced behind electrified razor wire barricades set up around the entrance, which itself was capped by a massive Fibrocrete plug weighing several hundred tons. She could see somber-looking British soldiers patrolling in groups, checking the outside of the train for hidden riders and explosives. The current, decrepit state of the EuroCon could not erase decades of paranoia about a foreign army invading by way of the tunnel… thus an entire NorCom army was dedicated to defending the entrance. Noone could imagine the thought of just destroying the tunnel and being done with it.

“Learning anything important, Commander?” Kinkaid as he leaned over her to watch the activity going on outside her window. “This is where everyone predicted that the Neo-Colonial War would start… not out in space, but right here on the ground with airstrikes to suppress the defenses while EuroCon armored assault trains came through the tunnel… but it never happened.”

“The trip would’ve been quicker if we could’ve just dropped straight into Geneva,” Jena said as the muted blare of an alert horn came through the streamlined chassis around them. The plug was being slowly rolled aside to let the train through. “I don’t understand why EuroCon airspace is still closed.”

“It’s a position of strength,” Kinkaid said as the train began creeping forward. “And probably for our own safety. I’m sure more than a few commanders in the EuroCon military would react badly to one of our dropships coming down toward one of their command centers… even supposedly neutral ground like the world capital. Some government sources within the EuroCon zone are accusing us of deliberately dropping Atlas twelve on them. Just sit back and enjoy the scenery, Commander.”

When the search teams had finished their sweep of the train, it began moving forward, Jena donned her headset again as they entered the tunnel and darkness swallowed their passenger car. She pushed the button on her armrest to tilt to seat back and closed her eyes as audio feed began coming through again.