Welcome back gentle reader
The continuing story of the changing of Mars and Thadius Tonstar, First of His Name.
If you are a new reader, this serves as a prologue to Jebidiah's Change. I hope you enjoy. My writing has been so focused on Jeb I had to do a find/replace on this to switch everything over to Thadius. Hopefully their personalities do not bleed together much.
-- Chapter 2: Mars, USNA Naval Base, Fort Denning --
-- March 24th, 2384 A.D. 5 AGR --
Often you don't know whether a woman is a friend, enemy or lover until it is too late. Sometimes, she is all three.
- Jordan
Thadius hated saying 'so far, so good' because, as the age-old joke goes, eventually you run out of floors. When they were preparing their defenses, Kami had asked how things were going, and not even an hour ago, without thinking, he had replied 'so far, so good' in some sort of twisted prophetic response because he had just run out of proverbial floors and hit the ground.
Projectiles slammed into the hastily erected barricades that Thadius used for shelter from the attacks of Brusset's men. It had been two tendays since he had discussed his plans with Kami, and she had gone and put the plan in motion, dragging him along for the ride. With the loss of New Atlantis and massive population decline in the scant few years since, the civilian government had ceased to exist, leaving the military as the only surviving organized group to fill the power vacuum. Friction promptly started within the ranks, first between the surviving branches, with the Marines removing the Navy from the power structure by virtue of sheer numbers. Next, the pre-existing rift between the 1st, 3rd, and 8th Marine Armies escalated as each ruling general fought for dominance. With the death, or execution depending on who you asked, of General Matherson of the 3rd, the various brigades began infighting as well, jockeying for political power.
Thadius' bright idea had been to reinstate a properly elected civilian government to oversee the military, as it had always been done in the USNA, and stop the infighting to preserve what was left of the dwindling human population. It sounded good to him, being biased as he was since it was his idea, but Kami absolutely loved it and began recruiting co-conspirators to help pull it off. The problem with conspiracies was they required enough people to pull it off, but for every person involved the risk of exposure went up exponentially. Thadius and Kami found out their scheme had been exposed a few hours ago, which led to their current predicament. Stuck in a hallway with a hastily erected barricade leading into a single room with a single exit. The wall their backs were against was not proverbial and very real.
The firing stopped, and a voice rang out, "Come on out Tonstar, no need for everyone to get killed beside you. Any of you others, Tonstar has led you to your demise. Kill him for us, and we promise you will leave alive."
Thadius yelled back, "Fuck off, Carter. I'd call you a prick, but scuttlebutt claims you never had one to begin with. Just the other day, Kendel was saying you are the reason she switched to women." A fresh fusillade of projectiles hit the barricade in response. "That struck a nerve," Thadius thought to himself with a chuckle before he sobered up again. This plan had better work.
When news of their attempt to usurp the military leaked, several opposing camps that were actively fighting each other called a truce and joined forces against Thadius and Kami. The enemy of my enemy was dumb logic but it proved effective and Thadius wished he could have found an application of it. Colonel Brusset, a complete asshole before the world came apart let alone after, had sent someone he knew would never let Thadius walk away from the confrontation, his good friend Sergeant Carter accompanied by his fellow goon squad. After their confrontation in the mess a few tendays before, his goons unsuccessfully attempted to orchestrate several unfortunate and possibly fatal accidents for Thadius. His continued existence was fuel enough for their rage, and Thadius' plan counted on them to stay angry and stupid.
Thadius had time to set up more than one barricade in the hallway, three to be precise, with a fourth and final just outside the doorway to the room which he was planning on sealing up tight when the time came. Carter was under the impression several defenders were behind the current barricade, and Thadius had no plan on disillusioning his attackers of that falsehood. There was, in fact, only Thadius on team defense. To keep up the pretense, he very rarely returned fire. Only three times to be exact, and two of those shots had landed, resulting in satisfactory cries of pain. Soldiers didn't tend to mind charging into rapid gunfire. The spray-and-pray heavily relied on the praying part, and a majority of those types of shooters aimed high, not really wanting to kill a fellow human. It is surprising how safe it is to charge someone spraying bullets like they have no care. Methodical gunfire, especially when it was coupled with a high hit percentage, was another beast, a much scarier one.
The plan was to hold the attackers at bay as long as he could, period, his only objective was vying for time. It was a simple plan, and as he finished wiring up the last of the booby traps on the first barricade, he felt confident of succeeding. He had started setting traps at the doorway and worked forward to where the attackers would start. It allowed him to have prepared emplacements to fall back on instead of all the good stuff up front, but it handicapped his fallback plan because he had to make sure he did not set off his own traps during his retreat. Not for the first time, he mused about the video games he played where one could trample his own traps all he wanted without worry. Shortly after the final traps were in place, the attacks had begun, and Thadius' methodical defense started taking a toll. A few more rounds of incoming fire and he spotted another brave soul making an attempt to probe his position. His fourth shot managed to take out his opponent's kneecap. The shrill scream was grating on the ears but very, very satisfying to hear nonetheless.
His fifth round found the shoulder of the next man stupid enough to try and pull the screaming, kneeless idiot out of the line of sight. In the back of his mind, he worried about the level of training the current batch of Marines was receiving. His sixth round was a bit high and missed; the fucker ducked down at the last second. He wasn't trying to kill any of them, though, truth be told, Carter had to die just because he was Carter. No other justification was needed in Thadius' mind. After nearly an hour of this cat-and-mouse shit, Thadius saw the next escalation coming as a now rare and costly flashbang grenade sailed into the hallway, skidding to a halt against the barricade. Thadius had just enough time and coverage to deflect and neutralize the effects. He knew what was coming next and moved to the second barricade before the assault rush took place.
The attacker easily breached the first barricade once they charged en masse, but their momentum was brought up short as one of the equally rare, and now equally costly, claymore mines Thadius had rigged to a trip wire exploded. For those closest to the mine, wounding wasn't really an option as the steel ball bearings ripped through their bodies before becoming embedded in the more (or less depending on how you looked at it) shielded bodies behind the newly dead. The screams weren't exactly shrill like mister kneecap, but they made up for it in volume. Shots seven and eight both connected with the soft tissue of those trying to remove the screaming wounded. Thadius found himself almost enjoying the last few hours of life he might have.
It was several hours and a lot more screaming before Thadius found himself behind the final barricade. He had outright killed at least two full rifle teams and wounded at least two squads worth of a full platoon. By himself. The Marines had really fallen on hard times if this was the performance level they now held. Pre-cataclysm they would have taken Thadius out in the first fifteen minutes with a minimum of casualties. Behind the third barricade, the one he had just abandoned, he had strung a carbon monofilament, too thin to really see with the naked eye, across the hallway about ankle height. When the first two attackers ran into it, they immediately crouched down to grab their legs where the fiber bit deeply into the muscle only to have their face meet the molecular cutting wire that was also strung across the hallway. That one was an absolute bitch to get into place with the tools available, but seeing the top parts of the heads of his foes slide off, exposing brains? Priceless. The two behind them, seeing how the first two had bent for their legs, correctly guessed there was a wire of some sort in play. In their rush, they both opted to leap over the other two, only to sail into the monowire they also couldn't see with the spectacular result of cutting both of their feet off, about halfway up their shins. Thadius had to shudder at the thought of what sort of pain was involved in landing on the stumps of what remained of your legs.
By this time, a majority of the attackers were in position in the long hallway, taking some measure of protection behind what was left of the barricades they dismantled to reach Thadius. He decided it was time and shut the doorway to the room, sealed it, and sent off the prepared message via the hardline wire that they had installed that morning. The attackers, what was left of them anyways, sensing victory surged further into the hallway and helped the last of the screamers and clear the last of Thaidus' traps. Just in time for the final part of the plan to come together as Kami launched two frag grenades into the corridor, one near and one far, trying to launch the second far enough to hit the now closed doorway. In the confined space of the hallway, it was a bloodbath as the shrapnel from the grenades bounced around until they met yielding flesh.
In later years, it would be told how Thadius had held off a full company, killing a full platoon and wounding the rest, with none of his attackers leaving unscathed. In truth, he and Kami did kill a full platoon, but he only wounded a second, not a full company, leaving a few soldiers untouched. One thing the tales did get right, when the fighting died down, Thadius found Sergeant Carter still alive, holding some torn scraps of shirt against his head where one of his eyes had been punctured by shrapnel. He begged for mercy as Thadius dug his finger into the remaining eye, permanently blinding Carter. "Listen, Carter, you may think me leaving you alive is a mercy, but I guarantee that you will find killing you would have been the mercy you beg for."
