Date Point 10y10m2w3d AV
HMS Valiant, En route to Crzlrfek System, The Freedom Stars
Technical Sergeant Martina Kovač
“…But you still got to eat the steak, right?”
“Well yeah, but by the time Stainless had finished briefing us it had gone cold!”
“It was still good though, right?”
“But it wasn’t as good!”
Marty gave him a stern look as she closed up Titan’s life support pack and handed it to one of the suit techs. “Well gee wiz, I’m so sorry about the pea in your fifty mattresses, princess.”
Adam’s eyebrows came down in the specific frown he used whenever a reference went over his head. “Huh?”
“…Fuck a duck,” Marty grunted, feeling a little disgusted in him. “You don’t even know that story?”
“Is this that Kipling guy again?”
“Is it-? No! No it’s not! Jesus!”
Now came his other expression, which was much the same as might be worn by a scolded puppy that wasn’t sure what it had done wrong but was very sorry nevertheless. Marty knew that it was completely guileless and un-malicious but with nine suit life support units to prep and sign off on, she was not in the mood right now.
“I should read that stuff, huh?” he asked.
“What you should do is let me concentrate, or do you have a sudden fetish for breathing CO2 that you never told me about?”
Scolded-puppy turned into kicked-puppy and he muttered something affirmative and went to check his mission gear again, leaving Martina to feel a touch guilty. Only a touch though—he really should know better than to distract her during the most critical phase of suit assembly.
For fuck’s sake, he was an intelligent guy, too! In fact when he was in his element, he was a genius. She wouldn’t have looked at him twice if he’d been genuinely as dumb as he sometimes acted, but when he was being dumb, he was dumb.
It wasn’t just the literature thing. Honestly, she could forgive him for not knowing his Rudyard Kipling from his Hans Christian Andersen: Something about his life story suggested that bedtime stories had not featured in the daily routine of little Adam Arés, whereas Martina’s father had first read ’Rikki Tikki Tavi’ to her at the age of four.
It was the sheer number and size of his blind spots that bothered her. She’d once seen him deliberately but with seeming innocence change course and tap an apparently random guy on the shoulder. He’d shaken his head and the guy had gone pale and made himself scarce. She’d asked him why, and Adam had stated with perfect confidence that the guy was stalking an ex-girlfriend, and had pointed out the oblivious gal in question.
He had a strange kind of interpersonal hyperopia that he seemed chronically unable to diagnose. He could spot somebody else’s creepy stalker ex from thirty yards away on a crowded street and yet still be completely blind to his own faulty behaviour. It was a conundrum. One that a degree of academic education that shamed most physicians had done absolutely nothing to equip her for solving.
Speaking of which…
She forced him out of her thoughts and directed her attention fully onto what she was doing. Nine valuable lives were in her hands, this was no time to allow herself to be distracted. What they were going into could plausibly become dangerous enough anyway, they damn well weren’t going to get hurt because of her.
The job was not being helped by the cramped confines of HMS Valiant’s tiny flight deck where the Techs were working butt-to-butt, elbow-to-elbow and by leaning around one another. If ‘Horse hadn’t needed to be present so Hargreaves and Doyle could sew him into his undersuit, in fact, she’d have told him to get the hell off the deck and make some room.
The crowding problem got even more acute when Major Powell bustled in from the direction of the CIC.
“Fall in, lads.” He lifted his voice above the hubbub without shouting, a neat trick that Martina wished she could do. She listened with half an ear as she checked the catalyst baffles in the next pack.
He looked strangely happy about something as the operators gathered round. “So. AEC’s worried that if we just grab the HVT clean and pleasant-like, we’ll have the Dominion callin’ on us every time they smell Celzi. So, we’ve been authorised, nay encouraged, to go full ham on this one.”
Feral grins all round welcomed this pronouncement.
“Now obviously we’re not monsters, and we’ll damn well remember the Law of Armed Combat, but we’re settin’ out to completely fookin’ terrify the leadership on both sides. If we do it right we might just persuade the Celzi to settle the fook down, and the Dominion to think twice before they call us. That means the officers get no mercy. Spare the conscripts if you can so long as they don’t try an’ be a stupid bloody hero, but today’s our day to give the Dominion and the Alliance a demonstration in just how dangerous we really are. Understood?”
There were “Yes sir!”s from the Lads, and several of the techs traded knowing looks and got out of their way as best they could in the crowded space to let them really get in the warrior headspace.
Marty had… got used to seeing them like this. When the adrenaline started pounding and the testosterone started flowing, they let themselves fall into an older, more sanguine place where the killers lived.
The first time she’d seen it, she’d learned of a new and hitherto unsuspected kind of machismo. A strangely silent one that had nothing to do with noise or posturing, and everything to do with contact. Body contact, eye contact, contact between brother souls. It was quiet, and intimate in a way that she knew she would never experience but was entirely certain she never wanted to.
She could watch their eyes harden and cool as they committed to their professional personas. Like watching a knife emerge from its soft leather sheath, something cold and deadly emerged from under the kind barriers they put up both to protect it and to protect from it.
She was used to seeing them this way… but when The Lads, whom she cared for both personally and professionally, stepped back from themselves and became weapons instead then it was hard not to be a little scared for them.
And hard not to feel sorry for the ETs they were about to unleash themselves on.
Date Point 10y10m2w3d AV
Hyperbolic trajectory, Crzlrfek System, The Freedom Stars
HUGINN ONE
”Valiant says T minus two mikes.”
”Copy that.”
Ten percent of lightspeed was a useful balance point. It was slow enough to be feasibly reached by a ship using some tricky warp field manipulations, and yet by the standards of any physical system it was absurdly fast, far too fast for any realistic interception that wasn’t warp-based in its own right. It was slow enough that the gamma-t was so tiny as to only matter to the computers, which could compensate, and far above the escape velocity of the Crzlrfek system’s obese orange star.
Most importantly, however, it was enough to give absolutely any object no matter how light an incredible amount of kinetic energy… and the General Electric GAU-8/S Equalizer mounted on a Firebird could fire seventy “objects” a second.
Dominion and Alliance naval doctrine both stressed the value of directed energy-on-target. In this regard, a Firebird coasting on a hyperbolic orbit at a tenth of lightspeed was the indisputable king.
But of course, from several light-hours away, all of that firepower was worthless.
”One mike.”
”Copy.”
Of course, this particular maneuver had never been attempted for real. For all they knew they were about to run smack into some kind of overpowered alien forcefield gizmo with much the same consequences as were felt by insects that strayed onto a highway.
It would all happen so fast that the pilots and their WSOs on HUGINNs one and two, and their comrades providing eyes over on MUNINN ONE and MUNINN TWO, would get only the swiftest impression of the incredible energies they were about to unleash. Everything had been calculated down to the millisecond.
”Ten seconds. Til Valhal!”
”Oorah!”
Silence before the violence.
Three…
Two..
One.
Date Point 10y10m2w3d AV
Crzlrfek System, The Freedom Stars
Alpha of the Brood Of A Million Teeth
The Alpha was forced to replay the sensor data in extreme slow motion to make sense of what it had witnessed, and on doing so it utterly forgot to guard its thoughts.
<Stunned awe; disbelief>
It rewound the data and played it again, even slower. There was the knot of defensive batteries that had frustrated it for several days. Four space stations spread out in a line, placed so that when the prize they guarded was not beneath them, it was beneath some other bodyguard of orbital batteries. Any ship that decloaked near them was inviting immediate obliteration.
Hunters hated to abandon a Hunt, but the Alpha was old and wily and knew better than to let pride get it killed. So it had sat, and watched, and waited for a window of opportunity. It had been on the verge of deciding that there would never be such a window.
And then the batteries had been destroyed.
The timing of it was what stunned the Alpha the most. There was a strong ping on the FTL wake sensors far out in the system’s outer halo, as of a few small ship approaching at incredible apparent speeds.
So fast, in fact, that their FTL transit lasted for less than a second. They had landed doing a respectable proportion of the universal causality limit, and had departed again at those same savage FTL speeds… but in their wake they had left a cloud of dumb kinetic projectiles that flashed through the defense satellites’ orbit with enough fierce energy that each one that struck home released the kind of energy normally only seen in fission warheads. The four defense stations ceased to exist before they even properly knew that they were under attack.
For any Hunter, witnessing violence on such an overwhelming scale was practically a religious experience, but the attackers had only made their first opening move. The strike craft must have dropped jump beacons as they came in, because the sky was suddenly full of ships.
And what ships! Small, dark, so sleek that the probing radiation of the ground batteries as they tried to get a lock just slid off like water on oiled steel. The tormented and rippling fabric of space twisted some more and disgorged metal rods that were already falling on precise re-entry trajectories that would drill them hard into the reinforced fabric of the ground facility that the Alpha had pondered for so long. Anything unfortunate enough to be caught beneath that tungsten rain was doomed.
It spun around and began to issue commands with all the fervour it had. <Exultation; Glee> +Humans! The humans are here! This is our chance! Ready the brood for battle!+
The Brood Of A Million Fangs did not fear defeat, nor death. They existed for violence, and violence had come to them and exposed its throat.
They would bite, they would fight, and even if they all died, they would live.
+MEAT TO THE MAW!!!+
Date Point 10y10m2w3d AV
Falling towards the ground, planet Crzlrfek, Crzlrfek System, The Freedom Stars
STAINLESS
EV-MASS was a spacesuit, and that meant glare protection to guard the eyes from maybe having to look toward the sun without even the meager protection of atmosphere. That meant that when a dozen bright flares lit up below them as the RFG strikes hit, Stainless didn’t even blink.
Nor did Starfall. ”VALIANT, STARFALL. Orbital strike on target, well hit.”
Plummeting toward the ground with no parachute, and he still managed to make the report with perfect ice coolness. It was no less than Stainless expected of him, but he still couldn’t help but feel impressed. The HELLNO jump—Baseball’s nickname for it had stuck even though none of them could come up with a suitable backronym—wasn’t exactly a stress-free situation, especially when they hit the tropopause and fell into boiling air.
”Angels Twenty.”
That was Rebar, watching their altitude. They could all see it, but Exo-Atmospheric Reentry jumps had a protocol now. They all remembered what had happened to Sergeant Stevenson.
The dust was clearing, and Stainless had a good view of the compound below. A lot of it was collapsed, on fire or both but he could see what looked like two breaches into the tunnels and basements that were the bulk of the facility.
“REBAR, HIGHLAND, STARFALL, TITAN and WARHORSE will land north east corner of the courtyard,” he declared. “RIGHTEOUS, SNAPFIRE, BASEBALL and STAINLESS will land south side. Remember, spare the conscripts if you can.”
”Angels Three, pop ‘em!”
They hit their EAR field emitter controls and the protective cocoon of forcefields that had shielded them from the searing plasma of re-entry found a new shape. Wide invisible wings of nothing but electrostatic wizardry zipped out around them and arrested their fall until they were coming in no harder than an ordinary parachute descent and without the awkward flapping mass of a ‘chute to control and shed once they were on the ground.
They hit the ground running with their weapons up and leading the way. It seemed nobody who had been unfortunate enough to stand outdoors during the bombardment was left alive: The overpressure had pulped them. Thank God for their helmets, because the smell must have been incredible.
Righteous led the way through the southern breach into the complex’s basements, his gun spoke a rhyming triplet, and they followed in after him.
If the target thought he’d seen overwhelming force already, he was sorely mistaken.
Date Point 10y10m2w3d AV
Celzi Alliance command facility, Crzlrfek System, The Freedom Stars
Warmaster Trez Ekrat
Ekrat had always thought the stories about humans were exaggerations. The stories of them bounding across the battlefield and slaying Vulza single-handedly were exaggerations. They had to be. Didn’t they?
But those stories were nothing next to the reality. There were nine humans loose in his compound, and they were death. They ignored the wounded, the dying and the cowardly but if any of Ekrat’s soldiers raised a weapon then that soldier died with neither mercy nor cruelty. Kinetic pulse fire fluttered harmlessly against them like paper on the wind.
A force of nature was coming for him and he had no idea how to stop it. He had no idea how it had even happened. His orbital defenses had simply vanished, scoured out of the sky with a contemptuous swipe of some unknowably powerful weapon. His ground fortifications had been smashed flat and now annihilation was sweeping through his facility and there was nothing he could do about it.
Nothing except gather his dignity and wait. He watched on the screen as his best Celzi commandos sprang an ambush on the humans that achieved exactly nothing. The thickly armored deathworlder whom they targeted just ignored five heavy pulse guns smacking into him, and pounced.
Ekrat had to look away. It was sickening to know that something was coming for him that could do that so easily.
He spared a last despairing once-over for his instruments and froze.
If what his instruments were telling him was accurate, then the humans suddenly didn’t seem so bad.
Date Point 10y10m2w3d AV
HMS Violent, orbiting planet Crzlrfek, Crzlrfek System, The Freedom Stars
Commodore William Caruthers
“…Now just where in the bloody hell did they come from?”
It was a strangely calm question to ask of a hunter Broodship, and Caruthers had asked it in an almost distracted way.
“They were tailing the defense platforms, cloaked… It looks like they’re ignoring us and going for the ground facility.”
“Smart. They must know by now that they can’t catch our ships so they’ve chosen the easier prey… Send a couple of Firebirds over there to kill the bastards, would you?”
“Yes sir…They’ve already launched their raiding shuttles.”
“Hmm. Is there any hope of intercepting all of them?”
“Not likely, sir. The Broodship is screening for them. I think they’re sacrificing it.”
“Hmm.”
Caruthers stood up and considered. The problem that the larger ship presented by screening the smaller ones was that it had sown gravity spikes around it which rendered the superluminal guns effectively useless. At those ranges the rounds were so impossibly slow that the slightest powered deflection by the Hunter ship would result in an outright miss. The Firebirds were going to have to attack from a circuitous angle, too. The master of that particular ship was a wily one.
And either fearless or suicidal. The Hunters had to know what they were up against here, surely?
He got on comms. “STAINLESS, RED SHIELD. We just had a Hunter broodship decloak up here and it’s already sending shuttles your way. What’s your status?”
Powell’s reply was about ten seconds in coming, and when it did he sounded terse. More so than usual. ”RED SHIELD, STAINLESS. Copy that. HVT secured alive. Request Hearthstone.”
For whatever reason, that particular brevity code always generated some amusement even in tense situations. Hearthstone was the quick way home for the Operators: deploy their portable jump array, set it to self-destruct once they were all through, and ride a wormhole to their preprogrammed destination.
Caruthers wasn’t sure what was so funny about it.
In any case, it was a sensible call. The fleet had orbital superiority but that was going to be of precious little use when all those Hunter shuttles touched down and disgorged their passengers, and there were a lot of shuttles. The SOR were more than a match for any Hunter, but numbers could provide all the mass the cannibalistic alien freaks needed to overwhelm them.
“Copy, STAINLESS. Hearthstone authorized.”
And that was that. A tense and humming kind of quiet suffused the CIC, broken only by precise updates and the susurrus that fell on any ship during a calm interlude in the fighting.
They had done all they could: everything was out of their hands now.
Date Point 10y10m2w3d AV
Celzi Alliance command facility, Crzlrfek System, The Freedom Stars
Warhorse
Hunters could be shockingly fast. In the minutes since the freakshow had landed on them, the greasy alien fucks had flooded through the base like water.
To which the appropriate response was to flood back. You didn’t try and dam the tide or stand in front of it like a rock, because that just got you washed away. You applied firepower, and you moved.
‘Horse’s armor had already stopped one hit. Some big fat heavy Hunter round had skipped off the concrete wall he’d been using for cover and struck his arm at a shallow angle. He had some ammo left, he had some grenades left. He knew exactly how many, but numbers didn’t enter into it. Thought didn’t enter into it: the knowledge was just there.
Reality was simple: Aggression versus aggression. Move. Kill. Get target. Move. Find team. Leave. Warhorse was not a thinking man at that moment: He was a Brother, among Brothers, grappling with evil in the dark.
Muscle memory, animal impulse, Mission: get target. Move. Hunters in the way? Kill. Clear the obstacle. Secure the flank. The thought was there, but the words only came when needed. Otherwise, he lived in a place of blood and rocks and splintered bones that men had known long before fire or the wheel had come along to paint them with a brittle veneer of civilization.
Warhorse was a killer, Hunters were weak. Puny. Red Hunter, ambush. Too close, teeth and claws. Tackle, stomp, check target. Target secure, keep moving.
Explosion.
Dizzy for a moment. Roll to cover, check limbs, check weapon, check brothers. Check target.
“Fuck!”
The Celzi was a crumpled mess. Off-color alien blood was oozing out of at least three of his eyes, and he really wasn’t supposed to bend that way. He was still trying to breathe, but…
Warhorse stepped back and Adam, the medic, stepped into his place. This was a moment for the rational human brain to step in, the bit that was more than intuition and trained operant conditioning.
But he was still assessing for triage when a white disk the size of a poker chip landed in front of him, flashing yellow. Both he and Murray were in the nervejam’s lethal radius.
Warhorse took over again.
Grab brother.
MOVE.