Date Point: 16y11m5d AV
Starship Silent But Deadly, Planet ‘Mordor,’ Hunter Space
Tooko, Pilot and Stud of Clan Firefang
Combat was infinitely more stressful when it was your friends doing the fighting, and there wasn’t a Daar-damned thing to do about it.
Tooko had a commanding view of the factory, though that by itself wasn’t good enough to see his team, nor the Fourth Fang claw. Stealth operations were… well… stealthy like that. He had no idea if things were going well, if they were going horribly wrong…
All he could do was silently orbit and watch. And wait.
A small spasm of relief flooded his soul when the telephoto cameras observed his testosterone-poisoned monkey friends swarming up the side of the cargo handling facility, just about as fast as Tooko himself would have run the same distance horizontally, and as effortlessly as if the bulky and insanely heavy packs on their backs were of exactly zero concern to them. They were approaching from an angle where they would be all-but-invisible from the ground, which was in turn a particularly difficult to access bit of dirt. If they’d made it that far…
Two shadows on the rooftop moved, and with a jolt Tooko realized that they’d been a pair of Whitecrests the whole time. The cavemonkeys handed off the targeting beacons to them and the pair darted off across the roof to deploy them while Ferd and his men hauled their dump webs toward the shield generator.
Four extremely heavy Ten’Gewek knuckling around on the roof probably wasn’t all that quiet from the inside though. It was just a warehouse after all, and they hadn’t been up there for even half a minute when a rollup door at ground level opened and a pair of Hunters eme rged… right into Rees and Wilde, who’d taken up position on either side with silky precision. Four swift and synchronized stabs to the spine reduced the Hunter population of the base by two.
The shield generators were protected by metal cages on the roof, which they’d been briefed about. Each cage got its very own Ten’Gewek, who looked to the Whitecrests for the signal—
Tooko’s HUD pinged. The beacons were up.
The Hunters noticed that alright, especially when the cavemonkeys tore the shield cages right out of their concrete foundations and tossed them off the roof. Almost faster than Tooko could follow, Hunters were boiling out of doors or even clawing through the thin sheet metal walls to make their own egress, ravenous for blood.
Fourth Fang shot them sideways in the ass with an absolute storm of firepower from their concealed position on the compound’s west side. Caught between that and the Humans’ disciplined, accurate shots from the east end of the compound, the angry swarm wavered, faltered, then fell into disarray and scattered, trying to find some cover.
The cavemonkeys meanwhile had only one job: get out, with their Whitecrest buddies along for the ride. Ferd unceremoniously scooped both of them up in his tail and flung himself off the roof—they were up so high!—and sailed through the air like he’d done the deed thousands of times before. Probably had, given they were a tree-dwelling people. The trees on Mordor weren’t anything like as sturdy as his native Ketta though, so Ferd crashed into one and rode its splintering, disintegrating form down, bleeding off momentum so that when he alighted he did so almost lightly among the collapsing branches and leaves.
That done, he gave his two passengers a hefty congratulatory slap on the back, hoisted his weapon, and added its weight to Fourth Fang’s contribution.
At the other end of the compound, Nomuk, Tumik and Genn didn’t bother with such frivolities. They just jumped off the roof and landed hard on some kind of a Hunter cargo container, which dented spectacularly.
The plan was for them to grab the three Humans and withdraw at speed. The Hunters still had something to say about that, sadly.
Two tanks smashed their way out of the goods yard. No frills, no messing around with fusion claws, they just barged through the thin metal like it was a cobweb.
Ferd was a bit distant from the fight. He charged in, much faster than Tooko ever would have guessed a Ten’Gewek could move. His speed certainly foiled the tank that turned his way, which raised its gun arm and tried to track him, only to lose him behind some containers. It opened fire anyway, riddling them with an alarming number of very large holes, but it was tracking behind him and the burst only succeeded in reducing the concrete behind his heels to gravel. Thwarted, it scuttled forward to hunt him.
The other tank went the other way, stalking Wilde, Rees, Frasier, Nomuk, Tumik and Genn. An anti-tank missile speared out of the trees courtesy of Fourth Fang, and to Tooko’s dismay the Hunter ducked and half-turned with stunning speed for something so big while its shields flashed some kind of ECM: the missile slashed past it, missed the tank by inches, and shredded a nearby wall section.
That distraction was all the opportunity the deathworlders needed, though: hooting war cries, the three Ten’Gewek slammed into it, grabbing its limbs with their hands, the segmented armor plating along its legs and back with their feet, and heaving. The tank struggled and wrestled, spinning and bucking as it tried to dislodge them.
Spurred by the presence of anti-tank firepower, the one pursuing Ferd abandoned its pursuit and turned to rake the Fourth Fang position with a blizzard of bullets. The Stonebacks flowed like air, first recoiling from the firestorm then maneuvering sharply to find a better position.
Ferd, however, wasn’t going to let the tank have its way. He vaulted a container and crashed onto its back with enough momentum to stagger it. His feet grabbed into the armor plates below its armpits hard enough to crush and buckle them, he grabbed hold of its fusion scythe arm, above the elbow where it wasn’t spitting with lethal energy, and heaved.
The scythe’s power flickered, and died. Tooko almost imagined he could hear the squeal of tortured metal and splintering composite from where he was as Ferd wrenched, twisted, torqued, and heaved again to fully separate the bucking Hunter’s arm from its body.
His men and the Humans were achieving something similar with the other one. Nomuk, Tumik and Genn weren’t Given-Men, but they were still absurdly strong by anything else’s standards. Strong enough that the Hunter they were rodeoing could hardly move its arms. Wilde, Rees and Frasier ducked between and under its legs with their own knives out, fusion blades sizzling as they cut upwards into its belly, crippling its legs. Frasier swarmed up the Hunter’s writhing body to stab deep into the gun and scythe arms for good measure while Rees and Wilde planted explosive charges, and then all six men withdrew.
The Hunter, its legs useless and its arms disabled, sank to the deck, twitched pathetically as it tried futilely to turn and murder them, and then burst in half when the charges detonated.
Tooko punched his seat’s arm and barked a victory cry, then corrected the minor wobble in his orbit. His hackles were up, his teeth bared and his blood racing. When those dump webs went off—
They did.
As the factory’s overhead shielding sputtered and failed, he wrenched the controls, flipped SBD through a turn that no mere stunt plane could ever have achieved, and fed capacitor power to the engines while the ship got a solid lock on the remaining tank.
“HILLFOOT, PIPPIN. Shields are down, can I shoot?”
Wilde’s voice was as level and calm as always. “Cheers, PIPPIN. CHUNKY, fall back and let him have his fun.”
Ferd gave the Hunter’s gun arm a last tug that thoroughly broke it, punched it in the back of its armored skull so hard that he stunned it, then sprang off its back and out of harm’s way taking its fusion scythe for a trophy. Fourth Fang were busy mopping up the last few Hunters now that they weren’t under heavy fire…
“PIPPIN, HILLFOOT. Kill that big bugger for me, would you?
Tooko grinned and armed his gauss cannon. “Roger, HILLFOOT. Firing.”
When it came to precision-killing one hard target, nothing beat a gauss cannon. It was deafeningly loud even within the safe confines of the hull and shaved off a pretty significant amount of Tooko’s speed with a jolt that strained the inertial stabilizers, but the result?
The result was that the tank, limping as it turned to try and raise its damaged gun arm, was struck by a hypersonic slug of white-hot tungsten wrapped around a very molten copper core, and ceased to exist.
Tooko nosed up, threw on the retros on full power, and peeled out of his attack vector to come around for a more gentle landing to pick up his team. His reward came from Rees, in a rare moment of lax radio discipline.
“…Fuckin’ ‘ell… Uh, good hits, PIPPIN. Well done.”
That was a feeling of triumph like no other. Tooko bled off the last of his speed through a wide swooping turn, and brought Silent But Deadly in for a landing in the clear ground south of where his target had been.
“Ready for pickup.”
They were up his ramp in moments. Fourth Fang had their own transport, already coming forward to collect them, so Tooko lifted off the instant Frasier had backed up it with his weapon trained outward for any miraculous surviving threats, and radioed to the Clawleader.
“DARKFANG FOUR, PIPPIN. We’re ready to light the fireworks.”
“Understood, PIPPIN. We’re clear, send it whenever you’re ready.”
His passengers hadn’t spent all that long outdoors and needed far less decontamination than they normally did. A quick high-temperature, high-pressure spray followed by a powerful blow-dry, and the men were already through the airlock, stripped down to the compressive underlayer of their NBC gear, pulling out the maneuver couches and strapping themselves in.
Tooko climbed, turned, accelerated, and switched comms channels all in one slick movement, while running an eye over his last visual of the target. Nothing Gaoian, Human or Ten’Gewek was left down there, so he sent the call. “Raining Vengeance, Silent But Deadly. Target prepared, beacons active. Fire when ready.”
“Copy, Silent But Deadly. Rounds away. Beware of turbulence.”
Tooko didn’t have time to reply before the clear and awesome proof of where the Raining Vengeance got her name lanced down behind him. Strobing pillars of superluminal blue radiation raked back and forth through the target facility as the Vengeance sent down thousands of rounds in just a few heartbeats.
The burst lasted only moments, but left a mushroom of dust and hot air blooming into the sky. SBD lurched in Tooko’s paws as a prolonged rumble of a shockwave passed her, leaving the air boiling and unsettled once it had gone.
Over the comms, the pilot of Fourth Fang’s dropship grunted a tense “Fyu’s ass…” as his larger, heavier, less agile vehicle bullied and jolted through the storm rather than surfing it…
But then they were back into clear and calm air. Tooko sideslipped, fell in alongside and behind the dropship at a higher altitude, then allowed some of the ice water to drain out of his veins so he could think again.
“…You lot certainly know how to wreck shit,” he commented over his shoulder.
The reactions were interesting. The Ten’Gewek were of course boisterously proud, with Ferd showing off an impressively brawny stone-hard arm whose bicep alone balled up to roughly the size of his own massive head. Much hooting and general macho braggadocio ensued, which made Tooko chitter. Theirs’ was a very uncivilized sort of charisma…but hey, it worked for them!
The Humans were a fair bit more restrained. For them, it wasn’t so much about displays of dominance and strength, though there was a certain quiet smugness about them. No, for the Humans, the overwhelming feeling seemed to be one of professional pride in a job well done.
All of them were seriously wound up, however. Since they were stuck in their chairs, the best they could do was review the mission footage. There were plenty of constructive critiques to go around, but it was all minor, incremental improvement they could think about for their next mission.
Ferd’s single-handed takedown of one of the Hunter tanks got many rounds of praise. “Christ,” Wilde shook his head with a grin. “That right there is why I don’t wrestle you, Chunky!”
“Good knife-work!” Ferd replied in turn, tapping the footage of the three Humans ducking under the other tank to carve and slice it apart. “How do you spin blade around hand like that?”
“Practice.” Frasier gestured with his hand. “But don’t try it with a fusion knife unless it has a grip safety like ours.”
And so on. It wasn’t long before they were cleared to un-belt, and that was the moment they all practically sprang out of their seats to burn off the manic tail-ends of their energy.
The Ten’Gewek didn’t even bother to remove their undersuits before they set into their usual wrestling games. Apparently, the slippery fabric did much to nullify Ferd’s unassailable strength advantage; all the cavemonkeys agreed this was a considerable improvement.
The Humans were, again, much less boisterous, but they too energetically attended to their post-mission cleanup, and after they’d finished with their own weapons and equipment, (eventually) managed to break up the wrestle-pile. It took Wilde nearly twenty minutes to wriggle free of Fred’s grasp, but once they’d had their fun, he reminded the Ten’Gewek to clean their gear.
And took the newfound opportunity to, if not relax, at least rest for a bit.
Wilde sauntered over into the co-pilot seat, clearly pleased with himself and his team.
“Went well, overall…but it got a bit hairy down there for a moment,” he confided.
“You made it look almost easy.”
The Human issued a tired sort of almost-laugh, and nodded. Clearly the adrenaline and lingering energy were fading. “Glad you think so, Took.”
Ferd hooted from the equipment station, “Easy because Wilde teach us good!” That was mildly infuriating; on top of everything else they were blessed with, they also had exceptionally acute hearing.
And essentially zero sense of privacy. They meant well, though.
“How long back to base?”
Tooko glanced at his map. “At the speed that bucket Fourth Fang are in flies? Five hours.”
“You staying up here?”
“Have to. It’s a long intercontinental flight. We’ve got friendly guns overhead, but if the Hunters send anything our way, fighting them off is my job…”
“Right.” Wilde stood again. “I’ma get some Egyptian PT in, then.”
“…Some what?”
“Some sleep, mate.”
Tooko glanced over his shoulder. Sure enough, Frasier and Rees were both already out like lights in their individual bunks. He had no idea how they did it. They were barely out of a furious fight to the death with two oversized super-Hunters followed by the kind of fireworks display hardly anybody ever got to see… and once given the chance they could fall asleep almost instantly.
Wilde clapped him on the shoulder and headed back to his own bunk.
That just left the Ten’Gewek, whose exuberant hooting displays of victory had wound down quite sharply too. Once they’d accomplished the all-important task of cleaning their weapons, they’d collapsed together in a tangled knot of limbs and tails, and were already nodding off to sleep. Of course, they liked to keep their reserves topped off even more aggressively than the Humans did.
The transition from lightning-fast, sustained, focused violence to seven men slumbering peacefully in his ship as they rose above the smog layer and emerged into beautiful clear blue skies was a little surreal for Tooko. He sipped some water, ate a little jerky, and, after checking one last time that they were well-protected under the Vengeance’s umbrella, he turned on autopilot, grabbed his tablet, and sat back to watch a movie that Frasier had recommended.
It was a long way home.
Date point: 16y11m5d AV
The Clawhold, Planet ‘Mordor,’ Hunter Space
Ginn, Foot-soldier first class, Grand Army of the Gao
Ginn waited until the forcefields and physical barricades that formed the Clawhold’s entrance were firmly closed behind them before he cut the power to his weapon, unplugged its ammo feed and returned it to the forward-facing position.
The multi-barrelled, spinning, howling thing he’d been given to replace the machine gun and grenade launcher from his previous Growl was a lot more intimidating to the Hunters. With a two-thirds-one-third mix of full metal jacket to shieldbreaker rounds fired in a deafening buzzsaw torrent, it tore their shields down in a flash and mauled the armor beneath for good measure. If Ginn aimed for the weak spots like the eyes and joints, the Hunters didn’t like it at all.
They were still a danger… but they were now a danger the Gao had a counter for. That was a much better situation to be in, but Ginn was still almost numb with relief from knowing that he was safely in here rather than out there once again.
Fortunately, vehicle maintenance wasn’t his job. He and his squadmates left their Growl to be decontaminated and checked over by the mechanics, and instead trudged over the open ground toward the mess facility.
The Mess, out of necessity, was one of the few places in the Clawhold where NBC gear could be safely removed, the others being the barracks, field hospital, and command center. Entering any of those involved a hefty rinse with high-pressure hot water from tail to top, and a scrub from two decontamination specialists with long-handled foaming brushes.
But, considering the alternative was like taking a good huff from a diesel vehicle’s exhaust, Ginn wasn’t going to complain.
The next step for everyone after getting out of the protective gear was a dust bath. Even with their bellies rumbling, they’d endured the itching for far too long. Ginn actually whimpered in relief as he finally got to roll and rub his back into the warm sand and soothe a particularly irritated spot. He wasn’t alone. The NBC gear was torture.
They didn’t take longer than they needed to genuinely relieve their suffering, however. Their bellies were empty and once their fur was dry and brushed and their skin soothed, the smell of roast kwek was like a hook in their noses.
There were a Claw of Stonebacks at one of the tables, joking and chittering and boasting as they tore into a meal twice the size of what was on Ginn’s tray. Second Fang, from the unit insignia, and not to be mistaken as any less fearsome than their brothers in First Fang. The difference was specialization, not talent.
Ginn had seen more Stonebacks in the last couple of days than he’d seen in his whole life prior. They were a big and influential Clan but…
Well. Before the homeworld war, Stoneback had been engineers and farmers working on big projects out in the country, while Ginn had managed stock at a supermarket in a suburb of Do Wun. Neither the supermarket nor the city existed any longer, and only the good fortune of living outside the quarantine perimeter had saved Ginn from sharing their fate.
His was a fairly typical story, in that regard. Most of the Grand Army had been left with no other future after the biodrone uprising, when the communes they’d grown up in, the businesses they worked for and the workhouses they lived at were all gone. The choice was stark: serve in the Grand Army, or starve.
That hadn’t been an ultimatum. That had just been the truth of it. And so Ginn served. He’d even met a female, shortly before coming to ‘Mordor.’ She’d politely and gently turned him down, but he’d still been left feeling good. There were so few females nowadays, even just getting to meet Sister Shoyma and have a conversation, even the chance to try and impress her, had been fulfilling. It had reminded him what the Grand Army was fighting for.
The pleasant memory distracted him so much that he didn’t notice the hulking figure approaching the table at first. When he did, it was because one of his squadmates nudged him. He looked up at the big brown mass of one of the Stonebacks and pricked up his ears in surprise.
The Stoneback pant-grinned down at him, smelling of friendliness and good humor. “Hey little guy, I hear ‘yer the one figgered out those big fuckers don’t like it when you shoot ‘em innaface. My folks tellin’ me good?”
Ginn’s brain short-circuited, but something about the huge, friendly face hovering above him drew an answer out of him before he could properly think.
“Well… I guess?”
“Thought so. My Brothers said you kept ‘yer head an’ kept shootin’, so they seemed ‘ta think ‘yer pretty good!”
“I haven’t died yet…” Ginn ventured. That earned him a hearty, baritone chitter and the Stonebacks joined him and his squadmates at their table.
Hanging out with Clan was a novel experience for most of them at the table. It was one thing to meet Clan brothers in official capacities through work, but another thing entirely to be treated like friends and brothers-in-arms. Ginn had worked in the shadow of Clan Goldpaw all his life, but always a long way down the hierarchy. The Clan were bankers, investors, owners, board members and executives. A mere shelf-stacker wasn’t the kind of person they interacted with. They lived in different worlds.
The Stonebacks didn’t. It didn’t matter to them that Ginn was entirely Clanless, that he had sired no cubs, or that he had been basically nobody before the war. They liked him. They said as much, and everybody knew that Stonebacks had a code against even little white lies. Here and now, they were just soldiers serving on the same polluted pit of a planet, taking on the same dangers and the same foes.
It had to end eventually of course. In time, the Stonebacks went on their way, but their parting encouragement to Ginn that he could ‘mebbe take a shot at the rites if ‘ya got good an’ big enough’ ran through Ginn’s head as he went back to the barracks and curled up with his friends in their nest-bed area. They still had safety gear to hand in case a Hunter attack breached the sealed environment, there were still the distant sounds of war going on outside…
But for the first time since arriving on the planet, Ginn felt good about things.
He slept well.
Date Point: 16y11m5d AV
Orbital Superiority Platform Raining Vengeance, Orbiting planet ‘Mordor,’ Hunter Space
Hiyal, Champion of Clan One-Fang
“This is what you were worried ‘bout?”
“Yes, My Father. We’re not sure what it is exactly.” Saying that it couldn’t be anything good would have been redundant.
The Great Father leaned in and studied the display. “How big?”
“About the size of a small outpost or mining platform. We think they actually reconfigured and moved a station from the outer system.”
“Drunker on Turkeyer should give us a better idea in a few minutes.”
The Great Father duck-nodded, took a step back, hooked his claws comfortably into the carrying harness he wore, and waited patiently.
Drunker on Turkeyer may have been marginally surpassed by the Silent But Deadly, but only marginally. In absolute terms, she was still one of the fastest and quietest stealth ships ever built, and even her position marker on Hiyal’s system map was based on where she should be if she stuck to the mission profile, rather than actual sensor data or a tracking device.
The approach was a stealth-warp, at only a few kilolights. Below the threshold where her carefully tuned drive would generate any ripples in local spacetime that would stand out from the ordinary gentle ripples caused by the interplay of planetary, lunar and stellar gravity wells.
Her egress was not so silent. At exactly the expected time, there was a strong gravimetric contact as the ship surged up to nearly half a megalight and streaked away from the stellar well before vanishing into a jump fold.
Moments later, her telemetry came through, and Hiyal growled.
The Hunter facility was basically just a bunker, stuffed full of cooling equipment… and forcefield emitters. Titanic ones.
“…Am I lookin’ at what I think I’m lookin’ at?” the Great Father growled. “‘Cuz that looks like one giant-ass forcefield array.”
“Yes,” Hiyal agreed. “Fyu’s sword, if they get that thing operational, they could focus stellar output like a giant lens…!”
“…Would system shields protect against that?” Daar asked.
Hiyal had no idea. Fortunately, knowing such things wasn’t his job. That role fell to one of his technical analysts, who considered the question solemnly for a few moments, commendably calm for a young male with the Great Father himself looming over him.
“…System defence shields are superluminal, they have to be in order to do what they do. But there is a little latency internal to the device’s own electronics, even with the internal time dilation. So when the shield opaques to prevent an energy burst from penetrating, there are always a few nanoseconds of leakage. Normally, the amount of energy that can leak through in that window would be insignificant, even for quite large events…”
“But a nanosecond burst of the focused energy of an entire stellar hemisphere is still a fuckova lot,” the Great Father finished.
“Exactly, My Father.”
“Enough to damage a ship?”
“Uh….” The technician grabbed a tablet. “…Yellow-white star, so stellar output is about… three hundred and eighty-four yottawatts… cut that in half for one hemisphere…”
Hiyal and the Great Father waited for him to calculate. After a few seconds the technician’s ears went flat, and he cleared his throat. “About… twenty exajoules per nanosecond.”
“That much energy in a nanosecond? That ain’t even enough time ‘fer a beam o’ light t’cross my left forepaw. Ain’t that gonna fuck wit’ the pulse?”
“It would force the pulse to have a maximum wavelength somewhere in the far thermal or near microwave, My Father, but… well, if I was building this weapon I’d want to use gamma or X-ray anyway.” The technician ventured an apologetic set of his ears. “It wouldn’t have any real effect on the total energy delivered.”
“…Well then. I s’pose the answer to my question is yes,” Daar observed, drily. “How much damage would twenny exajoules do ‘ta my ship?”
“That’s the equivalent of a couple of gigatons, My Father. If the Fury’s shields were opaque in the correct frequency before the shot landed, she might be able to deflect enough to survive, but more likely she’d just be instantly vaporized. The firing time is effectively instantaneous, and the optical qualities of a forcefield array are infinitely variable, so they could split the beam, or stutter it, direct… millions of heat rays per second at targets all over the system, depending on how well they handle the waste heat…”
“Welp.” Daar nodded, interrupting the technician’s increasingly worried babbling. “That’s a fuckin’ superweapon if I ever saw one.” He rose to his full height, turned and barked his orders.
“Get me Father Regaari, Champion Fiin, an’ my armor. We need the HEAT. Now.”