[SecSan2009] Forlorn Hope: Another Glorious Day in the Corps

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Mobius 1
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[SecSan2009] Forlorn Hope: Another Glorious Day in the Corps

Post by Mobius 1 »

This was, uh, due three years ago. Better late than never. I still owe Shroom a fic if I want to happily participate in this year's SecSan.

Part One: War Ain't What It Used to Be

One

A hollow detonation sounded some many floors above, and a light shower of dust trickled down from above, forming a brown coat on Butcher’s rifle. Absentmindedly, he swept the powder off with a glove before going back to shaking, rocking back forth in the corner he had carved out for himself in the trashed command center. What had once been the radar officer’s secluded corner now held the stunned marine, who has hoping that, when they finally stormed the place, he’d be the last one on the way out to the great beyond.

A few other soldiers were sprinkled across the CiC, mostly trying to cling to same idea Butcher was. The only real grouping of men was centered around the comm station, a small room – almost a closet – situated just off of the CiC’s main viewscreens, which were now shattered and sparking sporadically. As Butcher watched, his el-tee began gesticulating angrily, throwing a thumb in the direction of her battered men. The man he was directing anger against, a thin man who looked like a strong wind would knock him over, suddenly lunged forward and seized Lieutenant Ayaiya by her lapels, lifting her up and slamming her against the wall. Even though Ayaiya had a good fifty pounds of muscle on the plain-faced man, he towered over her, and it was only when he lifted her up did they see eye to eye.

In more ways than one. It only took a few whispered words, angrily hissed, for Ayaiya’s disposition to change, her to respond coolly, and the man to gracefully and graciously put her down. Had anyone else slighted Ayaiya so, their teeth would be lodged in her gauntlet. This man, however, simply acknowledged Ayaiya’s salute before turning to the slight woman behind him who was hurriedly yelling into the only working comm unit they could scavenge from Alpha Block.

Ayaiya dusted herself off, before going around the room, nudging her men into action. When she finally got to Butcher, he was determined to ignore her.

“Get up, Anton,” he said, throwing a wisp of compassion into her words.

“Why?” he asked, responding with cold iron in his voice.

“Because,” Ayaiya said, quite calmly, “Those two over there are agents for the Protectorate Extra Sensory Team. And they’re going to get us all out alive.”

“I don’t believe,” Butcher said, forcing resolve into his voice, “that they’ll do a damned thing for us, El-Tee.”

“You have my word, son,” came a voice from behind Ayaiya. The two marines turned to see the tall operative standing behind the Lieutenant, swiftly checking over a standard-issue assault rifle. He was black, with sharp features a couple jagged scars crossing his face, which was set into an expression of detached determination.

“Why should I believe you? I don’t even know who the hell you are!”

The man squatted down to eye level with Butcher. “Because this is what I and my partner do. Make the impossible, well, less impossible. And if you think a bunch of Imperial bullies are going to keep us from reaching that dropship, then stay here and wait for them drag you out of your hole, put a camera in front of you, and execute you on galactic television. Otherwise I’m your only choice.” He handed Butcher a magazine. “You’re going to need some bullets for that rifle, son. We’ll need every muzzle hot on our way out.”

Butcher hesitantly took the mag, and the operative stood up. “Oh, and Butcher: the name’s Rivers. Eric Rivers, Agent of Pest.”

Two

The Protectorate Marine was flung through the doorway, screaming, arms flailing, and he crashed into a trio of his buddies, sending all of them crashing to the floor.

Rivers looked at the thrown Marine’s shredded armor and looked back up at Ayaiya, lips pursed and eyes wide.

“Not what you expected?” she asked.

“No,” he checking the grenade launcher slung under his rifle. “Just hoping they’d wait until later.”

He rounded the corner and raised his rifle, firing the grenade straight at the waiting enemy commander. The captain, bounded in a gleaming red exoskeleton, batted the grenade into the wall to his left, only for the explosive to send him stumbling in the opposite direction.

“Go!” Rivers shouted, opening up with quick, precise single fire as the rest of Kilo Two-Three filed into the shower block, guns blazing. The commander, dazed, managed to get an arm up before Eric’s companion sprinted forward, and using the armor’s knee as a vault, sunk a vibroblade into the top of the commander’s helmet. She rolled off as Rivers moved forward under the cover of tiled pillars, covering her retreat. Dust and chips of tile were flying every which way, but Ayaiya had managed to rally Kilo Two-Three into a cohesive unit, and they had caught in Imperials in the middle of transferring captured Protectorate marines.

Butcher tossed his sidearm to one such comrade, who caught in and opened fire down the L-corner of the block at the second team of Imperial soldiers. Blood painted the creamed-colored walls as men fell, bleeding from ragged gunshot wounds.

There was only a moment of warning, a single cracking sound, before the ceiling ahead caved into to reveal a second armored soldier, this time decked out in orange and sporting a wicked set of claws on one gauntlet.

He seized Ayaiya by the shoulder and sent her flying backwards, before running through another soldiers with a vicious jab of his blades.

Seeing the area cleared around the new challenger, Eric fired a second grenade at the armor, but the suit caught the micro-missile and squeezed off its tail, sending it flying through the hole the suit had created in the ceiling. Bullets sparked off of its bronzed armor plating, to no avail, and Rivers hurriedly tossed his rifle to the closest marine – Butcher, and drew out his monoedge vibroblade, just as Emma appeared to his side, doing the same.

Together, they charged the suit.

Psionic pressure told them of the incoming blow, and Rivers dropped down and slid across the floor while Emma bounded off of a wall, both of them avoid a lightning-fast swipe of the claws. The trio came together in a flurry of sword strikes and barely dodged mechanical punches. Hydraulic lines were severed, and the suit began to slow under the two-sided assault, before catching Emma in a backflip and sending her careening across the shower room like a shuttlecock.

Rivers was suddenly faced with a seven-foot-tall exosuit and the realization that, one his own, melee with it wasn’t the greatest of ideas.

“Down!” someone yelled behind him, and Rivers hit the deck just in time for a HEAP round to strike the suit clean in the neck. The suit, its hydraulics half-mangled, was too slow to catch the round, stumbled back a step. The explosive burned there for a split second before detonating, decapitating the armor and sending it crashing, headless to the floor.

Rivers turned to see Butcher lowering his smoking rifle and tossing off a lazy salute. “That wasn’t too bad,” he said, walking over and handing Rivers his rifle butt-first.

“Hell, man,” Rivers groaned, catching the rifle and letting Butcher use it to haul him to his feet. “That was round one. We’ve still got to clear the hangar.”

Three

Rivers and Emma rounded the corner into the hangar, a double-tiered room that was surprisingly calm given the chaos in the base. A platoon of Protectorate soldiers hunkered behind two machine gun emplacements, covering the open end of the cavernous room with their autocannons.

Rivers’ radio buzzed. “Indigo Base, this is Oxide One-Six, coming in hot for extraction. Get your guys together; this is the last train out of here.”

Emma nodded to Ayaiya. “That’s the dropship. We may make it out of this after all.” She looked down at her watch, which had been busted. “How much longer until the bomb goes off?”

Grimacing, he said, “Ten minutes and… forty seconds. We can make it.”

“There’s a bomb?!” Butcher hissed from behind them.

“Well, yeah,” Rivers said. “You’d think we’d leave the only Protectorate base in the sector for the Imps to pillage over?”

The ground began to rumble under their feet. Conduits lining the corridor leading into the hangar began to detonate in short gouts of blue plasma.

“They just popped our auxiliary generators!” shouted the sergeant of the platoon of the din. With a crash, one of the overhead catwalks fell to the floor, forming a steep ramp to the upper levels and the traffic control office which overlooked the hangar. The bodies of Imperial soldiers lying motionless on the pavement began to tremble; spent brass clinked through the floor grating to the motor pool below. The lights collectively burst at once, showering the Protectorate soldiers in glass and plunging the room into thin moonlight. There was a muffled yelp, and a thump- a body hitting the floor.

Red lights running on the hangar’s local generator blinked on, casting the room in a bloody light. One of the marines was slumped against a storage crate, two large pieces of glass sticking from his right eye. Blood, black in the ambience, drenched his face.

“Shit, Rodriguez…” said one of his comrades.

“Dammit,” hissed the hangar sergeant. “Okay, take what gear you can off of him. Imps are probably forming up outside the room.”

The statement was punctuated by a rocket flying in from the corridor and hitting one of the sandbagged turret emplacements head on, sending the two operators flying back, the fronts of their bodies bloodied pulps.

The other machine gun began to chatter into the darkness of the hallway. Death screams were heard as the initial group of troops was mowed down, their bodies spilling forward into the faint light.

Two huge powered suits- Imperial Mobile Armor, mounting massive arm shields- charged into the fray, the impenetrable slabs of alloy mounted on their right forearms deflecting the stream of slugs directed at them. The nearest turtled for cover as the latter brought it arm-mounted laser cannon to bear on the turret, there was a high-pitched whine and a blinding red flash as the laser hit the sandbags and the gunners behind them. The pair manning the turret screamed as their skin ignited and they were cremated alive.

Eric immediately dived for cover, dragging Emma behind him as the Mobile Armor opened up with their shoulder mounted machine guns, raking the walls of the hangar above the PEST agents. Somersaulting behind a forklift, Eric began to swear continuously under his breath. The strike rifle in his hands was woefully inadequate for dealing with the Armor, grenades were the only thing they had that had a chance of slowing the mechanical beasts down. Of course, it’d have to be done from close range; these guys weren’t pushovers like the exosuits…

“Indigo Hangar, this is Oxide! ETA damn quick, are you clear?” Eric jumped and scrambled for the radio on his collar.

“No! No, Kilo- we have two MAs in here, you’ll need to wax them with you chin gun!”

“Copy that, Indigo. Let’s see how they like seventy-mil lead to the face.”

Dropping down into view, the Protectorate Dropship- a Mudskipper- began its approach, silhouetted against the moon as it flew straight in.

“Marines!” Emma shouted. “Fall back, now!! Do it!” Butcher, Ayaiya, and the rest of her squad, were only too happy to comply.

Eric could barely make out the dropship deploying its nose-mounted autocannon, the assembly swiveling to target Armor-

-The Armor turned to face the new threat, the pilots issuing war cries over their speaker in challenge, bringing their laser cannons to bear. It’d wasn’t a question that the pair of them could take down the Mudskipper with a single volley, it was who would fire first-

A shrill shriek filled the air, and the Mudskipper ruptured, venting fire from its rear. However, momentum carried it forward even though its engines had cut out.

“Take cover!” shouted one of the soldiers.

The Protectorate dropship with the bottom lip of the hangar, jackknifed, and exploded. Wreckage rained down in massive chunks on the grated flight deck, crashing through in sections. In an instant, half of the hangar had been transformed into a flame and slag-filled hellscape.

The Imperial Dropship rose into view, quad laser turrets swiveling, and entered the hangar.

Four

“Shiiiiiiit,” mouthed Rivers as he surveyed the situation before them. They were trapped from both sides by enemies, with a nuke ticking down below.

The Sergeant- his nametag, Eric saw in the firelight, read Yu- dived behind Eric’s meager forklift cover with two men behind him, their rifles aimed at the dropship.

“Roll!” shouted Yu, grabbing everyone and rolling them over stone lip of the grating, to the catwalk the ringed the room and led down into the motor pool. The Suits opened fire, and the forklift flew like a meteor end over end over end, embedding itself in the stone wall.

“Got any good plans?” Butcher asked, breathing hard.

Emma nodded. “Actually, I do. It’s our only option- we grab the dropship and use it escape. Your men can use the stone groove around the edge of the hangar for cover. Aim for the dropship’s turrets, disable them if you can. Eric and I will handle the Suits.”

“You will?” asked one of the soldiers.

“We will?” asked Eric, squinting at Emma.

“You got any better plans?”

“I only perform miracles on Tuesdays and Saturdays.”

“Well,” she said, “time to expand. Alright, let’s bust a move.” She and Rivers dived under the railing of the catwalk to the floor of the motor poll eight feet below, rolling and weaving behind the lined row of jeeps. The Imperial dropship, essentially a floating shoebox with an arm-mounted swivel turret on each corner, tracked its fire on them, vaping vehicles left and right. The chatter of Yu’s platoon’s guns could be heard above, death screams mixed with an explosion of one of the dropship’s turret’s above.

The Armor brought their cannons to bear on the PEST agents as they reached the other side of the room, gouging through the grating above and drilling through a pair of jeeps, sending them flipping out up and against the grating. A section of it gave way under the stress, dumping tons of the wreckage of the Mudskipper in front of the Eric and Emma. A weapons locker tumbled and burst open in front of them; without breaking stride, Emma kicked a sniper rifle into a her hands, racking the bolt. Rivers scooped up a rotary grenade launcher as he passed the locker, jumping and scrambling up the ladder leading to the air traffic control room two stories up.

He emerged back up on the hangar floor, feet from where the Armor stood. One moved to crush him with his arm shield, but Emma was underneath it, emptying her magazine into the wreckage behind the Suit, ricocheting shots into the back of its knee joints, bringing the five-ton mech to a kneel. Off-balance and open, the Suit’s shield swerved and crashed into the wall inches from Rivers, embedding itself in the stone. Not stopping his climb, the PEST agent brought his grenade launcher around and fired two shells into the Armor’s unprotected belly.

The grenades bounced off the Suit’s armor and into a corner, detonating harmlessly.

Using the rooted shield as a final step, Eric kicked up a floor before the four machine guns could track him.

The undamaged Suit fired its laser into the floor board mounting a foot from where Rivers stood a level up, flipping the entire panel, with Rivers on it, at out of the window of the office in a resounding crash. Twisting the midair, Eric barely managed to get an arm around the back end of the dropship’s turret as the panel flew past and hit the far wall.

The momentum of the impact carried the turret back around in a full arc to bear the cannon’s fury on the suits. The undamaged one of the pair managed to get its shield in play in time, deflecting the pulses, but the sprawled Armor could not. Four blasts hit it, stitching a line across its torso, blowing its weapon arm off, and knocking out the shoulder turrets.

But it was still alive.

Rivers didn’t get to see this. His turret was still continuing its mad arc, its firing arc now brought firmly on the cockpit of the dropship. It never stood a chance. The canopy folded inward, and the pilots were obliterated.

Realizing he had just melted their only escape, Rivers could only hold on as the dropship plowed into east wall of the hangar, dislodging tons of metal and stone, before tumbling and crushing the sprawled armor not unlike a boot would a beetle.

“Eric!” Rivers heard Emma shouting from below. “What! The Fuck! Are you doing?!

The dropship shifted as it slid down the stairs into the hangar, finally coming to a rest ass-end-down at an oblique angle to the floor. Rivers, at the top, began to lose his grip, just as the second MA appeared from below at the end of the makeshift ramp.

“Shit,” Rivers had time to mutter before gravity took ahold of him and he began to slide towards the charging cannon of the armor.

Six

Rivers leveled his grenade and began firing, his shells pinging harmlessly off of the MA’s shield. The sickly purple glow of the laser cannon reached blinding proportions and the MA let loose just as –

-The autocannon Yu, Ayaiya, and Butcher managed to wrestle into position began to thud out one round after another, catching the MA in its flank and sending it staggering to its side. The laser blast went wide, gouging a hole in the ceiling as Rivers shot past the MA, hitting the floor in a roll.

When Rivers came up, he was face to face with the suit, which had managed to maneuver its shield in to block the incoming high-caliber fire as it advanced on Rivers.

Only this time, Rivers had his sword unsheathed and at the ready.

He rolled towards the MA, barely avoiding a hasty and awkwardly-timed swipe of its sharpened shield, and thrust his sword upward, stabbing through the MA’s chest again and again, hoping to wound the pilot with one of his strikes. He moved away from the suit’s stubborn attempts to shake Rivers off, but he lost his grenade launcher under one stomping

The MA’s machine guns finally rotated towards him and in an effort to drive him off, and Rivers knew his time was up. He took one last hack at the bulbous cockpit before leaping off, snatching a loose grenade shell from the remains of his shattered launcher, and plugging it into the mangled chest of the MA before clambering up the suit and jumping into the air, flinging a hand out-

-To be caught by Emma, who hoisted him up to the shattered air-traffic control room. “Let me know next time you decide to ruin everything for everyone, Eric,” she said, taking a second to catch her breath.

Rivers ignored her and stood, holding a finger to his ear as he activated his PEST-keyed biocomm. “This is Agent Eric Rivers, putting out a call for any Oxides left in the area – we have a wildcat runaway in the base, and have two PEST agents and two squads of Marines requesting immediately evac. Anyone respond.”

Below them, the MA began to regain its footing,

Just in time for the floor to be blasted out from underneath it.

The Mudskipper entered the hangar with its chin gun smoking, before rotating to present its drop ramp to the waiting Marines. “Sorry for the wait!” the pilot called over the loudspeaker. “It’s getting pretty thick out there!”

Eric reached out and clasped Emma’s hand with his. “C’mon babe, now or never.”

They leapt.

Hitting the ground in synchronized rolls, they began sprinting towards the laden Mudskipper. Butcher was waving them forward, Ayaiya was covering their retreat – she gave a shout as the MA began to clamber out of the wreckage in the floor, cannon arm glowing-

Rivers grasped Emma’s arm – “You know what to do.”

She nodded, and they both made the final leap onto the blood tray of the Mudskipper. Emma, not even missing a beat, hit the deck in a one-knee shooting stance, spun, and took aim with her sniper rifle.

The Mobile Armor did the same with its cannon.

Emma let out her breath, and fired first.

The sniper rifle cracked, and the 12.7mm slug slammed into end of the jammed grenade shell, triggering in an explosion that split the armor of the suit wide open.

But the suit was still moving, its arm still tracking, and the bloodied pilot still alive and fighting-

-Rivers caught the pistol that Butcher tossed him and calmly took aim. “Looks like today just isn’t you’re day, bub. Play dead.”

He fired with psychokinetically procured aim, and the mech pilot’s head exploded in a fountain of gore. Eric raised the smoking sidearm as the MA finally collapsed to the hangar floor.

Tossing the pistol back to Butcher with a nod of thanks, Rivers made his way back towards the pilot at the front of the Mudskipper. “You know we need to hurry out?”

The pilot laughed. “No problem, Rivers. But we just got orders.”

“Orders that don’t involve us leaving the planet?”

Grinning, the pilot shook his head. “We’ve still got work to do. Another glorious day in the corps.”

Rivers sighed, and worked back towards the rear hatch of the dropship, where Emma was watching the base recede behind the mountain ridge as the pilot maneuvered solid rock between them and the nuclear explosion.

Trying not to meet eyes with anyone in the bay, he put a hand on Emma’s shoulder. “You heard?”

She tapped her temple with a finger. “Just another day in the corps.”

The Mudskipper disappeared into the evening fog and the pair watched the sun disappear over the horizon. Just before it was gone completely, it was replaced, if only for a few seconds, with a second sun.
SHADOW TEMPEST BLACK || STB2: MIDNIGHT PARADOX
The day our skys fe||, the heavens split to create new skies.
Mobius 1
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Posts: 1099
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 11:40 pm
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Re: [SecSan2010] Forlorn Hope: Another Glorious Day in the C

Post by Mobius 1 »

Part Two: operation cwal

Seven

The Mudskipper blew dirt and dust up in every direction, and Rivers shielded his eyes as he looked up at the craft and made eye contact with the pilot seated in the underslung cockpit. Emma stood by his side, with the rest of the Marines taking up a defensive perimeter around the LZ.

“Just so we’re clear,” Rivers yelled into his earpiece. “If you’re not on station to provide evac, I will personally haunt you.”

“Am I supposed to be afraid of that?” the pilot responded with some reserve of cool known only to dropship jockies.

“I’m the best psychic in the universe. You think I don’t know something about that?”

The pilot blanced behind his shades. “Fine. Fleetcom is looking to be offplanet in less than a day. Might be more than Imp forces in play, but you didn’t hear it from me.” With that, he gunned the repulsors and the Mudskipper disappeared into the roiling sandstorm that was currently swallowing the remains of Maneral’s capital city.

The Lieutenant, Ayaiya, sidled on over Rivers' side. “You, uh, have any background on why we’re not on the first boat off the rock, sir?”

Rivers caught Emma’s eye, and she stepped forward. “It’s a long story, Lieutenant,” she said chipperly, “And I’m not feeling particularly amiable to secrecy protocols today. We’ll tell it to you while we walk, we’ve got a couple klicks until we hit the target.”

With a few motions, Ayaiya ordered her squad forward into the shattered remains of the city that had, a day ago, been bustling with life before the biobombs hit it.

“It all begins with a man named Navar,” Emma said. “He was an Deus intel agent who was poised to leak us something huge in exchange for amnesty. We arrived at Blate Point in Leviathan space – free space, you know the deal – at an office building to extract Navar just as it fell under fire from merc forces. Big guys, known as the Conduit, made a splash over the past few years.”

Rivers clambered over a six-foot chunk of debris and offered a hand to help boost Ayaiya up. “Long story short, Navar gets a few words off to me before the gang’s leader, a serious bad dude named Thayden Gabriel Kor puts a couple of railgun bullets into Navar’s head. It’s all we can do to get out alive.”

“I suppose you think I’m dying to know what Navar told you,” Ayaiya said with a sardonic smirk. “Does it have anything to do with the mystery bullshit the pilot was spouting off a few minutes ago?”

“Yeah. He told us that the Ubeerians – the sunsabitches that half our ultra-tech is based off of – were partnering with the Imperium for an endgame gambit. Something that would break sixty years of endless war.”

“I thought the Ubeerians were killed by their own gorram guns back when we got into this whole mess? That’s what they always teach you in school, the danger of hubris.”

“Trust me,” Rivers said. “They’re still around. Still a pain in the ass to kill.”

“You’ve fought some?”

Rivers shaded his eyes as he surveyed the carnage of a annihilated cityscape before him. “I generally make it a policy to aid them along on their path to extinction, yes.”

Eight

One Day Earlier, at Indigo Base
The Planet Maneral, Protectorate Space


“And that’s all he said before he died?”

Director Nathaniel Luceno leaned back in his chair, rubbing week-old stubble on his chin. He was of middling height but possessed of the build of linebacker, a testament to the physical regiment he had never given up since he moved from active duty as a PEST agent to direct the Protectorate Strategic Intelligence Agency’s psionic service branch. Waving his fingers in a mental focus, the plastic mug of coffee jumped over from across the room into his waiting palm. He sipped carefully from it.

Rivers twisted his neck, cracking the bones. He still wore the same bloody civies from the disastrous ambush in Deus space. Beside him sat Emma, rubbing at the bandages covering the burns she had received from the plasma grenade explosion in the meeting room.

“Yessir. What do you know about the Clerics?”

Luceno ran a hand through his thinning hair and sighed. “Not much beyond what I’ve read in the history books. They supposedly were the leftovers of a large polity centered around Orion and functioned as the Collective’s sorta warrior priests. Not quite human – a match for twenty men. Apparently they had their last hurrah during the Schism and were never seen again.”

Emma shrugged. “Navar claimed they were just getting clear to recoup their losses.”

Sipping his coffee, Luceno gave practiced scowl. “Well, they certainly had enough time to form a decent nation beyond the reaches of our Otherspace probes.”

Shaking his head, Rivers sat up with a wince of pain. “Then why manipulate the Imperials from the shadows? If they truly had enough men, they could roll right in and crush us.”

“Which would be a terrible waste of time and men,” Emma pointed out, elbowing Rivers in the shoulder with a grin. “They could just string the Imps along with promises of lost weapons – or superweapons – and have us activate whatever is hidden in the ruins of the lost city. I don’t it’s some sort of pulse, as Navar claims, though. It’s kinda, well” –she shrugged- “ridiculous. I’m betting it’s some sort of virus that can be keyed to an individual species. The Schism did acquire a reputation for the use of biological weaponry, after all.” She tucked a strand of black hair behind an ear, pursing her lips.

Luceno rolled his chair over to a nearby computer and booted it up. “In any case, the Imps have launched a new offensive right in our own backyard. We’re expecting them to assault the O’Brien system later this afternoon, if our probe reports are accurate. You know what that means.”

River inclined his head. “O’Brien’s only a couple lightyears away. You think the Imperials chased us home.”

“It’s a distinct possibility.”

“You have anything on this Gabriel guy that popped Navar?” said Emma, sitting up.

Logging into his computer, Luceno pulled up a file. “Indeed. Come see.”

Rivers got off the table and walked over to Luceno’s side while Emma craned her head to look.

“Thayden Gabriel Kor, age thirty-two. Former captain in the Imperial forces, but went private when he grew disgusted with the methods of the commander he served under. Formed the Conduit, a syndicate operating out of the Leviathan. Beyond being the closest man to the Deus offices, he’d actually been back on Imperial contracts for some time on a provisional basis.”

Emma frowned. “Why the sudden change of heart, working for the Imps again?”

“Well, apparently, the last contract he took before the Imperials opened an account with him was the assassination of his old commander. The old general had apparently racked up a few enemies in the galactic echelons. Now that the point of honor has been satisfied, he’s their top dog – all plausible deniability.”

“Their black knight…” Rivers mused.

Luceno’s phone rang. He answered it – the set jumping into his hand - paused for a second, and then swore violently.

A second later, the air raid alarm wound up.

“What is it?” asked Emma, jumping to her feet.

“The Imperials,” growled Luceno, slamming the phone back down into the receiver. “They’re in orbit. A whole fleet of them – O’Brien was just a feint.”

He ran to the door, slapping telekinetically at the controls to open. With a hiss the portal slid apart and he dashed down the concrete corridors of the base to the command center with the two PEST agents on his heels.

“What do we have in orbit?” asked Emma as they ran.

Luceno consulted his wrist. “A pair of battleships on stopover originally heading to O’Brien. Our fleet is all one system over.”

“Shit!” breathed Rivers. They were sitting ducks.

A large impact shook the mountainside base and the lights flickered as dust floated down from the ceiling.

“Close range kinetic impact,” assessed Luceno.

“You don’t think they’re aiming directly for the base?” asked Rivers as he snatched a rifle from a nearby armoury locker extended from the wall. Checking the clip and racking the action, he slung in over his shoulder before passing a second gun to Emma.

“Don’t know anything yet. We need to get to Ops,” replied Luceno.

The pounding began to increase and, as the PEST agents sped into the monitor-lined ops, the siren suddenly cut out.

Luceno took the nearest Captain by the arm. “Tell me the situation!”

The captain drew his helmet shield down. “Twenty craft dropped in and just obliterated the space elevator. We’ve got perhaps two hundred landing craft coming in, with ten making a beeline directly for us. Our missile nets were up to intercept, from orbital bombardment pin-striked our turrets.”

“That means they’re looking to capture something – or else they’d nuke the site from orbit,” muttered Luceno. “What’s the ETA?”

“Two minutes at the best,” the Captain said, motioning to his men. “Temple Squad, form as escort around the Director. They’re on the first shuttle out.”

“What?” said Rivers. “If anything, we’re last out. I’m not leaving anyone behind.”

“This entire base ain’t worth three psychs, got it?” replied the Captain as he received more chatter on his shoulder-clipped radio.

“He’s right,” said Luceno, looking grim. “We-”

Fire!” someone scream over the base’s PA. “Incoming hurt in the south hangar, two dropships! Need backsuushd-

The last part sounded last a wet pulpy smacking sound, but Rivers knew the sound when he heard it – the man had just been shot in the jaw.

Nine

The flights flickered ominously. Gunfire pounded in some obscure corner of the base.

More shouts echoed through the open PA.

All personnel to level one battlestations-

-Forces in the outer perimeter, platoon strength! They’re established a beachhead!

-Jesus, they’ve got Mobile Armor suits! Get the anti-tank rockets!

“Look, sir, I’m not leaving until we can organize an evacuation,” said Rivers. “At least let me activate PARTING SHOT.”

Luceno paused. “PARTING SHOT, you say? The self-destruct mechanism?” He turned to the Captain. “How quick are your evac drills.”

“We can be clear in twenty minutes,” confirmed the Captain. “And PARTING SHOT can only be activated by a base commander…”

“I have the override codes,” replied Luceno sharply. “Have you squad accompany my agents to the Core to so they can activate PARTING SHOT.” Turning to Emma and Rivers, he added: “I’m heading to Ops to organize the evac. No matter what happens, the rally point is at the Maneral City spaceport. I hope to see you there.”

Emma nodded, racking the bolt on her rifle. “And the codes?”

Luceno tapped his temple with an index finger. “Grab them.”

Taking a deep breath, Emma blinked slowly. “Got it. Thanks, boss.”

Rivers nodded. “See you on the other side.”

The Captain grimaced. “I need to take the rest of my men to reinforce the south hangar. Temple Squad, you’re with the Agents. Go, go, go!”

With a silent beat of agreement, the group split into three, Rivers leading the Protectorate commandos deeper into the base. More tremor wracked the hallways as the PA continued to blare.

We just lost contact with substation eight!

The motor depot tunnel has been cut off!

Hostile forces ahead, open fir-arrrrgh!

Reroute second platoon to that circuit that just went silent!

Doors began to slam overhead.

“Jesus,” murmured Emma as they ran. “They’re initiating a lockdown on the southern quadrant. They weren’t able to contain the landers.”

Rivers glanced at the helmeted soldiers surrounding him. They probably knew their squadmates were dead by now.

“Contact!” a burly sergeant shouted. Muzzle flashes blinked up ahead. Someone lobbed a grenade. It was pure chaos, anarchy.

“Form up!” shouted Rivers. “Drop a mine at the corner and we’ll take the sub-tunnel to the Core!”

A trooper rushed forward, unclipping a pair of claymores from his belt, activating them just around the corner, daring the unseen Imperials up ahead to make chase.

Emma kicked open a locked side door, overriding the magnetic clamps with Luceno’s master code. “Through the portal, go, go!”

A massive burst of fire flared up from the junction up ahead.

“Dammit!” a soldier shouted. “They’ve got a flamethrower!”

Rivers punched him on the arm. “Altman, use your hand grenades!”

Twin energy grenades sailed high, but were shot apart meters from Altman’s hand.

It’s crazy, thought Rivers, they’ve got a sniper for a close quarters game!

Emma found his arm and squeezed. “What’s the longest you’ve held a battle meditation?”

Grimacing, Rivers dived through the portal. “A minute, at best. But you can’t seriously want me to do it now.”

The last of the Temple squad commandos leapt into the hallway. Emma sealed the door behind them, just as the first Imperial tripped the claymore. There was a flash and thunder boomed beyond the door, fire licking the edges of the doorway before it was closed.

Turning back to Rivers, Emma tapped her wristwatch, tapping into Indigo Base’s central computer. A hologram whizzed into life between the two PEST agents as they ran. Emma began to trace paths through the blue haze. “There are four other entry points to the core – and from what the mental conversation I’ve been keeping up with Luceno, friendlies only hold one right now, as our exit point. From what we’re gathering from foot traffic, the Imps have already dispatched teams down the corridors.”

“We can’t beat them to the Core and out again?” Rivers asked.

“Not a chance. Luceno is working with Comp Cent to funnel one of the intrusion teams away from us, but he won’t be able to catch both in time.” She paused, holding two fingers to her head. “Luceno just gave us the order to clear out the other team.”

“How many men?”

“A full platoon, thirty plus.”

“Jesus.”

“That’s why I asked out your battle meditation. I know we’ve only really done it in training, but if we link up might stand a chance against the platoon.”

Rivers gritted his teeth and looked away. The ‘meditation’, as Emma insisted upon calling it, was a recent development in Rivers’ growing psionic ability, a sort of culmination and integration of his abilities, an extension of his psionic coordination. To those who observed it, the meditation seemed to be a form of almost supernatural speed. This was not true – Rivers was instead sinking into a state of hyper-awareness that bordered on precognition. Reaching out and feeling his surroundings with impossible detail, Rivers could literally detail out his surroundings for five meters in every direction. Sound waves, psionic currents, and air distortions were all processed with the assistance of an experimental cybernetic neural net implanted in Rivers' sensory cortex.

He was the test case for the psitech, but he had never activated the net in the field. The meditation – a sort of zen zero-thought – ran the risk of overclocking Rivers’ brain and collapsing it. The longest he had been able to maintain the state was fifty-seven seconds at best. Any longer and he’d collapse.

Emma, in recent weeks, had floated and tested the idea that, with a telepathic meld between her and Rivers, they could not only increase the effectiveness of the near-future sense. Not only that, but increase the duration of the meditation entirely.

They had only tested the idea once, extending a session was worth twenty second’s worth of mental taxation to a full fifty seconds. The idea, Rivers and Luceno admitted, had merit, but needed further testing – which was right about the time the Deus operation came down the line.

“And what happens if it doesn’t work?” Rivers asked. “If I drop unconscious and you’re stuck dragging me out of the line of fire?”

“Eric, if we don’t do this, we’re all going to die,” Emma said, her face earnest. She gestured at her watch hologram. “The Imperials just took Second Quadrant, and they’re looking to take the southwest landing platforms. Things are spiraling out of control.”

After a short pause, Rivers nodded. “Let’s do this, then.”

Ten

Current Time, Maneral City

“That’s how we found you,” Emma said. “We had just cleared about the northern hangar bay to find it walled off and returned to the Command Center to find you guys. Rivers was exhausted, but we had just taken on an MA beforehand.”

“This meditation, it really works?” Ayaiya asked, looking unsure.

“If it hadn’t we wouldn’t be still alive,” Rivers said. He tensed up. “Look alive. The tunnel network starts here.”

“Tunnel network?” Butcher asked, overhearing and leaning in. “Ain’t possible, considering the rock this city’s built on. I was raised here, I’d think I’d know if we had a mole people city underneath our feet.”

In response, Rivers reached to his belt and withdrew a palm computer, flashing it to the concrete base a nearby building was built on, a face of stone twenty feet tall that expanded a hundred feet in either direction.

In response, a green sigil the size of a large truck began to glow on the concrete before the entire stone face began to slide apart at a central seam.

“This is becoming one of those days,” Butcher said, beginning to rock back and forth again.

“Keep it together, Marine,” Sergeant Yu said, clapping the man on the shoulder. “Fernando, take point. Ayaiya, I’ve got second.”

Ayaiya gestured an affirmative as the mishmash of a squad moved into the newly created portal. “Who created this? And how do you know about it, Agent?”

Emma shouldered her rifle and followed Butcher into the darkness, her cybernetics naturally piercing the darkness with active nightvision. “If you had my guess, it’d be the Ubeerians. Anything dark and mysterious and slightly dickish, you can’t go wrong placing your money on them.”

“I follow those rules,” Rivers put in, “and I’m never disappointed. I can only be curmudgeonly at so many things, and with finite resources of grumpiness I have to prioritize.”

“Boss, we’ve got a corpse up here,” Yu’s voice cut in over the comm.

Grimacing, Rivers hustled up to the head of the formation. His rifle’s flashlight bobbed over to reveal a man in a sleek black armored vest, his neck twisted at an impossible angle.

The patch on the man’s sleeve clearly identified him as a member of the Conduit.

“I can, however,” Rivers amended, “rustle up the need to be furious and annoyed on a moment’s notice. This is one of those occasions.”
SHADOW TEMPEST BLACK || STB2: MIDNIGHT PARADOX
The day our skys fe||, the heavens split to create new skies.
Mobius 1
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Re: [SecSan2010] Forlorn Hope: Another Glorious Day in the C

Post by Mobius 1 »

Part Three: What’s Mine is Mine

Eleven

“I was surprised it took so long for you to find this place.”

Rivers head jerked up, and he saw a man standing at the end of the tunnel, dressed in a bizarre mishmash of battle armor and monk’s robes. Even beneath the hood, it was still obvious the two-meter-tall form wasn’t human, not with mandibles and glowing eyes like that.

“We’ve done it a hundred times before,” the figure continued, looking almost forlorn. “We determine a species looks promising, and we uplift them. We nuture them, before moving on to another galaxy. It wasn’t until we met humanity that we discovered a race so malignant.”

Emma snapped her rifle up. “A Cleric, I presume?”

“Observant,” the Cleric intoned. “As always. We raised you to be our heirs in this galaxy – only to be met with a barrel of a gun.”

“Don’t kid yourselves,” Rivers shot back. “I’ve never met a Cleric for whom xenocide wasn’t on his daily plans.”

The Cleric chucked, a low buzz that had the pebbles on the tunnel’s floor trembling. “When you find a species for whom a single assassination can spark sixty years of unending war that, well, as we both know, halves and halves again your population, I think it’s fair to judge the project a failure.”

“Who the hell are you?” Emma growled, stepping to the side to clear the squad’s lines of fire while still keeping her gun trained on the Cleric.

The Cleric raised his chin, revealing more of his alien face, which had been instilled with a sense of… pride?

“I am the Sovereign, leader of my people.”

“You’re ground meat, is what you are,” Rivers cut in.

Everyone opened fire at once.

The din was spectacular, but nearly so much as the shimmering shield that caught, held, and melted each and every one of the hundred bullets that tried to strike the Sovereign.

The Cleric lowered an outstretched hand, and a hundred lumps of white-hot metal fell to the ground, sizzling in the dust. He turned, and threw a glance over his shoulder. “You’ll have to try better than that.”

Eric’s and Emma’s 2D blades were out before he had finished the sentence.

“Try and keep up,” Emma whispered to Ayaiya.

“He’ll be leading you into a trap,” the Lieutenant responded.

Emma cracked her knuckles. “I’m counting on it. Trust your instincts.”

The Cleric took flight into the room beyond, and Kilo Two-Three was on his tail.

Twelve

The tunnel system was not unlike a massive sewer, with thousands of pipes forming a maze of levels through the gargantuan room. When Rivers saw the Sovereign take the first running leap that placed him twenty feet down in a neat roll on a pipe, he nearly reconsidered his entire line of work. Not that he had a choice, he’d been conscripted as a extrasensory from age twelve.

It took several decades of training to make the jump, with Emma right behind him. Ayaiya saw the gap, cursed, and took her squad on a left, following a nearby pipe down at a steep angle to match progress with the PEST agents.

Bullets sparked around the Cleric, but his shield was still in play, and molten slug ricocheted every which way but into their target. Rivers, puffing hard, slipping into a psychokinetic zen mode and threw himself into a sprinting slide that took him between two pipes and dumped him into open air. He fell for perhaps two stories before rolling on a pipe that wasn’t ten meters from the Cleric. Solidifying his stance, he caught Emma’s outstretched hand as he followed behind him and, with a tremendous effort, flung her forward.

She landed in front of the Cleric, who had a 2D sword of his own in his hand. The two crossed swords only momentarily in a crack of lightning that could only come from two monoedge blades meeting, but the Cleric used his momentum to pivot completely around Emma and slid of pipe to one three meters below.

“Heads up!” Rivers heard Ayaiya shout over the radio. “We’ve got Imps down below.”

Rivers barely rolled to side when a stream of bullets cut through the space he had just been standing in. He rapidly searched out the source of the fire, and saw a man with black hair that sported a single streak of silver snap down a railgun and toss off a sarcastic salute before ducking back into cover. Gabriel.

Eric grimaced. Just when this couldn’t get any worse.

A laser cannon blast hit the pipe he was standing on about ten feet away and world pitched crazily as Rivers was thrown onto his back.

He saw a Mobile Armor sidling into position a couple stories up, already adjusting his aim. Without pausing, Rivers let go of his grip on the groaning pipe and slid down out of the MA’s line of sight, rapidly picking up speed as he approached the still burning hole the blast had blown in the pipe. Getting his feet underneath him and locating the Sovereign in the maze ahead, he kicked off the pipe just as it tore free of its mountings and crashed into the abyss below, hitting every pipe on the way down and generally raising hell.

He landed behind the Cleric and was up in a sprint in the span of a heartbeat. Emma was too his left, keeping pace on a tube parallel to theirs.

Another burst of fire cut across Rivers’ path, and again he saw Gabriel, this time not a story down. He was tracking them, and if Rivers didn’t do something quick it’d be two on two. And he had developed an allergy to fair fights. He caught Emma’s eyes – she knew what we was going to do with him saying anything, the benefit of a decades-long partnership – and leapt down to face Gabriel.

Everything around them became immaterial. The chatter of Kilo Two-Three taking on the Imp forces. The whine of the MA’s cannon. The clittler-clatter of Emma’s boots as we kept on the Cleric’s tail.

River straightened, a pipe below his target, and looked up to match eyes with Thayden Gabriel Kor.

Thirteen

One Week Earlier, Blate Point, Leviathan Space

Rivers and Navar arrived at the roof on the robotic window washer. They ducked behind an exhaust stack, peering out to see one of the Imperial gunships resting on the rooftop aeropad, its engines still whining, veiled in the pouring rain.

“Keep talking,” Rivers said to Navar. “The Clerics. They’re back because…”

“Because of the lockdown,” Navar said. “It’s going to end a week from now. When the Clerics retreated past the Abyss, they put their worlds into lockdown, so we couldn’t uncover their secrets. But now the lockdown is about to end, and the Clerics are using us against each other to recover their holdings.”

“But we’ve colonized a huge amount of former Ubeerian worlds.”

“Yes, exactly. They drop the lockdown and initiate their security systems to, well, clean up the place.”

“Christ,” Rivers breathed. “What are we talking about here?”

“A single, galaxy-wide pulse. Keyed to a certain species. In this case, the Clerics. Everything else is boom, dead. Agent, you have to listen to me. This goes beyond anything – the Leviathan, the war between your two powers, everything. This is the fate of the human race we’re talking about here. Which is why the Imperials are taking their Cleric ‘allies’ to the former Ubeerian Capital to start the apocalyps-”

Navar’s head exploded. Burst like a blood-filled balloon. There was no warning.

One second the Deus agent had a head, the next second he didn’t. It had simply been ripped off by a lethal twenty-round burst from a railgun somewhere behind Rivers.

Rivers spun-

-And saw the Imperial commander, Gabriel, standing in the doorway to the fire stairs, thirty yards away, his railgun rifle pressed against his shoulder.

Rivers looked down at Navar, bloodied and broken. The Deus man would tell no more tales – not without his head.

And so Rivers ran, his pistol up and firing.

Bullets flew wildly at Gabriel, who ducked smoothly into cover in the stairwell.

Click. His pistol ran empty, he swung his rifle around and fired it across his body, keeping Gabriel behind the door.

The PEST agent made a straightaway for the parked gunship.

Fourteen

Present Day, Maneral City Underground

Rivers watched Gabriel toss away with railgun before dropping down from above, landing in a crouch. Two hilts protruded from sheaths mounted on his back – both 2D swords stolen from PEST agents. The mercenary had killed two psions; and, considering the agents worked in pairs, he’d probably done it all a day’s work.

“The Imps must be desperate, hiring the likes of you,” Rivers sneered at the mercenary, reaching for his rifle – empty. Twisting, he redrew his own sword. “What’s a matter, they couldn’t afford Boba Fett?”

Gabriel didn’t dignify this with a response, instead giving a winning grin and opening a palm towards Rivers. The telekinetic blast hit him in his left shoulder, flipping him end over end into a wall, where he crumpled to the ground.

The battle roared by overhead, raining shells and corpse from above. Even above the chatter of small arms, Gabriel could hear Emma’s cry as she met the Sovereign in single combat again.

There came a shout from the left, and Gabriel spun, drawing his swords just in time to catch the first shot Rivers had aimed at him. The PEST agent had gotten to his feet and had apparently retrieved a sidearm from a fallen corpse. He walked sideways, apparently trying to keep Gabriel checked and under fire while he made his way to join up with his comrades and hopefully outnumber the mercenary.

Gabriel could let that happen. Sheathing one of his swords, he reached into a pouch on his belt and withdrew a razor-sharp disc. With a grunt, he straightarmed it at Rivers. Rivers didn’t have to dodge - the device buried itself in the concrete two feet to his right.

Rivers lifted his chin to him, firing off another shot. “You missed.”

Gabriel shook his head. “No, I didn’t.”

The grenade exploded concussively, sending Rivers flying. Staggering, he struggling to his hands and knees as Gabriel rushed forward to plant a kick in his nose. Catching the limb, Rivers yanked hard and Gabriel lost his balance, pitching backwards. As the merc landed, Rivers drove an elbow into Gabriel’s gut, doubling him up, before coming back to his feet. Drawing his sword, he thumbed it on and sliced it down at Gabriel’s neck

Only for the blow to be intercepted by the twin blades of the mercenary. Placing a kick into River’s stomach, Gabriel was granted just enough respite to leap to his feet and launch his own offensive – one blade held in a backhand grip leading the assault with a vicious uppercut.

Rivers met the cut low, holding the blow there for a few seconds, fighting his opponent’s strength before parrying his own slashes, both high. Gabriel caught each blow on a separate sabre, shrugging them off as a roof would rain. The mercenary worked in a circle around Rivers, alternating blows, aiming for limbs. Rivers lifted a foot here, ducked under a blow there, before a pair of blows sliced across each arm. Growling, he leapt forward with his own assault, desperate.

Gabriel had been expecting this, and seemed to foresee every one of the agent’s moves. Parrying the first, he rolled a blade over his shoulder, avoiding Rivers’ second blow entirely and barely missing his opponent’s neck by centimeters. The close call only pushed Rivers harder, actually forcing Gabriel to give ground rapidly. At last Rivers slipped up and drove his blade hard into the ground.

Gabriel was there instantly, swinging a blade horizontally at Rivers’ wrist. Pulling his out swiftly out of reach to dodge the cut before darting in back in, Rivers stepped into his foe’s guard, elbowing him as he pulled his sword from the ground. Gabriel stumbled back and Rivers was on him, his offensive in earnest now, making the bounty hunter to surrender a dozen feet or more. The individual one-handed grips couldn’t match the power Rivers was putting behind each swing, and Rivers said as much.

The bounty hunter leapt back twenty feet and dropped into a deep defensive crouch, the grin reappearing on his face. “It’d be ridiculously for me to carry around the twenty-six swords I own, wouldn’t you say?” Flicking each wrist, a smaller blade emerged from the butt of each sword’s hilt, transforming the swords into twin-bladed staffs. “Assuming I don’t count your boss, you’d be the twenty-seventh.”

Rivers glared at the man, crushing the hilt of his sword in silent anger. He had to maneuver Gabriel into the line of fire, or at least hold the psion at bay while Emma could catch the Cleric.

“How have you killed so many PEST agents?” Rivers asked, playing for time.

Gabriel flicked his wrist, and Rivers saw purple lightning flashing around the sword before a thunderbolt flew off the tip – Gabriel has used it as a focus – as it took Rivers in the chest.

Rivers stumbled backwards, seizing, and suddenly Gabriel was right there right in front of him, at an almost intimate distance.

“Because I once was one,” he whispered in Rivers’ ear.

Rivers and Gabriel both looked down at the same time.

The flame-wreathed 2D sword protruding from Rivers’ belly was slick with blood.

With a silent flourish, Gabriel withdrew the blade, flicked in clean of blood, and sheathed it all in one move.

Rivers cupped his hands over the wound, as if trying to staunch the flow of blood. With an air of finality, he dropped to his knees.

Gabriel sheathed his other sword and, bending over, retrieved Rivers’ blade from the dying man’s loose grip.
SHADOW TEMPEST BLACK || STB2: MIDNIGHT PARADOX
The day our skys fe||, the heavens split to create new skies.
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Booted Vulture
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Re: [SecSan2009] Forlorn Hope: Another Glorious Day in the C

Post by Booted Vulture »

aaaah. This is cool stuff man. Though i get the impression you started out just write akshun for the sake of it and then your hideous compulsion towards plot came into play :P Tying it together with the earlier story you did resulted in some choppy scenrs here and there but over all i think this is some of the most densely packed akshun you've written. :P
Ah Brother! It's been too long!
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