Naero's War: The Citation Series 2: The High Crusade (16 page)

All hands managed to get away to a safe distance, and awaited retrieval from the rescue teams and vehicles swarming their way.

Veronica mindlinked with Naero shortly thereafter, when they had their MCL on a medbed. They shared some of the last remnants of the psyonic pain that was still pulsing through Naero’s mind.

Veronica did her best to syphon away that pain and take it upon herself. Together, they kept Naero’s mind from collapsing and being destroyed.

Did…did we get them all?” Naero asked her.

Veronica checked. “You sure did. Great job, N!”

The orbital batteries did their work, completing the task.

Even as Naero and Om recovered, Bravo’s water weasels began mopping up whatever was left of the enemy.

The very next day was Thirdday and Food Night once again.

To celebrate their victory on the waterworld, Naero purchased a bunch of top-notch food supplies and took over the mess hall.

She made enough fresh, seafood and crab bisque to feed all of Company 36, and then some.

Her mates gobbled it up and came back for seconds.

Acer Adams broke down and proposed. And it wasn’t a joke. He seemed pretty serious about it.

The guy completely lost it and went for broke, gesturing wilding with his hands. And he wasn’t even drunk, that much.

He even had tears in his eyes. “Naero, I really love you, babe. I just can’t take it any more. I dream about you all the time. You kick ass like a warrior goddess. I can’t take my eyes off the way you are shaped, and that cute little butt of yours just knocks me out. It’s usually your face I see in my sex dreams–more of than not. I…I have never felt this way about anyone.

“And on top of all of that…you can fucking cook like this?”

Everyone within earshot simply stared in stunned silence.

Naero rose, stood before Acer, and then leaned down to whisper into his ear.

“Acer, you enormous ass howitzer. You stop humiliating the fuck out of both us right now, or so help me, I will rip your genitals off with my bare hands, cram them down your throat, and choke the living shit out of you with them until you turn every color in the rainbow and die. Nod your head if we have an understanding.”

Acer didn’t say another word. He nodded slowly, swallowed hard once, and then quickly made his way back toward the mess hall, presumably for more bisque.

12

On Pixie-6, Bravo Command got their wish. Bravo loved to fight in the black. The black was their home, their element. They were raised in it, nursed on it, and fought in darkness like no force in the galaxy. And they defended their domain with a devotion and a ferocity that had made them legendary.

No one. No elite fighting force in galactic history owned the night and fought under its dark mantle with more finesse and tenacity than the Marines of Bravo command. Bar none, they were the finest night fighting force that had ever been known to exist.

And they took any challenge to their dominion very seriously.

Nowhere was that fact made more evident that during the fierce battles that raged across the planet called Pixie-6.

That planet had a very radical trajectory to its axis that made the declination to the sun very odd at times during its year. As a result, almost half of the world plunged into a winter of almost sheer darkness for months at a time.

Without moons and a cloudy atmosphere, it was a world that suffered the Ejjai invasion in a complete blackout of cold terror.

And the situation would not change, alter, or let up for many days to come.

The locals were, again, mostly the Piettos of those sectors, barely thirty to sixty millimeters high. Fierce in their own ways, but still terribly outmatched and outgunned by the militaristic hordes of the Ejjai invader. One quarter of the local population of twelve billion had already been slaughtered during the invasion, before Bravo Command arrived on scene and hit the enemy with all of the blazing fury that the Spacer Marines had come to be known for.

Yet the invader had had time to entrench themselves right in the middle of numerous, key population centers on the planet’s surface. The enemy meatships were being stuffed to capacity each day. And the cloneships were already churning out fresh enemy units of cloned shocktroops, tens of thousands at a time.

With each day that passed, the war of numbers still appeared to be tipping in favor of the invaders.

Projections showed Pixie-6 as possibly becoming the first invaded world where the enemy could not be directly defeated by force of arms. At current rates, they would eventually tip the scales, and overwhelm all of the defenders.

Then there would be no choice but to eradicate all remaining life on the planet in order to take out the enemy. Of course, by that time, the local population would be dead, so razing the world by atomics and mass bombing to exterminate the invaders would be the only choice, before they could continue to spread their disease further to other systems nearby.

That was a very grim plan of last resort, and always ended in the planet being uninhabitable.

Bravo took on the challenge for what it was, and brought in all of their reserves and allies.

The invaders had already been pushed out of the area where the sun still shone.

Bravo and 36 raced into the black, knowing full well what was waiting for them. They rode headlong into battle with honor, and with unparalleled ferocity, to face down the invader at their strongest, in a stand-up, all-out war in the black.

Bravo went in to blast the enemy to perdition. And they did so at one hundred to one odds, a hundred thousand Bravo Command Marines against ten million Ejjai.

The Spacer Navy sped one hundred fleets–five thousand warships, to back them up on this one key engagement.

It was very possible for the tide to turn in the enemy’s favor.

The invader might use its numbers to hold out against the best that the Spacers had to offer.

Shetanna helped lead the coordinated assaults against the meatships and cloneships. They had to be put out of business fast, or the Alliance would never overtake the enemy’s expanding numbers. Destroying those factory ships became an absolute priority.

Invader clone production had to be stopped for any of their goals and plans to succeed.

Every MCL available worked closely with their attached units to see those ops through.

Shetanna and 36 haunted the invaders like destroying ghosts and phantoms until the enemy lived in terror of them. They hunted the meatships and cloneships down with a vengeance with cloaked ordnance, mines, and fusion neutron charges that were nearly impossible to detect until they detonated.

And then it was too late. That was the idea.

Cloaked fixers could ferry in tons of ordnance to the advancing Marine raiders, who also went in loaded down with gear and weapons to accomplish their tasks.

It took ten hours to prepare one of the largest initial assaults on meatships and cloneships, key communications centers, and command and control. All of these were targeted across a wide expanse of the dark battlefield by most of the Marine units who were not already engaged.

At the twelfth hour of the watch, over one third of the enemy’s existing cloneships and meatships exploded and were reduced to dust and burning wreckage.

That was the signal for the main assault to begin.

Up in the low clouds, the naval fleets targeted and kept up a steady bombardment of the invader within an expanding ring of fire and death.

Nothing that was of the invader escaped that ring alive.

Bravo appeared in great numbers wherever the enemy least expected them–even at the enemy’s very center–at the heart of its power and vast numbers.

They took the foe by the throat and shot them full of big glowing holes until the startled invaders stopped twitching.

The enemy had fully expected massive attacks around their dug-in perimeter, but not deep within what they had thought to be their most secure core.

Bravo proved to the invaders that the Marines could attack at will, wherever and whenever they chose, with impunity. Marine raiding parties, led by their amazing MCLs, continued to methodically attack and destroy the meatships and cloneships on the hour, striking wherever those vile craft could be located. And the hunt continued.

In the open battlefields, Marines continued to march forward in rapidly advancing formations of heavily armed troops in powered armor, meks, gravtanks, and Marine ground support gunships, starfighters, and fighter bombers.

Even large units could suddenly smash through the enemy, appearing as if by sorcery, unleashing precise interlocking and overlapping waves of combined arms, direct and indirect fire upon the stunned enemy positions.

Most Ejjai were dead before they even had a chance to react, so sudden did the Marines unleash sheer hell upon the foe.

Right after many attacks began, the cowardly Ejjai were often cut down as they fled, abandoning their positions, even when fighting back might have still given them a chance at victory.

The invader never wanted a fair fight. They wanted to butcher helpless civilians. They didn’t have the stomach for a stand-up fight in many instances.

That was their worst flaw of all, as the Marines saw it.

The invaders had no honor whatsoever. They were completely devoid of it. The concept did not even seem to exist among them.

They might fight out of spite or hatred, but that was it. They fought only to destroy. They couldn’t fight for each other. They didn’t give a damn about the clone invader next to them.

They flung their own wounded into the spinning processing blades of the meatships and laughed at them while they did so.

Naero had seen Ejjai wound the troops next to them to slow them down, so that they could get away for a few seconds longer. There was base, self-preservation instinct, and nothing more.

How could any force, however numerous, hope to achieve victory, when they meant nothing, to themselves or even to each other? When they fought and killed and died for no worthwhile reason?

The invaders were a plague unleashed on humanity. Huge swaths of them were being systematically eradicated on numerous worlds at every passing minute. And the Alliance, led by the Spacer Marines, was the cure. The Marines often saw themselves as if they were antibodies defending humanity as a whole, eradicating the invaders as if they were germs or viruses of a deadly illness or infection.

In the battles in the black, when the foe did return fire, they more or less pinpointed their positions on the combat grid and helped Bravo plan their next coordinated attack. The enemy fired in panic, knowing that they were about to die. They poured direct and indirect fire in all directions, hoping beyond hope to eventually hit something. At times they got lucky and did.

Often they hit their own troops, damaging each other in their terror. Some enemy units could wipe each other out, each thinking that they were firing at the Marines.

In some battles, very quickly, the disorder and chaos among the undisciplined invaders was nearly complete. The Marines timed their assault wavers and coordinated them precisely. They organized the combat grid and modified it on the fly, directing and guiding its unrelenting flow.

New units swept in, conducted the ops, and then swept forward or back out to regroup and hit another vital target nearby. Some units needed to rest and resupply themselves before their next turn on the line.

The Bravo Marines sustained these withering attacks on the invader in ways that were precise and relentless.

Shetanna and 36 pulled back to their rally points and turned aside briefly to watch several more enemy meatships and cloneships detonate behind them. They had been moving constantly, setting charges, and attacking for many hours straight in the combat zone.

The order came down finally. All of the them could withdraw to make room for fresh teams to go forward, and take a well-deserved breather.

Naero marveled that they did not see any of the locals in the rearward areas. Intel and the Alliance had done their work very well this time, and these sectors were clear and secure.

In many areas, the brave Piettos had offered to fight if they could only be armed.

If there were any locals in the area left to fight. Many times there weren’t. General Walker considered the Piettos to be a very valiant people, despite their small size. He always considered and granted their brave requests when and where possible.

Naero soon learned that this time, the Alliance had decided that it would be best for the locals to simply take shelter in rearward areas, so as to stay out of the way.

That allowed the determined Marines to go in, confident that there were no locals in the way. They could take the fight directly to the enemy and do what the Marines did best.

As General Walker put it, in his more or less exact words, Bravo Command was there “to blast the living shit out of the Ejjai invaders, and rip the screaming heads off of these assholes who so richly deserved and required to have such done to them, with all speed and dispatch.”

Shetanna and 36 continued to make their way back, leaving nothing but burning death and terror in her wake.

At one point, they spotted three companies of Marines on a crested hill and vale, engaging at least two thousand Ejjai troops and armor sweeping up the slope.

As one, the heads of almost every Marine snapped to Shetanna, and awaited her orders.

She knew what they wanted.

Orders be damned. They were here. They wanted to go help those other Marines who were already fully engaged and fighting so courageously.

They could see the weaknesses that they could exploit in the enemy formations from where they stood.

Shetanna sent several holos of herself on fixers into the enemy formations to confuse them and draw their fire.

Shetanna ordered an attack of opportunity and sent their supporting action up the chain to show up on the grid.

By then, 36 was helping those Marines turn the tables on their attackers.

The Dark Angel of Death tore through the enemy center, bloodred swords arcing and slicing in flashes and gouts of scarlet fire and lightning. She unleashed a full spread of Cosmic attacks, gutting the leaders of the attack and hollowing out their heavy weapons formations.

After she passed through, more reinforcements arrived, and the specters of Bravo trained hundreds of E-88 mini-guns on the enemy and ripped them to bloody shreds.

After the smoke cleared, there was nothing left of the enemy counterattack but burning chunks and lots of Ejjai corpses.

Bravo cloaked and proceed on to their next objective.

36 kept on heading back to rest.

Naero passed by a sizzling, burning frozen meatblock, blasted all the way here from the explosion of one of the meatships they had taken down earlier. She and her Marines stared at it in fascination and horror, even though they had seen them countless times.

Anyone could still make out the twisted, chopped-up pieces of little local Pietto bodies, packed together and making up that sick cube. Like little dolls and skeletons, pressed and frozen together in fear.

This was the enemy. And what the Marines felt for the invaders was beyond even what could be called hate.

There was no word for it.

This was what the enemy was, what they did, and what they wanted to do to humanity, and with all life that they encountered.