Naero's War: The Citation Series 2: The High Crusade (18 page)

Jonny Fox charged up and shot the freak with his microgrenade machine pistol but was also sent flying.

Shetanna dove in and then swept up, impaling both of her Chaos blades into the mutant’s thick, hunched back. Then she ignited twin blasts of scarlet lightning up through the creature, shredding it’s upper body into ash and charred fragments.

The hulking legs flopped lifeless to either side, and the battered Marine and her damaged armor fell away, into the arms of her comrades.

It was Chime. 36 pulled her back.

Another Ejjai mutant launched itself off the hull and came at Shetanna, hurling grenades. Shetanna intercepted the grenades in Chaos shield spheres that absorbed the blasts and shattered like glass, but contained the force of the explosions.

Shetanna screamed. Her sonic attack rammed the mutant back into the hull with heavy crunching sounds. Then a series of arcing Chaos blades shot out in waves from her swords, and sliced the thing into gushing slabs of meat and disrupting armor and ordnance. Even the hull of the battleship itself was damaged, deep gouges raked into its impossibly hard surface.

By then, most of the enemy were dead, including all of the big mutants. Shetanna called out to Sergeant Python Wilde. He just finished stomping his armored boot down on an Alpha Ejjai and blasting its head off.

“Python. 3
rd
Platoon. Let’s move forward and press into the mix. Other Marine fireteams are coming up behind us to help secure these areas. Our Platoons Four and Five are bogged down and need our assistance. Let’s give it to them!”

“You heard our MCL. Fight forward Marines, and drive on hot and hard. Our buddies need us. So, let’s go!”

They arrived at the area around the bridge, mired in another heavy firefight. Both sides were actually packed in too tight. The enemy had made the mistake of stuffing the corridors too full.

Now they were crammed too tight with dead, wounded, and troops still struggling for anyone to get through.

“I’m going in along the ceiling,” Shetanna told her Marines. “On my signal, blow open the outer hull walls throughout the length of this entire corridor. Coordinate that with the troops outside. Tell them to use cutting charges.”

“Sir…N,” Python objected. “You’ll be caught in multiple blasts. You could be wounded, killed, and sucked out into space!”

“Python, just do it. Follow my orders. I’ll be all right. This isn’t suicide. Trust me. I know what I’m doing.”

She shield herself as best she could, and shot in upside down along the ceiling. Sizzling red Chaos katanas sliced through and pierced skulls, and jabbed down into open mouths and throats. Ejjai blood geysered.

Om helped by dropping and dispensing microbombs and float-seeker mines onto the packed enemies. Any trapped Marines in the log jam would still survive out in space.

Shetanna gave the signal.

Marines inside and out ripped open that section of the battleship hull like a tin can, using a rocking series of shaped charges.

Almost instantly, the congested knot of enemies–most dead or dying from Shetanna’s sweep–were quickly sucked out into the black. Marines waited to retrieve any of their own. Any Ejjai were sent spinning on their way, and shot up for good measure.

Fixers raced in to put up containment fields and automatically started repairing the damage.

The blockage jam was now free.

Shetanna dropped down and raced forward, cutting down more foes on her way toward the bridge and the heavy fighting there.

Another of the hulking mutants tried to grab her.

Shetanna jerked its entire right arm free from its shoulder socket and kicked the monstrosity in the head several times in the flashing space of a second, crushing its face. Then she ripped up through the groin with her right katana and sliced the freak into two halves from hip to shoulder.

The Dark Angel of Death swept through the boiling maelstrom of its blood in zero-G. She concentrated with her third eye, targeting multiple attackers.

Streaking threads of Chaos force pierced a score of Ejjai, transfixing them in sudden agony with their mouths open and gasping.

Those glowing red lines expanded into impaling rods and then detonated, shredding the enemy forward position. Marines charged in behind Shetanna’s relentless advance, gunning the remaining enemy down at close range.

Finally they reached the bridge proper. The crew and their Marines held their position behind the last blast wall barrier. Enemy phaze troops penetrated that barrier. Other foes set charges, fired weapons, or mutants used energy weapons to slice at the blast screens in order to cut them down.

The bridge crew and defenders fought against almost a hundred foes.

Reinforcements of heavy Marines and meks surrounded the attackers in a circle of blazing death and came at them head on. Heavy weapons barked and scorched back and forth, shields disrupted, and the majority of the fighting was within two meters or less.

Shetanna cloaked herself and then concentrated. First she put up a ring of dense Chaos energy around the bridge defensive perimeter. With all of her Mystic might, she clenched her fists and tightened the ring inward, sweeping dozens of Ejjai off their feet and crushing them into the bridge blast screen. Those heavy blast screens buckled and cracked, but so did the foes smashed into them.

She reversed the ring, transforming it into a scything blade of scarlet energy slicing outward. She had to disperse it just as the right instant to avoid hurting any Marines. But the spinning blade of raw force cut down another third of the Ejjai from behind.

Shetanna left the last third of the enemy to the advancing Marines.

She transported into the bridge itself and phazed.

Phazed enemy troops positioned themselves all about the crew and defenders, preparing to kill all of the Spacers within. While they remained phazed, they were invisible and invulnerable to the defender’s weapons.

Yet that did not protect them from Shetanna.

An orb of glowing chaos energy expanded rapidly in the grinning maws of seventeen Ejjai. The orbs quickly shattered their skulls from within, bursting outwards.

Then she caused the spheres to implode. Seventeen corpses in phaze armor topple over onto their backs.

The blast barrier went down, and Shetanna rejoined First Sergeant Sam Gordon and 4
th
Platoon. He held a mini-gun in his right arm, but his armored left arm looked crushed and slack.

“One of those mutants shattered my left arm,” he noted. “Come on. Gunny Valmont just told me they’re outnumbered and fighting beside General Walker and some of his staff in the General’s state rooms!”

They shot forward, the rest of Platoons three and four behind them. “I’m with you, Top. But while we race over there let me biomance that arm of yours.”

Sam nodded. “I’d be obliged. I’ve never had any Mystic healing before.”

Shetanna grinned. “Well enjoy it. And by the way, it’s probably going to hurt like bloody hell.”

“Go for it, N. I’m a grunter, not a screamer.”

She biomanced the crushed bones and torn ligaments and tissues back to usefulness.

Sam did quite a bit of grunting, wincing, and sweating as she did so, but he was right. He sure wasn’t a screamer.

He worked his repaired left arm, still wincing a bit. “Haisha! Almost as good as new. Now lets gut these bitches!”

Dead and wounded Spacers and Ejjai lay strewn all about the corridors and large chambers around the general’s quarters.

Any Ejjai who still twitched got shot in the face and head.

Naero and the Marines could both hear and scan signs of heavy fighting still taking place deep within. One large conference room, like a small arena, was piled up with mostly enemy dead and wounded. The walls and the hull were pockmarked with heavy blasts and multiple explosions.

As they finally reached General Walker’s private quarters, all hell broke loose.

The hull buckled and then burst with multiple explosions from within. As the chamber exploded at several points along its length. Some foes were sucked out into space before the containment fields snapped up.

From the scans, over a hundred enemy attackers–almost a third of them the huge mutants, were doing their best to take down the General and his defenders, including Gunny Valmont and 5
th
Platoon.

Gunny had a large, two-handed energy sword in his hands, like the ones Naero’s father had once dueled with. He was doing his best to defend the general’s back, cutting down any foes who tried to attack the general from behind.

But General Walker, never one to hold back in any fight, was a terror to keep up with.

In fact, Naero was suddenly staggered at the sight of Walker completely enraged and let loose on the foe like one possessed. In his custom battle armor, he wore two enormous energy gauntlets on his big hands, powered by a small fusion power core on his back.

Those powered gauntlets glowed orange and yellow, and backed by Big Jim Walker’s massive thews, they could rip through almost anything.

To prove that very fact, Walker waded into dozens of the packed mutants, matching them strength for strength and more. His large, energized fingers melted into their shrieking, screaming faces as he crushed their skulls and ripped their heads from their necks.

He tore a duranadium support beam free of the battleship and swung it in wide circles, clearing some room to fight and crushed the slashers with it. He flung crushed and shattered bodies away all around him.

The other mutants still rushed in to close with him, attempting to drag him down.

Walker came straight at them. He fought and battled them in close, hand-to-hand. Any who saw it would remember that fight for the rest of their lives.

Those glowing, energized gauntlets froze into and tore through armor and flesh. Walker tore the mutants to pieces like some kind of machine. He ripped into torsos, crushed and tore out hearts and lungs, snapped spines. He tore their guts out. Within seconds he had slaughtered nearly a score of them.

In the face of such ferocity, even the big mutants broke and fled in terror from Walker, some of them coming right at Shetanna.

Anything to get away from those ripping, tearing energy gauntlets.

Shettana used Cosmic attacks and her blades to cut down half a dozen who foolishly thought that they had any chance to escape through her.

General Walker trampled and slew all the others, rapidly stalking and dragging them down.

Then Walker shut down his gauntlets, went back among his fallen defenders, and tenderly picked up the body of what looked to be a young female Marine. From the looks of the body, she had been repeatedly stabbed from behind, and her right arm and leg had been torn off, most likely by one of the mutants.

Then Naero saw the young Marine’s face and understood the general’s great wroth.

It was Walker’s daughter, Captain Taillara, who had served with great distinction as one of his closest aides. She was clearly a casualty from the intense and chaotic fighting that had erupted during the attack.

Her mighty father had avenged his beloved child as best he could, exacting a terrible vengeance upon the assassins.

Still, in the midst of all of that carnage, the great man held Taillara’s broken body close to himself, and broke down and wept.

Every Spacer present knelt down and mourned with their great leader.

Six stunned Ejjai sterodan mutants suddenly rose up out of a mass of tangled bodies where they had been clubbed down, shaking their huge heads, snarling and laughing.

Scores of Marines lifted their humming, glowing weapons, hot to cut them down.

“Hold your fire!” Walker roared.

“Don’t worry,” Shetanna told him. “I’ll take them.”

Before she could summon her katanas, Walker shoved his daughter’s lifeless body into Naero’s arms.

“See to my girl, Naero. I’ll deal with these monsters. They’re mine.”

Walker ignited his energy gauntlets.

It was always surprising how fast a man of his great size could move.

The Ejjai freaks stopped laughing when they saw death charging straight at them with those gigantic glowing fists.

They attempted to run.

They did not make it very far.

14

When read on a data pad, the the ill-fated mission on Bodis-2 should have been a cake walk. The sitrep was almost a joke. Yet there was plenty of bizarre trouble from the get-go.

Some missions and ops were just snakebit. There was no denying it. No way around that fact.

First of all, Bodis-2 had a population of only less than two hundred thousand divided up equally between five dome cities, all on the same west coast of the same continent.

The mostly Joshua Tech and Mining Consortium people there were seeking rare minerals, crystals, and other materials that were only found on that system in sufficient quantities.

Yet the history of the short-lived colony was one of nearly constant accidents and mishaps that seemed to occur there with an alarming, out of the ordinary frequency.

Naero herself sensed something odd about the planet and its strange energy fields even on approach. Bodis-2 gave off incredibly goofy Cosmic vibes.

Could un-luck and misfortune be quantified, or concentrated in one place? Was such a thing even possible?

The enemy had had trouble trying to attack it, as well. Half of their invasion fleet got caught in a bizarre magnetic storm that swept by, and crash landed on the surface, with great loss of life.

Half of Bravo’s work was already done for them, even before they arrived in system.

Estimates ranged between five thousand or fewer actual invader troops hiding somewhere on the surface, and they had no way to summon others, now that the Alliance and Spacer navies had arrived.

Shetanna and the Marines simply needed to locate the Ejjai and help eliminate them.

But the defenders soon found themselves plagued by numerous problems as well.

Even during the drop zone landing, there was trouble. All of this, despite the fact that their deployment went completely unopposed by the enemy.

Bravo still lost more dropship transports and suffered more injuries than in many other ops where they had gone in hot–under enemy fire with guns blazing.

First, the primary command transport with Major Luna and half of her command staff didn’t even make it out of the launch bay hangar during the drop. One of their engines burst into flame without warning, and the fire threatened the power core before finally being extinguished.

Major Luna and her staff suffered one person killed–Corporal Darren Taylor in the initial explosion and fire within the hangar. Many others suffered smoke inhalation damage and several minor injuries. XO Viho Cheyenne and third-in-command Captain Samson Konrad departed in a second dropship, as was SOP, to take over the op down below onworld.

But the strange magnetic storm effects plaguing the planet suddenly returned without warning, and left half of the ships of the 127
th
and 863
rd
naval fleets disrupted, most of their warships floating helpless around Bodis-2.

Cheyenne and Konrad and their teams were soon floating helpless up in the big black also, waiting for rescue and retrieval.

The only junior grade command officer who made the actual drop turned out to be Second Leftenant Holly Mitsubishi, no direct relation to Naero’s Mystic comrade, Hashiko. Holly assumed command, although technically, Naero outranked her.

Bodis-2 was a stupid little temperate rock, with some mildly active vulcanism. There were weird particulates in the mildly toxic atmosphere that made it unbreathable. Strange energy readings and odd levels that defied analysis or description were also present.

Correction. One could breathe the atmosphere and survive it, once exposed, but doing so made people loopy. Exposure caused people to flip out, hallucinate, and dive off cliffs or fall into the equally tainted rivers.

Everything on Bodis-2 seemed tainted with these drug-like, narcotic effects. The animal life seemed more or less immune to such effects, but they could at times behave in weird ways as well.

All forces remained under strict orders to stay buttoned up, as if they were fighting in a toxic and caustic atmosphere. All safety precautions and protocols had to be observed.

But their problems and mishaps only seemed to mount from that point on. 2
nd
Platoon leader Anaconda Wilde slipped and fell backwards off of a loading platform and fractured her neck slightly. Enough for her to get put on a medbed and await evac, along with a growing list of several others with equally unfortunate and bizarre injuries.

Whip Konrad, for once, said he had a good feeling about this op. He wasn’t going to die.

Then a mining ore hauler ploughed into him. He could have been killed, but his crushed armor saved him and sent him to the medical ship for the first time in his actual Marine career.

Moses Fay’s heads-up display went nuts and started playing movie vids only in fast forward mode. He couldn’t unseal, and had to be led back to the dropship by teks as if he were blind.

The teks had their hands full with all sorts of malfunctions and problems. Along with the dropships acting up, almost every E-19 pulse rifle–only the standard primary weapon of the Spacer Marines–powered down and would only come back up in training mode.

Yeah, that was going to be a big help in combat.

Several Marines, such as Trevor Lakota and Michael Borelli, grew a bit concerned when their G-1, HE microgrenades started blinking as if activated.

The Marines scrambled to toss the grenades a safe distance away, but nothing happened. The platoons tested some of their grenades, but only half of those went off as they should.

Corporal Choti Donovan was on point with a patrol when suddenly her entire suit of stealth armor disrupted and zapped her into unconsciousness.

At first they thought she had struck or triggered some kind of enemy stun mine.

But a quick diagnostic said that her suit had shorted out when she took a leak. Despite the fact that the nanomaterials of those suits were specifically designed and engineered to process human waste internally. They functioned so efficiently that they were rarely even questioned. The fact that one had malfunctioned was in itself amazing.

Reports reached them from a few other Marines who got zapped when they tried to pee.

Kerrel Apache’s gravwing had her bouncing up and down until she deactivated it. Mystaria Romanov complained that her comlink merely echoed and repeated everything she tried to say. She couldn’t receive or hear anything.

Clive Luna–no direct relation to the major–said that his suit was filled with the overpowering scents of fresh flowers, nearly choking him. Everyone else told him to shut the hell up and go on smelling his damn flowers and quit complaining. There were far worse odors to be trapped inside one’s suit with.

Corporal Kerrington’s leg armor froze up and would not move. He floated back to the drop point to wait in line to see the teks.

Branton Taylor fell into a steep ravine and fractured his right foot.

Maurice James kept blinking into stealth mode and vanishing for no reason. Julian Kothari’s suit, on the other hand, kept changing from one bright, flashy color to the next.

As these various concerns, incidents, and mishaps continued unabated, Naero called a halt to their advance.

“Everyone stand down, maintain security as best we can, and perform a level-1 diagnostic check on all of their gear–both armor and weapons. If you can’t check your stuff, have someone else run one for you. We can’t fight like this.”

It was maddening. And they couldn’t bring fixers down to the planet’s surface for fear of them going haywire as well.

Running the diagnostics took well over an hour, and left their effective fighting force at about fifty percent efficiency.

Half of them couldn’t fight. Fewer than three thousand troops were battle ready.

When there was time, Naero tried to help the remaining officers assess their status and form a plan of action.

They still had a primary mission: locate and eliminate the enemy forces on Bodis-2.

Om, can you give us any help? Om? Are you there?

No answers. Haisha. Even Om was down.

What the hell was it with this freaky place?

The remains of the strike force bounced around on the surface for several hours, more of them dropping like proverbial flies all the while.

And they had yet to spot the enemy or fire a single shot in anger.

Word finally reach them. “Call off the attack and search,” Leftenant Mitsubishi ordered. “The enemy has been found and has already been neutralized.”

Naero couldn’t believe it. Who or what had done so? She needed to find out.

She got the coordinates to help check it out.

Five thousand foes lay scattered and dead across the sands, many of them at the bottoms of steep cliffs and ravines.

Mitsubishi looked as if she couldn’t believe the reports. “For some reason, they all opened their battle suits up and went bonkers after breathing in the local narcotics in the air,” Mitsubishi said. “Then most of them attempted to fly without their gravwings.”

Naero almost got down on her knees. “Sir, I beg of you. Get all of us the hell out of here as soon as possible,” Naero said. “This planet is the most snakebit place I have ever seen. The sooner everyone is off this whacked-out rock, the better.”

Bravo departed Bodis-2 and fled that location with all haste and dispatch.

No one ever wanted to see or hear from that crazy world again.

Fourthday was another Chat Night, and all of the oddities of Bodis-2 were a big point of various discussions, at first.

Then the usual stuff and the mundane took over. Jason Ahmed’s and his wife Karyn’s daughter Dara had her second birthday.

Everyone shared vids of their kids and families and lovers. Any Marine who didn’t like stuff like that could go somewhere else.

Jessy Ramsey was married to a tek named Thaedel Wang, and they had twin boys, age three, Thomas and Frederick. Miriam Decker was married to Melody Kim, and they had a one-year-old daughter named Yvonne. Mystaria Romanov and her medtek husband Mark Daniels just had the birth of their daughter Alexandra by a surrogate mother. Some female Marines on duty chose that option during their tours.

Actually, Naero didn’t mind watching vids of happy people one bit.

It actually worked to help hold off the nightmares of countless dead civies, staring up from various battlefields.

Later that evening, Naero gravitated toward her gentle friends, Chime and Jonny Fox, and their quiet, easy-going ways. They weren’t usually all hyper, or full of crap, or on the make like some of the jarheads were.

Chime sat there between them, smiling and laughing softly to herself as she read one of her books. Until she dozed off and fell asleep peacefully on Naero’s or Jonny’s shoulder with her thumb still marking her page.

Naero thought that her odd friend Chime was a pretty young Spacer, but she was definitely the most beautiful when she was asleep that way. There was a quality to her finely fashioned face that made her look fresh and at ease, and not either wily or distracted as she often appeared when she was awake. But she also looked childlike and vulnerable.

No wonder Jonny, her cousin, always felt protective toward her, and asked others in her squad to look out for Chime. But Naero came to learn that all of the Marines had each other’s backs. Each was willing to lay down their life for their sisters and brothers.

And that fact ennobled the lot of them, whether they were fools, or dreamers, annoying twits, horndogs, or rat bastards on their own. In combat, there was never any question of that great and mighty fact. Everyone could count on it, and that was an extremely good and powerful thing.

Jonny sipped Jett with Naero and droned on a bit longer. He liked to talk about his future plans for himself, Chime, and their greatgran, after the High Crusade was won and over.

“Do you know what I’m gonna name my ship, N?”

Naero flashed him a smile. “Tell me Jonny.”

“Gonna name her
The Green Fox
. And I’m gonna christen her with a big bottle of Jett. My first ship, like all Spacers want.”

“You gonna join one of the booms, Jonny Fox? Gonna go off and explore?”

“Nope. Don’t want any of that. Plenty of others to do all of that, and more power to them. I just want to set myself up with a nice, safe, comfortable milk run. I don’t care where it is, just as long as it’s peaceful and quiet. I’ve had enough excitement being a Marine to last me…forever. Maybe even find me a sweet little wife…and just maybe, some kids someday for greatgran to fuss over before she makes the next journey.”

“Even for you, Jonny Fox? A wife, and even kids, someday?”

Jonny sighed and smiled. “Stranger things have happened. Even so.”