Naero's War: The Citation Series 2: The High Crusade (21 page)

Jonny held up his hands. “Nothing like that, N. So, frost. We’re just here to give you a little friendly education. That’s all. Nothing bad. Trust me, even if you don’t trust any of these other mooks, you know you can trust me.”

“All right. I still don’t get it. What’s with the goon squad?”

They all laughed. Acer spun in place. “Cause we are the best at what we do,” he said, running his hands down his sleek, athletic body.”

Naero rolled her eyes. Kill me now, Om.

“Re-lax, gal,” Decker told her. “We seen you bouncing around. We know for damn sure you ain’t got no moves. So we gonna teach you some.”

Her mouth almost dropped open. “Haisha! You…you mean you wanna teach me to–”

Patton called up some jump tunes. “That’s right. 36 Can’t have no asskicker MCL hottie like you who can’t burn the lines. Unacceptable!”

“Haisha,” Decker noted. “We’ve got a dance off with the other Companies in a month or so.”

Acer jumped in. “It would be an embarrassment, girl. We gonna teach you to move with style and grace…and
Authorit-T!
”

Naero tried to back away. “You got it wrong, guys. I
don’t
need dancing lessons.”

Jonny blocked her path. “N. You really do. Accept it. You stink right now…but we can fix that. You are an amazing athlete. Watch what we do, and we can teach you.”

Naero covered her mouth in humiliation. “I…I…can’t believe this.”

“Believe it sugardoll. We’re gonna switch those lame-ass stomps from sour to sweet. Come on, now. Work with us.”

Allen sang out. “No choice. You ain’t got no choice, honeypod. Company 36
always
brings the heat, and when we flare out, our delicious little Shetanna is going to burn them all down to the fucking ground in smoking ashes!”

Seeing that she had no choice, Naero and gave in. She laughed and danced, working with all six of the best dancers 36 had to offer.

“First you learn all of the basics and the current stomps over the next few weeks,” Jonny told her. “Then we bring in our best gungirls to refine your steps, and all of your different acts and routines, and plans of attack. Even costumes. Dancing is like combat, N. It’s all attitude, and focus, and concentration. You size up your foes–execute–and proceed to take them down.”

For hours Naero danced and flirted with the guys, laughing together and listening to them instruct her and give her attitude and crap. She had a great time learning from them all. They were actually great teachers.

Naero never had a clue that Spacer Marines were so into dancing. But they were all so hyper-competitive about everything else, she figured it only made sense.

By the time her first session was over, it wasn’t just Acer. They were all madly in love with her and would do anything for her.

Naero hugged Jonny Fox and whispered into his ear. “Thanks Jonny. I never would have done anything this crazy-stupid on my own. Thank you, my brother.”

“I know that,” he flatly said with a wide smile.

17

Fathom-5 was a hot world, close to its star, used for smelting and forging. Lots of volcanic activity along its fault lines. A hostile and toxic atmosphere. As well as the mining and smelting operations onworld, there were numerous research labs, giving the world a population of about 2.5 million.

The Spacer Marines were not there to evac the population.

Bravo Command came to fight, to take the invader head on and beat them into the ground. Their goal was to exterminate the Ejjai and put the system back to work for the locals.

Because of the harsh environmental factors, all of the Marines and the MCLs were heavily shielded, with modified, hotworld battle armor. Or they could elect to use meks. Some Marines did so, knowing that in a pinch, they could evac the mek and still remain lightly armored and shielded.

The trade-off was that meks usually drew extra fire, from the enemy trying to take them out first.

While the Alliance and invader fleets fought up in the big black, Bravo and 36 came down in the role of being assigned to security details. Such ops usually meant protecting the remaining civies and neutralizing any enemy attackers who tried to come after them.

The invaders had similar protective tek, and were engaged in combat with around fifteen major gigacities and population centers. The slashers were backed up by the usual armor, arty, gunships, and factory meatships and the like.

Bravo had the available numbers and firepower, so they engaged all fifteen enemy positions at once.

With the Ejjai invaders being there mostly to process the local population into meatblocks, as usual, they weren’t really very prepared to face significant military resistance of the elite variety.

The enemy had superior numbers on their side, and that was about it. Watching the Marines take the invaders apart was like watching an expert fighter chop and punch and kick her way through a gang of vicious thugs.

The thugs just kept coming, and the warrior kept taking them out.

This time, Bravo tried something new. The Marine units went in first and fully engaged the enemy. Then the MCLs were sent in last. They raced in cloaked and followed the directions of the field commanders as to where they should strike the enemy next. This way, the combat grid could process what had already been taken out in the initial assaults, and then send their favorite Mystic troublemakers in to exploit the biggest gaps and new weaknesses.

In one particular area, the invaders were using massed artillery batteries up close against the fighting, right inside the domes and smelting facilities. The sheer magnitude of firepower from these batteries was holding the Marines off, and wreaking destruction upon the locals.

Neither Bravo nor the Navy could go in and bomb them out, not without killing tens of thousands of civies in the process.

Then the enemy began rallying around that position, killing more locals as rapidly and efficiently as they could.

While those big guns kept blazing away in all directions at anything the Alliance tried to get going.

Shetanna ghosted her way in undetected, in an attempt to break the stalemate, crack the enemy positions open, and help decimate the foe.

Even as she attacked them, the enemy batteries kept up an intense barrage all about them.

A dozen Marine meks tried to drop in on the enemy. Ten of the twelve got slapped around hard and were driven back, forced to retreat behind the lines. Four Marines had to bail out and shield themselves as their damaged meks cooked off.

Messengers carried the wounded back to the dropships and field hospitals.

Captain Samson Konrad directed her through the enemy lines and positions over a secured link, in an effort to track down the battery fire control forces themselves. Yet, by then, there were thousands of Ejjai in that area, and more filling in as the slashers beefed up their positions.

Naero checked in on her link. “Sam, I could lop heads all day here and wear myself out quick, without making a dent by myself. I can’t do this alone. We gotta try something else.”

“You call it, N. Find a way to bust them up.”

It was the massed big guns themselves that were the problem for the time being, not the troops operating and protecting them. The Ejjai could be dealt with later.

Time to take out those cannons directly.

The combat grid gave her priority targeting on 443 major batteries and gun emplacements.

Haisha, a regular walk in the goddam park for any creative MCL.

But she didn’t have to take every single one of those big guns down all at once.

Shetanna went on a speed attack, and more or less ignored the invader troops, for the time being.

She extended the arcing, sizzling blades of her Chaos katanas before her, smiling her customary half-smile in battle, and buzzed among those big guns, not unlike an angry insect.

She also hurled scarlet lightning, explosive pods of unstable Cosmic energy, and ribbons of force that sliced and blasted their way through that forest of big, glowing barrels, several at a time. She lopped artillery barrels in half even as they attempted to keep firing.

Shetanna sent pods of explosive Chaos energy into the battery power cores and down the barrels and bores themselves.

The invaders filled the sky with every type of fire they could unleash, but usually, by the time they did so, Shetanna was already past those positions, and the secondary explosions were just starting to chain-react and take their toll.

Despite the fact that she remained cloaked as much as possible, the invaders simply wanted to fill the air with as much fire as possible, in the hopes of hitting her or anything else that might be up there.

The volume of fire and explosions behind her eventually caught up, and battered her around like a ball. Shetanna endured and kept at her objectives.

By the time she completed the arc of one pass, she had disabled or destroyed nearly one quarter of the massed artillery pieces, and that area was reduced to being a scorched wasteland. Explosions were still cooking off.

Om cut in at the same time that her sense of warning shot up off the charts.

N, get out of there!

Om…what–

No time. The enemy is filling the sky above them with airbursts.

At this range, the airbursts would inflict damage on the invaders as well, but they didn’t give a damn about that. All they wanted was to take her out and halt her rampage.

The enemy used all of their remaining batteries, tanks, gunships, and ground forces to fill the sky overhead with showers of exploding ordnance, just as Om warned her.

She used her Cosmic energies to transport away from certain death at the last second, popping way over to the opposite end of the enemy’s positions.

That was the key. Do what they least expected her to do.

They might expect for her to simply run for it. Shetanna stayed on the attack.

Speed, speed, speed. The enemy could only focus such concentrated airburst attacks in one small area. She simply had to keep moving and striking fast and hard in order to remain ahead of them.

Keep wearing them down.

But she was rapidly wearing herself down at the same time. Shetanna couldn’t keep up such a pace forever.

The enemy did their best to lock in on her and intercept her with focused airbursts of firepower and explosives. If nothing else, they could track her by the damage she left behind.

Shetanna continued to just barely slip away, and then show up somewhere else and attack from there.

By the time she had reduced almost half of those massed big guns, she knew that she couldn’t do much more.

Her warning sense shot up again. What now, Om?

Get the hell out of that entire area, N. The enemy have just uncloaked not one, but five atomic cosmicide devices. They are arming and preparing to detonate them!

Dammit, where are they, Om? Get our fixers on them. Paint them on the grid. Those atomics will take out the entire gigacity and half of Bravo and the Alliance forces with them!

That’s probably their idea, N. Fixers en-route. I calculate that there’s enough time to neutralize three of the five devices.

Naero got on the link with Captain Konrad. “Samson, come in, we’ve got a real problem here. I need help. Send in 36 with everything they’ve got. We must seize those devices before the enemy can detonate them!”

“I see them, N. 36 on the way. They should be right on top of you in seconds. We see the two remaining atomics that need to be taken out.”

“Copy that. I’m going in.”

Shetanna focused on cutting down the enemy teks and troops trying to activate the devices.

Two of the goddam things went live and armed. She was too late to avoid that part. Detonation was set for a few minutes away. The enemy was going to attempt to pull back.

Now invader troops swarmed on Shetanna, trying to take back the devices to activate the other three.

36 dropped in right on top of them at that moment.

Even in the midst of the intense firefight that erupted, picked teams of the Marines and teks ignored their own peril and attached gravlifts on the two live devices.

Fixers and I are jamming enemy attempts to set the devices off remotely, N.

Great work, Om. We still have to get these two out of here. We don’t have time.

Naero encircled the floating devices in globes of Chaos energy and rocketed up into the sky, hauling them away from the battle zone.

Transport away from them, N.

Not yet, Om. I can’t.

N, get us out of here!

Not…high enough…yet. Naero shrieked in agony. She was tearing herself apart to get the devices safely away.

Finally they reached fourteen kilometers up and still rising when the atomic cosmicide devices were seconds away from going off.

Om transported them back to the surface at the last instant.

Naero slammed into the ground, nearly unconscious, as the bright atomic airburst blinded the sky all above the gigacity, doing little damage.

It took Naero nearly two standard days to regenerate after that. Which brought them to another Secondday, and that meant Gear Night.

She and her mates spent the evening going over their rigs and various weapons, debating the latest mods and adaptations sent down by Spacer Intel’s R&D weapons, armor, and shielding divisions.

There were new power cells that lasted hours longer. There was a hot new float-seeker smartmine with a radical new mini-AI command splinter.

Naero and Om were even amazed by them. “Haisha,” Naero commented. “Talk about unleash and forget. These damn things could almost be turned loose to fight on their own.”

Everyone present had the same epiphany all at once, and then spoke all together.

“Haisha, we can launch clouds of them from the ground attack ships.”

“From drop pods on our suits!”

“From the fixer clouds!

“How hard would it be to cloak them?”

“Wait, what if the slashers figure out a way to turn them, and send them back at us? Remember what they did on that botworld.”

Everyone got on the horn with Intel, shunting their various suggestions and ideas on how to best deploy the new smartmine devices.

After things calmed down and winded down later, Naero passed by Whip Konrad, wringing his red hands and going into his routine once more before the next mission.

“A dream. It was just a dream. But they say sometimes dreams come true. I dreamed the slashers knifed me in the back. That’s how they’re going to kill me. Knives in the back. I’ll never see them coming.”

“Konrad, you’re an idiot. You gotta stop all of this shit.”

Whip just shook his head and kept muttering to himself. “Knives in the dark. A knife in the back…”

Naero rolled her eyes and kept walking. If that goon wanted to waste his time being all crazy and sad sack like that. It was his own stupid choice.

A bunch of Marines didn’t get enough of Chat Night on Fifthday, so they were bunched up in the vid room, sharing vids with each other, mostly of their kids or some trip they took on leave with a spouse or lover.

Luke Barrett just got himself hitched, to an extremely pretty girl named Thalia Kim, a fresh faced Navy ensign. Everyone was jealous and gave him crap about the honeymoon pics and vids–and how few there actually were.

Branton Taylor had sent himself as a holo to his wife Raiina Lii, and their little one-year-old boy Flynn. There was laughter and tears on both sides.

Maurice James broke down, mourning the fact that his three-year-old daughter Camilla, with his logistics wife Sarah Steiner, barely knew what he looked like. And his daughter had taken to calling one of her uncles ‘daddy.’ Everyone present tried to comfort Maury, and tell him it would be all right. In a handful of months, the war would end, and he would be back with them all.

Trevor Lakota laughed with his children as a holo, attempting to play and sing with them. Lakota did not normally laugh that much, and was very quiet and stoic. But laugh he did with his children. His wife Jenna was also of Clan Lakota, an engineer on a naval warship. Their children, Ronald, at two-and-a-half, and Elizabeth at age one were adorable, among the cutest infants Naero and many others had ever seen. It was clear how proud Trevor was of his family.