Naero's War: The Citation Series 2: The High Crusade (24 page)

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Shetanna and Company 36 drew the lot to be the final mop-up team to prepare to depart from earthlike Vantar-5.

That system had had a very rough time. Their initial population of eight billion, mostly Moh-Karran, was now down to only two billion left, after months of heavy warfare.

The Spacer Navy and Bravo had carpet bombed nearly entire continents that had almost been completely controlled by the invaders. They were festering with factory cloneships, meatships, and equipment factoryships.

The enemy had even sent out several more invader battle groups to join the attack on other nearby systems. The remainder of the shattered lander population basically hid and pulled back in shock, over the course of a handful of days, while the Spacer forces took over.

On this mission, Naero passed by Whip Konrad and heard him muttering about head shots. That was how the enemy was going to get him. Just a clean shot to the head. Pow! Done.

Naero shook her head at that loon, but it did seem to work. He worried and fussed so much, but nothing hardily ever happened to him.

And once the fighting began, Whip fought as well as any other devil dog. He never hesitated or held back.

Like everyone said, that was just his crazy ass process.

Fresh to the fight, the Spacers eradicated and hunted down the entrenched invaders, who up until that time had considered themselves more or less victorious.

Then the Spacer forces moved on to the next world in the system hopping plan.

Company 36 was about to depart as well.

Then the strike cruiser,
The Tiberion
, that they were then attached to had a major jump drive failure. Not wanting to risk a misjump,
The Tiberion
set down in the gigacity of Vantar, at the main starport to affect repairs. Estimates ranged at one or two extra days.

When three new invader battle groups suddenly attacked at random, out of nowhere. That changed everything.

They shouldn’t even be there still, and now they had to find a way to hold out until other Alliance forces could either reverse course and return, or fresh forces could arrive to help.

The first thing the enemy did was destroy
The Tiberion
, the only Spacer warship that they could find, while it was still docked for repairs.

Fewer than seven hundred Spacers and Spacer Marines were on the run, in their dropships and other assorted starfighters, transport craft, and vehicles. They faced more than thirty-thousand enemy troops landing onworld to come at them and begin the invasion all over again.

Company 36 had all the gear and supplies they could salvage from
The Tiberion
. They also had a small fixer cloud and did all that they could to expand it at short notice.

They mustered twenty thousand support troops from the battered landers, who were thus far poorly armed and led. But at least they were additional numbers.

Even as the defenders attempted to flee and hide, in order to regroup, they still came under attack. Many things started to go wrong. The Spacer Marines were too few and spread too thin to properly support the slower moving local forces. From the very outset, their hard-pressed defenses and all of the helpless civilian areas now re-exposed quickly began to collapse.

Help would still not reach them, at best, for almost a standard day.

And a standard day outnumbered by the Ejjai invaders could be a either a very long, or an abruptly short time during the war

Bravo Command ordered them to do their best, and if possible, to find an optimal place to make a defensive stand and hold their positions until relieved.

The first thing Naero and Om did was nail the invader fleets and landing craft in the distance with a surprise attack of makeshift atomics, while the overconfident slashers were still taking their lazy time unloading their gunships and gravtanks.

That reduced the odds somewhat.

Bravo and the defenders hid behind layers of unit shielding and slugged it out against sortie after sortie of enemy attacks upon their positions. The fixers were taxed in their monumental efforts to maintain and replace the shield devices repeatedly going down, and scrounge for weapons, ordnance, and explosives of any kind from the battlefield to hold the enemy off.

Naero had to hand it to the locals. They knew what was at stake, after all that they had gone through. A few more volunteers trickled in to pick up weapons from the fallen, but they only slipped in a few hundred at a time.

The defenders fought and sacrificed bravely as the situation remained grave.

Then something very strange happened.

A bright green glow appeared in the sky off in the distance, and according to the long-range scans of their fixers, something, or some powerful force over that way was drawing off the enemy in large numbers, and attacking and destroying them with impunity.

Then a similar red glow appeared in the sky on the right rear flank of the enemy, and the fixers reported the same thing. The invaders faced some other kind of unstoppable force or forces and were being devastated.

These new threats the enemy faced took some of the heat off of Bravo and the locals, giving them a much needed breather.

Shetanna led a stealth platoon out to scan the enemy lines. They took over a small force of enemy gravtanks and attacked the enemy lines in sweeps. Then they brought the captured, modified tanks back to their own lines, to dig some of them in and use that armor and additional firepower to hold the enemy off for three more crucial hours.

In the end, the enemy finally managed to knock out all of those captured gravtanks.

More fresh enemy gravtanks poured in. Bravo took them out with the last of their pulse cannons, float-seeker smartmines, and autoguns. Most of their Marine meks were already destroyed by that time.

Waves of Ejjai shock troops increased their attacks, sensing weakness. The weary defenders gunned them down with small arms and hurled them back again and again with grenades and microbombs.

Yet all the while, the constant fighting also slowly wore away at the defenders.

Naero and 36 led a final sortie under cover of their last shield pod, to gather weapons and gear from the heaps of enemy dead. The fixers also helped collect the gear and distribute it among the remaining defenders, less than a thousand in all.

These were all the weapons they had left to make their final stand.

They immediately came under heavy fire. Their last shield pod went down as they retreated back behind their reinforced defensive positions.

Spacer Marine snipers maintained a steady, withering, lethal fire against any troops who showed themselves, in or out of vehicles and armor.

The defenders retreated further within their tiers of defensive positions as the invaders pounded them with artillery and tank fire.

As soon as the artillery barrage let up, the invader wave attacks swept in once more.

Firefight after firefight erupted, waxing and waning, blazing back and forth.

Then the slashers unleashed another tank and artillery barrage, right in the middle of yet another infantry assault and firefight. They didn’t care if they cut down their own troops, as long as they could blast the defenders to dust at the same time.

Naero could hold back no longer. If she did not act now, they would be swept away. She had been conserving the last of her Cosmic energies and abilities for the final need.

This was it.

At least they had the enemy whittled down to the point where she could make a difference.

In the confusion, she slipped out, cloaked, with a single cloaked fireteam.

They hit the enemy artillery batteries and tank emplacements with all of their remaining explosives and everything they could muster. They took out as much as they could as fast as they could in the enemy’s rear where it was least expected. That would buy them some more time, until the enemy could bring up more big guns.

They ravaged the enemy’s rear areas on the way back, doing what damage they could.

At last the enemy cut them off and completely surrounded them.

A squadron of enemy gunships dropped down at the worst possible time to pour concentrated fire directly into all of the defensive positions, while more Ejjai shock troops charged in up close.

Shetanna and her fireteam rose up on their gravwings and attacked the gunships directly. They quickly damaged each of the enemy ships, crashing seven of the craft down into the packed enemy troops and exploding them. Three of the last five gunships turned and limped away, heavily damaged.

The final two gunships the Marines took over, and pulled back behind the defensive positions and trained those guns on the fresh waves of invaders.

A massive, all-out assault of countless foes swarmed on the final defenders.

Shetanna charged out with her Marine backup, cutting the enemy down and blasting them back with Chaos power lightning blasts, detonations, direct fire, and grenades. She speared the Ejjai on rods of Chaos energy and cut them down with wheeling sweeps of Chaos force and gouts of flame and blast effects.

Baeven’s voice, of all things, suddenly roared over Naero’s secured link. “Hold on, Naero. You and your people hang on, any way you can! Gaviok and I have done every thing we can on your flanks. More Marines have dropped in and are advancing on your position. Just stay alive, damn it!”

So that was what those strange lights had been in the darkness the night before. Baeven, Gaviok, and his strange crew had come to assist, and had done their best to aid them.

“Hold on,” Naero shouted to everyone. “Help is minutes away. Keep fighting Marines. Everyone fight to stay alive!”

She employed every trick that she could think of, burning through her arsenal. Every defender and Marine who could keep firing made every shot count. They kept shooting and backed her up.

Still the enemy pushed them back, by sheer numbers and ferocity, trying to drag them down.

They were fighting hand-to-hand with the foe when the first relief force struck, and dropped down among them to startle the soon-to-be-dead invaders.

Naero and her most of her people collapsed. They had plenty of wounded, but no KIA, amazingly enough.

Within the hour, the final enemy forces were crushed at last.

36 would
not
be the final mop-up unit next time.

Naero ducked away just long enough to send out a special thank you to her outcast uncle Baeven, Gaviok, and the rest.

How her uncle always seemed to know when she was in deep trouble still amazed her, but she was more than glad that he was out there, keeping tabs on and looking after her.

Back on the 36 dropship, Naero also made a point of checking on Whip Konrad.

Again. Not a damn scratch.

His insanity seemed to work, at least for him.

Anyone could call up the charts and see in general how the war was progressing through the invaded system and along the broad arc of fire in the hot zones. But most frontline troops still focused only on their chunk of that front. The Alliance continued to advance. It was more or less a meatgrinder of attrition now. As long as they could keep going, each day brought them closer to victory.

Thankfully, they had avoided a point of no return with the invader numbers. But for the first few weeks and months of the war, that had been a very real and serious concern.

Fourthday and another Book Night had the Marines reading their selections and floating around once more in zero-G.

Their buddy Pete was laid up with the wounded. Chime and some others took some books to them all and even offered to read to them in shifts, while they recovered.

Naero stayed behind this time and read some poetry and some comix, but she just didn’t feel much like reading.

Her and Jonny Fox sat around sucking down Jett and gobbling up paks of Spum. Nearby, Ted Kim bragged about how smart his daughter Nikki was at two-and-a-half. His wife, musician Rena Young already had their infant little girl playing the thiolin.

Zina Gordon had just returned from a leave with her husband, Loader-Chief Lawrence Donovan and their one-year-old son Darren.

Naero turned to Jonny. “Do you want kids some day, Jonny? I might at some point, but I think I might need to find a guy first.”

Jonny yawned. “That usually works out best. But if I get married, I want either two kids…or four. You see, I think it’s better if you have them in even numbers.”

Naero laughed and almost blew Jett out of her nose. “That’s batshit crazy, you moronic goof. Even numbers? What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

They laughed together.

“Well, I’m old fashioned,” Jonny said. “I want to take whatever we get by chance, and not know ahead of time. But I also want at least one girl, and one boy. One of each.”

Naero flapped her lips and gave him a raspberry. “With your stupid luck, you’ll probably get stuck with four boys, or four girls. Why risk that? Trust me. Let the docs help you out. It’s easy these days.”