Naero's War: The Citation Series 2: The High Crusade (29 page)

They were all kept fighting at the front as it continued to advance, but behind the scenes, there was always good camaraderie and healthy competition between all of the different Spacer Marine battle groups.

A few days later, after the wake, the next Seventhday brought the special dance night beatdown between many Marine units and groups based at the company level, including 36.

They made use of a huge WebBall arena ship.

Company after company sent in their best stompers to do their thing and wow the crowds with their skills and athletic prowess. Some groups were as small as twenty. Others had as many as fifty or sixty dancer.

Then the entire arena shook and shuddered. A full two hundred Marines from Bravo Company 36 marched in dressed in full white parade uniforms. Their MCL Shetanna flashed in, appearing to lead them.

As they danced, their nanosuits melted around their taut bodies from uniforms into tight, flashing and shining dance costumes.

Naero’s costume was so skimpy she didn’t quite understand why she simply wasn’t doing her routines naked. Her gungirls had helped design the lurid thing, and she took their word that it throcked.

They defied gravity, and in zero-G, the entire arena began to spin.

Shetanna summoned intricate glowing platforms, levels, and steps of glowing, transparent red Chaos energy out of nowhere for 36 to perform on and within. She and her Marines danced and flipped through the air. Holograms and light show beams highlighted and featured the hottest acts and dance routines.

For the finale, Shettana shot into the air and seemed to explode like a tremendous living skyrocket, and vanished within an explosion of light and a deafening boom as all the lights went out.

When the lights came back on, all of the units gathered there were left dumbstruck and speechless. Shetanna and Bravo had completely disappeared. Then the crowd exploded in thunderous cheering, went wild, and nearly tore the arena down.

Once things settled back down, other acts came on and made feeble attempts to compare. But everyone present already knew who had won the competition.

28

At Eldratha-2, humanity finally had the invaders on the run. But the Ejjai grew increasingly more desperate and destructive, doing everything they could to cause maximum damage, no matter what happened to their own forces.

The Spacer Navy and Intel neutralization fixer clouds had their hands full–speaking figuratively, since fixers did not have actual hands. Alliance dampening fields kept the invaders from simply blanketing the remaining worlds in atomics and cosmicide devices.

By now, the Corps fleets that had been crippled by the enemy were finally coming back online to assist in a major way, refitted and ready to fight once again. They became a major factor in the High Crusade, near the very end. Their numbers alone made a big difference against a final push on the part of the enemy to flood the Corps worlds with invading hordes.

For once, Spacers and landers–all of humanity–hunted the invading forces down with a vengeance and crushed them, wherever they could be found.

Besides that, working with the lander worlds became much easier with local lander fleets working side by side with the Spacers. As the Spacer forces penetrated deeper into the worlds of Corps space, old hatreds and prejudices, long egged on by the Corps, died hard. Spacer forces still came under fire at times from populations they were fighting to rescue from the Ejjai invaders.

Yet once everyone fully cooperated and coordinated their efforts together to defeat and destroy the invaders, everyone could agree on that much. There were far fewer incidents of prejudice and outright aggression against Spacers.

The local populations quickly learned the value of having the Spacers as their allies.

The Spacer military put the Ejjai down hard and fast, better than anyone else. And that saved lives and shortened the terrible war.

Spacers grudgingly began to be seen as avenging heroes, even on Corps worlds where the Ejjai did not invade.

And the various vid incarnations of Shetanna became a galactic phenomena. Nearly every sentient race had their own version of the legend in every form of media available.

There was even a hilarious Silesian variant of the Dark Angel of Death who grunted and cursed a lot, told rude jokes, and liked to fart at key times during all of the excitement. The frogs loved it.

Naero saw one of the vids and couldn’t get past Shetanna having a pulsing throatbag and coming up with creative ways to tell the Ejjai how to dine on her bodily waste products.

In many instances, however, on Corps worlds that had remained cut off by the invasion, it became better to send in some of the lander forces first, especially the heavily populated megacities where the focus was on trying to evacuate people in advance of enemy pushes and attacks.

Some of those lander populations still weren’t used to large numbers of heavily armed Spacers suddenly showing up in their cities.

But the new evacuation strategy also saved countless lives. By the time the enemy did strike, they often found entrenched, well-organized Spacer Alliance forces ready to blanket them in waves of destroying fire.

This amounted to a huge surprise for the invaders, when they were expecting to butcher helpless civilians in yet another frenzied orgy of bloodletting.

On a few occasions, the massed lander forces were so enraged that they actually requested that the Spacers hold back in supporting roles, and let them cut the enemy down.

They wanted payback for what the Ejjai had done to their various peoples, and were determined to get it.

The Spacers didn’t mind taking a breather here or there, and were always at hand if the enemy got tricky and tried to turn the tables.

Shetanna and Company 36, like the rest of Bravo, enjoyed having the extra forces to implement the various evac strategies. Then the defender attack units, such as Bravo, were free and clear to unleash all-out fury on the invader without being worried about fighting among a packed mass of helpless civies. That cut the hassles with fleeing refugees way down as well, not to mention a major reduction in civy casualties.

Of course, this wasn’t always possible. And it took many large additional military groups in massive efforts to effect such large scale evac-strategies. But it was worth it, and now they had the numbers to pull it off, where possible.

Coordinated, large scale evacuations ahead of invader attacks became the standing order and strategy of the day, whenever and wherever they could be implemented.

And it also meant that the horrible war was finally beginning to wind down. Everyone was very grateful for that.

Such was the situation Bravo faced on Eldratha-2. The Gigacorp worlds used huge mining transports to swoop in and evacuate the next gigacity about to come under attack.

They quickly leapfrogged and dumped the population off at another gigacity or between gigacities, in an area with a mild climate, somewhere else on the world that wasn’t a war zone. Of course it was a humanitarian and logistics nightmare, but another entire naval group of old ships and swarms of fixers tackled the task at hand. Relocation was better than slaughter, and in most cases, it was only for a matter of days, long enough for the military to wipe out the invaders. Like a big, messy camping trip.

On this world, Bravo and 36 held off the massed invaders and then brought in ground assault ships to eradicate the foe.

The Ejjai could never get the knack of not simply charging all of their forces forward to attack and destroy. Time and time again, this flaw in their strategy allowed them to be jammed up and simply rolled over, exterminating them in large numbers like a plague or swarm of insects.

This seemed to be a major flaw in their mental and strategic mindset and basic make-up.

Things continued to go well for the defenders, until the last few evacuation craft started to lift off, and then suddenly crashed back down into the starport.

One ship even caught fire, causing great loss of life. But the strange thing was, that initial reports from rescue teams said that the people inside were not trying to escape the flames.

The word came down. Everyone on those crashed ships had been stunned or immobilized somehow.

But how?

Scans hadn’t picked up any mass stunners at work. They were usually the size of huge vessels, and no such enemy ships were present, cloaked or uncloaked. Fixers detected no nerve gas agents present. How had so many people been incapacitated, and all at once?

Then more landers on the front lines began to drop, including units of the military. Even when they were in sealed EV suits, combat armor, and buttoned-up vehicles.

Whatever was causing the massive sweeps of stunning seemed to be spreading directly toward Shetanna and 36.

Then it began to take down the Marine units around them.

Om, what the hell is happening? Can the fixers detect anything?

As a precaution, she sealed herself with a gel-like suit of defensive Chaos energy.

I’ve done a nanoparticle scan through several fixer clouds, N. This is a nanolevel attack, far too sophisticated for the Ejjai to develop.

Another gift from the invader masters, then.

Apparently. We can’t see them with our eyes, but clouds of insidious tiny drones, or enemy stunbugs, if you will, are infiltrating everything. They are programmed to stun all of us, and leave us helpless before the Ejjai.

How do we stop it, Om?

This is far too big for you and me, N. I’ve discovered their weaknesses, however. Order the fleets in orbit to bathe this entire area in a low-level disrupting neutrino and electron pulse wave at these concentrated energy levels and frequencies.

At those levels, Om? They won’t harm anything. We won’t even feel a tingle.

Trust me, N. We won’t feel a thing, but the stunbugs’ delicate nanocircuitry will be completely fried, and fuse into useless dust. Then the microfixers can start scrubbing, cleaning them up, and recycling them. The entire task will still take days.

Naero called it in.

Haisha, Om. If only we could do something to make the stunbugs show up better on the scans.

I’ve got it. Tell Intel to flux the wave pulse to these frequencies and intervals. That should activate the stunbugs and cause them to show up toward the bottom of the infrared scans as low-level, ambient glowing light.

Brilliant, Om. That will cause the stunbugs to basically heat up and shimmer slightly, so that our scans can see if we’ve missed any.

I thought I just said that? I’m setting your helmet screen detectors and scan filters so that you can see them, N.

Naero’s face shield flickered before her.

Haisha, Om! We’re already swimming in them, like a sea of plankton in an ocean.

36 was about to be overcome by waves of these stunbugs.

Some of her Marines had already gone down. Somehow the little drones were even able to work their way into stealth combat armor and meks.

Then Naero’s protective gel suit began to light up, as the stunbugs attacked her protective Chaos field and tried to work their way through.

The enemy stunbugs sacrificed themselves by countless millions in an effort to wear down her defenses and literally chew their way through her active barrier of Chaos energy gel.

She flared her field several times, burning away great swaths of them around her. But as soon as she finished incinerating them with Chaos energy, more of them closed in around her.

Urgently, Naero called in the request for the blanket pulse waves over their positions on all channels.

The stunbugs were persistent and apparently adaptive. They swarmed on her with greater and greater intensity in an effort to overwhelm her defenses.

Om, hurry. Most of 36 is already down. They’ll stun me in less that a minute. Naero focused all of her Mystical powers just to hold them off.

On the scans, waves of seemingly harmless disruptor energy swept over the battlefield, bathing the the area from orbit in overlapping sweeps.

Om was correct. Keyed properly to the stunbugs, the energy feedback caused the tiny drones to seize up and became completely inert, falling to the ground or floating in the air as fading dust. Naero walked through them, kicking them up in clouds of extremely fine dust.

But the damage had been done, she saw as she looked around at all of her stunned Marines. Scores of units had been taken down and now lay helpless on the battlefield, at the mercy of any enemy forces who wished to rush in and murder them.

Om, we need antidotes to this stunning effect.

The biofixers and I are working as fast as we can. It’s not like they’ve been poisoned. Stunning is different, and knocks out consciousness in different ways–not at the chemical and neurochemical levels, but the deeper, actual energy levels of the brain synapses and body relays.

You mean, we have to find a way to trigger the stunned people so that they wake up again?

Exactly. Stunning puts a sentient mind and body to sleep basically, and usually for an hour or two. We’re working on reversing that process.

Then hop to it, Om. I’ve got a bad feeling that we don’t have too much time.

It is not possible to work on a solution faster. And yes, you are correct. Trouble is heading our way in the form of enemy skirmishers and enemy ground assault craft. They fully intend to pummel and pound this sector and everyone stunned in this area to death, and then suck up the bodies in the mini-meatships that will follow on. They obviously planned it all this way.

First Naero and Om called in all reinforcement units to defend the Marines who were stricken and helpless. The stunbugs were down, so there was no further need to hold back or take precautions.

“All reserves to the front. All available Spacer Navy orbital batteries. Put fire on these enemy ground assault craft that I have painted on the grid. Take them down. Protect our people who have been stunned. The enemy can’t be allowed to reach them. Halt and throw back the enemy advance.”

At first Naero assailed the enemy on her own. Shetanna smashed into the advancing lines of the enemy skirmishers, cutting, kicking, blasting, and using every lethal trick she could conjure up,

She looked like a flashing wheel of scarlet fire, or a spinning red saw blade of Chaos energy, scything through the enemy forward lines and positions.

Then a thin line of Spacer Marine reinforcements joined her, while the Navy pounded and blasted the attacking enemy ships.

Still, they were too few.

Alone, the Marines could not hold. And Naero and the other MCLs present on the battlefield were quickly exhausting themselves and their abilities.

They would be forced back, or swept away, and their stricken comrades left to the enemy to be slaughtered.

Another tide suddenly swept in.

Lander forces who had originally been part of the evac units soldiered up and flooded in. It wasn’t pretty, but it was enough to first hold the enemy, and then begin to throw them back.

The invaders went for broke, and sent in all of their available reserves, in a last-ditch attempt to press their fleeting advantage and overwhelm the defender lines.