Sentience 1: Storm Clouds Gathering (49 page)

Fortunately, her life-pod’s reentry system worked as advertised and she safe-landed near a pig farm, on the night side of the planet. Her satellite communicator had stopped working… the
whoever-the-hell-it-was
that was attacking them had probably knocked the birds down. From what Edison had seen, they were shooting at anything that moved up there. She’d even got a glimpse of some atmospheric fighters tangling with the invaders surprising little ships, just before her pod crossed over into the night-side of the planet and began its landing cycle. A half-mile hike and a short, but intense moment with a frightened pig farmer holding a shotgun, and she’d been on the farmer’s landline communicator to Fleet HQ in Minnaplis. A rotary winged rescue vehicle picked her up an hour and a half later, and whisked her back to HQ for debriefing.

“They had the strangest warships I’ve ever seen,” Edison stated. “Almost destroyer class, but not quite… more like what you’d get if bred a destroyer to a cutter. Guess you’d have to call them the equivalent to the old corvette class. Didn’t see any variations either — like they all were made from the same mold, like cookies. They looked cramped... really cramped. I’d really hate to try standing up in one of the damned things.

“They launched no missiles at all, that I saw,” Edison continued. “Just energy weaps and small ones at that. Looked to be about the equivalent of two, twin 3 or 3.5-gigawatt pulse-lasers up front, with a single twin mount at the stern.

“Their armor appeared to be similar to destroyer class. Even medium-yield missiles took’em right out. Didn’t seem to have any ECM either. Almost every missile we fired, hit. We were kicking the hell out of them until they got behind us… just too damned many of them. Couldn’t maneuver to keep them off our tail. They were everywhere.”

Elite Rak demolition specialists wearing space armor landed upon the outer surface of the human’s orbital fort and blasted their way past the fort’s airlock doors and hundreds of Raknaa assault troops stormed inside, only to be met with significant resistance from the station’s human crew. Eventually though, numbers won out and with the fall of the orbital fort, a narrow arch existed where the assault fleets could approach the planet in relative safety.

Ten full assault fleets, filled with over 500,000 of the large Raknaa warriors, a sub-breed of the Raknii race, had accompanied the
fleet-of-fleets
to the human planet. The six assault fleets that ran the gauntlet of missile and pulse-laser fire from the two forts that could still target their approach, now positioned themselves and began raining Rak shock troops down on the planet’s surface. Assault shuttles by the thousands blackened the skies above the human cities. More atmospheric fighters rose to oppose the landing, destroying hundreds of shuttles, but Raknii warships finally took them out after their bases were located.

As the surviving 215,000 Rak assault troops were pulling themselves together into fighting organizations to occupy the planet, the humans pulled yet another surprise out of their playbook. Artillery rounds began driving the lightly armored Rak infantry vehicles off of the roads. The Rak were unfamiliar with indirect fire and their advance was slowed significantly until Rak warships located and destroyed the strange tube-like weapons lobbing high explosives across absurd distances, to land with incredible precision amongst the Raknaa assault troops.

Even as the Rak assault troops regrouped and again began their advance towards the cities, strange heavily armored, tracked land vehicles carrying mammoth explosive firing projectile tubes, began shooting direct-fire anti-armor and anti-personnel explosives, which chewed the approaching Raknaa to pieces. Only the Rak warships had sufficient firepower to destroy these armored monsters, but there were too few of them left to prevent massive Rak casualties.

The Raknii were baffled by the aliens’ behavior. These humans just didn’t seem to realize that whoever controlled space, controlled the planet, so either humans were too stupid to understand when they were beaten, or they had more strange surprises awaiting the advancing Raknaa. The latter turned out to be the case, as when the Rak warships descended low enough to engage the human’s armored vehicles, they received another nasty surprise. Clouds of mobile, shoulder-mounted missiles having armor-piercing warheads rose to meet them from formations of human ground troops supporting their armor. By the time the Rak warships finished off the last of the armored behemoths, only 106 Rak warships remained and over half of the Raknaa assault force had been destroyed in just the first four turns of ground combat.

The surviving 125,000 Raknaa again regrouped into fighting units and engaged the 20,000 Alliance Fleet Marines and Planetary Guard troops in some of the nastiest infantry combat in recorded Rak history. The human troops appeared to be using some kind of projectile weapons that did terrible things when they impacted on the bodies of the unarmored Raknaa. Of course, the Rak energy rifles produced similar effects on unarmored human bodies as well, but most of the human warriors appeared to be wearing some kind of resistive body armor, the likes of which the Raknii had never seen. Machine gun nests took a terrible toll on charging masses of Rak warriors, reminiscent of ancient Japanese banzai charges. Automatic weapons spat an unimaginable amount of deadly projectiles that shredded the Rak assault troops.

The remaining warships aided with fire support, whenever especially well-entrenched defenders needed removing, but the humans were actually employing
thrown
explosive devices… another idea that absolutely amazed the Rak. Later, the humans introduced the Raknaa to indirect mortar fire. Their warships were often unable to locate the small, mobile launch tubes and thousands of Rak warriors actually fled from the inexplicable rain of death, coming from
Dol only knew
where. These humans were absolutely enamored with explosions and had devised an incredible number of ways of creating them!

But it was when the humans were first engaged in actual hand-to-hand combat, that the true
alien
nature of this new enemy was fully revealed. Most of the humans were a full 30 percent larger and had twice the body mass of even the oversized Raknaa — literally twice the size and three times the body mass of their Raknii officers. No one could have suspected, but these humans were giants!
Savage
giants at that… bayonets, combat knives and martial arts all came as very unpleasant shocks to the Rak warriors tasked with subduing these aliens — aliens who even used their weapons as blunt clubs, when necessary.

It was probably the Rak who landed in rural areas, not actively defended by the human military troops as they were near the cities, that came as the biggest shock of all to Raknii dreams of subduing this human planet. Even the human civilians were armed —large canine creatures with fangs, farmers with hunting rifles, children with shotguns, and housewives wielding butcher knives. Dynamite and homemade gasoline fire-bombs welcomed the Rak from every shadow. These gigantic
aliens
were crazy!

“Sergeant-Major! Malone’s squad is coming in with prisoners.”

Prisoners?
Fleet Marine Sergeant-Major William White turned towards the opening of the bunker and shouted, “On my way… this I’ve gotta see.”

White climbed the steps leading out of the bunker, gliding past the double dog-leg design of the entrance that provided cover from shrapnel, concussive blast and other rude occurrences normally found in ground combat situations. By the time his head cleared the low hanging entrance, White saw his first six ridiculously small
invaders
ringed with Marines, with their hands (paws?) pulled behind their backs and tied with strong plastic cable clamps that marines carried with them for just that purpose.

They were definitely NOT human… not by
any
stretch of the imagination.
Humanoid
maybe, as they were all bipedal, having the proper number of arms, legs and heads. But then, there was that tail to consider. They were basically
feline
in appearance. Five of the six were larger, approximately 4’6” to 4’ 8” tall and looked a bit like an old earth cougar, with corresponding fangs and claws. Unlike real cougars, they had opposable thumbs adjacent to three muscled “fingers.” Their coloring ranged from a light blonde to a dirty shit-brown. One even appeared to have faint stripe markings on its back and facial area. All but the smallest were dressed in identical crossed-belt combat harnesses above tough leggings of undeterminable color. Sgt. White blinked at the boots. He’d never thought to see a cat wearing boots.

The smallest one was obviously a different breed altogether. About three feet tall and having a mane haloing its head, looking for all the world like an old earth African lion… a very
small
old earth African lion. This one's fur was a golden color with a mane that was almost black. Unlike the larger ones, the smallest one wore a loose, blousy shirt that shone like silk. White silk.
What kind of creature goes into combat wearing white? Oh Yeah… I remember reading the French army once wore white uniform coats into combat. Almost as ridiculous as the bright red ones the British still wear as dress coats. Pfft… can’t see the blood, my Great-Aunt Matilda’s hairy fat ass!

“How’d you end up with these?” asked White.

Corporal Betty Malone stepped forward and said, “Tossed a flash-bang grenade down one of their hidey holes and there they were… all stunned as shit at the bottom. Got the cuffs on them before their world came back into focus. Thought I’d bring them to you as an early birthday gift, Sergeant-Major.”

“They give you any trouble?”

“Just a lot of growling and spitting for a while. One tried to take a bite outta Lance-Corporal Woods, but I shoved a grenade into his mouth and that put a stop to that shit. Guess they’ve learned what grenades are for and with those fangs, he couldn’t dislodge it,” replied Malone. “Think I might have chipped a tooth taking my grenade back after we got here… kitty slobber,
ew!
”

The surrounding marines laughed at Malone’s sarcastic wit, but all held their weapons pointed menacingly towards the small alien invaders.

“Well, I appreciate your letting me taking a gander at what’s been fucking with us, but we haven’t got any place for them up here,” said the sergeant-major. “Take them on back to Division HQ and turn them over to the spooks. Maybe they can house-break them as pets.”

More appreciative marine laughter was followed by Malone’s admonition, “You pukes heard the sergeant-major. Grab the alien weapons and let’s haul these pussies down to Division. Maybe we can scrounge us up some real food for a change, where the brass hangs out.”