Tales From the Terran Republic

As night fell Colonel Laurent looked at the map and sighed. Still no movement from the Federation troops. He was definitely disappointed, but not terribly shocked. In every single ground engagement between the Federation Army and human forces the Feds were dealt costly and humiliating defeats.

They won’t be trying that again. Their losses were in the tens of thousands across the Federation.

The colonel did some quick math in his head and nodded. The losses were definitely above the minimum goals for the initial day. The Feds lost a measurable portion of their ground forces, enough that massing troops would be difficult if they wanted to retain enough men for their defense.

He pulled up another report. In more than a few areas the Federation presence was reduced enough to start evacuations of some of the smaller enclaves. The General had placed a high priority on those people. They were almost entirely untouched by the plague.

Unfortunately, here in the Capital City, the location of the single largest population of completely uninfected people, they were hopelessly trapped. They had freighters registered under other flags waiting but there was no way to get the people to them. Currently, they were only able to send the barest trickle of people through a hastily improvised “underground railroad”. Thanks to a number of sympathetic races humans were being smuggled into other enclaves and out of the city, but it was only a few at a time, and they have over one-hundred and twenty thousand people. Over a hundred and ten thousand of them were non-combatants.

He had hoped for more volunteers, but he didn’t blame them. Most of these people came from "pure porkie” stock, arcology refugees, innocent spacers, people like that. Most of them didn’t have a single drop of raider in them. They weren’t fighters, just poor luckless bastards and their descendants. They had been kicked around and stepped on by everyone, raider, Terran, and Confederacy alike. They wanted no part of this and he didn’t fault them one bit.

He felt terribly bad for them. After everything they manage to find a home, a place to build a future and what happens? Another fucking Yellowstone kicks them right in the balls. He wasn’t able to protect them before but by God he was going to do it now. He was going to get as many of them as he could out of this death-trap.

There was a quiet beep as an encoded text came in. It was from his “piper” out in the fringes of the solar system. A battleship task force just entered the system. Fuck, it was the Ascension.

The Ascension was an elite ship with a blooded and experienced crew. Among it’s numerous achievements was causing significant damage to a Sovngarde battle group to the point she forced them to retreat, with losses.

They were going to obliterate them from space! Fuck. They were actually perform orbital bombardment on the Capital City!

They were dead. A battleship’s beam weapons could easily completely vaporize a building, and at full power it could wipe out a city block! There was no way that there wouldn’t be extensive civilian casualties!

He picked up a radio.

He summoned Major Geel, leader of his combat-engineers. He then typed out a hyperspace message for the piper to send to General Morgan. He included a personal message saying good-bye.

This was it for him. He wasn’t overly concerned for himself. He wasn’t a young man when Yellowstone happened and the nearly annual surgeries and treatments were becoming more extensive and painful every year.

He had cheated death enough, but some of the men and women under his command… They had barely begun to live. They had so much ahead of them only for it to be erased in less than a millisecond from orbit.

He looked at the map carefully. Did they dig in and hope for the best or do they try to engage the Federation forces in the government district?

He smiled grimly. He wasn’t going out hiding in a hole like some rat. He and his men would perform one final raid. Hopefully, they won’t be so eager to vaporize non-human neighborhoods and while their defeat was assured they would at least take some of those bastards along with them.

He sat down and started to draw up a plan of battle.

As he was planning his glorious demise one of the volunteers walked in. It was Vera, one of the people they had appointed a commander of one horde of irregulars or another.

“All irregular forces have reported in, sir,” she said as she stood at attention. “All present or accounted for.”

“Very good,” he said with a smile. Vera was a good young woman and took both her responsibilities and the situation very seriously. In fact, she had inquired about joining “the real army”. Unbeknownst to her, he had already started the paperwork.

“The police are still manning the barricades, sir. More people than ever have ‘taken the walk’ and let themselves be detained,” she said making a face of disapproval.

Colonel Laurent smiled sadly.

“Either take your chances in a detention camp or take your chances here, huh?” he said. “They might be the smart ones.”

“Sir?!?”

“The battleship Ascension just entered the system,” the colonel said in a matter of fact voice. “Tell me, what does that mean?”

Vera looked up pensively.

“Are they fortifying the system, after you know, Raylesh and Zaran?”

“But they already have more than enough ships here to keep out our hastily armed freighters,” the colonel replied. “Why else?”

“If it isn’t system defense then...”

Vera gasped.

“They aren’t going to bombard us are they?” she asked in terror.

“That is my belief, yes. The Ascension is renowned for the accuracy of its guns. There is only one reason to bring that ship here. They are going to take us out from space. The Ascension’s gunners are accurate enough to hit a single building or a single intersection from orbit.”

“What are we going to do?” Vera asked.

“Well, Vera,” the colonel said. “We are going to die.”

Vera’s lip quivered but that was her only reaction.

“The only question is how we are going to die,” the colonel said. “Do we dig in and hope for the best and then engage the invading forces with whoever is left or do we take the fight to them? We will lose but at least they can’t hit us from orbit once we engage the enemy. I’m opting for the latter. I will not die hiding like a porkie. I’m going to die with my boots on and my rifle in my hand.”

“I… I’m with you sir!” Vera said, her lip still quivering slightly.

“No, child,” the colonel said gently. “You are going to live, you and all of the irregulars.”

“But we can help!”

“No, you can’t,” the colonel said sadly. “Most of you will die in the first quarter-mile. The rest will likely die in the next. The only reason I would send you forth would be as decoys and, this time, I’m not doing that. No, this time I’m doing this my way, not the General’s. You take the irregulars and have them protect the civilians. That is what you signed up to do, protect your families, not be cut down in a doomed charge. So, protect your families. I’m entrusting you with this,” he said as he handed her an ancient radio handset and a notebook. “In this book are all of the contacts for the various enclave leaders who are helping us. You’ve met a lot of them but not all. You can use the handset to keep in touch with us tomorrow but do not let them capture it. Press this button, hard, and throw it if it looks like you are going to get caught.”

“But… I want to stand with you, sir.”

“In war you don’t get to do what you want, Vera,” the colonel chuckled. “You follow your orders and your orders are to take this and coordinate the escape. You are one of the best of the irregulars and everyone respects you. Your job is not to die, it’s to lead. Oh, and take this,” the colonel said as he walked over to the wall and picked up his saber assault rifle.

“Sir! I couldn’t!”

“This weapon has seen me safe through the Sol Wars and beyond,” he said as he handed it to her. “I know you know how to use it, yes?”

“Only in video games,” she said hesitantly.

“Close enough,” he smiled. “I would rather it live on in your hands than wind up in some division’s trophy case,” he smiled. He handed her his ammo pouches. “There is enough ammunition in there to both last you the whole war and get some practice in.” he laughed.

“What are you going to use?”

“This!” he said as he took her AK. “The Terrans defeated us with this trash,” he laughed. “If it beat us then it will beat them now.”

“Now sit down,” the colonel said firmly. “We don’t have a lot of time and there is much we must cover.”

***

Roughly an hour later Colonel Laurent was sitting at a table with his officers.

“… so that’s the situation my friends,” he said.

“Fuck.” the silver haired woman muttered.

“Well put,” the colonel laughed. “If we are going to go out, I say we do if fighting.”

“Goddamn right!” a man in his forties, wearing the unmarked gray armor of Morgan Security, snarled.

“We will advance under cover of darkness,” the colonel said, “If we follow these approach routes we should evade notice for at least most of the way. Our scanner cammo should provide concealment as long as we can avoid the cameras. Hopefully enough of us will be able to reach the opponent to inflict casualties.”

“And we should draw the Ascension’s fire away from the enclave,” another said.

“With any luck,” the colonel replied. “Just in case, how are the shelters, Major Geel?”

A grubby looking man wearing just a stained jumpsuit gave him an unhappy look.

“We’ve been reinforcing the metro stops and the sub levels of the theatre but there is only so much you can do with construction foam and wire, sir. Against a normal attack they are great. Against a fucking battleship? They might survive a near miss or a low power shot but a direct hit from their main gun? No way.”

“Is there anywhere that is safe?” the colonel asked.

“If the Ascension wants something gone it’s gone,” Major Geel replied. “However, the Cambridge Road metro station is the deepest and the tunnels themselves go even deeper. They are a good escape route for the civvies if things go to shit.”

“But isn’t there a risk of electrocution?”

“You are thinking about our subway lines back home,” the major replied. “The Feds just have passive maglev rails. The trains themselves have small reactors and induce a field as they travel. The rails are just blocks of coils. Sensors will also automatically shut down traffic if someone is in there so we can use them as escape tunnels if we absolutely have to.”

“Sounds good,” the colonel replied.

“That being said,” the major continued, “We can’t pack a hundred and twenty thousand into those tunnels. One, they would suffocate and two, they will be trapped. There is only one way to go once they get in there. We might as well be marching them right into a concentration camp.”

“So they get blown to hell or they get infected...” the colonel said grimly. “Wonderful…”

“Perhaps not,” Major Pascal, the silver-haired woman said, “There are enough humans on this planet to justify a camp here. Nobody on this planet is infected as far as we know.”

“Would you be willing to bet your family that the Feds will do that?” the Morgan Security officer growled. “Those fuckers want us gone.”

“We are leaving the enclave,” the colonel said after a few moments, “that is the best thing we can do for them. As far as the rest, we just have to tell them what we know and let them decide. We will support them as best as we can... Captain Stewart!”

“Sir!” the Morgan Security officer replied.

“Take the Morgan Security forces and support the civilians and the irregulars.”

“Sir?” Captain Stewart asked unhappily.

“The people here are going to need help. You will provide it. Do whatever you can.”

“Yes, sir...”

“Ms. Walker,” the colonel said looking towards a woman lounging against the wall next to a long black case embossed with the word “Keralx” in Imperial script.

“Sir?”

“I’m detaching you from my command… Kill.”

“Yes, sir,” the woman said with a smile. She took the case and departed.

***

“Excuse me, Colonel?” Vera asked as she entered the Colonel’s office, interrupting his preparations.

“I’m rather busy, Vera,” he said looking up from his map. He raised his eyebrow suspiciously. Behind Vera were a rather odd group of humans. They ranged from a leather clad punk to a rather preppy looking young woman. “And just who have you brought into my headquarters?”

“I think we can help after all!” Vera said triumphantly. “You want to get to the government district, right?”

“You disclosed our plans?” the colonel asked, quite annoyed. Perhaps he misjudged her after all. He would be taking back his rifle or at least finding someone actually suitable to bear it.

“I did,” Vera said, “but for very good reason, sir. These people are the best human hackers in the city, therefore the best hackers on the planet! They can get you there undetected.”

“They can?” the colonel asked.

“Yeah,” the leather-clad young man replied. “Spoofing city cameras and sensors is easy money. We can get you past them.”

“How, exactly?”

“There are literally millions of cameras, sensors, and the like in this city,” the preppy young woman said, “far too many to go to a single control point. Each block sends it’s data to a central processing station which then compiles, evaluates, buffers and distributes the data. Those block data transmission units in turn sends it to-”

“Just the basics, please,” the colonel said politely cutting her off. Maybe Vera gets to keep the rifle.

“Ok,” the woman said pushing up her glasses in which faint glowing lines could be seen, “we can access the neighborhood sensor processing units, and loop them out… That means we send them false data. We do it all the time for smugglers and the gangs.”

“And you can do that for us?”

“No problem,” the leather clad young man said with a grin.

The colonel looked over at Vera and smiled.

“I didn’t know you associated with these sorts of people, Vera,” the colonel said with a twinkle in his eye.

“I don’t… not really...” Vera said sheepishly, “But I know someone who knows someone...”

“Ah,” the colonel smiled, “say no more.” He turned to the hackers.

“How long will it take for you to ‘hack-in’ or whatever it is that you do?”

“We are ready to go,” the young woman said.

“But don’t you have to log in or something?”

“Nah,” the young man replied. “We gotta physically access the nodes. We’re coming with you.”

“Are you certain?” the colonel asked. “You know this is going to be very dangerous.”

“Oh please,” the preppy woman scoffed. “Getting shot is way better than what can happen to us if we fuck up other jobs.”

“We leave within the hour,” the colonel said. He looked over at Vera and smiled.

She grinned back.

***

A little later that night, Fed Trooper Gy-Jerin leaned against the side of an APC as he played with his phone.

“Hey!” his companion snapped from a nearby fighting position, “At least pretend that you are on watch, please.”

“Why?” he replied not looking up from his game, “I don’t even know why we are out here. There are a couple of miles of cameras, sensors, and drones between us and them and that’s not counting our own stuff.”

“Yeah, but it’s the Forsaken”, the other trooper said, nervously wiping his flat snout. “You know what they’ve done in other places, right?”

“Forsaken?” Gy-Jerin scoffed. “They can call themselves whatever fancy name they want but they are still fucking porkies.”

“Fine, porkies then,” his fellow trooper snapped. “The porkies have been kicking our asses across the whole Federation. All of our ‘stuff’ hasn’t done shit.”

“Yeah, but they didn’t have the Ascension in orbit. Those porkies poke their heads out of their holes for one sec-”

“Wait!” the other trooper hissed urgently, his snout twitching. “I smell-”

Federation Trooper Gy-Jerin’s phone fell from his hand as a plasma-jacketed tungsten needle blew his head apart.

His companion pressed himself into the pavement as countless rays of light ripped the air apart just over his head.

He heard the captain yelling something. He turned just in time to see the captain, and his command APC be vaporized in a flash of light.

People were running, screaming… blowing apart…

He heard Sergeant Vkk bellowing… something…

He looked that way hopefully. Sergeant Vkk would know what to-

Sergeant Vkk exploded too, ripped completely in half by one of those ungodly streaks of light.

Everything was so loud. He couldn’t hear anything and, partially blinded by those… whatever those unholy bolts were… he couldn’t see much.

He didn’t know what to do! This wasn’t anything like training!

Oh Creators! It was so loud…

Something else exploded. He wasn’t sure what…

He didn’t know what to do!…

He looked around for a sergeant… or an officer… but he couldn’t see anyone… Everyone was dying!

Nobody was yelling orders anymore. They were just screaming. Some people were trying to fight, to shoot back but they were literally being torn apart by those beams, their deflectors just giving off an anemic little blue flash.

He pressed himself down tighter against the ground. Instinctively, he started trying to dig, his short claws scraping against the concrete…

It wasn’t fair! They weren’t trained for this! What was he supposed to do? He prayed for someone, anyone to tell him what to do…

The APC beside him started to be ripped apart by thousands of those bolts, in almost a solid stream of blinding white fire. He screamed in agony and, dropping his needler, covered his ears from the noise, the impossibly loud crack from each bolt overlapping to create a deafening scream.

It sounded like, rage…

Then… silence… almost as deafening as the unholy noise…

He could hear nothing but a dull buzzing in his ears, his eyes, blinded by the glare, could only make out the dim glows of fires and… shadows moving among them…

Humans!

He curled up into a ball as he watched the wraith-like forms stalk through his camp. There was the occasional flash, sometimes preceded by desperate begging…

Then even that ended...

Forever later, he heard the sonic booms of fighters tearing through the sky above him and heard the distinctive sound of heavy blaster fire and more of that unholy screaming from the human weapons as the fighters engaged the humans somewhere nearby.

Suddenly, he saw something explode above him… then something else exploded… The fighters! How? How were their soldiers able to do that?

Now that his hearing had recovered somewhat, he could hear sounds of weapons fire in the distance, all around. They must be attacking everyone… everywhere…

How? How could they do that? How did they get here?

The night was instantly turned into day as a huge beam of light shot down from the sky with an unholy deafening roar like the wrath of his people’s ancient gods. Then, another bolt from heaven fell… and another...

***

“How in the Hells did they get here undetected?” a general yelled pounding the table with his claw.

“We don’t know, sir,” another officer said miserably. “One moment everything looked normal and the next they were everywhere!”

“And those abyss touched maniacs are too close for effective orbital engagement,” a naval officer said calmly. “We have hit what we can but we can’t do anything else without risking hitting our own people.”

There was a beep as another area of the map displayed on the holo-screen in front of them turned red.

“Dammit!” the general yelled and turned to the naval officer.

“Where are your damned fighters?!?”

“What do you want,” the officer replied, “fighters or bombardment? You can’t have both, sir. At least they can’t shoot down the Ascension, at least we think they can’t.”

The general cursed as another one of the red areas turned black.

“Well, what in the void are we supposed to do, then?” the general yelled.

“Have you tried, I don’t know… fighting them?”

“GET OUT! ABYSS TAKE YOU! GET OUT!!!” the general shouted, lunging at the naval officer.

“Gladly, sir,” the office replied with a smirk. Admiral Koo had the right idea, the officer thought as he straightened his uniform on the way out. With any luck he could get fired too!

***

“Fuck!” Tawnie, the preppy hacker quietly cursed.

“What?” Colonel Laurent, crouched behind some rubble asked.

“We lost Haxx0r… The leather jacket guy... That last orbital strike got him.”

“… Pascal...” The colonel said sadly.

“… Oh yeah… sorry, dude...” Tawnie said.

“So, what are you two doing back there?” the colonel asked as he viewed his combat map.

“Your commo dude and I are trying to crack the Navy’s communications,” Tawnie replied. “That fucking battleship isn’t picking these targets from way up there. It’s getting targeting info… We crack that...” she said as she flashed him an evil grin.

“...and we can send it targets!” the colonel chuckled. “If we can do that just once I will die a happy man!”

“What’s this with you and dying, man,” Tawnie replied. “I swear you have been picking out your fucking flowers since before we started.”

“Isn’t it obvious, child?”

“Not to me it isn’t,” Tawnie laughed. “When the reaper comes I’m kicking him in the balls… or giving him a blowie… whichever works.”

The colonel just smiled and shook his head.

“Time to call in the big guns,” Tawnie said as she let forth a frustrated sigh.

“The big guns?” Colonel Laurent asked.

“Yeah, I’m gonna summon Diakon, one of the hacker gods.”

The communications operator looked up.

“Isn’t he in jail for child porn?”

Tawnie laughed.

“No, some kid toucher is in jail. Fed Intel has this super hacker… goes by the handle ‘The Spider’… When The Spider gets on you you’re got. Diakon was getting ready to blackmail that pedo and when The Spider came knocking they had just enough time to frame that loser. He got arrested for crimes against the state and Diakon went dark… at least for a little while.”

“Really?”

“I should know,” Tawnie smiled as she dialed her phone.

“Hi mom,” she said and immediately winced, “… Goddammit, mom, I’m-… Where the fuck do you think I am?… Look-… Yeah, I know exactly who has already died. I’m right here you know.”

She winced and held the phone away from her ear as the sound of a woman’s paniced screeching could be heard.

“Jesus, keep your voice down… Look, I need your help. We are trying to crack the Navy’s codes… We do that and we can shut down that fucking battleship and maybe your precious little angel won’t get turned into a smudge like Haxx0r… and maybe light up Fed Intel while we are at it? Wouldn’t it be nice to give The Spider a little present?… Ok, text me when you have booted up The Beast and I’ll network you in… Um… Mom...Just in case, I’ve emailed you the code for my apartment. Jasper’s food is in the top of the cabinet next to the refrigerator… I love you, mom… bye.”

Tawnie looked over at the colonel with a grin.

“Parents, right? Always losing their shit over the tiniest little thing...”

***

Just before dawn General Stonebeak stormed out of Federation Command.

The nerve of that pipsqueak! He was furious. Just as soon as the business day started he was giving the Admiral of the Navy a call.

Someone that disrespectful and insubordinate had no place in the Federation military! He was going to personally see to it that they would be stripped of their rank and thrown out in disgrace!

Let’s see how that little shit likes that! the general thought with a smug click of his beak as he pulled out his smoking pipe…

Almost two kilometers away Ashley Walker sighed happily as she held her Keralx in her loving embrace. One of only two Keralx sniper gyrojets known to ever enter the black market, it had triggered a bidding war of truly epic proportions.

Jessica Morgan herself attended the auction but even she could only manage to get just one of them. Ashley was never told the amount that it fetched but the fact that Jessica Morgan herself could only afford to get one of them spoke volumes.

After it was scanned down to the atom, Jessica held a marksmanship competition. The prize, what she now held in her arms.

A flicker of light caught her attention and the optics, tracking her eye movements, instantly zoomed in on the source, some crab-cake smoking a pipe… a general no less!

She smiled at the comical image for a moment and then lined up the shot. It used “smart-gun” technology, good old Earth-tech. She locked in the target with the tiniest flick of her eye and then armed the weapon. The targeting computer used completely passive sensors to estimate wind-speed and range and when the barrel was precisely aligned with the target and all other factors were nominal, it fired automatically.

The entire process took a fraction of a second. The weapon being held on target by a master sniper speed up the process greatly.

With a nearly silent “Ssssszzzzz” the projectile left the weapon…

***

POP

The duty sergeant’s head jerked up from his tablet so fast his eyes flipped backwards on their stalks for a moment.

What in all of the Hells was that?

He checked the status panels. There were no security breaches and no reports of enemy activity nearby. Thank the Creators that their surprise attack seems to have stalled.

But what was that noise?

He activated a perimeter drone and launched it.

He watched the display. Everything looked ok. Nothing was out of place.

He sent the drone around the side of the building.

He smiled. There was old General Pinchy in the smoking area… Wait…

Holy Mother of Creation!!!

He slammed a rubbery prehensile flipper onto the alarm button and yelled about the sniper into the building’s intercom. The AI parsed his screaming into a series of priority messages and instantly transmitted them through the building, across the capital, and beyond.

Oh no! he thought as he saw Admiral Jerbin exiting a driverless cab.

He watched in horror as the admiral stopped, exactly in the sniper’s line of fire, and pulled out his phone to read an emergency message about the sniper that he was now standing directly in front of!

The sergeant lept from his desk and charged outside screaming.

The admiral looked up at him in confusion.

POP

“NO!” the sergeant screamed as the admiral’s head and most of one of his side lobes turned into a green mist.

“SNIPER! SNIPER!!! GET DOWN!!!” the sergeant screamed, heedless of the danger, “SNIPER!… SNIPER!...”

Ashley looked through her scope at the sergeant and smiled. The rocks on that guy! Lucky for him he was “only” a master sergeant. He was probably very important in the local scheme of things but she only had so many rounds… and she had taken a liking to the fellow. He gets to live.

Besides, staying here any longer was really pushing her luck. Time to move.

She slowly started to creep away.

This was fun!

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