Naero's War: The Citation Series 2: The High Crusade (28 page)

She glanced up at him and her lips parted slightly and caught her breath. “How did you know, Peter?”

He smiled at her. “Know what, Chime?”

“How did you know that I would love this book so much?”

Peter sighed, holding her gaze. “Because I’m the author, Chime. That’s my pen name. I wrote that book for you. I know you from all of your books. I know what you like to read. You’re exactly right; you are Chimaera. In every way.”

Chime trembled and sucked in a deep breath. She came forward, placing her hand on Peter’s chest, lifting her brown eyes to his.

Now it was his turn to gasp and close his gray eyes at her touch.

“You’re Aston,” Chime said. “In his language in the book it means the stone…the stone that never breaks. Just like Peter is for Petra, the rock. You wrote this book for me?”

Peter nodded. “And don’t worry. Once you reach the end, it stops on sort of a dire cliffhanger, but I am working on a sequel!”

Chime clenched her fists. “Oooh, I can’t stand this. I must read the rest now. Then you can show me the work in progress.”

“I can’t,” he said with a laugh. “It isn’t finished yet. You’ll have to wait. Why don’t we pick up where you left off. I could read some of it to you.”

Chime was suddenly like a lantern or a beacon, lit from within. “I’d like that. We can read together. You do a chapter, and then I’ll read the next. Oh, you must sign this copy for me.”

“I already did. Didn’t you see it?”

“Haisha, how could I have missed it? I just started reading. Who looks at the front matter anymore?”

They grabbed the book and strolled off together, babbling away.

Naero and Jonny Fox just stood there staring at them.

“What the hell just happened here?” Jonny said.

Naero giggled and tossed him a poteen bottle. “You’re cousin’s a lucky girl, Jonny. I think she just fell in love, and apparently with a secret admirer she’s had for quite a while. How about that? Pete’s crazy for your crazy cousin.”

Jonny just stared after them, a worried look on his face. “Huh.”

“Oh, come on,” Naero told him. “Chime deserves someone exactly like Pete. We know him. He’s a good guy, and a great Marine. A bit quiet, but the guy was practically made for her. Be happy for Chime.”

Jonny Fox nodded. “I am, N.” But he still looked slightly worried.

26

The invaders tried something different on Jamie-8. Unfortunately this was one of the first worlds where the invaders had struck, and they had been there a long while. Meatships and cloneships were running full tilt.

After losing half of its Capital Class System population of fifteen billion humans and near-humans, the entire planet was in disarray and abject confusion. Resistance was sporadic, and the invaders held sway over half of the planet.

While the Marines of Bravo Command attacked, the invaders suddenly cut their losses and attempted to flee, taking with them anything they could steal.

On Jamie-8, they had amassed fleet after fleet of all manner of stolen starships: merchant craft, liners, couriers, mine haulers, and yachts. Every type of vessel and starship imaginable.

These thousands upon thousands of starships, taken from their murdered owners, gave them many cobbled-together fleets.

Bloodships.

The invaders launched all of them at once, hiding behind the dense screen of smaller vessels.

At first the Spacer Navy closed in, trying to blockade the way. They started systematically blasting the ships trying to escape, cutting off others, and using Marines to board and pacify them when and where possible.

Then the Marines reported that the ships were packed not only with Ejjai and contraband–but with human captives and hostages, many of them pregnant women and children. Such prisoners were always the prized prey of the vile invaders.

“All ships, stop firing,” Major Luna told the Navy. “Trap the ships or have fighters disable them. We must capture them and keep them from jumping. The Ejjai have filled all of their bloodships with hostages! I say again…”

The naval blockade closed in tight, closing off any attempt to escape. The Spacer warships still destroyed the invader warships–including the cloneships and meatships.

Marine boarding craft began systematically clearing the trapped ships. They stunned everyone on board or pumped the ships full of sleep gas.

Then the Ejjai started blowing vessels up on their own, rather than allow them to be captured.

Om, this is going to a bloodbath. Think. How can we head this off?

More rapid-acting stun gas, N. Have the fixers or Marines slip onboard and flood each of the bloodships with the new stun gas. If the boarding craft or naval ships can get in close enough, they can use mass stunners. That’s the only way to neutralize the Ejjai and do this fast enough to save lives.

Naero proposed those exact courses of action straight up the chain, clearing them through Spacer Intel and Command. Om had already coordinated every fixer cloud and instructed the medical fixers to prepare large quantities of fast action stun gas.

The fixer clouds swarmed on the bloodships and filled each one that they could with the fast-acting gas. Even where the Ejjai wore EV suits or combat armor, special Intel cloaked insertion drones slipped onboard and immobilized any foes who could not otherwise be taken down by the gas. They used stun needles or actual shock charges or stun grenades, if nothing else.

Even so, with that many ships, it took a long time to dispose of that many Ejjai on all of the captured vessels. Marines and naval crews and landers chucked the invaders out of airlocks. Many of the Ejjai got sucked back down into the planet’s gravity well and flared in bright sparks, burning up on reentry.

It would be a major undertaking to reclaim and deal with all of those remaining starships and captives onboard each of those vessels. But eventually, the bloodships were systematically landed in safe areas and emptied out.

There were still some pockets of heavy fighting onworld as well. Naero and Bravo Command focused on eliminating them.

The enemy did their best to conduct their military actions right in the middle of the most densely populated areas. It kept them from being bombed into oblivion outright, and allowed them to do the most damage possible before they were put down.

At times, Naero grew tired of the constant, brutal fighting.

But she was really good at what she did. As an MCL, she was one of the best, if not the best.

Killing and exterminating Ejjai, perhaps one of the vilest and most hyper-violent species ever encountered by humanity, was an art form to her now.

Each time Naero looked down at a dead civilian, sprawled upon a war torn street, she realized very clearly, exactly what her duty was: to utterly defeat and destroy the Ejjai.

The invasion had to be crushed, as quickly as possible, world by world. Every second that she kept fighting perhaps just brought the war that much closer to being over. And just maybe, fewer helpless people of all ages would be mutilated and killed.

For all defenders, dead civies and especially dead children were always the worst thing to run across. The invaders did not always have time to collect all of the dead for the meatships right away, especially in heavily populated areas. Yet that did not keep them from killing everyone in sight and then pushing on.

The invaders actually enjoyed rotting carrion.

They could always come back, given the chance.

Like everyone else among the defenders, Naero was sick to death of seeing dead kids. Their dead faces haunted her when she slept, and several times she woke up, already sobbing. Their slack, open, helpless little mouths, sometimes filled with water, dirt, mud, or blood. Their milky dead eyes. Their stiff, pathetic little bodies, limbs, and hands and feet. Sometimes they were in pieces.

Even worse, sometimes they were only near death.

Sometimes they could be saved.

Sometimes all efforts to do so failed.

Everything about the war became a living, walking, breathing nightmare.

If only Naero could go through the rest of her entire life without seeing one more dead child.

Part of her would be willing to give almost anything for that. But the sickening war still raged on each day, on too many remaining worlds ahead of the High Crusade to save humanity.

Realistically, her personal wants simply did not matter. The war was the reality. The war was what it was.

Damn the invader scum.

She fought them, and slew them in great numbers wherever she and her brave Marines were sent, on world after broken and shattered world.

They brought hope and victory, where before there was none.

Shetanna slew the invaders–calmly, efficiently, and coldly–as fast as she possibly could.

When the invaders lay vanquished and dead on one world, it was then time to pack up and exterminate them on the next. She knew that many of the Marines of Bravo command felt almost completely the same way.

She knew by now that her good friend Jonny Fox was also something of a slight psyonic healer. Since he had saved her, she saw him also do the same for others. His talent wasn’t very strong, and he used it only in great need, to sustain life by giving his own life force directly to another. Doing so taxed him to a state of exhaustion and left him vulnerable or even helpless.

On three occasions that she knew of, her friend Jonny had saved the life of other wounded Marines in this fashion, keeping them alive at great risk and cost to himself until better help could be found.

One day, after a wild, pitched battle, Naero found Jonny passed out and near death himself, next to a dehydrated, dead lander boy of three. Jonny had clearly done everything he could to save the child, but in the end, it had all been for nothing. The little boy had been too far gone.

Naero used her own biomancy powers of healing to save Jonny’s life, and carried him back to his squad. Neither of them ever spoke about the situation thereafter.

She had seen the tears streaked down Jonny’s face that he had shed before he passed out, trying to save that poor lost little boy.

Everyone longed for the war to end. Haisha, let it end. And yet it dragged on.

Kill off the invaders to the last.

Rid all humanity of this scourge; end the atrocities.

End the vilest of wars that humanity and Spacers had ever endured.

And because the Bravo Marines so stoically shared her pain and torment each step of the way, Naero felt a deep abiding, familial love for her brothers and sisters. She fought jealously to protect them when she could, even to the point of exhaustion and taking harm herself.

Yet, in truth, they needed little protection. The elite Marines of Bravo Command were the premier warriors of their age, and warrior-for-warrior, they knew no equal.

With them, Shetanna grew to become even more than a legend among legends, revered even by the landers of the Corps worlds who had, before than time, hated and despised all Spacers and slurred them as murdering spacks. Now, Shetanna was nearly worshipped, much to the chagrin of the waning, out-of-favor Gigacorps who caused this entire mess.

In return, Naero’s Marine brothers and sisters loved and defended her with a loyalty that far surpassed all devotion and ferocity.

They knew her weaknesses very well. Her Cosmic abilities taxed her, and many times she fought until the point of complete fatigue.

When she dropped, Bravo was waiting there to catch their dark angel in their arms and whisk her away to safety.

Woe to any foe who came against her to take her life.

The Marines fell upon any such threat that came against their fallen angel with an astonishing fury that was unmatched, and could hardly be believed, until it was actually witnessed up close and in person.

Shetanna’s protectors fought like guardian angels, and shattered all comers. They crushed such attackers with absolute and astounding, stunning annihilation.

General Walker himself even joked that Shetanna should simply exhaust herself on a daily basis in order to channel the fierce loyalties and awesome ferocity that she awoke in Bravo Command. The end of the war would simply come that much faster.

Naero didn’t have the heart to inform the general that that was how many days at the front actually went.

On Jamie-8, Shetanna and Bravo Command crushed the invaders without halt or mercy in nine of the ten largest gigacities on the planet.

Wherever they went, the lander leaders recognized them now, and cheered their names, flinging flowers at their feet, and heaped praise and adoration upon them.

Yet that wasn’t what any of the victors really wanted.

They just wanted the fucking war to end.

27

Chickamauga-7 was a funny little world–an earthlike moon, actually, in an area of blank space, with only five hundred million people.

It wasn’t even important enough to be part of any major trade route. Yet it was, just barely, a mining outpost, and a small naval base and research facility. Rumor had it, on good authority, that the system had been first colonized by accident, and then used as a hideout by smugglers and pirates for a time, before becoming slightly more respectable and useful.

Yet it had one thing that made it an a valuable oddity. The planet was the greatest known and almost sole source of the rare pseudo-element of Thelluria.

Thelluria was one of the rarest Cosmic substances in the galaxy–next to something called Ur-metal. Thelluria could be used by psyons and even non-psyons to either enhance or defend against psyonic abilities and powers.

Perhaps that was in part why the troubles began.

The enemy invasion forces were not especially numerous or any fiercer than any others that 36 and Bravo had faced.

Yet strange, inexplicable events began to occur during the course of several battles.

In one instance, a hundred local defenders and about the same number of Ejjai suddenly doubled over, dizzy and unable to go on fighting.

The only other weird thing was that an Ejjai corpse had been found missing its head. Not impossible, in a war zone, but it appeared that the enemy had gone out of the way to take the head themselves, and leave the body for some reason.

The very next day, several hundred troops at the front of a heated battle grew overcome with nausea and had to either retreat, or be carried off.

There was no scanned evidence of nerve gas or any biological agents present in the air. No one could figure out what was causing these strange, mass effects.

Then later that same day, in another gigacity nearby, thousands of defenders at the front were stricken and passed out, going into some kind of paralysis or induced coma.

This was not the work of mass stunners, which could be detected and countered quite readily. Nor, again, was it any biological or nerve gas agents.

More defenders poured in to defend the stricken.

They too fell victim to the same affliction.

For the time being, no more troops were sent into that area.

Yet strangely enough, neither did the invaders rush in to attack the helpless troops lying on the ground.

Why would they hold back? They never had before.

The enemy was obviously causing this, and knew something that the Alliance didn’t. Suspicions grew among the MCLs and pointed to a possible link to psyonics. But the Ejjai had never shown any psyonic talents before, and had never been known to be psyonic in any way.

Psyonics usually required higher sentient brain functions to be present. The bestial, uplifted Ejjai were barely sentient.

Shetanna volunteered to sneak in cloaked and investigate with only a small, secret guard of one Marine Company–36.

An initial scan found hundreds of dead Ejjai shock troops in a single troop transport that had been shot down and crashed. The anomaly was that each of those troops wore helmet liners of precious, Thellurian alloy. The Ejjai were shielding their own troops against mass psyonic attacks.

Another unit came in from Intel to collect the bodies, and especially the never-before-seen helmet liners.

As soon as Shetanna and 36 continued on further into the area in question, Marines began to complain about feeling uncomfortable, suffering nausea and feeling dizzy.

A wave of special Intel fixers were sent in, and coated all of their armors in a Thellurian spolymer designed to resist and block out psyonic waves, powers, and abilities. Being a Mystic herself, Naero sensed bizarre pulses and bursts of strange, intense Cosmic and psyonic energy. Yet it was very fleeting, freaky, and disconcerting.

She could shield and protect herself, but there was no way to track it yet.

Once the psyonic-blocking spolymers were applied to 36, the disabling effects were greatly lessened, and the sortie could proceed with its investigation.

Naero and Om attempted to zero in on the strange psyonic energies at work, but they seemed very unstable and hard to pin down. And at first they seemed to emanate from one direction, and then another.

Finally she decided to call in several Marine starfighter strafing and bombing runs on the areas in question. She specifically warned HQ and the Navy that the pilots should be given the same Thellurian spolymer protections against mass psyonics.

The strafing runs came down quickly, crisscrossing the enemy side of that section of the front lines.

After they passed over, a cloaked enemy starship, of a type and designation never encountered before, disrupted and crashed to the ground deeper behind enemy lines.

Shetanna and 36 immediately pursued that strange ship, trying to reach the crash site, feeding Intel and HQ all the data that they could along the way.

Not only had the strange vessel given off wild psyonic signatures, but both Naero and Om thought that they had seen some kind of psyonic projector arrays deployed on the underside.

When they reached where the ship had gone down, it was not on fire and had not exploded. But smoke or steam did escape through several vents and tears in the hull, and burst hatches from the crash. Shetanna led her team closer.

The vessel itself was round and squat like a thick pill, armored with several odd-looking hatches.

They quickly attempted a full scan from the outside before trying to go in. Other enemy forces could converge on the scene at any second.

Om notified her about the fixer scans.
N, as we suspected, that ship is loaded with high quantities of Thellurian alloy in any number of concentrations, and configured with many different types of arrays and psyonic projectors.

Basically, the entire ship was a psyonic generator that could focus psyonic force. It was a weapon.

And a very powerful weapon at that, N. You and the others must be very careful. But the design of this weapon requires a natural source of psyonic energy. Machines, robots, and tek cannot be psyonic on their own. This generator steps up psyonic force many times over–

I got it, Om. There must be powerful enemy psyonic users on board somewhere to fuel this weapon, whether they are Ejjai or some other alien race.

The ship has been disabled and cannot fly, but the psyonic projector arrays are still active.

Copy that.

They approached the strange starship to enter within. Scanners and fixers picked up the signatures of small arms fire on board.

Some kind of firefight was taking place inside.

Between who? No other Alliance unit was even near that ship.

Who were the invaders fighting? Each other?

Without warning, a furious psyonic blast rocked the ship and everything around it within five klicks, on a magnitude never recorded before. The psyonic waves passed through everything.

Several Marines cried out, despite their protections, and collapsed. Blood streamed from their eyes, mouths, ears, and noses. They had to be floated back to the lines on their gravwings.

Naero and the rest of 36 who could go on, proceeded to close in and gain access to the ship.

Inside, sporadic fire could still be detected up ahead and on several levels.

Shetanna and the Marines performed a direct assault, taking down the Ejjai with direct fire and grenades.

The strange thing was that many of the Ejjai they encountered seemed to have been fleeing, fighting to get away from something, and had terrified looks on their faces when they stumbled into the Marines.

Finally Naero and her team were inside the ship and made their way through about half of it.

Another massive wave of psyonic power, this time telekinetic, ripped through the damaged craft, tearing the hull and supports apart. Fleeing Ejjai troops shrieked and cried out further within.

More Marines dropped and had to be floated out.

Yet another mindblast struck. This time, they suffered a direct casualty. Maurice James, a young Marine with budding telepathic abilities, collapsed without a word. When the medics reached him, his helmet was full of bloody mush.

James had taken a direct psyonic spike, and his skull had exploded. Death had most likely been instantaneous.

Naero could sense the powerful source of the psyonic attacks, dead ahead of them now. It lurked within the core of the ship that the rest of the Ejjai were trying to flee from.

She didn’t want to lose anyone else, so she transported right to the source to face it down and destroy it, on her own.

She was in a central psyonic collection chamber, lined with Thellurian step-up rods to gather and intensify psyonic powers.

The first thing she did was race around the chamber, destroying as many of the rods as she could with her Chaos swords. Ejjai dead lay piled up in heaps and scattered in ones and twos. Half of them had been trying to fight their way out of the chamber and escape.

Most had not made it, and like James, their heads had burst open, or their bodies had been telekinetically ripped open and twisted in extremely creepy ways.

Naero heard strange gurgling, chortling sounds as she continued to race around the room, taking down the psyonic collectors.

As she came around a large shielded pod, she beheld two male Ejjai being contained in Thellurian alloy cages.

Hideous psyonic mutants, perhaps grown or developed in some lab.

One was clearly dead, shot up full of holes.

Unfortunately, the other creature was still very much alive, and enraged.

The Ejjai had been trying to kill the mutants and cut off their knots of multiple heads sprouting from their broad, warped necks. So many heads that the mutants could hardly hold them up, they were so top heavy.

The remaining psyonic mutant was wounded and furious, but it hadn’t spotted her or become aware of her yet. The damn thing had so many heads that its shriveled, atrophied body could hardly move around.

Each ravening head itself, no matter what various size, was swollen with a distended, blue-violet glowing brain that pulsed with its throbbing black veins and blood flow. The glowing brains were so large that some of the heads did not have eyes.

A psyonic freak–a monster–created by equally sick and twisted minds. These were their enemies. Once more, the Ejjai could not have created such an abomination on their own.

Who was helping them do these things?

Shetanna ignited her katanas and swept in at the thing to take it out.

At last it became aware of her, and her intent.

Psyonic force waves drilled Shetanna back into the shattered hull.

Three times she tried to fight her way back in against those waves of force.

Three times the mutant flung her back.

Glowing tentacles of naked psyonic power lashed out like lightning, wrapped around her, and dragged her toward the mutant’s working, gibbering jaws.

Shetanna fought back, chopping and hacking at her bonds, but her swords simply passed through them like ghosts.

If she was going to survive and defeat this thing, she had to engage it on a psyonic level.

Marines broke in and opened fire on the mutant, but it shielded itself against their attacks and sought to entangle them all in hundreds of glowing psyonic tendrils.

Shetanna allowed the creature to draw her closer, putting up a show of struggling in vain.

She impaled it on scores of jagged spears of psyonic Chaos energy, once she was close enough. Then, once the mutant dropped her and the others and stopped attacking, for good measure, she severed all of the still glowing heads off at the thick neck.

After the Marines saw to the body of Maurice James, Company 36 sure had a tale to tell that night.

Word filtered down that overall, the war as a whole was going well. Bravo Command was still the tip of the spear, but even they could only fight on about ten percent of the invaded worlds.

They couldn’t be everywhere at once. All of the other Spacer Marine Battle Groups had their hands full on many other worlds, more or less doing the same thing–gutting the invaders. But the Alliance forces and even more and more Corps world forces continued to back them up.

Bravo had plenty to keep them busy, and like most frontline fighting units, they focused on that. Occasionally stories would filter down through the ranks about units facing down similar challenges and threats, or even something new to look out for.

Then there was new gear. All Marines loved their tek.

The 3
rd
Command Death Eyes were the first to integrate the new phaze rifles throughout their units. The Razor Princes, and princesses, of 6
th
Command tested new powered suits of combat armor with built in energy blades. The 8
th
Command Star Walkers implemented the latest gravwings, and advanced microdrone droppods.