True heroes aren't like the comic superheroes. They don't stand in front of a cheering crowd after they saved a female reporter who fell off a skyscraper for the fifth time that week. They are the ones who go into the dark places, do their job, and go home.
They are the ones who do the million little things that make our civilization work, but no one notices them.
They are the ones who suffer through pain and tears, but smile when their children ask if they're sad.
They are hidden in every one of you.
— Lieutenant Russo, address to his troops before the landing in New York. Wars of the 21st Century: The Oligarchy Wars
Ceres slowly drifted apart. Alarms sounded all around the Templars, but Rokla could only stare. He had just witnessed millions of deaths.
We're losing…
He fought the intrusive thought, but clearing his mind didn't work when you stood eye to eye with something that casually broke planets apart.
'Buddy, get your shit together. You can hide under the coffee table after we beat the shit out of this sucker.'
Oliver's rebuff snapped him out of his fear trance.
His trainers in Hellhole had tried to explain it to him. Fear is normal. Accept it and work with it, not against it.
He hadn't understood it back then. He wasn't really afraid in combat — not even at Point Charlie — but now…
The doctors explained it with something called Reduced Startle Response, a common occurrence with all Templar recruits.
He had never been truly afraid. But here he was now, panting inside his helmet, his paws sweaty and his tail tucked between his legs, encased in the best armor humans could build.
Instinctively, he grabbed the short-barreled P90XT, the chosen weapon for this mission. They didn't know the situation inside the sphere, so they had decided on a smaller weapon, usable in close combat.
The touch of his weapon calmed him. Together with Oliver's snarky remark, he got back control of his breathing.
Not that he really touched his weapon. His armor's sensors relayed the signals to his bio-interface, and his brain interpreted them as touch.
In reality, his body was motionless, packed in layers of kinetic gel and armor. But to him, to his brain, he was the armor.
Better not to think about it, as his training officer always said.
Outside their transporter, Rokla saw the Gneisenau getting hit by debris from Ceres.
Which made him think — why hadn't the Doomsphere killed them yet? The scout team had been much farther away than they were now, and they were killed in fractions of a second.
The whole team heard General Russo's voice over the p-p radio.
"Mission update. Browner's Navy got its shit together. Apparently, some sort of spy software was leaking our every move until now. It took a Glider and a VI to get rid of it, but now we have the advantage. The enemy expects to know our actions in advance."
The Templars looked at each other.
If the Sphere had known they intended a boarding, it would surely have prepared defenses.
Lance Corporal Williams said what everyone was thinking.
"So…pack extra grenades?"
Their initial plan had been to stay stealthy. That was now out of the question.
"Stop being a smartass and listen, Williams. Browner has a really nasty surprise for the Sphere, and it will hit in T-minus ten. Get your transport inside Gneisenau 's magnetic field. You'll be making a timed transit with her. You hear me?"
"Sir, Lieutenant Barlow here. I hope you mean make the transit inside Gneisenau 's hangars?"
Barlow. So that was the pilot's name. Rokla had seen him multiple times, but the Templars and flight crews hadn't had much time to mix and get to know each other during training.
"No, son. There's no time to land, and there will be no time to launch after the transit. I'm sending you the flight plan. You'd better start preparing."
Rokla saw the plan appear in his field of view.
The mission type had its name for a reason. You've got to be shitting me indeed.
"So, the plan is one of Browner's brainfarts combined with my tactical genius." General Russo paused. It was his usual humor, and everyone in the service already knew it. "In T-minus nine, the Sphere will get hit by Bismarck , ramming into our friend at forty-nine C."
Rokla tried to imagine the impact, but probably even Oliver had trouble calculating the immense energy the massive ship would create, hitting at forty-nine times the speed of light.
"And half a second before impact, Gneisenau will transit with your Fafnir inside her bubble for exactly one second. This will shield you from the worst of the radiation and gravitational waves the impact will create."
Timed transits had always been risky since VIs could not take control of ships, and programmed transits were still… buggy. Rokla just hoped the engineers on the Gneisenau had found a way to solve the issues. It was the newest thing the Aligned Planets had to offer, after all.
"Immediately after exiting transit, Gneisenau will make a damage assessment on the enemy sphere, and if we manage to break through its hull, you will close in and attempt a landing."
Barlow's sharp inhale could be heard through the shared channel. He was the pilot and knew best how risky this maneuver was.
"Gentlemen, we have T-minus seven minutes thirty seconds. Godspeed, sons. Russo out."
With that, the general ended his transmission. Not that he didn't hear every word and see every metric from his FOB, wherever that was right now.
The Templars' professionalism prevented any further bickering. Everyone knew there were hundreds of points of failure. But everyone also knew what was on the line if they failed.
So they went to work eliminating every point of failure they could influence.
Rokla and the others checked their gear, then checked the armor of one other team member. Meanwhile, the Gliders helped Lieutenant Barlow and Gneisenau 's engineering team with some obscure calculations Rokla didn't even try to understand.
The battlecruiser had rescued almost all Gliders from Ceres. The ship had been moored closest to the Glider habitat, and the engineers had simply dragged the segment out of the station when it undocked. Brutal but effective. Very human.
This simple fact further motivated the four Templar Gliders to ensure Gneisenau 's survival.
Rokla finished his checks at T-minus three minutes. That was bad, because there wasn't enough time to do them again, but too much time to sit and wait. Because with the waiting came the doubts.
So he began to eat and drink. That always helped waste time. And every calorie would be needed in combat, even if his body didn't move. No. Don't think about that. Best not to think about it at all.
Over the open channel, the team could hear soft humming.
Rokla checked the team overview. The sound came from Lieutenant Barlow.
"Everything all right, Barlow?" Morris' voice cut through the hum.
"Yeah, sorry, sir. I hum or sing quietly to relieve stress. I hope I didn't distract you."
"No, I was just checking. Are we in place?"
"Yes, sir, just waiting for the fireworks."
"Oh, the joy. Hurry up and wait. Welcome to the Army, boys. Where we go to exciting new places and meet new and interesting people." It was Williams' usual banter.
Richardson continued the probably centuries-old joke. "And then kill them."
"Transit!"
The shout surprised Rokla completely. He had been so focused on eating and running through the mission steps that he hadn't noticed the time passing.
Going FTL inside the transit field of another, bigger ship was different from transiting in a Fafnir. You were much closer to the border of the field.
Other soldiers in training had reported seeing things outside the field.
Before he could adapt and fully take in the experience, Barlow screamed again. "Transit."
They had survived the first step.
Rokla's vision was now connected with the sensors of their Fafnir. To him, the walls were as transparent as glass.
In front of them was the Doomsphere, much closer now.
The hull was melted in large sections, and in others, still in the process of evaporating from the intense heat.
" Gneisenau has confirmation. We broke the hull. Begin acceleration to target."
The kinetic gel in the suit prevented Rokla from passing out as the Fafnir accelerated with the intense speed the transporter was built for.
"Time to target, seven seconds!" Barlow's voice sounded slightly pressed. Take away the inertial dampeners' six G, and the pilot still had to sustain thirteen G without being fully immersed in kinetic gel.
Rokla's respect for the man grew by the second.
The Templars stood up, positioning themselves above the entries to their insertion tubes. Rokla knew the next steps by heart. The Fafnir would bank hard above the surface, the latch would open, and the Templars would be ejected by the transporter, each packed inside a Templar SVDS.
Templar SVDSs were offensive versions of an already purely offensive system. They were harder and smaller, a perfect fit around the armor, designed to penetrate light cover.
Rokla almost laughed when he learned that humans considered anything thinner than ten centimeters of steel to be light cover.
And it didn't start to spin. Thankfully. Every time he remembered his training insertion with the standard system, he felt sick all over again.
"Insert!"
The latch beneath Rokla opened and he was sprayed with gel, emerging from the bottom of the Fafnir a moment later.
In his visor he could see that Barlow had managed to bring them to the lowest insertion point possible. One kilometer.
The Templars were in perfect formation, and he could hear Oliver screaming in his head.
'Yeeeehaa!'
"You're as mad as the humans, you know that?"
'And you're a mutt that thinks he's people. Enjoy the happy moments.'
Impact.
Some units preferred impact in the so-called superhero pose. One knee down, the same arm punching the ground with a fist.
Templars saw this as stupid and wasteful. You wasted good kinetic energy you could use to stomp an enemy's head in. And you wasted time standing up.
Templars landed standing up, in a circle, gun ready to fire, ideally directly into an enemy position.
Rokla looked around.
They had crashed through a thinner outer shell directly into some sort of fabrication unit.
"Drones away." Richardson had launched his spy drones. His Glider, Reconnecting, would scan the area through them in search of any electronic signals.
Just like in the simulations.
'Found something.' Reconnecting's mental voice rang clear through the group. They had discussed keeping Glider communication inside the armor, but had decided that this was A) unfair to the Gliders, since humans spoke all over the place, and B) stupid, because every mission detail was essential to share.
"Rokla, Richardson, go. We cover you." Morris' order was sharp and fully in line with training.
Reconnecting had marked the spot. Fifteen meters above them on a strut, a suite of sensors.
Rokla didn't know if the Doomsphere usually had artificial gravity, but right now it didn't. So they simply jumped.
Their sensors showed 1.7% of Earth's gravity. Enough to know up from down, but not much more.
So they used their integrated zero-G thrusters to reach the sensor suite.
They could have shot them from the ground. But up here, up close, Richardson could try to blind them and use them as an electronic attack vector.
Be offensive in every situation.
Richardson attached his electronic counter set. "Sensors dark. The system is surprisingly simple. 16k QAM serial bus."
Rokla didn't understand a word, but that wasn't his job anyway. He used his higher position to check their area for hostiles.
The fabrication unit was massive. He could see the curvature of the Sphere. There — was that movement in the distance?
He tagged the section.
"Launching lurkers." Four drones launched from the back of Williams' armor. Lurkers were extremely stealthy drones, used only to observe their targets, unlike Rokla's Strikers.
"Contact." Williams shared the lurker stream with the whole team.
A group of robots moved through a corridor about a kilometer away. Checking the map the lurkers had created while flying, the corridor between the towering machines would not lead them to the Templars' position.
The planners of this mission had been right. The Sphere's sensors had been completely blinded by the Bismarck 's impact.
"Wait, what's that?" Morris had spotted something in the video.
ServerNotResponding sent the lurker closer.
'Looks like a body.'
The Glider was right. Leaning against one of the machines lay the dried-out remains of someone. By the discoloration of the metal around the body, the person must have died there long ago, and no one had ever cared to move them.
"How long has he been dead?" Morris asked no one in particular.
'Unknown. We can't detect any gases created by decay. Centuries, or longer, in this atmosphere.'
"Done. Got a boatload of data. The system isn't encrypted at all." Richardson interrupted the discussion.
"What did you get?" Morris had shifted position, moving closer to the corner of one of the roaring machines, ready in case the robots changed direction.
"The motherlode. I'm attaching a sniffer. I'll tell you when I come down."