TOC Short Story: Havoc on the Battlefield

TOC Short Story: Havoc on the Battlefield

The air crackled overhead with the sound of distant rocket detonations as some manner of atmospheric aircraft screamed overhead before turning skyward once more with a supersonic crack. Debris were thrown a hundred meters from the blasts and in the shadow of a broken supermarket a human woman wearing standard union military gear threw herself prone in the shadow of a partially collapsed row of shelving and cursed out loud.

“Fracking fuzzers!” Charlie Kirzgat grunted as she hit the ground hard enough to leave bruises on her knees through her armoured kneepads. She rolled over and out of the open as the pinging of rocks and red-hot shards of shattered duracrete echoed all around her and then slammed her back against the shelving as she pulled herself fully into cover, gasping.

She checked the charge on her Electrolyzer rifle, the promethium powercell read a healthy eighty-percent charge. Good, she still had some fight left in her after all. She had been afraid she would be left toothless, such was the speed with which the attack had come. She shook her head as more explosives rained down from somewhere over the horizon, these ones seemed to be falling much farther away to her right at least. Maybe it was even friendly incoming fire.

She didn’t hold much hope for that though. They had been attacked out of nowhere by some hostile force calling itself the Hegemony of something. The name felt vaguely familiar. She thought she had heard of them before, but she could not place where in that moment.

“Luck-cursed rebel wannabes.” She muttered to herself before tensing.

Had that been ruble shifting nearby under booted feet? Or was it just more debris?

Charlie hunched into the shadow of her cover a little farther, for once she was not annoyed by her short and squat stature. The high gravity of Nesket Prime had shaped its people into compact and powerful powerlifter forms. She had been called ‘dwarf-like’ before and always railed against the term. But now as she huddled in the dimness of a ruined city, she wished she was miles underground mining for gold and jewels. Which was saying something given her fear of those mines.

Nesket was particularly wealthy in minerals; the lower density of the super-sized planet made mining operations easier than its higher gravity would suggest. The population of the planet was primarily human and nerivith, though there were small scatterings of other Union races to be seen if one knew where to look such as the slaaveth holdings near the northern sea. She fingered the trigger of her weapon as she heard the sound again, closer now. A faint scuffling, like a noppin rooting through dry leaves.

After another minute she saw it, it was a soldier in a strange uniform that she almost recognised. She could not place the soldier’s race as they were wearing a fully enclosed helmet that covered their more obvious features, but the heavy plates of ceramometallic-laminate over a ballistic hyperdiamond buckyweave nanofiber mesh was unmistakable as the heavy assault carapace armour she sometimes saw special operations members of the planetary defense forces use.

She balked at that, her weapon was effective against light armour at close range, but those plates were specifically designed to absorb and distribute heat and shock over their full surfaces. It was likely her directed energy weapon would not even penetrate them at this range, giving the unknown soldier plenty of time to fire back and obliterate her at their own discretion.

She fumbled at her tactical gear for a grenade, but found her fingers empty. She had been caught unawares by the attack like most of the planet and had only had time to gear up in her most basic equipment before the PDF base on the edge of the city had been wiped out from orbit by heavy bombardment. She had been lucky she was stationed in a smaller outpost to the edge of the town when it happened or she would have been immolated in the kiloton-range kinetic impacts that had flattened half the city and left it a burning ruin.

She blinked tears from her eyes as she fought to forget the screams of civilians and soldiers alike as the sky had been torn by the flashes of the orbital strikes. Streaks of falling ordinance had reached down from the sky like ghostly fingers and high in the distance she had been able to make out the pale outline of a large ship in the upper atmosphere as it rained death and torment upon the planet below. The shots had felt deliberate, but the destruction they had wrought had been indiscriminate, destroying military barracks and children’s schools alike.

Charlie felt her fingers tighten on her weapon. She would make them pay for this atrocity. For this unprovoked attack on her home. Her people.

She knelt slowly and then poked out from her improvised cover, looking for an opening in the unknown soldier’s guard. She had time to notice a strange symbol painted on the pauldron of their heavy armour, a strange black fist and star motif on a field of red. Not a symbol she recognised and so she ignored it as she pulled the trigger to her weapon three times in rapid succession.

Now Charlie wasn’t an expert marksman by any means, but like all members of the Nesket PDF she had passed her range time with the best of them. So she was unsurprised when her shots landed exactly where she had aimed. Two to the lower side of the torso where she knew the carapace armour was thinnest and the third she planted in the back of their knee in the hopes the concussive force would twist or fracture the joint even through the armour.

She was partially successful, the knee shot breaking something with an audible hissing snap that caused the soldier to scream and fall. Their arms flailed as the rifle in their hands fired when their finger jerked the trigger spasmatically. But as the wounded rebel dragged themself into the cover of a nearby refrigerator display she cursed. Her shots had injured them, but not put them down, and now they were out of sight and in solid cover.

What was worse she thought she could hear more movement rushing in her direction. She hunched further into the cover of the ruined structure and crawled as silently as she could towards the rear of the partially collapsed building. She was at a major disadvantage inside the structure she realised. These enemies seemed to have assault gear, meaning they were immune to the darkness, loud sounds and chemical agents. Hell, they might even have acoustic and lidar tracking systems in those damn things as well for all she knew.

She crawled into the darker spaces at the rear of the building, as she did so she felt an old, familiar fear begin to grip her. She stopped moving and closed her eyes, taking deep breaths as she had been taught by her mother after she had lost her father in a mining accident many years ago.

A small hole seemed to drop out of her middle, all the fear and rage and pain of the last hour flowing into it as she took a deep and steadying breath. She had learned to meditate when she was a child, her father worked long hours in the mines and she had been asked to go down with him on more than one occasion as there were ways children could be made useful in the crushing blackness down below. She had been trapped in the same cave-in that had taken her father’s life, and the lives of twenty-two others. But her small stature and low metabolic needs had saved her from death that day.

She poured all these negative emotions into that hole she had formed in her mind. She pushed her hope and sense of self into the hole for good measure while she was at it. If it was her destiny to die on this day, she would need to be as icy cold as space itself if she was going to take them with her to the crushing deep.

She grinned as the calm replaced the fear, then she opened her eyes again.

Gone was the wild look of a woman pushed to the edge, instead her face was a mask of focus. Her mind sharpened by her mental exercise. She gripped her weapon, she had no spare powercells for it, but there was a chance that somewhere in the back of the store they had a powercell refilling station. It might not be military, but she was sure she could at least jury-rig some manner of adapter for a civilian one if she needed to. As long as there were recharge sticks in it then she would be fine, they were standardised and should fit her weapon’s powercell.

Charlie climbed to her feet and then stopped as she heard the unmistakable sound of something clattering to the ground at the front of the ruined supermarket where she had been only a minute before.

No time left to worry, she moved towards where she knew the employee area to be. There in the back, the door was closed and locked as she pulled on it though. She cursed under her breath and then glanced around to see if there was an office or employee nearby. No time to look for a key she suddenly realised as the clanging got closer, she took aim at the locking mechanism and fired her rifle once.

The searingly bright beam of green energy lit the darkness with a strobe of light and there was the sound of something flashing to steam followed by the distinct tang of burning metal. As her eyes cleared she saw that her shot had largely done the trick. There was now a neat, brass-splattered hole where the simple locking mechanism had used to be. She thanked the builders of the structure for being too cheap to use more robust locking systems and kicked the door inwards.

It took her two tries, the doors creaking and then smashing inwards with a clatter as she forced the remains of the lock to shatter with her heavy boot. She ducked inside quickly and turned on the light on the side of her helmet. The room was dark, the power was out it seemed. But she knew what kind of layout to expect having worked in similar locations before she had joined the defense force.

She smirked at that even as she moved deeper into the room and around a corner towards a door labeled ‘maintenance personnel only’. She had only joined up in the PDF to help pay for college, she had never really expected to be in a fight like this. Weekend warriors, that was what the career soldiers called people like her. And she had grudgingly accepted the label as they were right. But she was no slouch, she always poured one-hundred-percent into everything she did. If she could not be the best she might as well be the best that she could be, just like her father used to tell her before.

She stopped, something in the half-illumination of her helmet had caught her attention. She looked back and had to suppress a shout. Yes! There in the back corner of the small, cramped maintenance room, was a promethium powercell exchanger.

She rushed to it and cursed as she realised that the civilian powercells were far too bulky to fit into the slot on her own weapon. But they would have recharge rods in them. She grabbed the first one and checked it, groaning. The indicator was solidly red. Useless.

She tossed it back onto the table and checked another. A dark amber, less than ten-percent.

She cursed aloud. “Shit!”

There had to be a box of spares around somewhere, she looked as fast as she could all the while acutely aware of the noise she was making. The promethium core of her own powercell was still healthy, if she could just find a few recharge rods to put in it.

Charlie stopped as a small yellow box caught her attention.

“Yes!” She whisper-yelled into the darkness and reached for it.

It was a small and comically decorated carton depicting a smiling grey rod with cartoonish features. Eyes, nose, mouth, complete with a bowtie and the slogan, ‘Roger Recharge is always ready!’. She opened it and grunted, it had only a single compressed metallic hydrogen recharge rod inside.

Well, it was better than nothing. And she had overstayed her welcome already. Her weapon’s charge was about three quarters still, so she wasn’t desperate just yet. She jammed the thick silver rod into one of her pouch pockets and stepped towards the exit.

Something made her pause though. Some small sense other than sight or sound, the tiny short hairs on the back of her neck standing on end as she threw herself back into the cover of the room as the air was filled with smoke and fire right where she had been about to tread.

“SHIT!” She cursed again, louder this time as something red-hot slashed her exposed lower cheek and caused a trickle of blood to stain the collar of her uniform. The intensity of the fire waned, the red beams of a laser weapon stopping as a few more regular bullets whipped through the now shredded doorway. She heard a small sound, something so simple that on any other day she might not have thought twice about it. A small pop followed by the tinkle of something small and metallic impacting the floor out in the darkened hall.

‘Grenade!’ she screamed in her own head even as she rolled for the cover of a heavy toolbox. She heard the grenade hit the far wall, she saw it bounce into the farthest corner of the room and land on top of the very work bench she had been standing at before.

She slammed her head down and curled into a fetal position as the small bundle of hate detonated. If she had not been wearing the protective ear coverings of her helmet the sound alone would have rendered her deaf. As it was, the pressure wave in the enclosed space pummeled her body from all directions at once. She screamed as something inside her seemed to tear, she tasted blood in her mouth and her eyes refused to focus. But she was alive, somehow.. someway.

There was a ringing in her ears that would not go away and no matter how much she seemed to blink her vision was still grey and swimming with fizzing sparks. But then she lifted her hand to cover her face and realised two things at once. Her helmet visor had caught a jagged piece of metal, stopping it less than a centimeter from her left eye but breaking a large part of the smart display in the process. And her eyes were blinking as the harsh orange sun now shone in them unfiltered by the broken, polarised visor.

She frowned at that in mild confusion. Sunlight? She was inside the back of the building, how was there sunlight in her eyes.

She looked again, blinking rapidly and losing a few precious seconds as she made sense of the scene before her. The grenade had blown a hole clear through the thin back wall of the store and sunlight was streaming through the torn metal. ‘Escape!’ a small part of her brain screamed at her, and to her credit she shuffled forwards towards it at the best pace she could manage in her battered state.

But she was wounded and disoriented, bleeding internally in all likelihood as well and to make matters worse it tasted like she had bit the crap out of her cheek too as the taste of copper filled her mouth. Charlie shuffled forwards as the bloody saliva dribbled down her chin, all sense of time drowned out by the pounding of blood in her head and the ringing in her ears. She stumbled suddenly as something seemed to push her forward violently from behind, a dark spot of blunt pain blooming in the space between her shoulder blades. Arms flailing, she tumbled into that bright circle and out the rear of the structure.

Her fall was far from graceful and she groaned in pain as she ended up on the ground in a tangled heap. But her gun was still in her hand, and she was not dead yet.

She shuffled a few meters from the gap and into the cover of some manner of low electrical box before she tried her best to stanch the flow of blood in her mouth. She grabbed a small quickheal capsule made especially for mouth injuries from her medical pouch and crunched down on it, spreading the tingling gel across the inner surface of her partially flayed cheek. It hurt, and she hissed at the sting of it, but gritted her teeth as it began to work its way into the wound.

Within a few seconds the bright spot of pain that it had been in her mind began to fade to a dull background ache and the bleeding slowed. She bared red-stained teeth in victory at the tiny win and leaned out from cover slightly. Without the polarising visor of her helmet, the bright orange dwarf sun above tinged everything around with a harsh sepia tone, but it was not too bad and she could still see. She knew that leaving her eyes exposed to the harsh glare for too long could lead to permanent damage.

There was another clatter near the hole that had been made and she saw the tip of something poke out of the wall. It looked like the barrel of a rifle, perhaps a light machinegun of some sort. There were gunshots nearby and the thing pulled back into the building as she leaned back into cover. She breathed out and started to shake a little as the adrenaline that had been keeping her going started to fade a little.

She couldn't let herself go into shock, if she passed out she would die. Simple as that.

With a groan, she pushed herself to her feet and aimed her Electrolyzer G66 over the top of the electrical box. But the hole stayed silent, no carapace armoured nightmares flooded through the gap to assail her again. None of these strange soldiers and their unknown black-star sigils accosted her position.

Charlie looked around, more gunfire and the sharp snaps of a beam rifle sounding from two streets over. She was reminded that she was not the only one in trouble and her sudden good fortune would not last long. She might be alone, but she was still part of a greater whole, if she could just find other elements of her own company to link up with.

She stopped at that. Her company was gone. Burned to ashes in the fires that had struck them without warning from on high. She had only survived as she was seen as a non-integral asset and moved to the side. She frowned as the pain and fear tried to crawl their way back out of the hole she had put them in earlier.

“No.” She said aloud, gripping the butt of her laser rifle tighter into her shoulder as she did so. She was still a Union soldier. Duty bound to defend its people, even if she had never really expected to be called to fight. Her father would not have hesitated from such a gargantuan task, and neither would she.

Charlie took a step, it didn’t hurt nearly as much as she had feared it might. So she took another, bolder this time. Something in her left leg shifted uncomfortably, but held. So she ignored it and kept walking. Step by step, her gun raised and ready to fire, her eyes squinting in the harsh light as she looked for danger or allies.

She crossed the open street near the corner of the supermarket. Walking by the remains of a crushed van she saw the carcass of a dead civilian still smoldering in the driver's seat. She coughed but ignored the smell of burning hair and meat as best she could and crouched in the shadow of a partially collapsed building nearby. The scene before her was so dark and full of horror that it scratched at the corners of her sanity just to witness it.

In front of her was a field of corpses. Men and women, multiple species, lay dead in the street where they had fallen. What was worse were the bodies far too small to be adults, she looked away lest she lose what tenuous grip she still had over herself. It looked to have at one point been some manner of public space, maybe a food court or rest area. It must have been packed when the first strikes hit. Now it was a graveyard.

Who would do this? Who would commit such atrocities and why? What was the purpose? Recognition seemed to tug at her memory, but she was too distracted to pull at the thread.

Her hands clenched again at the sheer brutality on display as she ground her teeth to keep from screaming. Tears filled her misty vision and she was forced to stop and wipe at them, but it was hopeless. More tears came to fill the spots left behind till they streamed from her face openly. The drops of liquid rage left burning trails on her dirty cheeks as she tried and failed to suppress the horror that was tearing her mind apart from inside.

She stumbled over something and stopped as she looked down. It was a scorched toy noppin. The small plushie animal looked to have originally been a bright yellow croc noppin, the wide head and thick arms unmistakable. It was black now, charred and partially melted on one side with a rear leg missing.

She reached down and gingerly picked it up off the ground, looking around blindly as if she would be able to return it to its rightful owner. Somewhere amongst the horror that her reality had become.

It was while she was so distracted that the snaps of supersonic rounds alerted her to danger. One bullet tugged at the hem of her uniform as it narrowly avoided hitting her in the thigh and she dropped the small stuffed animal. She started running towards the nearest cover she could see. A scorched looking decorative shrub surrounded by a knee-high retaining wall of neat concrete blocks. As she dove behind it her face contorted with pain as bruised and battered muscles took another beating. She felt the sore spot in her side grow sharply as the pain increased, but it was get down or die. But she refused to give up so easily, it was only pain. And pain was an old friend to her.

Hunching behind her sorry cover, she peeked out around the side and was dismayed to see a group of no less than eight hostile combatants heading her way in tight military formation. They were bunched close enough together that had she thrown a grenade she might have effected real damage to their number, but alas she was grenade poor. She could see the reddish horns of at least one nerivith and the bulky frame of a yeown amongst them, even the raised and armoured frill of a slaaveth warrior. A multitude of species was arrayed against her then it seemed.

She cursed again, her mother would have been rich to hear her. The swear jar she had perched atop the kitchen stove would be near-to brimming after today, the thought made Charlie smile slightly despite the situation.

This was quickly followed by a frown. Her mother lived in another town, a smaller one nearby. But one without a direct PDF presence, which is why Charlie was here and not there in the first place. She prayed for the first time in many years to the gods her mother still believed in that the old woman would be okay.

“Dear Lords of the sky..” She started, but was interrupted by more incoming fire on her meagre cover. She continued, shouting now as she aimed up and over the curb at her assailants, “Dear Lords of the sky, of the void, of the universe! Save my mother, save the people of this town if you are able!”

She fired at one shape and saw it reel back, a new line of smouldering craters in the heavy plates on their chest.

“Protect and shelter them from the wrath of evildoers!”

She fired again, her gun chirped. Warning her of a low charge. This time her fire was less effective, though one shot did hit the barrel of the nerivith rebel’s gun. The steel glowing white hot as it warped out of shape.

“Save them from the path of terror!”

Her rifle chimed low, barely audible over the din of war. She yanked the spent powercell from the gun’s underhand slot and pulled out the spare recharge rod from her pocket. Using the ejector, she pulled the spent metallic hydrogen fuel core and tossed it aside where it clattered to the burned ground and smouldered slightly. The heat of it was enough to scorch her fingers through the thick padding of her gloved hands. With practiced precision, she slotted the replacement in and sighed as the standardised replacement fit perfectly into the military grade hardware.

Charlie slammed the hot powercell back into her weapon, the charge meter slowly changed from red to amber and then finally to a sickly green as the promethium core metabolised the substance to generate kilowatts of power in a few moments. Not a perfect fit then it would seem, but good enough for her purposes. Good enough to let her bite a few more times.

She continued her shouted plea. “Lords of sky, save them. Save us..”

She fired the rifle again, one wild shot taking a soldier in the neck right above their armored gorget, the figure went down choking on their own shattered throat. Their weapon falling from nerveless fingers as they slammed into the asphalt in a thrashing heap.

She screamed as she fired her last few shots. One taking an enemy soldier in the elbow and nearly blowing their arm completely off, another striking the slaaveth in the faceplate and snapping their frilled head back as they collapsed out of sight behind an abandoned car.

“..save me!” she finished in a roar as the indicator light of her weapon turned a solid red and gave a slow and almost mournful chime. The gun was hot. Smoke rose from the focusing lenses at the end of the barrel, the radiator vanes shimmered with heat as they tried to dispel the fury of her final assault. But it was over, the powercell was spent. And so was she.

She stood for a moment longer, not really believing that the end had finally come for her. An incoming shot hit her in the shoulder and knocked her to the ground as she stood there dumbly. She barely even felt the wound as it slowly leaked dark blood across her uniform and slowly pooled under her on the blasted duracrete of the dead plaza.

Charlie rolled over onto her back and groaned as she forced herself to look towards the sky far above. If she was going to die, then she wanted her last memory to be of the ever-shifting clouds of her home. Not the destruction that surrounded her now. The orange and reds and shocking yellows of the sky overhead were as mesmerising now as they had been the first time she saw them in her youth.

A small smile crossed her lips even as she heard the sound of approaching footsteps. She was going to die like a hero from the stories at least. She had made as good an accounting for herself as anyone might have been willing to believe, maybe more. She squinted at the clouds, something about the sky didn’t look right.

‘Where did those five stars come from?’ she wondered to herself even as the small pinpricks of light in question grew in brightness and intensity. With a sudden realisation she understood, it was more incoming fire from an orbital platform.

Was it Union? Or from this.. Hegemony?

She shook her head slightly, a tiny movement, but all she could muster. It really didn’t matter who had fired the shots. She was dead anyway, and so were her killers. This at least made her smile, not vengeance from beyond the grave in the traditional sense, not really. But it was a justice of sorts, and that was enough for her.

Then something happened that she did not expect. The points of light suddenly dimmed, and then vanished completely a heartbeat later. She started at that. Had she just hallucinated the entire thing? Had her hopes for a heroic and dutiful end really manifested as such a forlorn hope as ultimate justice in this tainted and corrupt universe?

The thought of this final blow to her enemies being denied almost moved her to tears, and she felt something in her mind break at the very thought of such an ignoble end. Such a meaningless, utterly pointless death. Killed like a feral aljin that had tried to bite a child.

She resigned herself to her new fate as the shadow of something loomed over her. It was one of the rebel soldiers, that same black fist and star sigil on their chest as they aimed a large bore weapon at her head. She could not see their face through the reflective visor they wore, but she could feel the contempt radiating from them in waves. Almost like a physical force.

Then the world ended.

Or at least that is what it felt like from Charlie’s perspective on the ground as something, no.. multiple somethings slammed into the ground with enough force to make it leap under her back. There was a sound like a hundred screaming jet engines just before and then all was dust and flying smoke.

The soldier standing over her raised a hand defensively and then aimed his gun at the nearest source of the blast, Charlie forgotten in the face of this new and seemingly unseen threat.

Then they were gone.

In a flash of light and gore the top half of the heavily armoured soldier was erased. Like a child throwing an open bottle of juice against the wall, the soldier was painted across ten full meters of the surrounding landscape with such overwhelming violence that it made her physically recoil though she was already on her back, as if she could burrow through the ground below her to escape this fresh new horror.

There was no escape though it seemed. Not for her, and certainly not for the suddenly terrified rebel troops that had come to surround her in a loose circle. In a moment they went from being in a position of ultimate superiority to being the terrified victims of an ambush they had not even realised was upon them till it was far too late to flee or find cover.

She heard a scream from her left that ended with a sickening crunch, one that was drawn out far too long for her to want to think about. To her right there was a sudden cacophony of sound, the dust was lit by a stream of tracer fire that seemed to hit a great black wall of armour. The soldier fired again and again as he tried to run, but with great shuddering steps the hulking shape reached out of the obscuring debris and hit them hard enough that they were physically catapulted through the air like a toy doll. Cartwheeling limply before slamming down on the opposite side of the road in a boneless heap. They did not move again.

“The Lords of war have come.” Charlie whispered under her breath as the air was filled with yowls of terror and screams of pain. Gunfire erupted all around.. and then there was a sort of heavy silence that filled the air with more dread than the chaos that had preceded it. She didn’t dare to move. She hardly dared to breathe. The air began to clear slowly, and her breath caught in her throat as the nature of her rescuers was finally revealed.

They were huge. Titanic bastions of dark black armoured plate, fully three-and-a-half meters in height if not more. Upon their backs were great bulging powerplants, even more heavily armoured than their fronts and each carried in their hands a weapon of supreme potency. She had never seen one in person, she had only heard the stories. Seen the holonet footage of these juggernauts of steel and bone and fury on worlds too far to name.

She knew her rescuers now, Sub-Orbital Shock Units. The most highly elite of the Union’s special forces rapid response teams. They were trained to make the impossible look easy, they were as far removed from her and the remains of the soldiers that had surrounded her as man was from maggots.

“SOSUs.” She said, barely more than a whisper. But it was enough.

One of these colossi turned her way, the shoulders ending with no head. Only a bundle of sensory apparatus, the gleaming yellow ‘eyes’ of which turned on her as the thing shrugged its shoulders as if loosening up after a sparring match. It stepped her way, those feet cracking the ground beneath its armoured tread such was its weight.

It spoke in a voice that did not at all match its frame. It was masculine, youthful almost, and much warmer than she might have expected. “Oh, good! I was worried we would not land in time to rescue you.” The voice said, the sound of a grin coming through even without a face to show for it.

She blanched as it reached a huge hand towards her, but she needn't have worried. The hand stopped just above her and she tentatively reached out for it. Grasping it as the man lifted her from the ground as easily as a father might lift a newborn babe. She tottered on her feet, dizzy from lack of rest, blood loss and trauma.

“Whoa, careful now!” The SOSU said suddenly, using his huge mechanical hand to steady her with a precision that she would have not imagined was possible were it not happening to her presently. “You took a hell of a hit there, it looks like a flesh wound. Bullet passed right through and didn’t do any lasting damage. Hmm..” The figure said.

“What? Who?” She managed to gasp out between breaths as she tried and failed to get ahold of herself. More explosive sounds echoed in the air, more of these black-clad nightmares falling from the sky like avenging angels of war.

"In a minute.” The soldier said, their youthful tone soothing and energetic at the same time. She leaned on the hand more, it was like leaning against a carbcrete wall. The strength of that limb was daunting to imagine, this monolith of destruction. And yet, as gentle as a kitten.

The SOSU looked around without moving, those sensor bundles seeming to swivel all around in a most disorienting manner before focusing back on her. “You require medical aid. I will assist you, then I need to move out. There are others that need help and only a few dozen of us were in the system close enough to help.”

As the man continued talking she watched his other hand in amazement as it grabbed a small black box from its waist and then set it on the ground next to her. From the wrist opened two panels that extended human-sized hands that reached out independent of the now motionless larger limb to manipulate the box’s contents.

“We were just here in a monitoring position, extra training and the like. See new worlds, meet new people kind of thing. Keeping an eye on the system just as things seemed to go to hell all around us. Command had a feeling that those Hegemony bastards might hit you guys I think, or else we would not have been here in the first place. Oh, hold still please.” She winced as one of the hands grazed her shoulder wound painfully. “Apologies, this is a little more difficult than it looks.” He paused as she just continued to stare at him, or rather, the mammoth of armour plates that he was contained within.

“It’s not rocket science after all.” He seemed to chuckle. “Oh who am I kidding, this is way more complicated than rocket science. I am Talon by the way.” One of the hands actually paused its ministrations to reach out in a greeting. She shook it in wonder, her mouth moving silently as he went back to his work.

“Yeah. So it was like this, these Hegemony guys rolled up with some battlecruisers and messaged the outer mining belt that they had two hours to clear out or they would be treated as hostile. Never have I seen a den of rats emptied so entirely and so fast as that. It’s a Luck-cursed ghost town out there now. I was surprised that they only hit a few of the bigger towns and none of the major cities. They must want to leave the infrastructure intact.” He continued to speak rapidly as the wound was sealed, hit with a local anesthetic and some quickheal and then a round bandage was applied to either side.

“There you go. All patched up, though it looks like you might have some heavy internal bruising. You should really get to medical.. uh, well. I guess the hospital got blown up too. Very troubling.” Talon said as he stowed the small hands back and replaced the medical box on his huge waist with his main arm.

It took Charlie till he stopped supporting her gently to realise that he had asked her a question.

She spluttered, “I.. huh?”

Talon seemed to shake his ‘head’ slightly, the camera bundle in the center moving slightly side to side. “I asked you if you are fit to travel. You can stick with us if you want, it will probably be the safest place. As long as they don’t try to nuke us from orbit.” She blanched at the mention of nukes. She had heard about the disaster on Sector Eta the year before. Suddenly it clicked, that sense of recognition she had been feeling this whole time.

“Wait, was that the same terrorists that were attacking here?” She blurted. It made sense, fit their MO for wonton slaughter.

She realised that her mind was wandering again and shook her head. “I need… rest. I think I will make my way over into some cover and just wait about. If that’s alright?”

Talon seemed to give her a look before standing straight. “Okay. But please be careful, miss, uh. What was your name?”

She chuckled slightly, the tiny woman looking up at this hulking behemoth before her. She smiled, “My name is Charlie. And it is very nice to meet you, Talon.”

There was a moment of solidarity between them, soldier to soldier. And then the moment passed as the sound of violence once more echoed across the war-torn city. Talon stood and hefted the mighty autocannon in his grip, fingering the controls like he was unsure how best to proceed. He gave her one last nook then seemed to come to an internal decision.

The mighty figure plucked something small from his waist and handed it to her. “Here is a shielded identity beacon, don’t turn it on until you have a place to hunker down safely and I will come back to get you when the city is clear. Here are some rations too, and your weapon looks like it got damaged in that fight. Take that guy’s MR-34, I don’t think he will be needing it anymore.” He said, gesturing at the modern art painting that had been a Hegemony rebel only minutes before.

She looked around and spotted the fallen weapon, as well as a few additional magazines not too badly soaked in blood on the trooper's utility belt. If she needed more than that then she was likely beyond help anyway. Grabbing the offered goods, she watched as Talon started to stride away and called out after him.

“Wait, what will you be doing?”

Talon stopped and waved a hand, “What I do best. Winning!” He turned and then stopped one final time, “If I survive this, I earn my wings. So I hope I make it, I hope you make it too. Charlie.” he said her name, the sound of it echoing in her head over and over. Then he was gone, the massive suit of armour breaking into a run that surprised her once again in its maneuverability and agility.

Charlie shuffled around aimlessly for a minute before tucking the beacon and rations into a pocket and grabbing the fallen MR-34 and its spare ammo. She tucked the magazines into her own tactical pouches, they were a tight fit, but she found that she could shimmy them in if she did it slightly diagonally. She looked around for a good place to hunker down,

It took her another minute or two, but she found a good spot behind a ruined sign for a local business that was far enough away from the death and chaos of before that she could finally stop and rest a bit. She felt a little guilty for not doing more. But there was little she could have done in her current state other than die pointlessly. Not while there were SOSUs romping around, laying waste to anything not wearing the eagle of freedom.

Charlie leaned back against the carbcrete behind her and removed her helmet. In one of her pockets she had a pair of sunglasses and she put them on instead. She replaced the helmet to keep the strong sunlight from burning her tanned skin too much and then closed her eyes.

That dark pit was still yawning at the back of her mind, and now that she was no longer in mortal danger it threatened to vomit its contents all across her waking consciousness. She took a few deep breaths and then prepared to let the onslaught of emotions take her. But as that deep emotional pit opened and the fear and pain and loss streamed forth like a tide of darkness to carry her away, it stopped. Slamming into a dark barricade that she had erected without ever being aware of it.

The barricade was familiar, tall and darkly armoured. And it had a name in her mind.

“Talon.” She whispered and then smiled again as she remembered the sight of him falling from space to save her. She had wished upon a star and it had answered it would seem.

She wondered how old the man was, he had sounded young to her. Maybe early twenties, maybe more. It was impossible to tell, what with all the armour and whatnot. But her smile deepened as she relived the events of the day. Surely her mother would be safe, if what he had said about the rebel attack was true.

Her breathing slowed as she let the fatigue win. She gave up her war with unconsciousness and drifted into sleep. Her hands never left her weapon but she slept without fear of death. For she had already seen the face of death in black steel and fury, and death watched over her.

End of Story