The Hipno Chronicles:
Ghosts of Liandris
Prologue:
Beta Company's Victory at Regulus Beta
1135 HOURS, JULY 3, 2358 (IMPERIAL CALENDAR) \
53 REGULUS-D SYSTEM, TARGET AREA COMACHE, PLANET
REGULUS BETA
The orbital pod impacted, and metal wrenched and sparked. Inside his cocoon of titanium, lead foil, and stealth ablative coating, Hipno-B292 watched black stars explode across his vision, he tasted blood in his mouth, and the last air compressed from his lungs.
Bludshot's training kicked in: he pulled the pod's twisted frame apart and blinked in the bright blue sunlight.
Something was wrong. 76 Regulus-945S was supposed to be a faint yellow sun. This was electric blue--boiling plasma blue.
He jumped, rolling to one side as the blast washed over him. The outer layers of his Semi-Powered Infiltration armor boiled and peeled like a bad sunburn.
"Training," his instructor, Lieutenant Colonel Kuran, had said. "Your training must become part of your instinct. Drill until it becomes part of your bones." Bludshot reacted without thought; a lifetime of training took over.
He raised his PA6-L battle rifle and fired along the trajectory of the plasma bolt, making sure to sweep low.
His eyes cleared, and as he automatically reloaded his weapon, he finally saw the surface of Regulus Beta. It could have been hell: red rocks; orange dust-filled sky; the scars of a dozen impact skids and craters around him; and thirty meters ahead, dark purple splashes of Scarfer blood soaking into the sand.
Bludshot pulled out his sidearm and warily moved to the fallen aliens. There were five with extensive wounds to their lower legs. He shot them each once in their odd angular vulturelike heads, then he knelt, relieved them of their plasma grenades, and stripped off their armshields.
Although Bludshot wore the full suit of Semi-Powered Infiltration armor as issued to every Hipno Defense operative (colloquially called 'SPI' armor by technophiles), its hardened plates and photoreactive coating could only take a few glancing shots before failing. The armor's camouflaging textures sputtered and stabilized, however; and once again blended into the rocky terrain.
Every operative had recieved extensive training in using the enemy's equipment, so Bludshot would improvise. He strapped one of the Scarfer shields to his forearm. It was excellent protection, as long as you remembered to crouch behind it and cover your legs, a tactic larger LEGION soldiers would have trouble accomplishing.
The display on his faceplate flickered to life, a transparent layer of ghostly green topography. One hundred kilometers overhead, the baseball-sized Stealth Tactical Aerial Reconnaissance Satellite, or S.T.A.R.S, had come online.
A single blinking dot appeared that represented his position. Bludshot was five kilometers south of the primary target.
He scanned the horizon and saw the Furian factory city in the distance, looming from the rocky surface like a castle of rust with giant smokestacks and blue plasma coils pulsing deep inside. Beyond the factory lay the lavender shoreline of a toxic sea.
Additional dots appeared on his HUD...a dozen, two dozen, and then hundreds. The rest of Beta Company was online. Two hundred ninety-one of them. Nine hadn't made it, either dead on reentry, killed from impact, or by Furian forces before they could get out of the pods.
After the mission, he'd check the roster to see who they'd lost. For now, he stuffed his feelings into a dark corner of his mind.
Bludshot sighed with relief as he saw the eight Xs representing the subprowler Black Cat exfiltration craft appear and then fade on his display. That was their only way off this rock after Operation TORPEDO was accomplished.
Text scrolled across his display: "TEAM FOXTROT PROCEED ON VECTOR ZERO EIGHT SIX. PROVIDE FLANKING SUPPORT TO TEAM INDIA."
No reply was necessary. Orders were broadcast from S.T.A.R.S overhead, and any break of radio silence would reveal their postion.
Three of the dots on the display winked, and tiny numbers faded into view. B091 was Ruby. B174 was Flurry. And B004, that was Marco. His friends. Fireteam Foxtrot.
Bludshot loped forward, found an outcropping of rock, and took cover under it, waiting for them to catch up.
To stay on task, and not get distracted by his racing heartbeat, he reviewed Operation TORPEDO one more time. Regulus Beta was home to a Furian refinery. The sea on this tiny world was unusually rich in deuterium and tritium, which they used in their energy reactors. The factory processed the stuff, and refueled their ships, making this Furian operation on the fringe of LEGION territory a prime target. It allowed the enemy easy acess to Keidrian space.
There had been previous attempts to neutralize the target. LEGION CENTCOM had sent nukes, launched from hyperspace, but plutonium emitted an aura of Cherenkov radiation upon reentering normal space, making all the stealth coatings lead linings useless. Lady Furia's fleet had easily detected and destroyed them.
There were similarly too many Furian ships near the moon to send a slow, distantly launched nuke in normal space. Nor was a regular invasion or even the elite Basitin Shock Troopers worth the attempt. The LEGION had one chance to take the factory out before the enemy would muster their defenses.
So they were sent.
The three hundred operatives of Beta Company had been launched seven hours ago into hyperspace from the LNC carrier Firewolf. They had endured the ride in long-range stealth orbital drop pods, suffered debilitating nausea transitioning unshielded into normal space, and then got parboiled on the fiery ride to the surface.
From the warm welcome given by those five Scarfers, Bludshot knew they'd been detected, but the Furians might not yet know the size of the breach in their security. He'd have to move quickly, take advantage of whatever element of surprise remained, blow the factory, and if possible, the secondary targets of ammunition and ration depots.
They could still do this. They had to do it. Destroying that factory would cut the Furian supply lines to Keidrian/Basitin space. This is exactly what Bludshot had trained for since he was six years old--years of drills and war games and schooling. But that might not be enough.
He heard the crunch of gravel under a boot. He spun, rifle raised, and saw Ruby.
Every operative looked about the same in their SPI armor. The angular shifting camo pattern of the armor was part legionnare mail, one part tactical body armor, and one part chameleon. Bludshot, however, recognized Ruby's slender form.
He made the two-fingers-over-face gesture, the age-old silent hello. She gave him the slightest of nods. He handed her a Scarfer shield unit and two energy grenades.
Marco arrived next, then Flurry ten seconds after that.
When all their appropriated shields were in place, Bludshot gave Team Foxtrot a series of quick, sharp hand gestures, ordering them to move ahead in a loose arc formation. Stealthy, but fast.
As he stood, thunder rumbled, fire flashed in the sky, and a shadow covered them--and vanished. Two teardrop shaped Furian Lightblade fighters roared over their hiding spot.
A line of plasma erupted a hundred meters behind them--an inferno that billowed and blossomed straight toward his team.
Bludshot leapt to one side, activating his shield, holding it between him and the three-thousand degree flames that would melt through his SPI armor like butter. The force field flared white from the radiation; his skin on his palms prickled with blisters.
The plasma passed...thinned...evaporated. The air cooled. Furian air support was already in play. That made the situation a hundred times worse.
With a blink, Ryan switched his HUD from TACMAP to TEAMBIO. All members of Team Foxtrot showed skyrocketing pulses and blood pressures. But they were all still green. All alive. Good.
He sprinted. Stealth was no longer an operational priority. Getting to the factory where they couldn't be strafed was all that mattered.
Behind him, Ruby, Flurry, and Marco fell in line, covering the rough ground in long, powerful strides at nearly thirty kilometers an hour.
Red ovals appeared on Bludshot's TACMAP: Lightblades, on another attack run. More than before...three...six....ten.
Bludshot glanced to either side and saw his comrades, hundreds of operatives running across the broken ground. The dust from their charge filled the air and mingled with the smoke from the last plasma blasts.
Three of them lagged behind, turned, and braced, holding M19-B SAM rocket launchers. They fired. Missiles streaked into the atmosphere, leaving snaking trails of vapor.
The first bounced off an incoming Lightblade's shield; the missile exploded, not damaging the craft, but buffeting it nonetheless into it's wingman. Both craft tumbled, lost fifty meters of altitude, and then recovered--but their leading edges scraped the ground, dissipating their weakened shields, and they spun end over end, erupting into fiery pinwheels.
The two other missiles struck their targets, overloaded shields, leaving their target Lightblades covered in soot, but otherwise intact. The two singleships waved off their attack runs.
A small victory.
Ryan slowed to a trot and watched as the remaining six Lightblades dipped and released their plasma charges, then pulled up, rolled, and vanished in the haze.
Each charge of dropped energy was a brilliant pinpoint that elongated into a lance of boiling sun-fueled sapphire. When they hit the ground, they exploded and fanned outward, propelled at three hundred kilometers per hour by momentum and thermal expansion.
A wall of flame appeared on Bludshot's left, and it made the camo panels on his armor shiver blue and white. But he didn't move. He remained transfixed on the other five fires enveloping scores of his friends.
The plasma slowed, still boiling, and then the clouds cooled and thinned to a dull gray haze, leaving crackling glassed earth and bits of charred bone in its wake.
On his TACMAP, dozens of dots winked off.
Ruby sprinted past Ryan. The sight of her snapped him back into action, and he ran.
There'd be time for fear later. And for revenge. When they blew this factory there'd be plenty of time for bloody revenge.
Bludshot shifted his focus off his TACMAP on his helmet's faceplate and farther ahead to the primary target, now only five hundred yards distant.
From the center of the city-sized factory the blue glow was too intense to stare directly at, casting hard shadows in the web of piped and the forest of smokestacks. The structure was a kilometer square with towers rising three hundred meters, perfect for snipers.
Bludshot forced himself to run faster, ahead of Ruby, Marco, and Flurry, darting from side to side. They understood and mimicked him.
Energy bolts exploded near his foot. He weaved back and forth through a hailstorm of high-angle trajectories. His suspicion about snipers had been correct.
He dodged, kept running, and squinted ahead at the edge of the factory. His faceplate automatically responded and zoomed to five-times magnification.
There was another threat: shiftin luminescent edges of force fields, Scarfers. And in the shadows, the arrogant eyes of a Furian Theron Master in purple armor, staring straight back at him.
He skidded to a halt, grabbed the sniper rifle slung on his back, and sighted through the scope. He stilled his labored breathing. A plasma bolt sizzled near his shoulder, crackling the skin of his SPI armor, singeing his flesh, but he ignored the pain, irritated only that the shot had thrown him momentarily off target. He waited for the split second between the beats of his heart, and then squeezed the trigger.
The bullet's momentum spun the Theron around. The articulation of its neck armor exploded off the creature. Bludshot shot once more, and caught it in the back. A splash of bright blue blood spattered the pipes.
Scarfers emerged from the shadows at the periphery of the factory, crawling out behind pipes and plasma tubes. There were hundreds of them.
Thousands.
And they all opened fire.
Ryan rolled to the ground, flattening himself into a slight depression. Flurry, Marco and Ruby dropped as well, their battle rifles out in front of them, ready to fire.
Plasma bolts and red-hot spikes crisscrossed over Bludshot's head--too many to dodge. The enemy didn't have to be able to see them. All they had to do was fill every square centimeter of air with lethal projectiles. His team was pinned, easy picking for those Lightblades on their next pass.
How had the Furians mustered such a counterresponse so quickly?
If they had been detected earlier, their drop pods would have been vaporized en route. Unless they had had the extreme bad luck to get here when a capital ship had been docked at the factory. On the blind side? Could the S.T.A.R.S overhead have missed something that large?
One of the Coloniel's first lessons echoed in Bludshot's head: "Don't rely on technology. Machines are easy to break."
His COM crackled: "M19 SAMs execute Bravo maneuver, targets painted. All other teams ready to move."
He understood: they needed cover. And the only cover was dead ahead in the factory.
From the field, six smears of vapor lanced forward to the factory. The M19 SAMs detonated on contact with pipes and plasma conduits--exploding into clouds of black smoke and blue sparks.
The enemy fire slowed. That was their opening.
Bludshot rolled to his feet, and sprinted for the thickest smoke. Team Foxtrot followed.
Every other HD operative on the field charged as wel, hundreds of half-camouflaged armored figures, running and firing at the dazed Scarfers, appearing as a wave of ghost warriors, half liquid, half shadow, part mirage, part nightmare.
They screamed a battle cry, momentarily drowning out the sound of gunfire and explosion.
Bludshot yelled with them--for the fallen, for his friends, and for the blood of his enemies. The sound was deafening.
Scarfers broke ranks, turned to flee, and got shot in the back as their shields turned with them. But hundreds more held their ground, overlapping shields to form an invulnerable phalanx.
Ryan led Foxtrot into the smoke-filled shadows of the factory. He found a pipe the size of a redwood dripping condensed water and green coolant and took cover behind it. In the mist he saw Ruby, Marco, and Flurry take positions as well. He gave them rapid-fire orders with hand signals: Move in and kill.
Bootfalls sounded behind him. He spun, PA6-L raised--and found himself face-to-face with a Theron, its jaw mandibles split in mimicry of an impossibly large grin. The monster held a plasma sword in one hand, and a plasma pistol in the other.
It shot and swung.
Bludshot sidestepped the deadly arcs of energy, set his foot between the Theron's too-wide stance--pushed and fired at the same time.
The Theron sprawled to the ground, and Bludshot tracked his body, spraying rounds into the slit of its helmet. He didn't miss.
Team Foxtrot closed on him, leaving six dead Scarfers behind, their bodies snapped like ragdolls. Behind them on the field came rapid thumps and flashes of heat. Plasma grenades.
Scarfers and Therons rushed from their cover in the factory to meet the rest of Beta Company on the field, realizing perhaps that it would be suicidal to fight Hipnos in close-quarters.
Thousands of Furians clashed with two hundred LEGION operatives in open combat. Tracer rounds, spikes, plasma bolts, and flaring shields made the scene a blur of chaos.
The Basitin/Keidrian forces moved with speed and reflexes no Furian could follow. They dodged, snapped necks and limbs, and with captured plasma blades, they cut through the enemy until the field ran with rivers of gore and blue blood.
Bludshot hesitated, torn between moving deeper into the factory complex and executing the mission and running back to help his comrades. You didn't just leave your friends behind.
The sky darkened, clouds overhead turning steel gray.
Bludshot's COM crackled to life: "Omega three. Execute now! NOW!"
That stopped him cold. Omega 3 was the panic code, an order to break and run, no matter what the cost.
Why? They were winning.
Bludshot saw the clouds move. Only...they weren't clouds.
Everything was clear to him now. Why there were so many Furians here. And why Lightblade singleships, craft designed for space combat, were bombing them.
Seven Furian cruisers sank from the clouds. Over a kilometer long, their bulbous oblong hulls cast shadows over the entire field. If these ships had been parked in formation, refueling over the complex, the S.T.A.R.S might have mistaken such large structures as part of the factory.
"We have to help them," Ruby whispered over TEAMCOM.
"No," Flurry said, making a short cut motion with his hand. "The Omega order."
"We're not running," Marco broke in.
"No," Bludshot agreed. "We're not. The order is...in error." Despite the environmental controls in his SPI armor, he felt chilled.
Lightblade fighters dropped from the cruisers, dozens of them, and gathered into swarms. Darkly luminescent like a blacklight bulb, transport beams appeared from the belly of each cruiser, and from them marched hundreds of Therons onto the fold.
"But we can't help them, either," He whispered to his team.
Half of Beta Company turned to face this new threat. Impossible odds, even for Hipno, but they would buy time for the rest of them to find cover.
Finding cover was a futile tactic, though. Seven Furian cruisers had enough firepower to neutralize even two hundred Legionairres. They could pin them down, send in ground reinforcements by the thousands or, if they wanted to, glass the entire planet moon from orbit.
That left only one option.
"The core," Bludshot told them. "It's still our mission, and our only effective weapon."
There was a heartbeat pause, and then three green acknowledgement lights winked on his display. His friends knew what he was asking.
Team Foxtrot moved as one, running into the factory at top speed, dodging pipes and supply pods.
A squad of six Therons were ahead, hunkered behind a tangle of ducts. Ruby threw a handful of concussive grenades to disorient them, but the team kept running. Any delay--even to engage an enemy who could take shots at their backs--might rob them of their only chance.
The surviving Therons recovered and fired.
Marco fell, on hand clutched at the metal spikes that penetrated his armor and punctured his lower spine.
"Go!" he cried, waving them off. "I'll hold them."
Bludshot didn't break stride. Marco knew what had to be done: keep fighting until there was no fight left in him.
The core was a hundred meters ahead. It was impossible to miss, so bright Bludshot's faceplate automatically polarized to maximum tint, and it was still hard to look at. The core was the size of a ten story building, pulsing like a huge heart, fed by glowing conduits and steaming coolant pipes. It was a marvel of alien enginnering, and complex--which hopefully meant easy to break.
"Main coolant ducts there and there," Bludshot shouted over TEAMCOM and pointed. "I'll jam the dump valve." He moved to the base of the core.
Ruby's and Flurry's acknowledgment lights winked.
Bludshot's helmet display fuzzed with static, then popped and went black. The reactor plasma and its intensely fluctuating electromagnetic field was wreaking havoc with their electronics.
He found the dump valve, a mechanism the size of a Heron dropship, just below the main chamber. He unspooled the thermite-carbon cord and ran it around the valve twice. He then primed and activated the charge. A line of lightning brilliance flared and sizzled through Furian alloy, fusing the valve into a solid lump.
He glanced at Ruby. She set an explosive charge on one of the two main coolant lines that fed the reactor, and then set the timer on the detonator.
Flurry was setting his timer, too--then vanished in a flash of smoke and thunder. The core flared brighter than the sun. Coolant fumes screamed from twisted pipe and alarms blared.
"NO!" Ruby screamed.
She ran past Bludshot toward the billowing cloud of toxic coolant. He caught her wrist, jerking her to a stop.
"He's gone," he said. "EM field must have set off his charge."
She wrestled out of Bludshot's grasp.
"We have to get out of here," he told her.
She hesitated, taking one step toward Flurry.
The support structure groaned and started to melt and sag from the superheating core.
She turned back to Bludshot, nodded, and they ran out of the chamber--deeper into the factory complex, through a jungle of struts and hissing ducts, and splashing through lakes of leaked, boiling coolant.
The charge Ruby had set went off and silenced the alarms.
Even with their backs to the reactor, running at a full-out flat sprint, the glare from the core doubled as it reached near supercritical phase. It was too much to endure, even through a polarized faceplate, and Bludshot squinted his eyes nearly shut.
They turned a corner, slid down the railing of angled stairs and onto a catwalk that protruded over a ledge. Five hundred yards below, an ocean churned against rocky cliffs.
They had made it through the factory, out the back side, where massive tubes sucked in the ocean water for processing. Ruby looked back at the factory and then at Ryan.
She offered her hand. He took it.
They jumped.
In free fall, Bludshot struggled, pumping his legs. Ruby released his hand, and straightened her body. He did the same and then pointed his feet down a split second before he hit the water.
The impact stunned him, then he tasted salt, and choked on water that filled his helmet. He clawed for the surface. The lining of his SPI armor swelled, taking on water, weighing him down.
He broke the surface, paddling as hard as he could with his legs to stay afloat. He clawed at his helmet release and pulled it off. Next to him, Ruby had her helmet off as well, gasping.
"Look." He nodded at the cliff tops.
From this angle, they saw the Furian cruisers over the field. Lances of laser fire rained down from the ships' lateral weapon arrays and blasted his fellow soldiers. Firepower meant for ship-to-ship combat...how could anyone survive that?
A new sun appeared. The supercritical core flared and light filled the world. The cruisers rippled, distorted, their alloy skins boiling away in the heat. They disintigrated, bits blasted outward.
The rocky prominence shattered into molten debris.
"Down!" Bludshot cried.
He and Ruby pushed themselves underwater, diving to escape the overpressure and incinerating blast. His waterlogged armor might now save his life.
Overhead, water flash vaporized. Droplets of liquid rock and metal hissed past him. Heat smothered him...and a giant hand grasped and squeezed until all Bludshot saw was blackness.
Bludshot lay on the ground panting. They had nearly drowned after the blast, but managed to shed their armor, and finally, exhausted, swam back to the shore, and dragged themselves around the battlefield and into the hills.
He and Ruby had made it to extraction point six where he had seen one of the stealth ships.
No Furian reinforcements came. They had all been killed when the reactor blew. Operation TORPEDO was a success...but it had cost the lives of everyone else in the Beta Company contingent.
All that remained of the factory, the Furian cruisers, and ground forces of Beta Company was a glass crater four kilometers in diameter. No bones, not even a camo panel from a suit of SPI armor. Gone. Whispers in the wind.
Ruby pulled herself up against the hull of the Black Cat subprowler craft, her body trembling. She started to stagger back down the hill.
"Where are you going?"
"Survivors," she whispered, and took one uncertain step forward. "Foxtrot. We have to look."
No one had survived. They had checked all COM frequencies, searched the shoreline, fields, and hills on their long, silent hike back. No one else was alive.
Ruby was tiny. Like Bludshot, she was ten years old, but at one point six meters and seventy kilos, Ruby was one of the smallest active operatives. Without her SPI armor and weapons, and her slender red form covered only in modest body sheathing, she looked even smaller.
Ryan stood and gently put his arm around her. She trembled violently.
"You're going into shock."
He found a first-aid kit and injected her with the standard postmission antishock medical cocktail.
"Survivors..." she whispered again.
"There are none," he said. "We have to get out of here. The hyperspace capacitors will drain in four hours and we won't be able to jump."
She turned to him, eyes wide and brimming with tears. "How are you sure that we won? That we're alive?"
Bludshot was alive. He was certain. But as he cast one final glance at the crackling fields of Regulus Beta, he thought about the three hundred LEGION operatives who had died today, and felt only despair.
Had they truly won?
He helped Ruby into the prowler and closed the hatch. The ships engines thrummed to life, then dulled to a whisper. The craft lifted and angled up into the darkening sky.
Ruby's words asking if they were alive would be her last. "Posttraumatic vocal disarticulation," the experts would eventually declare. And although recertified for duty, she would remain silent---either unable, or unwilling, to speak for the rest of her life.
In the years to come, Bludshot would reflect on Ruby's last question every day. "How do you know we're alive?"
Something had died for every Hipno that day.