StarCraft
Confederate Dropship Angel Four-Zero re-entering atmosphere above Tau Polaris Colony
Cargo – 32nd Drop-Assault Unit; the 'Furious Angels'
Inbound to LZ Zulu – Zerg Attack in Progress
The dropship Angel Four-Zero screamed its protest as the atmosphere turned it white-hot. The hull glowed as they slid through the planet's ozone layer like a stone through a wet paper bag. Within the Durasteel hull the twelve Terran Marines, clad shoulder to foot in their powered battle armour suits, were shaken and buffeted against the reinforced seats into which they were strapped. Their powerful Gauss rifles rattled in their rack by the drop ramp. None wore helmets yet, for the simple reason that if their rough entry was to cause spontaneous vomiting, then it would be even more unpleasant for the individual vomiting – this way they shared the pain.
It was counter-regs, technically – there were a hundred things that could come loose on atmospheric entry in a dropship – rifles for one – and any of them could put a soldier out of action before they even hit the ground, if there was no helmet in the way. But you learned to play the odds, and an experienced Drop-Assault unit knew that if they hit the ground with a steamed-up or vomit-filled helmet, and came under fire, they might as well be dead already. So the helmets stayed off.
First Sergeant Caleb Smith stood by the dropship's cockpit door, one gauntleted hand gripping the overhead rail along the dropship's ceiling. He looked at each of his men in turn. The closest was his second in command, Sergeant John Baron. He was the only black soldier in the squad, an imposing figure without his powered armour suit, and twice as scary when encased within it. He was almost a head taller than Caleb himself. There wasn't a man in the unit who would consider back-talking him, or leaving his side.
Past him were Corporal Bill Sampson, Private Dean Harper, Private Alex Larue, and Private Saul Anderson. On the other side of the hold, seated along the wall were Corporal Jack Pollux, and Privates Harry Troy, Vincent Carter, Jacob Walton, Will Roper, and Samuel Dawson. All were veterans of multiple combat drops, had scored multiple, kills, in most cases been wounded. When a man was killed, replacements tended to get their trial by fire quickly. Not once had a man failed them.
They had a reputation for never having failed an objective, always fighting like men possessed, and never causing civilian casualties, earning them the nickname the Furious Angels. They came down from the heavens, slew the unworthy enemy, and then went back from whence they came. Besides, it had a ring to it.
"Right boys, you know the deal. We drop-assault the ongoing Zerg attack, assist local forces in repulsing the enemy, and get anti-air defences back online. Once airspace is clear, the battlecruiser Avenger will deploy dropships to extract the civilian population and Delta Squadron reinforcements to destroy the Zerg infestation which is still at a fledgling level." He had to bellow over the racket of re-entry but he made himself heard.
All eyes were on him. There was determination but no fear.
"At this point we will extract too. But make no mistake, local forces are minimal, and there will be at least a day of hard fighting before this is through. So hit hard, shoot straight, and keep it together. Nobody in this unit dies today, are we clear?!"
"Sir yes sir!" chorused the men in the hold.
"Nobody dies today? That's good to know." Muttered Pollux, ever the smart-ass.
"For Fuck's sake, Jack, you have got to learn to keep your mouth shut." Sampson shouted from across the hold over the shrieking of metal.
Then they broke through the atmospheric covering at incredible speed, and began hurtling towards the cloud layer.
"Two minutes to drop-off!" The pilot yelled over the comm. System.
Smith jumped into his seat next to Baron, locking himself in. There were muttered oaths and prayers, silent under the din of the descending dropship. They hit the cloud layer.
"One minute!"
They began to slow, jolting as the VTOL engines reversed and reverse thrust tore through the craft. Somebody threw up – it hit the ceiling and then a second later splashed onto the ground. Each person was lifted in their seats, and then slammed back down.
"Thirty seconds!"
Another age passed, the shuddering slowing, the reverberations slackening. The bulky dropship was slowed by wind resistance and its engines even further.
"Ten seconds – move it or lose it boys, stack up by the door."
Now the din of battle replaced the complaints of the dropship. Explosions, auto-fire. The keening cries and roars and wails of the Zerg.
"Mutalisks, four of them. It's gonna be close!" screamed the pilot.
The door began to descend. The ramp let in the darkness of the night outside, and the strobe of weaponsfire.
The twelve men formed up on the door, grabbing rifles, struggling to keep their balance.
The dropship shook anew as venom-coated Mutalisk fire slammed into the hull. Harper and Walton collided together and hit the floor. Baron and Larue dragged them to their feet. One more almighty shake as they hit the ground. The ramp slammed into the ground.
"Into it Marines! Do you sorry bastards want to live forever!" bawled Smith and the eleven other Marines poured out into an impact crater with water and blood pooled in the bottom. Smoke was all around. To the left was a cliffside. Atop could be seen prefab structures, possibly bunkers. To the right was the metal defensive wall of the civilian settlement.
Ahead the smoke obscured all. At the lip of the crater, dark shapes moved in the fog of war. Smith was most of the way to the lip of the crater, heavy booted feet slipping in the mud. A Zergling reared, emerging head-first through the smoke, shrieking, as alien as anything he'd ever seen. A mass of claws and teeth, strong and lithe. His Gauss rifle came up, it's heavy bulk at chest height. A burst of automatic fire ripped into its carapace, tearing open the torso, splashing blood and gore across the dirt. More poured through the smoke. The squad surged to meet them as they poured forth. U-238 shells cut through the tide of alien creatures, and suddenly they were gone.
"Baron!" called Smith, and suddenly the man was at his side. There was a roar of engines, and the dropship took off, blasting mud and smoke away from the VTOL engines. It disappeared into the obscuring fog.
The sergeant arrived at his side.
"What is it Caleb?"
"Take half, and circle behind, and around the town. Try to find the South Gate, and link up with the defenders. I'll take the other half and circle round to the North side."
"Yes sir." Caleb disappeared again.
"You heard me Marines, do it!" called Smith.
He rushed ahead, up and out of the crater. Over the bullet-torn corpses of the Zerg, past mutilated human remains. More shadows in the smoke, ahead and to the left. Zerglings, and bigger, hulking forms, Hydralisks. Green venom passed through the smoke, slapping against Caleb's armour and eating into the torso plate.
Three or four Marines joined him, and Gauss fire ripped into the shadows. Gore fountained. Shadows buckled and fell and flew apart. Acidic venom hurtled through the air.
"Right flank! Right flank!" called a Marine out of Smith's sight.
He turned, bringing the heavy rifle around, in time to see Zerglings leaping from the metal walls of the complex, clambering over. He opened fire, and the combined lead output of three Gauss rifles drove the shrieking abominations back over the wall. Blood splashed the Marines below the fortifications.
"Forward!" screamed Caleb, and the line of Marines followed.
They came past the corner of the compound wall. The din of battle grew louder. Looking to the right, Caleb saw that at the North Gate, rifle fire and flame throwers still ripped and burned into the Zerg. Colonial Militia forces still held, but Zerg were loose in the compound.
The smoke was not as thick here, and he could see he had been right about the structures on the clifftop being bunkers, but their windows were dark and silent. One of them burned, thick black smoke billowing into the night sky above it.
"Assist those forces. Clear the gate!" bellowed Caleb Smith. "Two men watch the flank, watch for additional forces."
Caleb's fire teams advanced on the gate, rifles before them, sheet-firing into the flank of the swarm advancing on the gate – easily a hundred, Zerg, more. Hulking Hydralisks and Zerglings. Thirty feet from the gate was a wall of ripped-up Zerg bodies, the closest point that they had gotten to entry. Caleb was impressed. The flat, dirt landscape was covered in their dead. As the flanking fire began, many more were torn down. The mass began to thin. They were clambering over their own dead, walls of them, hillocks comprised solely of alien corpses.
The fire team reached the edge of this sea of bodies, began to step onto the heaps of matted dead to get closer to those still living, their feet sinking into the masses of bloody tissue and wounded flesh, coming free with squelching reports that turned the stomach.
The bursts became shorter, less frequent as it became a matter of finishing off small groups and wounded aliens. The troops inside the gatehouse had ceased fire. "Clear!" came a voice Caleb recognised as Private Larue.
"Clear." He agreed. There was a chorus of further agreements.
The din of battle was gone, he noticed. The South Gate was obviously secure. Sporadic fire continued, as expected, as the Zerg forces were systematically exterminated.
"Fuck me. That was intense." Murmured Dawson. Roper agreed with him, uttering his own famous brand of heartfelt-expletive list.
"Everybody get into the compound." Caleb stated. He vaguely noticed that his armour smouldered where the venom had hit it. He would have to get that checked.
Baron stopped, catching his breath. South Gate was a similar state to the North, an ocean of Zerg bodies. The South Gate had been holding too when they arrived. A dozen Colonial troops in powered Marine armour suits and well armed with Gauss rifles and short-ranged flamethrowers (troops using these being commonly labelled as 'Firebats'. They wore a special armour with a fuel tank across the shoulders) had been garrisoned inside the Gatehouse, a bunker-like construction within which resided the controls for the Durasteel-reinforced fortified gate. Three quarters of the way up the twenty-foot gate was a gantry that also extended around the length of the inside of the walls, a firing step. The Marines had initially held that too, the colonial squad leader had informed him. There had been a dozen in the North Gatehouse and along the gate parapet, identical to the South Gate. Along the walls had been some sixty further defenders, five additional squads, while another squad had been garrisoned within the town hall, a prefab structure in the centre of town in which the civilian population, some eight hundred colonists in this town, had taken shelter. Other towns had not suffered attack yet, but some others had been lost contact with.
He was informed by the breathless, wounded Militia Sergeant, that a large underground bunker for supplies and munitions had been largely emptied for the five hundred and fifty civvies that had turned up. Others he presumed were dead or hiding in their homes.
Baron's money was on dead. The catwalk around the walls for defence was empty too, except for bodies, nearly all of which he could see, he noted with satisfaction, were Zerglings, the Hydralisks too bulky to scale them. From the instance of the Zerg coming back over the walls at them, Baron guessed they were dead too.
From the state of the town, they had taken hundreds of the little bastards with them – which was worrying as this was, in relative terms, a tiny swarm that had attacked the town. A fledgling swarm. Before long, there would be a Swarm a dozen times the size of this one at the walls.
"So, Sergeant. You arrived just in fucking time believe me." Muttered the Militia Sergeant, a Sergeant Walker.
"I hear you man. Where's the Marshall of these parts?" Baron replied, hefting his Gauss rifle, leaning it over his armoured shoulder.
"Couldn't tell you. I think he was on the walls. Which doesn't bode well."
"I hear that too. Zerg came at us from over the West wall. I think there might still be some within the city. You guys got a radio around here?"
"Yeah. We got comms. Follow me." Walker replied, gesturing for Baron to follow.
"Marines. Hang out. Get to know some of your fellow troopers here, we'll be fighting alongside them before the night is out."
The five Marines at Baron's back, standing in the field of bodies outside the Gate, moved into the group of Colonial troopers that had since emerged from the now-open South Gate, while Baron and Walker went through. A doorway on their left led into the Gatehouse. There was a bunker-like room, the floor awash with shell-casings, the bunker stinking of flame-thrower fuel. They went up a short flight of stairs, up to a second level of the bunker that was smaller than the first. More shell-casings. A comm. set sat on a metal table at the back.
"Knock yourself out." Said Walker, standing behind him while Baron stood by the comm. Set, a big black box with a hand-held transmitter/receiver. He tuned the device to Caleb's headset frequency.
"Furious One this is Furious Two, do you copy."
"I read you, Baron. How does it look over there?" Caleb replied as the transmission crackled through the apparatus affixed to the side of his head.
Caleb's team had watched the heavy Durasteel gate grind into the ground a few minutes before, and watched a Colonial Sergeant march out, four of his men behind him in two by two formation. Evidently an experienced trooper.
"Reinforcements. Jesus Christ, I am psyched to see you sons of bitches I thought that was it." The man called in a Texan drawl as they approached. A true Earth-born trooper? Rare this far out in the sticks. Caleb instantly felt a rapport with the man. A little piece of what he fought for, right there in front of him.
"Here we are, the 32nd Furious Angels, at your service, Sergeant…?"
"Damn, they named you right. Sergeant Lukas, Lukas Deacon. I think the men on the walls may have made it off, I think the Marshall ordered them to retreat into the town, last transmission I got."
"Good to hear. Sorry there aren't more of us, but the Confederacy has seen fit to abandon the colony. The fleet needs twenty-four hours to get into position. We just need to hold on until then." Caleb appreciated the man's business-like attitude with just the right amount of levity.
Moments later they were all within the walls, and Baron had called him moments before Caleb was going to call Baron.
"South Gate is clear. We got a dozen colonial boys here. Can't see any on the walls." Crackled Baron's voice on the comm..
"We got a dozen here too. The guys on the walls pulled back into the town according to Sergeant Deacon over here, he got a transmission. Any 32nd killed or wounded over there?" he asked the last question with trepidation, dreading the answer. He was the only one hit of the North team, and he wasn't wounded. He had managed to scour the acidic venom remnants from his armour now, and no significant damage was done.
"None sir, no hits. Apparently there's a dozen men in the town hall, with the bulk of the civilian colonists from the town. There's talk over here of more civvies in the wastes heading here with the remainder of the Marine units from their homesteads."
"Good to hear. We'll regroup at the town hall in twenty. Try to link up with the other Marines. It's crazy, ninety-six militia defending a town like this. Each wall must be nearly a click long. See you in a few. Furious One out."
"There were a hundred and forty-four of us." Said Deacon sadly, from somewhere behind Caleb.
"I'm sorry, Sergeant. What happened?" Asked Caleb.
"Forty-eight men, one entire platoon, was sent out into the wastes to investigate the disappearance of a supply caravan, a few trucks and patrol vehicles, coming here from Landfall, the second-biggest down on this rock, due North of here. The last transmission said they encountered Creep on the ground, coating the terrain thickly. Evidence of Zerg structures requiring nourishment. We lost contact seconds later."
"Jesus. What a waste."
"You're right, Sergeant. You're right. Watch yourself man, heading towards the town hall. Might be Zerg we haven't killed yet." Stated Deacon, and clapped Caleb on the shoulder.
"See you later Deacon. Form up, Furious Angels, we're heading out."