Great Pyramid
Unknown Moon
Z MINUS 5 HOURS 17 MINUTES, 8 May 2017
Shortly after the Guardians took the fight into the forest and back to the Horde, Captain Takamora reappeared.
"Where the bloody hell have you been?" Colonel Markson rasped, at once glad the man was still alive, and angry he hadn't sounded off when the roll was taken moments ago.
Hohiro displayed his damaged comm system, answering the question of his silence. However, he wasn't alone. Trailing behind Hohiro were the two stone sentries they encountered earlier. "Fine, thanks. How are you?" Hohiro jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "Look who followed me home."
Markson nearly jumped out of his skin as the sentries exited the tunnel to flank Hohiro. He stared up at their near featureless faces. Only the eyes blazed red as brightly as ever. "Uh, yeah. Well, the more the merrier, I guess." The colonel jerked a thumb in the direction of the distant clearing the Horde used for a landing field. "They went that away." He had to practically jump out of the way as the stone behemoths marched off in the wake left by the six Guardians.
"I wonder what history is going to say about this," Hohiro commented as he watching the rock creatures disappear into the wreckage of the forest.
"Who cares?" Markson shot back tiredly. "You and I likely won't be around to read it."
Further banter was abruptly cut off by explosions, rivaling the old Saturn 5 rocket launches of the Sixties, blasting across the landscape complete with appropriate ground quakes. The already bright sky became blinding as the flash from capital ship weapons blasting the earth blotted out everything for miles.
Of the four platoons first landed on the habitable moon, only two remained. Fully half of Colonel Markson's command had been either killed or severely wounded by the combat drones and their unusual weapons that left vapor trails when fired. He formed up all the able-bodied survivors into squads and, at a pace some would later consider reckless, headed off into the dust storm boiling through the tress.
Commander Zarin stared at the landscape, a grim smile of triumph gracing his lips. Smoke and dust obscured six craters three hundred feet wide and fifty feet deep. The dust and debris slowly settled. Troopers, shocktroopers, and drones cautiously approached the craters, weapons at the ready. Zarin's smug smile tightened as the smoke cleared on the slight breeze drifting across the land. The deeper he could see into the pits with no sign of the power armor, the more his confidence rose.
His smugness disappeared as the last wisps of smoke cleared away from the craters. What he could see that his forces on the ground could not frightened him. In five of the craters, energy shields glowed as the last tendrils of the plasma blasts were absorbed, redirected, and dissipated. Sensors displayed intact powered armor without so much as a scratch on the paint, but they had been knocked flat. The operators were undoubtedly dazed by the experience.
However, crater number six, the one directly in front of his warship, where the suit with wings was, was empty. They didn't get the luxury of reacquiring the target. Around a dozen robot heads poked over the rim of the crater Jake Rockwell had been blasted into. Those heads and torsos were summarily ripped apart by a lethal hail of plasma fire from Jake's dual gatling guns he held aloft and horizontal for maximum carnage.
A similar scene took place around the rims of the other occupied craters as the Guardians shook off their dazed conditions and resumed the battle. After knocking back the bold robots, five Guardians roared out of what was supposed to have been their graves on plumes of backpack thruster fire. Each landed lightly a meter from their craters as if it was something they did every day, and continued sticking it to the shocked Horde forces.
Feril was having a rough time against the Horde fighters. Bigger, more powerful, and able to turn almost literally on a dime, Feril and he wingman, Lieutenant Junior-grade Jackson pulled every trick in the book to stay out of the enemy's gun sights. When those ran out, which took a matter of minutes, they invented maneuvers some of which were never dreamed of by the engineers. On more than one occasion Feril thought she heard something snap and pop somewhere behind the cockpit. She prayed the dropship would hold together for just one more maneuver, and she'd been saying that for the past four.
Jackson tried a high-speed tight turn to the left in an attempt to turn inside his Horde pursuers. Feril saw right away it wasn't going to work as they effortlessly matched his turn.
"Jackson! Pitch out! They're turning into you. PITCH OUT!" Feril mentally urged the man to heed her warning, but it became obvious he couldn't; the turn was just too tight. Trying to pitch out from it would likely damage something vital and cause the dropship to crash, or explode.
Red laser bolts lashed out from the Horde fighters. Their fire missed initially, but the robot pilots quickly adjusted their aim. Laser bolts began slamming into composite ceramic armor marching up the dropship's spine to explode the cockpit. The ship detonated in a flaming cloud of debris scattering down into the forest where the fuel and unexploded munitions sparked isolated fires.
"NOOOOO!" Feril screamed. She yanked back on the stick at her right hand throwing the dropship into a murderous climb away from her pursuers. At ten thousand feet she leveled off, rolled over and dove down into the onrushing fighters. Her maneuver took them by surprise, and they broke away from one another to get out of the madwoman's way.
Feril pulled up at the last possible moment and roared away at just under tree top level. Branches slapped and broke against the composite ceramic hull Her RIO, Rear Instrument Operator, guessed where she was heading. "Left five degrees. The clearing is about a mile ahead."
Laser bolts exploded in their wake as the four fighters formed up and roared after the surviving dropship. This one proved to be more of a challenge since its pilot accounted for seven fighters shot down. They wanted this one destroyed in a bad way. Orange blossoms lit the cockpit as Feril divided her attention between the heads-up display and the radar screen at her left hand. This would be a speed race to see who got there first. At a higher altitude the Horde fighters would win hands down. Here among the tree tops Feril had the advantage because the trees interfered with their targeting computers.
All at once, they arrived at the clearing. Feril showed off just how quick and agile a dropship could be in certain circumstances. She exploded from the trees amid a hail of laser fire. Some bolts glanced off the ceramic hull as she threw the dropship into a hover faster than even the ship's quick reaction controls could compensate for. The weapons pods opened up smoothly as the targeting computer lock on to all four enemy fighters. Upper and lower pods belched fire and smoke as rockets leapt from their racks in short order at the moment a lock-on was acquired.
Rockets corkscrewed through the air in pursuit of the fighters now finding themselves on the receiving end. Feril emptied her remaining ordinance into the air after her antagonists. She wore a grim smile of satisfaction as the enemy ships lost their battle to evade the return fire one by one. Seeing the flaming debris fluttering to the ground helped Feril vent enough to calm down.
She took a quick check of her ship's status. It wasn't handling so well hovering thirty feet off the ground. This was a clear sign she'd likely snapped a few structural supports, maybe even damaged an engine. The rest of the stores list was not good. A few hundred pounds of fuel remained and all the weapon racks were empty. Reluctantly, Feril extended the landing struts and set down as close the to the trees as she could for cover. Once on the ground, she shut down the engines, and fired up the auxiliary power unit to keep the systems running. The comm chatter revealed numerous casualties in the opening rounds of the battle.
Her attention returned to sharp focus, however, when mention of the Guardians came across the channel. They had finally arrived. From the sounds occasionally captured by a transmission, Feril deduced the Guardians were kicking ass and taking names. A slight tremor vibrated through the dropship minutes after the Guardians joined the fight. Feril quickly checked to make sure it wasn't something else giving out somewhere inside her ship. Satisfied everything was in order, she looked up and saw the residual aftereffects of warship-grade plasma weapons being discharged. Though they were several miles from the battle, the detonations must be horrific.
"What was that?" the RIO asked nervously.
Feril shook her head. "I'm not even going to begin to guess."
Whoever built the power armor thought of nearly everything. Hanging over a hundred feet in the air on thrust jets from the wing assemblies, Adrian watched his fellow Guardians rejoin the fight and continue ripping the robot army apart. The destroyer to the north finally spotted him, and took a shot at him with a starboard plasma battery. Their shots missed by a wide margin because the targeting computers were not programmed to hit something as small as power armor or even a fighter. Horde mentality did not consider a fighter much of a threat. The outcome of this battle would change that.
Adrian boosted higher getting a position above the warship where there were no defensive batteries. His targeting sensors zeroed in on the ship's heart – the plasma power core – took careful aim switching the rifle to a single powerful discharge, and squeezed the trigger. Energy ripped into the barrel for a second before the blinding yellow/white beam exploded into a tight shaft stabbing for the warship's heart.
Normal weapons Horde forces encountered were fended off by their armor technology. The technology they now faced was anything but normal. Adrian's rifle combined plasma and energy into a lethal combination, which melted through the densest armor Horde warships could field. The key was hitting it not with a widely spaced beam that could be more easily dissipated, but with a tight beam impacting a specific area with enough power and duration to melt through to the vital systems within.
Adrian pumped two more devastating blasts into the thick shielding of the power core as fast as his weapon's recharge rate would allow. He watched with grim satisfaction as the ship veered away losing both power and altitude. The ship plowing into the forest over a mile away from the battlefield, settled, and erupted in a cloud of smoke, fire, and flaming shrapnel. The shockwave leveled the surrounding forest to a distance of approximately three hundred yards around the crash site.
The heavy corvette responded by backing away from the battlefield, throwing up a net of anti-aircraft fire along the way. Unknown to the human's, but painfully aware by Zarin, the Horde force of warships had been cut in half with approximately one-third of the ground forces still active. Zarin was trying to pull a victory out of this, but the strength, speed, and raw power of the Guardian armor was making any kind of a victory for the Horde all but impossible. Obviously, the Eternia was responsible for the destruction of the ships left in orbit, but the starship had yet to appear in the battle zone. Zarin's only real hope was that the Eternia had been damaged enough that it could not pursue him as he abandoned the rest of his ravaged command to its fate.
Upon reaching the battlefield, Colonel Markson and Captain Takamora quickly evaluated the situation. The shear destruction from the warship-grade plasma weapons, to the chaos the Guardians and the stone sentries were causing was mind-boggling. The craters still smoked from the plasma strikes, and the shattered hulks of robots and drones lay everywhere.
The heavy corvette backing away from the battlefield formed the backdrop to the stone sentries and six Guardians continuing to stick it to the Horde. The winged suit dropped into a soaring dive as several fighters dove in after him. Adrian rolled over to bring his rifle to bear releasing a backward blast that plowed into the lead fighter, and clipped the left wing of a trailing fighter. The remaining three fighters dove through the expanding fireball of their leader to continue the hunt. They appeared nearly desperate to inflict some kind of damage of the apparently indestructible suits of power armor. They concentrated on Adrian when they should have been looking out for where he was leading them.
With the stone sentries, four Guardians, and surviving members of Markson's unit taking shots at targets of opportunity, Jack Rockwell set his sites on Adrian's descending form. He led his intended target for several hundred feet before settling on a spot in the air and unleashing the full power at his disposal. Adrian had nothing to worry about even without being in contact with his companion because his momentum carried him away long before the plasma bolts reached him. The fighters behind him, however, were not so lucky.
The diving form of Adrian Cobretti effectively concealed Rockwell setting up to ambush them. The robot pilots realized their mistake when their target rolled away to their right. A storm of plasma bolts from the ground slammed into the three fighters mercilessly. The fighter whose wing had been damaged previously simply exploded. The fighter at the center of the formation lost an engine depriving it of the power needed to pull out of the dive. The last Horde fighter did manage to wing out to its right, but that maneuver opened the belly to Jack's tracking fire, and blew it apart near the western edge of the clearing.
By now the remaining Horde forces managed to close the distance where the devastating energy weapons the Guardians carried could not be effectively employed. Adrian touched down next to Jake, who let the mechanical arms reach around from him back to retrieve the cannons and return them to the storage position. Adrian's rifle and shield disappeared in bursts of white light. Panels opened in the underside of each forearm, retractable clamps popped out long enough to slide cylinders into the waiting hands before disappearing in a matter of seconds.
Adrian ignited his twin energy sabers. Sorceress stood at his right shoulder, magical shield on the left arm with her remaining magical might focused into a blade projecting from her right fist. Sonya now had an Etherium shield materialize on her left arm to compliment the spear. Brad continued to use his scimitars while Jake and Jeromy were forced to abandon their ranged weapons in favor of their melee blades.
Colonel Markson dug his surviving people into the craters to afford the best possible cover from everything except strafing runs. Despite the savagery displayed in this battle, all the combatants appeared to be waiting for the 'other' one to blink first. Using hand signals, Markson intended for his people to blink. He directed fields of fire and designated specific targets all with hand signals and clicks over the tac net.
Hands tightened on handles and triggers. Eyes squinted tracking along pin sights. Heavy metal feet shifted minutely in anticipation. Though they were not equipped with emotion chips, Horde Troopers and Shocktroopers appeared on edge. Tension as stick as a slab of armor plate yet brittle as a seashell fell across the field building to the inevitable breaking point.
As if someone telepathically shouted 'NOW!' explosions erupted all around the Guardians. In the ensuing chaos, thermo-energy weapons, pulse rifles, laser fire, and magical energies chopped down a full three-dozen robots. Three surface-to-air missiles screamed across the debris field to slam into the few remaining tanks still capable of fighting. Follow-up heavy weapons fire finished the job. Six suits of power armor expanded outward from their center as if another universe had exploded and was expanding exponentially. Everywhere they passed, on foot or by thruster packs, shredded robots lay in their wake.
A deep shadow fell across the field as one of the destroyers glided into to firing position. Hundreds of laser cannon ports glowed with priming charges in preparation to unleash another murderous plasma barrage. Several actually discharged when four unidentified objects slammed into the other destroyer moving to back up their comrades. The warship disappeared in four overlapping balls of boiling plasma explosions. Staring in stunned awe at the sudden violent demise of another enemy warship, the Guardian Force witnessed a very welcome sight. A small ship relative to the Horde monsters blasted through the expanding gases that had been a ship of war moments ago. As clinging tendrils of plasma stretched and finally broke away from the starship's shields, its shape became very clear.
Eternia had arrived.
Scorched, stressed, bloodied, and damaged by the intense fires of re-entry, Eternia somehow made it through the steep dive into the atmosphere even after the heat shields failed two minutes into the trip. More systems shorted out, but only a few were actually required to keep the ship running.
Finding the battlefield hadn't been a problem because the course Ensign Comorov plotted brought them into the lower atmosphere almost on top of it. Sensors displayed in real time the intensity of the fighting, so no one on the ground was likely to notice the sonic booms as Eternia dropped to subsonic speeds. The next thing they noticed was they had flown in through the proverbial back door. Two destroyers and one heavy cruiser were just waiting to be taken by surprise.
Captain Majourny did just that.
Four plasma torpedoes raced away on their mission of destruction. Jo-jo watched with a grim smile as the target destroyer evaporated in a fiery cloud of plasma detonations. Instead of maneuvering around the energy cloud, Ace plunged the scorched starship through it. The re-activated shields dissipated the boiling inferno where it clawed at the energy blister easily. This turned out to be a lot less stressful on the shields than re-entry had been. Eternia passed through in moments dragging tendrils of plasma energy with it.
The surviving Horde fighters launched in pursuit of what was undeniably the most dangerous element presently on the battlefield. Dorsal and ventral quad laser guns discharged in concert with port and starboard laser batteries to keep the fighters at bay.
As Eternia drew the fighter cover away, Adrian stared at the remaining destroyer. He had the power to destroy it, but that would mean leaving a dangerous hole in their ranks. Colonel Markson ended the debate upon seeing Adrian's poise. "Go! We'll keep this party going!" He punctuated the statement by cutting down two Shocktroopers attempting to take the Guardian by surprise.
Adrian nodded, de-activated and stowed the beam sabers, recalled the shield and laser cannon, and blasted off right into the face of the destroyer. As he came abreast of the command deck windows, robots could be seen scrambling for non-existent cover. The targeting reticule settled on the windows, though Adrian could hardly have missed at the range of fifty meters, and snapped the trigger. As before, all the cannon's energy poured into one massive blast that melted the windows on contact, and blasted into the warship's control center. Two more blasts finished the job sending the ship into an uncontrolled dive into the ground. The decapitated Horde ship slammed into the ground at the southeast end and skidded into the trees angling away from the pyramid.
When it came to a rest, Adrian grounded behind the dead warship, and prepared to discharge into it one more time. This energy beam would be different. Adrian threw all available power into a blinding blue beam exploding from the rifle's muzzle. Tendrils of blue energy sparked and sputtered like lightning throughout the hull as, nearly powerless, Adrian's armor collapsed. There hadn't been enough power left for the armor to remain standing, so Adrian lay on scorched grass waiting for the power cells to recharge.
In the dim image lining the inside of his helmet. Adrian had a skewed image of Captain Takamora and several soldiers running across the carnage toward him. "You all right?" Takamora asked when he got within earshot.
Adrian's response was barely audible over the external speaker. "Yes, but my power cells are nearly drained."
"What did you do?" one of the soldiers asked, eyeing the dead warship.
"Fired…electromagnetic pulse beam. Drained power to critical level…"
Takamora frowned. "The ship was out of action. Why do that?"
"De-activated robots still functional…inside. That many less to fight."
Smart kid, Hohiro thought, glancing at the warship again. No activity could be seen anywhere around the hull.
Using his eyes to manipulate the heads-up displays, he searched to files and options for some way to override the normal recharge and cause a ram boost of the power cells. He finally found what he was searching for in the diagrams for the power distribution system. In moments, power surged back into the systems. The green lenses of the eyes slits pulsed vibrantly as Adrian clambered to his feet.
"Much better," Adrian replied. The images brightened inside the helmet and the volume from the external speaker strengthened. "Captain Majourny, can you hear me?"
A moment later, Jo-jo's voice responded over the open link. "Loud and clear. Looks like you have been busy."
"The fighting is winding down, but there's that corvette to take care up. We can't let it escape," Adrian replied. As he watched, the corvette halted its turn. Evidently, the commander came to the conclusion he wasn't getting out of here alive, so the only option left was take as many of the enemy with him as possible.
"We see it. Looks like he's getting ready for something unpleasant. What can you do?"
Adrian considered his options. The EMP pulse was out. Even if it did short out the warship's shields, it would leave his armor drained and he might not survive a fall from around a thousand feet up. The warship was bigger and more powerful so his full-power cannon blasts would hardly scratch the shields. Something took shape on his primary display. Adrian stared at the modified design the suit's rudimentary artificial intelligence assembled before his eyes.
"How many torpedo salvos do you have time to fire?" Adrian asked, both liking what he saw and dreading it at the same time.
Jo-jo consulted the displays at her left hand. "Time enough for two salvos," she replied as the ship shuddered from more laser impacts.
"Just get me a vulnerable fluctuation in their forward shield array. I'll do the rest."
"Do I want to know what you have in mind?"
Adrian's answer was immediate, flat, and sent a shiver down Jo-jo's spine. "No."
Jo-jo immediately issued orders. The first salvo would be reaction warheads. Plasma warheads in the second salvo should be enough to get the brief vulnerable condition Adrian wanted, especially when all the warheads were set to maximum possible yield. Ace brought the starship around in a broad arc aiming straight for the corvette's bow. Horde fighters continued to harass them, but the defensive arrays kept them at bay.
Adrian launched himself skyward once again. In moments, he popped up suddenly in front of the command deck windows startling everyone present. Not wasting any time, Adrian lined up his rifle and began firing blast after blast into the shields.
As expected, the hull-power blasts did no damage to the corvette's sturdier shields. "So, you do have a limit after all," Zarin sneered. "Concentrate all forward batteries on that suit and destroy it."
Sensors caught the power buildup in the forward defense array. As expected, Adrian thought, continuing to fire ineffective shots into the shields. This was nothing more than a delaying tactic. However, if the robots are on the ball, they will see the torpedo launches. Looks like you're concentrating more on me than looking for the real attack, Adrian thought evilly. GOOD!
Announcements of the launches echoed over his link to the ship. Passive sensors showed the weapons on their way. Both the weapons and starship were so far away the Horde would not be able to see either through him, but it did not appear they where paying attention to their sensors. Did they really believe their stronger shields could protect them where their counterpart destroyers were not so lucky?
The numbers cycled down rapidly as the torpedoes guidance zeroed in on the corvette. At ten thousand yards, the weapons kicked in maximum thrust and turned in on their terminal run. Adrian's timing had to be perfect. Though he wasn't the target, one or more of the torpedoes could catch him inadvertently if he moved to soon. With enough time the Horde might shoot a few of the torpedoes down lessening the amount of explosive force unleashed against the shields.
Laser bolts lanced out from the warship's snout. A few came dangerously close, but most missed by a wide margin because he was simply too small for their targeting computers to lock onto. At two thousand yards, the missiles were at full burn, and the countdown reached zero. Dropping his arms to his sides, wings tucking in to a forty-five degree angle, the thruster pack ignited and boosted him up out of the way in seconds.
Zarin immediately realized his mistake as soon as the power armor cleared the zone. Sensors that had intermittent contact with small inbound objects now got a positive lock on two flights of torpedoes roaring in at terminal velocity. Point defenses did throw up a defensive screen, but it was too little too later to concentrate it in a way that would take a few of them out.
Four reaction weapons slammed into the forward shield arc unleashing blue lightning radiating out from the impact point. Their guidance computers homed in on a remarkably small point for maximum damage. The result was a flicker in the forward array Adrian wanted. The shields flickered several times before it looked like the computers were automatically resetting. That's when the flight of plasma warheads slammed home in almost the same spot. Shield systems overloaded as the computer automatically tried re-routing to keep them functional. Plasma fire erupted all over the forward arc of the warship and even breeched the shields to blister the armor plates in places.
Adrian had his vulnerable spot, and he looped down and arrowed straight for it as Eternia blasted past trailing laser fire and annoying fighters. The cannon dematerialized from the right hand while Adrian brought the shield up in front of him. He placed his free hand underneath, and the shield expanded to create a kind of tapering cone with which he used to punch through the still flickering shields and hull armor.
Robots reacted too late to this new threat by jumping out of their seats in search some safe place. A guided human missile exploded through the windows bringing with it heat and fire from the dissipating plasma cloud. Zarin died screaming at the inevitable. Adrian glimpsed bulkheads, corridors, chambers, mechanical rooms, computer control centers, and lots and lots of robots on his passable through the heart of the warship. His passage sucked the plasma fires along with it where it fed upon raw materials inside the ship. Those fires were dying, however, because the reactants were practically used up. He punched through another thick bulkhead to find himself passing through the engineering spaces. Before he realized it, he punched through the thick shielding of the power core. He was upon and through it in an instant and powering through the drive engines a second later. The next thing he knew, Adrian was reconfigured to normal combat mode, shield and rifle in place, and hovering several thousand feet up and a half-mile down range from the dying warship.
The final clashes of battle on the ground were overshadowed by the stunning eruption of the corvette. The engineering section detonated with the uncontrolled release of energies from the power core. Hull armor rippled, cracked, and peeled away from the space frame as the starship ripped itself apart. The last vestiges of resistance fell minutes after the last capital ship died.
Adrian coasted in for a soft landing near the gathering survivors amid the ending rain of debris from the corvette. Eternia and the remaining dropship banked in zeroing in on whatever clear space seemed safe enough.
After the ships landed and shut down their engines a silence fell upon the lands like a heavy oppressive veil. This silence was incredible. It was like watching a television program with the sound muted. The silence became irrationally scarier than the explosive chaos of the battle they just survived.
The boarding ramp lowered and Jo-jo led the way as the three groups joined fifty meters from the grounded ships. Colonel Markson and his surviving soldiers got their first good look at the colorful suits of power armor. The Guardians got their first good look at the Eternia and all the scorch marks indicating what she and her crew endured. And no one denied they had embarked upon a path from which they could not turn away.
Unknown to any of the humans, two humans watched from atop the great pyramid that had served for a thousand years as a final resting place for the armor until such time as it was needed.
Corwin and Kodec Ugnor watched the reunion with interest. After thirty minutes the group broke up to begin salvaging what they could, retrieving the dead, and preparing for departure.
"And so it begins," Kodec replied ominously.