Indar — The Crown, 1700 hours
The air was filled, not just with sound and light. "Aircraft, flying shrapnel, charged plasma, you name it," she thought. The Vanu Sovereignty and the Terran Republic were at each other's throats over the spire-like air base that stood upon the high rocky outcropping known as the Crown, once again throwing everything but the kitchen sink at each other, for the trillionth time it seemed. Being at the center of the continent and having a vantage point over surrounding bases and research laboratories for miles, it was a prime point for the chaos of the never-ending war.
And it was the Crown where Captain Sofia "Iron Lady" Izetta thrived.
Peering out from behind a shipping container, she briefly scanned her surroundings before reaching for a heavy fragmentation grenade from her bandolier, depressing the arming button before lobbing it as hard as she could toward the first story balcony that ringed the outside of the air base. Her eyes never left the balcony as she raised her weapon once more with one hand, waving toward the rest of her squad hiding behind the rocky outcroppings nearby to move up with her. Sure enough, a lone purple-clad light assault trooper jumped over the railing of the building's walls and dropped to the ground outside to escape the grenade before it went off, flaring his jetpack's engines to slow his fall. With a quick burst from her light machine gun, the man dropped to the ground, lifeless before he even touched down. As soon as the grenade went off, she sprinted for the massive building before her, pressing her back against the wall next to a doorway she knew led into the ground floor. Like magic, her squadron was with her, formed up against the wall behind her and on the opposite side of the doorframe. Over the din of the battlefield, she could hear the distinct chirp of automated sentries inside, lurking in some corner of a building she knew all too well. Her mind ran over the possible layouts of the inside defense, taking every possibility she could conceive of into account.
After a brief moment of thought, she decided on a plan. "Two sentries, stairwells on either side of the door," she said to her squadron point-man across the doorway from her.
The young man nodded. "Flashbang the upper stairwell and push the engineers out. Same old, same old," he said. "On my count."
The young pointman was showing promise, Sofia thought. Not a grade-A student in training, but he had definitely caught up and even surpassed several of the other new recruits in her squad by a wide margin. Perhaps maybe even officer materiel, in time.
"Three, two, one, smoke 'em," the pointman said. Like clockwork, the squadron pushed in the moment the pointman pulled the pin on a flashbang grenade. Sofia was the first in behind her pointman, her light machine gun in hand. She pulled the weapon to her shoulder and leveled the weapon's sights on the stairwell to the left side of the doorway, taking aim at a bulky auto-turret waiting for her advance. With a squeeze of the trigger, the heavy machine gun shook in her iron grip, hosing down the turret with bullets before it could even detect her presence. Without even a moment's glance at her handiwork, she turned the heavy weapon toward the closest Vanu soldier on the stairwell and opened fire, dropping him quickly. Storming up the stairs with half of her squadron in tow, she sprinted up the stairs that led over the tank deployment platforms to the next floor.
Like clockwork, as she reached the door to the second floor, a grenade came bouncing down through the open doorway. "Shields up!" Sofia barked, reaching for a button on the side of her helmet. With a soft click of the button, the hum of her armor's overshield generator filled her ears as a pulsing red energy field engulfed her, layered over her like a thick jacket just in time to catch the brunt of the explosion as the grenade went off hardly two feet behind her. Her helmet's heads-up display flashed red as the shield ate the explosive's shrapnel, dissipating its energy and leaving her unscathed.
"Move, move!" She barked, rushing through the doorway. Instinctively raising her light machine gun to a platform above, she took aim and opened fire on the surprised Vanu soldiers, caught off guard by the surprising rush offensive from their red-clad aversaries. Heads popped as the combined fire of her squad scythed down the defenders.
Within moments, a torrent of Terran Republic soldiers pushed up through the stairwell behind her. Sofia lowered her rifle and strolled into a small side-room where a cylindrical tower-like computer stood, holographic keyboard waiting and ready for inputs. "Too easy," she thought.
The Vanu forces at the Crown had fallen within minutes. "Almost like they weren't even trying," she thought as she sat on the edge of one of the four wide aircraft resupply platforms that jutted out of the Crown's spire, her legs dangling over the edge. "No matter how many times we try, what tactics we use, he won't come out…"
"Still bitter, ma'am?" A voice over her shoulder said. She didn't bother to look back at the newcomer; her second-in-command, Johannes Friedrickson, loved trying to sneak up on her. "Catching the tiger by the tail," he would call it. "That was over a year ago now. I'm surprised you even still give a shit," Johannes added.
"Tell me, corporal," Sofia said, "…If someone busted your balls and made you sing opera for the whole world to see, you're telling me you wouldn't want to make that fucker shit out his own teeth if it took more than three days to find him?"
The man took a seat next to her on the edge of the platform, removing his helmet. He had soft facial features, striking green eyes, and kept himself clean-shaven and his ruffled brown hair short — something she appreciated in a world where men thought blowing up tanks gave them the right to smell like they hadn't showered since the colony ships first touched down fifty years ago. "No, I'd bust their ass, for sure. I just don't see the point of this," he said, gesturing to his surroundings with wide-spread arms. "We've been running this game of yours for more than three months now. I see it in your plans. You run the same strategies over and over, waiting for whoever this shady "Moses" guy is to rip your team a new one like last time so you can hand-deliver him a grenade. It's getting to a point where we're setting new records on taking the Crown back from the Vanu, the New Conglomerate, hell, sometimes both. Every time, the guy's a no-show."
Sofia looked down to the ground below, focusing on a landmass she knew every nook and cranny of: a large land bridge of solid rock, naturally formed by god knows what, that spanned a drop of several hundred feet, connecting the Crown with a nearby supply depot. She could remember it like it was yesterday; Her and her team were rushing the Crown from the supply depot along the land bridge, leading the charge. Under her orders, several of her squad members had donned heavy exosuits known as MAX suits — heavily modified mining exoskeletons upgraded to carry armor and weapons ranging from chainguns to grenade launchers, even small anti-aircraft flak guns. With that kind of firepower, and after dealing with any anti-tank emplacements, a frontal assault would turn from a grueling slog to nothing less than a total joke, in theory. That's the way it had been for the past forty years of her service, anyway.
As they were progressing along the land bridge with support from the armored battle suits, a lone rifleman appeared amidst the fighting on the platform Sofia now sat on. One by one, he dropped the twelve armored exosuits with a single shot that sounded like the thunder of God, each round punching clean through the MAX suit's armored helmets like wet paper. The rest of her squad broke into a panic and dove for cover, barely even blind-firing over the crags of the rocky land bridge in fear of their weapon exploding in their hands from a single shot from that man's gun. Although she was able to regroup her men and coordinate with another squadron to successfully take the Crown that day, it had been an utter embarrassment; the squad under the command of the notorious "Iron Lady" supposedly the strictest and strongest of the recruit-training squadrons, had broken down like a bunch of babies. It had tarnished Sofia's career, seemingly permanently. No one knew what happened to those infamous recruits under her command that day. There were still rumors, even three months after the event, that Sofia herself had wiped their data from the Reconstruction Tubes databanks and executed them all herself.
"We have to keep trying," she replied. "I don't care how many years it takes, I'm going to find that bastard and skin him alive, show him what true pain is. Anyway, the right stairwell during the assault. How did B team hold up?"
"Like clockwork," Johannes said. "Cleaned 'em out, no major incidents. I think our pointman's done now, ain't he? Jacob was his name, right?"
Sofia nodded. "Yeah, this was his last. HQ said they already had someone lined up to take his spot. At least someone upstairs still sees us as competent, I guess."
"More than competent, ma'am," Johannes laughed. "Brigadier General Crags still thinks you're the second coming of Jesus in terms of training troublesome recruits."
"Stop kissing ass if you don't want to eat shit, corporal," Sofia grumbled. Sliding back from the edge of the platform, she hopped to her feet and picked up her light machine gun, attaching it to the magnetic hardpoint on the back of her chestplate next to her rocket launcher. "Let's go give them a speech, I suppose."
Sofia stood at the front of the command room at the top of the Crown's spire, looking out through the energy-shield-guarded doors toward the platform she had just been sitting on as she gathered her first few words to her squadron. Fifteen men, including Johannes, stood before her in two staggered rows, awaiting their squadron commander's first words.
"So, I suppose you think you are all, shall we say, 'hot shit' right now, correct?" She began. "And you might be right. We reached within fifteen seconds of our previous record time for capturing this base."
Her squadron let out a solid round of cheers, high-fiving each other for their success. "However!" Sofia barked, regaining their attention immediately, "there is no such thing as perfection. Miller!"
A young man from the second row stepped forward, locking eyes with her at once. "Crossing the land bridge, you missed your grenade toss on those entrenched MANA engineer turrets by a mile. Utterly embarrassing. Almost turned one of our men into swiss cheese, if he hadn't the presence of mind to engage his overshield to take the blast," she announced. At this, the entire squadron booed their comrade, but the embarrassed young man didn't dare look away from Sofia for a moment as she eyed her squad into silent submission. "Expect double PT every day until I see you stop pitching grenades that make a crippled man look like an Olympic athlete."
"Yes, captain!" The young man replied. He waited until Sofia gave him a nod before stepping back into line, still red at the cheeks from embarrassment. One of his squadmates jokingly slapped him over the back of the head, but Sofia was quick on the draw. "Mark! Get up here!" she snapped, glaring at the offending soldier as he stepped forward sheepishly. "Take off your helmet."
As soon as the young man took his helmet off, Sofia viciously backhanded the man across the face. "You don't fuck around when I'm chewing someone out unless you want to join him. Understand?" She growled. "You can join Miller on his PT. Since you're new, consider this a mild warning. Next time, you get a double sentence." All color drained from the young man's face, save for the red marks in the shape of the backside of her armored gauntlet where it had hit him. She knew she had to instill fear in the recruits each time she got a new one, and Mark was no exception. His squad mates would be letting him know just how easy he'd gotten it. With any luck, their horror stories would do the work for her.
"Now, with that out of the way," Sofia began, "we have a graduating member. Jacob Smith, as you know, was tired of all of your bullshit, and so decided to get his ass in gear and graduate!"
All eyes turned toward the squad pointman at the end of the back row, standing proudly with a grin on his face. "Figured I might as well lose brain cells elsewhere," he retorted.
"Good, because I was getting tired of your smart-ass attitude," Sofia replied. "I forwarded your assignment info to your data logs. You'll report to Commander Hughes tomorrow morning. Now get the hell out of here!" she ordered.
The young pointman gave Sofia a brief salute before heading for the door, letting out a triumphant cry with his fists in the air the moment he stepped outside. Sophia watched with the beginnings of a smile from the corner of her mouth as he sprinted toward the far end of one of the aircraft resupply pads, throwing himself off the edge to hover down to the ground below with his jetpack. "Now, as for you shitheads, we've got orders for tomorrow, so PT's on hold," she declared, turning to the rest of her squad. "Sleep armed. Expect a proper Vanu-sponsored wakeup call. We'll be out of here after that, headed for Esamir, so get your game face on. First man I hear bitching about the cold gets to scrub everyone's armor, got it?
The entire squad simultaneously saluted. "Yes, captain!"