Esamir – middle of nowhere, 1400 hours
Sofia stepped out of the tunnel, shielding her eyes against the bright, cloudless Esamir sky as they readjusted to the blinding daylight. "Thank god that pigshit's over with," she thought, looking around. "Thought it was going to turn into a bloody moshpit in there. Even the well-laid fortifications of the underground Nanite Analysis facility over on Amerish turn into a meat grinder on a good day, but that damn excavation site…" She shuddered at the thought of how badly that operation could have gone if even just a few more squadrons of the Sovereignty were present.
"Captain!" a voice called out from the tunnel behind her. Turning back toward the dimly lit tunnel, she could make out someone running toward her. Slowing to a jog, the young man stepped out into the light and briefly saluted her. "We've just received confirmation that the techs back out at Orbital HQ got the device this time, and have it hooked up. Guess they were able to decipher the geek-speak in those encrypted Vanu documents our spies swiped a week or so ago. They've got you lined up to give it a go."
"Fine, now let's get the hell out of here before those rebel scum Conglomerate turds show up," she ordered, starting back into the tunnel with the young man hot on her heels. "This is the second time we've taken this damn facility, and I don't want some stupid gearhead technician telling me he got us all royally fucked by tripping some trap left behind by those blue assholes." The first time, she knew, the technician crew she had escorted into the Vanu Sovereignty-formed dig site had been compromised by a New Conglomerate spy, who had used the Sovereignty-made teleporter left behind at the site to ship one of the two remaining alien devices back to some rich corporate CEO's vault. She had found out and executed him on the spot, of course, but it had already been too late; the device was in the hands of the NC, and a well-laid trap had forced her and her squadron out of the dig site. This time, she had taken the facility back from the NC and was ready to try again, this time watching over the trans-mat delivery process herself with her handgun at the technician's head.
Reaching the end of the tunnel, she found herself standing before a cavernous underground room dug straight out of rock, the high dome-shaped ceiling carved right out of the rock that formed the mountain ridge above them. All around the massive room, her squadron went about their business polishing up their weapons. A few soldiers caught her eye, though: Four of her men were seated about a shipping crate, slinging cards across the improvised table in a game of poker. Glancing over to the soldier who had given her the report, she motioned for him to be silent before walking around the edge of the room toward the gambling men.
She had almost made it to the table when another of her soldiers, seated on the ground not too far from the gamblers, stood up and saluted toward her. Almost instantly, the four seated around the crate swept up the cards, the thin pieces of reinforced paper disappearing like magic into the soldiers' uniforms' sleeves. "They hired him as a damn lookout, those sons-of-bitches," she thought to herself, giving the saluting soldier a nasty glare.
"Yes, Captain?" one of the gamblers said, turning to face her. His shaggy dark-brown hair and permanent easygoing grin were recognizable from a mile away. Nothing infuriated her more than that shit-eating smile he wore, especially when he caught him red-handed breaking almost any Terran Republic policy.
"Cards, private," Sofia growled, her hand outstretched. As the soldier reached out to drop the cards into her open palm, she snatched his wrist and yanked him forward, catching his face with her other metal-plated hand and throwing him to the ground. Planting one of her heavy, armored greaves on the small of his back, she looked down at the writhing soldier with a gleam in her eye. "Private Smalls, you've failed Infiltrator school, but I'll be damned if you fail me. Clearly, the two-and-a-half years of PT you owe me doesn't quite mean enough, so we'll try something different," she barked, reaching for her sidearm.
As she leveled the handgun at the back of the young man's head, an explosion rang out throughout the cavernous room. "Rebels are here!" A voice cried out from the entrance tunnel. All around the room, Sofia's squad scrambled for their weapons, hastily packing away their cleaning supplies to get ready for the fight ahead of them.
"Well, I guess it's your lucky day, Private," Sofia said, lifting the man to his feet by the neck of his form-fitting jumpsuit. "Now suit up and get the fuck out of my sight before I change my mind."
"Yes, Captain," the young man said, hastily sweeping up his part of the deck of cards he had dropped and jamming them in his pocket.
"Jeez, that hurt," the young gambler thought, stretching out his spine in an attempt to undo the damage his overbearing captain had wrought. Collecting the rest of his deck of cards from his friends, he stuffed them back in their well-worn steel container as he meandered over to his waiting MAX suit, its chest plate resting against its thick steel legs. "Hey, babe, ready for another round?" he thought as he stepped up to the armored exosuit, gently sliding the steel cards packet into a small gap he'd fashioned in the suit's interior padding around the right shoulder. Turning around, he gently climbed backward into the suit, slipping his legs into the padded interiors of the heavy powered armor suit.
As he slid his hands into the gauntlets of the MAX suit, the powerful turbines on the machine's back sprung into life. The suit's hydraulics unlocked, letting the arms and legs move freely; the heavy armor, however, never weighed down on his body for a moment as he reached down for his chestplate, pressing it against his torso until the system's hydraulic locks latched it in place. "Last piece," he thought as he reached down for the helmet, taking a moment to look over a small inscription just inside the helmet below the visor from the previous owner of the suit that read "she does the thinking for you". "Damn straight she does," he thought.
Slipping the helmet on, the device latched into place with the suit's neck joint, securely attached to the rest of the suit. With the flicker of worn LED's blinking into life, a heads-up display appeared on the inside of his helmet, detailing everything he needed to know; pressure for the hydraulics that moved the suit's limbs, the integrity of his armor, even the ammo count of the attached weapons — which read as zero, because he had detached the weapons for cleaning before getting sidetracked with poker.
Stomping over to the poker table in his MAX suit, he reached down and picked up his two weapons, one a hefty grenade launcher, the other a belt-fed chaingun. One by one, he held the bulky weapons up to the mounting hardpoints on the back of his suit's arms, waiting for them to automatically affix themselves and link into the suit's control software. With a digital chirp and a brief notification on his visor's HUD, the ammunition counts for each of the weapons updated, showing a full magazine for each.
"Alright, babe, let's get this party started," he muttered to himself as he jogged off toward the cavernous dig site's entrance, each step a resounding mechanical boom in his ears as he chased after his long-since-gone squad.
"A'ight, boys, let's get wild!" Daniel yelled, raising his gauss rifle to his shoulder. The blue-clad squadron behind him let out a rallying cheer in response to his signature war cry as they readied for combat, opening fire on the first of the Terran Republic soldiers that filed out of the tunnel some hundred meters away. Along the muddy, snow-dusted dirt road to the tunnel he jogged, firing his rifle in one-second intervals in the general direction of the tunnel to force his enemies to take shelter from the hail of incoming fire he and his squadmates provided. Over the sights of his rifle, he watched as his brother James and a few other jetpack-toting light assault troopers took to the mountain to his left like wild goats, scampering along the steep rocky hills with uncanny speed. It was a classic tactic; get men just above the door that formed a bottleneck, and the enemy couldn't come out of their hidey-holes without catching a bullet in the skull. If they tried to peek the doorway and clean the light assaults out, his men would be waiting from the side to take them down. "The only thing we need now is a recon on the hills across from the shaft itself, so they could fire down into the cave from cover…" he thought.
Just as his brother reached his position above the tunnel's entryway, a heavily-armored MAX suit came barreling out of the tunnel, guns blazing. James was quick to unload his shotgun's magazine at the metal monster, but the hot steel pellets did hardly more than scratch the armor's red and grey paint scheme. The MAX suit turned one of its heavy gun-toting arms toward the young warrior, raising its heavy grenade launcher to swat the man off of the mountainside. James instinctively reached for his grenade bandolier, flicking a flashbang grenade toward his opponent.
"Get that motherfucker outta here!" Daniel yelled, pointing at the MAX unit as it shielded its eyes against the stunning blast of light. As the squad anti-tank soldier stepped forward, he readied a rocket launcher against his shoulder and took aim at the MAX suit some sixty meters away.
Then, all hell broke loose.
A thunderous clap resounded from the mountainside somewhere behind the squad. Before he knew it, the launcher-toting soldier was face-first sprawled out on the dirt road, a jagged hole in the back of his helmet, and he was being dragged to the ground by a squadmate shouting "sniper!" at the top of his lungs. Out of reflex, the squad engineer tossed down a small metal plate that extended into a thin metal frame, a blue energy field filling in the space to form a wide protective barrier. "Get 'im up, doc!" the engineer yelled, nodding toward the fallen soldier as he peered through the translucent blue shield, looking for any sign of the mysterious sniper.
Daniel slapped his rifle onto the hardpoint on his back and reached for his medical tool. "Come on, bud, get up!" he thought, leveling the handgun-like tool at the dead soldier and pulling the trigger. As the device did his work, another shot rang out, this time in front of the squad somewhere far off in the distant mountain ranges. "Holy shit, we're surrounded by these damn snipers!" he thought as he looked up to see who had fallen. To his surprise, however, he watched as the MAX suit soldier up the road dropped to his knees, a nasty fist-sized hole in its chest. His brother was nowhere in sight.
"What the unholy hell is going on…" he thought.
"We're tearing these guys a new one," Edward thought as he chambered a new round into his anti-materiel rifle. The poor soldier in the MAX suit hadn't even stood a chance; even the significantly more advanced suits the Vanu Sovereignty used hardly stood a chance at stopping such a large round, and the Terran Republic's armor technology was a far cry from that, he knew. Edward pressed a button on the side of his helmet to activate his microphone "You deal with those New Conglomerate guys yet, Char?" he asked.
Radio silence greeted his question, only to be broken by the unnerving crack and whine of Charlotte's plasma rifle spitting out another deadly round from some unseen crevice in the mountainside. "I take that as a yes," he muttered as he readjusted his rifle, taking aim straight down the length of the dig site's entrance tunnel. "Now if only I had a rocket launcher to ram down that TR squad's throats right now…"
Cries from the pinned New Conglomerate soldiers rang out as they turned their weapons to the mountainside above the road behind them. At once, he knew she had finally been spotted, and turned his rifle to face the NC forces. "You've gotta be kidding me, Char," he thought as he looked through his rifle's optics at the blue-clad soldiers, watching them spray rounds almost indiscriminately to the rocky crags above. None of the NC soldiers seemed to have a clue to where she was.
"…although I can't say I do, either," he thought, surveying the mountainside in hopes of finding his friend. "I need to take the pressure off her so she can get a shot." He lowered his aim back toward the center of the mass of NC soldiers huddled up behind the engineer's Hard-Light barrier and took a deep breath, steadying his aim upon the soldier with the medical cross emblazoned on the front of his helmet.
With a gentle squeeze of the trigger, the rifle spat out another fiery round. To his surprise, however, the bullet deviated, dipping low and to the right. The round impacted the man in his right thigh, snapping what remained of his leg clean off and sending him tumbling to the ground. Hastily rechambering a third cartridge, he took aim once more and sent another round on its way, finishing the job. "Shit, I might be getting too old for this crap," he thought with a shake of his head. "Could've sworn that was dead on, and there's hardly any wind today…"
An earsplitting snap rang out, causing Edward to jump in his skin. "Fuck me, that was fast. Those reds didn't waste any time finding me," he thought as he turned his rifle to the entrance of the tunnel, firing blindly into the dark pit in hopes of scaring, or maybe even hitting, whoever had shot at him. The snap of passing bullets split the air as he turned around to take cover behind the top of the stony ridge, pounding out the staccato rhythm that he knew only a semi-automatic rifle could provide.
Just as he reached the top of the ridge, he felt a piercing pain shoot through his body just as he began to step down into cover. His legs gave out from underneath him from the shock, sending him tumbling to the ground just behind the top of the stone ridge. "Shit, it never stops fucking hurting," he groaned, looking down at his torso. There wasn't any puncture wound on his front side.
"Fuck, they got me good. Probably still lodged in me after it lost a lot of it's energy getting through the suit's shields and armor," he thought. Over the muffled yelling of the distant soldiers, he heard the resounding thump of a rocket being launched, followed by the roaring explosion and hiss of flying shrapnel hitting the ground for hundreds of yards around. "Did they…?" he thought as he rolled himself over onto his stomach, letting out a cough that sprayed the glistening snow below him with crimson blood. With every ounce of strength he had, he crawled up to the ridge and peeked over, following the trail of smoke from the NC soldiers' position to a small peak high above the mountain. Through the smoke and debris, a chunk of rock the size of a Prowler came flying, bouncing off the mountain as it tumbled downward, each impact throwing off more boulders in a cascading rockslide. The rumble became louder and louder, until finally the shower of sliding stone slammed into the dirt road, crushing the NC soldiers in their path. To his surprise, however, a jet of dust shot out of the dig site's tunnel, throwing a few Terran soldiers clear out of the tunnel and sending them tumbling down the small ravine between Edward and the tunnel.
"I guess all that shaking collapsed the dig site. Probably killed all the TR forces in there," he thought, silently grinning as his vision started to dim. "Not a chance in hell Charlotte got off that mountainside before all that shit came down. Thank god I got her registered with the Tubes last week…"
As the rumbling subsided, his vision finally faded to black, the last bloody sigh escaping from his shredded lungs.
"Bio signs for Ed just stopped, Bill," Jimmy said, sipping a cup of fresh coffee as he looked over his laptop's screen. "Same for this other ID, whoever she is. Ed wanted her in on the project as backup, I guess."
"Alright, I'll flip the switch, gimme a sec," Bill replied, setting down his own mug and placing his hands on the keyboard connected to the data relay they had worked on. Typing in the two ID's into the databank pulled up the network of files he needed. "Hitting the button in three, two, one…"
Within a fraction of a second, the data "transfer status" indicator bar on the screen flashed from 0% to 100%. "Holy smokes, that's fast. Ed wasn't kidding when he said it'd be fast…"
Suddenly, a bright light filled the room, emanating from the Vanu alien technology mounted in the data transmitter. "What the fuck?" Bill shouted, shielding his eyes from the blinding glow.
With a flash of light and the screech of rent metal, everything disappeared before them…