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Warringer
Chapter 57
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After having been dropped by one of the freighter Monsoons, the sleek metallic shape continued to drop towards the deep atmosphere of Jupiter. It was already falling for several hours, its thermoelectric generators providing more than enough energy for various scientific experiments, instruments and its on-board computer.
This computer, even if it had a tachyon channel connection to Earth and was shielded by several layers of lead and low powered shields, could be considered to be a stone age computer. Various circuit boards with hardened TTL microchips, resistors, capacitors and transistors made up its core, reminiscent of the computers of old. It only had the computing power of a 1980s 80186, but its software was making up for the lack of computing power.
But even than its power was more than enough for the job it would do.
It continued to fall towards the atmosphere of Jupiter, the metallic surface shining in the light of the sun and illuminating the painted on symbols of NASA, ESA and GDI, as well as its name, Pluto.
While it looked much like a missile, there were several things that set it apart from normal missiles. It lacked the four equally sized wings, trading it for a delta wing and something that looked much like the tail of a plane. Another thing where the two large air intakes and a pair of nuzzles that looked more like those of a jet fighter than that of a missile.
Finally it began to encounter the first thin parts of the gas giants atmosphere and its nose cone slowly began to glow in a deep red. Only the advanced construction materials prevented it from burning up in the upper atmosphere as it fell deeper at speeds that were well above Mach 15.
As the atmosphere got thicker the computer noted the increasing flow of the hydrogen based atmosphere and slowly opened the air intakes allowing the gases to stream into its engines.
Its engines had been born in the minds of a number of scientists during the early time of the nuclear age as part of the project it now carried the name of, Project Pluto. Twin specially designed 500MW nuclear reactors acted as engines of the large missile and now the computer pulled the moderators that had previously prevented the reactor to get into its hot phase, only producing enough energy to power the computer via a large number of thermoelectric devices.
Now however the twin reactors began to work, heating up the atmosphere that streamed through them, propelling them through the nuzzles and providing thrust.
The speed that had dropped as the missile dropped deeper into Jupiters atmosphere began to climb again until it was steady at Mach 7 and the computer leveled it into a horizontal flight path, the pair of delta wings providing nothing more than control as the missile itself was kept in its flight through sheer power.
The entire hull of the fast moving missile began to heat up until its glowed in a dark red, stripping away any paint on its surface, but none of the heat managed to get into the interior of the missile as it was blocked by the advanced ceramics and alloys of Earth Alliance minds.
Moving through the high atmosphere of Jupiter at high speed, its instruments began to do what they were intended to do, analyze the upper atmosphere as well as sending telemetry towards Earth.
On Earth, more exactly in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the data was received by two groups. Both with different interest in the results of Pluto's flight.
Somewhere in Geneva, a whole group of people snickered and threw a party at this cunningly concealed test of the first planetary style weapon of mass destruction. It would only be a matter of time until more Plutos where build with the intended specs, capable of delivering several dozen thermonuclear warheads to any target on any planet they were dropped on. And no planetary or orbital weapon would be able to intercept the Mach 7 HySLAM.
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Sarachi Hasami was glad to be a pirate. While being able to do much of the things he wanted to do, he didn't have to take the responsibility for it. And most of the stuff he wanted to do was raising mayhem and make some money from it.
This time however he thought that maybe his captain and their commander had bitten of a little more than they could chew. What they had awaited to find was a defenseless planet of their scrounge, that had caused Galaxy Police to route them out nearly complete. A planet that was ripe for their picking. What they had found was a planet with a very good defense and a very effective fleet backing up that defense. Just two ships had been able to make it through the atmosphere.
But they were causing mayhem and destroying as much as they could until the defense of this planet would find a way to fight them. And there wasn't even one person who would fight against them.
Hasami was piloting an armed hover vehicle and cruising above the city, diving down upon an unsuspecting ground vehicle now and than and making strafing runs across the buildings and long streets.
As he glanced down towards the ground he blinked as he noted a strange tracked vehicle. It was a boxy vehicle and second box with a cylinder sticking from it was on top of the first box.
He blinked once or twice before grinning. It had to be some sort of transporter and from the look of the ground around it it was very heavy. Not very fast and unable to get out of the way of his fire. It would be helpless against a strafing run and be destroyed along with whatever it transported.
He brought his hover craft around before pulling it into a dive towards the vehicle. As he began to shoot the plasma cannon of his craft he was very surprised to see how the plasma bolts harmlessly impacted into a shield around the vehicle and how the second box with the cylinder began to swing around.
He frowned as he pulled his craft up and prepared for a second strafing run. Maybe it was a transport for something valuable?
He glared at the vehicle as he made his second dive, obvious about the fact that he was staring down the cylinder.
His mind hadn't enough time to register the short flash of light from the cylinder as a High Velocity 88mm tungsten projectile went straight through the front window, only to sheer off the top of his head before destroying the fusion cell of his craft resulting in a detonation that let debris damage the surrounding buildings and harmlessly peppered the tracked vehicle.
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"A little suicidal, wasn't he?" Leutnant Alexander Hinrich asked as he looked at the screen in front of him.
The controls of the Krauss-Maffei Pzkw XI 'Tiger' were different from those of other tanks and reflected the fact that this beauty was a design that was completely new. The designers of Krauss-Maffai had taken some bit from the Israeli Merkava, with driver motors and the reactor in front of the command area, while the turret was remotely controlled and also held all ammunition for the 88mm HV Railgun, the 40mm HV auto cannon and the TOW launchers. There was also the commanders weapon, a remote controlled 15mm PPC instead of caliber .50 machine gun mostly found in 'classical' tanks.
So the commander, gunner and driver were sitting in a rather comfortable cockpit hidden behind Carbonat VII armor and a shield that was rated for an assault shuttle, looking at the rest of the world through the armored cameras all over the tank.
Oberleutnant Marek Bosorevski, the commander, raised an eyebrow, taking a bite of the McRib he nearly had forgotten when all this had started, careful not to smear any of the burgers sauce over his uniform or the interior of his tank.
"For me it looked like he didn't know what a tank was."
Than he patted Hinrich on the shoulder, incidently managing to smear some of his burgers sauce to stick to his gunners uniform.
"Good shooting by the way. I don't think anyone ever managed to take out a plane with the main gun of a tank. You're the first."
Hinrich grinned.
"The turret actuators are very fast ans responsive."
He grinned some more.
"And very accurate. I could shoot the eye from a fly with the main gun."
In front of both, Feldwebel Thorsten Michaelis chuckled and waved his hand in front of his nose.
"I smell too much self admiration."
Bosorevski mock glared at Hinrich.
"You better didn't."
Hinrich just rolled his eyes and frowned as he looked at the screen in front of him.
"Someone just dropped by to look what happened to that shuttle."
Both commander and driver of the massive tank turned towards their own screens.
Outside there was a group of several aliens skidding around the corner, two or three of them in something that looked like powered armor. They stopped and looked at the tank for some time before they started to shoot, plasma and particle beams slamming into the tanks shields.
Bosorevski glanced at the stress meter of the shield. It was steadily hovering around thirty percent of shield stress, not even close to getting to the magical ninety percent mark where the shield got into something the eggheads called cascade failure because of the shield internal feedback loops or something.
"What do you think? Should we get them down the hard way or the fun way?"
"Fun way," Michaelis said with a smirk and his feet stepped down onto the two gas pedals for the left and right thread, causing over 90 tons of heavy tank to jump forward, racing towards the bad guys.
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Captain Thomas Dodge, United States Navy, glared down at the offending piece of paper he was holding in his hands. Dodge was the commander of the USS Stingray, one of the currently only three vessels of Wolf Pack Fleet as the stealth fleet of the GDI was called. Stingray was a modified Monsoon class gunboat, fitted exclusively for stealth operations, but retained most of its offensive potential, including the scaled down G.O.D. Particle beam cannon that took about twenty percent of the ships volume.
Most of the crew, were reminded of the situation on the old USS Stingray, an old WWII diesel sub, in terms of space for the crew, and didn't complain. Much anyway. At least they didn't have to put up with Pascoe anymore.
"Is something the matter," he heard a male voice behind him asking.
He turned slightly and looked at the Ferron, who had been placed on his ship of all things as part of an officers exchange program.
Commander Serkal Harnov used to be the executive officer of a Ferron frigate before becoming part of the officers exchange program and ended up on Stingray to learn about the humans way of waging silent war.
Dodge said nothing for the moment, instead he reached for the microphone of the ships 1MC.
"Attention," he said." We just received news from Earth. It seems that Earth has been attacked again. By pirates of all things this time."
Around him the crew fell into a silence, not daring to do anything. Stapanek who had chosen to visit the bridge at this moment, stopped and Dodge could see him first going pale and than slowly red.
"I'm now holding new orders from Admiral Mancuso. It seems that the interrogators have been able to... 'convince'... some of the survivors to give up the coordinates of their home base. Salvaged computer cores have confirmed these coordinates. We are closest to the planet and are to proceed under maximal speed to the system and hares the pirates in system until a larger fleet can arrive to take care of the remaining pirates."
Again he stopped and lowered the piece of paper.
"As far as I can tell, we are dealing with a planet that was invaded by the pirates and most likely used to build their ships. Its very likely that we have to deal with fixed defenses and, hopefully, one or two shipyards. An additional optional order is to try and secure any shipyards we might encounter."
Harnov was able to see the evil smile on Dodges face.
"Okay people, lets play pirate on some pirates and steal us a few shipyards."
Somehow Dodge knew that this new orders might be able to counter those rumors about that special tattoo...
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"Shit, shit, shit, shit," Goldmann continued to curse as he ran through the streets of Jerusalem as fast as he could. He didn't look back lest he would be reminded of the scene that he had witnessed not too long ago when an armored alien had literally ripped apart Lieutenant Levi.
He tried to ignore the mocking laughter that sounded behind him, coming from the armored alien that had told him to run after Goldmann had emptied an entire clip of AP munition from his M4 into it.
"Shit, shit, fuck," he continued, wiping away the blood of Levi that had been splattered all over him while the alien had ripped him apart.
"GET OUT OF THE WAY!" he screamed at a group of Palestine." GET SOMEWHERE SAFE!"
The men and women stared at him as he ran towards them, the M4 dangling from its strap as the Isreali soldier ran like he had never ran before, even during basic training.
Goldmann swallowed hard as he forced himself to stop rather than continue to run. He whirled around, and grabbed his M4. He just hoped that he was able to change the magazine of the rifle before the alien was onto them all.
The mocking laughter continued to sound through the narrow streets and Goldmann didn't turn around as he fumbled his his rifle.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck..."
He did manage to change the magazine before the alien slowly stalked around the last corner that Goldmann had turned around.
The aliens laughter took on a crazy sound as it saw Goldmann and the group of people behind him.
"How cute," the alien mocked," he thinks he can fight back and safe his friends..."
Goldmann swallowed hard, his aim wavering slightly as he pointed his M4 at the alien. He knew that his weapon wasn't able to get through the aliens armor, but also that the aliens seemed to prefer to fight in close quarters.
He was surprised and horrified as someone grabbed him from behind for a moment, before releasing him. He stumbled back before realizing that one of the Palestine had made a grab for the grenades that hung from him and had pulled the pins, throwing them one after the other at the alien that still was more than twenty meters away and very slowly advanced towards them.
The grenades dropped in front of the alien and one came to rest between its legs. The alien stopped.
"Rocks don't hurt me," the alien sneered.
"Fuck," was all Goldmann could say as turned around and dropped to the ground before the grenades exploded one after the other.
There was a shrieking sound of pain coming from the alien as the grenades detonated, rippling the area around them with deadly shrapnel and debris that was able to penetrate the armor.
Goldmann didn't get up for several more seconds. As he did, all he could do was stare at the bloody remains of the alien and shake.