—unknown trooper, unknown era
—
“Out of the way, get out of the way!” A trooper shouted, his words barely audible over the constant barrage of gunfire.
More than a company of soldiers had assembled on the walkways and ramp, some setting up portable fortifications while others brought entire boxes of ammunition and duffle bags’ worth of magazines. Most, however, remained focused on keeping their gun barrel pointed at the closest enemy.
The comm announcement worked better, transmitting directly into the troopers’ earpieces. Most simply intensified their fire. The barrels of their rifles and stubbers were glowing from the constant firing, while polymer casings formed piles around each soldier. A handful were curious enough to look backwards to the top of the ramp. At that moment, the sight was more beautiful than any glitter-skinned stripper.
A quartet of Crocodile infantry fighting vehicles advanced from the garage’s bowels, their tracks clicking and creaking against the textured floor. Troopers surrounded them, ready to use the vehicles as cover and support in the upcoming bloodbath.
Victor looked on from his forward command post, which was little more than an armored personnel carrier full of presently useless communications equipment. He sat on its roof, next to the pintle-mounted .50, with a pair of binoculars and a radio. His rifle hanged from its strap, the barrel still reeking propellant from the few bursts of lead he’d put into one of the monsters outside.
Monsters, there was no other way to describe them. Terran-variety fauna shifted in ways that made them entirely terrifying to man. Spiders three or four meters tall, millipedes twice as long and ruby-eyed wolves that blended into the darkness outside like shadows. The latter had already claimed four unlucky souls, an entire pack jumping up to the gantry for a split second before dragging the unfortunate section into the abyss-like forest. Fortunately, the wolves weren’t invisible to infrared vision goggles.
The voice on the radio belonged to the lieutenant in charge of the first QRF to arrive from the 4th Scouts Battalion. New lad, but he looked enthusiastic —as any cav scout ought to be— and the staff sergeant babysitting him appeared to have a good head on his shoulders.
Noting down the callsign in his mind, Victor pressed on the bone-conducting microphone ‘halo’ around his neck. “Acknowledged, Hitman-2-5. This is Overlord-Actual, good hunting.”
‘Let’s hope you don’t get turned into spider chowder, kiddo.’
DUDUDUDUDU
The lead Crocodile’s autocannon opened fire into the forest, blinding white headlights shedding light into the monster-infested abyss as it rushed down the ramp. The cavalry scouts advanced on either side, forty streams of tracers laying down interlocking fields of fire.
For all their size and strange abilities, no monster appeared to be bulletproof. That was fortunate; Victor had done jobs on two different worlds with bulletproof alien fauna. The memory of a sandworm erupting out of a Dune to swallow a tank whole, only to dive back into the golden sea before a single soldier could react…it still haunted his dreams, a decade later. And the less said about the dinosaur affair, the better; he’d never had to bill a client for that many atomics, before or after.
…
“Well, sir, this is really putting the combat in combat engineer.” Lieuteant Colonel Samter commented.
“You should really work on your jokes, Sarah.” Victor muttered, shaking his head in false disappointment. “But yes, it is, and that’s why you have the M31. The Demolishers aren’t just for blowing up bridges or clearing IEDs; this is what they were designed to do.”
A pair of modified Rhinos moved past his headquarters, bearing a shortened barrel, dozer blades and half a dozen other explosive goodies that ought to make any proper combat engineer giddy with excitement. They drove down the vehicle ramp and into the forest beyond, which had grown brighter over the past two hours. A battery of portable floodlights, as well as the Crocodile’s own headlights, really made a difference.
The defense had become far more organized in the last hour as troop numbers surged from two companies into two battalions. One was in charge of the ramp itself, which had been fortified with sandbags full of local mud and riddled with heavy stubber and grenade auto-launcher emplacements. Bursts of fire and the muted auto-launcher thumps could still be heard, though the tempo had fallen to a steady rythm.
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Forward defense had fallen to the other battalion, which was charged with creating a perimeter beyond the ramp. A full company of combat engineers, as well as a platoon of light engineering vehicles, was helping them. They filled sandbags, unfolded concertina wire and unpacked steel mesh-lined hesco walls. All inside the charred crater that the Victoria’s descent had created, where trees had been razed by the impact and then turned into fine charcoal dust by thruster exhaust.
Yet that was not enough for Victor or his staff, which was growing anxious of attack. Just as the regiment was mustering its forces, so could an enemy be doing beyond the forest. If somebody lived close by, they’d have certainly witnessed the dropship’s descent. It must’ve looked like a most fiery meteorite indeed. The Regiment needed to be prepared to defend against attack, even if such attack might never come. That meant they needed space.
Space to set up their artillery and air defense batteries. Space to assemble their maneuver units and establish proper fortifications like trenches and minefields. Space to establish a no-man’s-land between said fortifications and the forest itself, where they could see an enemy —whether monster, man or alien— advancing towards them.
That meant they needed to clear the forest. To raze it, to chop down the trees and level the thick bushes in a circle hundreds if not thousands of meters in diameter around the dropship. Not quite a monumental task with multi-dozen-ton bulldozers and demolition charges, but not a walk in the park, either.
Said operation fell under the purview of the Engineer Battalion, commanded by the woman standing next to Victor. Lieutenant Colonel Srah Samter, a woman so lazy she finished a week’s worth of work in a day just to take the other six days off sipping electrolyte mix straight out of the pouch and watching a trashy superhero movie.
“Well…we can do it. Probably. Thankfully, the Demolishers have remote weapons stations for their .50s, so we don’t need to worry about some poor schmuck getting dragged off by the shadow wolves.”
“That’s what we’re calling them? Shadow wolves?” Victor asked, squinting Samter. “That’s what the troopers are calling them?”
The engineer shrugged. “That’s what they’re calling them. Sounds about right.”
“Where are the imaginative nicknames that shouldn’t end up on debriefs but invariably do so anyway? I distinctly remember reading a medical report calling the damn sandworms anal annihilators, because some moron managed to get a baby worm so far up his ass they had to bring in a combat surgeon to pull it out. Where are those names, huh?”
“I…uh…I don’t know what to tell you, sir.”
“…forget about it.”
—
Many mercenary outfits relied on technology to do the hard work. That ranged from semi-autonomous combat drones to orbital weapons platforms, guided artillery ammunition and machine learning-based intelligence gathering. It was often the very reason they succeeded…in spite of other deficiencies.
The Regiment eschewed many of these ‘glass cannons’, which required expensive, time-consuming maintenance and whose reliability was questionable at best under combat conditions. Proper training of enlisted and officers alike by regiment veterans gave them an advantage that glorified bandits and ill-trained gangsters could not match, and they owned almost everything they needed to re-build their entire arsenal.
Many a rival outfit had collapsed after running out of fancy drone bombs and guided artillery shells, utter disbelief etched on their pale faces as regimental fire support continued to rain barrage after barrage of plain ol’ HE on their positions.
There were, however, a few pieces of tech that even Victor’s most conservative officers adored.
The Jackal was one such piece. The fixed-wing drone could be loaded in a hardened case aboard a squad vehicle, assembled and launched in a time span of five minutes by two soldiers, and flown over the battlefield for four hours. That was four hours of constant reconnaissance, all handled from a tablet.
It was nothing new. In fact, it was very old tech in absolute terms, hailing from the early 21st century. Yet technological progression post-fusion, except for the hyperdrive, had reversed from exponential to logarithmic. In the frontier, where farming was often done by ox-led plow and something as basic as a battery had to be imported from the Heartland, the Jackal was an advanced tool indeed.
Victor’s answer to most problems on the battlefield was artillery, tanks, and mechanized infantry. Everything else was just a force multiplier, a failure point and a cut from his profits. Yet the Jackal was simple enough that they could build it in-house, with engineers iterating on each batch to make them lighter, cheaper and better. They were reliable, effective tools.
“Remind me again, how many of these things do we have?” He asked his quartermaster, who was sitting on the other side of the conference table.
After two hours commanding from the APC, the situation had calmed down enough that he’d moved back to officer country. Not to be confused with resting; he was still on shift, though working from the conference room meant he could have a hot plate of food served delivered to him and his staff from the galley.
They were eating the same stuff the grunts on the front were; dasht. Scrambled eggs with chopped onion, mushrooms, bell peppers and liver pieces marinated with honey mustard. One could scoop up the entire serving in under a minute; it contained enough sugar, calories, and spices to keep a man going in the worst conditions. It also had the benefit of being quick to cook, which was rather useful in times like these.
Major Flemming wolfed down a spoonful before replying. “Roughly four drones per company.”
Victor nodded, looking at the screen mounted on the wall behind the head of the table. It showed the dark sky of this strange world, through the camera lens of a Jackal being prepared for takeoff.
Speakers crackled with static.
The signalier who’d been awaiting on the other side of the table almost jumped at the trooper’s words.
“Hitman-4-1this is Overlord. Signal’s good on our end, you’re good to go.”
A thumbs up appeared on the edge of the drone camera’s field of view, and moments later the robotic scout launched from its canister with a hiss of pressurized air. Within moments, the speakers hummed with the steady whirr of its rotor. As its heading leveled out, the landscape below came into view.
“Stars, is that a…”