Authors note: Welcome to the very first chapter of this brand spanking new series. Just a little heads up, there will not be my usual amount of graphically described fornication in this series, but there will be some, where it is appropriate. As with all my writing, this is not a sex story, this is a story that has some sex in it. I hope you enjoy and please feel free to leave any feedback you deem warranted.

Stay Awesome

Nova

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Chapter 1 - The longest day

In the vast expanse of space, around the spiral galaxies, through the streaking colors of nebulae, past binary stars, burning balls of fire, and wandering comets, between asteroids, around all the planets and moons, and above all the species that call this part of space home, a ballet has been playing out for countless millennia; an opera that transcends time and distance. An ancient race had long ago shed this mortal plane and ascended to the next, leaving behind a spattering of their genetic material. Over millions of years, it was allowed to drift, blown on stellar winds, carried on comets, hitchhiking on passing freighters, until one particular group of cells - a few lines of ancient DNA - found itself falling through the atmosphere of Splanos II, carried safely within the bosom of a raindrop.

The settlers of a simple farming colony there led simple lives, intentionally separating and distancing themselves from the hardships, cruelties, and struggles of life in the Imperium. None were disloyal or rebellious; they just wanted to experience lives away from the politics and the endless rush toward technological advancement. The thing they wanted above all else was to live in peace.

It was the middle of the wet season. Crops, livestock, and colonists alike were being watered by the passing monsoons in a deluge that had lasted weeks and promised to last weeks longer. A couple danced in the downpour. The love between them was as timeless and perfect as the ascended DNA plummeting toward them. They smiled and laughed as they danced to the music that only they could hear, his seed quickening in her womb. The very moment of conception. With a gleeful laugh, she looked up to the heavens and held out her tongue, tasting the freshness of the water, feeling that indescribable zest for life that only the young and the in love can feel.

One very special drop splashed onto it, absorbed almost instantly into the young woman's blood, and washed through her body to the first sparks of life in her belly. Where the ancient DNA merged harmlessly and symbiotically with the embryo's. The child's course of life was altered, changed at the fundamental building blocks of his humanity. He would be born, like a handful of others over the centuries, with glowing blue eyes and the genetic knowledge of a race lost to the sands of time.

His name would be Elijah, and the galaxy would never be the same again.

********

Michaels. 1

The Colonel was a severe and formal-looking man. His once jet-black mane of hair had been stripped of its color years ago, leaving him with a distinguished, almost silver, cropped style that peeked out beneath his dress uniform's peaked hat. Forty-three years of military service had imbued him with a sense of purpose and discipline that he felt would make the Imperium a much better place if applied to all manners of civilian life. He stood straight-backed and keen-eyed. His well-groomed mustache perched itself atop the grimly set scowl of authority. There were 20,000 of the Imperial Navy's most elite troops amassed in formation before him, and, as one, they snapped to attention as their Commander stepped up to the podium.

Colonel Michaels didn't need microphones or speakers to project his voice, no matter how cleverly they were hidden into the podium in front of him. This was a man who had cut his teeth shouting orders over the chaos of combat, rallying battle-weary troops, and snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. He knew how to make himself heard.

The Marines of the Imperium were among the most professional and respected of any military unit in any of the known species in this part of the Galaxy. Mankind's rapid expansion outward from the Sol system had demanded that they, along with the Imperial Navy, carry the weight of humanity's ambition. Only a few centuries ago, the people of Earth had looked to the stars and wondered if they were alone. Now, they knew with certainty that not only were there other species hiding in the cosmos, but most of them had distinct technological advantages over the fledgling spacefaring race.

Diplomacy and the ability to reach a compromise had set up healthy and mutually beneficial trading relationships with some of them, and had kept the peace with others. But it was only ever a matter of time before one species, or another, pushed back against the relentless march of human progress. When that inevitably happened, the Navy - against huge odds and with staggering losses - obliterated the enemy fleets in titanic stellar battles. But when it came time to forcibly seize control of a hostile planet, they called in the Marines.

Just as they had done in the days of Earth's oceanic battles, the Marines held true to their doctrine of ship-to-ship and ship-to-land operations; all that had really changed was that those ships no longer floated on the sacred waters of humanity's homeworld, but floated through the endless blackness of space. The Army, if you could call them that, was responsible for defending human planets. A rag-tag group of organized combat divisions and local militias, they were a far cry from the brutal fighting forces he now commanded. The Colonel seriously doubted the men and women defending human soil could even accurately be called soldiers. They lacked training, discipline, unit cohesion, or even the most basic measure of pride. Luckily for the Imperium, it was the Marines who bore the burden of offensive campaigns.

But the men standing to attention before the aged Colonel were no ordinary Marines. These men had all volunteered - or had been volunteered - to join the elite 381st Marine Division, the highly classified "Three-Eight-One." Augmented through a combination of gene manipulation and cybernetic implants, Three-Eight-One was mankind's first attempt at creating genuine super-soldiers. But unlike the stories of Earth's ancient Sci-Fi theories, there had been no abducted children, no test-tube babies, no sickening experiments, and no crimes against humanity. Every man and woman before him had earned the right to join his beloved division through the crucible of combat. These were battle-hardened veterans long before they became super-soldiers. The experiment had been wildly successful. Even the most optimistic projections of the military's research departments hadn't come close to forecasting the performance of even Three-Eight-One's most lackluster recruits. These warriors were a force to be reckoned with.

Stronger, faster, more resilient, and more intelligent than normal soldiers, these men had been trained in every tactic known to the human military, taught to use any weapon or employ any vehicle, and equipped with the latest equipment mankind had to offer. They would do anything it took to achieve their objective, and they were utterly devoid of mercy or disobedience; they were the perfect combat unit.

They had been so successful that entirely new military strategies had to be developed to take advantage of their abilities. Boarding actions had always been dangerous and bloody engagements; a fully equipped unit of normal Marines could expect to take 50% casualties when boarding even the most lightly defended of targets. With Three-Eight-One's ability to utilize stealth equipment, they could seize control of an enemy craft before the crew even knew they were on board, and if discovered, they could bring overwhelming violence to bear in acts of unparalleled aggression. Deployed in small squads in larger planetary conflicts, they could survive behind enemy lines for months without detection, wreaking havoc on enemy supply lines, disrupting communications, and assassinating key leaders with impunity. But deployed on large-scale offensive assaults with full armor and air support, as they would be today, they would be unstoppable. Every training exercise had been a resounding success; every simulation had shown this single division to be able to outfight and defeat forces twenty times their number. Colonel Michaels had found himself wondering, on more than one occasion, how many of his old friends would still be alive today if they had the training, or even the backup, of any of the Marines in front of him.

Now, for the first time, they were being deployed in anger on a full scale, not against some marauding alien menace, not against some backwater Xeno stronghold, but against other humans. Rebels who had violently declared their secession from the Imperium. It was the ultimate betrayal, a slap in the face to everything that Michaels held dear, and an insult to the men and women who had paid the ultimate price for the comfort these rebels now took for granted. Michaels wanted them dead to a man.

The Emperor himself had ordered their merciless annihilation.

The Three-Eight-One would be his instrument.

Of the 20,000 combat-ready soldiers in front of him, 15,000 made up the ranks of the infantry. They would be the boots on the ground, the ones who would storm the enemy lines and establish a beachhead from which the reinforcing divisions would push out to pacify the rest of the planet; they were the armored fist of the Emperor's vengeful will. The other 5,000 were made up of crews of the armored detachment assigned to the 381st - piloting the three-man Monitor Mk V main battle tanks - and the air wing with their single-seater broadsword fighters. There were, of course, countless other men and women assigned to the Three-Eight-One, from medics and logistic workers to the crews of the three destroyers in low orbit providing heavy fire support, but only the armored soldiers before him had earned the right to say they were Marines of this elite division.

"Marines!" He called out to his men. "Today, we go into battle with the worst kind of enemy. Humans have spent the last six centuries overcoming petty aspirations such as greed and the thirst for power, but there will always be those who resist Imperial rule and put themselves above the collective good. These cowards have plotted and schemed on the edges of Imperium space, thinking themselves safe from the protective gaze of our beloved Emperor, and now they have declared open war. Three weeks ago, the rebel fleet ambushed and destroyed a small, peaceful flotilla led by Admiral Vadek, the hero of Rigelus IV. All hands were lost. More than three thousand men were killed as they transported food and supplies to the suffering people of Orpheus VI. Then, the rebels moved to the planet of Vallen and took over! The civilians of this peaceful planet who couldn't be convinced to join them have been bought, those who couldn't be bought were coerced, those who couldn't be coerced were threatened, and those who would not bow down to threats, those who stayed loyal to the rest of humanity, were killed. Now, rebellion runs rife on humanity's sacred soil.

"Thousands have already been murdered by the rebel scum. The traitors responsible have forfeited the right to the impartiality of Imperial justice; they have declared war, not just on the Emperor and the Imperium he leads, but on humanity itself! Today, we answer that challenge!"

A resounding "Hoo-rah!" burst from the ranks of men and women in the hangar before him.

"You are the Three-Eight-One, the best of the best, the finest soldiers that the Imperium has ever produced, and it is my profound honor to lead you into combat for the first time! Together, we will reimpose law, order, and Imperial control over this wayward planet. Together, we will rescue the innocent and the loyal who were caught in the crossfire. Together, we will show the rebels what happens to traitors. We will rain fire and fury down on their strongholds, we will break their armies and then break their spirits, we will crush this rebellion in its infancy, and we will do it together!"

Another "Hoo-rah" was barked into the echo chamber of the carrier's interior.

"Now, for the battle." Col. Michaels said after the vocal surge of support faded into nothing. "The entire 381st will be deployed for this assault. The first two waves of infantry will secure the landing zone and will engage any enemy in the open under the cover of the entire air wing. Then, when the armor has been landed with the final two waves, the entire division will advance in force on the enemy command complex and cut the head off the snake. There are to be no prisoners taken among enemy combatants. If they are holding a rifle, they are targets, and you are under orders to kill them all. Civilians may be there under duress, so unarmed personnel are to be detained for questioning.

"Platoon commanders will have local authority on the ground, and each company commander has been given detailed objectives. They will brief you on your individual unit's orders. I will be landing with the armor and will retain overall strategic command for the main offensive push. We are the best; we are elite, and I expect nothing short of perfection from each and every one of you, something I know you are more than capable of giving. Keep your heads down, remember your training, and watch out for each other. I have no doubt that we will all be celebrating our victory by tomorrow together!"

"Marines of the Three-Eight-One. TO WAR!" With a fist held high, the Colonel roared the battlecry into the hanger; his words echoed back at him by the thousands of battle-hungry soldiers ranked before him. Nodding in satisfaction, he turned and headed through the door he had entered as the division filed out to their individual units. The heavy carrier, along with its cruiser and destroyer escort, would arrive in-system in less than an hour. Then, all of hell would be unleashed on the witless fools who dared defy an empire.

********

Elijah. 1

Elijah took a long, deep breath, centering himself and calming the whirlwind of thoughts that rushed through his mind. These kinds of meditations were ones that had been drilled into him since he was a small boy. His parents had never known what to make of his glowing blue eyes, and neither had their doctor. But when the doctor had raised the question to Imperial medical, he had inadvertently started a series of events that culminated in the abduction of the infant, the murder of his parents, and the destruction of his colony. They may not have known what those eyes signified, but Imperial Intelligence certainly did.

He could still remember their faces. The pride in his father's eyes as he looked into the crib, the overwhelming joy on the face of his mother, and the indescribable love emanating from both of them. He wasn't supposed to remember them; he had no idea what had happened to them and was happy to live under the assumption that they were still alive and well somewhere out there. Nobody knew, not his instructors, his guides, or even the women who had raised him. They all assumed that no child would be able to remember their parents, who were secretly and mercilessly killed when he was only a few months old. But an ascendant one forgot nothing. These were the things he focused on when he needed to be centered.

Another deep breath. He could feel his senses heightening. His eyes were blindfolded, but he already knew that three opponents were stealthily approaching; his hands gripped a little tighter onto the Danja practice swords. He could hear them moving. A sound far too faint to be picked up by even the most sensitive surveillance device was crystal clear to him. He could hear the stretching and compressing of the ligaments in their knees, the padded grinding of bone against bone as joints flexed, the level, determined breaths. He could smell them. He could feel the change in air currents wash over his skin. All of it painted a picture as vivid as sight onto the backs of his eyelids.

Elijah had heard all of the proverbs, and he accepted them for what they were, but where his lesser sword masters taught him to move like water, he surreptitiously ignored them. Water could be caught, captured, and contained; it had substance, its movements could be predicted. Elijah moved like a shadow dancing away from the light. Defeating an opponent - or three of them in this instance - was a forgone conclusion, but he strived for perfection. If they landed a blow, he would have failed. He felt the ripples of the air and the whistle around the thrusting wooden blade as one of his assailants lunged toward him. His body moved by instinct, stepping to the left and pirouetting forward around the outside of the attacker's arm. His hand gripped the swordsman's wrist as he barged his shoulder into him, knocking him forward and then rolling over his back. The man's arm was bent backward at a hideously unnatural angle before his wrist, then his elbow, snapped. Elijah twisted his body around as he landed; his free hand, holding his own sparring sword in a reverse grip, drew the blade along his opponent's throat. A sharpened Danja would have almost sliced his head from his neck.

The other two attackers were moving now as well, both of them hoping to overwhelm him by attacking from different angles. Using the momentum from his roll over the first attacker's back, he let his body fall to his knees, bending backward under the wild but practiced swings of the temporary enemies, and slid forward. One of his blades smashed into the kneecap of the man to his right with a sickening crunch. Spinning as he rose, Elijah trusted his sensitive skin to translate the rolling currents of air around him. The loud slap of one Danja deflecting another echoed around the room, then again, then again, as the anonymous swordmaster sent a flurry of attacks his way. Block, block, and then stepping back, the sudden shift in position causing his attacker to over-extend, leaving himself open to the perfectly placed counter. Elijah stepped forward inside the swing of the man.

A few broken ribs and a cracked sternum were not an injury to be scoffed at, but in real combat, the razor-sharp Danja would have pierced through his ribs and eviscerated his heart.

The heavy breathing and pained grunts coming from the floor of the practice area gave away the position of the man with the shattered knee. Elijah calmly strode toward him and finished him with a tap of his blade on his head. Of course, real combat would have seen his blade buried into the man's brain, but it was a practice bout, after all.

A loud clap from the corner of the room signified the end of the bout, and Elijah reached up to remove his blindfold. He turned and bowed first to his opponents. The three of them lay in crumpled, painful heaps where they had fallen. Medics were already rushing toward them. Imperial medicine would have those injuries fully healed in a matter of hours, so each man, despite their pain, returned the bow as best they could. Elijah then turned to offer a respectful bow to his robed and bearded instructor.

The ancient-looking warrior nodded his head, the closest he would ever come to offering one of his students a bow in return. Bows went up the chain of ability. Age, rank, and status had nothing to do with it. You bowed deeply to acknowledge the presence of someone more skilled than you; you offered a nod to acknowledge it. As good as the young prodigy was, Han Wu could break him like a dried twig with little more than a few well-practiced gestures. To even receive that nod of acknowledgment was an honor bestowed on very few, and Elijah was profoundly grateful to have earned the master's respect.

With a simple muttered command, Han Wu set Elijah to task. The instructor appraised him with an expert eye as he went through the many forms of this particular kata. Each movement was designed to train the body to perform an impenetrable block, or perfectly timed counter-attack, or an unstoppable strike.

"What is the purpose of Umwhaan?" The Wu asked calmly, circling the younger man, watching the flawless flow through the procession of forms.

"To bestow justice, Master," Elijah answered. The question was more than a test. Being able to use your mind when fighting was the key to surviving; instinct was all well and good, but there were some things that training could not teach. Being able to think clearly when performing another task was vital. More than that, interrupting the steady rhythm of breathing was important too. Deep, steady breaths were all well and good in a safe practice environment, but in a real combat situation, you were rarely given the time to catch a breath.

Elijah was concentrating too hard to spot the flicker of a frown that washed over his mentor's face. "And to whom do we provide that justice?"

"To anyone fighting oppression or tyranny," the student intoned automatically, his breathing level calm despite the excursions.

"Ah, but who are they? How does one know the difference between an innocent victim of tyranny and, say, a fleeing criminal battling against the forces of the law?"

It was Elijah's turn to frown; that question was a new addition to the test.

"Moreover, what even is tyranny? How would one recognize it?"

The sandy-haired, blue-eyed student kept moving through the kata, albeit a little less flawlessly, as he considered the question. "Tyranny is a consequence of rulership," he stated slowly. It was more like he was thinking aloud than answering the question. "Tyranny comes about when a leader denies unalienable rights to the people they lead; it is the oppressive removal of the rights that those people are broadly expected to possess."

Wu nodded. "And who decides what rights a person should have?"

"Society," Elijah answered firmly.

"Really?" Wu raised an eyebrow. "Mankind is a society with a long history of tyrannical leadership and refusing the rights of one group or another."

"I disagree," Elijah replied, his arms moving through graceful but deadly transitions as he adjusted his stance. "Relatively small sections of human society have been consumed by tyrannical leadership. The rest of mankind invariably came to the aid of the oppressed and restored balance."

"When it suited them," The aging master added.

"Yes, Master, but that was not the question. Society, as we know it now, encompasses the entire species, as well as the alien species who have integrated themselves into the Imperium. If a planetary governor went rogue and started to oppress his people for the benefit of himself or a smaller group of the population, the rest of society would step in to restore order."

Wu regarded the younger man as he circled him, watching each precise movement. "You have heard the rumors, I assume?"

Elijah paused for a moment. This test was venturing into dangerous territory, but given the context, there was only one thing the old master could be talking about.

Wu took the nervous glance from his student as an affirmative answer. "Then how do you explain this secession movement?"

"They are criminals, Master."

"All of them? How do you know? Have you met them all and asked them?"

Elijah furrowed his brow. "They are traitors to the Imperium."

"Why?" Wu watched as Elijah glanced around the empty room, "It's okay; you are free to speak plainly here. There will be no retribution for asking questions that improve knowledge."

Elijah stopped his movements and stood himself up straight before turning to face the Umwhaan master. "They defied the will and the orders of the Emperor. They broke away from the Imperium."

Wu raised an eyebrow as if this remark answered the previous question.

"Are you suggesting that this is a form of Tyrannical rule?" Elijah asked, his eyes widening a fraction of a millimeter at the implication. "It is treason to even think of questioning Imperial will!" The elder didn't change his expression. "I do not understand, Master."

Wu took a deep breath but managed to stifle the sigh. "Let's move on to the next set of kata, young one."

Elijah paused for a moment, watching an unfamiliar expression wash briefly over his mentor's face. He had been training with the man for the last seventeen years, ever since he was old enough to hold a Danja. He had surpassed every other student; he had been the youngest in history to achieve the golden belt of the highest rank, yet the look that flickered over his instructor's face looked almost like... disappointment.

As quickly as the look appeared, it was gone, replaced with the tilted head of expectation. Han Wu had given an order, and Elijah still wasn't moving. The young man snapped to attention, offered the respectful bow reserved for the grand masters, and moved his body into the first defensive pose.

He would be certain to be ready for the next test.

********

Stevo. 1

Sergeant Stephen 'Stevo' Taylor wrung his hands over the grip of the sleek, black X-44 assault rifle that was cradled safely in his arms as his squad marched toward the dropship loading bays. There were twelve bays on the heavy carrier in total, six on each side, and each of them held more than a score of dropships. The rest of his squad was chatting excitedly behind him, eager to go into a proper battle for the first time since their enhancements. The sergeant checked his weapon for at least the fifth time. It was the peak of infantry weapon technology, able to fire magnetically constricted laser bolts at ranges close to a mile. It could punch through concrete, melt through three inches of titanium armor, and eviscerate a human body accurately at 1500 yards. The power dropped off sharply after that, but it could still pack a lethal punch at 2000. He had to agree with the eggheads; this was one hell of a weapon. The optical sights attached above the firing mechanism would allow him to effectively identify and engage the enemy with almost no risk of friendly fire - thanks to the IFF feature of the in-built computer. The 'Identity friend/foe' system would outline any friendly soldier with a green aura making it possible to instantly gauge his position in relation to the rest of his squad.

With integrated radio in his tactical helmet, titanium/ceramic composite full-body combat armor, and enough power packs to keep him firing for weeks, he was among the most combat-ready troops ever assembled for war by the Imperium. His father had been a marine and had fought in the liberation of Signus IV. Stevo had grown up hearing tales of combat and heroism from the aging patriarch of the Taylor family, but Signus IV was the one battle he had never spoken about. Every question about it had been met with a haunted look and a soft shake of the head. It wasn't until he had signed up himself and started basic that he understood the reasons.

The medal in the case on the wall of his study and the missing right arm were more than enough evidence that Mark Taylor was one of the valorous few who had made it out of that battle alive. How a battle with an 84% casualty rate could be called a victory was beyond Stevo, but he couldn't help but wonder how much better the marines of his father's generation would have fared with the sort of tech he was carrying with him now.

He took a deep breath and shook his head clear. It had been a long time since he had been distracted by thoughts of home. His father, a hero of the Imperium, had all but disowned him when he had announced he was signing up. "Honor and glory are not bought with the blood of innocents!" He yelled, his red face contorted in fury. Stevo couldn't even begin to understand his opposition to military service, given the prestige his family and his father owed to his own. "I will not have a murderer living under this roof!" He had gone on without offering anything in the way of an explanation for the totally unexpected tirade. "So your choice is between them..." He gestured contemptuously to the service papers in Stevo's hands, "... or us!"

Stevo had chosen them. That was the last time he had seen home.

His new family had been with him since the start of his new life. Bravo Squad, 2nd Platoon, Rifle Company Able, 4th Battalion, 7th Regiment, 381st Marine Division. At least that was the full designation; in all honesty, Stevo had only ever met people outside Able company on a handful of occasions and could run over a member of another regiment with a truck and wouldn't know who they were. The Marines were an enormous extended family, but like most extended families, you were vaguely aware that there were other members, but you only ever saw them during big events. For most of his time in the military, Stevo had stuck with the men of his platoon and with the rest of his rifle squad in particular.

"C'mon, Sarge, we don't wanna be stuck with the cheap seats!" McCaffery called as he jogged past, landing a staggering hard slap on Stevo's shoulders. Dylan 'Mac' McCaffery had been Scottish in a former life, but the man was a giant, one that was able to move with surprising speed for his size. He was the squad's heavy weapons specialist, and his rotary plasma cannon was balanced effortlessly over his shoulder as his power-assisted armor allowed him to move the enormous weapon as if it weighed little more than a few pounds.

"He's right, Sarge," Angel agreed with a wry grin. "First man on the bird is the last man off. If we time it right, we can use his fat ass as a bullet sponge until we can get to cover." Angel was the squad sniper and the only member to still be using a ballistic weapon. Bullets were considered obsolete, but the ones being fired by Angel's SR-91 sniper rifle were hyper-accelerated by magnetic rails that ran the length of the barrel and hit with even more power than the plasma bolts fired from Stevo's assault rifle. Add to that the fact that they were tipped with explosives, and she could take down anything without a shield at ranges beyond two miles with relative ease.

"Jeez, gurl," Big G, the comms specialist, groaned with a teasing, beaming grin. "That's harsh, even from yo' fine ass!" His helmet was tucked under one of his arms, and his freshly braided cornrows swung freely around the top of his neck. Big G had earned his name by being easily the smallest, youngest member of the squad, a good six inches shorter than the hulking mass of McCaffery. Stevo had no idea what the G stood for. "That's not sayin' she ain't gotta point, though, Sarge."

Dusky, Ryan, and Rev all chuckled from behind him, shaking their heads at the intrasquad banter that often bordered on racist, sexually harassing, or downright hurtful. But these people were family, and none of them thought for a moment that the jibes were anything other than playful banter. "Hey, Sarge, we running the pool for this one?" Ryan called out. The ginger menace - as his squadmates called him - told people he was Irish. He wasn't. He was from Detroit and had abjectly failed to ever provide any sort of proof of any Irish heritage. He was also a bit of a gambling man.

"Yeah, Sarge," Angel called over her shoulder. "What was it in the last exercise, 100 credits buy-in, highest kill count get the pool?"

"Woo yeah," Dusky hollered, her caramel skin and chocolate eyes glowing with excitement at the prospect of combat. An odd response from the squad medic. "I'm going hunting. Hey Rev, you got a prayer for us?"

Rev was the son of a genuine Baptist preacher. Rumor around the platoon was that his father had even more of an extreme reaction to Rev's enlistment than Stevo's own. Despite the bonds of brotherhood and fraternity that existed in spades throughout the platoon, Rev was the only member who never spoke of home or his family there. Even with everything they had seen and everything they had done throughout their long military careers together, Rev had somehow managed to keep his faith. Stevo didn't know if he should be admired or pitied for that.

Rev held up his hands and looked towards the heavens - which was a surgical white deck plate three feet above his head in this case - and called out in prayer in a voice loud enough for every other man in the corridor to hear, too. "Heavenly Father," he started, falling into the cliche voice of a white Baptist minister that he swore was an accurate impersonation of his father. "We pray to you on this most illustrious day, beseeching you to grant us, the Three-Eight-One, victory in our hour of need. May Angel's bullets be straight and true as she delivers your justice..."

"Amen!" Angel called out.

"May Dusky and Ryan find their cover to be broad and tall and strong against the fire of thine enemies..."

"Amen," they both called back.

"May your most devoted son, Big G, fight with all the might that your righteousness can grant, and may his words be heard by all..."

"Amen, Reverend," Big G smiled, making the sign of the cross and kissing his fingers.

"May Sarge, our most noble leader, guide us with the character, the wisdom, the courage, and the fortitude that you expect from warriors of your armies..."

"Amen!" Stevo chuckled.

"Hey, whadabout me?" McCaffery arched an eyebrow as he lumbered backward, a few paces ahead of the rest of the troop.

"May your devoted son Dylan "Sun blotter" McCaffery keep his fat ass alive long enough to give us all cover to get off the bird..."

"Ah fuck you, man," McCaffery laughed.

"As we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we shall fear no evil because the Three-Eight-One are the baddest mother-fuckers in the valley! Thy rod and thy staff and red hot plasma fire comfort me! Also, Lord, we pray, at the moment that we need your guidance the most, that you totally fucking ignore the prayers of the other guys cos those rebel assholes are about to get FUCKED UP!"

"AMEN!" The hundred or so men of the rest of the platoon shouted as one, smiling and laughing as they listened, sounding off and filling the hallway with a wall of sound as Rev finished his prayer.

Shaking his head and laughing, the ranking member of the squad just walked onwards. The fear and adrenaline were starting to take hold now; that knot of anticipation and nervousness grew as they got inexorably closer to the dropship hanger bay. It wasn't a fear of dying. It wasn't even a fear of being injured. It was a fear of letting down his men. One bad call, one bad move, and all of them could be killed in the blink of an eye. The privilege of leading men into combat, despite what his father had screamed at him, was one of the highest honors that the Imperium could bestow on a man, and Sargeant Taylor had no intention of letting his men down.

He looked up at the numbers above each door they passed, each one marking an entrance into the upper hanger where the drop ships were waiting to be loaded. Twenty-three, the door to the bird that Bravo had been assigned to; the number loomed overhead, black numbers on a plain white placard that jutted out above head height on top of the doorway. McCaffery, ever the eager one, was leaning against the wall a little beyond the door, letting other squads go in first as the rest of Bravo caught up with them.

"You good, Mac?" He asked, turning back to watch the others slowly approaching.

"Aya, Sarge, Fightin' fit and ready ta go!" The certainty on his face wavered for a moment. Under any other circumstances, Stevo might have missed it, but that look of nerves perfectly reflected how he was feeling himself. They were the best trained, best armed, and best-led military unit in Imperium history, and that was before he took into account the augments that had been built into his body and into his DNA, but they were not mindless drones. None of the men and women boarding the birds had a death wish; none of them were beyond the fears of mortality, and despite their overwhelming advantages, all of them knew that a stray bullet or an unlucky step could be the difference between life and death. Zigging instead of zagging could get anyone killed.

Stevo nodded at the heavy gunner. "You got this, Mac. No stupid risks; just get off the bird, get to cover, and trust your training. We'll all be coming home."

Mac sighed heavily but nodded back. "Dun' nae worry about me, Sarge. I'll get the job done. I just... I don't wanna let the others down, ya know?"

"You and me both, man."

"Any final words of advice, fearless leader?" Angel grinned as the rest of the squad finally arrived at the docking bay entrance.

Stevo looked around all of them. "No heroics today, no showing off, and no unnecessary risks. You all know your roles. Stay fluid, keep moving, use cover where you can, watch your six, and watch out for each other. I want loud, clear, and concise communication from all of you. I'll take point; you follow me in. I want Dusky to be very bored on this one; if her med kit needs to be opened for any of you, I am gonna be pissed!"

"So, to be clear, Sarge," Ryan grinned, not a shred of fear in his voice, "we don't have permission to die."

"That's a big fucking negatory, dipshit," Sarge chuckled back. "Now, you head Mac, the first one on the bird is the last one off. Let's load up."

He stood aside to watch the other six members of his fire team clamber up the rear loading ramp of the DS-12 Condor Dropship, then followed him in. He paused for a moment at the base of the ramp, reaching up and placing his hand against the cool titanium hull of the craft and whispering a prayer of his own. "Look after my people, M'lady. Get us down safe, and bring them home alive."

********

Almark. 1

Flight Lieutenant Emylee Almark ran through her pre-flight checks for the second time. At 32, she had flown dozens of sorties in dozens of combat zones, not to mention countless numbers of simulator hours. A two-time ace, she was considered to be one of the best fighter pilots in the Marine Corps. Launching from the Goliath was new, though. Most of the older carriers had massive fighter bays; the craft would power up, raise from the deck of those cavernous hangers under the power of their anti-grav thrusters, and then, when the hanger doors were open, they would launch into the void with the thrust of their main engines.

The Goliath was a newer design. Broad hanger doors represented a large, indefensible, and very obvious chuck of real estate on the side of these gigantic ships. Unable to be reinforced by the super-structure, they were also a very obvious weak point for enemy gunners. The four flight decks were not just home to 250 fighters each but also the fuel and ordinance that came with them. Even a moderately lucky shot that managed to breach the hangar doors had a good chance of triggering secondary explosions, rendering the whole hangar completely inoperable and ending the lives of countless deck crew in the process. The newer designed Argonaught class carriers, of which the Goliath was a member, had the fighter and bomber bays run the length of the ship's interior, but individual aircraft would be catapulted through a series of launch tubes dotted along the lower part of the hull. It allowed entire wings to be launched simultaneously and also ensured that they were close to top speed when leaving the carrier, a massive tactical advantage if being scrambled directly into a close-quarters dog fight raging close to the carrier. With fifty tubes on each side of the vessel, the entire combat wing of 1000 fighters could be launched in a little over seven minutes. Today wouldn't need that level of rapid deployment, however, but with the whole squadron being tasked with escorting in the drop ships, followed by combat air patrol and close air support for the marine landings, it still promised to be more exciting than normal.

"Sabre wing, preparing for launch in T-minus thirty seconds, give go or no go," the voice of the flight controller crackled through Almark's radio.

"Roger and received, flight. I have green across the board. Go for thirty."

"Confirmed Sabre one."

"Hey half-pint," A voice came over the radio; Sabre four, her wingman, using her callsign to get her attention. She wasn't overly fond of the name, but she was short, and it was certainly better than some of the other ones she'd heard in her time. A pilot callsign was never their choice, it was bestowed upon them by their comrades and, once earned, were completely immune to even the most reasoned pleas for reconsideration. "Any intel on what we're facing down there?"

"That's a negative, Lurch," She replied. His name had come from the fact that the man was a massive 6'9" and towered over everyone else in the squadron. "We are going up against rebs, so intelligence thinks it could be anywhere between one and three whole combat wings."

Lurch scoffed. "Military intelligence, now there is a contradiction in terms. Alright, on your lead, boss lady."

"Sabre wing, prepare for launch in five... four... three..."

There were often moments when Emily was forced to consider the marvels that technology allowed. The catapult that propelled her XF-18 Broadsword down the Goliath's launch tube managed to accelerate an eight-ton piece of military hardware from zero to 300 miles per hour in less than two seconds. A brief glance down at her HUD highlighted the fact that the burst of speed equated to about twenty-seven Gs. If it wasn't for the inertial dampeners integrated into the fighter's airframe, her body would have been crushed under its own weight, and her ribs would now be touching her spine with the remains of her pulped lungs mushed around them.

The running lights that capped the launch tunnel blurred into a single line of light, and the slight vibrations of her engines merged with the dull rumble of the fuselage as the fighter rocketed down the frictionless rails - the vibrations coming from the thinning residual air in the launch tube rather than from contact with the catapult. Then, only a few seconds after the "go" was given, the vibrations and the lights suddenly vanished, and her broadsword was fired into the inky blackness of space. Shoving the throttle forward and banking to the right, she circled wide of the carrier's starboard hull to allow the rest of the squadron to deploy and give the rest of Sabre flight a chance to form up on her wing. The almost glowing blue and green ball of Vallen, the rebel planet, loomed large out of her portside canopy.

"Alright, Sabres, sound off," she called calmly into her radio as the shadows of the five other strike craft pulled into formation around her.

"Sabre 2, in position."

"Sabre 3, on station."

"Sabre 4, on your wing."

"Sabre 5, present Miss Half-Pint," She could almost hear Joker's grin through the radio.

"Sabre 6, reporting in"

She rolled her eyes but kept talking, allowing the smallest of smiles to pull at her lips. Joker was a nice guy, easy on the eyes, and one hell of a flirt. She'd have wiped that smirk off his face and blown his mind several times over by now if it wasn't for the whole inter-rank fraternization rules. "Alright, children, we are assigned to the first wave. We escort in the heavies and then provide top cover for our boys on the ground. We are in for the duration, so I hope you all visited the little pilot's room before we left."

"Don't make me turn this flight around!" Joker chuckled over the comm link.

"Watch for AA fire," Emily went on, ignoring the teasing comment, "and keep your eyes peeled for hostile interceptors. The whole combat wing has launched for this one, so identify targets before you engage. I don't want any friendly fire complaints when we get back. Those things are a fucking nightmare, and you all know how I feel about paperwork! We all copy?"

A ripple of affirmatives all echoed through the radio.

"Alright, form up on the dropships."

********

Stevo. 2

The dropship rattled as it broke through the upper stratosphere, buffeted by the high winds and thin air as the craft made the transition from the void of space to atmospheric flight. 500 dropships had left the Goliath, 125 craft per infantry wave - thirty marines of the 381st division in each dropship - the third and forth waves had their payload of Monitor IV battle tanks slung underneath them, the men of the armored detachment already inside them. They would land just like the rest of the Marines, ready to fight. As much as Stevo's nerves were rattled by being in the crew compartment of the Condor, he couldn't help but feel that the tank crews had it worse. Entering orbit in a tin can was never a comfortable experience, but at least his tin can had wings.

Heavily armored and possessing multilayered shields, these dropships were designed to survive landings under sustained fire, but they were large, slow, and difficult to maneuver. The fact that they were carrying thirty of the imperium's finest meant that they could accurately be called "bullet magnets" by the men inside. The smell of sweat, gun oil, and fear permeated the cabin as thirty sets of hands gripped tightly onto their weapons, and thirty pairs of eyes glanced nervously around at the other men of the platoon; there were no windows in the cabin, they could only look at each other or at the deck. Four squads were packed in tight along the hull-mounted seats, all tucked into harnesses. Twenty-eight marines were ready for combat. The Platoon commander, Captain Santiago, Stevo's commanding officer, paced up and down the center gangway; he and his radio operator made up the other two spots in the thirty-man complement. Beyond them, Stevo could make out the pilots in the cockpit, one of them manning the flight controls while the other stared intently at the holographic targeting displays for the chin-mounted chain gun and the underwing rocket pods that made up the dropship's defensive arsenal. Through the cockpit window, he watched as the inky blackness of space gave way to the dazzling azure of the atmosphere.

The sun was low in the sky, just starting its ascent into the heavens. Stevo was a sergeant, hardly one of the master tacticians who had put this op together, but there was something disconcerting about making a combat drop during daylight. The era when nighttime insertions were riskier or even more difficult was long gone; the entire division could have been dropped in during the darkness of night, making it much safer for the men being landed. The whole division could have been on the ground and ready to advance at first light, or, even better, they could have attacked before dawn. There were so many tactical and strategic advantages to a nighttime assault, even down to the fact that small arms fire being used against them was significantly less accurate at range unless the enemy had decent low-light optics. According to intelligence, they didn't, so why not take advantage of that? Instead, they were being tasked with mounting a frontal assault against a fortified position in broad daylight.

There was no doubt that they would be successful. Even if those defenses were being manned by Imperial Army regulars; they would be swept aside, let alone a rag-tag group of rebels. But still, he had a sneaking suspicion that this deployment was being used as a "proof of concept" to the military brass, a showcase of what this division and its augmented soldiers were capable of. In reality, the whole rebel position could have been vaporized from orbit with the marines sent in to secure the rubble; there was no need for this assault to happen at all. Men were going to die today for no other reason than someone up the chain of command wanted to show off to their boss. He just hoped that none of his men would be among them.

"The rebels have set up base on an Island in the Northern Hemisphere's largest ocean," The Captain called out, snapping Stevo's attention back to the moment. "We are to land on a large section of beach on the southern part of the island and advance on the main command structure in the center. Able company is landing on the extreme left of the line! Our orders are to clear out any bunkers and firing positions on our left flank to prevent the main assault force from being caught in a crossfire. Anti-air and anti-armor hardpoints are our priority, but this is a simple sweep-and-clear mission. We will be taking point with 8th platoon and 12th platoon, and we've got close air support from the gunships. I don't want any bullshit glory hunting today, Marines. Identify enemy strong points and weapon positions, call them back to me, and I will order an artillery mission to clear them out. I want a slow and steady advance with full unit cohesion; this is not a race to the finish, do you get me?"

"We get you, Sir!" The men of 2nd Platoon called back in one voice.

"Out-fucking-standing! We will be touching down in..." He turned and looked toward the cockpit, the pilot holding three fingers in the air. "...three minutes; check your weapons and armor now."

Stevo took a deep breath and looked down at his rifle, grateful to be able to think of something more productive than the intricacies of mission planning. The power pack was fully seated in the grip, charged and secure, the optics were activated, and the scope-link reticle flashed green in the eye-piece of his helmet, along with the shield status icon and ammo count. The X-44 standard-issue infantry battle rifle didn't have an ammunition capacity, per se. The powerpack could keep the weapon firing indefinitely, providing fire discipline was maintained, but using the weapon on full auto or even rapidly using the burst fire mode would heat up the powerpack and vent the excess energy through the heat sinks. If that was done too often or for too long, the power pack would run out and would need to be changed. Luckily, he was carrying a few spares. Firing on full auto was a rarity, though; the squad already had a support gunner, and burst fire was overkill against unarmored targets, so Stevo made sure his weapon was in single-fire mode, then checked the safety. That would be flicked off after leaving the bird. He checked the chin strap on his helmet, then noticing that barely thirty seconds had passed since the order was given; he checked them all again.

Stevo had never considered himself a religious man; he was not one of those who said a prayer before combat, but looking around the other twenty-seven seated men, he couldn't help but notice at least a dozen somber bowed heads and silently moving lips. That rambunctious, over-eagerness to get into the fight was reserved almost exclusively for men who hadn't seen enough real combat to know better. The sanest of all men were the ones who avoided the fighting like it was radioactive. It was an odd position for a veteran marine to hold, but people were going to die today. It would only be blind luck that would prevent one of those people from being him or one of his men. He had seen whole squads swallowed up in an artillery hit. He had watched dozens of men fall to a well-placed machine gun nest in previous engagements. Combat was a meat grinder. It was chaos and violence taken to extremes, and as proud as he was to serve in the Marine Corps, he was under no illusions; He and the men around him were little more than fodder.

The vibrations of the dropship suddenly ramped up in intensity as the first of the flak bursts exploded in the air outside the hull, throwing the men against their harnesses and knocking the captain onto the deck. He quickly scrambled to get into his seat as that now-familiar deathly silence filled the cabin. Every single Marine in every single dropship knew that despite the shields and the armored hull, one direct hit by those massive explosions and it would all be over.

********

Almark. 2

"Break formation and take evasive maneuvers!" Almark barked into her radio as she slammed the throttle lever forward and jerked the flight stick to the left. "Break through the flak and get eyes on the firing positions!"

The veteran pilot knew that flak only functioned effectively above a certain altitude; below that, the chances of being hit were minute, but the telltale flashes of the AA Flak batteries should be easy to spot from a lower altitude. She chanced a look over her right shoulder to check if her wingmen had formed up as ordered, but it was just in time to watch a dropship in the rear of the formation take a direct hit. Shields were great at deflecting solid projectiles and could usually only be worn down by energy weapon fire, but the airframes of the drop ship still relied on the fundamental properties of aerodynamics. An explosive direct hit essentially caused an enormous bubble of turbulence. That disrupted airflow smashed into the dropship with the same physical consistency as solid concrete; the shields did nothing to protect against air, no matter how dangerous. The right wing of the impacted dropship buckled wildly before snapping off, the shield emitters attached to it breaking away and destroying the cohesion of the shield bubble. Left unshielded, the shrapnel inside the flak bursts ripped into the hull. The armor deflected some, but not much. Most of the crew and the passengers had already been eviscerated by glowing chunks of super-sonic metal long before the dropship banked against its missing wing, rolled onto its back, and nose-dived toward the ground.

"Fuck!" she spat in frustration. There was nothing that could be done. Just like that, thirty-two men were gone. By the time the wreckage had plummeted out of view, another half dozen dropships were going down. One of them simply disintegrated under the wind shear and the loss of structural integrity. She watched in horror as the bodies of fellow marines were ripped out of the fuselage and dumped into the sky at the full mercy of the planet's gravity. Some of them were kicking and flailing as they fell, still alive as they fell tens of thousands of feet to their deaths.

The target island was tiny in comparison to the ocean around it, but in terms of landmass, it was roughly an equivalent size to the entire Island of Ireland. The landing zone was on the far south of it, but from this altitude - a dozen miles above sea level - it was impossible to make out anything in the way of detail, let alone pinpoint individual gun batteries. They were simply too far away. But Emily was a veteran pilot; she knew the capabilities of the land-based defenses that she normally flew against, and these cannons were no different. Designed to lob shells at targets as they entered the atmosphere, their barrels were enormous, upwards of 100 ft in some cases. It gave them a massive vertical range, but it severely limited the lateral firing angles.

Coming in over the ocean south of the Island meant that the positions of the gun emplacements could only be in the area around the landing zone. Signaling her crew to follow her in, she pushed the nose of her Broadsword down and dove toward the island. Soaking up the miles at mind-boggling speeds, her wing - along with a few others - rocketed out of the sky to get within visual range of the guns chewing up the dropship formation.

"There, I can see them!" Saddlebag, her number three, called over the radio. "Ridgeline above the beach at our one o'clock."

Emylee snapped her head forward and squinted at the landscape. It only took a few seconds to spot the characteristic muzzle flashes of heavy flak cannons. "Nice work, three!" She flicked a switch on her flight stick to change to communication with the Destroyers. "Fight control; this is Sabre one. Priority fire mission request, over."

She had already adjusted her HUD to display the grid reference overlay by the time control got back to her. "Roger, Sabre one. Ready for fire mission.."

"Grid reference, one-six-eight by zero-nine-nine. Raise twenty-five, right forty. Fire when ready!"

Almark had been flying ground combat missions for long enough to read those reference charts in seconds. Each square was overlaid on her HUD from the perspective of the command ship in orbit, and each represented about one-hundred-square meters, far too big an area to target anything accurately. The number raised, and the number adjusted to the right were her estimations - based on a fraction of a second's worth of a glance - how far above the bottom grid line and how far right of the left grid line her target was. She would need to be much more careful when friendly forces were on the ground, but if she could guide in munitions close enough to the target to even disrupt fire, that would be enough to save Imperial lives.

The sky ripped open a few hundred yards to her right as the MAC rounds shot past. The Magnetically Accelerated Cannon was a monster of weapons engineering, and there were six of them on each of the three destroyers providing support for the landings. Able to launch a shell not much smaller than her fighter at hypersonic speeds, the impact of the shell alone was enough to cause massive amounts of damage, but with its antimatter explosive payload, it was truly devastating. The ridgeline on which the Flak cannons were situated erupted in a colossal ball of fire and sundered earth, the force of the blast gouging an enormous crater out of the land and tossing the debris into the air. The cannons vanished in the explosion, the force of the blast ripping the emplacement - and the rebels manning them - apart in the blink of an eye. Other squadrons must have spotted other emplacements on different parts of the target island because the air seemed to come alive with the racing shells of the naval bombardment. The destroyers fired off their massive batteries as fire requests came in fast. Huge portions of the mountain range overlooking the landing beach were blown out of existence, and scores of enemy guns were systematically destroyed.

Pulling up on the flight stick to slow her angle of descent, she arrested the rapid rate that the planet's surface was racing up at her and leveled out. Checking her scanners quickly; it looked like all of the airborne contacts within range were friendly. The momentary smile of relief was quickly replaced by a frown.

"Really?" She thought to herself. "No fighter defense at all? That can't be right. This is supposed to be the rebel stronghold. There should be interceptors everywhere!"

Her wingman was apparently thinking the same thing. "Err, Half Pint, are you seeing this?" Sabre 2's voice came over the radio, and her face appeared on the holographic display in front of her.

"Yeah, I see it, Buzzkill."

"So I'm not the only one concerned about the clear skies, then."

"What's there to complain about?" Joker's grinning face appeared next to Buzzkill's on the holographic display. "Ronald Reb saw that we were coming, they threw in the towel and legged it. Can't say I'm surprised; my reputation does precede me," He chuckled to himself, but Almark saw through the self-deprecating joke. The entire wing had expected to fly into a shit storm of enemy fighters as soon as they cleared the flak ceiling. Instead, there wasn't a single rebel craft in the air, meaning one of two things; either the rebels didn't have any - an idea so absurd as to dismiss out of hand immediately - or they were being held back for some reason. And that vastly more likely explanation made her nervous.

It made her very nervous.

"All wings, this is Sabre one. No enemy contacts in the air, but keep your eyes peeled. If they are being held back for some reason, we need to be ready when they join the fight. Keep your formations and watch your sixes."

She waited a few seconds for the various flight leaders to acknowledge her transmission before turning her attention back to her own wing. "Duck?" Sabre six's face appeared on the screen, her remarkable good looks still clear despite the flight helmet and screen resolution. "I want you to hang back on the strafing runs and keep an eye on your scope for enemy fighters; I don't want us being caught out when we are on our runs."

Visibly disappointed by not being able to score any ground kills, she nodded nonetheless. "Roger, One. I've got my eyes peeled."

"Don't worry about your kill count. If nothing comes after two runs, I will rotate you out. Everyone will be getting the same shot at scoring some kills today."

"'Cept you," Joker grinned. "You will be down in the muck with the rest of us racking up your tally."

"The burdens of command, Five, the burdens of command." She smiled at Joker's laughing face before turning her attention back to the task at hand. "Alright, let's do our first fly-by, see if we can't have a look-see at what is waiting for our boys. Sabre wing on me!"

********

Stevo. 3

It was loud in the dropship cabin. The craft had been rocked and buffeted by flak bursts for what seemed like an eternity, despite only being a few minutes. Mixed with the dull roar of the engines, the noise in the cabin would have overwhelmed the hearing of any normal human. But Stevo - along with the rest of the three-eight-one marines - wasn't normal; one of the upgrades they had received was augmented hearing. Perfect for stealth missions and security patrols, it gave them the ability to filter out background noise and focus on sounds they wanted to hear. In this case, Stevo was listening to the half-whispered conversations between the pilot and the company captain.

"How many have we lost?" Captain Santiago asked, his head craned to the side to peer out of the cockpit at the rest of the formation.

"So far? Twenty-one." The pilot answered somberly.

"Twenty-one?!?" Santiago gasped, snapping his head back with a look of disbelief and horror on his face. "That's almost a fifth of the first wave's landing force! What the fuck happened to sporadic and light AA fire??"

The pilot just shook his head. The Captain at least had the decency to realize that those twenty-one dropships didn't just hold marines of his company but also friends of the pilot flying his.

"Fuck!" The Captain exhaled deeply, patting the pilot on the shoulder. "Alright, Lieutenant, keep up the good work. Get my boys down in one piece, and you won't pay for another drink for the rest of this deployment."

"Roger that, sir."

********

Almark. 3

"Holy fucking mother of Santa Claus!" Joker gasped, his face appearing on Half-pint's screen. "Are you seeing this?"

Seeing it? It was impossible to miss! The beach and the hills overlooking it were filled with enough gun emplacements to bring down a shielded battleship if they were aimed upward. The wall of laser fire that they could lay down would eviscerate the dropship formation in a matter of seconds if they followed their assigned flight path to the landing site.

"Dropship control, this is Sabre One," she barked into her comms unit, ignoring Joker for the time being.

"Sabre One, this is control; go ahead."

"This is an urgent redirect. The dropships must descend to a lower altitude over the ocean and fly in low to the beach. Extremely high numbers of AA weaponry covering their current approach vector, over!"

"Errr... that's a negative, Sabre One. Intelligence reports very little anti-air capabilities at the LZ. That is why it was chosen."

"Then get one of those assholes to fly down here and check it out for themselves. If the dropships follow their current descent path, they will be flying right at them; you will be looking at a total loss! It will be a fucking turkey shoot!"

There was a pause over the radio, presumably as some very worried-looking officers scrambled to process this new information. "Roger, Sabre One. A new decent vector has been transmitted to the dropships. They will reach their approach altitude fifteen miles out to sea and approach at low level from there. Thank you for the intel. Pass on our regards when you blow those rebel bastards to hell."

"Not a problem control. We are just about to start our attack runs; we will be sure to pass on your best wishes."

"Happy hunting, Sabres. Control out."

"You heard them, Sabre wing," She called into the radio, the almost feral excitement at upcoming combat starting to stir in the pit of her stomach. "Time to introduce ourselves."

"It's about goddamn time," Joker grinned at the screen. "I was starting to feel a little antisocial up here."

"Five, don't make me swap your spot with Duck."

"Roger that, Sabre five. Shutting the hell up."

"Adda boy." Almark chuckled to herself. Joker was a pain in the ass, but - as the saying went - he was her pain in the ass. He made inappropriate jokes, had zero respect for comms discipline, and a lot of people would call his attitude toward his superiors a lesson on insubordination, but when it came down to it, he was a solid pilot, he was cool under fire, he followed orders, and was the sort of wingman you would want covering your ass when the shit hit the fan.

"Holy shit Half-Pint," Lurch laughed over the radio. "Getting Joker to shut up; that's an Imperial distinguished service medal right there."

"Fuck, it's at least a Hero of the Imperium medal if I ever saw one!" Duck added with a laugh of her own.

A burst of static over the radio silenced the jokes. "This is Scimitar flight, beginning our strafing run over the eastern side of the LZ."

Emylee clicked her thumb over the comm switch. "Good luck and happy hunting, Scimitar One, Sabre flight starting our strafing run over the western flank." She let go of the toggle switch with her thumb and switched back to intra-flight comms. "Alright, enough with the comedy act; it's game time. Form up on me, and follow me in. Weapons free! May God have mercy on their souls, 'cause we're going to have none!"

********

The broadsword fighters were marvels of modern technological engineering. A single-seater, multi-role, atmospheric, and stellar fighter, it was capable of performing almost any strike craft mission short of heavy bombing runs. It was a sleek, aerodynamic design with swept wings and a narrow fuselage reminiscent of humanity's earlier jet fighters. Heavily shielded but lightly armored, it relied on exceptional speed and maneuverability to out-perform and evade enemy interceptors and anti-strike craft defenses - be them on the ground or bolted onto the sides of capital ships - but with its four rotary-barrelled, rapid-fire laser guns and two heavy plasma cannons slung under its wings, it was capable of dishing out an extraordinary amount of firepower for its size.

Short of having a single means of propulsion, the Broadsword actually had three. Its conventional plasma/ion engines were capable of giving it astonishing bursts of speed. Only needed to be used in short bursts for forward momentum and acceleration in space; it was also capable of providing thrust for upwards of 1,600mph in-atmosphere. For maneuverability, it relied on retro thrusters dotted all along its hull, which diverted some of the thrust from the engines to quickly change direction.

Where the real genius of the Broadsword's design came into its own, however, was in the inclusion of antigrav thrusters. In space flight, these thrusters were useless for anything more than slight, low-speed course corrections and takeoff and landing from carriers. But in atmospheric flight, they really came into their own. Able to counter the gravitational pull of the planet and coupled with a remarkably strong inertial dampening system, it allowed the fighter to maintain the same levels of maneuverability in-atmosphere as it had in space. In the hands of a well-trained pilot, this craft could fly sideways, backward, or in any direction it wanted, using its forward momentum to maintain flight while pointing its weapons systems at whatever target the pilot liked. More than that, without the concern of crushing the pilot under staggering amounts of G force, the aircraft was able to change direction at an eye-watering rate. Able to fly at 800 mph in one direction, flip over, and then accelerate to the same speed in the opposite direction in less than a few hundred feet without any of the adverse effects this would normally have on a pilot. To say that this level of maneuverability made it a formidable dog-fighting craft was an understatement of biblical scale, but more importantly, it allowed the fighter to race across a battlefield while still being able to keep its guns on target even after passing it. The overwhelming majority of the craft's weight was dedicated to providing an airframe strong enough to withstand these maneuvers, with second place going to the weapons.

Nowhere near powerful enough to go up against shielded capital ships, its primary function was to sweep an area clean of enemy fighters and bombers before - in the case of planetary operations like this one - using its plasma cannons to attack ground targets. With shields able to shrug off all but the heaviest of small arms fire, the only thing the fighter needed to worry about were heavier AA emplacements or Anti-Air missiles - neither of which were fast enough to keep up with the speed and agility of this well-rounded fighter - and other fighters.

The strength of the shields, however, was also the fighter's Achilles heel. If the shields were knocked out, either by enemy fire or a systems malfunction, the Broadsword became extremely exposed. The armor was paper thin. Pound for pound, the marines about to land on the beach were carrying heavier and thicker armor than that protecting the pilot and the rest of the aircraft. The standard operating procedure drilled into any broadsword fighter pilot was a simple one. If the shields failed, you got the fuck out of the area using the vastly superior speed and then headed back to the carrier as quickly as the engines could carry you.

Considering that this level of shield failure had never happened, the pilots who flew the broadswords quickly fell in love with the strike craft.

********

Verdant balls of fire erupted from the trenches and the reinforced bunkers as thousands of plasma bolts from hundreds of ground attack fighters punched into the defensive lines. Somewhere at the back of her mind, Flt Lt. Almark was questioning how the rebels managed to get so many men and static defenses in position in time for the landings. Either they were much better prepared than she had imagined, or there were a lot more of them than anyone expected, and all of them happened to be just in the right spot.

Yanking her flight stick to the right to avoid a burst of optimistic laser fire blasted into the air, she followed the stream of red dashes back to its source, put the domed bunker under her crosshairs, and pulled the trigger. The airframe rocked a little as the plasma cannons unleashed their glowing green munitions, and Emylee watched as they smashed into the fortification. She didn't fully understand the physics involved with those weapons, but she understood enough to know that the penetration power of the shot was governed by the strength of the magnetic constrictor field around the bolts - easily being enough to punch a square-foot hole in the shell of the fortification - before the actual plasma was allowed to detonate. That was the source of the terrifying viridescent explosion that blew the bunker, and the rebel soldiers inside it, to pieces. Concrete, chucks of reinforced masonry, broken AA weapons, and broken bodies were tossed into the air, some of the larger parts raining down on the surrounding earthworks and crushing men before they could scramble out of the way.

She almost felt sorry for them... almost. Her obedience and loyalty training had taught her the penalty for this kind of treason, and she was happy to be the fist of the Emperor's retribution.

"Die, you rebel bastards!" Joker howled over the comms. "It's like shooting fish in a barrel. I'm gonna need a gun-cam review to be able to count my kills at this rate."

"Wait, we're counting ground kills for the rankings?" Duck asked in dismay from her place circling a thousand feet above the battlefield.

"No, Duck, we're not." Emylee chuckled as she strafed a trench line with laser fire before turning an anti-armor cannon into a melted, twisted pile of metal and body parts. "I think Joker is just getting a little carried away. Only priority mission targets and air kills are counted."

"Oh thank fuck for that!" Buzzkill answered. "To be honest, I'm not sure I could live with myself if Joker got a higher score than me."

"Again," Joker grinned.

"Yeah, yeah. You got lucky," Buzzkill groaned with a roll of her eyes.

"You're Sabre five for a reason, fuck nuts," Saddlebags teased him.

"Yes, okay. Knocking up that Admiral's daughter may have been ill-advised," Joker grinned boyishly. "But god damn, Sooo worth it. That girl could suck a golf ball through a garden hose and was dynamite in the sack. Besides, she literally begged me for it!"

"She couldn't have known you very well then," Lurch winked. "I can't imagine any girl begging you to go without protection if she did."

"You'll get no argument from me on that one." Joker laughed, a green flash reflecting off his visor as he finished off another enemy position. "And no, I met her less than ninety minutes before she was begging me to become a daddy."

"She didn't call you..."

"Oh yes, yes she did," Joker winked at the comms unit before leaning sharply to the right. "Whoo, the... erm... The laser fire is getting a little thick over here. That last batch zinged my shields a bit."

Snapping straight back into professional mode, Half-pint barked out the question. "What's your shield strength, five."

"Shields holding at seventy-four percent."

"Seventy-four?" Saddlebags asked, the joking banter replaced with immediate and evident concern. "That was a lot more than a zing."

"Agreed," Almark nodded, turning her broadsword to the area Joker was staffing. "Five, pull up to a safe altitude and swap out with six. Duck, you're in."

"Roger that, One," both pilots answered immediately and almost unanimously. Even if nobody said it, the fact that Joker wasn't arguing and pleading to stay in the fight, and the fact that Duck wasn't gloating about replacing him, was more than enough evidence that things were getting hairy.

"No more idle chat; focus on the mission. The dropships will be on the final approach by now. ETA can't be more than ninety seconds."

********

Michaels. 2

Colonel Michaels took another glance at the battle map and frowned. Thanks to the skill and professionalism of the air wing, his wave of dropships, along with the two before it, would be entering the combat zone some thirty miles out to sea, well outside the range of the Flak cannons. Only the first wave had to weather that particular storm. The destroyers may have rained down all kinds of holy hell on those positions, but that was no guarantee that they had all been silenced. Sabre One had already been earmarked for a medal for her actions, not only in getting the first MAC rounds on target but for her revision of the descent vectors that undoubtedly saved hundreds of lives.

Flight controllers could be a petulant and stubborn bunch, but she had sliced through their intransigence like a plasma blade through butter.

That, however, was not what had the Colonel frowning. His battle map was refusing to cooperate. The interactive table in front of him should already be showing a 3D, topographical, holographic map of the combat zone, complete with all known enemy positions and the location of friendly forces. He should have been able to see, at a glance, the layout of the terrain, bottlenecks, strategic weak points, and traps. Instead, he was only able to see a top-down, two-dimensional rendering of the area with zero information on enemy positions, next to no details of the terrain, and very limited indicators of where his own forces were. Someone was going to be put up against a wall and shot for this degree of fuck up. All the wonders of modern technology, the best Marine Division in the Navy's history under his command, a target personally ordained by the Emperor himself, and he was reduced to reading a map and guessing his force's layout like a fucking savage.

Unfortunately, there was nothing he could do about it at that particular moment. Not for lack of will but because he was currently strapped into his seat in the command center of his modified Monitor IV battle tank, slung under the belly of a Condor Dropship about fourteen miles above the ocean of a rebel planet. The Marines had been using the term 'Snafu' for centuries, but he could only marvel at how relevant it still was.

Situation normal: All Fucked up!

He huffed and sat back in his seat. Until he got on the ground and could assess the situation for himself, he would just have to listen to the radio chatter and trust the Marines to do their jobs. From what he could gather, half of the fighter wings had commenced their strafing runs, and although AA fire had been much more robust than expected, losses were at a minimum. The rest of the fighters were escorting in the dropships, the first wave of which was due to touch down at any moment.

The first wave's job, albeit a dangerous one, was relatively simple. Secure the LZ and engage any enemy targets that posed a direct threat to the rest of the landing. The second wave would join them, pushing out to secure the beachhead. The third and fourth waves should then be able to land with comparative ease, and, from there, they would break out of the beachhead in force and advance on the rebel stronghold. Once the local forces had been destroyed, the 381st would hold their position until being relieved by the reinforcing divisions being brought in on the heavy carrier Colossus in a few days time.

Four days of hard fighting. That is all the three-eight-one had to prove that the experiment had been a success. When the Colossus's task force arrived in the system, they would take over ground operations, including the long-term occupation of the planet, while Col. Michaels' division was shipped back to the Goliath for the long journey home. But all of that would have to wait until after the bloodletting, and Michaels couldn't afford to be distracted right now. All he could do was follow the blips on his malfunctioning map as the dropships approached the beach.

The first wave hitting the beach; a truth as valid now as it was during Earth's first, second, and third world wars, was the fact that they often suffered enormous losses. Softening up the enemy defenses with naval bombardment and air support helped their chances, but it was rarely enough. Those men would be facing everything the enemy had to throw at them. Michaels had been at Signus IV, he was in the second wave that day, and he still had nightmares about the things he had seen. There wasn't much left of the first wave by the time he landed; entire regiments had been wiped out to a man, and those that were left were in no position to continue the fight. His wave had replaced them, and he had been shown the full horrors of modern military combat. As bad as the massacre had been, it was also the catalyst for change. Sweeping improvements to the command structure, vast technological overhauls, and the rapid implementation of upgraded equipment had made a huge difference. The Marines of today were not only more formidable than they had been back then, but they also had a lot more survivability. Still, a first wave was always going to be a first wave. He glanced back at the map as his first wave approached the beach. A lot of good men were about to die.

********

Stevo. 4

They were still in the air when the rear loading ramp started to open. Stevo's squad would be the second out of the bird. Fortunately, the drop ship would be facing the enemy, allowing its chin-mounted chain gun to provide cover while the marines poured out of the back. The days when the first few rows of men were mowed down before they could step onto enemy soil had passed, but not by much. There was still that first frantic dash to find cover.

"Touch down in 15 seconds," The Captain called out. "Get to cover and secure the LZ. Good luck, gentlemen. I will see you at the finish line. Give 'em hell, marines!"

"Hoo-rah!" came the unanimous reply.

The dropship rocked as its landing struts touched down, and the ramp finished its descent a few seconds later. Delta squad was the first out of the door; Stevo took a deep breath, nodded to his troopers, and charged down the ramp after them.

For a few brief, merciful seconds, nothing happened. The sounds were muted by the adrenaline racing through his veins. The roar of the dropship engines, the barked commands of other sergeants, the rattling of the chain gun providing suppressive fire, all of it was drowned out by the sound of Stevo's own heavy breaths, his feet hitting the sand, and his heart pounding in his ears.

Then all of hell broke loose.

From hundreds, perhaps thousands of points further up the beach and along the hills beyond, the rebels opened fire. Most of the small red dashes were wildly off target, fired by small arms, but the few that hit were absorbed by the marine's shields. However, the larger heavy lasers, the ones usually reserved for shooting down heavily shielded fighters, or heavily armored dropships, were much more potent. A member of Delta squad was a few meters ahead of him, running toward the cover of some rocks sticking out of the sand; a few smaller caliber bolts bounced harmlessly off his shield bubble before a heavy laser round found its mark. Punching through his shield like it wasn't even there, it hit the marine in the upper chest. The heat and the power of the bolt incinerated the man's skin and flash-boiled the blood around the impact point, causing his body to balloon out for a split second and explode like a burst grape. Everything above his abdomen was ripped into pieces, and a hail of blood, shredded skin, and bloody mulch sprayed into the air before raining down onto the ground around him and any marine unfortunate enough to be running over it. The legs somehow took another step before toppling to the side.

Stevo could only watch as another Marine was hit in the same way, then another. Being on the far left of the line, he could look to the right to watch the entire first wave racing from the birds to the nearest cover, man after man falling to the merciless onslaught of the defender's heavy guns. Turning his attention back to the task at hand, he wheeled a little to the left and made a beeline for what looked to be a collapsed marble pillar. Cover to about chest height and large enough to hide his entire squad behind without needing to bunch them up, it would be perfect cover while they regrouped and prepared for the advance.

The air cracked as a heavy round snapped past his ears, missing his head by inches. The instinctive flinch and duck away from the sound caused him to stumble forward; a blast from behind him, doubtlessly from a mortar round, knocked him further off balance and caused him to lose his footing as he fell. He landed hard on his shoulder, instinctively rolling to make sure his rifle was kept out of the sand, and his lungs promptly emptied themselves under the impact. He looked up in time to see a heavy laser shot rip through the air in which he would have been standing if not for the fall, and clumps of sand were raining down on him from the explosion. Deciding that having the wind knocked out of him was significantly preferable to evisceration, he pulled himself to his feet and carried on his panted, breathless dash to cover.

After only a few seconds of sprinting - a few seconds which felt more like a few hours - he dove behind the collapsed white marble column. Stevo may not have been one of the officers in charge of strategic planning, but he knew a shit show when he saw one, and one glance over the top of the cover was all he needed to see how much the brass had fucked up. They were on a beach, an actual fucking beach. Of all the places they could land on an island of more than 25,000 square miles, they managed to choose the worst possible spot. Their backs were literally to the water, with only a few hundred yards between them and the cresting waves. To make matters worse, both sides of the beach were blocked by towering, imposing-looking rock cliff faces that spouted at least 100 feet into the air. There was absolutely no room to maneuver, and there was absolutely nothing in the way of flanking opportunities for the marines, while the rebels could take the high ground on the cliffs and fire down into them with impunity. In fact, he was absolutely staggered that they hadn't realized that yet. There was almost no cover between this column and the first trench line aside from a few broken rocks at the base of the cliff. And from their summit, any rebel soldiers on the cliff could render his current cover useless. They would be wide open if the rebels got their shit together.

Their objective, according to a waypoint on his helmet's HUD, was at the top of the hills at the far end of the beach, meaning the only avenue of attack was a full frontal assault against entrenched, well-prepared, fortified positions and an enemy who seemed to be more than a little prepared for them. A decently aimed rebel artillery barrage could end this assault in its infancy. That mortar attack had already killed scores of marines, and the heavy lasers were still taking their toll. It was only the undisciplined use of small arms that gave him any hope of success. Once they got inside the firing arcs of those heavy laser emplacements, they should be in a much better position.

Mac was only a second or two behind him, crashing his shoulder into the stone cover and panting hard as he looked over at the sergeant. Stevo offered him a wordless nod before they both looked back down the beach for the rest of the squad.

Angel was the first to appear out of the carnage, seeming to dance around the incoming fire before squatting down behind cover and chancing a glance up the beach at her soon-to-be targets. Rev was next, looking around wildly before spotting the three of them and sprinting over.

"Where are the others?" Stevo barked at him, not really expecting an answer but refusing to believe at that point that only half of his squad had survived a fifty-meter dash.

Rev just breathlessly shook his head. "I don't know, Sarge. I lost sight of everyone in the mortar attack."

Stevo looked back again. The dropship was just taking off, making room for the second wave; the wash from the massive plasma engines banished the smoke from the impact craters and revealed the litter of blasted and mutilated corpses covering the beach. "There!" Mac said, pointing into the carnage. Stevo followed his arm, making out the two figures stumbling towards them.

Ryan was missing a leg. The shattered armor and shredded flesh ended in bloody tatters just above where his right knee once was. Dusky was supporting him, his arm over her shoulder and hers around his waist, he was hopping as fast as he could, but it was clear that Dusky was doing most of the work.

"Shit! Angel, break out the portable shield, Mac, Rev, cover fire!"

"You got it, Sarge!" Mac grunted as he swung his multi-barreled support weapon off his shoulder and onto the top of the column. With a brief check down the sites, he squeezed the trigger and unleashed a blizzard of green plasma bolts at the closest enemy positions. Stevo pulled the butt of his rifle into his shoulder, leaned around the edge of the column, sighted the rebel's heads sticking out of the trenches a few hundred yards ahead of them, and opened fire as Rev did the same on the other side of Mac. Their smaller red laser shots, mixed with the torrent of green plasma bolts, smashed into the enemy position. One unshielded head was hit by one of Stevo's rounds, the heated shot punching a smoldering hole the size of a grapefruit straight through it. A few more were blown to pieces as Mac found his mark before he turned his attention to a heavy laser emplacement.

Angel sprinted out towards her squad mates. With the Sarge, Rev and Mac making a nuisance of themselves, most of the incoming fire was being directed at them, leaving the path open for her to help Dusky drag Ryan to safety. Being an expert marksman, she had recognized the rebel fire for what it was, wildly inaccurate and relying on sheer weight of numbers - rather than training - to score lucky hits. She had no doubt that one marine platoon could have wiped out every man and woman evacuating the dropships on this part of the LZ. Some of the shots being aimed in their direction were passing twenty feet above their head; no self-respecting drill sergeant would ever let a marine pass basic training with that level of inaccuracy. The heavier emplacements had built-in sights, that made them more dangerous, but there were nowhere near as many of them, and a good number of those were still targeting the strike craft racing up and down the lines.

She reached her wounded squadmate and the medic in only a few seconds, slinging her rifle over her shoulder and hooking herself under Ryan's left arm. "C'mon ginge, you're holding us up!" She jibed playfully. "I should be over there blowing up rebel skulls, but noooo, instead, I'm dragging your mangled ass off the beach."

"Fuck you, Angel!" Ryan laughed through what must have been excruciating pain. "We both know you would still want my ass even if it was mangled. Luckily, it's only my leg, and I was blessed with a spare. I can't imagine how pissed you're gonna be when I beat your scores with a prosthetic."

"Yeah, yeah, hop along! We'll see!" She looked over his shoulder at Dusky; that look of stoic determination was one she had seen on countless medics over the years. In her opinion, there was nobody on a battlefield who could compete with a medic when it came to courage. Some of the things she had seen those crazy bastards do to rescue a fellow marine had blown her mind. "Sarge wants me to drop the porta-shield. Do you want to do this here or get him to cover?"

Dusky met her eyes and shook her head. "He's stable; I stopped the bleeding back there. Let's just get him to cover."

"Roger that. Have you seen Big G?" She cast a look behind them, looking for the youngest member of bravo squad.

"I'm right here," his cheerful voice burst over coms. All three of them turned to see him running out of a pillar of smoke, his armor spattered with sand and scorch marks. "One of those fuckin' mortars got pretty close. Turned me 'round for a second. Miss me?"

"Glad you could make it," Angel called back. "Get up there with Sarge and help lay down cover fire."

"Nah, you're the better shot here, ma'am," He said as he caught up with the walking wounded. "You'll be better placed up there while I help the cripple. Besides, yo' fine ass looks better without this fool's blood all over it."

"Hey, I'm right here," Ryan complained.

"I know, and we should be over there, so hop faster!" Dusky panted.

"Alright, grab him," Angel nodded, giving up her place under Ryan's left arm for Big G. "No fucking around, get to cover as fast as... son of a bitch!" she swore as a small arms bolt bounced off her shoulder. "Yeah, these fuckers are starting to piss me off. Get him to cover!"

"Starting to piss you off??" Ryan laughed, still bravely ignoring the pain. "They shot off my leg, they made Dusky open her med kit - and you know how the sarge feels about that - and to make matters worse, I lost my fucking rifle!"

"Yeah," Angel snorted. "Get him to cover so Sarge can kill him."

Big G's laugh was cut off by a wet crunch as a heavy laser bolt hit him in the face. His head exploded. His throat and his left shoulder were taken along with it. His severed arm dropped to the floor as Dusky and Ryan stared at him in horror. The force of the impact knocked what was left of him onto his back, where his leg twitched macabrely. The three of them were frozen in shock, their helmets and armor painted in the arterial spray, bone fragments, and brains of their friend.

"Fuck, G is down, I repeat, G is down!" Angel yelled, her voice automatically being carried to every other member of the squad.

"Fuck, G! No, fuck...!" Ryan dropped onto his good knee and dragged himself over to his friend.

"He's gone!" Dusky screamed at him, not even needing to check to be sure. "There's nothing we can do. We have to leave him!" She immediately rushed over to Ryan, trying to grab hold of him to pull him to safety. There was nothing left of Big G above the chest, she didn't need to be a medic to know that he was gone.

"No, I ain't fuckin' leavin' him. I can't..." Ryan batted frantically behind him to push her arms away from him.

"GET OFF THE GOD DAMNED BEACH!" Stevo's voice yelled through the comms.

Dusky and Angel exchanged a look before each of them hooked an arm under one of Ryan's armpits and dragged the screaming marine the last few yards to cover.

Hurling Ryan into cover, Angel immediately unslung her long-barrelled rifle, flicked the cap off the scope, rested the barrel on the top of the column, and started firing. Each one of her deadly accurate shots ended the life of at least one rebel as the explosive rounds tore into any target she spotted. Dusky was working on pure instinct. Ignoring Ryan's sobs, she immediately went to work sealing his wound.

"He was right there," Ryan sobbed hauntedly. "He was right fucking there. It's my fault; I got him killed. He's dead, and it's my fucking fault."

Stevo spun around, grabbed Ryan's helmet under the chin, and jerked his head to face him. "Stow that shit, marine!" he barked. "It is not your fault; it's theirs!" He pointed in the direction of the rebel defenses. "They fucking shot him, not you. He was doing his job; now it's time for you to do yours, that's how we make sure he didn't die for nothing! You're on comms duty now, and I expect you to get your shit together. We make every one of these assholes pay, and then we give G the send-off he deserves. Are you with me, marine?"

Ryan looked deep into Stevo's eyes. The look of horror at G's death quickly morphed into one of grim resolve before he gave a nod. "I'm with you, Sarge. We're going to fuck them up!"

"That's what I want to hear. Dusky, how's he doing?"

"He's not going to be line dancing anytime soon, but he is stable. No chance of him bleeding out, but I strongly advise leaving him here while we advance."

"Yeah, that's fine. We need him on comms, and he doesn't have a weapon anyway." He spun back around and fired another handful of shots downrange. "Okay, Mac, Angel, stay here and maintain suppressive fire. Rev, Dusky, you're on me; we are going to flank around the left and storm that trench line. Stay low, stay fast, and keep your eyes peeled. We have another ten minutes before the second wave lands, and I want those emplacements silenced before they do," He ducked out of cover and popped off another dozen rounds. "Move!"

Stooping low, the three marines roadie-ran along the length of the broken column and darted over the short clearing to the base of the cliffs. Stevo had not been thrilled with the idea of being on the extreme end of the line, but with little risk of being flanked, thanks to the cliffs, it was no different than anywhere else. He wasn't sure if the cover provided by the fallen rocks could be replicated anywhere else along the front, so the normally precarious position actually worked in their favor. They may even be in defilade of any firing positions from the cliff top if the rebels realized the strategic advantage they provided. With Mac and Angel keeping rebel heads down, not a single shot was fired in their direction, giving Stevo the strong suspicion that they may have made it across the open stretch without being spotted.

They crept from rock to rock, the high-pitched blasts of rebel laser fire, was being answered by the deeper thudding of Mac's cannon. With three rotary barrels and a much larger power source, not to mention more than triple the number of heatsinks, his cannon was able to lay down heavy cover fire almost indefinitely. His powered armor didn't just allow him to carry the damned thing with ease; despite it weighing over 100lbs, its larger bulk meant sturdier shield emitters and thicker armor. A heavy laser shot could still penetrate it, and it would still do a lot of damage if it did, but Mac's training would have dictated that those emplacements be the first thing he targeted when he opened up. Unless one of the rebels scored a direct hit with a rocket - an insanely difficult feat at the best of times, hence why the Marine Corps had phased them out - he was able to shrug off almost anything the enemy could throw at him.

Angel was firing slower. The loud concussive blast of her older, long-barrelled ballistic rifle came fewer and further between. The difference was that almost every one of her shots was scoring kills. She would also be targeting much further up the beach by now, doubtlessly picking out, and picking off the men manning the heavier guns, or anyone that looked even remotely like an officer.

Regardless of who was beating whom in terms of kill counts, they were both doing their job perfectly. The only thing the rebels were able to focus on was the blizzard of fire being thrown against them, meaning they completely missed the much greater threat moving around their flanks. Stevo finally reached the last of the boulders and stooped down behind it. Moving his hand in well-practiced gestures, he twisted the sight on the top of his rifle and disconnected it. He then slowly and carefully leaned forward to hold the sight clear of the rock and pointed it toward the enemy trenches.

The IFF system really was a game changer, and maneuvers like this one were showing why. Stevo could still see through the site thanks to its link to his helmet's eyepiece. He could literally see around corners, but more than that, each marine had a transponder embedded in their armor; when the IFF's onboard computer recognized armed soldiers, it scanned for the transponder. Not finding one in the rebel forces, it highlighted each of them in a bright red outline. More than that, if the rebel was behind partial cover, it could extrapolate - with a fair degree of accuracy - the position of the rest of their body despite them not being visible. It then broadcasted that information to every single other sight on every single other marine's weapon in real-time. Meaning that at that very second, Mac and Angel were being told exactly where the enemy forces were.

"Mac, Angel, you ready?" Stevo said quietly into his comms.

"Roger that, Boss, on your go," Angel replied a second later.

"Alright, Mac, you know the drill. Walk your shots from our end of the trench toward the center. Angel, you block reinforcements."

"Aye, ready when you are, Sarge." Mac gruffed over the wire.

"On three. Three.... Two... One... Execute!"

There had been seven enemy soldiers at the mouth of the trench on the other side of the rock when Stevo pulled his arm back and reattached his sight; by the time he, Rev, and Dusky had broken cover to advance on it, all seven of them had been ripped apart. Green flames still burned from the remnants of clothing and body parts, but for most of them, the rebels had simply been blown to pieces where they stood. Very little above the chest was left intact.

Sprinting into the trench and raising his weapon, Stevo started to hunt. This was his happy place. There was no fear or nerves anymore; there was no time for that. In the thick of combat, when all else around him was descending into chaos, that was when he was at his most focused.

Mac's green barrage was a dozen feet further along the trench than Stevo's assault force, scores of eviscerated bodies lay sprawled on the floor. He only found one alive, a boy in his late teens, maybe very early twenties, who had his arm and most of his side blown away by plasma fire. His mouth was opening and closing, and he lifted his hand to Stevo, pleading for help. The sergeant put a laser round through his face without breaking his stride.

After a couple of dozen yards, however, the rebels had started to get wise to Mac sweeping shots, ducking behind cover well before the barrage got to them. Many were still caught up in the explosive plasma detonations, but most were still fine when Stevo rounded the corner and opened up on them.

Short, sharp, accurate bursts; that was the best way to fire. Unless your aim was pathetically bad, no unshielded enemy soldier would ever need more than two rounds. One to put them down, another to make sure they stayed down. What that translated to in a firefight, however, was a rapid series of shots at center mass height to clear the trench, and then advancing forward and finishing off any unfortunate survivors with a clean shot to the head as you moved. There was almost zero chance of any of the hit rebels being combat effective even if they managed to survive the first shot. Their nervous systems and major organs were completely destroyed, and they invariably had a glowing, smoldering hole the size of a grapefruit punched right through them; they were already dead. Their brains just hadn't realized it yet. Finishing them off was as much about mercy as it was about combat protocol.

The first group of rebels contained about ten soldiers, the second about fifteen, and both of them were cleared in a matter of seconds. By this point, Mac was laying fire down on the bunker itself. The heavy laser that poked out of the narrow gun slit had been partially melted by one of Mac's opening shots, but men were still using it to take cover from the onslaught. The magnetic constrictor fields around the plasma bolts fired from Mac's cannon were slowly chipping away at the reinforced cover, but more than a dozen men were still safely inside.

Until Dusky tossed an antimatter grenade in there.

One of them, presumably the one closest to the door, bolted from the bunker and into the trench, coming face to face with Stevo. Both of them stood there blinking at each other for half a heartbeat before the Marine squeezed his trigger.

A laser bolt left his rifle at several hundred miles per hour and smashed, at point-blank range, into the rebel soldier's mouth.

The human body is an incredible machine, able to absorb all manner of trauma and still remain largely intact. For example, there are three main constructs in the neck that keep your head where it is supposed to be. The first, obviously, is the spine. The other two are ligaments that run down either side of the esophagus. These are called the sternocleidomastoid muscles or the SCM muscles. Stevo's shot punched a hole through the man's jaw, instantly vaporizing bone, teeth, flesh, and muscle before exploding out of the back of his head. The entire face below the nose was simply gone, and so was the top of his spine. Only those SCM muscles held up the remainder of the man's head before they, too, collapsed and the rest of the soldier's skull collapsed into the hole where his throat once was.

He actually stayed on his feet for an amazing amount of time, considering brain death would have been almost instantaneous.

A few seconds later, the blue-purple explosion ripped through the bunker as Dusky's grenade detonated. Obliterating the bunker and every man still inside it.

********

Jim. 1

Her finger hesitated as it hovered above the screen.

He had seen that flicker of doubt wash over her beautiful features countless times, but his faith in her was as unshakable as gravity. "Go on, Cookie," he smiled warmly and encouragingly at her. "You draw a line between the two shapes that are the same."

His daughter, the apple of his eye and the only thing he had ever done right in his life, pressed her finger against the green triangle and slowly, waveringly, drew a line across the screen and toward the red square. At the last moment, it stopped, her brow furrowing in concentration before she diverted its path and linked it to the only other green triangle on the holo-pad.

There was a cheerful ding followed by a crowd of children singing "Hooray" to her through the speakers, and sprinkles of confetti rained down from the top of the puzzle. It had been her seventh attempt, but the look of surprise, pride, and triumph that she flashed up at him made every hardship about his current situation seem infinitesimal. The swell of paternal love in his heart was one that made his life worth living.

A burly, rough hand, one used to hard manual labor, tapped him on the shoulder, and the hushed voice of the usually gruff Mike Saunders whispered into his ear. "It's time, Jim."

James Edwards, or Jim to pretty much anyone who knew him on more than a passing basis, had never in his life had ambitions of leadership. Not once. The thought of the extra responsibility made his skin crawl, but the prospect of that responsibility extending to the lives of his friends sent genuine shivers of fear down his normally stoic spine. Jim's life revolved entirely around Abigail, and he found his eyes once more returning to the beaming pride on his daughter's face. She was all that mattered. She was why he woke up each morning, she was why he wasted his time, his labors, and his health in the dust-heavy mines, and she was why he was in this god-awful position now. He had made a promise to his wife on her deathbed, just eight months earlier, that he would do everything in his power to nurture and protect the girl who had brought so much joy to their lives.

He was proud of the fact that, despite the soul-crushing grief of losing his beloved Grace, he had kept his promise, and Abigail was thriving, or at least she was thriving as much as she could in the inhospitable and downright toxic environment of the Morus I mining station. Flashing a look up to Mike, he nodded grimly and leaned over to kiss his daughter's cheek. "Keep going, Cookie. I'm so proud of you," he whispered to her. The beaming smile he received in response once again momentarily peeled the fingers of fear off his heart to let her warmth in. Abigail had never spoken; she was seven years old, and not a single syllable had ever left her lips. He wondered briefly what she would say to his prideful congratulations, but that smile would have to do for now. One of the other women of the group, a woman who had been friends with Grace but whose name escaped him for the moment, shuffled closer to Abigail, offering to watch over her as Jim, the de facto leader in this shit show of a situation, was busy. He gave her a grateful nod, flashed another look to Abigail, and stood to head off with Mike.

"How's it looking, Mike?" He asked after following behind the foreman for long enough to know the rest of the group wouldn't overhear them.

"It's bad, Jim," Mike shook his head, his usually calm composure crumbling in moments into the same look of near-panic as he had seen on the faces of dozens of the miners recently. "They've collapsed the southern tunnel. Unless they mount some sort of relief effort, we're trapped."

"Jesus," Jim shook his head. "How in God's name are they allowed to get away with this?" Mike's haunted look offered no answers. "Okay, How're we looking for air?"

A momentary respite from the fear flashed over Mike's face. "So far, they haven't targeted the oxygen recycling plant. That's no surprise, though; it's the most valuable piece of hardware down here."

"But if they did?"

Mike looked around the vast cavern in which they were trapped. "It's hard to be accurate, but we'd have... maybe two weeks' worth of breathable air if they cut our supply off."

"Are the comms still up?"

"Yeah, they haven't hit the uplink either."

"That's something, I guess." Jim sighed. "How many were in the tunnels when they collapsed?"

Mike's face darkened again. "At least two hundred. We haven't finished the count of the missing yet."

"Fucking bastards!" Jim spat, his calm demeanor failing as his mind thought of all the faces he knew would have been in the collapsed section of the mine. Friends whom he had worked beside for a decade, and men he would never lay eyes on again. At least not until they were forced to dig their bodies out of their tombs. Jim took a heavy breath and looked back deeper into the cavern. Abigail was hidden from view from this angle, but he could make out the back of the woman's head, the one who was looking after her. Heavy dust motes hung in the air, and more seemed to cascade down from the hard-rock ceiling of the cave. Living in this underground squalor, having to fight against the dust, the cold, and the occasional infestation of ten-foot-tall mine spiders, was part of the job for seasoned miners like Jim and Mike, but it was no place for a child. There were currently more than thirty children trapped down here with them, many of whom had at least one parent now buried under millions of tons of rubble. A few of them unknowingly - for the moment - had lost both of them.

All of it in the name of maintaining the bottom line for some faceless, pitiless cooperation.

Well, not anymore. If they wouldn't listen to reason, then Jim would be sure that the wider Imperium, maybe even the Emperor himself, would be told of the crimes the mining company had committed against loyal citizens.

He steeled himself against the inevitable and nodded to Mike. "Alright, time to get the word out."

********

Stevo. 5

"Bravo leader, this is able actual. Report!" Captain Santiago's voice crackled breathlessly over the coms. Stevo had been hunting for what felt like hours, although he had no real idea of how long it had actually been. All he could say with any certainty was that the third wave had just been dropped off, and the fourth, final wave, the one bringing in the last of the tanks, was on its way.

To the Captain's credit. Stevo hadn't given him an update since they landed.

To be fair, he had been a bit busy.

His squad had been joined by the remains of Delta and Echo squads, both of them having lost their sergeants, and they were supporting Stevo's assault team's progress up the beach. They would clear a trench and all connected bunkers and then lay down cover fire for Mac, Angel, and the new additions to join them, then they would move onto the next while the rest of the squad covered them. Unlike the first trench, which had needed to be flanked over semi-open ground, each of these trenches was connected to one another, meaning they could stay in cover as they moved.

Stevo dropped into a crouch as Rev and Dusky opened up on the men of the next trench and pressed the switch on his wrist to connect his comms to the Captain. "This is Bravo, one KIA, one wounded, we have breached the trench system and are about a third of the way up the beach. Delta and Echo leaders down, remnants linked up with Bravo."

"Roger that, Bravo. Confirm your ping ID." The voice came back a few moments later.

"Zero six zero Zulu eight," Stevo answered promptly. The ping ID was the unique code for his battle armor. It would allow the Captain to punch that code into his wrist-mounted computer, and Stevo would show up on his HUD like a Christmas tree, letting the captain see his exact position relative to his own, even through cover.

There was a pause, presumably as the captain looked for him across the field of battle. "Excellent work, Bravo. Now pay attention..." Stevo rolled his eyes but didn't interrupt. "We are pinned down by a hardened bunker to your three o'clock. I repeat, we are pinned down! Multiple KIA and those mortar rounds are getting pretty fucking close. I need you to take that son-of-a-bitch out!"

Stevo glanced down the trench line in the direction the Captain said the bunker was. Sure enough, the concrete dome at the top of it was just visible from Stevo's position. As the crow flew, it wasn't that far away, but that section of the trench hadn't been cleared, and neither had the trenches in front of it or behind it. They would have to fight their way to the bunker while under fire from both flanks, and when viewed in that light, it was a really fucking long way away.

Stevo looked over his shoulder, Mac was gleefully pumping rounds of burning emerald fire into the next trench, keeping the heads of the enemy pinned down... or blown off, but both he and the rest of Bravo squad were undoubtedly listening in on the conversation. Angel was reloading, but he caught her looking past him to that bunker in the distance. The grimace on her face perfectly mirrored the knot that was curling around his gut.

It would take some form of divine intervention to get to that bunker, silence it, and get back here without taking losses. Heavy losses.

He clamped his finger back down onto the comms toggle switch. "Sir, I can see the bunker from our position. There is no way to get there without excessive losses. But I may be able to get close enough to get accurate coordinates for a fire mission from the destroyers."

"Well, shit, that'll do nicely, Sergeant," Santiago's voice came back a few moments later. "Make sure they use low-yield munitions, though; we will be in the blast radius of anything bigger."

"Roger that, Able. Stand by." Stevo lifted his arm to look at the wrist-mounted computer display and changed his com frequency to contact the air support.

Stevo had every respect for officers of a higher rank, especially the ones who had earned their stripes. To his credit, Captain Santiago was one of them. There were plenty of officers in the Marine Corps who perfectly embodied the philosophy of 'it's not about what you know, but who you know' in order to secure their promotions. That being said, Santiago's order was a stupid one. It was very very easy to lose the ability to think clearly when you were under fire and your men are being killed around you, but that was what their training had taught them to resist. What the Captain had essentially done was to pass the buck. He had made the bunker Stevo's problem, along with the casualties that would be taken if it wasn't silenced. The most obvious solution was to contact the air wing, but combat can do strange things to a person's sense of logic and Stevo didn't see the need or the advantage in pointing it out.

"This is Bravo squad on the western flank to any local air support, priority mission request."

A holographic face of a young man shimmered onto the computer's display. "You have reached the messaging service of Sabre wing. There is nobody to take your call right now, but if you could leave your name, your number, and a short message. Someone will get right back to you."

Stevo blinked.

"Jesus, Joker! What the hell..." A woman's voice cut over the first. "Stay the fuck off the coms and get back the carrier if you aren't going to do your god damned job!"

"Just trying to lighten the mood, boss,"

The man grinned before his face shimmered out of sight to be replaced by one of a startling attractive woman. "This is Sabre one. Go for your mission."

Despite his training, his chosen vocation, and his recent activities, Stevo would never have considered himself a violent man, but every now and then, he felt that urge rising from the pit of his stomach. One that made him want to tear someone's head from the shoulders and feed it to them. But he clamped down on the feeling quickly. Men were dying, and there would be time to find that asshole later. "We have a bunker pinning down Marines on the landing zone. Approximate grid reference zero-one-niner by five, three five."

There was a pause as the woman on the screen squinted, apparently looking for the area he had just given her. "I've got it, Bravo leader. Domed heavy weapons emplacement on the... third trench line?"

"That's the one, ma'am." Sarge nodded. "Be advised, this is a danger close mission. Friendly forces are within the blast radius of the bunker on two sides." He doubted he was technically in the blast zone, but he had seen what those high-yield artillery rounds could do, and he wasn't sure enough about his position to risk it.

The woman nodded, still understandably paying more attention to what was in front of her than she was to his holographic face on her control panel. "She's a big bitch, I'm not sure low-yield will cut it. Implosion should work, though. I will tag her myself. From your east, Marine, enjoy the fireworks. Sabre one out."

The comms channel closed before Stevo could offer his thanks... or his number, but he looked up in time to watch a Broadsword race toward him from the East a few moments later, flanked by two more fighters. They must have covered a mile or more of the beach in only a few seconds, but he just managed to make out a red dot of ... something... being fired from the lead plane. Whatever it was thudded harmlessly into the roof of the dome and stuck there.

It took Stevo only a few seconds to realize what he was looking at before he quickly switched the channel back to the Captain. "This is Bravo leader, artillery fire incoming. Get your heads down!"

********

Almark. 4

"Fuck sake, Joker." Flt Lt. Almark barked into the coms. "That was way too far. There is a time and a place for humor, but that wasn't it! People are fucking dying down there!"

"Alright, boss lady," Joker nodded on her screen. "That one sounded much better in my head. My bad.."

"That Marine was cute, though," Duck smirked through the channel.

"Yeah, I'm sure he will look even cuter when he rips Joker's arms off and beats him to death with them," Emelye scoffed back.

"Ah, but now you see the genius of my evil plan," Joker grinned. "He will have to find me to beat me to death, which means you get to see him again."

"You can't argue with the logic," Buzzkill added through a bark of laughter.

"Alright, alright," Almark silenced the channel. "If the cute marine survives, I will get his number after we have all watched him beat Joker to a pulp."

"Worth it!" Joker grinned.

Halfpint shook her head and flicked the munitions selector on her stick, put the target reticle over the bunker as they approached at several hundred miles an hour, and tapped the trigger. The tracking tag shot through the air and buried itself into the concrete dome of the gun emplacement. She toggled the comm channel to the ground support frequency. "ISS Lincoln, this is Sabre one."

"Go for Lincoln fire control," the voice came back.

"Requesting implosion munitions on the embedded tag frequency. Single round, Danger close." She answered, simultaneously sending the tag's ID frequency to the destroyer. With that as their guide, they were capable of putting a round onto the target with a margin of error of only a few inches.

There was a pause. "How close is danger close, Sabre one?"

"Close enough for high-yield to be out, but the target is too heavily fortified for low-yield to be effective."

Another pause. "How urgently does the target need to be destroyed?"

"Extremely!"

"Shit, Okay. Do local ground forces know the round is incoming?"

"This is a priority mission from them, Lincoln."

The fire controller sighed. It wasn't one that suggested they disagreed with Almarks request, but the simple fact of their existence was that a shot fired with a single degree of error was the difference between a good kill and a dead squad of marines. When the dust settled and the body bags were filled, it was those gunners who would carry the burden of friendly kills. It was even worse on danger-close missions, they could have their aim spot on, they could be accurate enough to shoot the wings of a fly's back from orbit, and still end up killing some of their own men.

"Roger that, Sabre one. Wish them luck from us. Round incoming."

********

Implosion munitions, in a drastic break with military tradition, are not really anything like what they sound like. For a start, they were not technically munitions, and secondly, they didn't implode. What they were could only accurately be described as a physics experiment on meth.

The shell fired from the Destroyer ISS Lincoln was little more than a metal tube with a hardened point designed to punch through the bunker's shell. After that, things got a little weird. Stevo got to watch from a much closer distance than he was comfortable with as the air was ripped open by the shell, and the top of the fortified dome cracked open.

The creation of singularities - miniature black holes - was child's play to modern science. They were doing that shit all the time. Hell, every single craft in orbit had a whole bunch of them being used to power different parts of the ship. He had heard a rumor that a single heavy carrier had more than twenty and that the largest battleships in the fleet had at least double that number. But whereas the ships used the electromagnetic fields of those singularities for power generation on a gargantuan scale, the implosion munition was more concerned with their gravitational effects.

Because, for a few short seconds, a black hole the size of a soccer ball blinked into existence within the confines of the bunker.

A black hole is called a black hole because that is what it looks like. The singularity at its heart has a gravitational pull so strong that not even light can escape. And with the light sucked into the event horizon along with everything else, it makes it look black. In this case, that "everything else" was the entire contents of existence for about fifty meters in every direction around the bunker.

Men, machinery, munitions, masonry, and the very ground on which it stood were all sucked into a single point, not to be dragged into some wormhole as pop culture would have the masses believe, but simply squashed down to its atomic parts under the sheer, unimaginable weight of gravity. The sand was sucked from the beach in every direction; any parts of the ground that weren't attached to the rest of the planet securely enough were ripped from the surface and dragged into the storm. Men in the trenches outside the bunker, dropped weapons, dead bodies, rubble and debris, the smoke from the fires that dotted that part of the battlefield, along with the actual fires themselves, the stores and equipment crates in the trenches, the floorboards, the water lining the bottoms of dugouts, the trenches themselves... the very air around them... all of it was pulled towards a single central point with terrifying force...

And crushed out of existence.

With the air being sucked into the maelstrom, the sound didn't carry, meaning that all of this carnage, from Stevo's perspective, was completely silent.

It couldn't have lasted more than a few seconds. Certainly, no more than five. But when the singularity burned itself out, with the air rushing back into the void, and the dust settled, there was a 100-meter wide gap in the battlefield. The bunker, its inhabitants, its weaponry, and everything around the enormous crater was just gone.

Stevo breathed a sigh of relief, muttered some words of thanks to Sabre one and the destroyer's gunners, issued a quick report to the captain, gave a nod to the rest of his squad, raised his rifle, and advanced onto the next trench line.

********

Laura. 1

A lone figure walked through the pawl of darkness.

The cloud that blanketed the entire planet had robbed the world of light on the brightest of days, but at night, it was the thing of nightmares. A sky bereft of stars was an unsettling sight for a mariner, but the deserted streets of this once bright and vibrant city were just as bad.

The planet's name was Xnios, and no, she didn't know how to pronounce it either, but it was a marvel of the cosmos, totally unique, even for a Gaia-class world. When the planet had been discovered some four-hundred years ago, it looked to the survey ship's crew like the very garden of Eden had been found. Even without a need for large-scale terraforming, colonizing a new planet was never a straightforward proposition. Hostile native species, poisonous flora, dangerous fauna, and even the composition and chemical make-up of the planet's water was a variable on every world outside Sol. Most importantly, the presence of illnesses and diseases that would need to be studied and inoculated against was an endeavor that usually took decades.

Xnios had none of these things. The flora was bountiful, the fauna - mainly consisting of grazing mammals and burrowing reptiles - was friendly and inquisitive enough to be tamed by the survey team after only a few landings, and there didn't seem to be a single harmful pathogen on the entire planet. It had taken eight separate survey missions to confirm that little nugget, with nobody within the scientific community even considering the possibility that could be true. It was much more likely that the pathogens that had to be present on the planet were just beyond humanity's ability to detect.

What they did find, however, was a strange compound found in every soil sample they took, no matter where on the surface they took it. It acted as a natural accelerant for the growth of local plant life. A banana tree, for example, planted in this ultra-fertile soil would produce a tree the size of a small building and fruit the size of the average man's leg. But when ingested, it had a whole range of health benefits that had doctors of the Imperium scrambling to replicate artificially. Not only did it ease and cure common ailments ranging from Cancer to arthritis to athletes foot, but it seemed to negate the cell degeneration that came with the normal human aging process.

Living on Xnios didn't quite make people immortal, but it certainly extended the average lifespan by a few hundred years.

So when the medical department of the Imperium abjectly failed to replicate this compound's properties, the planet became inundated with the Empire's richest and most powerful citizens, all vying for a slice of long life in paradise. So focused were the new residents of this new world on the benefits of living on this newest of Imperium paradises, that all but a few failed to ever properly investigate where this compound actually came from. They knew it wasn't harmful, and that was good enough for them. Instead, Xnios became the most desirable place for the rich and powerful to live after the capital and Earth itself.

It was, of all people, a geologist who finally identified the mysterious compound. Although still unique in its properties, he recognized that it was not dissimilar from the chemical makeup of rocks usually found several miles beneath a planet's surface. The geological world could not even begin to guess how it had made its way to the surface in such massive quantities, though, at least not until the earthquakes started.

But by then, it was too late.

It was the lifecycle of the planet that made Xnios truly unique, an event that the local population had come to call "The Expulsion." Every single other habitable world ever discovered by the Imperium, including Earth, had some measure of tectonic and volcanic instability. The pressures and movements of tectonic plates would cause earthquakes ranging in devastation from apocalyptic to barely noticeable, but these were - planetarily speaking - fairly localized. Pressure built up under a single point of the crust, it slipped and caused earthquakes, or it weakened and formed volcanoes, through some of which a constant stream of subterranean gasses were released. As dangerous as these events and places may be, they helped to release pressure and maintain the geological stability of the worlds they happened on.

Xnios had none of these things. No matter how sensitive the equipment, there had not been a single earthquake of any measurable size, anywhere on the planet's surface in any of the long centuries since its colonization.

In hindsight, that should have raised a few eyebrows.

Then one day, there were.

As if synchronized by a galactic clock beyond the comprehension of man, the pressure that had built up beneath the planet's surface all released at once. Fissures in the ground opened up, countless numbers of them. Some were barely large enough to swallow a golf ball, others swallowed entire mountain ranges and the picturesque cities built onto them. An earthquake in power that a Richter scale could not measure shook the entire planet for hours. Then stopped just as suddenly as it started.

The population of this idyllic world had never had to deal with a natural disaster any bigger than a moderate forest fire before; they just didn't have the emergency infrastructure to cope with the complete destruction of entire cities, let alone the tsunamis that followed. Entire land masses were simply consumed by the once calm seas. Perhaps it is understandable that very little, if any, attention was paid to the gasses being released by the vents and fissures that had opened up in their millions all over the planet's surface, spewing hundreds of millions of tonnes of that magical compound into the atmosphere.

At least not until it started clogging up the engine intakes of the relief vessels sent to aid the colonists. When they started falling out of the skies, crushing the very people they had been sent to help, people started paying attention. That was only the beginning.

Too much of anything can be bad for you and the human population, many of whom had spent their entire lives benefiting from the properties of that compound, now discovered what would happen if their bodies were saturated by it.

It is, perhaps, a cruelty of nature that if anything could go wrong with something as frail as a human body, it goes wrong in spectacular fashion. The "growths" started a few months after the earthquakes stopped. The same properties that made the flora of the planet gargantuan in size, started having the same effect on the people.

Some were lucky, an arm tripling in size over the course of only a few weeks, or fingernails growing beyond control was a terrifying sight to behold but barely an inconvenience compared to others. It was those who had individual internal organs balloon in size, crushing the others, and leading to horrifically painful deaths, which caused the real panic. People whose eyes would bulge and burst in their skulls. People whose ribs would suddenly start to grow until they impaled themselves. People whose nervous systems would go into overdrive, making their skin so sensitive that the gentlest touch of the lightest breeze would feel like fire.

Mercifully, this phase didn't last long. Not because the growths stopped, but because the clouds of noxious, compound-filled gas became so thick in the air that breathing it in for more than a few hours would cake a man's lungs in so much of that tarry residue, that they would cease to function. Suffocation was not a nice way to go, but considering most of the alternatives on offer, that or a bullet were accepted gladly.

In a little more than three months, the planet had been reduced from a population of several hundred million to less than a few hundred thousand. With no way of combating the cloud, and no way of evacuating the people, entire stratas of the Imperium upper class were decimated.

Perhaps it was hubris, maybe it was something nobler, but even after the danger had been realized, the population of Xnios poured unimaginable resources into saving the planet and reversing the damage. The lone wanderer didn't know if it was an attempt to preserve the paradise they had claimed for themselves, or maybe they just wanted to save the wealth they had hoarded there. But what was clear now was that if they had put a fraction of as much effort into saving lives and following the early advice to evacuate as they had into rescuing what was already lost, they wouldn't be living in hermetically sealed bunkers, cowering beneath the wet-sand-colored cloud that now blotted out the sun and strangled the life out of every plant and animal exposed to the elements.

At some point during this cataclysm, some situationally insensitive scientists had marveled at the events unfolding on Xnios. By measuring the compound content of the soil, its gradual decline over the years, and its sudden and violent replenishment, they had somehow calculated that "the expulsion" was an event that took place every four to five-hundred years. The original survey ship could only have missed the eventual dissipation of the last compound cloud by a matter of decades. It was no consolation whatsoever to the millions of people dying on the surface, and their observations probably left them with few friends among the survivors, but there was no doubt that the Imperium colonization bureau was already planning on reclaiming the planet once the calamity was over.

For now, though, with all but the smallest and most modified of ships incapable of traversing the atmosphere and leaving the planet, the survivors were left to weather the storm. Orbital drops of food and medical supplies were made close to the largest cities, but those in more remote locations - places where towering buildings had never been built and, therefore, had not collapsed onto the heads of city residents - were left to fend for themselves. It is perhaps another cruelty that the survival rates of the earthquakes were significantly higher in the parts of the planet where supply drops would never be made. No city living meant no being crushed as they collapsed around you, but it also meant you were sometimes hundreds of miles away from the nearest drop. History may never know how many countless Xniosians would starve to death or die of exposure to the cloud, trying to reach the orbital drop locations. Travel for all but the most hardy and well prepared of survivors was a death sentence.

Daytimes were dark; the rays of the once brilliant sun couldn't penetrate the pawl that now covered the entire planet. All the sun seemed to do was add some color to the sickly shade of brown that now made up the sky. The night was just pure blackness.

The city of Meridian had once been the shining beacon of the northern continent. Its relatively high elevation had spared it from the worst of the tidal waves that had decimated most of the low-lying lands on other parts of Xnios. But it, like practically every other settlement, had been reduced to rubble by the earthquakes that had caused them. Only the most sturdy of buildings had survived the shakes, and now the occasional glow of light from interspersed, tightly-sealed windows was the only illumination on the now deserted streets.

Due to its higher elevation, almost a mile above sea level, the city of Meridian had grown around the enormous, sprawling spaceport that had been built here during the earliest days of the colonization effort. Being the largest on the northern continent, it had become the primary entry point of the masses emigrating to the new Eden. Given the social status of most of these people, an inordinate amount of effort had been put into making Meridian the model city. Every major building, especially those over a dozen stories tall, seemed to have been an architectural art project. Grand open plazas were planned into the city layout, and broad, tropical-tree-lined boulevards made up the circulatory system of this once living, breathing, vibrant city. Everything.... Everything... had been white.

Now it was a mass of crumpled masonry, shattered steel, and half-crushed bodies. Hundreds of thousands of residents were buried in the rubble along with the dreams that promised to make this city one of the jewels of the Imperium. The broad open boulevards were mostly gone, filled in, and made level with the median height of the rubble pile with the odd noticeable, traversable sections which had been cleared before the worst of the cloud effects had become apparent. One such cleared section ran from the outskirts all the way to the spaceport. It had been designed to aid in the distribution of aid and aid workers when the relief effort was underway, and then facilitate the evacuation when it was tardily abandoned.

To her right, the twisted carcass of a moderately sized freighter, one that had apparently faltered during its escape flight and fallen back to terra firma, rested haphazardly atop the remains of the buildings and survivors it had crushed when its fall had abruptly ended.

Everything was caked in that fine brown dust.

Still, though, there were signs of life. A light flickered through a window, and a shadow watched from behind a twitching curtain as the lone figure made her way toward the spaceport. Footprints in the dust crisscrossed the road, leading to and from the wreckage of the freighter. Perhaps their creators had been looking for survivors, more likely, they were looking for anything of use that could be salvaged. But they were alive, the lone figure, Laura Dondarion, was alive too.

And she intended to stay that way.

Planet ending Cataclysms aside, she had a mission to complete.

********

Stevo. 6

"Outstanding work, Sergeant!" Captain Santiago's voice warbled through the speakers. "4th platoon on me! Stay low, stay fast, and get into those trenches! Johnson, move your ass!"

The landings had been going on for about ninety minutes, and the whole episode had been one haunting comms burst after another. Every report, every fire mission, every frantic request for air support or a medic, and every casualty was announced in an overlapping tirade through the comms frequency. And Col. Michaels, on his final approach to the landing zone with the fourth and final wave, had been forced to just sit there and listen to them.

He had given up on the map. He would have to rely on his own eyes to assess the situation when he got on the ground, but what was in front of him instead was even more harrowing. The most up-to-date casualty reports.

The first wave had already suffered a staggering 38% losses; the vast majority of those were KIAs based on the fact that small arms fire were easily deflected by the marine's shields, but the heavier lasers that found their mark rarely left much of the victim intact. To be fair, somewhere around 21% of those losses had been suffered during the descent. The first wave's dropships had weathered the very worst of the flak ceiling and had been chewed to pieces, which meant that only 17% were casualties of the actual fighting.

Only 17%

With that many dropships blown out of the sky, the first wave was much weaker than had been originally planned, and this had left huge holes in the firing line. Large sections of the beach were simply not touched by that first wave, and the guns that would have been trained on them were instead allowed to target the marines on either side of the gap. Those gaps remained in place until they were eventually plugged by the much more intact second wave.

There were men on those second-wave birds who had assumed they were walking into an already secured LZ, only to find themselves in the same sort of shit storm that the first wave had endured.

They were currently functioning on 11% casualties.

But there had been good news with the bad. There had been several breakouts along the line. Able company on the far left flank, whose transmissions he had just monitored, now sounded like they were advancing in force. Dog Company and Victor Company, along with elements of the second wave's 14th regiment, were moving up in the center, but the right flank had stalled. The crossfire there sounded particularly brutal, and whereas the rest of the beach had been able to find small pockets of cover, the right flank had been wide open when they landed. Most of them had never made it to the first trench line. Of the 17% combat casualties that the first wave had suffered, two-thirds had fallen on that flank.

The arrival of the third wave seemed to be turning the tide with much-needed reinforcements being deployed to the areas that needed them the most, and some heavy backup to support the breakthroughs where they were happening.

The airwing had been conducting itself with distinction too. Only six fighters had been lost so far, but they had almost single-handedly provided enough cover - between the fighters themselves and the artillery fire missions directed by their pilots - to get that right flank out of the shit storm it had found itself in. There were hundreds of soldiers on that flank who would live to see the end of this day thanks in no small part to those pilots.

Michaels shook his head and dragged his hand down over his face. This was turning into a long ass day, and they weren't even two hours into it.

"Sixty seconds till touchdown," the tank commander's voice came through his headset. Tanks operated much in the same way as ships of the fleet did, in that no matter the chain of command, the captain was always in charge of his ship, just like the commander was in charge of his tank. The presence of an admiral, or in this case, a colonel, didn't change that, and the operation of the sixty-five-ton, heavily armored unit was entirely and solely down to him. What the tank did when it hit the sand was out of Michaels's hands, he was just a passenger, albeit a very highly-ranked one.

"Roger that," Michaels calmly replied, his level voice belying the worry that it would be his head on the chopping block when the final full scale of this blood bath had been calculated. "Give 'em hell, commander."

"Looking forward to it, Sir!"

********

Janus. 1

Janus liked tits. Janus had always liked tits. She liked tits so much that she often found herself randomly staring off into space on her post's quieter hours and thinking about them. It wasn't that she was a pervert; well, maybe she was, but who cared? Tits were awesome.

And she had seen them all.

There weren't many perks of being a customs enforcement officer aboard the Orpheus VI planetary space station, the pay certainly wasn't one of them, and the endless hours of tedium were enough to drive her to madness. But the tits helped. Every person who boarded the station had to pass through security; every time they did, they had to go through one of the body scanner things. There was some long-winded and suitably impressive piece of technology that made sure there were no weapons, explosives, illicit substances, or other contraband on their person, however, the bosses still wanted it checked by the good old-fashioned Mk I eyeball. That was her job. The scanner would present a picture of the visitor onto her monitor, it would promptly do its scanny thing, and a picture of them completely naked would be presented to her on the screen.

The ones with the nicest tits always got to stay in there just a little longer than was strictly necessary.

Every shape, size, and color had walked through her scanner over the years. Occasionally she would even see their owners wandering around the habitat ring of the station and would struggle to suppress a knowing smile. But on long days like this, the thing that kept her going was thinking about tits.

It was certainly better than thinking about conditions on the planet's surface.

Six months ago, nobody would ever have dreamed that Orpheus would be in its current state. The colony was doing well; it was never going to be the biggest in the Imperium, nor the prettiest, nor the richest or the fanciest. It was unlikely to ever appear on a list of tourist destinations, but it was doing okay. People got up, went to work, earned their keep, then went home again. All was well in the world.

Until one of the other customs officers, another person doing her job, fucked up.

You see, one of the items of contraband that the scanners looked for was seeds. Orpheus had been terraformed over the course of about eighty years, but that didn't mean that the ecosystem had come anywhere near settling down. That could take centuries. Every item of vegetation that was planted - either for decoration, oxygen recycling, or foodstuff - had to be on a list of pre-authorized species. And even then, how much of it was planted and where it was used was strictly monitored.

The exhaustive investigation that had been undertaken after the catastrophe had found that some sentimental fuck muppet had decided to bring a flower to the colony. A rose. A Hybrid Tea, to be precise. It was a pretty little thing, she had to admit, but it wasn't on the list.

The rose, however, wasn't the problem. The root ball it was growing out of was. Because buried within that root ball were a few seeds of what the people on Earth called Mare's tongue.

It was a weed; nothing special, just one of those pain-in-the-ass nuisances that gardeners all over Earth's northern hemisphere had been battling against for thousands of years. The stuff was ancient, it even predated the evolution of simple grass. Hell, it was the stuff that the fucking dinosaurs ate, but unless it was allowed to get really out of hand, it was pretty harmless stuff. It would wreck a flowerbed or a vegetable garden with ease and could even fuck up a half-decent patio, but that was about it.

The problem was, this wasn't Earth.

The soil here had a massively higher nitrate amount, for one thing, and there was a subtle yet fairly significant difference in the oxygen content in the air on Orpheus. What this meant was that as soon as the dumbass planted the rose, the Mare's tongue took hold.

And exploded.

Within a month, half of the arable land in Loki's Landng - the bread basket of the colony - had been taken over by this insidious weed, killing off crops almost immediately. Within three months, almost two-thirds of the entire farmable land on the planet had been rendered useless. By four months, the planet was completely incapable of growing its own food. It didn't matter what measures were taken or what defoliants and herbicides were used; the Mare's tongue grew back. On Earth, a fairly substantial stalk of the stuff would be about a centimeter thick; on Orpheus, they were bigger than she was. Buildings were already starting to crumble after the weed had grown through their foundations. Not having safe places for the people of the colony to live was a pretty big deal, but it was kind of overshadowed by the fact that the 4.8 million colonists on the planet had about a week's worth of food to survive on.

The investigation team finally traced the breach in protocol back to the customs officer two booths down from her; she had been at her post when they had arrested him on the spot and dragged him away. It may have made no difference whatsoever to the state of affairs on the planet, but the baying masses were somewhat placated when the man blamed for the whole thing was publicly hanged in front of a roaring crowd and a live TV audience. Not the idiot who brought and planted the rose, but the guy who didn't spot the seeds... Genius.

Things since then had changed.

The writing was already on the wall. Everyone could see it; the planet was lost. They would have to kill off all the vegetation on mass, planet-wide, and start again. No vegetation meant no oxygen, and no oxygen meant no colony. The planetary administration didn't quite want to admit that almost a century's worth of work had been lost to a few spores of Mare's tongue, but they were the only ones fighting what seemed like an inevitability to everyone else.

The colonists who could afford to get offworld had already done so, but until the evacuation was ordered, Orpheus VI was still in the middle of a relief effort. Convoys of food were being shipped in from all over the Imperium, but the vast majority of them were inspected by specialist customs teams who would board the freighters and search for contraband. This meant that the only people wandering through Janus's security station were the few people from those freighters who didn't want to go down to the planet, choosing instead to take their RnR on the station instead.

And then the fucking rebels had attacked one of the convoys.

The situation on the planet was already dire enough without other humans making things worse.

Now, the Imperium fleet command was insisting that all convoys travel with a cruiser escort. That in itself was no big deal, nor was it a particularly unreasonable order, but it had the effect of slowing the whole process down. A convoy could be sat at its origin point for days before a few cruisers were assigned to it, and those days were a delay that the people of Orpheus VI couldn't afford. The crews of said cruisers were often the ones more likely to board the station.

There was something odd about the attack, though. Something that didn't quite make sense to Janus. The flight lanes from the core worlds to Orpheus were hardly through some backwater sectors of space. They were heavily trafficked, heavily guarded stellar highways. Hell, they were so busy that large sections of the route had to have their own traffic control centers to maintain some sort of order and avoid unfortunate accidents, and more than a few had their own dedicated security forces. So what the fuck was the convoy doing so far away from any of them when it was attacked and destroyed?

More than that, the vaulted Admiral Valdek was in command? Really? The hero of Sigmus IV, the man whose tactical brilliance had snatched victory from out of thin fucking air, if the stories were to be believed, was running point on an unarmed relief convoy? Why the hell was a military officer in charge of a civilian expedition in the first place? And who did he piss off to be stuck with the sort of mission that would bore even the laziest of seasoned freighter captains to tears? And if he was so brilliant, why did he wander into bandit country more than two-days flight time from the established shipping lanes?

But then again, this was the Imperium. Anyone with a modicum of sense knew that the news was heavily filtered. It was often difficult, maybe even impossible to discern what had really happened from the plethora of bullshit that the "office of political conformity" - a fancy title for the Imperium's propaganda department - pumped out with eye-rolling regularity. But, being the Imperium, pointing out the often ludicrous flaws in the official story was extremely hazardous to one's health.

Or at least one's freedom.

It didn't do to ask questions. The wrong question, at the wrong time, to the wrong person - especially if you technically worked for the government like she did - was liable to get you dragged out of bed in the middle of the night by the sorts of men who liked to wear black all the time. Still, when there were no tits around, her mind often wandered to ever more fanciful imaginings of what really happened to that lost convoy.

Maybe Valdek made some sort of political enemy who sabotaged the convoy's navigational computer, maybe it was a rival. That led them to the badlands where a conveniently placed rebel flotilla was waiting. Maybe Valdek wasn't aboard at all, maybe the rebels had assassinated him, and instead of admitting the flaws in the capital's security, they used the loss of the convoy as a cover to explain his sudden death. Maybe there was no convoy at all, maybe Valdek had turned coat and gone over to the rebels, along with a real flotilla of Imperial warships and the whole thing was just smoke and mirrors. Hell, the whole thing could have been made up as a way to demonize the rebels. Maybe the entire event was just an excuse to militarize this section of space with an increasing amount of cruisers and destroyers which came with the convoys, but never seemed to leave.

Still, more military personnel meant more traffic into the station. More traffic meant more money spent in the marketplace, and that meant a better life for the people living here.

And there was something about a set of tits in uniform.

What Janus especially loved about tits, especially military ones, was the way that they changed based on where the person was from. A lower gravity colony produced women with... lower-hanging fruit. There was less need for the muscles that supported them to develop, so when they were subjected to normal gravity, things tended to droop. On the other end of the scale were the women born to higher gravity worlds, their muscle structure was far stronger than the average woman, so no matter how big the bust, gravity seemed to leave them alone.

Unsurprisingly, those were the women who were subjected to more thorough examinations in the scanner.

She turned her head to look through the window as a destroyer, an Orca class, if she wasn't mistaken, slowed itself to a halt in the docking bay, and the airlocks were connected to the station's boarding gantries. A smile flickered over her face. She was sure there would be some fine specimens of chesty women on board that beauty.

********

Stevo. 7

Stevo unloaded another staccato blizzard of red laser bolts into the next line of trenches. He wasn't really aiming to hit any of the rebel soldiers hunkered down in it; they had already taken cover. But keeping their heads down meant that Mac, Dusky, Rev, and Angel could scramble to cover in regular intervals along the trench wall beside him without worrying about incoming fire.

"All units, be advised," a man's voice declared over the comms unit in his helmet. "Colonel Michaels has landed with the fourth wave and has now assumed overall operational command."

Stevo shot a glance at Angel, who, in turn, rolled her eyes back at him. Stevo liked the Colonel, but he was a textbook case of 'officer syndrome,' meaning that he had very little clear understanding of events on the ground outside his immediate field of view and yet always acted with a steadfast belief that he did. Fortunately, grunts like Stevo had learned long ago that officer's orders were to be taken with a healthy dose of salt. As long as an objective was achieved, the higher-ups didn't usually care if their orders had been carried out to the letter and, more often than not, couldn't tell one way or another anyway. It was when they started micromanaging that things got awkward.

Stevo's advance through the first five trench lines had been a perfect example of that. The orders had been to advance, and that is what Stevo had done. He had taken stock of the situation in the area - things like the manpower available to him, the strength and position of the enemy, and the availability of cover and air support - he had come up with a plan and executed it. Simple. If, on the other hand, his order had been to flank to the left while another squad provided cover and a third tried to advance head-on, there would have been little room for the improvisation that had allowed him to get this far. In Stevo's mind, the worst types of plans were the ones that were the least flexible. Versatility had been trained into the three-eight-one since its inception, and as good an officer as Michaels seemed to be, flexibility and the allowance of unit autonomy were not concepts that seemed to be inherent in the man.

That being said, Stevo was very aware that his was one of the more forward units of the corps; only a few other squads, at various points along the beach, had advanced as far as he had, and it was very likely that Michaels first objective would be to shove a boot in the ass of the units hunkered down further back on the beach.

"All units, this is Colonel Michaels," the gruff and no-nonsense voice quickly followed up the announcement of his arrival. "Left flank, excellent work, hold position, maintain covering fire, and await reinforcement..." Stevo groaned at the loss of momentum, but with his squad stretched out over two trench lines, it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to get some backup to allow the next movement to be made in force. "... Right flank..." Michaels went on. "Keep your heads down, armored support is inbound. I will be assuming command of the center with the rest of the tanks. All units will ping their IDs and then take cover for orbital bombardment."

Stevo flashed another look to Angel, and then to Rev, all of them knew what that meant, and each of them shared a wide-eyed glance before they dropped down behind the cover of the trenches and activated the feature of their comms to highlight their positions.

Some thirty miles above them, the three orbiting destroyers were priming their weapons. Advanced computers were calculating payloads, shell trajectories, and wind speeds at the various atmospheric altitudes to make sure that the targets identified by the fire control center were hit accurately. The high-yield explosive warheads being loaded into the vast bank of orbital MAC cannons were not things to be trifled with, and a margin of error of less than a hundredth of a decimal point could lead to disaster. After only a few minutes, all of the targeting information was received, and an inch-perfect map of the battlefield had been generated based on topographical scans of the area, combined with the pinged location of all friendly forces. The gunnery crews had trained tirelessly for this moment over the years of their careers, and the sense of anticipation and apprehension was building by the moment. The lower sections of the beach were blanketed in little blue dots, each representing a still-living member of the Imperium Marine forces, around each of them was drawn a friendly-fire circle - any shots landing within these circles represented a significant risk of killing the dot at the center of it - while every single other part of the beach was targeted and marked as a free fire zone.

The command was given... FIRE FIRE FIRE.

Each of the destroyers lurched as a dozen guns per ship fired at once. And then again. And then again. And then again. Over and over, as the three destroyers, led by the Lincoln, introduced the rebel forces to the closest thing to hell that a human mind could comprehend.

Back on solid ground, Stevo had crouched himself as deep into the trench as it was possible for him to get. Facing the wall of the trench and covering his head with his hands while pushing it as close to his knees as he could. He just about managed to cast a look along the line to make sure his squad had followed the orders to do the same before the sky seemed to rip open with the first salvo of hyper-velocity shells. Conventional wisdom said that the men of the Three-eight-one should be cheering, applauding the demise of a foe who had taken so many of his comrades, but there were no cheers, every soldier still standing was scrambling for cover against the terrifying onslaught from above.

The sound was deafening, even though the audio pick-up on his helmet had been turned off to prevent his eardrums from rupturing, he could somehow hear the murmured, mumbled sounds of Rev's prayers floating through the comms channel over the cataclysmic cacophony of war,

"Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name..."

The ground seemed to jump as the first shell hit the beach, or at least the first shell in their area of it. In reality, the massive vibrations caused by the equally enormous explosions had bounced his body an inch into the air, but to him, it felt as if the whole planet had shrunk away from the detonations, being blasted that single inch downwards and away from him, and it took a moment for its gravity to realize that he had been left behind.

"Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in..."

No sooner had his toes reacquainted themselves with solid ground did the debris and sundered earth started raining down on him, blocking out any further sounds from the rest of his squad, prayers included. It probably took less than a second for all of that to happen, yet in that time, four more shells had hit their zone in rapid succession, not to mention the hundreds of others obliterating the rest of the beach in front of the friendly lines. Despite his best efforts, Stevo was knocked off his feet, rolling to the side just as the wall of the trench he had been leaning against caved in, bowling him over in an avalanche of damp sand, wooden boards and large rocks. One of the boulders smacked into the side of his head hard enough to make his ears ring, his shields absorbed most of the damage but the solid, half ton hunk of rock still managed to knock the long range com link of his helmet offline.

His armor was strong enough to protect him, bearing the weight of tonnes of earth well enough to prevent any sort of injuries, but even with the biotic implants and the now buried leg servos in the armor itself, there was far too much weight on him to pull himself free.

Another impact rocked through the ground, and enough sand was launched into the air, and then into the trench to leave a covering of the stuff over him. He swiped his hand at his face plate, momentarily surprised to feel the stuff peppering against him and not hitting his shield, before he was reminded by the flashing red shield status of his HUD that his shields were still charging. He looked at the trench wall looming over him. If that thing failed, he would be buried alive, and as good as his armor was, it held nowhere near enough oxygen to keep him alive for the time it would take for the others to dig him out, especially not if they were still under fire. He was just about to start to worry when something caught his eye. Something grey had been buried in the sand behind the now-collapsed trench, like a concrete pillar, about three feet in diameter, had been driven into the sand until the top of it was about three inches beneath the surface of the beach. At first, Stevo thought that it must have been part of the support structure to reinforce the trench, but that opinion was banished by the fact that not only had it done a woefully inadequate job of that, but it was far too far away from the trench to offer support, and it hadn't been connected to the retaining wall in any way at all. Stevo squinted at it for a moment longer before he was reminded of his predicament by another colossal explosion and another shower of debris. The wall above him seemed to groan.

"Fuck Fuck Fuck!" he grumbled to himself, the flashing red icon on his HUD telling him that is comms unit was suitably screwed enough to make calling for help a waste of time. Instead, he tried his best to ignore the death and destruction being rained down around them, and started to kick his legs. Even an inch, just a single solitary inch of movement may have been enough to get him free.

********

Crow. 1

General Cornelius Crow had been watching the battle with a mounting sense of trepidation for almost two hours. Deep in his command bunker, a few miles from the beach, he was personally in no immediate danger, but his men, his freedom fighters - rebels one and all - were dying by the thousands. And every single one of those deaths felt like a plasma bolt to the heart.

Four waves, his intelligence officers had said, four waves is what they would need to endure before they could make their move, but holy shit! Each one of those waves was a fight the likes of which he had never seen before, and the savagery of the combat was something he hoped never to see again. Men on both sides were being butchered, and contrary to the assumed persuasions of his position, he took no joy in the deaths of his opponent's men. Unlike them, he knew the truth. He highly doubted if many - if any - of them would be fighting against him now if they had access to the information he did.

Unfortunately, he knew that most of them would never get the chance to find out.

"Sir, They've pinged," one of the tactical officers in the depressed command pit in front of him called out. Crow looked over at the man in front of one of the rows of brightly lit console screens, a young man, barely out of boyhood, standing out against the rows of anonymous heads simply by the virtue of him being turned to look back at the aged general. "All units have been told to hunker down and take cover, ready for the bombardment."

Crow nodded. "Put it up," he said with a calmness that in no way matched the cold grip on his chest.

The young technician nodded and turned back to his screen, entering a number of commands with deft movements of his fingers and transferring the information up onto the main viewscreen against the far wall. The General sucked in a deep breath, trying to steady the nervous tremble behind it as his eyes surveyed the information in front of him. He knew the stakes of his next order.

To give it would mean war. They were at war anyway; that much was glaringly obvious by the carnage on the beach, but so far, that war had only been a series of minor skirmishes, and in the grand scheme of things, this battle was no different. There would be no going back after the order was given. The Imperium would throw everything they had at them after this, there would be no end to it until one faction was destroyed completely by the other. But then, maybe that had been the idea all along.

The savagery of the fighting would be almost biblical. The seven fires of hell would be forced to take note of what would become of the wider mankind.

On the other hand, not giving the order would almost certainly mean death. Death for him, and death for his men. More death than he could stomach allowing. It would almost certainly come for most of them today, but the few that escaped would spend the rest of their lives being hunted down like vermin. There was not a man in the rebellion who deserved that kind of fate.

His eyes danced over the viewscreen. The topographical map of the beach, already showing the static and fluid defenses he had organized, now began to populate with the glowing blue dots that marked the position of each one of the thousands of Imperium Marines fighting their way toward him. It was all playing out exactly as he had been told it would. Strict military doctrine could lead to predictable orders being given, but this was uncanny even for the most seasoned of military intelligence offices, and that was before he even considered how the 'head shed' had managed to crack Imperium military encryption and gain access to their orbital targeting systems. For the briefest of moments, he found himself questioning the real origin of the orders he had been given.

"Your orders, Sir?" The young man's voice pulled him back to the butchery being played out in front of him.

The veteran officer took another deep breath and answered with as much confidence and authority as his unquiet mind could muster... "Do It."

********

Almark. 5

Like water being forced from a puddle under the impact of a rock, the air support for the landings - Sabre Wing amongst them - had scattered in every direction as the sky had been ripped open by the merciless and relentless barrage from the destroyers. Even from two miles out, Emylee Almark could see the devastation that the high-explosive shells had inflicted on the rebel lines. As was to be expected from the professionalism of their crews, the orbital destroyers had landed their shots with almost superhuman accuracy and had turned the upper portions of the landing area into a maelstrom of flying debris, explosions, fire, and now, billowing smoke. From this distance, she couldn't make out the bodies and body parts being tossed into the air, but it didn't need to be seen to be understood. The rebels were taking a pounding.

And just like that water racing back into the puddle once the initial shock of the stone had run out, every fighter wing in the sky turned and headed back to their stations about the battle as soon as the all-clear alert had been received.

"Ho... lee... shit!" Joker murmured through the comms. "That... was fucking impressive!"

"Hmm," Lurch's holographic face replaced Joker's on her console. The tallest, most stoic member of her fighter wing nodded as his eyes, like hers, surveyed the incalculable amount of damage that had been rained down from orbit. It was more of a gruff affirmative grunt than any form of recognizable speech, but it perfectly communicated the pure destructive majesty of what they had just witnessed

"Alright, people," Almark said into the radio. "Game faces back on; the Marines will already be starting their push. Our job is to plow the road for them."

"Whose turn is it on overwatch?" Joker asked with his cheeky smile that she would never admit to finding cute.

"Buzzkill, you're up."

There was a sigh from Sabre two, but she answered anyway. "Roger that, pulling back and maintaining altitude. Eyes on scopes."

"Don't worry, two, I'll rotate you out soon enough." Halfpint nodded to her as she eased the throttle forward on her engines. The broadsword's engines sent a steady, comforting vibration through the airframe as they powered up, and her fighter, followed by the rest of Saber wing, surged forward as if each of them were hungry for blood or at least worried about missing out on kills.

Emylee rolled her neck. They had been on station for a little over two hours, and being strapped into the fighter's less-than-ergonomic seat was starting to make parts of her middle-aged body ache in ways she was too proud to talk about. For a moment, she allowed her eyes to drift to the side, looking through the armored canopy of the fighter and over the lush, idyllic expanse of turquoise waters. In any other reality, this would be a stunningly beautiful place to live. Instead, it had been turned into a warzone by fucking traitors and ungrateful rebels. With a huff, she turned back to the task at hand.

They were close enough now to start being able to make out more than just the ominous pillars of smoke rising from the beach. The armor had landed before the air wings had pulled back, but now they had split into two separate and distinct columns. The smaller one was headed to the right flank, the guns of its ranks flashing as they launched their heavy plasma bolts at unseen targets further up the beach. The larger column, no doubt containing the Colonel's tank, had formed into ranks and was charging - as much as a sixty-five-tonne tank could charge - up the center of the beach, each monstrous piece of armor providing cover for the men who were swarming out of their foxholes to follow behind them.

Their operational area was over the comparatively quieter left flank, though, and she nudged the flight stick in that direction to correct her heading. Her mind drifted to the cute marine who had called in that fire mission, and her eyes found the smoldering ruins of the impact site the implosion munition had created. She didn't doubt that he had been clear of the blast site, but she was more than a little surprised at the slight tug of fear inside her at the prospect of his not surviving the battle. The visor of her helmet was starting to pick out the blue dots of Marine's pings and, knowing Sgt Cutie was up there with the more advanced elements of the push, she placed her target reticule over a spot about 50 meters ahead of the most advanced blue dot, and gently squeezed the trigger.

A verdant stream of magnetically constricted plasma bolts was launched from the gun barrels under the fighter's wing, followed a few seconds later by the same searing assault of plasma from the other strike craft in her wing as they raced toward their area of operation. She had no idea what she was shooting at; for all she knew, she could have been raining holy hell down on nothing more than the evil machinations of blasted sand, but the idea, at this point, was not necessarily to crush the enemy but to lay down cover fire for the Marines to advance. Keeping the head of a single rebel down long enough to save one Marine's life was enough to label this maneuver a success.

Her rapidly increasing air speed had her approaching the beach at a blistering rate, and she started to make out more detail around her target area. The shadow of a half-blasted bunker loomed over the rearmost trench line, its main gun had long been reduced into a half-melted, half-blown-up tangle of metal, and the bombardment had reduced the trenches around it into a smoking patchwork of impact craters, but the bunker itself seemed to be relatively intact, so much so that she could see the tiny shapes of rebel soldiers scrambling into it to take cover from Saber wings attack run. She toggled the switch on her flight stick to flick to her heavier weapon loadout and gently coaxed the target reticule onto the dome of the bunker, lifted it a little to take the gravity-dependent downward arc into account, and...

"Contact! Contact! Contact!" Buzzkill's panicked voice flooded through the comm channel. "Fuck, lots of contact!"

Almark had squeezed the trigger but had no idea if her shot hit its target as her eyes immediately shot down to her sensor scope.

"Oh my god..." she whispered to herself as her eyes widened. "Sabre wing, break formation, and engage hostiles! Stay with your wingmen and fire at will! Don't let yourself be pulled away from the beach."

A series of affirmatives through the radio confirmed her order. "Now," Joker grinned, the excited glint in his eye sparkling even over the muted light of the holographic console. "We just have to find this Will character out of all of that lot and fire at him!"

********

Stevo. 8

It was like the orbital barrage had stirred a nest of angry hornets. Looking up from his back and futilely trying to drag his legs out from beneath the weight of the collapsed trench wall, Stevo could only watch as what looked to be hundreds upon hundreds of enemy fighters shot overhead toward the incoming Marine air forces. Range must have closed in only a few seconds because he'd only had the chance to blink a few times before sheets of red laser fire started shooting out of - and into - the fighters racing overhead. Three of them seemed to explode almost instantly; another had its shields stripped by a brutal burst of fire before its canopy was punctured, and the cockpit was painted with a ghastly burst of red. A fifth fighter had one of its wings sheared off, and it immediately started to spin, corkscrewing toward the ground and hitting with a colossal explosion a few dozen meters further up the beach, once again showering him with another spattering of sand.

Stevo cast another glance at the bulging trench wall and redoubled his efforts to kick himself free. "Fuck fuck fucking fuck!" he muttered to himself, forcing himself to focus all his attention on trying to get his legs free.

A shadow seemed to blot out the sun above him, and he looked up. Mac's helmeted head was leaning over him, his lips moving silently behind the clear screen of his face covering... Stevo knew from the din of the aerial battle that his external mic was working, so he tapped his fingers against the side of his head and then swiped his fingers across his throat.

Mac looked confused.

"His radio's out, dumbass," Angel's voice sounded through the speakers in his helmet as she appeared next to Mac. "Turn on your local chat!"

"Can ya hear me now?" Mac tilted his head.

Stevo slumped back onto the base of the trench with a snort. "Yeah, Mac, I can hear you. Wanna give me a hand?"

Mac grinned. "Hey Sarge, you're missing tha party!" He hooked his arm under one of Stevo's armpits, with Angel grabbing the other side, and both of them started to pull him free.

"Laying down on the job," Angel said, a smirk pulling at her lips as she teasingly shook her head. "Good thing Ryan didn't see that." Angel pushed for a second, her eyes flicking off to the middle distance for a moment before she burst out laughing. "Ryan said it's the only horizontal action you've been seeing lately."

Sarge chuckled and pulled himself to his feet, looking back along the trench in time to see, and then wave off, the approaching squad medic. "I'm good, Dusky," he said. "Rang my bell a little, but the shield took most of the hit."

The medic nodded, crouching against the trench walls. "Your legs?"

He was crouching against the trench walls now and cast a look over the lower parts of his armor. "Fully functioning and happy to be out from under that shit." he smiled over to her. It was probably not the most concise of sit-reps to his medic, but it seemed to satisfy her. "What's our..."

A deep, rumbling, grinding sound stopped the words from rolling off his tongue. The three of them slowly turned to look at that concrete pillar he had spotted buried in the ground. Sand was starting to slide off the semi-circular lid caps that were opening on its top, and a long, silver pole, surrounded by four thin metal strips, started to slowly rise out of the pillar.

"Sarge?" Angel asked nervously as she watched the 'thing' exposing itself.

"No idea, let's just... back away from it."

The pole kept rising as the squad moved back along the trench, trying to put some distance between them and whatever it was, while still trying to stay in cover from the increasingly heavy fire coming from the rapidly recovering rebel trenches. The fly by from their tardy air cover seemed to have reinvigorated their fighting spirit, and small arms fire was zipping over their heads with alarmingly growing intensity. By the time Stevo looked back at the pole, its tip had risen ten feet above the ground, and the metal strips were starting to extend. With one end looking to be attached to the top of the pole, the bottom parts were slowly rising upward and outward, like the spokes of a deploying umbrella. Stevo barely had time to arch an eyebrow at it and share a confused glance with Angel, before crackles of electricity started crawling up the pole and arcing like a tesla coil between the fingers of the umbrella-like contraption.

Seconds ticked by, and the crackles of electricity seemed to get stronger, so much so that Stevo was almost certain that he could feel a tingle around the tips of his fingers. "Sarge?" Angel called out from behind him. "Ryan said he can see more of those things all over the beach. I don't like this one bit."

"No, me neither. Are our reinforcements close yet?"

"They're one trench behind us, boss," Rev replied.

"Alright, tell them to hold position, we'll fall back to them and regroup. Mac, you ready to lay down cover fire?"

"Always, Sarge. Just tell me when."

Steve Taylor didn't get the chance to answer. With a dull, whirring thud, a pulse of energy blasted out of the arcing, electrically ringed tower that had grown out of the beach. For a brief second, nothing happened... and then suddenly, everything happened at once.

"Shields are out!" Angel yelled in alarm.

"Coms are down, too," Dusky's voice followed almost immediately.

"We've got incoming!" Mac barked as he hoisted his rotary cannon onto the lip of the trench and instantly opened fire.

"Fuck!" Sarge grunted. "EMP?" he looked at Angel as she, Ducky, and he all moved to firing positions against the trench wall.

Angel shook her head as her shoulder hit the wooden support beams that lined the trench. "Shields and comms are EMP resistant; the blast would need to be at the exact frequency of our systems, and not even I know that! That shit is ultra-classified information!"

"And yet..." Dusky shared a concerned look with both of them.

"There'll be time to think about that later," Stevo said. The list of fuck ups on this mission was starting to coalesce into a possibility that sent chills up his spine. "For now, we need to get off this beach. Dusky, Rev, Angel, fall back to the rear trench, link up with our reinforcements, and then cover Mac and me as we pull back. I want a solid firing line to hold off their counterattack. I have no desire to be overrun today."

"You got it, Sarge." Angel nodded.

"What about Ryan?" Dusky asked. "With no comms, he has been cut off."

"Let's hope he has the sense to stay put. But otherwise, there is nothing we can do for him at the moment."

"Ryan? Sense?" Angel snorted as Rev ran in a crouch toward them. Sarge shot her a smirking look before he raised his head up over the trench and unloaded half a dozen shots on the rebels scurrying from one shell hole to the next, each crater giving them a decent amount of cover to fire back from. The trench system beyond his position had been utterly obliterated.

"Alright, move!" He barked at them, then returned his focus to laying down cover. The trench system behind them was still intact, and the communication trench, the one that ran vertically between each horizontal trench line, provided enough cover for his three squad mates to pull back in relative safety.

Stevo sighted down his scope, laying his reticule over the head of a rebel firing wildly toward Mac. With a squeeze of the trigger, the head exploded in a spray of blood and gore that coated this target's friends in the sort of stuff that never came out in the wash. He set his lips into a grim line and maintained his fire. When one shell hole had been cleared of rebels willing to expose themselves to his or Mac's hail of fire, he moved on to the next.

The returning fire from the rebels was grossly inaccurate, but he still felt a few hits pinging off his armor. The titanium/ceramic armor he was wearing was still incredibly strong, even without his shields, but it couldn't hold up against sustained fire. He ducked his head back down and started skirting around to the other side of Mac to change positions. The heavy gunner, with his vastly heavier armor, had no such concerns and was gleefully spreading his verdant hail of death over anything that moved.

Three enemy soldiers chose the exact wrong moment to make a break from the safety of one shell hole, trying to find cover in the next. Mac had hit two of them in seconds, the plasma bolts melting through the flimsy rebel armor and then exposing their friends to the horrific sights and grizzly sounds of plasma liquifying flesh. Stevo didn't give the third man much of a chance to witness his comrade's grotesque ends; the laser bolts from his rifle smashed into the man's torso, coring a neat line of holes through him and severing everything above the rebel's nipples from the rest of him.

In the time that it had taken to fell those three, another eight had managed to rush forward into some of the closer shell holes and a withering burst of fire was launched toward them, forcing both him and Mac to duck back down into cover. It may have only been less than thirty seconds, but he just knew that more and more enemy soldiers were pouring forward. Things were getting a little hairy, and their window to fall back was getting smaller by the moment. "On me, big guy," He called out to Mac.

The heavy gunner glanced over his shoulder at him, repositioned his body to face the sergeant, and nodded. "Ready when you are, Boss," he answered breathlessly.

"Alright, let's move. I'd rather not be here when this position is overrun." With another affirmative nod from Mac, they both turned and ran in a stoop toward the communication trench and back to the rear line. He let Mac take the lead, for no other reason than he could hear the rebels reoccupying the trench he had just vacated only a few seconds after they entered the vertical connection line. It would mean he would need to turn and cover their withdrawal, and Mac's rotary cannon, as effective as it was, was simply too large and unwieldy to maneuver in this cramped position. Right on cue, a laser bolt punched into the wall of the trench next to him, and he spun around to unleash a blistering volley of fire back along the trench. Two enemy soldiers were cut down before the others dove back into cover. Stevo kept walking backward until Mac had rounded into the corner to join the rest of the squad.

"You, You," he pointed to two flustered members of Echo Squad. "I want you on either side of this trench opening, and you floor anything that tries to follow us down here."

"Yessir!" came the unanimous and simultaneous response.

"Everyone else, spread out and prepare to repel boarders! We hold the line here!"

*******

Michaels. 3

Colonel Michaels was unceremoniously dumped out of his seat as the tank was shaken hard enough to make him wonder if they had been hit by one of the orbital bombardment rounds. Normally, such a violent expulsion from his chair would have been enough to have him vying for the severed head of whoever's fault it was. There would have been promises of immediate and painful 'disciplinary action', most of which he probably couldn't legally follow through on, but they were in a combat zone, and accidents happened. But that was immediately tempered by the facts that the lights went out at the exact same moment - plunging him into complete, ominous darkness - and that the tank's crew sounded as worryingly confused about what had happened as he did. There was some very colorful language coming through the door to the command deck.

Muttering his own torrent of obscenities, he felt around for the edge of his desk and pulled himself to his feet. The darkness was overwhelming, so much so that there was no discernable difference between having his eyes open or closed. As a commander of all ground forces, he was literally and effectively blind.

"All radio comms are out, Sir!" A voice, the tank commanders, he thought, echoed into his cabin. "Instruments are non-responsive, engines, anti-grav cyclics, and shields are non-functional. We are dead in the water!"

In the very useless blink of a totally blinded eye, the Colonel thought back to the last thing that had happened before the lights literally and figuratively went out. The commander and the tank's gunner were cheering raucously as yet another shot from their super-heavy main gun found its mark. But over the comms, more and more increasingly concerned reports were coming in about some form of pylons climbing out of the sand all over the battlefield. The camera of his tank, the literal eyes of his command, had just managed to locate one. There had been a bright flash on his screen, and then everything had shut down.

The thought that came to mind was not only the most logical one, it was the only one. An EMP had knocked out... well, at least the power of his tank, but by extrapolation, that meant that every other tank would have suffered the same fate. But as quickly as the thought was forming in his head, so were the counterarguments. EMPs had been a well-known and well-studied phenomenon for centuries. Their use and the defense against them had been standard military doctrine since before humanity had taken to the stars; the systems employed by the units of his division were simply immune to them and were no more susceptible to EMP blasts as they were to spit wads.

And yet... here he stood. In complete darkness, with every single system on his tank entirely inoperable.

He cursed again.

Okay, best case scenario, his tank - and his tank alone - had suffered a major systems failure and the rest of the operation was going smoothly. The chances of him being that lucky were too long to even consider. More likely was that the entire armored brigade had been rendered combat ineffective. His mind flicked to the rest of the division. Even through the heavily armored hull, he should have been able to feel if the airwing had suddenly started dropping out of the sky, so they were probably still in the fight, but the systems that ran the tank's shields were identical to the ones on the broadsword and if his shields were out, so were theirs, and that was an enormous problem.

Now that he thought about it, the shields on the personal armor of the Marines were no different. That was a big deal, but at least they were still protected by the impressively resilient armor itself. Without shields, the broadswords were effectively being protected by the equivalent of tin foil. An EMP knocking out those shields was literally impossible. He was no engineer, but he knew that the only way to inflict that level of global shutdown was with an energy spike measured at an incredibly precise frequency, one that was so minute that accidentally guessing it was in the odds of a few hundred billion to one. That didn't leave too many possibilities that explained this level of balls up!

Fuck... if there was one thing that his father had taught him, it was that speculation was an unwinnable sport.

"Colonel!!" The tank commander's voice barked through the door to the command deck. In his ponderings, Michaels had forgotten to answer the man.

"Do you have a view of the battle?" he shouted back.

"Negative, Sir. External camera feeds are dead, and the hull retraction mechanism is unresponsive."

"Fuck! Okay, then we need to get out of this fucking tank. We are useless here, and I need to re-establish contact with the Marines. How do I open this door?"

"There is an emergency release lever," the commander called back. "On the wall next to the upper left corner of the door."

"Perfect," Michaels muttered under his breath. "Now, all I need to do is find the fucking door!" He started swinging his hands around, trying to find something recognizable. His right hand knocked against something hard, and he grasped onto it, holding it while his right hand kept sweeping, finally thumbing into something that felt a lot like the padded leather back of his chair.

Okay, so that meant his left hand was holding onto the right-hand corner of his desk, and his right hand was holding his chair. The door had been directly behind him as he sat, so if he turned a little more to the left, took a few steps, and reached out, he should...

"Yes!!" he grinned triumphantly as his swinging fingers brushed over the rim of the reinforced door frame; he let them slide up until they found the upper left corner, allowed them to wander onto the bulkhead, and let his grin spread wider as they finally curled around the emergency release lever. He pulled on it hard, and the door swung open onto the beach.

His arms shot up to blot out the blinding light that raced into the cabin, startlingly bright light blazing through the widening gap and forcing him to turn away from it to blink the retinal glare from his eyes. He managed to look back into the tank as the commander, gunner, and driver followed the light and climbed out of the command deck. "We need to get to cover and link up with local command. Do you have weapons?"

The three men nodded.

"Body armor?"

There was a pause before they shook their heads.

"Then I guess we had better run fast then!"

Still squinting and blinking away the glare of the light, Michaels stepped out of the tank and onto the sand. Luckily, the heavily armored, sixty-five-ton vehicle had been facing directly up the beach, meaning that the door that opened on the tank's rear flank was in perfect cover. He darted his head around the corner of the tank to get a quick lay of the land, and try to spot the nearest group of marines while he waited for the tank crew to arm themselves.

He should have been feeling nervous about not having a weapon himself, but after seeing the casualty reports, he knew there would be plenty of spare ones around to be picked up. A Marine's weapon was sacred, and he would fight to the death anyone who tried to take it from him. But a dead Marine had no use for one anymore, and the Colonel did. He was certain their ghosts - the ones he knew would haunt him for the rest of his life - would understand.

Within only a few short seconds, the commander of the tank and the other two men of his crew had stepped onto the sand with the Colonel. Michaels pulled himself back behind cover and turned to them. "If the tank is facing our twelve o'clock, then our nearest cover is about seventy meters to our one o'clock..." The three men nodded. "Stay low, stay fast. There is a lot of small arms fire out there, but we seem to be pretty far from the fighting. All you need to do is get to cover!"

"But..." the commander frowned. "... we're already in cover. Wouldn't it be better to stay with the tank, using that for cover and being close in case the systems come back online?"

Michaels blinked. "Alright, that's a good point, commander. But I need to get up there. Can you cover me?"

"We will do our best, Sir," the commander nodded. "Good luck!... Ready, boys?" The two men of his crew nodded their affirmations and wrung their hands a little tighter over the grips of their rifles. Michaels offered one last nod, turned, and sprinted as fast as his aging legs could carry him toward the first trench line.

He made it less than halfway when the world turned upside down.

He had set his eyes on the trench, the backs of fellow Marines clearly in sight as they stood and fired to hold the lines, but there was no missing the shit storm going on above him. The broadswords were the most advanced fighters the military possessed, but without their shields, they were extremely vulnerable. It only took the sight of three of them being shot out of the sky in quick succession to confirm his worst fears. Their shields were gone, too. A glance to his right allowed him to easily see the other tanks of the column as useless and immobile as his was; some of them already had their rear doors open and their crews taking cover behind the behemoths, but most of them looked as lifeless as hunks of metal washed up on the morning tide.

It was a series of dull thuds that drew his attention to the top of the beach, a frown furrowing his brow as his legs beat beneath him as fast as he could manage. That furrowed brow turned to one of terrified, wide-eyed disbelief as the thousands... thousands... of iridescent green balls of plasma mortar shells started to fill the sky from beyond the top of the beach.

The first explosion was deafening - enough to make him stumble forward, but not quite close enough to prevent him from keeping his balance - as it smashed mercilessly into one of the tanks a few hundred meters to his right. The tank didn't explode; that would be a technical fallacy. It was the plasma bomb that exploded; the tank was simply obliterated in the process. He didn't know why the shock of seeing that explosion forced his brain to resort to such trivialities, but that is what happened as another five tanks were reduced to smoldering ruins and flying pieces of wreckage in only a matter of seconds. Another tank was hit, this one much closer, the one that had been directly next to his on the advance up the beach. The blast from it knocked him onto his front and had him skidding to a halt with the wet sand scouring layers of skin off his face.

Panting and moaning, he rolled himself onto his back, looking back the way he had come and at the crew of his tank as they suddenly grasped the reality of their situation. The tanks were being targeted with unerring accuracy, and they were standing right behind one... until they weren't.

The commander yelled something to his men and took maybe three steps out of cover on his sprint towards Michaels, his crew right behind him, when their tank was hit. All three of them were caught in the explosion. The heat from the blast seared the skin on Michael's hands as he held them up to protect his face, the smoke from it blotted out his view of the sun, and the shards of shrapnel raced over his head at about the perfect height to cut him in half if he had still been standing. Sand was launched into the air, a fair amount of it landing on him as he looked back in shock at his former crew. There was no blood, there were no bodies, there was no gore, there were no mangled corpses... there was nothing left. They had been blown out of existence.

Another blast rocked the ground beneath him, snapping him out of his daze. With an almost feral snarl falling from his lips, he pulled himself to his feet and resumed his run toward the trenches.

********

Stevo. 9

Point-blank range was not really a thing in modern combat, at least not on a large scale. Sure, there were isolated incidents like when Stevo and his fire team had been clearing that first trench, but that was a massive rarity. Instead, the Imperium Marine Corps doctrine defined 'point-blank' as any engagement at a range of less than fifty feet, with exceptions made for hand-to-hand combat. There was about thirty feet between Stevo's trench line and the now occupied fourth trench that he had withdrawn from, and yet the savage hail of fire flowing between them had been as unforgiving as it had been unending. The Marines of Stevo's four squads - the fourth one having joined his Bravo team and the remnants of Echo and Delta - had been holding their own, which was to be expected against rebels. What had surprised the Sergeant, however, was the ferocity with which their enemy was fighting back.

Not only were there a seemingly endless number of them throwing themselves into the fray, but they were keeping all four squads of genetically enhanced and highly trained Marines pinned down. That was certainly not something to be expected. Three of his men had already fallen since his order to hold the line. One was KIA, a lucky headshot smashing through the faceplate of his helmet and bursting the Marine's head like an overripe grape; the other two had been wounded, and he was waiting for Dusky to tell him how bad they were. Not that it made much of a difference. This far from the support of the rest of the Division, there was no hope of evacuating a seriously wounded Marine out of the combat zone, and the walking wounded would have no more luck trying to make it back under their own steam, not with the volume of fire being thrown at them.

Now that he thought about it, there was supposed to be a steady stream of medevac dropships landing on the beach to pull out the wounded, and Stevo had not seen a single one since the fourth wave had landed. He squeezed off another rapid burst of shots at the opposite trench as his mind added that fact to the ever-growing list of things that didn't add up about this mission.

The cacophony of battle was deafening. With comms down, the Marines had been forced to yell orders along the lines using the speakers built into their hermetically sealed helmets. Although this allowed orders to be passed in the same way they had been for eons of warfare, it also meant that the external pick-up - the microphones almost built into every helmet - were also forced to register the background sounds of combat. Under normal circumstances, that sound would have been muted, or at the very least lowered, to allow the Marines to use the comm system unimpeded, with sensors indicating the direction that gunfire was coming from. Now, though, Stevo, along with every other Marine, was completely at the mercy of the almost overwhelming din.

It came as quite a shock, then, when - over the rapid sounds of laser and plasma shots - he heard someone from the rebel lines yelling out an order to his men. "Now!" the voice echoed over no-mans-land. "Take cover!"

And just like that, the fire from the rebel line blinked out, and every enemy soldier dropped down into the trench and out of sight.

With nothing left to shoot at, most of the Marines ceased fire, glancing back and forth amongst themselves in confusion. A strange, eerie silence fell on their small corner of the battlefield with only the muted and muffled echoes of the aerial dogfights - and more distant firefights - disturbing the strange calmness.

Stevo frowned.

That frown only grew as a series of deep, rumbling thuds echoed not only over the stillness of the paused combat but through the soles of his feet from the ground itself. A flicker of movement caught his eye, and he turned his gaze skyward to watch in horror as countless balls of plasma crested the ridgeline above the top of the beach and arced in the sky to targets behind them.

"Incoming!" he almost screamed into his comms unit, forgetting for a moment that his had been knocked out and everyone else's' were completely non-functional. But his voice carried through the trench, and every Marine looked up, their faces twisting into the same look of shock, then fear, that Stevo was sure marred his own features. "Spread out!" he barked, "Take cover!"

All four of his squads burst into action, most of them running away from him, further along the trench to put space between themselves and the men next to them. Even if this trench took a direct hit, the blast would only be able to kill one or two spaced-out Marines rather than a whole tightly packed squad. A few more men ran past him, positioning themselves on the other side of the two men guarding the junction with the communications trench. For his part, Stevo hunkered down at the bottom of the trench for the second time in less than an hour. He looked up at the trench wall and silently willed it to hold as the vibrations from artillery detonations started vibrating through his feet.

The seconds ticked by - an odd phrase considering that mechanical, clockwork timepieces had been replaced by digital chronometers centuries ago - but each one of them seemed to stretch out for an eternity. With each passing second, the shockwaves from the blasts further back on the beach grew stronger against Stevo's feet and louder in his ears. It was clear almost immediately that the enemy gunners had started with targets closest to the waterline and had marched their bombardment up the beach toward their own lines, but the creeping barrage crept inexorably closer. It took about forty seconds for the first grains of sand to start raining down on him and his men, another ten until that rain became a flood, and then the world turned green.

Stevo was knocked onto his back when the first mortar round hit, landing exactly between the two men guarding the communication trench and blasting them to pieces. Almost immediately, another hit further along the trench and then another behind him toward where the bulk of his men were cowering. Artillery was, at best, a suppression weapon. Normal wisdom dictated that it was far too inaccurate to be used to decimate forces in cover. Yet, these verdant balls were landing with an accuracy that suggested the gunners had their fucking addresses. There were twenty-eight men and women under his command in that trench before the first round hit, and the seventeen rounds fell into the trench without touching the sides. Stevo could only watch in blind terror and morbid wonder as one Marine after another was blasted out of existence.

His eyes, somehow, found Rev. His lips were moving, no doubt in prayer, just as they had been during the first bombardment they had been subjected to. This time, though, it seemed that God's attention was elsewhere, and Rev's body was blown apart by the eighteenth hit. Dusky, on the other side of him from Stevo, screamed and rushed forward toward her friend; there was nothing she could have done. She knew it, Stevo knew it, but she rushed forward anyway; the look of fear, shock, and defiant determination etched onto her face was clear even from the distance between them.

A second after she started moving, another round smashed into the point she had been taking cover. The blast from the explosion and the corresponding shockwave launched her limp body twenty feet into the air. Stevo could only watch in muted silence as she cartwheeled through the smoke and was dumped mercilessly onto the ground behind their trench. Stevo was moving before his mind could even process the thought, pulling himself to his feet and looking back toward the rear lines, searching for Dusky. He knew there was no way the rebels would risk being upright in their own trenches under this sort of bombardment, so the chances of his being shot were minimal.

In less than a second, he spotted her. Both of her legs were missing, and the armor had been blown off one of her arms, showing the tattered flesh hanging by a few heroic tendons beneath it. Despite this, she was on her belly, her one good arm clawing at the sand and dragging herself to the safety of the next trench line back. She looked back over her shoulders, her eyes wide with fear and, no doubt, a massive amount of shock. They were begging him for help.

Stevo flexed his arms, ready to pull himself out of the trench and run to her aid, just as another shell landed on top of her.

She was blown to pieces.

Stevo just blinked at the impact crater. First Big-G, then Rev, now Dusky... just gone. Ryan was wounded, assuming he had survived the barrage at all. Over half of his squad was down. He could only stare at the red stains around the smoking hole in the sand, his mind trying to piece together the tatters of his broken spirit.

He wasn't allowed to wallow in his shock for long. Spatterings of sand and debris were still raining down on him as the lethal balls of plasma plied their deadly trade; each detonation sounded more like a muffled echo to him, though, rather than the deafening cacophony of war, but he was suddenly and violently barreled off his feet as Mac pounced on him and pushed him back down into cover.

"She's gone, Sarge," Mac said firmly, but unable to hide the agony behind his eyes at the words he was forced to say. "There's nothin' ya can do."

He looked up at the Scottish giant of a man, his lips parting and closing as his mind tried to form words; his body wanted to push him off, to scramble to its feet, to run to the aid of his decimated unit, even though he knew there was nothing he could do. But no matter how much his body wanted to move, his limbs and his muscles were in too much shock to cooperate. All he could do was stare up at Mac and swallow down on the lump that was quickly forming in his throat. "Angel," he finally managed to croak out. "Where's Angel?"

"I'm here, Sarge," her voice came from behind Mac, his view of her blocked by the hulking mass of heavy gunner on top of him. "We need to... Jesus!" Mac flinched, hunkering down as another round hit its mark, a cloud of sand and green fire being blasted into the air, and another impact blast raced along the trench. There was a part of Stevo's mind that understood that without their armor, those airblasts alone would be enough to kill them. "We need to get the fuck out of here, they must have these trenches pre-sighted!" Angel yelled over the sound of sand and rocks raining back down onto them.

"Withdraw," Stevo groaned as Mac climbed off him and pulled him into a crouch. "Get anyone still alive back toward the tanks!"

Mac glanced back over his shoulder and shook his head, a haunted look on his face. "There's nae anyone left, Boss; they're gone. It's just us."

Stevo balked for a moment. That wasn't possible. Artillery didn't work that way, even if the trenches had been presighted. They would have to blanket every single inch of every single trench to be sure that they caused the amount of damage that they had, but every single shot seemed to land exactly where one of his men had been standing. Not every plasma bomb had hit their mark, obviously, but the ones that had were inch-perfect shots. That just wasn't possible unless the enemy gunners knew exactly where every Marine was and could be sure that their chances of moving were...

"The ping!" he murmured, wide-eyed in shock as the only possible explanation dawned on him. "They hacked the ping!"

Mac grimaced, "I didn't send mine, I was too busy shooting, and I was right next to you. I thought that would be good enough to give my location."

"Mine was knocked out when the wall collapsed on me," Stevo breathed. They both turned to look at Angel as the sergeant was pulled to a crouch on his feet. Angel looked back at him, the fear and realization clear on her face. "Your helmet!" Stevo barked at her. "Toss it, then we need to get the fuck out of here!"

Angel didn't need to be told twice. With a series of deft and well-practiced movements of her hands, she unsealed her helmet, gripped it by the collar, and launched it forward toward the enemy trench. She had her rifle back in her hands in a heartbeat and the three of them bolted toward the next communication trench that ran rearward.

Less than ten seconds later, their ears were assaulted by the screams of enemy soldiers as a plasma bomb found its mark, the one that should have been on the top of Angel's head.

********

Almark. 6

"I'm hit! Help me! AAARGHH!!!" Saddlebag screamed into the com unit. Sabre three's face contorted into an expression of pure terror before being hidden behind the wash of flame as his cockpit was engulfed in an inferno. Almark barely managed a glance to her right to watch in horror as his fighter plummeted toward the sea in a ball of fire. There was no ejection, no parachute; he was already dead, and she knew it. She didn't have time to mourn her fallen wingman, though; she was too busy fighting for her life.

The energy blast that had rippled out over the beach a few minutes earlier had been the turning point in the battle. Under normal circumstances, she was sure that her wing of super-advanced Broadsword fighters could have eviscerated the enemy formations, using their powerful shields and vastly superior maneuverability to quickly gain the upper hand before unleashing the full blistering weight of the aircraft's firepower onto them. But that isn't what happened.

Her shields, just like every other aircraft in her wing, had blinked out within seconds of the energy blast being released. Comms with both the surface and the orbital fleet were out, too, and communication with the other wings was spotty at best. It was only the fact that each fighter wing was given a slightly different internal frequency to use amongst its members that kept the comms alive between the pilots of Saber Wing.

"Halfpint! You have two on your tail!" Joker's voice barked through the holographic display. "Hard left, one-eighty.... Now!"

Almark didn't hesitate, trusting her team implicitly; she slammed her flight stick to the left while activating the anti-grav generators on the dipping wing and yanking back on the throttle. Her broadsword seemed to jump to the left, slowing down dramatically and spinning on the Y-axis like a top while still sailing forward on its own momentum. She looked up in time to watch the two enemy fighters race past, massively overshooting their target but putting themselves directly in her crosshairs as her aircraft righted its direction and then shoved the throttle forward again. She feathered her finger over the flight stick's triggers and felt the airframe vibrate slightly as a hail of laser bolts slashed through the armor of one of her would-be assailants. It was ripped apart as one of those bolts hit the power core. The other enemy fighter banked to the right, thinking that would keep it safe, but Joker, coming from her five o'clock high, unleashed his own blizzard of firepower and neatly bisected the enemy fighter's wing from its fuselage.

"I owe you one, Joker," Almark breathed gratefully into the coms.

It was a testament to the tension of the massive dogfight and the shock at losing Saber three, that Joker just nodded at the holographic display without the slightest hint of a smile or the poorest attempt at humor.

They were out over the water now, maybe a mile or two from the beach, the dogfight pushing them further and further away from the men they were supposed to be protecting, but with their shields down, they were being forced to fly incredibly defensively. All around her, broadswords were being swatted out of the sky. The rebels already had an enormous numerical advantage before the energy spike, but entire wings were being wiped out at a breathtaking rate.

"I've got two on me! I can't shake 'em," Buzzkill yelled into the coms

"I've got you, two," the rich timbre of Lurch's voice followed a few seconds later. "Bank right on my mark.... Mark!"

Halfpint's eyes flicked between the holographic display, her own instruments, and the skies around her as she tried to keep on top of the rapidly deteriorating situation. Buzzkill's cam seemed to lean to the right; she instinctively knew that the camera hadn't moved at all; it was just the g spot that had forced her body to the left as she pulled off the maneuver. Lurch's camera seemed to vibrate as he let loose with his guns.

"Jesus, that was close," Buzzkill breathed, her body righting itself in her seat as a look of relief washed over her face. That look lasted less than a second. "Lurch, Watch out!"

Lurch's eyes shot upwards, his face a mask of horror as he raised his hands in front of his head. Something bright flashed through the feed, a light that momentarily scoured the holo-feed white. When it cleared, Lurch's headless body was slumped to the side, and the soft glow where a laser's impact point had blasted through the headrest of his seat. The whole cockpit had been bathed in red.

Almark couldn't bring herself to watch her friend's strike craft fall like a stone out of the sky and smash into the ocean, instantly being obliterated under the force of its own impact among sheets of violently displaced water

"Saber wing, regroup on me," she ordered, choking back the tears.

"I'm hit!" Duck's voice echoed through her radio. "I'm losing power..."

"I've got him!" Buzzkill's response was almost instant, and her cam vibrated, shaking her pale and hunted face as she unleashed vengeance for her fallen friends. "Got the bastard!"

"Duck, status!" Halfpint barked.

Saber six took a few seconds to answer as her eyes checked over her instruments. "I've got red across the board, One," she looked back sorrowfully. Both of them knew what that meant.

"Alright, get back to the carrier," Halfpint nodded with half a smile. It was another loss for Saber Wing, but at least she would live, unlike the others.

"I'm... I'm sorry," tears streaked down Duck's beautiful face as a look of resignation flooded her features.

Halfpint smiled back, then looked out of her cockpit canopy to watch the pretty girl's fighter pull up and accelerate out of the combat zone. "That leaves three of us," she said with a renewed determination into the comms as she looked down at Joker and Buzzkill. "No more fucking around. Stay close, watch out for each other, and let's get some goddamned payback!"

Her wingmen didn't answer; they just nodded, the look of grim determination set in their steely eyes, just as they were in hers. She banked right, aiming back toward the beach, lining up her target reticule with a flight of four enemy fighters that were casually sailing through the skies as if the aerial battle had already been won. She squeezed down on her trigger and watched as the hail of rapidly firing laser bolts corrected the arrogance of their assumption.

********

Adam. 1

Adam braced himself against the wall of snow, listening to the thudding sounds of projectiles hitting the opposite side of it. The vibrations, much stronger than he thought they would be, were knocking small clumps of the frozen water off his makeshift barricade and onto his collar. Of course, his luck being what it was today, most of those clumps managed to find their way down the back of his neck, causing him to shiver violently. How had it come to this? Every plan he had laid had not only been thwarted, it had been used to drive him back. What had started out as a well-planned assault had been turned into a rout.

"Come out from there with your hands in the air, and we will make this quick!" A voice traveled over the once pristine whiteness.

"You'll never take me alive!" he snarled back as his frozen fingers curled against the frozen ground.

His heart was hammering against the inside of his ribs, and his rapid breaths were misting in the frigid air as fast as he could breathe them out. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to calm his pulse and focus on his hearing. Nothing could move silently in these conditions, just the crunching of soft snow compacting underfoot was always enough to give away a position, but he had learned long ago that there was very little that was silent about his assailants.

Focusing inward, he gradually managed to regain control of his breathing, swapping the rapid, panting gasps for deeper, more level breaths, and with that new focus, his heart rate started to calm. His ears picked up the telltale sounds of movement, and his head shot to the right; his eyes and ears trying to pick out the source of the sound. A broken branch snapped to his left, spinning his head in that direction.

He was being flanked.

The wall he was leaning against was barely covering him now; there was no cover at all on either side of him. If one of his attackers got around to his flank, it would be over, and Adam wasn't ready to die just yet! His time was running out; it was now or never, and there was one thing that his father had always taught him. If you were going to go down, make sure you did it fighting.

With a warcry that wouldn't have been out of place on the barbaric battlefields of antiquity, he scrambled to his feet and vaulted over his defensive barricade, his scant ammunition clutched between his numb fingers. Roaring out his final defiance as he drew his arm back...

And got hit in the face by a snowball.

Another two smacked into his chest from slightly wider angles. Throwing his arms into the air with a groan, he fell back onto the ground, making sure to over-dramatize his final death rattles. The coldness of the snow soaking into his back was instantly fought off by the warmth of the peels of laughter dancing through the air from his daughters.

"Got you, Daddy. We win!"

Brown-haired Lucy ran over, barely able to breathe through her raucous laughter, and jumped onto her stomach next to him, squealing in delight at her part in the victory. Natasha wasn't far behind her, the elder of the two sisters more than aware of their father's feints. It was a caution that paid off as Lucy's giggles were instantly replaced by screeches of laughter as Adam yanked her onto his chest and started to tickle her mercilessly. One form of deadly winter combat was over, but that did not mean the girls had won the war.

"Alright, alright," Jenny, his darling wife, chuckled as she padded over to them. "Get off the ground before you catch your deaths." It was impossible for her to sound stern with that beaming smile on her face.

"You!" Adam hissed playfully, "Traitor! You were supposed to be on my side!"

"Traitor is such an ugly word," Jenny smirked. "I prefer to call it female solidarity."

"Tell it to the tribunal!" Adam continued in faux indignation. "It'll be the firing squad for you!"

"I'll be on your side, Daddy," Lucy beamed innocently up into his eyes.

"Excellent!" Adam grinned. "Next time, victory and glory shall be ours!"

"Yeahhh," Lucy giggled.

"Oh really?" Her mother grinned at her, "I guess that means you don't want the girl's-team hot chocolate then?"

Lucy blinked and then frowned. Her eyes showed the thoughts playing through her young mind as she weighed up her love for her father against the prospect of steaming, chocolaty goodness. "Sorry, Daddy." she shrugged. "Girl's team has snacks."

Adam snorted loudly before flopping dramatically back into the snow and loudly bemoaning the fact that he didn't have any sons to fight off the evil female hordes that had taken over his household. Still laughing, the three women of his family turned and started making their way back home.

They made it about twenty paces when Jenny let out a loud scream as a handful of snow was dumped unceremoniously down her collar by her passing, grinning husband. "Oh, you bastard!" She half-laughed, half-screamed at him.

"Language, Timothy!" he called back over his shoulder, beaming cheekily.

"I'll remember that later when you want se...cond helpings of dessert!"

Natasha scrunched up her nose and shook her head with a look of disgust on her face as Lucy frowned. "I don't think that's what you were going to say, Mommy."

"Vengeance is mine!" Adam called out to the skies, his arms held high as raced toward the house, burst through the back door, turned and waved to his girls through the window... and then playfully locked the door.

A minute later, the three ladies of his life casually strolled through the glass-covered side door in the living room, the sounds of giggles, playfulness, and immeasurable love echoing around their home as they always should. "You can't beat us, Daddy." Lucy grinned triumphantly

"Urgh, you're just too clever for me, Nugget," he huffed at her, following with a teasing wink that pulled another proud and beaming smile onto her angelic face.

His wife stepped up behind him, leaning down and pressing her warm, soft lips against his roughly stubbled cheek. "Do I need a shave?" He leaned back to look up at her

She shook her head with a smoldering look in her eyes. "Nah, I quite like the rugged, grizzly man look you've got going on. Maybe keep it for a few days longer," she finished with a wink. He was just about to answer with his smoothest, most witty line when a chime alerted his attention to his office. Working from home was a luxury that allowed him to indulge in time with his family, but he was still expected to actually work; that chime was a notification that a message had been received via the secure comms network, and a message sent via that method always required urgent attention. He rolled his eyes with a smile at his wife. She knew the deal and stood back upright to let her husband rise from his chair.

Adam turned and kissed her deeply, earning the loving couple an 'Ewwww' from Natasha and another giggle from Lucy. Adam bowed to his girls with a tip of his imaginary hat, spun on his heels, and skipped toward his office.

With the office door closed and locked, he sat down on the ridiculously comfortable desk chair and pressed his palm to the DNA reader on his console before the holographic interface hummed its way to life. There was only one message in his secure and heavily encrypted inbox, but his eyebrows were pulled into a frown when he read who it was off. He clicked on the name, and his call was routed through dozens of communication relays, over hundreds of lightyears, to the headquarters for the office of internal security and to the overweight and slightly sweaty face of Frank Horrigan.

"Frank, what can I do for you?"

"Hi Adam, sorry to bother you, buddy," Frank glanced up at the holo-feed from his workstation. "I've got something I need some help with and was wondering if you had any advice."

"Sure, send it through," Adam smiled. Frank lacked in all but the most basic of understandings of personal hygiene and health, but he was a solid worker with a keen mind. As the division chief, it was Adam's job to make sure that all the people under him were working to peak efficiency, and that sometimes meant that problems were kicked up the ladder to him. Fortunately, Frank was one of the brighter members of the team and rarely bothered Adam with the minutia of his work unless it really was important. Adam answered directly to the minister for state security, and everyone in the Imperium knew how much the state valued its secrecy. So, if something was kicked up the ladder to him, it was his responsibility to deal with it.

A few seconds later, his console dinged to announce the arrival of the data package, and Adam opened it. "Alright, Frank. What am I looking at?"

"Ultra classified file was opened in the Naval Quartermaster's system," Frank explained with a frown. "Except there is no evidence that anyone had used their access code to open it, and there doesn't seem to be any network breaches."

"So someone has opened a file they may not be supposed to open or even know exists, and you don't know who or how?"

"Pretty much, yeah."

"Have you checked the logs?" Adam asked

Frank shot him a look, one that perfectly articulated the obviousness of that step. But then that frown reappeared. "The logs were scrubbed, Adam."

Adam sat up a little straighter in his chair. "That... isn't supposed to be possible."

Frank held his eyes, gesturing a shrug with his hand and nodding toward the screen. "This is why I've come to you. The network is secure. Nobody has hacked in; whoever accessed that file had legal access to it but didn't want anyone to know it had been accessed."

"Any evidence that information has been copied?"

"Without the logs, I have no idea, but... it's not the sort of file you peruse for light reading."

It was Adam's turn to frown now as he pulled up the file in question. Technically speaking, neither he nor Frank were allowed to access it, but his office had been granted special dispensation in order to keep the files secure. "Alright, what are we looking at?" His eyes started scanning the lines of text in the document.

"It's the equipment manifest for the entire Goliath battlegroup."

Adam started to shuffle uncomfortably in his chair. The manifest of a battlegroup could be an extraordinarily dangerous piece of intelligence if it fell into the wrong hands. It was the equivalent of leaving your battle plans out for the enemy to find. The information contained in this single document could put tens of thousands of men, not to mention billions of credits worth of hardware, in a very precarious position. "Have you checked the Goliath's mission orders?" Adam asked.

"Also Ultra-classified. Black ops stuff. But no evidence it has been accessed. So I didn't look."

Adam nodded; that was smart. Knowing too much was not something to aspire to in his line of work. "So, someone legally accessed the equipment manifest for a mission, information they were allowed to have, but didn't want us to know it was them, and they didn't need to access the details of the mission itself..." Adam pondered aloud. "...meaning they probably already know them. Maybe one of the mission planners?"

"Would they need to know the caliber of the guns, or the exact com modulations to plan the mission? And why would they be so careful to cover their tracks afterward?" Frank asked pointedly.

Adam drummed his fingers thoughtfully against his chin. "This may be one for the boss."

Frank nodded. "It's not much to go on, but I think you may be right."

"Alright, Frank, leave it with me. I'll send it up the chain."

"Thank's Adam. Say Hi to Jenny and the girls for me."

"Will do. I'll see you next week."

With a smile, Frank closed the comms channel. Adam took a breath and started flicking through his list of contacts until he found the one he was looking for, and he pressed the icon to open a channel. Minister Sandra White was a stern and formidable-looking woman, one who had been placed in the position of minister for internal security by the Emperor himself, thanks to her almost fanatical loyalty to her benefactor. She was not an easy woman to work for.

Politics were above his pay scale, and he had neither the time, the patience, or the inclination to wade through that shit heap, but the politics sometimes came with the job. However, having a boss who knew less than nothing about the work you did was a constant struggle for a consummate professional like Adam. If she knew that she knew nothing, that would be something, but Sandra White seemed blissfully at ease with her ignorance and her position of power.

"Mister Doncaster," the minister breathed with a thinly veiled air of contempt as she accepted the call. "What can I do for you?"

"Minister White," he bowed his head respectfully. "I'm sorry to disturb you. One of my team has found evidence of something... troubling."

Sandra rolled her eyes with a huff. "Send me what you have."

"Right away, Ma'am." He tapped a few icons on his console and forwarded a copy of Frank's data package to her. "It should be with you now."

She nodded without reply and opened the file on her own console, reading through the summary of Frank's findings before opening the classified file itself. Adam had spent decades in the security services, starting out as a field agent what seemed like a lifetime ago. He knew how to read people. So it surprised him to see the look of shock that momentarily flashed over his superior's face. Her eyes widened, and her jaw slackened for a fraction of a second before she composed herself.

She cleared her throat and turned back to the interface. "Who else knows about this breach?"

"Just myself and my team member, Frank Horrigan."

She nodded. "Okay, Mister Doncaster, I need you to pay very close attention. You have stumbled onto something that is far above your rank or your security clearance. It would be very wise for you to forget that you ever saw this. Do I make myself clear?"

Adam frowned and was about to say that no, he didn't understand in the slightest, and it was his job to investigate this. But there was something about the edge in her eyes. Something that almost looked to be threatening. He closed his mouth and nodded. "Of course, Madam Minister, I will close the investigation immediately and order all corresponding files destroyed."

"See that you do."

"Thank you for your ti..." The channel was closed before he could finish his sentence. He shook his head at the blank holo-feed and muttered something impolite under his breath. He typed out a quick message to Frank, telling him that the Minister was dealing with the matter and he should delete all files and investigation notes as per procedure for classified documents and then sent it on its way.

It was not the first time that something had troubled him about an investigation, and he was sure it wouldn't be the last, but there was something about the reaction from Sandra White that didn't sit quite right. The cold tendrils of a feeling that almost emulated fear crawled down his spine.

He shook the thought clear from his head. His job was to protect state secrets; he didn't need to understand them to make sure they didn't get out. He locked his computer back down and stood from his chair before making his way toward the enticing aroma of freshly baked cookies and the sounds of his girl's musical chatting floating through their home.

The unease from the call melted away in moments.

********

Stevo. 10

A fighting retreat, a running firefight, a backwardly advancing gun battle, call it what you will, Stevo was doing it. At every trench intersection or at every bend in the line, either he or one of the two marines still left alive would wheel around, aim their weapon behind them, and systematically gun down any pursuing rebel soldier brazen enough to be caught out of cover. The two others would withdraw to the next cover, where one of them would assume a firing position and cover the retreat of the unit. Over and over again.

Putting fist-sized holes in less than two or three pursuing rebels was a rarity, and Stevo could only guess at the horrific casualties he and his Marines were inflicting on their enemy. He had to admit a bit of grudging respect for their foe; despite the incredible amount of punishment they had received before the energy blast, including an orbital bombardment that would have smashed the resolve and the morale of an Imperium army infantry regiment in moments, they were still fighting, they were still coming, and they were winning.

It had only taken a few minutes for them to retrace their route through the trenches they had spent the previous few hours clearing, hopping over the bodies of the soldiers they had killed on their initial advance. In some places, the iridescent green flames from Mac's heavy cannon were still burning. The smell of death was everywhere.

There were two things that they never taught you in basic training... the first was that when a person was killed, what was left of their body experiences a total muscle shutdown, so all the bodily fluids that were being held in came pouring out. It was far from uncommon to see a dead body haloed by the blood from their wound and the equally unpleasant defecation pooling around their hips. The second thing that they didn't tell you was that the closest known animal to a human being, in terms of the physical attributes of skin, was a pig. It didn't take a genius to work out what a burning human body smelled like. Couple those two aroma's together, add in a healthy dose of Ozone from where laser fire and plasma bolts cracked through the air, sprinkle in a touch of smoke from the countless fires burning around the beach, and you had the makings of the stomach-churning smell of a battlefield.

They had been fighting their retreat for only a few minutes, but it seemed like hours. The issue plaguing Stevo's mind was where they were retreating to. Retracing their steps all the way back to their landing point would just trap them between the enemy and the sea, and there was no way the three of them would survive a protracted gun battle from behind the pillar behind which they had left Ryan. The sounds of plasma and laser fire from further along the beach, however, gave him hope that his was not the only group to have survived the rebel artillery barrage, if he could just link up with them...

"Mac, keep an eye out ahead of us," he barked breathlessly. "We don't want to get ourselves caught penned in if a group of them get in front of us."

"Aye, Sarge," he panted back.

"Angel, keep an eye out for a standard rifle. We need weight of fire now, not accuracy and range."

"Understood," she grimaced. They both know how much she loved her long-barrelled sniper rifle.

"Intersection coming up," Mac called back.

Stevo looked up in time to watch Mac drop to his knees and peek around the corner and into the next trench. "Clear!" he shouted.

"Move forward, I've got this one." The sergeant ordered.

"Where are we going, Boss?" Angel called as she snapped off another few shots, turned, and started running after them.

"Company command should be just up ahead; that bunker was the one that pinned them down..."He gestured to his left. None of them could see it, but that was where the implosion round had cleared a hundred-meter section of the beach of... well, everything. "... Captain Santiago was advancing on that last I heard from him."

"You think any of them are alive?" Her voice echoed from behind him as he assumed a kneeling firing position at the intersection of the trenches and raised his rifle, ready for the inevitable flood of rebel soldiers behind them.

"I don't know, but I can hear gunfire from that direction, so I'm hoping someone is still fighting."

He watched her crane her head a little, listening for the sounds of battle ahead of her. With a nod, she ran past him and followed Mac. No sooner had she cleared his line of fire than the enemy rounded the corner she had been covering and charged along the trench. They spotted him and started to raise their weapons, but they never got the chance to fire.

Stevo squeezed the trigger, and his battle rifle once again sang its deadly tune. Each semi-automatic shot was blasted out of the muzzle of his weapon with a peculiar-sounding, high-pitched 'whump' noise. Almost like someone flexing a sheet of metal. There was probably some high-tech, super intelligent explanation for this that involved an understanding of particle physics that a Marine sergeant would never quite be able to fathom, but now was not the time for such thoughts. His hail of fire smashed into the advancing soldiers as they stormed up the trench, two abreast. He didn't need to be fancy with his aim, simple shots to center mass. The rounds punched through the light rebel armor like a plasma blade through butter, part burning, part melting, and part blasting through flimsy kevlar and comparatively flimsier flesh. In many cases, individual bolts ripped right through the front rank of men and drove into the bodies of the men behind. They fell by the score, only one or two managing to snap off a wildly inaccurate shot before Stevo mercilessly put them down.

He had never seen men so seemingly eager to charge into the relentless and remorseless hail of oncoming fire. It was like they were physically incapable of feeling fear, something that was pumping adrenaline through Stevo's own body at a frightful rate.

Considering how long it had felt like they had been withdrawing, compared to how long it had actually been, it surprised Stevo when the minute or so of him covering Mac and Angel's dash along the trenches went by in the blink of an eye. It was only looking up when Mac shouted that he was ready at the next defensive point that he really took stock of the scene before him. The smoldering, bloody remains of at least thirty enemy soldiers were heaped in front of him. He snapped off another couple of shots at soldiers trying to climb over their fallen brethren before cradling his rifle in his arms, turning, and sprinting back along the trench.

It barely took a few seconds to get back to Mac, his rotary plasma cannon opening up as soon as Stevo was clear. Angel was only a dozen feet in front of him, her eyes scanning the trench ahead, not only for encircling enemy troops but for the next place from which to provide cover while Mac withdrew to join them. "Fuck me!" she exclaimed, skidding to a halt.

She was still just standing there, staring at the scene before her, when Stevo caught up, his own eyes curiously seeking out whatever it was that had made his usually diligent and professional underling abandon her tactical awareness at a time like this. One look was all he needed to fully understand the cause of her faltering withdrawal, and he felt his jaw drop and his stomach lurch violently.

Unlike the trenches that he and the rest of Bravo squad had been in when the rebel artillery had hit, Able company command - the much larger unit based around Captain Santiago - had bypassed the imploded gun emplacement and set up their command post in what looked to be a half completed command bunker. The trench Stevo was standing in opened up into a square depression in the beach, measuring about twenty meters along each edge. Into that bunker had poured at least two squads of infantry, maybe three, a logistics unit - mainly consisting of Marines tasked with the permanent maintenance of communications - and it looked like it was being used as a staging point for the evacuation of the wounded, too, meaning that part of the medical corps had been here as well.

In the dead center of the square bunker was a deep, smoldering, scorched hole where round after round had smashed into the sand with enough force to gouge out a crater and enough heat to turn the inner ridges of it into glass. Spread out around the crater, in every direction, all of them facing out away from the impact point like petals on a blooming flower, were the crumbled and shattered remains of Able company command.

Stevo was easily able to see what had happened, just from where the bodies had fallen. Both of the Marine rifle squads had been on the firing step against the northern wall, almost certainly laying down covering fire against the onrushing rebel counter-attack; he had no doubt that if he were to look over the parapet, the beach would be awash with scores of enemy dead. Directly behind them, almost right on top of the impact point, had been the communications officers, more than likely frantically trying to re-establish comms after the energy blast. Toward the south end of the bunker, on Stevo's right as he looked out of the connecting trench, had been the medics and the wounded. Stretchers had been laid out in orderly rows, but the blast had tossed them and their occupants against, or over, the rear wall. Their mangled bodies, along with those of the heroic medics aiding them, were in crumpled heaps against the wooden boards that held the beach back from the command post. The blast that ripped into the center of the bunker would have detonated with a blast powerful enough to render their armor useless. The shockwave alone would have burst internal organs like they were balloons; even those not killed instantly would have suffered horrific levels of internal bleeding and wouldn't have suffered for long.

That only left Santiago himself. Stevo had served with the man since the Three-Eight-One's inception and knew him well. As soon as it became clear that comms had been lost and shields were down, he would have ordered his adjutants to the wall to help with the defense, he would have picked up a rifle, and he would have joined his men, as close to the center of the line as possible to rally his forces.

"Get a weapon and any spare battery packs you can," Stevo muttered to Angel as he stepped into the bunker of death. He walked closer to the northern wall; the second body he turned over was that of the Captain. The massive internal injuries the man had suffered had ruptured his eyeballs. Although they were closed, the grim waterfalls of now drying blood were still clearly marked as they ran out of his tear ducts, one trickling down his cheek, the other pooling on the side of his nose before dripping onto the inside of his helmet's faceplate. Similar trails of blood were running from his nose and from his ears. The force of the blast - or blasts - must have been enormous, but unlike Stevo and his squads, they hadn't had the luxury of being able to spread out.

"Mac, get back here!" Angel shouted out as she took up a position at the trench entrance with a newly acquired X-44 battle rifle, her long-barreled ballistic rifle slung over her shoulder. Stevo should have known better than to assume that she would have given it up just yet.

A few seconds later, Mac hurled himself into the bunker as Angel opened fire. "Holy shit!" he gasped, looking around for the first time.

"Load up on ammo and anything else you can find, Mac," Stevo said despondently.

"We need to find a place to hunker down and defend," Angel shouted over the rapid fire of her weapon.

The Sergeant nodded to the impact crater in the center of the bunker. "It's safe to say that this spot has been pre-sighted. But you're right..." He paused for a moment, looking toward the opposite trench from the one they had entered through. The sounds of gunfire had lessened but not disappeared altogether. "...That way," he finally said, "I'll take point."

His body had been finely tuned for this, for exactly this situation. Prolonged and extended periods of heavy combat were not the norm in modern warfare - most of it coming in the form of lightning-fast boarding actions that lasted maybe thirty minutes at most - but as the current battle was showing, it did happen occasionally. By this point in the fight, a regular marine would be exhausted, he would be tired, and adrenaline would be racing through his body and causing it to shake uncontrollably; that shake would throw off his aim and make him miss shots that could have saved his life. Stevo, like every other of the enhanced soldiers in his division, didn't need to worry about that. His body had been engineered to not only be able to consume the lactic acid that made muscles ache when pushed, but actually function more efficiently on it. His nervous system had been rendered immune to the shake caused by the massive amounts of adrenaline that his body now produced while still keeping the increased reaction speeds that it was famous for. He could switch off pain receptors - that is what had allowed Ryan to remain so calm after literally losing a leg - and his blood clotted at a massively increased rate. The chances of him bleeding out from anything less than massive gunshot damage were almost zero. Augmented by cybernetic implants, he was both stronger and faster than a regular human. His increased speed allowed him and his tattered squad to put serious distance between them and the pursuing rebels each time they moved, and his vastly amplified strength allowed him to carry the ridiculously resilient yet deceptively heavy armor that was keeping him alive. The Titanium/ceramic suit was not quite as heavy as he was, but it wasn't far off.

His eyes were keener, his sense of smell could pick up a human's scent at ranges of twenty meters, and his dramatically more sensitive hearing could pick out the sound of breathing - or, in this case, gunfire - not only over astonishing distances, but let him zero in on a vector to the sound with uncanny precision.

They darted into the trench and immediately took a right into the communication line that fed back toward the sea, then another left to continue toward the center of the beach. At each curve of the trench, and at each intersection, one of them would level their weapons at the rebels in pursuit and eviscerate them in a blizzard of highly accurate and lethal gunfire.

Stevo lifted an eye to the sky. The timing of this operation for the mid morning had never made sense, but that detail now seemed to be helping them as, after hours of fighting, the sun was beginning to set... disorientingly to the East. Each Marine's augmented eyesight worked infinitely better in the dark than any normal human could hope to match. Low-light amplification and straight-up night vision were well within Stevo's abilities, and he was hoping that the fading light would give them an opportunity to get himself and any survivors he could find off this god-damned beach.

********

Michaels. 4

Colonel Michaels blinked open his eyes, coughing against the acrid smell of plasma smoke and sand particles in his lungs. Hocking up something gravelly from his chest, he turned his head and spat it out. It wasn't until his second conscious lungful of air that the blinding headache and searing agony from the rest of his body announced itself with a vengeance. He closed his eyes again and groaned.

His mind was rapidly trying to come to terms with what had happened to him, why he was on his back, half propped up against the wall of a trench, and why he was in so much fucking pain.

Fleeting glimpses started coming back to him.

His tank had been hit just as he had started his sprint to the Marines in the first line of cover. Most of them had been in the trenches, but a few of them had been kneeling behind some marble columns. One of those pillars was lying along the sand, but another three were still standing proudly after however many centuries since their construction. It was one of the Marines behind the fallen column that had first spotted him. Looking back to stare fearfully at the wrecks of the destroyed tanks and the hell being rained down on them by the rebel artillery barrage, that Marine had somehow recognized him and started yelling at him to run. Within moments, a few more of his comrades had joined in the chorus before peeking above cover to lay down what suppressive fire they could.

Those few seconds of terrified sprinting had felt like an eternity as sand from the continued destruction of the armored column had pelted him from above. His shoulder had hit that waist-high marble column so hard he thought he may have dislocated it. Panting breathlessly, he hand patted the first Marine gratefully on the shoulder, too out of breath to articulate his thanks.

"What's... your... unit?" Michaels finally managed to pant.

"Fox Squad, Sir," The Marine saluted, or at least as much as a crouched marine under fire was able to salute. "Assigned to 4th Battalion HQ. The Major is that way; just follow the trench system." The man finished, pre-empting the Colonel's next and apparently obvious question.

"Radio ahead and let them know I'm coming," Michael nodded.

"No can do, sorry, Sir. Comms are dead. We were going to make our way to command, too, before the artillery strike. Mind if we tag along?"

Michaels had forgotten about the comms blackout. It could only have been a few minutes since his tank and ground to a halt, but a lot seemed to have happened since then. Still, the Marine's casual stoicism pulled a smile onto the aging Colonel's lips. It was men like this that made Michaels damned proud to be a Marine. "The more, the merrier, Corporal."

"Fuck, we've got incoming!" A voice behind him barked out. Michaels was just about to peek over the top of the column to check for himself when an iridescent green explosion yanked his attention back toward the twisted wreckage of the tanks. The plasma bombs had finished off the last of the armor, and their impacts were now starting to march toward them.

The Corporal, whose name he hadn't got yet, suddenly grabbed him by the scruff of his collar and started running, keeping Michaels in a crouch as he was half-pushed and half-dragged toward the nearest entrance to the trenches. "We need to get to cover now!" the Corporal's voice was surprisingly calm, but Michaels had seen what those hits could do close up, and he was feeling very fucking far from calm.

The Colonel was unceremoniously thrown into the first trench, two other men in front of him, the Corporal jumping with him, and three men behind. He had barely hit the floor when the heat and debris of an artillery hit flashed over the top of the trench. A rifle hit the floor next to his feet; the armored hand of an almost certainly dead marine still attached to it.

Things after that had gotten a bit frantic. The four of them - Michaels, the Corporal, and the two Marines who had beaten them to the trench - had made a beeline for the nearest communication line and had just made it past the junction when that first trench had been hit. That had been followed by a crazed, panicked dash further up the beach as one plasma hit after another seemed to chase them along the trench.

Each successive hit closed the gap on the fleeing Marines as more and more men they encountered on their escape joined in the stampede of running soldiers. All of them had been armored; Michaels was not, and he was starting to feel the increasing amount of heat from every blast that detonated in the trench behind them. Michaels had glanced behind him at one point, counting seven new additions to their escape following him along the trench; he had only looked back ahead for a few seconds before feeling another frightfully near impact. There were only three when he looked back again.

Suddenly, he was shoved to the ground, he couldn't tell if it was the Corporal's doing, the man hadn't let go of his collar since they had fled from the column, or if it was the shockwave from yet another terrifyingly close hit, but when he looked back up, there was nobody left behind him, and the Titanium/Ceramic armor on his makeshift escort was scorched from the blast.

"We... we need to keep moving," the no-longer stoic Corporal had yelled over the cacophony of detonations and death screams around them. He finally let go of his collar and offered a hand to the colonel, pulling him to his feet as he took it. Panting and wheezing, trying his hardest to fight down the burning of his lungs, it took Michaels a few seconds to start running after the Corporal and toward the Battalion HQ.

In hindsight, those few seconds probably saved his life. The Corporal had turned around to check Michaels was there, and was about to say something - probably a yell for the older man to get his ass moving - when he vanished inside a massive plasma explosion. Michaels felt his body being lifted off the ground, the blast and the shockwave from the huge detonation tossing him into the air. He vaguely remembered the heat scorching his outstretched hands, and watching the beach coming up to meet him.

Then there had been darkness.

Michaels looked around; he was alone. Green flames licked at the walls of the trench about twenty feet to his left, but the way was clear to his right. Looking up at the wall in front of him, it seemed like his body and bounced and rolled over the hard sand of the beach before it crashed into this trench, leaving a Colonel-sized divot in the apex of the sand wall. He leaned his head back against the wooden boards that had somehow kept the trench intact through the bombardment and looked up into the sky. The sun was starting to set now, and darkness was starting to bleed the color out of the overhead vista, but at least it no longer seemed to be filled with those ominous green balls. There was just the flash of movement and the contrails of aircraft racing overhead.

He coughed again, spitting up more of that gritty, smoky shit from his lungs, and this time managed to get a fair amount of power behind it when he spat it out. The splatter of gunk hocked out of his lungs was blood red.

The moment his brain registered the blood he was coughing up, the pain blazed through him again. Every nerve seemed to scream its annoyance at him, every shred of skin and every broken bone demanded attention and acknowledgment of the punishment they had been forced to endure. All he could do was groan.

No, that wasn't all he could do. He may have been old, he may have been battered, burned and bruised, and he may have been the recipient of none of the enhancements gifted to the other Marines of this unit, but he was still a Marine nonetheless. Sitting down and quitting was not an option. He needed to get to the command post.

He put his hands to the ground and pushed himself up to his feet... before immediately tipping forward and smashing his face into the floor. Another blast of pain ripped through his body. He rolled over onto his back, screaming against agony that seemed to burn every other thought from his mind. There was only pain; everything else in the universe had been wiped from existence by the torturous agony that blinded him to all else.

He pushed himself up onto his elbows to look down at himself. His eyes widened in horror as he saw the tangled, twisted, one-legged wreckage of his lower body, his skin blackened and burned where most of his clothes had been seared or blown off his body, and the fingers on one hand - clearly the one he had held out to protect his face from the blast - had been burned down to useless stumps on his charred hand. One leg was missing below the pulverized mess that had once been his knee.

He coughed again. There was definitely more blood than sand in that one; he could taste it, the metallic tinge to the thick, warm, viscous fluid in his mouth. He didn't have the strength to hock that one out, and it ran weakly over his chin and into his graying beard.

The world started to spin, the lowering light of dusk getting darker and darker as he laid himself back onto the floor of the trench, looking up at the sky.

He opened his mouth to say something. He wanted his last words to be something more profound than the scream of agony that had ripped out of his lips the last time they had opened in anger. Instead, a frothing bubble of blood popped on his tongue.

He sucked in another wheezed breath instead.

There was nothing left he could do.

The light was fading around him, and seeming to take the searing pain with him.

The darkness took him. He embraced it gladly

********

Almark. 7

"I've got the one on the left; you take right," Almark nodded to Joker through the comm feed. "Buzzkill, watch our six."

Both wingmen confirmed their orders, and Halfpint gently coaxed her crosshairs over the point in the air where her targets would be by the time the hail of heavy laser fire raced across the distance from her wing to the enemy craft. Twelve years of flying had made this type of 'leading the target' gunnery more of an instinct than anything else, and her experience was rewarded as the enemy fighters flew right into the blizzard of angry red dashes. One of them was blown to pieces in an instant, one of Joker's shots puncturing through the power core while her own fire had drawn a line of glowing holes along the enemy flank, culminating in a hit straight through the canopy, turning the pilot into a cloud of red mist.

Another nudge of the flight stick immediately lined her up on the second flight of enemy fighters. This time, her shooting sheared off a wing, sending her target spiraling toward the deck, while Joker reduced the enemy engines to shrapnel—a long plume of smoke followed the stricken aircraft as it plummeted into the sea.

"Great shooting, Joker!" Almark smiled proudly as her eyes scanned the skies.

"Thanks, Boss, yours wasn't too bad either," he grinned back.

"Buzzkill, how are we looking back there?" She asked as she spotted another wing of fighters heading back toward the beach. There was no response from Saber Two. "Buzzkill, do you copy?" Still nothing. She craned her neck to look behind her; Buzkill's fighter should have been following them at a higher altitude, allowing her to monitor the area for enemy aircraft sneaking up behind them as they had just done to the rebel airwing. Yet her fighter was nowhere to be seen. "Joker, can you see Two?"

There was a pause in the response, one that was filled with a growing knot in Almark's chest as her eyes glanced down to ominously see only Joker's feed still active on the holo-feed. His eyes finally flicked back to hers. "I can't see her, One. You don't think... Shit! Hostiles on our six, three of them!"

"Break right!" Emylee instinctively barked out as she slammed her flight stick to the left, breaking apart her wing. "Head for the beach, I will cover you!"

What? No! That's fucking crazy!" Joker replied, the adrenaline coursing through his veins adding a quiver to his voice, but he followed her orders anyway, executing a near-perfect set of evasive maneuvers as his jet raced toward their original area of operations Two of the three enemy strike craft following him.. Almark maintained her turn, sharp enough to keep out of the firing arc of her own pursuer, while lazy enough to bring her up into position behind the two aircraft chasing Joker.

Even from this range, it was clear that the enemy was far too fixated on Joker to have kept an eye on her. Neither of them was even attempting to break away from her newly acquired attack run. A simple squeeze on her trigger was enough to educate one of them about the dangers of tunnel vision as his wingman was blown out of the sky. The surviving fighter peeled away to comparative safety. "Up and over, five!" she barked quickly.

It was a move that they had practiced countless times over the wings' training sessions. Joker yanked back on his stick, pulling his nose up sharply and rapidly decreasing his airspeed while simultaneously flipping his anti-grav thrusters to max. His aircraft seemed to flip in the air, upside down and facing backward while its momentum dragged the fighter straight up. Joker zeroed in on Almark's pursuer and ripped it to pieces with a withering hail of gunfire as Halfpint's fighter shot past beneath him.

"Okay, I would never have thought of that," he chuckled nervously as he righted his aircraft and formed up on her wing. "Time to get that other fucker?"

"Absolutely!" She replied back, her eyes already picking out the one surviving bogie in the endless skies as it headed toward the center of the beach.

"One? Are you there?" Duck's face shimmered onto the comms unit.

"Fuck, Duck. Where the hell have you been?" Almark breathed a sigh of relief as Saber Six checked in after being ordered back to the carrier.

"Coms are messed up," the stunning blonde replied with a sigh of her own. "There is a queue to get back into the carrier, and I couldn't bounce my signal off their coms array until I was closer."

"Are you there now?"

"Just pulling into the hanger now. How's it going down there?" Duck answered as the shadow of space over her helmet was gradually replaced by the bright lights of the carrier's flight deck.

"There's... only Joker and me are left," Halfpint replied after a moment's pause. She knew the effect the news would have on the youngest member of the flight. She also knew that Lurch especially had taken her under his wing, so to speak, and his loss would hit hard.

"Oh, no.... Oh God!" Duck's sobs started to echo through the uplink. Her face was already a mask of shock, grief, and pain. A mask that Emylee knew that she would be wearing herself if she managed to survive this mission. It was only the adrenaline and the edge of combat that was letting her ignore the reality of her wing's losses for the time being. If she made it back to the carrier, all bets would be off. "I'm... I'm touching down now," Duck's trembling update came.

"I need you to get in contact with flight command," Almark started. "If we don't get some support down here soon, we are in trouble!"

"Roger that," Duck sniffed as she pulled off her helmet and looked into the comm feed. "I'll head there immedia... Wait... something is happening..."

There was an ominously long pause.

"Duck?"

"They're.... Oh my god!" She hissed, ducking down lower in her seat, flinching away from something that had her eyes wide with fear. "They're shooting the pilots!"

"What?!? Duck, what are you talking about?... Duck!"

"They're killing us! They're... no, please, No, NO!" Duck's hands came up to cover her face before laser blots ripped through them, punching glowing holes into her head and riddling her body, making it jerk violently in the seat with every impact. She slumped lifelessly to the side, blood flowing out of her flight suit in a score of places.

An arm, obviously attached to her killer, appeared on the screen as it reached down to deactivate her channel.

Almark could only stare in stunned silence at the spot on her console where Duck's face had once been. Joker's face next to it had lost all color. His mouth opened and closed a few times as - like her - he struggled to understand what he had just seen. "What.... What do we do, Boss?"

Her mild whirled, refusing to believe what her eyes were telling her. There was no way that could have really happened... was there?

"Boss!" Joker's voice barked through the open channel.

"I... I don't know."

"We can't go back to the carrier!" He stated the obvious. "Halfpint!" He yelled after a long pause, trying to snap her out of her daze.

Emylee forced herself to concentrate. "We can't stay here forever either. Power cells are good for about three days of flight, but we'll need to eat and sleep. Fuck.. I don't know."

"What about bugging out over the beach and hooking up with the Marines?" He asked after a long pause.

"How do we know they're not under orders to shoot us, too?"

"While fighting off the rebel counterattack? Sounds to me like they've been screwed as much as we have!"

Almark hadn't considered that, but whatever knocked out their shields and operational comms must have wreaked havoc among the ground forces, not to mention the massive artillery bombardment that had forced the equally massive dogfight out over the water. Even now, looking back toward the beach, she could just about make out the hulking wrecks of the tanks, black pillars of smoke rising from the carcasses of the once mighty war machines. Each tower of smoke stood as a monument and marked the site of battle. Emylee hadn't seen most of the barrage; she had been a bit busy at the time, but she could only imagine what a bombardment of that scale would have done to the men on the ground.

She sighed heavily. Bailing out of a perfectly good, if unshielded, aircraft went against every single one of her most basic instincts. More than that, wind was a pretty unpredictable thing when you were launched into it at a few hundred miles per hour, and there was no guarantee that it would let you land where you wanted to. She was wearing a flight suit, not combat armor, and there wasn't so much as a sidearm in the cockpit for personal protection. Considering how much of the beach was currently being overrun by rebel forces, the chances of her landing close to friendly forces were pretty slim, and landing amongst the enemy would end very, very badly. That was before the memory of Duck's bolt-riddled face flashed through her mind and reminded her that she couldn't be one hundred percent sure that the Marines on the ground even were friendly.

And yet, as her eyes scanned the skies, picking out the contrails of dozens of enemy fighters in the distance, she was coming up short when it came to thinking of an alternative. The options, when the bullshit was set aside, were startlingly simple. Fight, run, or hide. Running wasn't on the table; there was nowhere to run to. Technically, she could have turned her fighter around, headed out over the ocean, and kept going until they reached another land mass before dumping their strike craft into the sea, swimming ashore, and trying to blend in with the locals. But she was still only wearing a flight suit, hardly an outfit designed for going incognito, and she had nowhere near enough understanding of the planet's geography to know where the nearest population centers were from her landing point, the weather conditions - which would be a vital piece of information if she chose, or was forced, to rough it out in the wilds - or even what language the locals would be speaking. No, running wasn't on the cards.

Fighting, to those with no experience of such things, may have sounded noble, heroic, or even glamorous, but there couldn't have been more than a handful of friendly aircraft in the AO; they were all prohibitively spread out, and she had no way of contacting anyone outside of her wing, let alone any surviving fighters to organize a new formation and a coherent battle plan. Optimistically, if she chose to fight, she would have another half an hour to live. Probably significantly less. Sure, there was always the option of fighting it out until her fighter was hit, then bailing out. But the fate of the rest of her wing was more than enough proof of the chances of that happening. Not one of them had been given the chance to bail out, and she had no realistic reason to expect her luck to be any better. Both her and Joker surviving was almost laughably unlikely. Even then, her half an hour estimate was contingent on not a single enemy fighter scoring a lucky shot that would kill her outright in a fraction of that time. Lucky shots happened frequently enough to make the name an almost meaningless cliche.

Hiding was the greatest of the unknowns. It had the most "ifs." If they could bail out at the most opportune moment, if the wind didn't drag them into a part of the beach already overrun, if they could link up with Marine ground forces, if they were still friendly,... then she might get to survive as long as they did... unarmed... unarmored... and fighting off the onrushing rebel counterattack.

A whole host of age-old sayings marched through her mind in the blink of an eye. Between a rock and a hard place. Up shit creek without a paddle. Totally fucking fucked. There were plenty to choose from, and all of them were about as apt as the others.

It took only a few seconds for these thoughts to flash through her brain. Each one spent staring in dumbfounded mutism at the hologram of Joker's face on her console. Each one of those seconds was one spent not giving her full attention to the combat raging around her. "Shit, we've got incoming!" Joker's voice snapped her back to the moment as a hail of wild, albeit inaccurate, laser fire showered around her. "Four O'clock high!"

Her highly tuned reflexes slammed her stick to the right, not the left. Banking away from the fire, she knew, would give her attacker more time on his target, which in this case was her. Flying toward him would force him into either pushing his craft into a dangerously steep dive for their altitude as she flew beneath him or it would force him to break contact. Joker, reacting just as quickly, split the pin, pulling up hard to make the enemy wing either split up to chase them both or maintain their formation and concentrate on only one of them.

For a moment, she thought she had them. It was that tiny flash of elation that came with turning the tables on a predator hunting her down, but it was short-lived. As soon as she had passed beneath the enemy wing, she yanked back hard on her stick, engaged the anti-grave thrusters, and flipped her broadsword onto its back, ready to slam the throttle forward to race after the formation of rebel fighters as they chased after Joker. He was a good pilot, an excellent one even, and his unpredictable, evasive flying was giving his hunters little to no chance of getting their shots anywhere near him, but a dull thud rocked through her fighter and immediately made her realize her mistake.

She hadn't checked her flanks.

And the fresh set of rebel fighters that had been bearing down on her had been completely missed. More than that, her maneuver had slowed her airspeed down to almost zero and presented them with the entire underbelly of her fighter - as big of a target as they could ask for. That thud, followed by the violent vibration shuddering through her airframe, was more than enough proof that she had been hit. Red warning lights washed over her console display, showing the exact points where she had been hit. The underside of her right wing had been punctured in four different places. Normally, that wouldn't be a problem; her anti-grav thrusters were more than capable of compensating for the loss of lift that the wing provided, but those lucky shots she had refused to discount a few seconds earlier had come for their dues, and one of those shots had shredded the power couplings that fed the generator on that wing. Her aircraft, with its far too low airspeed, was starting to drop out of the sky, and the ground loomed ominously large above her upside-down canopy.

With a growl, she slammed her throttle forward and used her control surfaces to right the aircraft. There was a small silver lining to her condition; her slow airspeed had meant that the new wing of enemy fighters had raced past her, and were now banking around to finish her off. It had been a genuine accident, a happy result of her need to increase airflow over her wings, but her broadsword leaped forward with the sudden surge in power and brought her into an almost perfect firing position behind the enemy.

A few seconds later, all that remained of them was a cloud of shrapnel falling toward the beach. She growled angrily at herself, looking around to check her surroundings not only for any more sneaky bastards trying to blindside her but looking for Joker. His face on the screen was a mask of pure, calm concentration. He wasn't panicking; he must have been terrified, or at least a little nervous, but his face showed nothing.

"Joker, I can't see you," she said, trying to keep the tremble out of her own voice.

"I'm bringing them right to you," he smiled back. "Your three O'clock high."

She craned her neck to look out of her canopy, her eyes sweeping wildly over the endless expanse of sky. Finally, she spotted them, three rapidly growing dots trying to be joined by a blizzard of barely visible red flashes. "Got you," she said with a sigh of relief. "Which way are you going?"

"Left, toward the beach," he said with a grin.

She smiled and nodded back. It was a textbook maneuver; he would fly straight at her, then turn at the last possible moment, leaving the way clear for her to open up on the fighters following him. She would only have a few seconds, but she was confident she could destroy at least one of them, and the other - now on the receiving end of the attack - would be forced to disengage from her wingman.

"Ready?" he asked

"On my mark." She squinted through her HUD, placing the reticule of her weapon system directly over the sleek nose of her wingman. His tormentors were directly behind him; as soon as he moved out of the way, she would be lined up perfectly. The distance between them was closing at a terrifying pace. "Three, two, one... Mark!"

Joker's broadsword seemed to jump to the left like a gazelle frightened by a pounding lion. The move was so sudden and so sharp that the enemy fighters behind him hadn't been given the chance to even blink, let alone react before Halfpint squeezed hard on her trigger. A torrent of flashing red laser bolts was flying in the opposite direction now, and she could just make out the rebel pilot looking up in time to see the front of his aircraft being cored through. It was obliterated in a hail of tangled metal and fire. The second fighter banked hard to the right, desperately trying to avoid flying through the cloud of falling debris left by his friend, but he was too late. He managed to turn enough to dodge Almark's fire, but the jagged remains of a torn-off wing slammed into his own, shearing it off like it was made of cheese. The fighter started spinning and then tumbling wildly.

The satisfied smile on Almark's face lasted for only a heartbeat; the out-of-control rebel fighter was tumbling straight toward her. She jerked to the left, trying to avoid him; it was the only option she had, but her new vector sent her straight through the hail of burning metal from the first fighter. Alarms started sounding immediately, but the clangs of metal hitting metal drowned out their siren as the shrapnel pulverized her airframe. It lasted less than a second, but by the time she was clear of the carnage, she knew she was in trouble.

"Woo, fuck, nice shooting, Lieutenant!" Joker cheered through the comm. His tone changed dramatically when she saw the look of concern on Almark's face through the holo-feed. "Are you okay over there, Boss?"

"I'm in trouble, Joker," she muttered in reply. "I've lost almost all of my dorsal retro-thrusters; the structural integrity of my stabilizer is close to zero, and I'm losing power. This bird is a glider!"

"Shit!" her wingman spat. "Alright, let me get back there and take a look." It only took a few moments for her to spot Joker's broadsword forming up on her wing and then gradually reducing speed to get a good view of her tail. That sentence would have earned the younger man a slap only an hour ago, but now was not the time for jokes. There was a distinct rattle in her stick now, and a steady vibration was rocking into her through her chair. More concerning was that both seemed to be growing in intensity by the moment. "Jesus, Em," he murmured, the sudden drop in formalities telling her all she needed to know before he even started to speak properly. "Your engine housing is shredded, there is shrapnel sticking out of your wings, most of your control surfaces have been ripped off, and you're trailing smoke. You need to find a safe place to ditch, or you need to bail over the beach." His eyes flicked up and to the right. "Fuck, and we have more incoming."

Emylee hadn't been able to pay attention to the skies around her, keeping her bird in the air, straight and level, was quickly becoming a fight. Her airspeed was dropping rapidly, and she was bleeding altitude at an alarmingly high rate. Ditching into the ocean wasn't an option; the airframe was too weak, she didn't need to be able to see it to know that. Turning the aircraft would almost certainly be enough to force it to start breaking up, trying to effectively crashland onto the water was almost laughably unrealistic. No, bailing out over the beach was the only option left open to her, with all the concerns she had before still in place, but with the added caveat that the only area she would be able to jump in was directly ahead of her. Turning to put herself over friendly forces just wasn't possible. Where she landed would be down to almost pure luck.

"I need you to get over the beach and bail, too," she finally said, looking down at another expression of calm concentration on Joker's face. He had apparently already peeled away to engage the next wing of hostiles.

"If it's all the same with you, Boss, I think I'll stay for a while," he smiled back "I fancy my chances of getting some payback for the others."

"Joker, I'm not fucking around. Get to the beach and bail out. That's an order!"

Joker sighed and glanced down into her eyes, an earnest tone in his voice. "I'm sorry, Em. If I bail, you won't make it to the beach. If one of us has to die today, then it's gonna be me," Emylee made to talk again, but Joker cut her off. "You took me under your wing, you believed in me, you put up with all my shit, and you saw me as a pilot, as your wingman. You will never know what that meant to me. So I am going to repay you by giving you time to get out. These fuckers aren't going to know what hit them!"

"Joker... please," she could feel the tears running down her cheeks, and she blinked furiously to get the mist out of her eyes. She could tell by the look in his eye that he wasn't going to listen to her, and there was no way for her to force the issue.

"Get those bastards for Duck, for me. It's been the honor of my life to fly with you, Lieutenant," he smiled serenely. "This is Joker, signing off." There was a pause as he kept his eyes on hers before he refocused his attention back on the skies ahead of him. "Alright, you bastards, let's dance! This one is for Lurch!..."

Almark was forced to pull her eyes from the holo-feed by the rapidly increasing rattle in her broadsword. She was shocked to see how much altitude she had lost in that short exchange. And her eyes started to scan the approaching beach for any sign of friendly forces in her flight line.

"Yeah, fuck you!..." Joker laughed through the comm, "Who's next? For Buzzkill, baby!"

The smoke was starting to clear, and the wreckages of the Marine's armored column grew larger by the moment. Cresting white lines, looking like ghostly blood vessels, seemed to ebb up and down toward the sand as the waves from the ocean washed onto the beach.

"That's two! Saddlebag's next. Who fucking wants it!..."

There was a lot of movement on the beach, most of it on the upper sections furthest from the waterline. Men seemed to be pouring out of tunnels carved into the ridge like angry ants spilling out of a kicked nest. Avoiding them was quickly becoming her highest priority

"Yeah, fuck you, too! Now, these ones are for me... that's one... And there's number two... Woo! There's three.... And that's four. Come on you assholes! Who wants to be number five?" An automated voice echoed through the comms, 'weapons malfunction' the woman's voice warned. "Oh, you lucky son-of-a-bitch! Oh well, let's do this the old-fashioned way. Banzai mother fuckers...!"

Almark looked up in time to watch Joker's broadsword jump forward under a massive burst of thrust, banking left... and smashing straight into an enemy fighter. The resulting explosion enveloped a second enemy aircraft that was sent flaming and tumbling toward the ground. She couldn't say anything; she couldn't feel anything over the sound of her heart breaking for her flight wing.

With tears blurring her vision, he reached up and wrapped her hand around the ejection lever on the side of her seat's headrest. "Now or never," she whispered quietly to herself.

"Ejection seat malfunction!" The warbled voice came from the console in front of her.

Emylee Almark's eyes shot open in fear, and she stared out of the front of her canopy, watching in dread as the ground raced to greet her in a not-so-loving embrace.

********

Stevo. 11

Stevo frowned to himself as another blistering hail of incoming fire sailed woefully and uselessly over his head. At first, he had taken the rebels laughable lack of accuracy as just good luck, then he had wondered if they were being herded in a certain direction, but now, after a seeming eternity of being chased down, he was fairly convinced that his assailants were just shit shots. They relied on sheer weight of fire rather than any sort of advanced training. Spray and pray was an utterly absurd method of vanquishing an enemy unless they were crowded together in the open. He wasn't complaining; Marines with even a modicum of training would have not only cut off their escape by now but would have killed them a hundred times over. These rebels seemed to have been taught to point their weapon, squeeze the trigger, and that was about it. More than that, the rebels, in their pathetic excuse for body armor, were walking straight into the path of incoming fire that he was sending back at them. The ineptitude of their training was staggering. Stevo was never one that particularly enjoyed counting his kills, and he took no sense of pleasure or pride in ending the life of another human, but he must have been approaching two hundred kills by now. Considering that fifteen enemy kills was considered a huge number on most missions, the number he had gunned down was astonishing. Mac must have been racking up a truly eye-watering number of kills.

He patted the heavy gunner on his shoulder as he ran past, once again switching covering positions, and he listened to the high-pitched whine of Mac's rotary cannon spinning up before the rapid staccato series of equally high-pitched thuds announced the torrent of death that was doubtlessly eviscerating the enemy ranks. Stevo knew what that weapon was capable of, and he was more than aware of what it could do to a person's body. It was almost enough to make him feel sorry for the rebels facing down its business end.

Up ahead of him, Angel was taking up the next covering position. The trench was getting shallower now, meaning he had to stoop lower to stay in cover, but the side protecting him from the sporadic fire from further up the beach was a good foot higher than the side facing the ocean. This disparity in the trench wall heights meant he could look out at the carnage that had been leveled against his comrades behind him. A small, faint glimmer of hope flickered through him as his eyes found the collapsed pillar behind which they had first taken cover after landing, the spot where they had left the wounded Ryan. Although scores of plasma fires and impact craters littered the beach ahead of it, the pillar itself seemed to have survived the bombardment relatively unscathed. But three more waves had landed on the beach since the rest of his squad had pushed forward from that pillar; any one of those could have helped Ryan move up to the first line of trenches, and the zealously eager young Marine would have had no complaints about being taken closer to the action, especially after comms had been severed and his ability to contribute had been reduced to zero. But judging by the condition of the trenches his squad had battled through, if Ryan was in there, there was very little chance he had survived.

Ryan had been the second youngest member of Bravo Squad, only a few years older than Big G, who had claimed the position of Squad baby. He was young, he was brash, but he wasn't one of those fools who harbored romanticized notions about combat. He regularly partook in the morbid but stoic gallows humor that so many other soldiers used to handle the prospect of fighting, killing, and maybe dying, but he had been no fool. He had been dependable, and having a squad of people who could be relied on to follow orders was as important as a squad that could use their own initiative to get the mission accomplished. Ryan, like the rest of them, had both. What set him apart was the fire that Ryan had in his eyes. Mac always seemed to take everything in his stride, and Rev's faith had guided much about the man. Dusky was a medic to her core, and seemed to almost be the mother of the unit in her desire to look after everyone. Big G had been the least experienced, and he always looked like he was just taking everything in, basking in the new experience, and was eager to learn. Angel was almost as battle-hardened as Stevo; she took no joy in combat but understood her duty. There was a hard determination to her that he was sure was mirrored in his own eyes. Each member of his squad had been different, but it was their differences that made them work so well together. They had gelled as a unit very quickly, and by the time they had hit the beach, they were as close as family.

Now, three members of that family were dead, and another was missing. He didn't have time to grieve them properly yet, but he knew that it would be long before he was crushed under a cloud of self-recrimination and despair. Still, judging by the scores of dead Marines he had been forced to step over on his flight from the counter-attacking rebels, he had to assume that Bravo Squad had gotten off relatively lightly compared to most others. The rabbit warren of trenches made traversing the beach a long, arduous, and circuitous affair; in many cases, they had needed to travel further away from their destination in order to find a clear path closer to it. But they were well away from the frontlines now, or at least where they had been. The bodies of rebels killed in the initial assault were still here, obviously, but they were now massively outnumbered by the blasted, dismembered corpses of dead Marines. Artillery strikes were a messy way to be killed. A lot of the dead were lying where the blastwave had dropped them, their internal organs practically liquified by the impacts, but there were just as many who had been eviscerated and disemboweled by flying shrapnel or had just been blown to pieces.

It was a macabre, demoralizing, haunting flight from the enemy to a place of safety that may not even exist.

Movement in the sky caught his eye. The dogfight that had been so savagely fought for the strategic real estate above them had petered out to almost nothing now. The Imperium fighters had been massively outnumbered and - by the looks of things - had been wiped out almost to a man. But they had held their own far longer and far more effectively than Stevo would have predicted. There were no Imperium fighters left overhead, but the enormously disproportionate losses inflicted on the rebels meant that there were not many of their strike craft left either. The sun was almost gone now; darkness had claimed most of the sky above him, and what would normally have been a beautiful wash of oranges, purples, and crimsons was shrouded behind the pillars of black smoke rising from countless fires and the remains of the Imperium armored detachment. Yet through all of that, a lone black dot, trailing its own smokey addition to the sky, seemed to be headed right for him.

In fact, the trajectory of the gliding aircraft seemed to be so obviously headed right for him that it made him pause and raise his weapon in preparation for the suicide strike he assumed it to be. "Mac?" he called out to the heavy gunner behind him. "Does that plane look to be on a kamikaze run to you?"

"I think that's racist, Sir," he panted breathlessly with a grin before looking up at the rapidly growing, still smoking, black dot. It was enough to cause him to pause, too. "Errr..." he squinted at it. "Is that one of ours?"

Stevo had to admit, even if only to himself, that he hadn't considered that, but now that he was using his enhanced eyesight to focus on it as well, the shape of it was starting to look familiar.

"What's the holdup?" Angel called to them between the rhythmic thuds of her rifle; each shot doubtlessly ending the life of another pursuing rebel.

"I think we've got a friendly bird about to crash into us," Stevo replied.

"Uhh... should we... move?" her cautious voice floated back to him over the din of battle.

The dot was growing much faster now and getting much closer. "Too late! Take cover!"

It was like something out of a holo-movie. It all seemed to happen in slow motion. Angel was already in cover, but Mac and Stevo spun around and ducked beneath the shelter of the trench a split second before the broadsword hit the beach. Miraculously, the trench wall - despite groaning loudly - held firm against the sudden impact, and Stevo managed to look up in time to watch the underbelly of the fighter bounce overhead, raining sand and debris onto him, while laser fire from the obscenely poorly trained rebels sailed between them.

Stevo had barely had time to pull himself to his feet before the fighter hit the beach again. At first, it reminded him of skipping stones across the lake near his family's home, but the violence of the impacts quickly dissuaded him of any nostalgic comparisons. The pilot, despite an obviously monumental effort, hadn't quite landed her aircraft flat enough to the beach on the first bounce, and by the time it had started making its way groundward again, it was tipping to the left. The wing hit the sand first, gouging a rent deep into the beach before it sheared off; the rest of the airframe - dramatically slowed by the resistance on the wing - cartwheeled over itself, smashing the nose into the ground before it started to tumble. Sickening crunches and the screams of tortured metal were only drowned out by the crashes echoing through the twilight.

At least a dozen times, the aircraft hit the beach. The fighter was still on its side, with the cockpit and the belly facing outward along the ground while the sides where the now dismembered wings had been were hitting it. It made for a dramatic scene, pieces of metal and shards of debris being tossed off the fighter in every direction while gouts of sand were thrown into the air around it. Stevo could only watch as the broadsword finally came to tangled, twisted rest and the coverings around what was left of the engine burst into flames.

"Ain't nobody could survive that," Mac murmured as he, too, watched the carnage.

Stevo could only nod in agreement. The fire was spreading quickly, fingers of flames crawling their way along the frame of the fighter. He was no engineer; he didn't have the first idea what the Broadswords used for fuel or what exactly it was that was burning, but those flames were moving fast. "Sarge!" Angel's voice came from back along the trench. "I'm not gonna be able to hold them for much longer. We're gonna have to move soon!"

"Fuck, Alright. Mac take this spot and..." A flicker of movement caught his eye and he squinted again at the crashed fighter. Was that... was that an arm moving in the cockpit? He strained his eyes, trying to make out the shadows in the darkness, highlighted by the flames that were crawling closer to the pilot.

The arm moved again, seeming to push against the canopy of the fighter.

Yes, that was definitely movement. The pilot looked like they were trying to get the canopy open. They could only have a few more seconds before the flames reached them. He couldn't imagine anything worse than surviving a crash like that only to be burned alive in the wreckage. "Ah, shit! Mac, lay down cover, Angel, you're with me!"

He didn't wait. He knew he couldn't, but more importantly, he knew he didn't have to. Mac was already stepping into cover and readying his weapon, and Angel was already running back toward him. Both of them would follow his orders to the best of their ability. Besides, Mac's rotary cannon was more than capable of holding off the hordes of rebels indefinitely. Stevo clambered up the side of the trench, rolling over the top and up onto his feet and into a sprint, his rifle cradled in his arms. The fighter couldn't have been more than fifty feet away, but his enhanced muscles pumped his legs fast enough to cover that distance in seconds.

Whether the enemy didn't see him, or whether they didn't shoot at him, or whether their shots just missed by such a huge margin as to go unnoticed, he didn't know, but he managed to get to the downed broadsword completely unscathed. He looked into the cockpit. To the pilot's credit, they had other things to be thinking about so didn't seem to notice his arrival, but her head shot up to look at him after he pounded his fist against the canopy.

"It's stuck!" her muffled voice shouted through the armored glass. "I can't get it open!"

"Sit back!" he shouted back. The pilot's eyes squinted for half a heartbeat in confusion, before widening in realization and she pressed herself back into her seat and pulled her arms down to her lap and out of the way. Stevo took a step back, lifted his rifle, and started firing. The armor on the strike craft was paper thin, at least compared to the penetrative power of his battle rifle, and shot after point-blank shot started punching through the sealed joint between the canopy lid and the rest of the fighter. Satisfied that his shots had ripped through the joint on both sides of the canopy, he stepped forward again and - now with the help of the pilot - forced the bent metal of the cockpit lip open.

Angel slammed shoulder-first into the side of the fighter after her own mad dash from the trenches, it didn't look like she had been spotted either. "Glad you could join us," Stevo quipped over the screeches of metal being bent out of the way.

"Fancied a change of scenery," Angel panted back, her rifle up and aiming toward the trench line, covering his rear.

"Jesus, thank you!" the pilot whimpered. "My legs, they're stuck. I can't feel them." she looked down at the wreck that had once been her console. That second impact, the one on the nose, seemed to have folded part of the airframe inward, crushing her legs and pinning her in place. Stevo glanced back at the rapidly approaching flames.

"This is going to hurt," he said, looking into her eyes.

The pilot bit back a sob and gave a single, firm nod.

The same muscles that had been enhanced to allow his burst of superhuman speed across the beach had not been limited to his legs. His arms were now capable of bench pressing 500 lbs before they started to struggle, and as much as 650lbs if he really pushed it. More than that, they were currently being assisted by powerful actuators in the joints of his armor that not only allowed for extra movement, but could be used to add power to them. He reached into the cockpit, feeling around between the pilot's legs for a firm grip on the underside of the console, finding one, giving the pilot a preparatory nod, and then pulled with all his strength.

Being so close to both sounds, he couldn't quite tell which was louder, the groan of metal being bent away from the pilot, or her ear-splitting screams of pain. Stevo had been in the military for most of his adult life and had done all the training required for his rank. Although he was nowhere near the medic that Dusky had been, he knew enough about crush injuries to understand the danger he was putting the pilot in. Crushed bones leaked bone marrow into the blood, that on its own was toxic and potentially lethal, but more than that, the tissue below the crush was being starved of oxygen, toxins being released into the blood that - when the compression was lifted - would rush back to the heart, then spread to the rest of the internal organs and causing catastrophic damage. The training he had received told him this, but the solution was always to get the patient to an aid station as soon as possible.

Well, it wasn't possible here, and he didn't have the first idea about the treatments that would normally be applied in one, or if it was possible for him to replicate them now. What he was doing was a massive risk, but it was one very much measured against the rapidly advancing flames and the alternative of letting the pilot burn alive instead. When it came to a choice between definitely dying horrifically now, or maybe dying horrifically later, there was only one answer.

Groaning and snarling against the strain, Stevo pried the full weight of the front of the aircraft off the pilot's legs to the sound of her shrieks of agony, and then - once he was satisfied she was free -he hooked his hands under her armpits and dragged her out of the fighter.

He wasn't even sure she noticed she was out over the pain ripping through her, but he certainly noticed the flames starting to crawl into the interior of the cockpit. Unfortunately, her ordeal wasn't quite over yet. He swung his rifle over his shoulder, scooped her up with one arm behind her neck, and the other behind her destroyed knees - to more howls of pain - and then turned to Angel.

He was about to order her to cover their retreat back to the trench when his eyes glanced over her shoulder.

Standing tall in a space between the network of trenches was another spattering of those marble columns. A few were still standing, but most of them had collapsed to the beach and had formed three sides of a rough and imperfect square. There were gaps in the cover in each corner, and the side facing the water was almost wide open but his decision was made in moments. "There," he barked to his Squadmate.

She spun around to look at what he was referring to, then turned back with a smile. "Nice. I'll go back to cover Mac."

"Be careful," he nodded before he broke cover and sprinted to the makeshift fort. The dash to the columns was probably shorter than the one from the trenches to the downed fighter, but being open to enemy fire on all sides, it felt a whole lot further. The pilot in his arms, a mask of rictus pain etched onto her face, felt every single footfall. She may have been aware of what was happening, but to Stevo, she seemed oblivious to everything around her aside from the lances of agony shooting through her body. A single glance at her mangled legs made it very easy to see why.

Rounding the end of one of the toppled pillars, Stevo carried the sobbing pilot a few feet along the column, making sure she was out of the line of sight of as many gaps in the defense as possible and set her down as gently as he was able. He risked a quick look around, checking all directions for any rebel soldiers getting into position to attack, but he could see nothing. He dropped down onto one knee and helped the pilot to unclasp her helmet. Her long, flowing locks of golden hair spilled out onto her shoulders, and her piercing cerulean eyes stared up at him.

She huffed a laugh, a flicker of recognition in her eyes. "Sergeant cutie," she smiled. "Good to see you in one piece."

He laughed back as he recognized the pilot who had answered his request for fire support, an odd sensation on its own in the middle of a warzone, but a nice one nonetheless. "Steve Taylor," he smiled back at her. "My friends call me Stevo."

"Flight Lieutenant Emylee Almark, my friends call me Halfpint," she nodded back, valiantly trying to ignore what must have been the pure torture coming from her legs. "Thanks for pulling me out of there."

"Don't thank me yet, Lieutenant," he grimaced with another look around. "The phrase 'out of the frying pan and into the fire' is very much applicable here."

She tried her best to give him a reassuring smile - it was better than groaning in pain - and rested her head back against the pillar. "I think after saving my life, we can skip the rank. Call me Emylee, Halfpint if you must." One look at the handsome Marine was enough to tell her that there was no amount of smiling in the galaxy that could reassure him now. She was just starting to realize the situation she was in. She had thanked every lucky star and every long-lost deity that she had been pulled from her fighter at all, let alone by a Marine, and one that was not going to kill her at that. But she hadn't considered the conditions of the ground forces when she had been forced to make her choice.

They were Marines, the best of the best, genetically enhanced and using the best equipment the Imperium had to offer, and they were fighting against poorly organized and poorly equipped rebels, they should have been carving through their ranks like they were nothing. But then nothing else about this mission had lived up to the briefing so maybe she had been a fool to think that this would be any different.

"How bad is it?" she asked, then yelped as a burly heavy gunner in power armor and a smaller, lither, and much more feminine marine rounded the column and dived into cover with them, a spattering of laser fire sailing over them.

"Well, they know where we are." Angel grunted as she pulled herself to a crouch next to the column

"This is Angel," Stevo said to Emylee, "That's Mac." With a nod to the heavy gunner who was setting up his weapon on the opposite corner.

Almark smiled and nodded at both of them. Then turned back to Stevo, still not having received an answer to her question. He sighed and looked back at her. "We think the rebels hacked our systems. They used our location pings to target their artillery strike, and that energy blast thing knocked out our comms and our shields. When the artillery hit..." The haunted look in his eyes as he paused told her everything she needed to know. "We haven't found anyone else alive. We heard a firefight from that direction a little while ago," he pointed behind him and to the eastern end of the beach, "But that seems to have died down. We can't call for evac either, and none of the medical dropships have arrived."

"They're not coming," Almark whispered after another long pause.

It was Angel who broke the almost accusatory silence that followed. "What do you mean?"

"One of my wingmen, Duck, she was hit. She bugged out back the carrier... They killed her."

"Who did?"

"I... I don't know." Emylee's eyes met Stevo's. "Just that it wasn't the rebels. She was on the carrier; she had landed. She said the other pilots were being killed, and then she was shot."

Stevo and Angel shared a look, one filled with meaning and developed over countless battles fought together. One that articulated a single sentiment. "Fuck!"

"Why the hell would they..." Mac stuttered, looking back at them rather than checking his surroundings for attack. "... that doesn't make sense... They can't have sold us out. Why would they enhance us and then..." The words died on his lips. Not so much because he knew the others had no answers but because his mind wasn't capable of comprehending a betrayal on that scale. "I don't understand," he finally said weakly.

There was another long pause. Considering the hours of frantic fighting that had preceded the last few minutes, the deathly silence that covered the battlefield was vastly more disconcerting than even the most hectic din of combat.

"What do we do, Sarge?" Angel finally asked.

Stevo sighed again and looked around. He could just about make out movement from the enemy. They knew where they were, but didn't seem to be in any sort of hurry to attack. Considering how suicidal their pursuit of them had been, that was bothering him more than it should. His eyes then flicked over to Almark, more specifically, to her legs. "We're on our own, and we're immobile," he replied slowly. "I'm not leaving anyone else behind. So we sit tight and repel boarders."

"Then what?"

"Fuck, I don't know, Angel. Did those bastards seem to be in a prisoner-taking mood to you? We have no exfil option; we can't go to ground and hide, and surrendering doesn't seem to be an option. They know we are here, and one artillery round could finish us off. We keep our heads down and fight if we have to fight. Even if that means a last stand."

Angel and Mac shared a look, then shrugged. "Works for us."

"Leave me here," Almark moaned, wincing as she tried to sit herself more upright against the pillar. "You might be able to escape..."

"Sorry, lieutenant," Angel smiled, offering her a hand to help her. "That's not how we do things. Besides, we're on an Island and we're surrounded. Where would we go?"

"Nope, it's death or glory." Mac winked at her.

"Hoo-fucking-rah, Marines," Stevo chuckled. Almark could only smile at the bonds formed in the crucible of combat. Again, it was better than breaking down at the loss of her entire wing and all her friends. But she knew her future was going to be a very dark place indeed.

"Who knows," Mac offered, his voice quiet against the silence and the stillness of the night. "Maybe we'll get lucky."

********

Elijah. 2

"Can someone please define for me the word 'Firepower'?" the blading lecturer asked the class.

Elijah managed to stifle a sigh, partly because his level of self-control was better than to make such an error in front of a professor known for the draconian lengths he would go to in keeping a student behind after class. With this being the last class of a very long day, Elijah felt no need to antagonize the follically challenged man. But mostly, he stifled that sigh because his mind was busy elsewhere. There was, of course, a very small proportion of it taken up with maintaining the pretense of paying attention to the class on the off chance that he was the victim of some random demand to answer a question. The rest of his mind was miles away.

His eyes were locked onto the window. Not onto the sweeping and majestic views it afforded of the towers and spires of the magnificent city beyond but at the window itself. His eyes were looking at the glass... into it. Without only the slightest amount of concentration, he was able to focus his sight deeper and deeper into the pane, the structures that made up the glass: the molecules and the complex web of atoms that came together to form something transparent. That was the part that he found interesting; that was something his mind could explore through the tedium of fleet strategy class. A compound that had a remarkably similar makeup to the opaque sand found on a standard beach, when treated to a certain manufacturing process, allowed light to pass between its molecular structure and in so doing, could be said to be transparent.

Except it wasn't. Not really. Or at least not completely. In looking at the window, it was plain to see that it was a window. The glass was not as transparent as the air around it, and that slight difference in opacity allowed the brain to be able to tell that it was there. He knew there were certain types of glass that were much, much more transparent than the type used in this particular window pane; he had seen blocks of it used in the resonance chambers of the local anti-matter power plant on the class's tour of the facility. The differences between that glass and this window were down to the microscopic impurities within the structure of the atoms. A broken bond here, an imperceptibly small bubble there, tiny little details which each blocked a minute amount of light from passing through and increasing the opacity of the glass.

The real test of glass, he somehow knew without having the slightest idea of how, was to measure how thick it would have to be to block all light from traveling through it, when the weight of impurities became too much and it could be said to be completely opaque. The glass in the power plant would need to be three miles thick before it got to that level; the glass in front of him would probably reach it after a few feet. The question now running through his mind was if it was a completely different manufacturing process that allowed the power plant glass to be so clear and impurity-free, or was it the same process done to a higher standard?

Elijah knew nothing about glass fabrication. It wasn't often that he found a subject that challenged his ignorance. It was a good feeling; it was the excitement of having something new to learn. It was a challenge, even if it was only one made to himself, by himself. In classes like this one, those were proving to be something of a rarity.

Another part of his mind was occupied with Master Wu's odd behavior during his class earlier that day. Uhmwaan was, like many other forms of martial art, a discipline rather than a method of violence. It was only through the mastery - and then control - of the ability to inflict harm could you truly be said to have found peace. That peace, that center, was something he had felt after every lesson for as long as he could remember, but today had been different. That question, such a simple one, had vexed Elijah for every moment since Master Wu had dismissed him. More accurately, the look that had crossed the ancient-looking warrior's face when he had seemingly failed to answer it.

Part of him was deeply troubled by the Grand Master's insinuations about the Imperium and about the Emperor, but an equal part of his was just as concerned by the fact that the more he thought about it, the more sense those ideas made. Elijah's intellect, his inherited knowledge from some ancient race, was vast beyond measure, but his personality and his loyalties were shaped - like everyone else's - by the world he had grown up in. He had been taught since infancy that the Emperor could do no wrong, that he was the closest thing to a living deity as it was possible to be, and that the iron fist with which he ruled over the rest of humanity was for their own good, or at least a necessity against the baser instincts of man. The Imperium, with all the benefits and security that came with it, was only held together by the will and the authority held by the Emperor.

And yet, despite this hitherto unquestioned knowledge, something deep inside him knew that this was a form of governance that was deeply repressive. Nobody else seemed to see that, though, or if they did, they kept it well and truly to themselves. But whereas the rest of his class seemed proud of the "advanced classes" they had been placed in, a course designed to catapult its students up the ranks of planetary and system governments, Elijah couldn't help but think of it as something very different and a whole lot more sinister. Indoctrination.

The other students in his class may have thought it was cool to be learning about military tactics, a class required if one wanted to enter the elite officer training of the Imperium Navy, but it was just dawning on Elijah that there were only so many hours in the day, and this class had to replace some others on the curriculum. And what were the subjects cast aside so he could learn about firing arcs and combat maneuvers? Music, art, literature, philosophy, and the heavily censored social sciences that encouraged people to not only think for themselves but to question the status quo.

Elijah had spent his life living and learning under the safe umbrella that the Imperium and its Emperor provided, and yet, one question asked while focusing on the mental clarity of Uhmwaan was enough to shatter - or at least rock to the core - that lifelong belief. He was young and, contrary to the commonly held misconceptions about his heritage, he didn't know everything, but he knew enough to see that a single, simple question shouldn't be enough to cause any serious amount of doubt in any institution. It was like a marriage; if one question was enough to shatter the illusion of its stability, then the whole thing was based on some pretty shoddy foundations. But, whereas you could divorce a spouse to end a bad marriage, could you divorce yourself from an empire?

"Arjun!" the professor's sudden bark yanked Elijah back into the topic of the class. Thanks to his near superhuman mental processing abilities that entire train of thought had stretched for only a few seconds. "explain the term 'firepower' to the class."

Elijah turned in his chair. The flustered subcontinental boy on the other side of the class stuttered a few times before fumbling out his answer. "It is... um... the number of weapon systems on a ship... and... how powerful they are?" the inflection in his voice at the end of the sentence made it sound like more of a question than the answer to one.

"No! No No No! That is a ship's loadout, its weapon complement. Someone else, please," the frustrated lecturer glanced impatiently around the class. "We will be staying here until someone gets this right. I have nowhere to be after class and have nothing better to do. How about you?"

In a herculean feat of self-control, Elijah managed to refrain from rolling his eyes, but when nobody else in the class offered an answer, and being in no mood to have this class extended by a single minute longer than necessary, he raised his hand.

"Yes, Elijah,"

Elijah was capable of regurgitating the textbook verbatim, but the balding professor - for reasons that Elijah doubted he would ever understand - seemed to think that memorizing a text and understanding it were mutually exclusive concepts, so simply parroting the words of the text back at the professor was as likely to provoke the man's ire as saying nothing.

"Firepower is the total amount of force able to be projected by a ship at any single point in time."

"Exactly, thank you!" the professor sighed.

"I'm sorry," Arjun frowned. "How is that different from my answer?"

Most of the class seemed incapable of stifling the groan that Elijah caught in his throat. That question had the potential to drag this class out for another hour at least.

With a huff, the professor turned to the small, squat podium at the front of the lecture hall and pressed a few buttons on its display. A moment later, a holographic representation of a massive naval vessel started to slowly rotate in the air above it. "This is a Shangri-La class Battleship," the professor gestured at the image. "Its main armament is forty-eight magnetic accelerator cannons and one hundred particle beam emitters. That weapon complement is divided equally along each side of the ship giving it a devastating broadside attack..." The image changed, the holographic ship stopping its slow rotation and spinning into a top-down view of the vessel with its bow pointing toward the ceiling. Long firing cones grew out of the sides of the battleship. "... This is an Orca class destroyer..." A comically smaller ship faded into existence to the side of the battleship. "Which has the greater firepower?"

"The battleship." the class murmured back as one.

"Yes. At this moment in time, the battleship is able to project the force of an entire broadside - or half of its loadout..." a pointed look to Arjun "...to bear against its target. What about now?" The battleship shrank a little and moved closer to the ceiling while the much smaller destroyer moved in behind the larger leviathan. The firing cones of the destroyer's forward-facing laser cannons grew out of the bow of the smaller ship while none of the weapons on the Battleship were rear-facing. "Who has the greater firepower?"

"The destroyer," Elijah intoned, expecting the rest of the class to understand the obviousness of the answer and parrot out the required response, but he was apparently alone in his wisdom.

"That's correct," the professor pointed to Elijah while looking out at a sea of otherwise confused faces. "It doesn't matter how many weapons the battleship has, it is unable to bring any of them to bear on its target. In this position, the battleship's firepower is essentially zero. Elijah..." The professor rounded on him.

Fucking perfect!

"...seeing as how you are the only one here who seems to have read the textbook, why don't you educate the class? How would a fleet commander counter this situation?"

Eliah sighed. The rest of the class looked at him, most of them with an air of hostility. These classes were not designed to foster excellence in their students but to breed competition between them. "He would use a picket of destroyers to stop the enemy from being able to get into that position, and if that failed, he would have a screening force of cruisers able to provide close support to the bigger, less maneuverable ships."

The professor grinned almost predatorily. Elijah was now enemy number one of the entire class after embarrassing the other students, and all of the others - with no other means of retribution - would be forced to work extra hard on their assignments in order to beat Elijah and embarrass him in return. To the young man with the cerulean blue eyes, it was a game that seemed as counterproductive as it was pathetic.

"Thank you, Elijah," he smirked. "Smaller, faster ships are used to protect the vulnerabilities of the larger ones. While the battleship engages the enemy, the cruisers protect the battleship. Now, for everyone except Elijah, I want a five-thousand-word essay from each of you detailing one historical battle where this tactic has been deployed. Let's say by Monday." The groan from the class was markedly more pronounced than it had been for Arjun's question.

Elijah sighed again and looked back toward the window, studiously ignoring the accusatory looks his fellow students were giving him as they started to file out of the class. Fuck them. All they had to do was say "The Destroyer," and that would have been the end of it. The answer was obvious even without the graphical aides from the holographic podium, and if they couldn't work out the answer from that, then maybe they needed to do the essay. Half of these idiots wanted to be fleet commanders in the future, so it was probably a subject they should be better versed in any way. He stood, swept his datapad into his backpack, and wandered out of the class.

An hour later, he was back in his dorm room, lying on his bed and staring at the ceiling. The room that had been his home for the last five years didn't look much different than the day he had been assigned it. It wasn't spartan, but it wasn't exactly homely either. It was... a necessity. The sun had set beyond the western horizon, and the welcome relief of night had sucked the last embers of another shitty day from the room. Elijah liked the dark. The dark meant he could sleep, and instead of dreaming of girls, or parties, or nightmares about final exams, his mind was free to wander to the cosmos. His imagination dived into the hearts of burning stars, it danced around the rims of black holes, it theorized the most efficient ways to terraform planets, and although he would never admit it to that fucking child of a professor, it conducted massive stellar maneuvers with titanic fleets of self-designed ships.

The fucking Shangri-La. That was a perfect example of humanity's ineptitude. Space - and the battles fought in it - were three-dimensional, so who the hell only loaded out a ship with weapons on one of those dimensions? And yet, that ship was hailed as self-evident proof of the insurmountable might of the Imperium Navy. The propagandists failed to mention, however, how often they had been lost or seriously damaged in every naval engagement they had been involved in. But that was the imperium's MO in a lot of things. Throw men - or ships - at a problem until it goes away. He had studied the great stellar battles of history and, in all but two cases, had deduced that mankind had emerged victorious through a combination of luck and sheer weight of numbers. Perhaps it was arrogance, maybe even youthful hubris, but Elijah had plotted out the strategies that he would have used and was sure that if he had been commanding the enemy fleet, he would have crushed the Imperium with comparative ease. Maybe the Imperium's fanatical and brutally enforced self-aggrandizement, while ignoring the problems of its own people, was the reason why there was currently a rebellion burning through the outer rim.

He frowned at the ceiling. It would seem that Master Wu's question had sparked off a chain reaction of other questions that had left Elijah's once unshakable faith in the Imperium in tatters. Perhaps that had been the idea.

But if that had been his instructor's aim, then the next obvious question was, "Why?"

Elijah let out a frustrated sigh and rolled onto his side, his eyes glancing over at the weapon rack on the opposite wall that held three of the deadly, razor-sharp Danjas of his martial discipline. The very last of the day's light was glinting dangerously off the polished steel blades. He watched it, letting his mind wander as it always did. He needed to sleep, he needed to wander the cosmos again, and he needed to find his center despite the increasingly obvious fact that it couldn't be maintained for long in the life he was currently leading.

His eyes slowly closed, and sleep finally took him.

A shadow moved silently at the foot of his bed. An ancient-looking man that Elijah had spent almost two decades knowing as Master Wu stepped out into the room. Elijah felt none of the rippling air currents, he heard none of the creaking of joints in the old man's bones; he was deaf to the silent breaths and featherlight footsteps and blind to the soft blue glow that seemed to burn from behind the old man's eyes. There was something on his lips, though, a smile, one of almost paternal pride, but that smile slowly faded to one of firm resolve. "I'm sorry, young one," Wu whispered to the sleeping boy. "Our time has run out. I am taking you from here before they can corrupt you and use you against us. All will be explained."

Elijah gasped as the needle was pressed into his neck, sleep vanishing in an instant against the sudden realization of the attack on him. His eyes flashed open, looking up at the face of his Master standing over him. His mouth opened to speak, but the fog was already descending. "Shhh," Wu whispered. "No harm will come to you. Rest now; we will be far from here when you wake."

Elijah held the man's eyes until the last possible moment. Life was about choices: he could choose to fight off the drugs, to gather his wits and his will to alert security with a yell for help, or he could trust his fate to the paternal look in his Master's eyes. He let out a long breath and surrendered to the darkness.

Elijah liked the dark.

******

Almark. 8

Hours had passed. Each one of them seemed to stretch out interminably longer than could be deemed reasonable, but the three Marines maintained their watch. Like sentinels against the encroaching night, not one of them succumbed to the tiredness that hours of combat must have smashed into the very core of them. Almark could only watch them in quiet admiration. It was a respect made even more profound by the soundtrack their vigil was being played to.

Over the course of the night, a new sound emerged from the silent darkness, growing increasingly more appalling to the squad who had survived as time dragged on. It possessed a strange ventriloquism, the source of which was almost impossible to locate. It was like a long, haunted, smothered moan came up from the corpse-littered battlefield itself as the voices of hundreds, maybe thousands of wounded men merged together on the soft night breeze. It was an unearthly, hateful sound, almost a living, tangible thing creeping toward each of them like a stalking predator. The sound was more awful to the survivors being forced to hear it than the most frantic screams of battle. It seemed to come from everywhere at once, from the most distant reaches of the dead-strewn and still-burning beach to being almost startling in its nearness. It could almost be reached out and touched.

The occasional weak cry for help punctuated the writhing concord, some begging for a drop of water, some calling on their god for mercy, and some calling on friendly hands to finish what the enemy had so horribly begun. It didn't matter which flag those voices had fought under; all were equal in their plight and in their pain.

There were dreamy, delirious voices murmuring the names of loved ones as if they were right there with them, standing over them to guide them on their final way. Yet, underneath it all was the deep bass groan from the closed lips and open eyes of men too hopeless or too heroic to articulate their final moments of agony.

For the group hunkered down in the middle of that beach, men and women who had heard the screams and seen the faces of their friends at the moment of their deaths, a new form of sadistic torture was being inflicted on them. The night itself seemed to collapse into a claustrophobic blanket that covered them all, and that deathly moan drifted mercilessly over it. They couldn't run, they couldn't hide, and they couldn't surrender.

All they could do was wait for that last fight that didn't seem to want to come.

For the first time in her life, Almark wished for the end to come to claim her. It was better than listening to the torment of so many others wishing for the exact same thing.

She just hoped hers came quicker than theirs.

********

Histories and Lore

Humanity's first tentative steps into space were a mixed bag of good and bad luck. Earth, despite being surrounded by as many systems as every other race's home planet, was actually surprisingly isolated. When empires expand, they look for two types of worlds: habitable ones and ones that can be mined for resources. In the immediate vicinity of Earth, stretching out to a few dozen light years, there were a handful of habitable planets and scores of resource-rich astronomical bodies. From planets to moons to asteroid belts. But further out, there was nothing. A seemingly endless expanse of lifeless, barren, useless rocks, dead systems, gas giants filled with useless elements, and vast, swirling nebulae that interfered with even the most modern of sensors. The "home territories," as the area within this expanse came to be known, were quickly annexed and populated, turning a huge swathe of space into a thriving stellar economy. But the Hudson Expanse, the name given to this lifeless, barren wasteland that surrounded the home territories, stunted mankind's further advancement to the stars until better engines and hyper-drive technology could be produced.

However, for the other, older, more advanced civilizations that surrounded the fledgling human empire, the expanse was just too much of an inconvenience to warrant further exploration. Countless exploratory expeditions were mounted by various species into the expanse dating back to the time when mankind still found gunpowder a pretty revolutionary idea. But after traveling for weeks through the wasteland and finding nothing, they invariably turned around and headed home. This allowed humanity to develop independently of the rest of the galaxy until they were technologically advanced enough to cross the expanse on their own. When they eventually did venture beyond the expanse that had kept their existence safe and hidden, humanity finally realized that they were far from alone in the cosmos. The Hudson Expanse was quickly turned into a fortress, an enormous defensive network that spanned lightyears. Vast, unbroken sensor nets, massive defensive platforms bristling with the best weapons mankind had to offer, unnavigable minefields, and patrolling fleets. If the early expeditionary fleets sent forth beyond the veil of the Expanse ran into trouble with hostile alien neighbors, they could quickly retreat to safety. As the Human Empire spread outwards, the expanse took on a new role and a new name. Tasked with defending the core worlds of the home territories, this defensive network became known as the Inner Ring.