All is Fair. Ch. 01

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."