The Autumn War Vol. 03: Defiance

"They are bombing the surface," Tatzi explained, her Borealan accent rolling off her tongue. "Come, we will watch."

"I figured that little maintenance window might give us a pretty good view," Jade explained, memories of their first encounter there giving Evan pause for a moment. She noticed, smirking at him, but it was lost on the rest of their friends.

"Why the hell do you know about this?" Evan asked incredulously, directing his question at Hernandez.

"I heard from Gutierrez up in navigation that we're burnin' into a new orbit," he explained, waving his hands animatedly as he talked. "And you know Sasha, the guy who works in the mess?"

"No, I don't know Sasha," Evan mumbled. "How the fuck do you know all these people? We've only been here about a week."

"Well, he's in with some of the officers, and he told me that they told him that-"

"I don't need the whole story," Evan said, interrupting him. "Skip to the end."

"They're hittin' somethin' on the ground hard. Word is, half the fuckin' fleet is about to bomb the shit out of Kerguela."

Evan slipped on his pants, then located his boots, hurrying after the group as they made their way down one of the Omaha's winding corridors. Jade led them to the little maintenance room, the door sliding open with a press of a touch panel, and the squad piled inside. To Evan's relief, Foster was keeping mercifully quiet about what had transpired there during their last visit. There was barely enough room for them all, the two Borealans taking up an inordinate amount of space, but everyone was able to get a view as they crowded around the window.

Above them, beyond a pane of reinforced glass that was framed by tiny frost crystals, Evan could see the carrier's engine nacelle jutting from the ship's hull. If the engines had been burning, they weren't any longer, the conical exhausts now dark. Far below, Kerguela's red and orange surface glowed in the light of the system's star. It wasn't scrolling past anymore. They were in a stationary orbit, matching the moon's rotation to hang in place above it, and so was the rest of the fleet. With the sun directly above them, Evan could make out the glint of nearby ships flying in close formation, its light reflecting off their hulls. There must have been a dozen jump carriers and even more escort ships, all of them seeming to stand still as they floated through space. They were still kilometers apart, but even being in visual range of another vessel was unusual, let alone being able to pick out detail like this. It was practically an aerobatics show as far as the Navy was concerned. He could make out the bridge windows and hangars on the jump carriers, the torpedo hatches on the angular frigates, even a few smaller craft drifting between them as they ferried cargo and personnel.

"Look at them all," McKay said with an impressed whistle. "That's an attack formation if I ever saw one."

"How many do you think there are?" Jade asked.

"I count twelve carriers," Collins replied, standing on his toes to get a look over her horned head. "That's a quarter of the fleet, at least. What the hell are they hitting that requires that kind of firepower?"

"Hernandez, if you're full of shit," Garcia began. He quickly went silent, however, everyone watching as the guns on the nearest jump carrier slowly came to life. Along the underside of its round, ocean-grey hull, a forest of weapons rotated into position. Like a stabilized camera on a gimbal, they locked onto something on the ground, snapping into place in unison.

Evan could just about make them out, and he counted fourteen of them, their barrels shining in the sunlight. Their design wasn't unlike that of the XMR, but the electromagnetic accelerators fired far larger projectiles, and they fired them a hell of a lot faster. When those things hit the ground, they released enough kinetic energy to rival a small nuclear strike, just without all of the radiation and fallout.

"There they go," Collins said, everyone going quiet as the carriers began their bombardment.

It was hard to tell what was happening with no impressive muzzle flashes and no chemical plumes from rockets to follow. At first, the only indication that they were firing came from the subtle glow of the coils on the long barrels of the guns as they heated, then from the flashes of light as they hit the atmosphere. The tungsten projectiles slammed into Kerguela's air like asteroids, the release of energy and the intense friction picking them out like fireworks. Only now did Evan realize how many of them had been fired. Each of the twelve carriers was loosing a salvo of fourteen projectiles every couple of seconds, alternating between their arrays of guns to allow the barrels time to cool. Like bright stars, they seemed to cover the planet, but they hadn't even reached the surface yet.

It took them only a few more seconds to impact the ground, a series of even brighter, more vibrant flashes filtering through the layer of drifting clouds. The projectiles were moving far faster than even orbital speed, and they were now dumping all of that energy into the moon, carpeting the red forest in scattered pinpricks of brilliant light. The clouds were blown away by the shockwaves, punching great holes in the canopy, dark mushroom clouds starting to rise into the sky even as more of the weapons impacted all around them.

Each subsequent salvo seemed to land in a different patch of forest, creating a very inorganic grid pattern of explosions that was oddly eerie to witness. The shockwaves were spreading now, Evan watching them disrupt the surrounding trees in a ripple pattern, like someone had dropped a pebble into a pond that was covered in red algae. It looked small at this distance, miniature, but those blasts were crossing kilometers in seconds. Raging fires spread in their wake, turning the trees to tinder, rings of fiery red expanding and combining until vast swathes of the region were ablaze.

"How long are they gonna keep it up?" McKay muttered, transfixed by the sight. "What are they trying to kill that isn't dead by now?"

The explosions continued to walk across the planet's surface, clinical, predictable. The oldest impacts were now towering plumes of dark smoke that rose high enough into the atmosphere to cast long shadows on the moon's surface, reminding Evan of volcanic eruptions, while the newer explosions tore up the nearby forest. It went on for minutes, what must have been thousands of explosions cutting a swathe across the planet, leaving an area that looked to be the size of a country burning. It almost resembled a vast sea of lava, the glow penetrating even the dense debris cloud that was starting to clog the sky.

"I was under the impression that the idea was not to destroy the moon that we're supposed to be returning to the Valbarans," Aster muttered, her antennae waving as she watched with wide eyes.

"Someone down there sure pissed off the Navy," Hernandez replied, his tone more subdued than Evan had ever heard it.

A sudden klaxon sound disturbed the silence, everyone who was attending the grisly spectacle glancing around as a distorted voice echoed in from the corridor outside.

"All duty shifts, report to the mess hall for briefing. Repeat - all duty shifts, report to the mess for briefing."

"All duty shifts?" Collins asked, giving his friends a confused look.

"I think I know where we're going," Evan added, sparing one last apprehensive glance at the ruined forest below. "Call it a gut feeling..."

***

Simmons met up with the rest of the team on their way to the mess, and they arrived to find the room even more packed than it had been during their last briefing. They searched for chairs in the sea of personnel, packed shoulder to shoulder like sardines in a can, a few Borealans and Jarilans standing out in the crowd. Slugs in a magazine seemed like a more apt metaphor, considering the air of tension and excitement that hung over them.

The briefing was being given by one of the Omaha's lieutenants - Evan still wasn't accustomed enough to his adoptive home to know them by name yet - the man wheeling along a portable hologram emitter that was about the size of a luggage chest. He set it up at the near end of the mess hall, and with the help of a couple of assistants, the machine flared to life. A room-spanning view of the devastation that Evan and his friends had just witnessed firsthand was projected into the air, showing a scrolling orbital feed of burning forests and fields of embers. It really did look like the aftermath of some kind of apocalyptic volcanic eruption.

"The Navy just got done dropping several thousand kilotons of fuck you on the Bugs," the lieutenant began, gesturing to the scene. "That mountain in the thick of it all is the Ant Hill," he added, gesturing to a flat-topped rock formation that was surrounded by a sea of flame. "According to the Ninnies, that's where the Queen is holed up."

A murmur spread through the room, Evan and Hernandez sharing a glance.

"The Queen?" Jade hissed.

"Twelve carrier groups will be participating in a ground invasion of the area that we just bombed to shit," the lieutenant continued. "The goal will be to secure a landing zone around the perimeter, then advance inside this two-hundred-kilometer circle, where we'll fight through any surviving critters on our way to this rock formation. Priority targets are enemy radio transmitters, bunkers, and anti-air emplacements. Once we reach the foot of the mountain, we're going to secure it, then send in the Trogs to flush out the Queen. Word is the Red King is operating in this zone," he added, taking a moment to glance around the mess hall. "For those of you who might have forgotten, that's the bastard who gutted your old companies during the first wave of landings. If you're looking for payback, now's your chance."

Evan's brow furrowed, images of the towering alien hefting a dead Marine flashing before his mind's eye, its red carapace reflecting the fiery glow of the wrecked vehicles that were burning all around it. He reached behind his neck, his fingertips brushing the hard polymer of his implant. He felt something grab his other hand, Jade giving it a squeeze as she peered up at him, and he returned the gesture with a weary smile.

"The Omaha's job will be to secure an LZ for the following battalions here," the lieutenant continued, pointing to a red circle at the edge of the burning forest. "Even after such heavy bombardment, Naval Intelligence is estimating opposition forces in the hundreds of thousands. The Bugs burrow deep, and they're smart enough to know what we're trying to do. Keep your eyes open, and kill anything that has more arms than legs. Present company excluded," he added with a nod to the nearest Jarilan.

"That's alright, sir," she replied. "They gave us armbands for a reason."

Her comment got a chuckle out of the room, serving as more proof of how far the aliens had come in their short time serving as auxiliaries.

"As you've probably been able to guess by the mass orbital bombardment, the gloves are coming off on this op," he continued as he began to walk up and down the front row. "The jump carriers will be providing Beewolfs and Penguin gunships for close air support, so any time you see something your guns can't scratch, just call in a takeout order of hot tungsten. We're gonna have about a thousand birds running sorties around the clock, so you shouldn't have long to wait. Hotel company - I want you standing by to rain death wherever the rest of the battalion needs it. You'll be remaining in the initial drop zone to provide artillery support."

He pulled up an image of a Scuttler, one of the Bug tanks. The creature looked like a giant, eight-legged crab, and this one was equipped with an organic missile system - a SAM battery made of meat and chitin that was hitching a ride on its back like some kind of parasite.

"Priority targets will be these fuckers - anti-air Scuttlers. The missiles they carry are pretty short-range, but they'll be a threat to our fliers. They're known to bury themselves in the ground before ambushes, so it's not out of the question that some of these things might have been able to batten down the hatches when they saw the first salvo hit. Not to mention that the Queen is certainly holding some of her forces in reserve inside the ant hill. We can't crack that thing with orbitals, not without killing the moon in the process."

The lieutenant switched the view on the feed to show a satellite image of the moon's topography, presented as a color-coded height map. He turned, then hesitated, planting his hands on his hips.

"Yeah, I dunno why this slide is in here. The ground sure as hell doesn't look like that anymore. In any case, Golf company's job will be to find the safest path through the terrain. It's gonna be hell down there, even after we've given the dust time to settle, so prep for a rough drive. One more thing," he added, turning back around to face the audience. "They're going to be deploying a Yagda superheavy as a mobile command post, and it's potentially going to be loading nuclear sabots. Who am I kidding, of course they're going to use them," he added with a roll of his eyes. "I don't want anyone exiting a vehicle without a sealed pressure suit, and I don't want anyone raising their visors or taking off their helmets down there. The Navy isn't responsible if one of you jarheads inhales radioactive dust and gets lung cancer."

"This pep talk is just what I needed," Hernandez whispered, giving Evan a nudge with his elbow.

"Start prepping for the drop," the lieutenant ordered, shutting off the hologram with a hand gesture. "Expect low visibility, chemical and radiation hazards, and enemy ambushes. They've had a lot of time to dig in down there, and they know we're coming. We shouldn't take anything for granted. Fight smart, do your jobs, and we'll deal a crippling blow to the Bugs on Kerguela. With no Queen, their hive is effectively sterilized, and we can hunt the rest of the ugly shitheads for sport."

CHAPTER 4: ASHLANDS

The lander decoupled from the carrier with a tangible clunk that reverberated through Evan's seat, his stomach lurching as its engines pushed them out into space. He checked the tightness of his straps, glancing around the vehicle bay. The IFV was strapped to its sled, anchored to the floor, and the members of his squad were sitting around it in crash couches that were bolted to the walls. Hernandez was to his right and Jade was on his left, her two Jarilan companions sitting beside her, their four hands gripping their harnesses tightly. He heard Simmons' voice crackle through on his helmet radio, rising above the rumble of the craft's thrusters as its systems automatically dampened the ambient noise.

"This is gonna be a standard hot drop, with an emphasis on hot. The crew is gonna mount up to provide heavy support, then I want the rest of you to spread out and start securing the area with the rest of the company. We have to make sure that LZ is airtight before anyone follows us in. We have no idea what we're going to face down there - could be an army of Bugs waiting for the ramp to open, could be nothing. The bombardment filled the upper atmosphere with enough debris that we can't see shit from space."

"What, so we're just supposed to hope and pray?" Collins asked incredulously.

"We're a Ghost Company!" McKay replied, giving him a nudge from the seat to his left. "We laugh in the face of death, and we...chuckle quietly in the vicinity of potential danger."

"One of the benefits of being first to drop is that there's no chance of blue on blue," Simmons replied, Evan gripping the edges of his seat as he felt atmospheric turbulence start to buffet the vessel. "There are no friendlies operating down there, so shoot anything that moves."

They were squashed into the padding of their seats as the lander began to decelerate, and after a minute more, it touched down with a thud. Evan looked to the troop ramp as it began to descend, lifting his XMR from the rack beside him, rising from his seat. It was daytime, and he expected to see sunlight flooding through the growing gap, but all he saw was a dingy red glow. The ramp hit the ground, kicking up a cloud of ash, the IFV sliding down the rails on its trolley. The vehicle kicked up another puff of dust that filled the air as it skidded to a stop, the team thundering down the ramp to cover the crew as they mounted up.

Evan emerged into a vision of hell.

Where once there had been towering trees, their autumn leaves forming a dense canopy over their heads, there was now nothing but burnt stumps as far as the eye could see. Some of them had been torn right out of the ground by blast waves, and others had been snapped in half and stripped of their branches, leaving blackened trunks that jutted from the ground like giant fence posts. There was no underbrush anymore, not a blade of grass or a shrub in sight, like a giant plow had upturned the top layer of soil. No, not soil. As Evan trudged through it, he realized that it was ash, forming a layer that was almost high enough to reach his ankles. Even though it had been hours since the bombardment, much of the terrain still burned. Embers smoldered in some of the tree trunks like hot coals, and bright cinders sailed through the air high above them, carried on the wind from nearby fires. The sky was even more foreboding, Evan glancing up to see not a blue expanse filled with colorful auroras, but a black shroud of airborne dust like the pyroclastic cloud of a volcano.

"Are we bringin' the ring back to fuckin' Mordor?" Hernandez grumbled as he walked up beside Evan, his rifle sweeping the nearby trees.

"At least we can see further," Jade grumbled, advancing to cover Evan's right flank.

More landers were coming down, roaring through the smog above on plumes of hydrogen flame, throwing more billowing ash into the air as they neared the ground. The rumble of engines was joining the noise, the nearby IFV coming to life, the railgun on its blister rotating to cover the infantry. Kodiak MBTs were rolling down their ramps, six-wheeled Timberwolf scout vehicles bouncing on their suspension as they drove into the trees, smashing through the charred husks of fallen logs. Some of the landers were already lifting off again, heading back to orbit to collect their next payload of vehicles. In as little as fifteen minutes, all of the battalion's 150 vehicles could be on the surface.

"Fan out!" Simmons barked, shouldering his rifle as he rallied the team. "Search the area! Fleetcom wants a five hundred meter perimeter!"

The squad formed a line, the IFV rumbling along behind them as they made their way into the ruined forest, Evan scanning the terrain ahead with his visor. Jade was right in that the lack of trees made it easier to see, but all the smoke in the air meant that they were limited to a couple of hundred meters before everything faded into a grey haze. He felt something crunch underfoot, glancing down to see a desiccated branch crumble to dust under his boot.

"How could anything survive down here?" Donovan asked, passing by a ruined stump that was jutting from the blasted earth like a broken tombstone.

"Why didn't we just do this to the whole fucking moon?" Foster added, hopping over a charred log. "Seems like a waste of time to fight this war with guns and tanks."

"Because people have to be able to live here when we're done," Garcia added. "If we didn't want the planet, we'd just let the battleships peel open the mantle like a giant orange."

"If we didn't have these helmets, we wouldn't even be able to breathe," Evan said as he peered into the smog. His helmet was doing its best to highlight terrain features, trying to draw a line over the horizon, but it was jittery and imprecise without enough data. "Speaking of which - can you not use your antennae, Jade?"