The Rask Rebellion

"Where did the others land?" Hoff asked, tweaking the controls on his helmet as he tried to clean up his vision. "I feel like I'm on the inside of a fucking hourglass."

"This way," Brenner said, following the blip on his HUD. They trekked through the desert for a couple of hundred meters, Brenner's skids sinking in the loose sand, until another capsule appeared in the haze. It was nestled between two dunes, its hull scorched with black streaks by the heat of reentry. Three more of the team members walked over to greet them, falling into formation as they proceeded to the next pod. They were spread out fairly evenly, the twelve-man team able to reassemble before long. All things considered, it wasn't that bad of a drop. There was usually somebody shooting at them by now.

They made their way to the target coordinates, struggling across the dunes, their eyes peeled for enemy scouts. The Rask would certainly attempt to reclaim their stranded crawler, and in such low visibility, the prospect of stumbling across an armed convoy in the open desert was a real one. As Brenner crested a dune, their destination finally came into view. He dropped to his stomach, gesturing for his squad to do the same, everyone hunkering down.
The crawler was even more massive than it had looked on the grainy video feed, eighty meters long, its deck at least fifty meters off the ground. The storm was already starting to bury it, sand drifts consuming its titanic tracks. Upon its deck, he could make out the barrels of the railguns through the haze, three of them jutting from the port side. There were probably three counterparts on the starboard, but they were obscured by the sepia fog. Towards the rear was a tall conning tower that had been fashioned from prefab buildings, a large comms dish protruding from the roof. There were lights on inside, he could see the glow that was bleeding through the slatted windows.

Hoff whistled, sidling up beside him. He took a knee, shouldering his rifle and examining the behemoth through his scope.

"Gotta admire the ingenuity," he said. "Picking up movement on the platform that rings the deck, looks like they have a couple of cats keeping a lookout. Good job we had the storm for cover, or they would have seen us drop from miles away."

"What's our approach?" Petrova asked.

"According to the schematics," Brenner began, "the only way to get inside is via a descending gantry. Looks like the crew have raised it, they probably think there's no way for any intruders to scale that height. We'll take out the guards, then grapple up and breach through one of the hatches that lead inside the vehicle. I want a second team to climb up onto the deck and make their way to the prefabs. There's no way to know what additions the Rask have made to the crawler, but my money's on their comms room being up there, close to the dish. Priority one is to prevent them from sending a distress call. We want their backup to waltz straight into a kill zone when they show up."

He tapped at the side of his helmet, increasing the magnification, watching the two Rask patrol along the platform. They were wearing the usual gear, a blend of armor that the UNN had supplied to them, and leather clothing. They both had XMRs in their hands, meaning that the crew was probably well-armed. It didn't matter what kind of armor you wore, it wouldn't be stopping a two-kilometer-per-second projectile.

"The first thing we need to do is take out those guards," he muttered. "Those fuckers have good ears, the report of a railgun might alert them. Stevens, you're up."

Another member of the team climbed the dune, lying prone on the sand by Brenner's side. Brenner tore his optics away from the crawler for a moment, watching the man bring his rifle to bear. It was an older weapon than the railguns that were favored by most of the team, a CR-58, the service rifle used by the UNN during the latter years preceding the Betelgeuse Incident. It fired a caseless round, making it several magnitudes less powerful than an XMR, but unlike the electromagnetic railguns, it could be fitted with a silencer.

Stevens checked the top-loading magazine, then braced the stock against his shoulder, aiming the fat suppressor in the direction of the crawler. He reached out to make some small adjustments to his scope, then shifted his weight, settling in. The Rask guards were only about seventy meters away, but the visibility was poor, and the wind was howling. One had to take the time to account for such factors when firing a conventional projectile.

There was a muffled crack as he squeezed off a shot, the first Rask crumpling. The second heard his companion hit the deck, spinning around to see what had happened. He barely had time to raise his weapon before Stevens had put him down, the alien toppling over the human-sized railing, tumbling fifty meters to the sand below.

"God damn," he chuckled, his Southern accent pouring into Brenner's helmet. "Feels good to finally be able to just shoot the bastards. I'm likin' this war already."

"This has been a long time coming," Hoff added.

"Hoff, Stevens, Petrova, Bates, Wachowski, you're with me," Brenner said. "The rest of you, get up onto the deck and make your way to the prefabs. We'll clear out the lower level, you guys secure the comms equipment."

They split off into two groups, climbing over the crest of the dune and making their way down the sheer face, sliding in the loose sand as they went. The storm never let up, whipping against Brenner's visor like he was being sand-blasted, the howling wind audible even through his helmet.

"How the hell does anyone survive in this shit?" Hoff muttered, taking up the rear. He was speaking over the team's ad-hoc network, they wouldn't even have been able to shout to make themselves heard over this gale. "The place is barely habitable, even the most ruthless mining corp would probably think twice about throwing down a colony here."

"Why do you think the cats are so damned tough?" Brenner asked. "They have a saying here, the strict mother raises disciplined children."

"The fuck does that mean?" Hoff scoffed, scanning the walkway again with his rifle.

"It means they believe the planet makes them strong," Petrova added. "The planet is their motherland, and they are her children."

"That's right, Petrova," Brenner continued. "High gravity, harsh environment, fierce competition. There's a good reason the UNN uses them as shock troopers."

"Never took you for a cat person, LT," Hoff muttered as they approached the crawler.

"It's worth knowing things about the people you're being sent to kill," Brenner replied. "But if you must know, I'm more of a dog guy..."

The twin tracks situated beneath each corner of the massive vehicle were about as large as Kodiaks in their own right, the sand now beginning to form drifts around them, as though the desert was trying to reclaim them. The longer this thing stayed in one place, the harder it would be for it to dig itself out. If the crew had ever managed to fix whatever mechanical problem had stranded them, they would probably have needed a whole army of Rask armed with shovels to free themselves.

"Thing's as big as a goddamned building," Stevens muttered, craning his neck as he looked up at the hull high above them. The underside was crisscrossed with all manner of structural supports and exposed machinery, the haze obscuring the far end from view. It was like being beneath an iron sky.

"Grapples," Brenner ordered, letting his XMR hang from its sling as he pulled a device from a holster on his belt. It was shaped like a pistol, small and compact enough to be wielded with one hand, a spool of nylon-lined cable wrapped around the barrel. He aimed it at the walkway high above, and his team did the same. Brenner pulled the trigger, the device firing a grappling hook that caught on the guardrail, wrapping itself around it before catching. He gave it a tug, making sure that it had a good hold. Falling from that height in one-point-three Gs wasn't something that he'd be likely to survive.

He hooked the launcher to a harness on his belt, letting the device lift him off the ground, his skids leaving the sand. The wind rocked him as he neared the walkway, making him swing, the same happening to his team. Hoff almost clocked Stevens in the head with his boot, but Stevens elected to slow his ascent, narrowly avoiding a kick to the helmet. When they were in arm's reach of the railing, they hoisted themselves up, detaching the cords from their belts.

"Leave the grapples here," Brenner warned, "we might need to make a hasty exit."

The second team began to scale the hull, climbing up to the deck above. It was about twelve feet high, but there were ample handholds, not a problem for someone with superhuman grip strength. As they vanished over the top, Brenner led his team around the side of the hull, following the walkway to the nearest door. They stacked up beside it, their weapons at the ready. Stevens unscrewed the suppressor from his rifle and stowed it in a pouch on his chest rig, shortening the barrel length a little to make it easier to handle in close quarters.

"We go on my mark," Brenner said, raising a clenched fist. "Weapons free, shoot anything bigger than Hoff. We'll do this room by room, compartment by compartment. Leave nothing alive, we don't want any nasty surprises."

There was a chorus of affirmations, then Brenner waved them forward, gripping the hatch's handwheel. He turned it, hearing a mechanical clunk from the mechanism, the heavy door swinging open on its sturdy hinges. He made his way inside, sweeping his rifle across the corridor, finding it empty. It looked like the interior of your average industrial spacecraft, lots of exposed metal and wiring, the deck beneath his feet nothing more than a metal grate.

He began to move forward as his squad followed behind him, the deck creaking beneath their feet, the corridor filling with the shuffling of their gear and the subtle whir of their electronics. A human might not have been able to pick it up over the ambient noise of the crawler, and the sand that pounded on the hull, but the cats had sharp ears.

Brenner brought up a schematic in a window in the bottom left of his HUD, trying to figure out where they had breached. It was the port side, towards the front. The Rask would have certainly made some modifications, but there was no way that they would have been able to make any significant changes to the layout of the vehicle, not without completely rebuilding it.

They came across the first room in the dingy corridor, Brenner waving to it. His team stacked up, waiting for his signal as he reached up to tap at the touch panel on the side of his helmet. As well as the usual view modes such as night vision and FLIR, he had a camera with a sensor that allowed him to see through certain materials as long as they were thin enough and unshielded. The hull of this thing was too thick for the device to penetrate, but maybe he'd have more luck with the doors. Nope, nothing. Either the metal was too thick, or the room was empty.

He hit the switch beside the door, the panel sliding out of the way, and he dipped inside to find that it was indeed empty. It was just a storeroom, stocked with crates and what might be spare parts.

They moved on, checking two more rooms and finding them deserted. Where was the rest of the crew? What were their duties on a vessel such as this?

Brenner checked his map, noting that there was a larger room down the corridor to their right. They found the hallway just as empty as the last, stacking up as they prepared to breach. He aimed his sensor at the door, watching as a series of blobs appeared on his HUD. The device sensed heat, showing a cluster of colorful shapes on the other side of the door, their warm reds and oranges contrasting with the cold blue of the background. They were only visible through the door, the thick hull to either side of it blocking the signal.

He turned up the gain on his helmet mic, the software filtering out the ambient noise, picking up faint traces of conversation from the other side. It was was fragmented, alien, a series of hisses and throaty growls that he could make no sense of.

There was shuffling behind him as his team bristled. They didn't need to ask what he was picking up, they could patch into his helmet's feed and see exactly what he was seeing. Brenner raised his fist silently, using hand signals to inform them of what he was about to do. Trying to be as quiet as possible, he reached down and plucked one of the concussion grenades from his belt, priming the fuse with his thumb. He counted down from three with his fingers, then hit the panel beside the door, sliding it open. Without even poking his head around the frame, he gently tossed the grenade inside, the sound of alien conversation suddenly morphing into cries of alarm.

The software in Brenner's helmet was programmed to dampen anything above a certain decibel limit, but the Rask were not so lucky, the resulting implosion rocking the crawler. The deck vibrated beneath his skids, dust and debris raining from the ceiling above them as the grenade went off like a firecracker in a soda can, a bright flash of light illuminating the wall adjacent to the open doorway.

Brenner charged in, his team fanning out behind him, a scene of chaos and confusion greeting them. The room must have been some kind of mess hall. There was a large metal table that ran the length of it, loaded up with stacks of large MREs whose contents had been spilled all over its surface. The stools that had surrounded the table were all upturned, their occupants stumbling around in various states of shock and confusion. Some were rubbing their eyes, others covering their ears as they rolled about on the floor. The aliens had far more sensitive eyesight and hearing than any human, the effects of a concussion grenade would have been amplified tenfold.

"Open fire!"

The deafening crack of railguns filled the compartment, the team raising their weapons, unloading on the disorientated Rask. Brenner's rifle kicked against his shoulder, the magnetic coils on the barrel glowing red with heat as he loosed a burst at a nearby alien, the tungsten slugs tearing through the kneeling feline. They left crater-sized exit wounds, spraying blood and viscera, his target slumping to the deck.

The chatter of Petrova's PDW joined it as she swept it across the room, the slugs spraying showers of bright sparks where they punched through the hull, cutting down more of the creatures while they scrambled for safety. Some dove beneath the table for cover, but it was to no avail, the hypervelocity projectiles piercing through it like paper. Firing that kind of weapon in full-auto would have made it uncontrollable for most shooters, but her prosthetics allowed her to keep it stable, her polymer fingers wrapped tightly around the forward grip as the bullpup tried to leap out of her hands.

Stevens' choice of weapon might be outdated, but it was no less lethal. The caseless rounds made short work of one of the aliens, the marksman putting three bullets into its chest as it struggled to its feet, sending it crashing to the floor in a twitching heap. The others joined in, and when the dust began to clear, at least ten Rask lay dead on the deck. Every surface was pocked with molten holes, a wisp of grey smoke rising from Stevens' muzzle, dark blood seeping through the metal grate that made up the deck.

"Looks like we caught 'em chowing down," Stevens mused, stepping over the motionless body of a dead Rask and reaching out to pick up one of the MREs from the table. He turned it over in his prosthetic hand, examining it through his opaque visor. "Assholes are eatin' on the UN dime, these are Navy ration packets."

"We probably just alerted the entire crawler," Brenner muttered, swapping out his magazine for a fresh one. "Things are gonna get hairy from here on out."

There was muffled gunfire from somewhere above them, Hoff gesturing to the ceiling.

"Sounds like the B team has found something to shoot at."

"Keep moving," Brenner said. "We should split up, we'll cover more ground, and numbers aren't doing us any good in these narrow corridors. Hoff, Petrova, with me."

They nodded, his companions falling into formation behind him as the other three set off through an adjacent door. Although they were out of sight, there was little danger of friendly fire. As long as they were in comms range, his HUD would tag them with a floating icon and a name so that he could keep track of friendlies in the vicinity.

As he emerged into the corridor on the other side of the mess hall, he heard the sound of heavy footsteps, turning to see a group of Rask come barreling around the corner about ten meters away. They were tall enough that their heads brushed the ceiling, their shoulders so broad that two could barely pass one another, the aliens skidding to a halt as they noticed him. These ones hadn't been caught with their pants down, they were wearing body armor, and they were clutching XMRs that must have been six feet long in their furry hands. Each one was tipped with a cruel bayonet that glinted under the naked bulbs, their edges serrated like saws.

The lead alien was quick to the draw, maybe even faster than Brenner, but its weapon was completely unsuited to fighting at such close range. In the time it had taken the alien to bring the unwieldy thing to bear, Brenner's sights were already aimed at its head, a quick squeeze of the trigger popping it like a ripe cherry. The newly headless alien toppled over, the ceiling painted red with gore. One of its comrades aimed its weapon around the corner, blind-firing, showers of sparks filling the corridor. Brenner was forced to dart back into the safety of the mess, letting his XMR hang from its sling as he readied a second grenade.

"Fire in the hole!" he yelled, leaning out to hurl it down the corridor like he was pitching a baseball. It bounced off the far wall, detonating before it even had a chance to hit the ground, another implosion shaking the crawler. The light bulbs that dangled from the ceiling flickered, swinging back and forth, more dust and debris raining down to the deck below.

The three of them raced out into the hallway, Hoff turning to cover their rear as Brenner and Petrova neared the corner. One of the aliens was slumped against the wall, close enough that the blast had knocked it out. There was blood pouring from its round ears and its feline nose, it probably wouldn't be waking up any time soon.

As Petrova rounded the corner, there was a sound like an angry lion. It was a deep, guttural roar, an alien warcry that triggered a primordial fear in Brenner that he had to fight to suppress. She was lifted off the ground as the thing barreled into her like a freight train, pinning her against the far wall with its forearm, knocking her PDW aside. The cat was wearing a fucking helmet, it had shielded the creature from the worst effects of the grenade.

Its clawed hand shot down to its belt, drawing a knife the size of a machete, a wicked gut hook fashioned into its point. Brenner aimed his rifle, but the two were grappling, he couldn't fire without the risk of hitting his squadmate. As the Rask drove the blade towards her neck, Petrova caught its wrist in her prosthetic hand, slowing it enough that it stopped an inch short. The alien's bicep bulged beneath its leather jacket, the whine of the motors in her arm growing louder, the limb creaking as flesh was pitted against metal.

With her back braced against the wall, she delivered a savage kick to the alien's knee, a muffled yowl of pain echoing down the hallway. On the second kick, it released her, Petrova dropping to the deck as her assailant took a stumbling step backwards. The Rask recovered quickly, its flashing blade whistling through the air as it swiped at her, but Petrova ducked under it with all the agility of a gymnast. She knocked its feet out from under it with a sweeping kick, the deck shaking as the five-hundred-pound creature came crashing down. As it struggled to its feet, she reached for her sidearm, putting two slugs through its visor.