Suddenly the fort's warning klaxon started its terrible wail. A sound that could mean only one thing: The enemy had arrived at this most inopportune time. “Stand to! Stand to!” screamed Zahra while most of the rest of the people there were still trying to realise what was happening.

“Four platoon to the outer ditches. Everyone else get inside and load up!” She added glad that even in these times soldiers followed shouted orders, during chaos, without consciously even understanding them.

As Zahra started running she could hear other orders being shouted. “Two platoon load up and get into the outer ditches.” Lieutenant Joe Andrews had also, apparently, made his men bring ammo to the parade. “Get the VIPs into the fort.” Oh yeah, she'd forgotten about them. Oops. Excluding the platoon assigned to man the walls during the ceremony this left just under seventy men out of over six hundred actually ready to fight. And those with only fifty rounds each, instead of the normal three hundred they would take into combat.

While the humans outside the fort were devolving into chaos, those inside had all moved to the outer walls, to defend against the fast attack vehicles the elves used, leaving the gate totally unprotected. A mistake Valna'a was all too eager to take advantage of.

Quickly climbing out to the ditch she made her way to the gatehouse leading her team of silent, near invisible, saboteurs. Running under the archway that proudly identified this fort was named after a traitor, she quickly found and pressed one of the emergency gate close buttons. Her squad leader, Saphin, doing the same with the button on the other side of the gap, confirming to the defence system that this was indeed a genuine emergency, and causing the fort to go into complete lockdown. The outer and inner gates slammed shut, with the heavy locking bolts seating them. The fort was now totally sealed off, only able to be opened with the two special keys being turned at the same time, in the corresponding control boxes. The problem was the keys were outside, with the two most senior officers, and the control boxes were inside. Also outside were over a hundred heavily armed elves blasting away at the human vehicles and shredding the VIPs' bodyguards with their supersonic discs. A few of the guards got a couple of rounds off. To their credit three of these rounds hit their targets. But close protection pistols were no match for the combat armour they were trying to penetrate and the guards died, to a man, causing no casualties.

Valna'a and her team were now free to hunt the 30 or so humans guarding the fort. 6 elves against 30 humans. A match the elves enjoyed much more than their disorientated and confused foes. Having sealed the gates, Valna'a and her second opened fire on the guards on the rear upper walkway, killing six of the ten before the survivors even realised they were being attacked from behind. As with all such walls the upper walkways were heavily protected from the outside, but totally unprotected from fire within. The idea being that any enemy that took the walls would be easy prey to the second line of defence, and if the enemy go to the central compound to fire up at the defenders on the wall, the fort was already lost. Her team having already fanned out to attack the embedded bunkers and the corner towers. The screams of the dying humans mixing with the battle cries of her people. Battle cries that were electronically enhanced to create panic amongst the prey.

One of the surviving four, knowing they were sitting ducks on the walls dived onto the walkway, in a prone position, to give himself as much cover as he could. Then returned fire at the two elves below. Even scoring a hit that chipped Valna'a's helmet. This caused Valna'a and Saphin to duck for cover, while the other three survivors made a dart for the cover provided by the towers.

Similar results had been scored by the rest of the team, raking the other two sections with fire and reducing them to a mere fraction of their size.

Leaving the other four to deal with eleven survivors on the outer walls, Valna'a and Saphin began the hunt of the platoon's command section that were guarding the redoubt. A feat made more difficult by the protective doors being sealed shut as part of the fort being in shutdown. This was expected and the two elves had mini-mortar launched grappling hooks designed to get them to the lesser protected roof.

Relying on the jet bikes assigned to support them for this part the two elves launched their grapplers up, both securing locks with their first attempts. Then it was just a matter of scaling the wall, and taking control of the redoubt's roof, and shooting down on any humans still on the wall. Any cleaning required would be performed once the main battle was completed. Racing up their lines the two invaders found the roof clear, the humans in the redoubt hiding from them. Leaving Saphin to keep an eye on the exit points to the roof, Valna'a moved to the edge prepared to shoot down onto the outer walls, only to find no targets for her.

Within a couple of minutes she got the calls from her team confirming that the outer walls had all been clear and the fight here was over.

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Elsewhere with the elven raiders expecting the soldiers outside of the fort to be unarmed they had concentrated on the dignitaries' body guards, annihilating them before most of them could even get a shot off.

The chaos was every bit as magnificent as Korsephan had dreamed it would be. Humans were running every which way while his heavy vehicles launched entangling net after entangling net to bring them down. The fear and panic was so great and so tangible that he nearly passed out with orgasm the sadistic pleasure caused him. A pleasure rudely interrupted by the thump of a human Las-pistol hitting his helmet in the right eye piece, shattering it and causing the electrics around it to explode. Searing pain covered the right hand side of his face, and the world went black as his helmet short circuited and shut down. His armourer would pay dearly for this, he thought as he ripped his helmet off his head looking for who had dared to shoot him.

Looking in the direction the shot had come from Korsephan could make out an old human in heavily decorated uniform shooting at his men from behind a wrecked grav-car. Lining up his rifle Korsephan switched to full auto and emptied his three hundred round magazine into the man and the vehicle he was using for cover. Korsephan was many things, but a bad shot was not one of them. By the time he'd finished the old warrior's torso had ceased to exist, with his head and arms no longer attached to each other, or the lower part of his body, while a fine, red mist hung in the air as though as a testament to an true hero.

With the enemies' battle plan not taking into account the possibility that any humans would be armed, the riders had concentrated on the largest bodies of men as this would cause the maximum chaos. This allowed Two and Four platoons to mostly make it to the outer ditches.

Having been at the front of the platoon Zahra was the furthest from the ditch. This did not stop her from being one of the first to reach it. Even pausing to pick up Private Ellis' rifle where she had dropped it in her panic.

Zahra did a baseball slide up to the edge of the ditch, coming to a stop in a shower of dust, just by the edge. Scrambling over the lip, she was grateful for the rough surface of the trench allowing her to settle easily into cover and assess the situation. Her platoon's results varied. Some had failed to make the ditch, either being caught in nets or being shot by the attackers. A few had made it but had not considered the effects of just jumping into the ditch, injuring themselves in doing so. Zahra did not have time to worry about them. Deep down theirs was a last stand and there was no chance her few troops would be able to hold off the enemy until help arrived.

Not being able to stop them, however, was not the same as not getting some revenge. so she steeled herself, calmed her voice and commanded her men as though it were a training exercise. With her calm presence and reminders to lead the enemy her platoon opened fire. Basic troops, however, were no match for the specialised troops against them. The humans' shots mostly went wide of the jinking jet-bikes, while the deadly return fire kept finding its mark.

Zahra saw corporal Cooper drag a wounded trooper to the bottom of the ditch. Calling for a medic to tend to the wounded woman, before taking her place in the defences and shooting a grav board rider off his machine. Her pride in the corporal's work was brief as an enemy round hit the ground in front of the corporal, shattering and sending shrapnel into the young woman's face, ending her involvement.

Having emptied Private Ellis' rifle, and taking out two attackers, Zahra grabbed the rifle from a fallen trooper and lined up her next shot, killing a jet-bike rider and causing his machine to plough into the ground before cart-wheeling into the gates of the fort. The very gates that had traitorously closed, dooming them all. This was not going to be a heroic win against the odds. This was just going to be a heroic last stand and she was damned sure she would make these bastards pay dearly for their victory today.

Parade uniform did not come with communications gear, so Zahra could not check in with the survivors of Joe's platoon and could only hope they were giving as good as hers.

Suddenly there was a lull in the fighting. All the unarmed men were down or captured. The enemy moved backwards out of her men's effective range and seemed to wait.

“Hold your fire.“ She called to her surviving men. “Give me an ammo count and watch for dirty tricks.” There was no way the enemy were going to retreat now. The field was theirs. Zahra did not care about the why; she used the brief respite to look round at her platoon, making a quick count of the survivors, before starting to search for any unspent ammunition. The news was not good. She had six combat effectives left, from an original thirty five, with an average ammo count of just under six rounds a man.

Above her Xaradorn smiled to himself. “I've got your dirty tricks right here.” Throwing two stun grenades on the remaining combatants along with three more stun and three knock-out grenades into the trench.

“LT!” Croaked corporal Cooper pointing upwards. Trying to warn her officer of the threat from behind. Zahra had just enough time to look up into the mask of a raider on the wall above her, before the stun grenades went off, incapacitating her long enough for the knock-out gas to take effect.

“You! Find whichever creatures have the release keys, bring them here and bring them inside, so we can get out of here.” Valna'a yelled to one of a pair of disc riders who had landed by the ditch and were preparing to loot the fallen cattle there.

“How, the fack, do you expect me to figure out which one of those animals has a key?” Shouted the rider back. “I don't understand their barbaric language, and I doubt if any of them know ours - yet.”

Flicking her pistol to low power Valna'a shot the unhelpful rider in the stomach and turned her pistol onto the other one.

“I'll figure it out.” She grumbled, before leaving her partner writhing on the ground and moving off to see if she could.

“Good call.” was the reply.