“C’mon, baby. Push it. Push it. Push it!”

Flea leaned closer to S-29 Akira and whispered. “Push it.”

“You tryin’ to sabotage him, Flea?” said Dust, laughing.

Flea laughed and stood back up. “Push it, baby!”

On the opposite bench, S-23 Kachina pressed the same amount of weight (four-hundred fifty kilos), imperceptibly faster.

“C’mon, Akira,” Flea urged. “C’mooon!”

Strand was squatting on the ground coaching Kachina, and around them both the pilots cheered. A line of eight sentinels stood along the wall, watching their brothers compete.

Flea held his smile when he saw his captain enter the gym, followed by almost two dozen others. Something was wrong. The sentinels raised their laden barbells to the peak their arms could extend, seemingly at the exact same time.

“Did you not expect a tie?” asked the captain.

As the cheers died down, Flea looked at Red Ten, the Harbinger he admired most. As a novice jumper, Flea spoke reverently to all the radiant battle masters. In time, he learned a safer way to deal with them.

“Captain,” he spread his arms, “captain. Oh, my captain. You mean to tell me that with your radiance, you couldn’t see that my dearest friend lost the wager?”

S-29 Akira set his barbell on the rack and stood. “Captain,” he said.

Red Ten folded his arms high on his chest. “Akira, did you lose?”

The machine man cocked his head, then gestured towards the bench. “If you beat me, Captain, then I’ll say I lost.”

Another cheer went up, but the pilots quieted down quickly. The captains were gathered in armor and harness, and some even carried their skullforts under their arms.

“Has the time come, captain?” Flea asked. He chanced a look at Dust and saw a mean flicker in her green eyes.

“The time has come,” said General Sensus. The man strode into the gym behind the gathered captains and the section chiefs, and they all parted to let him in.

Flea was struck by the power in the man’s stride. All had respected Sensus, so much that when he was elevated to the highest rank a Harbinger had ever had, not a voice spoke against him. He wore his station well, and Flea was moved to give his salute on bended knee. The other pilots followed suit.

“Goodness,” Sensus blurted. “Friends, please...”

“Let them,” said Maiajova, one of the captains raised to colonel in the new command.

“Let them,” said Black Fountain, the man other Harbingers feared.

The sentinels started to chant the words, followed by the captains, and the pilots slowly stood and clapped to the chant. The noise grew loud until the general, smiling, raised a hand.

“Mortal friends, steel cousins, the council has spoken. Our scouts have given us the positions of our enemy, and before they gain another millimeter of ground, we are going to strike them where they are not prepared.”

Dust started the next cheer.

“We will strike them, and they will not recover,” the general continued. “We will cause Red Orak to turn back around and face us while the rest of Albion’s armies close in from behind. Jumpers, your section chiefs will brief you at thirteen hundred. Sentinels, the mission specs will be uploaded within the hour. We depart at midnight. Ready yourselves.”

The General left, and the jumpers and sentinels filed out of the gym.

“Midnight,” Dust said in the hall. “What’s midnight?”

The long suns of the res wards and boulevards were almost mythic in the barracks. In truth the barracks was a poor moniker, being a loose and overused term for all the Harbinger’s facilities. Odd, Flea thought, that they should adapt such a lazy term applied by the non-rads.

“Midnight,” said Strand, “is when we fly.”

“How’d you pass the IQ test again?” Flea asked.

Dust laughed.

“Come on, kids,” said Red Ten, “Dead Orak’s waitin’.”

“Hey captain,” said Flea, “you know you don’t gotta be worried. You the only red we gonna see.”

“Oh, you’ll be seeing lots of red, Flea. There’s gonna be pieces of him everywhere.”

From there it was the fastest prep and most emotionally charged briefing Flea could remember. The jumpers were briefed separately, each given their trajectories and the flight plans of the supplementary attack groups, which in this case were all going to be comprised of the sentinels. It was mostly going to be a ground war, with minimal dog fighting in space. Long range missiles would trigger mines and eliminate the majority of any orbital defenses Orak might have in place, and the Harbingers were punching in where their defenses were only just being put in place. It was a classic pincer move, and while it wasn’t stated explicitly in the brief, the jumpers had a consensus that this war was over before it began.

“You don’t think this is a little sudden, Captain?” asked Seneca, Red Ten’s second.

“I think General Sensus knows better than to give the Tangents time to dig in,” answered the captain.

The op was simple. There was a habitable (barely) moon where the bulk of the Ifrit, Orak’s primary ground forces were massing. His heavier soldiers; the Archeus and Anunnaki, among others, were holding other planetoids with few support troops, leaving the Ifrit vulnerable to a strike by a superior force. The breaches were closing naturally, and while the Artifexus had disappointed all on their efforts to seal them permanently, they had determined roughly how long they could be sustained, and confirmed Solomon’s theory that they would only appear in certain places. So, with this first wave of his foot soldiers eliminated, Orak’s tactical options would be severely limited.

Flea felt his blood warming as they finished each jump. The target moon, La Mancha, was known to him. It was thought to be a garden world. The colonizers who survived did what they had to, making their would-be colony a nest of pirates before Albion entered the sector, and Harbinger Two played a pivotal (and enjoyable) role in clearing those pirates out.

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“Like old times. Eh Cap’?” Flea said.

Red Ten was in one of the three rear seats, brooding over a message on his vam.

“Yeah,” he said eventually. “Sorry, Flea. I’m a little distracted.”

“No worries. Everything ‘ight?”

“Yeah. No. Outriders reported back. There’s been no sign of Harbinger One.”

“The team or the ship?”

“Either.”

“Damn. That can’t be good.”

“Actually, it might be.”

“Yeah, true. They won’t be mixed up in the fight.”

The jumps went by, and they were slipping quietly through a field of debris, courtesy of Red Orak’s now defunct sensor net.

“There’s our old stomping grounds,” said Silhouette.

“Aptly said,” Mangonel chimed in.

The cabin was crowded with radiance, and Flea almost scraped a piece of satellite.

“Hey, guys, this is my room,” he said. “I can smell your heat!”

Mangonel chuckled. “And we can smell your... something else.”

“Allright kids, clear out,” said Red.

The team went back to the lander and strapped in. As always, the captain was last.

La Mancha filled the forward window. The shallow sea that lay across the stars lapped at a string of shore. Plumes of orange and violet and white erupted where the Sentinel craft strafed. Flea, focused on flight, rushed in past a wing of Ifrit attack ships. A wing of Sentinels hit them with a broadside, then kicked their thrusters hard and finished them off while backing away. The rest of the way was a gauntlet, and H5 took a few hits. But Flea kept her steady. Like an arrow, the insertion craft shot into the ground and Flea pulled up, firing his guns at an artillery installation that had not yet been destroyed, then formed up with a trio of other jumpships. They rose to atmo, began a circle that would take them on a course over their teams, ready to drop in and assist at a moment’s notice.

An orbital missile battery fired a spread across their flank. The jumpships spread apart, releasing their Snap Dragon counter measures, then closed in and turned as one to eliminate the battery.

“Flea,” called the captain. Flea signaled the other ships and banked, listening closely as Red Ten called in a Blue Monday. The other jumpships held formation while Flea pulled forward, charging up the massive particle projection cannon that ran the length of H5’s fuselage. Silhouette and Gilgamesh painted two points to the north and east of the team’s position. Flea synced his targeting computer with the signals and activated the weapon. Even from his distance, the light of the particle canons was blinding. Black smoke gurgled in slow churns out of the craters left by the weapon, and the team progressed unhindered to the enemy’s southern line.

Flea rose again, running wing with the other jumpships as they supported the surrounding teams. The other jumpship formations swooped like raptors on the horizon, leaving craters where the enemy forces were too thick for the Harbingers. The next time Flea was called in, he wasn’t needed. An attack group came out of trenches they’d rapidly dug and pulled the Ifrit down. Their deaths were quick.

Flea fell in with the others, and they formed up with another squad of jumpships to do a concentrated particle canon attack on a heavily armored bunker. Missiles and energy clouds sprayed upward like pollen. Flea saw one of the missiles connected with a jumpship. A ripple of pale green light washed around the ship, then contracted. The ship imploded, then burst in a cloud of grapeshot, downing the nearest friendly craft.

“What was that?!” Dust cried over the comms. Flea sighed with relief to hear her voice.

“We need to say...” Strand was cut off. His ship got caught in one of the energy clouds. It was shredded to powder.

“Talk to me Flea!” Red Ten shouted.

“Their weapons are crazy!” Flea felt like an idiot the second his sentence was over. “Captain, Strand is gone. One hit and our ships are destroyed.”

Just then a small fighter flew by and landed a blast of some sort of thermal round. It threw off vector for a moment, but he recovered, chased the fighter down and shot it out of the sky.

“Their small ships don’t have anything like that,” said Planck, H2’s pilot. “I think it’s just those bunkers. We gotta watch ourselves, but we gotta take every one of them out.”

“I agree,” said the general’s voice. “All ships, double your squadrons and coordinate your attacks. S-10, devise an infiltration protocol and take as many of those bunkers out from the inside as you can.”

“On it, General,” replied S-10 Trismosin, oldest and deadliest living sentinel since the tragic loss of the 79th.

Then they came, the smallest of them three times the height of the tallest men, and others taller still. Flea thought the enemy had living turrets that emerged from some colorless fog, but it was the Knights, and they were moving in force.

“Where did they come from?” he asked anxiously. “Intel said they were holding other worlds!” Haruspex and Revol were instantly on his mind, and as he looked at the dozen or so Archeus Knights striding soullessly across the field he nearly panicked at the thought of his own team becoming Anunnaki. “Forget the bunkers,” he said. “We need to kill the knights.”

“Negative,” said the general. “My command is not rescinded. Eliminate the bunkers. S-10, devise a distraction protocol with minimal losses and assist teams 2 through thirteen in holding back the Archeus. We’ll take them out one at a time. I’ll move in with the section chiefs with your attack group. Where are those damned humans?”

Flea checked his scopes and saw nothing but them and the enemy. “I got nothin’. Dust, you see them? Planck? Anybody?”

The non-rad battalions should have arrived ten minutes ago, but they were nowhere in sight.

His wing formed up with another of the same size and they wore down a bunker at range. It took them longer, but no ships or pilots were lost. The second bunker had some sort of long-range railgun that shot through three jumpships with a single slug. They split into even numbers when they met with another, more decimated wing, and joined forces on the largest of the bunkers, whittling it down with everything they and losing six ships in the process.”

“General Sensus,” said Planck, “if the non-rads don’t show, we won’t have enough ships to transport all the teams.”

“Sadly, that won’t be an issue,” the general replied. Flea’s heart sank. All around Archeus, clouds of colored light were being inhaled into their cold, towering shells. The Anunnaki sang as they fought, aroused at the thought of new stolen brethren.

“Captain?” he said. “Mangy? Ehrgeiz? SIl? Seneca? Nimbus? Guys!”

“We’re here, Flea!” shouted Gilgamesh, the team’s best scout.

“Hey,” Flea said back, “I was getting' to you.”

“Keep the comms clear,” said the general.

There was still chatter, but all vital, and Flea felt foolish. He’d seen each one of his team go down and come back up a hundred times. He felt sorry for them when they tossed in bed and cried out in their death dreams, but they got up the next day and spun up like normal. Now those monsters were wading through them and sucking Harbinger souls through their pores, and there was nothing anyone could do.

An Archeus finally went down. Then another. But it was not enough.

“Back-up’s comin!” hollered Dust.

Flea checked his scopes, and sure enough, a fleet of heavy ships was bearing down from the east. Then they were in visual range, and for the first time since he became a pilot, Flea lost his will to fight. He shook off the fear though, just as soon as it came, and launched an alpha strike at the last bunker. Meanwhile, the general called for a tactical retreat while the kzinti troop transports lowered to the ground. The cats formed a line behind the ifrit, and the two fronts spread out to surround the harbingers, who were moving as quickly as they could without showing their backs. All Flea saw now was their light. Their bullets were either spent, or of no more use.

“Clear us an extraction point,” ordered the general, and every surviving jumper moved to the coordinates Sensus gave them. They coordinated their fire, making a corridor through the troops coming around them from the north, and blasting to slag any foe that dared to flank them from the south. The tip of the norther line fell quickly when the Harbingers moved through, and in seconds the extraction craft were launched. No one spoke as they retreated, and Flea was just grateful that his whole team made it back. The captain sat in the cockpit with Flea. The whole left side of his visor was blasted off.

As they rose to orbit, Flea saw something terrible hovering just above the surface of La Mancha, and he wished he hadn’t checked his aft viewer.

“That’s him,” said Red Ten.