The Lucky 4th Space Marine Battalion, Mid March Across Hellious, GC 3478 June 8th, 2239 Hours—
Lieutenant Colonel Taft lifted his hand from the shoulder plate of the combat armor beneath him, revealing the emblem of their battalion. It was a blood-red four sporting a black border, with six slightly larger fours placed behind each other in a line. Patting the emblem four times, each time receiving a ping indicating a secure connection between the two power suits had formed.
As he was an officer, part of the data the connection provided was a status report on the vitals of the space marine inside. It didn't take five tries to memorize the readouts, which had all either flatlined or showed zeros. Not that he needed the information, as the hole torn out of the man's side, taking a large chunk of the man's armor and torso, told enough of a story. But it was tradition for the battalion to check four times as one last send-off.
They couldn't take the bodies with them, but that didn't mean they had to just let them lay right where they dropped. So long as they weren't in active combat, Taft would take the time to mark the location of the dead on his HUD while doing the bare minimum of a ceremony.
Standing up, Taft looked around. The 4th Battalion was spread out over a relatively flat patch of ground. Off to the east, there was a range of mountains, but between here and there was what looked like a long stretch of parched dirt and large clumps of boulders. A few scraggly, thick-barked bushes could be seen scraping out a life, but from how it looked to him from their current location, they were few and far between.
What all that amounted to was that there was shit in the way of cover overhead, but there were plenty of spots that could act as hard points in the line when they were attacked again. And it was a when, not an if. Once the Swarm started attacking something, they would not stop until they were eradicated or there was nothing left to attack.
The worst part was that the battalion could do nothing but weather the storm. Looking to the horizon of the heat-scorched land, Taft didn't want to think about the number of queens out there somewhere. They were building up their hives while sending out just enough of their forces to keep the battalion — and all the others unlucky enough to crash out here — off balance before they came forward with an unending surge.
Usually, Taft would send out every scout team they had, supplied with every drone available, to scour the area until they found the queens before marching the companies to wipe them out. But that would be a pointless endeavor. No, it would be worse than pointless, as they would take casualties for every assault. And once the job was done, what would they get? They would get more queens sent down from the leviathans, who were constantly hanging in the skies overhead, which was horrible for morale. Eventually, they would fail in neutralizing a queen when they were still weak, or they would be worn down until they were too weak to accomplish the job again. The result of either situation would be the same. Leaving Taft and his men in the unpleasant situation of experiencing what it was like to be stranded on a hostile planet. Though stranded might not be the best word to describe the situation.
Their combat dropship was capable of flight and even had some light and heavy railguns for armaments to perform limited fire support while acting as a fighter or a base. It was decent at both jobs, but its main reason for existence, and what it excelled at, was being able to go from orbit to planet side and back while protecting its cargo. Namely, the Space Marines inside. During the time the marines were being deployed, the ship would also resupply the battalion as they hopped about the planet.
The Tomb — as they called their dropship — was not designed to enter dogfights with flocks of the Swarm's flying creatures as it tried to maneuver to the battalion. The thing was, it wouldn't have to, so long as it stayed on the ground. The Swarm was weird that way. Their ground forces and space forces rarely interacted with each other. If a ship took off and caught the attention of the flying drones, which it would if it went more than a few hundred feet from the ground or moved too fast, the Space Swarm would dive bomb and mob the ship until it was scrap metal. But if it stayed on the ground, they would treat it like a part of the landscape unless attacked first. The exception was if the flying units were birthed from a hive on the planet, which was easy to tell as they were smaller and slightly different, making them more optimized to deal with an atmosphere. If any flyers were planet-born, they would attack the large combat shuttle while it was still on the ground, even if unprovoked.
So it was the general combat doctrine for any force that found themselves on a planet where they didn't have control over the orbitals to never take to the air. And it was a strategy that Taft planned on following. So long as he didn't order all his troops into the shuttle and lift off, they had a real chance of holding out until they were rescued. Though their odds would have been practically guaranteed if the 444th Corp had been able to make landfall in anything close to organized. Or if the 4th Legion had come down anywhere in a planet-sized area on this god-forsaken super-planet.
From the intercepted transmissions, they were not the only ones… inconvenienced. If such a word could convey the gravity of this clusterfuck of a deployment. They picked up transmissions for isolated ships from a half dozen fleets and tagged the IFFs of starships belonging to two dozen more fleets from every branch of the Coalition while they were combat-dropping to the planet. However, since those first few days, the communications in their immediate area have all but gone quiet. For all intents and purposes, they were alone, though they were still picking up garbled transmissions bouncing off the atmosphere, so at least they knew someone was out there still fighting.
But that meant little when his battalion was stuck on the ground and would soon be attacked from all sides. While their dropship had the facilities to maintain their armor along with a small forge to make food, ammunition, parts, and small ordnance, that was all it had. The dropship was designed with the belief that it would be operating in conjunction with a fleet and at least the rest of the 4th Brigade, if not the whole 4th Division, for support. And even then, their defense would be rapid attacks and retreats rather than digging foxholes and making a line.
The Lucky 4th was a mechanized infantry battalion meant for long-distance scouting and skirmishing with the Swarm as it approached the rest of the division. Their combat drop transport was meant to reposition with them, stopping by to resupply before moving again. Holding an area was never its purpose, even if, in a pinch, it could act in that role. It was quite the issue when they couldn't lift off and reposition with the Swarm in control of the sky.
Ironically, the Swarm holding the sky was the source of Taft's one real hope for his men. As they went down and for most of the following day, they spotted numerous other ships coming down around them. This land was now littered with the broken husks of carriers, transports, and even battleships.
Hundreds of ships, some of which came down in a controlled descent without a giant bloom of fire around them. And one of those ships was a Forge Ship. Those marvels were the backbones of the Coalition. The modified transport contained a device that took Catalyst, the energy from its reactors, and some mass, and it popped out anything that could be wanted. From a meal to a nuclear reactor, it was all possible. It just took time, and not that much of that either.
When Lieutenant Colonel Taft learned of its existence and general location, he made the decision right then and there. They had no other option. Staying at their dropship was untenable for everything but the short term. But the forge could build them a dreadnought, given enough time. More importantly, it could make them the hardware for heavy weapons to hold out against anything but the largest Swarm assaults while building the most powerful radio in its database.
Even if the crash was a thousand-plus miles to the east of their position, it didn't matter. They were trained to cover ground quickly, and that was what they would do. It didn't matter that they didn't know exactly where they were going or the number of the Swarm they had to cut through to get there.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
"Lieutenant Colonel," Major Ulson drawled as he sauntered up, performing what could loosely be taken as a salute. "Contacts eliminated, injured treated, and the companies are ready to march."
"How many did we lose, Ulson?" Taft asked while looking around. His HUD pointed to the positions of the companies, which were spread out in a rough diamond formation, one at each point, with a single company in the center ready to support as needed.
"This fight? Seven. Since this shit show masquerading as a disaster started? Forty-nine." The man moved to rub the side of his head, but his armored hand only clanked against his helmet, and he muttered in frustration, "Damn, itching never goes away before the fourth day in the suit."
Taft ignored the side comment, as it was perhaps the thirtieth time he had heard it this deployment, and that wasn't even counting all the times he had heard it in the past. "That many this early on our campaign? Things aren't starting out great."
"Hah, if you call this a campaign, then I don't want to know what you call a clusterfuck." Then his voice lost the dry amusement as he said, "Given what we're working with, the losses should be higher. I hate to admit it, but the only reason we haven't suffered more casualties is because the Swarm are acting weird."
“…I've noticed. There are too few, and half of those that show up are injured. But it doesn't change anything."
"No, I guess not," Ulson said, sliding back into his slow draw like he was shedding a jacket that didn't quite fit. He almost seemed more fatigued from the seconds he spent taking his position seriously than the hours of moving at a quick march. It's a miracle someone as indifferent as him has been thrust upward to such a level. Then again… he would be one of the first I would choose to be at my back in a fight. "Though," Ulson continued after a moment, "I would like to know what beasts out there are going toe to toe with the Swarm."
"Ohh?" Taft said, amusement filling his voice as the weight of command pressing down on him lifted for a moment, "I'll remind you of that when we meet them." He enjoyed the horrified silence across the private comm for a second, then clicked over to the general command channel. "We're moving out on the double."
**********
657th Interceptor Carrier Group of the CMSV Hollow Victory, Acting as a Rearguard for the 189 CM Fleet, June 8th, 2330 Hours—
Andraya pulled back on her controls, lifting the nose of the fighter and killing the thrust for a moment before flicking the stick to the right and down while pushing the thrusters up to a quarter of their full acceleration. She felt the jostling of the wind on the hull of her fighter, the thrum of the engines, and deep thuds as she pulled the trigger for her duel rail guns running along the cockpit.
The bolt drone within her sights exploded with the six rounds she fired in the moment she cut the thrust. She didn't see the chunks of the creatures as she flashed by, but her fighter bounced as the gas trapped inside its body exploded outward. As she saw a clear pocket of air along her flight path, she took a second to glance at the display showing the atmosphere outside the fighter's hull and felt her heart skip a beat. "Ancestors curse you!" She shouted before hollering into her headset on her flight frequency, "Flight 35, break off and dive! We're about to be in the middle of an eruption! Evade, ev— Oh, you incompetent traitorous bastards! I'll skin you alive for abandoning me!"
She heard some static-filled replies, but she didn't have time or the desire to decipher the traitor's excuses. Cutting the thrust for a fraction of a second, she felt a sudden spike in G's getting past the inertial dampeners as she flipped the fighter around and down before pushing the throttle all the way forward and triggering the boosters. Her breathing became challenging, like three tons had suddenly plopped down on her chest as she fought to keep her hands from jerking on the controls, throwing her into a catastrophic spiral.
Gritting her teeth, Andraya stared at where she wanted the starfighter to go, holding down the trigger for her railguns while trusting her shields to protect her. It was her goal, and she would make it there. It didn't matter if darkness was steadily creeping in from the sides of her vision and her enhanced body was being ground down by the overwhelming forces exerted on her. I'm killing myself, a distant part of her mind said, but even that thought flicking across her mind only made her teeth bare in a crazed smile.
Bolt drones and even other doomed fighters flashed through the tunnel her vision had become. More from instinct than conscious thought, she dipped and swung the fighter from one side to the other, attempting to avoid a direct impact on the obstacles in their path. As she maneuvered, her vision pulsed as she placed more and less G's onto herself, narrowing her sight even further.
But it wasn't enough; she knew that. She and her flight, along with a few hundred other fighters, had been forced to hold a position as the fleet retreated. In the dogfighting with thousands of contacts, she had lost her perspective of her surroundings and, apparently, her flight. Andraya might have been more disappointed in her failure to keep an eye on her surroundings if she hadn't spent the last ten frantic minutes dancing along the edge of life and death. Staying alive took president over all else in such situations. And it was no small feat that she downed at least fifty of the bolts along the way. That was something to be proud of, especially considering she was fighting in a thick atmosphere, something she had never done outside of the occasional training session.
Bolts were… well, they were basically target practice. One-on-one, they couldn't fight a child placed inside a cockpit. It got slightly more challenging when it was a hundred to one, but only a little. Their primary weapon was an arch of green energy that looked like lighting but could be fired in space and was far too controlled for that to be the case. The weapon did its job well, however, as it was one of the best attacks to break a starship's energy shields. But the attack wasn't that effective in a dogfight with its charge-up time. A good pilot can count the seconds it takes for it to fire and move out of the way at the last moment.
While the Bolts had difficulty taking out a single fighter, they had an easy time taking out entire flights, squadrons, and even wings of fighters. The bastards were designed to be killed, literally. When killed, they released a gas that could be ignited with their green attacks — or any other kind of explosion — once it reached a certain threshold. The real irritating part was that the Swarm seemed to have some degree of control over the ignition point of the gas and could even control its movement to a degree. But, over the centuries of fighting, it was noticed that there was an upper threshold. A point that the gas would always ignite once given a spark, and that point would be right—
Andraya felt her fighter shudder violently, and then a screeching of twisting metal filled her ears as green flames surrounded her transteel cockpit. As she watched the flame ripple over the surface of his shields then hull of her ship, ripping chunks out of the enriched metal, her heart sank.
Thrown violently to the side, Andraya felt the straps of her harness dig into her delicate skin. The once clear surface of her canopy shifted to a cold gray as the power running through it was cut, and she tumbled. She had no idea which direction was up or down, and all she could hear was the snapping of steel breaking apart and the sound of the whooshing of distant wind.
Seconds passed as she plummeted, and she tried to count them. “One… Two… Th—Three… What was I on?" But random tumbling after the borderline reckless flying had been the last straw. She was dipping in and out of consciousness and lost track of how much time had passed.
Eventually, the drag of the wind slowed what was left of her ship enough for her to regain consciousness. Eyes snapping open, her hand immediately dove to her side down into the groove between the seat and the dashboard all around her, fumbling for a lever she hardly ever had a reason to touch. Yanking up on it, she heard a series of explosive pops before she was smashed down into her seat, making her release a small grunt.
The chutes slowing the descent of her capsule could not have been open for more than a few seconds before she felt her descent come to a thudding stop. Before she could move, Andraya was tumbling again. She threw up her hands over her head as she was rocked back and forth over the next couple of seconds until finally coming to a stop again.
"Well, this is annoying," Andraya muttered as she reached out, grabbing hold of the emergency release lever for the canopy. With a few good yanks, she released the clamps while also lifting the cockpit slightly as the canopy pushed against the ground. Grabbing onto her harness with one hand, she hit the release button, allowing her to flip around and crouch upright.
Planting her hands where her feet usually rested, she strained her legs and sharply grunted, throwing the rest of the cockpit to the side. The several hundred pounds of steel rolled away with a creek and scraping of steel on stone.
"Ahh, that's better." she sighed, standing to her full height, taking in the fresh air and dark embrace of night. "Can't ask for a better night to go for a midnight wal—"
Ducking and twisting in place, Andraya threw herself to the side. A sharp whiz snapped past the place where she just was. "Beasts won't even allow a lady a moment to get her bearings," She hissed in outrage as she lunged into a graceful sprint down the rocky hillside, throwing a withering look to her back at the Swarm spiker further up the steep hill. "And now I have to chase after my supplies! Why am I always surrounded by incompetents, and nothing seems to go my way!?"