MARINE BASE CAMP SERENITY, CHARON
POV: Baedarsust, Malgeir Federation Marine Infantry (Rank: Head Pack Leader)
Baedarsust realized that the squad scenarios were even harder than the solo ones. In hindsight, it made sense why the Terran instructors only started them on those after they’d complete some basic solo scenarios.
The challenges were more complex. The enemies, more numerous. And the potential for error and danger multiplied.
The missions didn’t just end when one of his squadmates “died”. Every one of his people that were injured or killed, he had to spend precious time and dedicate the rest of his Marines to get them out of the enemy station. He had to manage the resources in his squad.
He had to learn who they were.
Frumers was a bad shooter. He just was. He was too jittery and was having trouble trusting his suit for aim and weapon handling. He was working on it, but Baedarsust put him at the back of the squad formation. He carried the heavy equipment and medical supplies.
Spommu couldn’t be trusted with explosives. But she could shoot. In fact, she shot the best of them all on the simulator and in the actual, physical range outside. So she got the long gun, except when they were practicing station breaching.
Quaullast mastered all the specialized Terran equipment with ease. He had good spatial awareness. He got first dibs on the explosives and gadgetry. His only problem… poor stamina and attention span. A few attempts and he was already panting with fatigue.
And Baedarsust had to figure out who he was himself.
Objectively as an individual Marine, he wasn’t bad at anything, but he wasn’t particularly good at anything either. The Terrans said that was actually a good quality for a squad leader because he was a barometer for the rest of the squad, but Baedarsust wasn’t sure if they were just trying to make him feel better.
He micromanaged too much. Apparently, that was a common issue. Allowing his squad to function independently while still paying attention to detail… that was a continuing lesson in humility.
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Baedarsust felt the gravity disappear through his suit as the corridor lights went off. As his suit instantly switched to infrared and radar vision, he noticed a glint across the long hallway. The computer recognized the threat, outlining the target with a red box.
“Ambush!” he yelled into the radio as an angry volley of rifle fire swept across the module towards his Marines.
His squad reacted instantly, each boosting to a piece of cover among the debris kicked up by the lack of gravity. Baedarsust thrust this suit behind a pulled-out compartment on the wall, bringing up his rifle as he minimized his exposure to the enemy fire.
Spommu opened fire without warning, dispatching the attacker in a burst of deadly fire. Baedarsust watched as the enemy’s suit spin out of control on the far end.
Not relaxing, they kept their weapons up, scanning the corridor for more threats.
“Sound off!” he shouted at them, and they individually confirmed they were uninjured.
He let out a sigh of relief— until he turned around and saw, attached to the wall, the enemy had left him some reading material next to where he was cowering, about a meter in front of his face.
Baedarsust didn’t know a lot of the Terran script, but this one he’d seen before. In increasing frequency.
FRONT TOWARD ENEMY
“Shit.”
The screen went black.
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Baedarsust scratched his snout under his virtual reality helmet. “So how are we supposed to survive an ambush like that?”
“In the Red Zone? Most of the time, you don’t,” Aida shrugged. “A well-prepared ambush is a death sentence. You can be the most well-trained Marine in the galaxy. A squad of tier one ODT operators. But if your number’s up, that’s it. There’s nothing you can do about it.”
“So why are we running these training simulations—”
“Because sometimes the ambushes aren’t well-prepared. Sometimes you do get half a second to react. Remember the videos?”
Most of the training consisted of watching videos, more than simulation and drilling time. There were a lot of them.
Baedarsust viscerally remembered a segment of helmet camera footage, one of the first they were shown: a Republic Marine took two careless steps into what was apparently an empty hallway on an industrial station, only for a squad of unseen enemies behind a thin sheet metal wall to open fire through it. They shredded his legs in a split second. He’d gotten lucky; his squadmate right behind him reacted in time, grabbing and pulling his suit out of the corridor into cover before a remotely detonated explosive blew a hole in the corridor to decompress the station module.
All within five seconds.
Baedarsust wasn’t sure he would have reacted in time if it happened to him. He supposed that was what the training was for. He replied, “Yeah. Get to cover. Return overwhelming fire. Fight through the killzone.”
Aida grinned slyly. “That’s the theory anyway. If that doesn’t work, you’re dead anyway. So… ready for the next one?”
Baedarsust sighed. “Put us in again.”
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Baedarsust and his squad stared through the airlock window towards the dark warehouse station module with their helmet optics.
“What’s the plan here, boss?” Frumers asked.
“We’re not running in there like a bunch of lemmings — like that last one, that’s for sure,” Baedarsust muttered.
“Lemmings?”
Spommu looked up, eager to answer. “There are these Terran animals, I saw a video of— I’ll tell you about it after this.” She shut up after an impatient glare from Baedarsust.
“Camera drone first,” he ordered. “Quaullast, you’re up.”
Quaullast rummaged through his utility backpack until he found the paw-sized brick he was looking for. Unpacking it, he turned it on and paired it with his tablet. “Ready.”
The four of them covered the airlock door with their rifles and attached themselves to solid handholds as Baedarsust activated it. It slid open with a hiss.
“Pressurized, good. And there’s gravity too,” Baedarsust commented as he glanced at the suit readings. “Get the bug in there.”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Quaullast activated the controls for the camera drone, and it smoothly flew into the darkness. Each of their helmets began receiving video from its infrared camera as it slowly made its way through the mess inside.
It contained aisles and aisles of standard shipment palettes.
“Damn, it’ll take us forever to check through all of them for our target,” Spommu said.
Baedarsust pointed at a windowed office in the corner of the massive warehouse. “Maybe there’s a manifest. Check that corner room. Might be a control room.”
Quaullast carefully flew his drone towards it. As it approached, they saw several digital devices turned off and arrayed on a table inside it through the Terran height window.
“Alright, we can start there then,” Baedarsust said. “Clear the warehouse. Make sure there’s no one waiting for us.”
Quaullast flew the drone in a crisscross pattern through the aisles with its automatic thermal identification system. Back and forth, back and forth. After the second repeated scan, he turned to Baedarsust. “Looks clear.”
“Any other entrances or exits?”
The drone specialist took a second to review the footage and reply, “Not that I can see.”
“Good enough. Keep it running,” Baedarsust said, turning his rifle over twice for a last-minute double check. “Let’s get in there.”
“Moving!”
“Extending past your muzzle on the right!”
“Clear left!”
“Clear right!”
“On the move!”
They filed into the open doorway, covering each angle as they’d been — recently — trained to do. With the warehouse mapped onto their helmet screens, they followed the fastest route towards the office they saw.
Though the drone had cleared it, Baedarsust checked for traps manually, glancing at the corners of the glass window beyond it.
Nothing.
“Make entry, Frumers,” he commanded as his squad took up position around him.
“Making entry.” Frumers curled up his fist, and with the activation of a paw control, he put his armored fist through the window. The glass shattered easily, its pieces clattering down around them, bouncing off their EVA armor.
One by one, they vaulted into the office, scanning each corner with their rifles.
“Clear.”
Baedarsust checked one of the tablets on the table for traps with his suit. No suspicious cavities or cables. It seemed like a real device. Not taking any chances, he activated his personal suit jammer.
Taking a deep breath, Baedarsust switched the tablet on. It happily complied.
He took his combat gloves off and began to operate it, searching through its files in its intuitive interface.
“Ah yes,” he grinned. “Looks like we were right. Warehouse cargo manifest right here. Searching for… any mentions of weapons.”
Nothing.
“Hm…”
“Well, that makes sense,” Spommu commented, stealing a quick glance at the screen without taking her rifle off the entrance. “Nobody would actually transport illicit goods with their actual listings in the manifest.”
Frumers nodded. “Yeah. I knew a guy who smuggled rations back in the Navy. They’re going to be either marked as something innocuous, or they won’t be on the manifest.”
With a short command to his suit intelligence, Baedarsust cross-referenced the manifest listings with the data they collected from the camera drone. “Two boxes not in the manifest. I guess we should go check them out.”
As a squad, they filed out of the office, using the camera drone’s map to navigate to the first shipping palette that was unlisted, on the ground near the airlock.
Tall as their heads — just slightly shorter than an average Terran adult — and about as wide as it was tall, the box looked like any other in the room. After a quick scan revealed nothing, Baedarsust reached for its open handles with his paws.
“Wait,” Quaullast suddenly said, stopping him with a paw. “What if it’s rigged?”
Baedarsust shrugged. “Maybe we cut in instead. Did anyone bring the laser knife?”
“No.”
“Nope.”
“Nope, I thought you did.”
“Ah, screw it, it could be rigged to blow from cutting in too,” Baedarsust muttered, reaching for the handles again. His squad instinctively took a few steps back.
He gave it a firm tug, and it gave way without resistance. The whole front of the box fell open, revealing a crate of neatly arranged children’s toys. Stuffed animals.
Specifically, stuffed animals that resembled Malgeir people.
“Haha, very funny,” Baedarsust said sarcastically, looking up towards the ceiling as if talking to the simulation operators.
“Hey, that one looks like you, boss,” Spommu said, stepping towards the crate and picking up one of the stuffed Malgeir toys. Pulling it up next to her helmet, she mimicked Baedarsust’s voice, “Get the door open, Frumers.”
Joining in the fun, Frumers grabbed one of them as well. “Check out that room with your drone, Quaullast… Huh. These don’t look right. Why do their heads and eyes look so big?”
“They’re children’s toys,” Baedarsust said, unamused. “They’re not supposed to be anatomically correct. Cut one open, see if they’re hiding anything.”
Frumers removed his combat gloves and sank his claw into one of the toys’ guts, ripping it open to reveal… a bottle of pills. He read the label on it before shaking it twice, hearing the pills rattle around in there. “Aha! Combat drugs, I think…”
“Alright, I guess the mission is to collect them all,” he said, and the squad began the slow work of gutting the toys and stuffing the pill bottles into a plastic evidence collection pouch he produced from one of his many utility pockets.
A couple minutes later, they were interrupted by a confused Quaullast checking a notification on his suit. “Wait a second, boss. The camera drone says the other box has moved.”
“The other box?”
“Moved?” Baedarsust set down the stuffed toy he was gutting in his paws.
“Yeah,” Quaullast confirmed, transmitting the camera drone image to their suits.
The front of the other box was open.
“Shit, there must have been someone hiding in it!” Baedarsust exclaimed. “Spread out. We need to find them!”
The four of them instinctively grabbed their rifles and took up positions, fanning out to each cover a separate aisle with their weapons.
“Alright, proceed down the aisle and clear,” he ordered. “Assume anyone in here is hostile, shoot on sight.”
The four of them carefully picked their way through the aisles, the warehouse palettes obscuring the line of sight between them. They kept their claws on the triggers.
As they slowly advanced, clearing their corners slowly, there was the distinctive whir of a Terran weapon an aisle over from Baedarsust.
Brrrrrrrr.
Then, a crash. Spommu’s signal disappeared from his helmet.
“Crap!” he yelled into the radio. A red triangle appeared on his helmet display, highlighting a spot on one of the shelf locations, superimposed over a shipping box one level up. “Top rafters! Top rafters! Suppress them!”
Brrrrrrrrrr.
Three automatic weapons whirred out in unison in response, hissing a hail of kinetic projectiles towards the suspected target location and shredding everything in a two-meter radius.
“I don’t see them!”
“Up there! Behind the boxes!”
Brrrrrrrrrrr.
He heard another crash. Frumers’ life sign went out.
A new triangle appeared, still on the top level a few meters away to the right from the first. Baedarsust adjusted his fire, riddling the new location with a fresh burst.
Another crash, and Quaullast went down as well. But he was apparently still alive. He screamed into his radio from his downed position, “Top rafters, blue box! Running left to right, left to—”
Brrrrrrrrr.
His signal cut out.
A new triangle projected further to the right again. Baedarsust kept his claw on the trigger, his rifle’s barrel now glowing red hot. In his optics and slightly away from his aimpoint, he saw one of the boxes shift slightly and something metallic peeked out from behind it.
What the hell is that?
He tried to adjust his aim. Not quickly enough.
Brrrrrrrr.
His screen went black.
“Dammit,” Baedarsust swore as he dismissed the post-mission review screen listing the dozen or so hits he sustained in a few milliseconds.
“Nice try,” Spommu said. “I think you almost hit them at the end.”
“What the hell was that?” Quaullast asked.
Aida’s voice came over the radio. “That… is a last-generation infantry model combat robot.”
“Didn’t seem very last generation to me,” he whined.
“It doesn’t take state-of-the-art to be able to react quicker, shoot better, run faster, and jump higher than you meatbags.”
“So how are we supposed to fight that?”
“You’re not. It’s a combat robot. You ever see one of those, you’re probably screwed,” Aida admitted. “Fall back outside and get the support ship to blow the whole place to bits. Instead of running at it like a bunch of… lemmings.”
“You heard… that?”
“Yup, Lemming Squad. I think I like the sound of that,” Aida said, the smile evident in her voice. “For your squad name.”
Baedarsust groaned. “I didn’t know we were getting named today! Why do the other squads get cool names like Badger and Ketchup?”
“You… want to be called Ketchup?!”
Baedarsust grumbled something incoherent. “Lemming is fine.”
“Lemming Squad it is.”
Quaullast’s voice cut in. “So… the enemy — the Resistance — they have these robots?”
“Not that many, but they have a few stolen and repurposed ones from our armories.”
“So… we do have these!” Baedarsust said. “Why don’t we use them instead of us?”
“We do use them. Just not allowed to use them near places with lots of civvies,” Aida explained. “When they were first made, the old models would sometimes malfunction and accidentally kill unarmed civilians, so they were banned. The manufacturers supposedly fixed the problems… eventually, but the rules stayed. That’s why we’ll send you instead.”
“Great. So we have to fight by the rules and the Resistance doesn’t.”
“Welcome to the Red Zone.”