ZNS 4291, PLAUNSOLLIB (5,400 LS)

POV: Baedarsust, Malgeir Federation Marine Infantry (Rank: High Pack Leader)

In the background, Lemming Squad could hear radio traffic between a few of the other squads also making their way through the ship, punctuated by some shooting and explosions elsewhere. Baedarsust turned it down. They had their own work to do.

He had the whole ship’s layout memorized in his head but pulled up a 3D map of the Thumper-class battlecruiser on his display anyway. He realized they were in one of the side hallways of the ship, near the front. It was going to be a small hike to the center ship bridge, but not much more than they’d expected. His suit computer helpfully informed him that there weren’t any “shortcuts” they could safely take.

They probably didn’t bring enough portable thermite explosives to break through the ship’s armored hull. Not twice, anyway. And trying to cling on the hull of a warship while it was maneuvering was usually suicide. That didn’t mean they didn’t train for those scenarios, but he was glad they had better options today.

Like a little extra hiking.

“Great, I love walking,” Frumers complained as he checked the map situation in his own helmet.

“You don’t hear Marvin whining,” Spommu pointed out.

“When their robots revolt, Marvin is going to shoot us all first, then whoever planned this mission in the first place,” Frumers said.

“I would shoot you second-to-last, Frumers,” Marvin replied in a toneless voice. “You are my second-favorite biological being.”

Baedarsust shushed them, and he gestured towards Quaullast at the side of the hallway that led to the bridge. “Send out your drone to scout ahead.”

Quaullast did as he ordered, and they saw in their helmets the hallway terminated in a sealed blast door. They cautiously moved up to the door, with four of the robots leading the charge and two trailing to make sure nobody snuck up behind them.

“Get the door open,” Baedarsust ordered Quaullast.

Quaullast quickly tore down the maintenance access panel next to it with his claws, and he swore as he gazed upon the monstrous jumble of wires in it. He gestured at the robots. “Marvin, get over here. Analyze.”

Marvin walked over and reached his head into the dark space with his headlamp on. “Too slow.”

“What?” Quaullast asked. “We’re trying to open the sealed blast door. Analyze which wires to power so—”

“Too slow,” the robot repeated. He pulled up his rifle and released a three-round burst at the junction box, destroying it in a flash of sparks.

“What the—”

There was a loud whirring noise, and something in the door apparently powered down.

“Great,” Quaullast complained as he started rummaging in his backpack for his thermite explosives. “Now look what you’ve done, you idiot toaster. It’s a fail-secured door, not—”

“Stand back,” Marvin instructed him. Not waiting for the squad to react, he went up to the door, braced himself against one of the handholds on the walls, and pulled on one side of the blast door. Marlene immediately started working on the other side of the door. The squad could see the heavy-duty motors on the robot arms groan as they slowly tried to leverage the doors open.

The squad hastily found their own handholds behind the robots, grabbing tightly onto them with their paws. After a second, a sliver opened up in the blast door, and atmosphere rushed out, the air flowing from inside out into the vacuum of the breached hallway they were in. Another few moments, and the opening was just big enough to fit their bulky armor through. Quaullast reached forward and down, pulling a built-in mechanical lever under the door that locked it in place with a click.

Marvin and Marlene stopped pulling. Marvin turned back to look at Quaullast, as if in robotic amusement. “Their electromagnetic locks are not like Terran ones. They do not have quick blow panels. Their doors are fail-deactivated, not fail-locked, for search and rescuers. We are good to go.”

“Looks like you need more Grass Eater door exercises, Quaullast. Nice work, tin can,” Baedarsust chuckled as he patted Marvin on the back. “Let’s go.”

The squad filtered through the opening, four robots first again. Quaullast pulled the lever lock out after they all made entry, and the door closed with a heavy vibration under their feet. The red lights in the hallway activated as the central life support system started pumping air and atmospheric pressure back into the segment.

“That’s convenient for us,” Baedarsust commented as he looked up at a vent. “Scout ahead again.”

Quaullast’s little fly drone went forward in the curved hallway, this time terminating at a thinner, windowed door. He checked it through the window a few times. “It’s some kind of Grass Eater version of a mess hall, I think.”

“Any movement inside?” Baedarsust asked.

“Yeah, I think so,” Quaullast said, instructing the drone to change its angle to get a better view through the small glass frame. “They were caught by surprise, but they know we’re coming now. There are a few overturned tables, and yup, there’s a little Grass Eater holding a kitchen knife by the door waiting for us to come in.”

“They can wait right there. Marvin, grenades,” Baedarsust ordered. “HEDP.”

High Explosive, Dual Purpose. And neither of those purposes was screwing around.

Marvin switched to the grenade launcher on his rifle. “Stand back.”

They hurriedly each found some cover, dropping prone to the hallway floor to minimize their exposure.

Bloop. Bloop. Bloop. Bloop. Bloop.

The robot fired five grenades in quick succession towards the mess hall door, and the flying grenades contained more than enough explosive filling for their payloads to penetrate the thin metal and glass window, unleashing most of their deadly shrapnel on the other side.

The corridor echoed with the five concussive blasts. Thankfully, their suits filtered most of it out to protect their sensitive hearing, but Baedarsust could still feel an odd vibration jarring his teeth inside his sealed helmet. “Damage assessment,” he ordered.

Quaullast checked his drone again. “All clear.”

Reaching the door, torn off its hinges, they pushed it aside to a nightmare scene in the enemy mess hall. It was hard to count how many enemies the grenades killed due to the mangled fur and mixed blood and guts sprayed all over the room, but there were at least a dozen.

Baedarsust was glad the airtight armor prevented him from having to smell the mess.

Rounding one of the shredded overturned tables, they saw that one of the enemies had managed to get an armored EVA suit on. As Spommu flipped the suit over with her boot, the team saw a fire burning on the inside of the helmet visor — the Znosian Marine inside was cooking to a crisp thanks to the concentrated oxygen inside ignited by the grenade shrapnel. The figure inside was still twitching around in the suit in extreme pain as it burned.

Bang.

Wordlessly, Spommu fired a single round into the visor with her weapon, putting the creature out of its suffering.

Frumers picked up and inspected a half-intact plastic bowl containing some leftover rations of whatever they were eating: some kind of oatmeal.

After checking for traps, they went out the opposite door of the mess hall. Another curved hallway. Baedarsust double-checked his map to confirm they were still on the right track. They were.

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Their fly drone scouted ahead and found a small squad of Znosian Marines with full armor and equipment, manning a machine gun in a hastily set up fighting position behind improvised cover. The enemies were obscured by a curve in the hallway. The squad held back behind the robots, planning out their next move as they watched the enemies from Quaullast’s drone.

Six of them. They aren’t even looking the right way.

“Marvin, grenades,” Baedarsust ordered again. “Airburst.”

After grabbing more munitions from the trailing mule robots and rapidly reloading his grenade launcher faster than any organic being was supposed to be able to, Marvin took aim at the curved wall.

Bloop. Bloop. Bloop— Booooom.

The volley of five grenades bounced cleanly off the wall towards the fighting position on the other side of the curve, and the enemies huddling there were obliterated with deadly fragmentation.

Two more hallway segments later, Lemming Squad finally came upon a long hallway where the enemy Marine squad did correctly set up their weapons facing the threat that was quickly progressing through the ship.

“They’re guarding the door to the bridge, if I’m not mistaken,” Quaullast commented, checking the drone footage against his map again.

Viewing it from his helmet as well, Baedarsust nodded confidently.

Standard hallway scenario. Must have done this a thousand times.

“Marvin, Marlene: smoke and clear,” he ordered.

Wordlessly, they pulled out a visual-thermal obscuration grenade and tossed it down the bend towards the long hallway.

Puff. Puff.

As the red smoke deployed, they could hear the enemy Marines reacting in panic and shouts.

The Znosians started firing wild shots into the smoke towards them. The machine gun sounded in their direction, its tracers glowing through the smoke and putting a decent grouping on the curved hallway walls.

The two robots waited a second, then stepped into the hallway in unison. Unlike the Grass Eaters who were only geared with night vision and thermal sensors on their helmets, millimeter wave radars came standard on Terran infantry equipment. Baedarsust could see the outlines of the enemy Marines highlighted clearly in his helmet around the cover.

Brrrrrrrrrrrt.

The two robots dispatched all eight enemies at the checkpoint with their weapons like a buzzsaw through ice cream.

“Clear.”

Spommu asked the question on all their minds as they approached the bridge entrance to set up a perimeter guarding their rear. “Where’s Crickets Squad? And Badger?”

Baedarsust checked his command map in his display. “They’re… setting up to deal with a standard T-junction killbox, it looks like. And Badger… they’ve already secured the engineering room and the reactor. Good to know the ship isn’t going to go boom on us, at least.”

Quaullast rummaged through the dead Znosian Marines and tossed a captured enemy radio he found to Marvin, who snatched it out of the air with super-Terran precision. “Marvin, analyze.”

Within a couple seconds, Marvin got the radio’s channel and code, and the enemies’ positions and transmissions filtered into their suits’ communication systems, translated in real time.

“Lesser Predator Marines in armored suits! I swear I saw at least one of the Lesser Predators next to the big robots—”

“This is the life support section, we can’t reach our station! They’ve locked down the module!”

“They’ve trapped two of our security squads in the central armory, we need assistance if any squads nearby can—”

“There’s one coming out of the vents! Light it up! Get it! Ahhh—”

Baedarsust turned down the volume of the panicked screaming on the enemy radio network to preserve his eardrums.

“Feels good to be on the other side of this for once,” Frumers commented.

Suddenly, they heard the voice of the squad leader of Joker Squad, directly speaking into the enemy radio frequency. “Run, Grass Eaters, ruuuuun… Heeheeheehee. We’re coming to hunt you down one by one, and we’re going to roast and eat you all alive. Put down your weapons if you want to be eaten last. Mwahahahahaha.”

After a brief moment of clear air on the channel, the outraged Znosian troops screamed back into their radios at him.

“Die, predator scum!”

“May your eggs shatter and rot, abomination!”

“All squads, comms are compromised. Switch to next preset secured channel.”

The joker kept up his maniacal laughing as the enemy signals disappeared off the channel’s friend-or-foe positioning system. “Hahahahaha. Aww. No, that’s no fun. Where are you guys going?”

“I think you scared them off,” the explosives specialist on Badger Squad spoke up, also now directly into the enemy frequency. The former enemy radio frequency was now filled with voices from other Malgeir squads who had all taken radios from Znosian Marines who no longer needed them.

“Dude, our robot Arnie took a round to his frontal plate to get us that channel!”

“Woah. Why’d you do that? We were getting useful intel from their comms!”

“Did someone get their new—”

“Hey everyone, we just wiped one of their ambush machine gun nests. I’ve posted the new secure listen-in channel and code to squad leader comms. And Joker, keep your weird fantasies to yourself this time and stop screwing it up for everyone.”

Baedarsust had heard his Terran instructors lecture him on the concepts of initiative and freedom of action before, but never had he seen it in action as viscerally as he watched his fellow Cretan Marines and their robots bulldoze through the enemy ship crew with surprising ease on the blue force tracker.

Like hot knife through dessert.

Any signals representing the enemy that popped up were quickly extinguished by the robots autonomously confirming their kills. There were a few reported casualties… but not many more than a large-scale Red Zone raid. Their attached Navy medical units did their jobs in the calm and efficient manner they had been drilled to.

Crickets Squad took another two minutes to clear a path to the bridge entrance. The four of them finally ran up with their six combat robots; one of their robots appeared to have lost its right arm at the elbow but was holding up its weapon in the other just fine.

“Where were you guys?” Spommu teased. “We were wondering if we needed to send a rescue party—”

“Yeah, yeah. Laugh it up, you clowns. Our assault pod landed further from the target, that’s all.”

Baedarsust waved his paw. “Alright, alright. Settle down, cubs… We saved some for you guys. Lemmings, we’ll take the right door. Crickets, you take the left door. Watch out for traps inside.”

“Do we need anyone alive in there?” Crickets’ squad leader asked.

“Negative.” Baedarsust shook his ears. “Badger just messaged me they took two of their seven whiskers alive in engineering. We just need one of the command ports to their equipment.”

“Understood. How do you want to do this?”

“They still have atmospheric pressure in there. I’m thinking we just cook everyone inside before we go in.”

“No complaints here. You thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Probably. Squad, we’re doing a fuck-you breach.”

Lemming and Crickets Squads got into their positions, preparing their entry into the armored bridge room. Marvin and Marlene each picked up a rocket launcher, loading a thermobaric round into them before slinging them onto their hips, then fully reloaded their grenade launchers.

Quaullast and his counterpart on Crickets stuck their heavy breaching charges in a large rectangle on the heavy blast doors. They could hear the enemy bridge crew panicking on their compromised radios.

“They’re getting ready to breach the bridge! Everyone stand back!”

“Our lives were forfeited to the Prophecy the day we left the hatchling pools!”

Baedarsust held up three claws, then two, then one.

At his command, the thermite charges activated on both doors, burning directly through the thick metal. Before the rectangle of loose blast door could even fall to the ground, every single combat robot and Marine on both squads fired their weapons directly into it, pushing through the loose rectangular opening and their sweeping fire stitching through everyone standing in the way behind it.

Bloop. Bloop. Bloop. Bloop. Bloop—

As the opening cleared, dozens of grenades from the robots’ underslung launchers poured into the bridge, some bouncing one or more times before filling the room with deadly shrapnel, others bursting at preset distances. Variety was the spice of death.

Then, the thermobaric rockets raced in. If there were any Grass Eaters still left alive in the bridge, the rockets dispensed a mist of ignited high-energy fuel on… everything, forcibly sucking the air out of their lungs and incinerating everything with a melting point under 2,500 Celsius in their room-sized blast radius.

The ship’s automatic fire suppression system kicked in to put out the hundreds of small fires they started. There was a moment of relative quiet — except for the ship’s fire alarms — as the robots ducked into the bridge from the openings, looking over and trying their best to identify each of the burnt or mangled beyond recognition Znosian corpses coated in fire suppression foam.

“Clear left.”

“Clear right.”

“Bridge clear.”

“Good job, everyone. Get to work, Quaullast,” Baedarsust ordered, trying again not to imagine the smell of the gory mess outside his helmet.

Quaullast marched to the command chair. He pulled what looked like the body of the eight whiskers captain draped over her command console off his new working area with a weighty thud. There was a small service access hatch under the stand where her command console was. Quaullast tugged it open, connected a cable to the port inside, then gestured to Marvin. “Get extracting, toaster.”

As they waited for the robot to interface with the enemy ship’s computers, Baedarsust opened the large backpack that one of his mule robots was carrying, taking out the portable FTL radio pack. He connected his suit to the port on it and waited for it to begin the connection handshake. “Lemming Squad to Sunray, we have the enemy bridge.”

Beth’s voice came through. “Good work, Lemmings. You are… five minutes ahead of schedule. Can you pull their memory banks?”

“We’re on it. How are things on your end?”

“We’re dealing with a few sporadic incoming, but nothing we can’t handle yet, surprisingly enough. Looks like the rest of the Grand Fleet don’t want to tango. What’s your ETA?”

Baedarsust made a quick guesstimate in his head as Quaullast gave him a nod. “About five minutes. We’ve disabled the ship defenses in engineering, and it looks like Waldo and Crumbles cleared the primary hangar bay. You should be safe to send the return trip.”

“Alright, the stealth shuttles are on the way in. ETA ten minutes. You watch their backs, alright?”

“We’ll be fine, Beth. Don’t worry about—”

“I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to Marvin. You watch their backs, alright, Marvin?”

“Affirmative, ma’am. You are my favorite.”

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META

Faced with the after-action paperwork from the Plaunsollib boarding mission, Joker Squad’s COMSEC training officer made the rational choice of faking her death instead. Her replacement was a medically diagnosed masochist.