Rio De Janeiro

380 days post-invasion

Ana

Ana Cardoso was trying hard not to stare for too long at any of the strange beings she was sharing a shuttle ride with.

Despite making up most of the Imperial troops stationed on Earth, fewer kespans were being deployed to missions in hot zones due to battle fatigue and morale issues. After a year of skirmishes against human freedom fighters, and with the circumstances the way they were, Ana couldn’t blame them. Suddenly finding themselves the bad guys had to suck.

As such, the team she’d been assigned to was mostly made up of several other member races of the Imperium, those who had been part of the relief wave of troops called in from surrounding systems.

All of them were women.

That last point made for an interesting and somewhat warped experience compared to her prior military service. Interesting, because she was used to being vastly outnumbered by men and warped because, for all that they were women, they sure didn’t act much differently compared to the male soldiers she’d put up with in her youth.

She really was trying her best not to be rude. As one of the first humans granted probational entry into the Imperium’s armed forces, she had a reputation to uphold. That said, after checking her gear for the fifth time since she’d boarded the craft at Galeão International Airport— now firmly under Imperium control— her curiosity got the better of her, and she couldn’t help but take advantage of the proximity to inspect the strange women more closely. While they’d shared several training exercises in the lead-up to her first real mission, she’d not had as much of a chance to examine her teammates’ physiologies as she would have liked.

Sitting directly opposite her on the cold metal bench, attached to the side of the ship by selective magnetic fasteners as they all were, was a winged entity that somewhat resembled a shoe-billed stork, only larger and more brightly coloured. Vrina Keshtah —callsign ‘Singer’— blinked back at her as Ana drank in the blaze of yellow and orange plumage that jutted from the back of the alien woman’s military-issue helmet.

Singer was ulu-ulu, a terrestrial race of bird-like aliens whose gargantuan mega-fauna ancestors had evolved into smaller beings with stork-like legs that ended in four-fingered claws, the dexterity of which rivalled even that of mammalian-type races. Her combat armour, like that of every woman aboard, was customised to accommodate her species' unique proportions, covering even her bill in a flexible stab-proof mesh. There were long, piercing spurs on the backs of her feet —hands, claws?— and the barrels of two compact submachine guns gleamed beneath her wings, attached to an automatic guidance system linked directly to her neurotransmitter. During their drills she’d more resembled a dancer than a singer, using her fan-like wings to dart between pieces of cover while providing barrages of focused plasma fire that tore through training dummies with pinpoint accuracy.

Usually, colours like those seen on Singer’s crest wouldn’t have done her any favours on the battlefield, and there had been some discussion about dying them brown, much to her vocal displeasure. Eventually, though, it had been decided that among the bright pastel walls of the Abacaxi favela in Rio’s centre, her plumage wouldn’t be a problem.

That region, once known as Santa Marta, was located just east of Christ the Redeemer and had once been one of Rio’s safest and most heavily touristed areas. Things had changed dramatically since the invasion— or ‘failed induction’ depending on who you were talking to.

Today, the Abacaxi was a sprawl of brightly painted box houses, a vertical jungle of yellow and orange covered overtop by plant growth, cultivated to provide cover for the rebel gangs that controlled the area. The name, ‘abacaxi’, directly translated from Portuguese, was ‘pineapple’, and the slums lived up to that name, resembling a bulbous fruit, bristling with automatic weaponry and sour inhabitants.

Ana had done work in Abacaxi in the six months following the invasion, and she even knew some of the locals by name. This time would be different. Back then, she’d been working as an officer of the peace for the remains of a human government, albeit a woefully understaffed one reeling from the deaths of half its citizens. Since then, the regional authority had handed the reins over to the aliens in a bid for stability, and now she was entering as part of an Imperium-led force. The locals were furious, and Ana was fully expecting violence from the second they touched down.

The idea that she'd be fighting humans would have upset her more had the need for intervention in this case not been urgent.

Brazil had not been as untouched by the invasion as other more fortunate countries south of the equator. Imperium intelligence in the leadup to the nanite swarm had gotten one thing right; that North America had been the military powerhouse of the world. An extra helping of nanites in the form of an additional drop over Mexico had been made to more quickly reduce the effectiveness of the United States’ fighting forces, and they had rapidly dispersed in every direction to saturate the continent before moving south.

The result had been that by the time the killswitch order was dispatched, the nanites had made it as far as Bolivia. There were some holdout settlements in the south of Brazil that had escaped the swarm, but Rio had not been spared the way that most of Indonesia had.

For a time, there had been a distinct lack of violence, even with the collapse of the crime syndicates and the military and police that kept them in check. The killing wave of nanites had left holes in the hearts of every surviving Brazilian, and for three months, the city had mourned in solidarity. Eventually, though, that sadness turned to anger, and when the Imperium, lacking manpower, hadn’t been fast enough to step in and manage the power vacuum in the city, Rio de Janeiro had gone back to seed with new militaristic female fighters rising to the top of thoroughly stripped-down but not-quite-dead cartels.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Red Command, a crime syndicate formed by a union of prison inmates in the 1970s, was one of the largest cartels, and had recovered the fastest. Adapting quickly to its new environment, the organisation’s gaze switched over to a new commodity that people were desperate to acquire— genetic material.

Red Command’s new leader ‘Lince’ was the wife of a high-ranking cartel member who'd been killed in the invasion. Soon she had a small private army of hardened criminals to fill the holes left by their male counterpart, and roaming bands of well-armed fighters had descended on the southern regions of Brazil, crossing into Paraguay and Uruguay to kidnap men at gunpoint. Black market semen from people smuggling operations now accounted for almost all births in the country.

The Imperium could, of course, flatten the entire city without meaningful effort. But at a time when the whole galaxy’s eyes were on Earth, a degree of finesse was called for.

Hence Ana’s current position. Two years ago, she’d been a beat cop in a dangerous town, but she’d known she was working on the side of justice and law. Now, decked out in the sleek grey suit of the Imperial forces, she was having second thoughts about the whole thing. It helped that the people they were going after were murderers and people smugglers, but at the end of the day, the crime was only a symptom of the damage that the Imperium had dealt.

Some things never changed.

Singer blinked at her again and warbled something into the transceiver on her collar. The communication came through almost instantly, transcribed into the voice of a youngish woman. “Okay Speaker, time to quit gawking. Get your head in the game, we’re nearly there.”

“Oh good. Time to squish things.” A mass of coiled muscle and fur stirred to Ana’s left as Banta—callsign ‘Bruiser’— an apparently ‘average-sized’ ursinian, drew herself up to her full seated height. Her fluffy white ears nearly touched the ceiling as she towered over every other being in the craft, clad in plate armour that Ana was pretty sure could catch anything shy of a mortar round.

Ursinians were a lot like a cross between a bear and a bulldog, with squashed faces set above short muzzles and large eyes. They also had a strange honour system, which Ana had seen Banta struggle with during drills. Their society was apparently based on challenge and acceptance, with a heavy emphasis placed on duels. The tendency to focus on a single opponent at the exclusion of all others was something that could be trained out, but Banta’s rantings about the ‘dishonourable state of intergalactic warfare’ in the mess hall had been quite memorable and very loud.

Bruiser was their frontline, and in the drills that Ana had performed with the team, she’d watched the bearish woman shove cars to the side, flatten doorways with a single kick, and, in one instance, punch clear through a brick wall to provide a breaching point for grenades. Pneumatic pistons in the wrists and ankles of her suit allowed the massive woman to transfer an absurd amount of power with each blow of her tree-trunk-sized limbs, and along with her standard-issue rifle, she had come equipped with an enormous shield to provide cover for the strike team.

Opposite Bruiser, the team’s leader and its only kespan was conducting her fourth weapons check of the twenty-minute flight. Sergeant Rea’ar— callsign ‘Raker’— was something of an enigma to Ana. She was aloof, didn’t speak much outside of what was necessary and never once acknowledged Ana’s species as anything of interest to her, which made her hard to read. At first, Ana had been concerned that she was unhappy being saddled with one of the first human military attachés and the attention that it would bring, but it quickly became apparent that she behaved that way with everyone on the fire team. So, after several months of Raker giving off nothing but frigid ‘boss bitch’ energy, Ana had just quietly contented herself with the fact that at least the woman was a good NCO, even if kespans still rubbed her the wrong way in general.

The rest of the team was comprised entirely of Duradians, a race of lizard-like aliens who were quite literally bred for special operations. At some point in their development, they had genetically augmented their war-form’s natural chameleon-esque camouflage patterns into true active camouflage, and when they’d joined the Imperium’s shock troops, they’d refused to don the armour, instead preferring to rely on their bodies' natural capabilities, alongside a generous helping of surgical and biological augmentations. Ana had once watched a knife, wielded by a distraught widow, glide across the skin of a Duradian’s throat before it had been turned back on its owner. Unlike Singer and Bruiser, the Duradians were women of very few words, and for all of her attempts, Ana had yet to befriend one.

It didn’t help that their natural camouflage abilities made distinguishing between individuals extremely difficult, even for older races much more used to dealing with them. Or that they were collectively, in Banta’s words, ‘a bit socially fucked up.’

Raker looked up from her rifle, and her ear twitched in the catlike manner of a kespan who could hear something you couldn’t. “Copy that,” she said, then called out to the team. “Alright ladies, we are beginning our approach! Look lively!”

Abruptly, the shuttle turned, and Ana felt her lunch move to the left side of her stomach as the craft dipped toward the ground. As they neared the Abacaxi there was a soft pinging sound, and then another. Soon the air was filled with a spray of bullets that droned past like angry hornets, or else splashed against the solid force-projected shielding of the shuttle to fall back to earth. It was a customary greeting for the area, and nothing new to Singer or Bruiser, whose facial expressions remained terse and ready for combat. Ana wasn’t so used to flying in a bird that shrugged off armour-piercing rounds like paintballs, but she squashed her apprehension as the shuttle levelled itself again and bled off speed.

“Hey, Speaker. You with us or not?” Bruiser asked, her face suddenly filling Ana’s helmeted vision. A small readout in the corner of her peripheral vision identified her as a friendly immediately, outlining the Ursinian in blue even as Ana’s adrenaline spiked.

“I’m with you, and ready to roll,” Ana replied, wresting control back from her hindbrain and checking her armour readings one last time. All systems operational, shields up. “Let’s kick some people smuggling butt.”

“Karoo karaah” Singer trilled, the ulu battlecry left untranslated as the shuttle touched down with a loud thump. Detaching herself from the bench, Ana took up position behind Bruiser and thumbed the safety off of her adapted blaster.

Then the shuttle doors opened, and all hell broke loose.