Somewhere on Micah Prime - Robot Federation Territory
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Kaya knew something was wrong the moment she landed.
Her troopers looked up nervously at the base on top of Hill Thirty-Nine. “Gorsuch seriously wants us to take that?” Private Strathmore muttered. He shifted in his heavy battle armor, the carbon fiber plates shifting as his face plate stared toward the base. His head shook back and forth. “No chance, not if the first try didn’t work.”
“Shut up! I heard he once killed seven bots with an eighth bot! You want him after us? I already called my package. Get to yours!” Specialist Rogers stared through the scope of her rifle. She was the team’s scout and was already doing her job, checking the base’s defenses from a distance even though they’d already attacked it once. The whole team was, even Strathmore, though he didn’t stop complaining the entire time.
It felt familiar to Kaya. Right, even.
Robot fire was already coming in, and her nose wrinkled as a shot exploded a tree next to her, releasing a wall of stinking pollen that blocked her vision up the hill. She quickly pulled up the Champ’s Orbital Drop Support Liason to check her data; she’d hated interacting with them in training, but the system had just saved her life—kind of—and it had everything she’d need to lead a successful assault on Hill Thirty-Nine. Hopefully.
[LC Cameron! I see you’re trying to take an objective! Would you like some help?]
“Gimme our support options!” She shouted.
[I’m sorry. (╥﹏╥) The Champion of Democratic Intent is only equipped with the following:]
►Support Options
►Fighter Strikes
►Strafing Run (3/4, no re-arm)
►Corvette Strikes
►80-Millimeter Strike (1/1, 120 second re-arm)
►Drop-Pod Support
►Personal Reinforce (7/8)
►Squad Reinforce (7/8)
►MG-79 Suppressor (On Cooldown, Deploying)
►AMR-14 Can-Crusher (On Cooldown, Deploying)
[It’s not much, but I hope it helps! O7]
Something whistled overhead, and Kaya threw herself to the side, battle armor slamming into Micah Prime’s red dirt. A moment later, a round pod kicked up a cloud of dust as its retrojets howled. It slowed enough that she could watch the pod crash into the ground. She felt the earth shake for a moment. Then it opened, and Strathmore grabbed the matte-gray heavy machine gun and shoulder-mounted ammo system. “Alright! Heavy duty!”
Kaya—Lieutenant Commander Cameron—sighed. “System, set Fighter and Corvette strikes to mission commander primary, alive secondary.”
[You got it uwu]
As the system locked down, she breathed a sigh of relief. She stole a quick glance through the settling pollen, helmet filtering some of the interference, and stared up at the base. Then she pulled back as a rocket roared overhead.
The ominous yellow glow inside the base was just as bright as before; in their first assault, they’d broken through the wall and hit the base with a [Strafing Run]. The wall was still shattered, which was good, but the bots were ready for them this time. Stealth wouldn’t be an option.
“This is a nightmare,” Kaya whispered to herself. The whole squad was looking at her, waiting for orders, and all their hard-won progress had been lost. They’d all died, and even if they’d gotten better, it had to be weighing on her troopers. She took a deep breath to steady herself. Then she queued her mic. “Okay, Fire Team Alpha, Lost Earth needs this planet. The APDSs are waiting for a clear landing zone, and we’re going to give it to them. Now, up the hill, take the base!”
Strathmore’s heavy machine gun opened up, ripping into the base’s swarming defenders. Robotic soldiers fell one after another, but for every gun-wielding Terminator that fell, two more took their places. Kaya, Rogers, and Gonzales charged up the hill. Rogers took a position near some boulders and started dropping the auto-turrets that lined what was left of the wall. Her rifle barked out a bass beat to the frenetic machine gun fire.
But that wouldn’t be enough, and Kaya and Gonzales would have to take the base themselves.
A grenade bounced down the hill. Kaya threw herself to the side, but the explosion caught Gonzales. His body bounced twice, one arm and half a leg missing. Kaya swallowed bile, and a moment later, she dialed the five-digit code to call him back into the fight.
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The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Close Micah Prime Orbit - Robot Federation Territory
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General Cade Gorsuch stared at the simulated battlefield, watching Lieutenant Commander Cameron’s squad move up Hill Hill Thirty-Nine. They weren’t doing badly, but he’d once crawled over a field of bots to reach an objective, and could they live up to that standard? Hell, no. One of the blue dots winked—G3—winked out, and three seconds later, a beacon shot up to the Champ, a call for reinforcements again.
At this rate, they wouldn’t be able to take the secondary objectives, much less clear a landing zone outside the base for expedited extract. And he needed those secondary objectives.
The problem, he reflected as the lieutenant commander and G3’s second clone hit the wall, was that they were soft. Too soft. The Memory Recovery Capsule and cloning system had revolutionized warfare, that much he could readily admit. And by the standards of their day, the Champ’s drop-team was fine. Greener than grass on Mandarion, but fine. Fine wasn’t good enough, though. General Gorsuch needed excellence, and the EAF didn’t give him that anymore.
No, they just didn’t make soldiers like they used to. Not like when he was young.
[General, avert your eyes!]
Gorsuch didn’t look away as Lieutenant Commander Cameron called in an [80-Millimeter Strike] on the base a little too close to her position. She seemed to realize her mistake and threw herself off the hill; Gorsuch watched her roll haphazardly down the rocky slope, G3 right behind her. Sloppy. That’s what it was. Three years of the best training Earth’s Armed Forces could muster, and it looked sloppy.
The simulated battlefield flashed white, and Gorsuch blinked. But he didn’t look away, even when G3’s armor started reporting back major internal trauma.
Back in his day, there’d been consequences in this man’s military. If he’d failed an objective, it would’ve been because there were enough bots, bugs, or traitor scum to suffocate him in their corpses. These new Droppers would already have failed twice. And when he wanted an airstrike on his position, he had to call the damn thing in and then wait for a fighter to be available, not dial a three-digit code and get near-instant results.
No, the new teams were soft, sloppy, and substandard. All of them. Not that it was their fault. The damn MRC units allowed it to happen, and the EAF had adapted to literally infinite soldiers. “So, we can fight like the bugs? Great. But that’s not war. That’s suicide mission after god damn suicide mission. What happened to skill? What happened to heroism? What happened to sacrificing for your people?”
The rest of the Champ’s crew watched as he stalked over to the ship’s pilot, plucked an EAF baseball cap off the man’s head, and crushed it with one iron fist. “Soldier, in this man’s military, you wear regulation, or you wear nothing!”
“Sir, the EAF cap has been regulation for the last six years, sir!” The man said.
“I don’t give a damn what they say at ship school. Out here in the field, you will represent Lost Earth well, or you will find yourself going home! Do I make myself clear?”
Another crewmate leaned in close to whisper something to the pilot, who suddenly pales. Gorsuch glared at him as he stammered out an apology; she’d probably told the man some fake-sounding achievement that reminded him the general was not to be fucked with. He dropped the hat, which thudded against the corvette’s steel deck like a rock, and stalked through the door back to his quarters.
“Yes, the problem is that they’re all modern soldiers. If I could still drop, I’d show them how to really go to war.” He opened his drawer and dug around inside, looking for the drive he’d brought on board. Just where he’d left it, behind the perfectly folded dress whites he never wore. General Cade Gorsuch smiled into the mirror as his armored fingers closed around the tiny computer drive. It wasn’t much of a hope for returning to the days when the EAF had strode across all corners of the galaxy and pushed the Orion’s Belt Alliance to the brink of disaster.
But it was a hope.
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Somewhere on Micah Prime - Robot Federation Territory
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“Airstrike! Airstrike! Airstrike!” Kaya screamed. She punched in the code, 523, then tossed a beacon onto the battlefield.
[Coming right up <3]
The Champ carried a pair of light fighters. Kaya knew all about them, of course. Their class, designations, capabilities, and load-outs—all of that had been hammered into her. But right now, the only thing she cared about was that a Kingfisher could put lead on a target, and do it fast.
The target was the wave of bots swarming the base’s wall, trying to retake it.
Rogers had climbed the ruins of the transmission tower and was picking off the armored bots with SABOT penetrator rounds; the casings fell like rain. As Kaya watched, a bot disintegrated at the gap in the wall, but even with their designated markswoman’s shots and the red-hot HMG’s barrel spitting bullets as Strathmore held down the trigger against the wave, it wouldn’t be enough.
A howling ripped across the battlefield, and two dozen Terminators fell like super-wheat hit by a scythe. The dull-gray fighter waggled its wings as it disappeared back into the air.
►Strafing Run (2/4)
For a moment, it looked like they’d won. The bots wavered. Bullets shredded them as Kaya’s assault rifle joined the cacophony. She could barely hear her wordless battle screams over the gunshots, and she could barely see Gonzales fiddling with the base’s anti-air system consoles through the smoke. But they were winning, and their computer guy was almost done.
Then, the HMG clicked a dozen rapid clicks.
Strathmore shoved the gun away from him, grabbing his sidearm, but before they could adjust to not having the big HMG, the bots surged forward. One rushed toward Kaya, and she shot it a half-dozen times. Others poured fire onto the Champ’s team, forcing them behind barrels and shattered walls.
A rocket zipped across the battlefield as Kaya leaped from her position to a shattered steel and concrete barrier a little farther back. The shriek of twisting metal drowned out Rogers’s scream as the transmission tower toppled. A moment later, her icon went red. Kaya was already typing in the reinforcement support code, but how many deaths had the team paid to take Hill Thirty-Nine?
Ten? Fifteen? Kaya had lost count. But a lot.
Another bot charged her, and her rifle’s hammer clicked shut on nothing, so she pulled her service pistol and unloaded a half-dozen shots into the machine’s chest and head. It collapsed, but another was right behind that one—and another after that.
The sky whistled as Rogers crashed into the base’s concrete in a cloud of dust and anger. Her pod crushed a bot beneath it, and she emerged from its hatch already shooting.
That was enough space for her to reload her rifle and call in another [80-Millimeter Strike]. It hammered into the base’s far side a moment later, sending bots flying and shaking the ground below her feet.
Would that be enough to break the tide of metal heading up the hill toward the base? Kaya wasn’t sure, but she did know one thing: If the bots wanted to retake Hill Thirty-Nine, they had until Gonzales was finished. After that, the Armored Pericles Dropships would be here with the regulars, and the battle would be over.
After that, The EAF would own Hill Thirty-Nine.
She pulled the rifle’s trigger, and another bot went down in a cloud of sparks and oil. Just a few more minutes. Gonzales was almost done.
After that, she could wash her goddamned hands.