Sergeant Grays
“Alright, that was a successful second detonation. All teams hold positions and wait for the cavalry to get here,” I said over the radio. It was only a second before I got an acknowledgement from Team B.
“God, remind me to never be this close to a nuclear detonation again Sarge.” Came the word from one of the marines as he put a hand on the wall of the vent to steady himself. I couldn’t help but agree with him on that account. Minimum safe distance or not, that nuke still packed a punch that made several marines almost fall over from the shockwave alone.
I nodded. “You can ask me to remind you all you want, but that’s not going to stop command from doing it again if they wanted too.” His face got a bit paler. I switched my radio frequency over to the command one. “Command, be advised, all objectives complete and we are a go for phase two.”
My radio crackled to life for a second before I heard command. “Copy that, the mech boarding party’s ETA is five minutes. Hold positions.”
“Wilco command.” I said before turning back to my marines. “So, anyone want to bet how long it’s going to take them to take the bridge?”
The air was suddenly filled with various marines shouting out their guesses. “Twenty-five minutes,” shouted one. “Forty-seven minutes exactly!” shouted another. It warmed my cold dead heart to hear my marines being so passionate about something like this. It really was an excellent bonding activity that would have been more fun if we could see the boarding action itself.
I was about to open my mouth to give my guess when my radio suddenly crackled to life. “Put me down for twenty minutes,” said an extremely familiar voice.
I did a double take. “Major Morrow? Is that you?”
A loud bark of laughter came from the radio. “You can bet your ass that it’s me. Did you really think that you could go a single mission without me showing up eventually?” he asked. Major Morrow and I had some history. Over the past fifteen years or so, we had bumped into each other in various battlefields and deployments. It happened so often that I started to think that someone higher up than both of us was doing it on purpose. “I heard that you have control over some of the systems of the ship,” he started. “Do you by chance have access to the intercom system of the ship?”
I smiled, knowing exactly where this was going. “Yes, we do. Do you have any song requests for this boarding action?”
“Not right now, but we will have a playlist before we get this party started. But when we get there, we would like you to play this message first, then start the music,” he said, grinning a grin heard loud and clear through the radio.
“You got it, boss. Just tell us when.”
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Major Morrow
“You got it boss, just tell us when.”
I turned back to my men, grinning a grin that they wouldn’t even be able to see. “Alright boys! Our ETA is now four minutes! Get your gear ready to go and start brainstorming a playlist!” I got a variety of acknowledgments from the twenty men in the spacecraft with me as they started to run final diagnostics on their mechs, not like they needed it. The mechs were a marvel of human engineering, with various weapon systems that can be switched out on the fly, the most popular of which was referred to as ‘the bolter,’ and for good reason. It was a belt fed behemoth that was integrated into the arm of the mech, below the wrist so that one could still maintain function of that hand. It fired rounds roughly twice the size of a person and could easily over penetrate the most heavily armored mech suits available to civilians.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
But these weren’t civilian mechs that we were rocking. These were the most advanced military version that humanity had, and it showed. There was radar, sonar, optics and sensors that could see through the entire light spectrum, the most advanced reactive armor that we had developed, and even a point defense system that could be used to destroy incoming explosives before they could explode, all run by a very limited virtual intelligence. Hell, it could even be commanded to do room clearing among other things and carry out its tasks without direct oversight. While we weren’t expecting to have to do that, it was nice to know that it was an option.
“I got us a playlist boss,” said one of the men, turning to me as he made sure he was topped off on ammo. Without asking, he sent the playlist. I looked at it and smiled. It was filled to the brim with various songs from before first contact, some of them even being decades or even centuries old.
“This will do very nicely,” I said before switching my radio back on. “Sergeant Grays, we have a playlist. Sending it over to you now.”
There was silence for a moment before I heard laughter from the Sergeant. “Oh yeah, this will do nicely. What’s your ETA?”
“We’re docking right now; it seems like we didn’t even need stealth tech to get up close to the ship. I suppose we have you to thank for that,” I said.
“Just doing our job, Major. Patching into the intercom system, and… done. Your message is playing now.”
I smiled once more. Time to deliver the wrath of Terra.
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High Commander Tussus
“Damn those Terrans and their ability to destroy what they shouldn’t! As soon as I find them, their suffering will be legendary!” I shouted as I watched helplessly from my command chair, the utter chaos that was the bridge caused by the second detonation. I was about to ask a status update from my bridge crew when the intercom system suddenly crackled to life and started to produce noise.
“Attention crew of the Indomitable Crusade. This is Major Morrow of the United Terran military. You have attracted the ire of Terra and her people, and rest assured, you will be hunted down until there are no Yalayans left on this ship. There is, however, a way to avoid this fate. If you place your weapons on the ground and put your hands or equivalents in the air, then you will be detained and brought in for questioning. You will also be given a place to stay and three meals a day until this conflict is over. We will only give you one chance to surrender. You can be assured that there won’t be a second chance.” And with that the message ended. The entire crew sat dumbfounded. How could they have possibly hacked into our intercom system? And more importantly, what other systems have they breached?
I pointed to one of the communications officers. “Get a message to the crew at the computer core and tell them to do a hard reset on the whole system. It’s the only way to make sure that they’re not messing with any other systems.”
“At your command, High Commander,” came the response.
I was about to give another order when some kind of music started to play over the intercom. It was full of percussion and what I could only assume was the voices of Terrans. The music was so loud that I could barely hear my own security officer shout something about one of the airlocks being breached, and the armored Terrans that came flooding out of it. I immediately pulled up the security footage from that part of the ship, just quickly enough to see about twenty heavily armed and armored Terrans rush out of the airlock, putting a single kinetic slug into the skull of any crew member that did not comply with their demands. I felt my blood chill at the sight. Ancestors preserve us.