Admiral Fernando “Fearless” Villa

The bridge was silent as we all watched The Rabbit’s Foot detonate successfully in the cluster of enemy ships, destroying or crippling everything caught in the blast. I gave a sigh of relief as I saw the active threats counter drop by over fifty major players. That didn’t mean that the maneuver didn’t cost us a lot, however. I looked at the beacons being broadcast by the escape pods of the carrier. It looked like well over eighty percent of the pods were successfully launched, including the captains. Thank God he survived, good captains like him are hard to come by these days. As I scrolled through the casualties list, the feeling of relief quickly went away, like a breath of air in the void. They had lost the head engineer. A good man, as I recalled.

But there was no time to mourn as more and more craft, no longer being harassed by the constantly resupplying fighters, started to converge on the remaining ships we had in system. Then came the alert of boarding pods being launched by the enemy. It seemed like they had two or three going for each the Double and the Trouble while the rest were coming after us. It made perfect sense, we were the object of their conquest, after all. “What’s the trajectory of those pods coming in?” I asked the sensor officer.

“Most are going for the hangars and other areas they probably think are of tactical use, but there are some that are going for the hab zones.”

I took a deep breath. “Weapons, target the ones going for the hab zones first, then the ones going to the hangars. Have marines in mechs waiting at the impact points to ambush the boarders when they arrive. What’s their ETA?” I asked.

“ETA is two minutes,” replied the sensor officer.

I nodded. “Good.” I pointed to my security officer. “Evacuate all of the civilian areas not already evacuated.”

“Way ahead of you, sir,” he replied as he continued giving orders to the security personnel aboard the ship.”

As he did that, my eyes drifted over to the battlemap, where the enemy ships were spreading themselves out in such a way that there was no possibility of pulling a Rabbit’s Foot style of stunt again. The brutish, boxy design of the ships stood in sharp relief to the more elegant nature of our ships. They must never travel in atmosphere, or at the very least have figured out the wind resistance problem. I turned my attention back over to the timer that had been counting down to our eventual rescue. Twelve minutes.

---

Sergeant Grays

The alert for the anti-boarding operations went up, and the first thing that my men did was cheer. Not that we were being boarded, that was probably the last thing that they all wanted to happen. The thing that they were happy about was the fact that we were assigned a mech squad to assist in defending hab zone 55D from the boarders that were predicted to try and breach there. None of us had ever used a mech outside of training and the recertifications they had us get every six months, so everyone was a bit excited to get the chance to actually use one in combat.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

We were almost to the mech bay, where we would get our mechs, arm them up, and make our way to our ambush point.

“I always wanted to be a mech pilot, Sarge. Today must be my lucky day!” Collins said. Since the Indomitable Crusade, he had been promoted to tech specialist for the unit, and the duties of being the radio operator was relegated to someone else.

“Well then stop hogging all of the fuckin’ luck, Collins, I want to make it back in one piece,” shouted Jacobson, my new radio operator as he jogged down the hallway.

“Shut that shit marines, we still have a job to do, and by God are we going to get it done,” I shouted as we finally made it through the thick bulkhead into the mech hangar, where every towering mech was being manned and outfitted to fight off the boarders when they came. I checked my watch. A minute forty-five.

We were directed to our mechs by the supporting staff and made our way to the individual elevators. As I rose up to the cockpit of the mech, I couldn’t help but feel my anxiety rise. There was the very real possibility that this was our last stand, and that the reinforcements weren’t going to get here on time. I finally got to the cockpit, the chair going from pitch black to an almost blinding amount of light. Taking a deep breath, I sat in the chair and waited for the neural wire to connect with my nervous system.

I grimaced in pain as the wire inserted itself into the back of my neck and the mech synced up with my neural pathways. Civilians didn’t have to deal with getting “plugged in” to mechs, because all the civilian models which relied exclusively on brain scans. And while that method was effective, it tends to leave something to be desired when it comes to reaction times. In war, a split second could make the difference between killing your foe and your foe killing you.

Once the link was established, I flexed the hands of the mech and took a few experimental steps. All in working order, it seemed. I turned to face my soldiers doing the same. Some, of course had better control of it than others, but that was to be expected when operating such heavy machinery. I walked up to the armory wall, picking up a heavy gun for the emplacements that we would no doubt have to make. We started to sprint through the hangar and into the mech sized hallways, occasionally looking down at the countdown timer for the ETA of our new guests. With thirty seconds to spare, we finally made it into hab zone 55D to find that it was full of apartment buildings twenty to twenty-five stories tall. Past the gridded downtown city area, was the massive wall that served as the only thing standing between us and the void of space. “Funnel them down the main roads,” I shouted as I handed one of my men the gun to place down somewhere. “The rest of you take up flanking positions throughout the zone.” Thank God we have access to the security cameras here.

“Hey Sarge, what’s the policy on collateral damage?” the one setting up the gun asked me.

“Don’t cause any if you can avoid it. These are people’s homes, after all. Now brace for impact,” I replied as I eyed the timer on the HUD, an outline of where the boarding pod was expected to contact the hull of the ship and presumably burrow through until it would be our job to stop them.

After what felt like an eternity of waiting, the timer finally reached zero. An ear shattering racket was heard before the sound was suddenly cut off by the audio dampeners in the mech. A breaching pod, massive enough to easily destroy several blocks of the hab zone suddenly burst through the wall and demolished the first seven blocks of apartment buildings, only screeching to a halt at the eighth. Silence once again reigned as we waited for the pod to open and disgorge its troops.

We didn’t have to wait for long before a pair of Yalayans opened the pod, destroying another few buildings, and making their first timid steps out onto the ship. They looked around for a moment before declaring that the area was clear, causing more to spill out and start exploring the new space. They weren’t even looking in our direction when we swung out from behind the buildings and started opening fire.