Mark “Coop” Cooper
Location: System 1861, United Commonwealth of Colonies
It was slow moving, but maneuverable, and from the way it took a ninety degree turn and headed straight for the door Coop could tell someone was controlling it.
“Grenade!” At the same time he hit the close button on the door.
The thin sheet of metal slid between Coop and the fire team of marines before…BOOM!
“Fucking A!” The CPL leading the team cursed.
The door and Coop’s hulking LACS standing between the explosion and the team was enough to ensure everyone was ok, but that wasn’t always the case. Argo’s three squads were more than three quarters through the clearing of this rock. Resistance was growing, and it was staring to take its toll. There still weren’t any more KIA’s except the dumb PVT who’d taken the plamsa cannon to the chest, but another four WIA’s had been reported the nearer they got to the end of their mission.
The bad guys had made a scout come to see how effective their remote-control grenade had been. Four 3mm plasma tipped rounds tracked upward from his hip up to his head and blew him to kingdom come.
“Hallway clear!” The team came streaming out after Coop’s shout. They didn’t pay the guy in half a dozen pieces a second glance.
“Let’s keep moving.” The CPL put a rally point on their HUDs and they crept toward it.
It only took them a few minutes to reach the blinking dot on Coop’s HUD, which was both good and bad. It was good because they didn’t meet any resistance getting there. It was bad because they didn’t meet any resistance getting there. The guy he’d turned into pulverized meatloaf had to have friends somewhere.
Their team was the first to reach the objective. “Hold up.” The CPL held up his hand to stop, and everyone immediately moved to find cover while providing three-hundred-and-sixty-degree security. They sat there for a couple of minutes before STRATNET started to light up. Blue, friendly icons popped around corners and approached. The three hallways that fed into the intersection were filled with marines in a matter of minutes.
“Squad and team leaders, on me.” SGT O’Neil started to pull the key players into a huddle in one of the hallways. “You too, Cooper.”
Coop had been more convinced than ever on this mission that more responsibility wasn’t good for his health. Not only did it make you a target for the enemy if they found out you were in charge, but it put other guys’ lives in his hands. Coop could barely take care of his own shit, and he was well aware of his limitations.
“Here’s the situation.” The SGT didn’t care about Coop’s issues. He was interested in the final step of the operation.
A STRATNET rendering of the asteroid appeared on everyone’s HUD. It was more high-level than the one Coop and the team had been working off of, and it was probably the model that was sending SITREPs back to Argo. Most of the space was highlighted green for clear, but there was one big ass open space in front of them that was still an ugly red color.
“We’ve cleared everything but the main storage area.”
Coop didn’t like the sound of that.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” the SGT immediately confirmed Coop’s suspicions, “there aren’t a lot of good ways to get this done.” The map zoomed into a large open space. “This storage section was designed to hold everything from pallets of food to capital-grade missiles. Those aren’t tiny, and to store enough of them to make a difference we’re looking at a space roughly a square kilometer in size. We’ll get a better look with sensors once we get closer, but I’m sure it isn’t empty.”
“Cooper, you’re going to take point and get us a look at what we’re dealing with. While Cooper peaks his nose in, the shuttle is making a supply run to Argo and back. They’re bringing every smoke and EW grenade or countermeasure we’ve got onboard. I’m estimating at least thirty bad guys on the other side, and I’m going to get us everything we need not to become fish in a barrel.”
The SGT and his trusty team of leaders were going to discuss the plan in more detail, but for that they needed intel, and that was Coop’s job.
“So, that’s why we’re scouting alone into a likely ambush.” Coop explained to the unlucky marine who’d been paired with him. If Coop really thought about it, the lightly armed and armored marine was the real unlucky bastard in this situation.
Coop’s millimeter wave radar pinged down the hallway and transmitted the data directly back to the SGT. It was the same rocky corridor reinforced with duro-steel beams and polyplast that the rest of the rock was made up of. Most of the polyplast had been blasted away in the fighting to reveal the true face of the asteroid underneath.
The two-man team made a final turn and came face to face with a giant blast door…that was open.
“That’s not ominous or anything.” Coop hugged the wall and let his radar do the job. He boosted it with as much power as he could to avoid putting himself in the enemies’ line of fire. He’d be able to take what they could dish out, but after fighting for hours he’d lost twenty percent of his LACS’ battery. If there was another plasma cannon in there it could chew him up if he wasn’t careful.
“We need to get closer.” The other marine was monitoring the feed through STRATNET.
“Oh sure, why don’t you go up there and knock nicely and ask the bad guys if we can take a peek around.” Coop laid the sarcasm on thick, but started to inch closer. He didn’t like the metal-on-metal echo his boots were making as he approached.
He was only about five meters from the large opening when his gut told him to stop. No one had taken a shot on them yet, but he didn’t want to push his luck.
“That’s enough.” Coop made the decision and started to pull back. They didn’t get a full picture of the space, but they got the first few hundred meters.
“It looks like a market place.” SGT O’Neil reviewed the data while the squads armed up with the new equipment that had arrived. “I’m seeing some consumables, weapons, and even a few explosives.” He highlighted those in red for everyone to see. “It doesn’t change the plan.” He concluded.
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The plan wasn’t anything special: violence of action, mixed with countermeasures to fuck with the enemy’s ability to shoot back, and a whole lot of balls on the part of the marines. It was a standard Infantry cocktail, and Coop was the olive on top.
They rehearsed the plan once, virtually through their HUDs. They lost two guys and another two were wounded. It did not instill confidence, but the SGT had programmed fifty enemies willing to fight to the death. Coop doubted that was going to be the actual case as the squads formed up and moved out.
The twenty marines present stacked up in the hallway just out of range of the enemy. Coop toggled to his weapons menu, selected his 125mm cannon, and rotated an EW shell into the tube. EW shells were normally meant to confuse enemy sensors so the real boom boom could sneak through, but that didn’t mean it was a useless round. It still went boom, flashed, and sparkled when it went off. That’s exactly what the marines needed to breach. There was no doubt in any of their minds that a sizeable enemy force was targeting that open door. It would be stupid not to. On top of that, they bet that force was ready for conventional distractions, but a 125mm artillery shell roaring into your hiding spot and going off in your face was not conventional.
“Make sure everyone is buttoned up tight, Sergeant.” Coop relayed as he planted himself and computed the most advantageous trajectory for the round. “If we punch a hole in something important I don’t want people dying because they were stupid.”
“We’re ready to go when you are, Cooper.” The SGT’s reply was tense.
“Roger that. Firing in three…two…one…” Coop grimaced as his leg spasmed from the launch.
The round went hurtling through the open blast door and exploded about twenty five meters in. The marines were already charging in with all of their own sensors in stand-by mode. Their HUDs tinted automatically when the round went off, but it still looked like someone was shining a bright flashlight right into their eyes.
“GO…GO…GO!” The SGT led the way into the breech.
He went right, the next guy went left, and so on and so forth as the marines spread out. Every third guy immediately launched more smoke and EW grenades to obscure the marines’ entry. All that planning – and in Coop’s opinion flawless execution – bought the marines about ten seconds.
Coop had just entered the open area, and was sweeping left, when the first shot started ringing out. They were from the marines, and they were raking what looked like square-cut opening in the rock about ten meters above their position.
“Alternate high and low!” The SGT barked.
Coop was fourth in his line, so he was low. STRATNET tried to put everything together through the smoke and EW countermeasures, but it was still tough to give a cohesive picture in the chaos. The moment he caught movement he pulled the trigger. The three-round burst sprayed at the target, which turned out to be a man with one arm cocked back to throw while the other covered his eyes. Coop’s first round was too far to the right. It hit the wall with the mini-explosions common in plasma-tipped rounds, and threw rocky shrapnel for several meters. The second round found its mark in the man’s center of mass. It blew open his ribcage, pulverized both of his lungs, and shredded his heart. Not having armor was a bitch. The third round just barely missed clipping his hip and smacked into the rock on the other side to the same effect of the first round, but Coop was concerned with the grenade.
Fire fights were erupting all around him now, but his eyes were fixed on the small metal cylinder. He’d not paid serious attention to a grenade before and he’d lost his leg. He sure as shit wasn’t going to let that happen again. Instinct took over, and he moved away. It took him out of position.
The grenade ended up sliding out of the dead man’s hand. It hit the ground with a thunk and spent under two seconds rolling backward. Since the man had been coming out of one of those little cubes cut in the rock, it made it past the threshold before exploding. The little cave took two thirds of the explosion as it absorbed the shrapnel that rocketed outward. Some was launched out of the opening, and Coop felt it pinging off his armor, but the grenade was old and obsolete, so he kept on trucking.
A surge of relief swept over Coop, but it was fleeting. Now he was out of position, and the marine behind him was in his line of fire now. Coop adjusted accordingly and swept the area. It was a good thing he did, because he noticed a big-ass gun emplacement rotating toward them.
What it was, was an antique that the bad guys had covered in camo-nets until now. Some mechanism yanked it off, and Coop was staring down the barrel of one of the biggest guns he’d ever seen.
A search on his PAD would have told Coop that this was an old naval gun from back when the Commonwealth and old USA’s primary naval force was still sea-based. What the fuck the thing was doing here was anyone’s best guess. It was likely in storage waiting for someone to buy it for some backwater planet criminal’s intimidation and racketeering scheme. On some of the Rim Worlds you’d be able to hold a whole town hostage with one of those guns.
Coop’s neural networks were able to inform him that the opening on the behemoth was 127mm – bigger than his own tube – when it belched steel and fire. Thankfully, his armor thought faster than he did, and his railgun was already pumping out hypervelocity rounds to intercept. The bad part was this wasn’t a missile or modern artillery shell. This was just a giant hunk of duro-steel fired on a linear trajectory.
Coop’s gun did what it could, and his better railgun rounds chewed it up and knocked it off course a bit, but the 127mm, 500 kg rounds couldn’t be stopped. It smashed into the side of the asteroid like an angry god. The whole rock shuddered as the round went several dozen meters into the crust before its momentum was spent.
Coop picked himself off his ass and was immediately thankful that the fucking idiots shooting that thing hadn’t used explosive shells and punched a hole in the asteroid that would have sucked them all out into the void. It had kicked up a shit ton of dust, which made the marines’ jobs easier. They had the sensors and the bad guys didn’t. They would have been able to get the job done faster if four friendly icons weren’t black and another four a mix of red and yellow. Half the assault team had gotten tagged by that round and SGT O’Neil was one of them. Thankfully, he was only yellow.
“Keep moving!” His roar was a mix of pain and frustration. His armor was already pumping him full of drugs, but that wouldn’t mean shit if someone shot him while he was down.
“Everyone down!” He ordered over TACCOM.
Anyone with half a brain knew what was coming next, and they flattened themselves against the rock.
Coop’s leg screamed a second time as the recoil of the shot dug into him, but it was quickly wiped out by the satisfaction of seeing that big gun turned into twisted remains, and the fuckers who shot it blown into tiny pieces.
It was the effective end of the battle. Two large explosions, one of which took out the bad guys’ big gun, kind of killed a person’s will to fight. There was still some scattered resistance as a few of the guys and gals didn’t want to be taken alive. After losing five guys throughout the assault, the marines didn’t mind granting their wishes.
Even better, everyone above Coop in rank had been injured in the final assault. The SGT was yellow, two other CPLs had been killed, and one was red in critical condition, which left Coop the honor of sending casualty reports and calling for medical assistance back to Argo. The small gunboat didn’t have much in the way of a sick bay, and it was going to be overflowing once they got everyone back on board.
“Secure and catalogue everything, Cooper.” Ben radioed back. “And good job, that looks like it was a hell of a fight.”
Coop assumed they’d use the intel gathered on the rock to help with other smuggling or anti-piracy operations in the Sector. That was the only thing that made sense. Otherwise, they just would have blown this chunk of rock out of space from the start.
They had prisoners to deal with, shit to catalogue, intelligence to collect, and all the other crap that happened after you won a great victory.
There were chips of debris everywhere and covering everything. He kicked some aside and saw a handle. He went to one knee and picked it up. A small blaster –turned gray by the dust – sat in his hand. His armor quickly evaluated it.
“Hey, Cooper, where do you want us to start?” A marine approached with his weapon slung and a PAD in his hands.
“Let’s start on the far side and work our way toward the entrance.” Coop replied casually as he hid the handgun behind his back.
“Sure thing, you’re the boss until someone else gets here, and something tells me the fleet pukes are going to leave this to us.”