Mark “Coop” Cooper

Location: New Lancashire, United Commonwealth of Colonies

“Move your ass grandpa!” Coop blared over his loudspeaker.

The crowd of people surging through the gate and into the spaceport had bottlenecked as an old man stopped walking. He looked like he was about two hundred years old. He had a few wisps of white hair on an otherwise bald head, a bulbous nose with giant pores and blackheads that you didn’t need magnification to see, but he stood up tall when Coop called him out. Of course, he barely reached Coop’s belly button.

Time was of the essence. That’s what Coop’s commanders had told him. The Kingdom of Windsor was about to rain down hell on them, and they needed to get as many people off this rock as possible. That only worked if people hauled ass to the spaceport. Ships were putting down whereever they could, but with a dust storm that had rolled into town, and the general mayhem that an evacuation of a city caused, the spaceport was still the safest place for pilots to put down.

The battalions-worth of soldiers still on the ground in Town Center had formed a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree perimeter around the spaceport. As one of the big guns in the arsenal, Coop got a prime place next to the front gate, but it came with the downside of dealing with people. When people were frightened they did stupid things, and the MPs had already hauled away a few dozen who thought they could break the rules.

“You get one bag grandpa. This isn’t a luxury cruise. We’ve got weight limits to maintain.” Coop continued yelling at the stubborn old man. “You’ve got five seconds to decide. Five…four…three…”

The old man mumbled something under his breath. Coop was pretty sure it was a slew of four-letter words that probably involved Coop’s mother in some fashion, but he didn’t give two shits. What he cared about was the old man holding up the smaller of the two bags he was carrying.

“Thank you.” Coop grabbed the bag from him and chucked it to the side.

It weighed less than ten kilos and Coop was an HI trooper with an enhanced muscular-skeletal structure. His throw made quarterbacks in the Commonwealth Football League look like amateurs. It sailed a good few hundred meters in the air, whistling as it went. It easily cleared the throng of people, and crashed into a growing mountain of discarded bags on the side of a hanger.

“Eight and a half,” Mike graded the throw from his own spot herding people forward and making sure they obeyed the rules outlined by the Spyders’ crew chiefs.

“Eight and a half?” Coop waved on the grandpa and ignored the old man’s glare. “That was at least a nine.”

“Nope, no spiral.” Coop could hear the shrug in Mike’s voice.

“No spiral! It was a square-shaped backpack.”

“I didn’t make the rules. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.” Mike chuckled, and then Coop heard him yelling the same thing he’d yelled at the old man to another civilian.

“Cooper, Enders, shut up and get back to work.” SSG Hightower came over the battalion net and shut down the fun.

Signal authorizations had been sent out randomly during the first hour of the frenzied evacuation. Elements of the 2222nd, 2223rd, 2224th, the MP Company attached to the colony, and a few companies of engineers from Ninth Corps were on the ground, so the signal guys had patched together a brigade-level net in TACCOM and STRATNET. They doled out access appropriately…except they didn’t get it all right. Coop didn’t know if he was more pleased or surprised when it showed he had this brigade-level access. He guessed it was probably because he’d been on Abe with the RADM when this all went down, they saw that in his suit logs, and believed he was important.

That’s how a CPL HI trooper got to listen in on what the LTs and LCDRs were saying. Even SSG Hightower didn’t have that level of access.

“Have the PG battalions do a final of sweep the city in these three sectors.” The ID showed it was LCDR Benson, Commander of the 2223rd that was talking. He seemed to be the ranking officer on the ground and was therefore in charge. “They need to haul ass though. We’ve got less than an hour before those ships hit atmosphere.”

Coop couldn’t reference the maps the LCDR was using, but the short conversation told him enough. When the alert first went out, the Governor of the planet had activated three battalions of the Planetary Guard. These were regular people who’d gone through a severely abbreviated version of Basic on New Lancashire within the last ten years. The purpose of the Guard was to defend the planet in the future when the real Infantry troops were reassigned. Coop had heard rumors of systems in the Commonwealth with first class Guard units that could match an Infantry unit. The New Lancashire Guard was not one of those. They’d dug deep in the old stockpile to outfit these guys.

They wore gray smartcloth uniforms, and over them a triple-layer laminate plating and ballistic-weave vest. The stuff was the height of individual body armor back during the Last Terran War, but it wouldn’t stop a wet fart now. The Guard soldiers didn’t even have full-helmets. They had a little pot-looking thing that covered the dome of their head and a polyplast visor that lowered down the front in what Coop hoped was a HUD.

The LCDR had ordered the armories opened up and M3’s issued to the Guard soldiers.

Coop was more worried about getting shot by a guardsman than the royal asshats about to descend on the planet. They’d already had three accidental discharge reports, and Coop had personally heard the LCDR chew out the CMDR in charge of these Guard units. It didn’t matter that the Guard CMDR technically outranked LCDR Benson, Benson chewed the guy a new asshole.

Coop checked his suit’s internal clock. It was mid-morning in New Lancashire’s day, but you couldn’t tell from the dust storm running through town. It cut visibility and limited the range of sensors. The swirling crap only reached a few thousand feet off the ground, so pilots had smooth flying until the very end. He hoped.

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“Cooper, pull your head out of your ass.” SSG Hightower roared.

Someone must have snuck passed Coop with two bags. “On it, Staff Sergeant.” Coop focused on what was right in front of him for the next forty minutes.

The stream of people never seemed to let up or lessen despite the flights of sixteen Spyders flying continuous rotations up to the ships in orbit. That was a military standard load of eight hundred people a flight, but Coop knew they were pushing it closer to a thousand. It took them ten minutes to get up and five minutes to get back down for a fifteen-minute round trip.

The cargo ships in orbit were helping too. The ships Coop had been inspecting for contraband only a day ago were now dumping their goods and shoving people on board. Some of the larger cargo haulers could take several hundred people a run. Coop just wondered where everyone was going.

Abe already had thousands of Infantry and Fleet spacers on board. Sure they’d be able to take a bunch of civilians and cram them on the flight deck, but there was only so much space. They’d pack every ship in the defensive fleet to the gills, but there was no way they were fitting everyone in Town Center, much less all of New Lancashire, on what they had in orbit.

Rumor was that the Gold Technologies carrier group was helping, but they didn’t have Spyders like the Fleet. They had shuttles, but they fit thirty people max. Corporations didn’t do planetary invasions, so why would they be packing dozens of assault shuttles in their hulls. The cargo haulers were making up for that, but they were slower than Spyders with nearly a half-hour turnaround. Even with hours to evacuate, Coop knew they hadn’t gotten everyone.

Coop thought as STRATNET and TACCOM suddenly exploded with chatter.

Coop zoomed out to the wider sensor view offered by the orbiting satellites and saw dozens of hostile dots streaking into the atmosphere. They burned red hot from the friction, but Coop got a general look at them.

They looked nothing like any assault shuttle he’d ever seen. In fact, they looked a lot like the old-fashioned wine bottle opener Sandy like to use. That, or a fancy looking T. The majority of the vehicle was in the shape of a blade pointing down toward the ground, but it looked pretty thick; easily fifteen to twenty meters across, and over a hundred meters long. It ended in a horizontal section, like the top crossing of the T, but at either end of the horizontal bar it jutted down again.

Coop read the data streaming in off his HUD. There weren’t any exhaust plumes, but the ripple of gravity manipulation was prevalent.

New Lancashire’s planetary defense grid was tracking the ships – that looked closer to large gunboats, or undersized destroyers, than Spyders – and engaged. It looked like the enemy was planning to land all over the planet, but Coop saw no less than six ships heading toward Town Center. It made sense. It was the capitol and largest city on the planet, but Coop couldn’t help but feel bitter about the attention.

“We’ve got incoming!” Coop sent on his team channel, which he’d added Mike to. “Lots of bad guys heading our way. ETA under a minute.”

“Fuckin’ A! Of course our sorry asses are still on the ground when the bad guys come knocking,” Goldsmith immediately started bitching to relieve the stress.

The rest of Coop’s three-man crew was helping people get situated on the Spyders. For some reason, Charlie Company of the 2223rd had gotten the cushy detail. They weren’t on the perimeter, so they’d live longer than the rest of the battalion if the rumors about the Kingdom’s tech were true. Coop didn’t believe the wildest rumors, but to dismiss them all was just stupid. Whatever the case, this was going to be a tough fight.

A rough look said the inbound, hostile ships could likely hold a few hundred troops, but with the Guard, the Commonwealth had a little more than four thousand troops locked and loaded. That should be enough to hold the line.

“We’ve got a friendly flight inbound,” SSG Hightower’s voice cut through the chatter. “This looks like it’s going to be the last one, and it’s our ride.”

Coop looked out at the civilians still crowding the street in front of him. He could imagine soldiers jockeying for seats with the civilians, and he was really glad he was in a LACS. No one would be able to stand in his way.

“We’re going to make an announcement, have the civilians take cover in the city, we’ll close the spaceport gates, and then slowly collapse the perimeter and bound back to the waiting Spyders. LT Wentworth will deploy Charlie Company as she deems appropriate, follow her orders. You hear that, Cooper?”

“Of course, Staff Sergeant.” Coop grinned, and heard his team chuckle over their private net.

Word of Coop’s interaction with Bob the Twig was already spreading through the troops. Coop was humble enough to say he wasn’t a legend, but he wouldn’t have to buy himself a drink for a while if he made it off this rock alive.

“Quit yapping! Here they come!” As if on cue, the dust-filled sky split open and half a dozen ships broke through a few thousand meters above their heads…and the PDC’s defenses opened up on them.

Five-hundred-terawatt energy cannons, normally found on cruisers, opened up on the ships. Coop watched bolts of red lance through the sky and strike the ships less than a heartbeat later. At the same time, railguns opened up and threw hundreds of duro-steel rounds into them.

There was a reason assault craft never landed close to PDCs. Firepower like that brought onto a few targets was enough to turn them into finely-dispersed matter. It was better to land on the opposite side of a major terrain feature and hike toward the objective. That limited your loss of manpower and resources, and then allowed you to bring the maximum amount of force to bear on the target. The Kingdom of Windsor didn’t seem to understand this simple fact of warfare, and they flew right into the holocaust of fire and steel.

The sounds of railgun rounds and energy particles slamming into the ship made Coop’s suit automatically cut off sound. The vulnerable civilians hunched over in pain and clasped their hands over their ears. It didn’t do much good as round after round of impacts rolled over the city.

“Splash six,” he joked over the team net expecting to see six balls of twisted armor falling to the planet in useless hunks.

“Fuckin’ A!” This time Goldsmith wasn’t bitching.

“Crap.” Mike seconded the comment.

“We are so fucked.” The usually unflappable PFC Nickelbaucher sealed it for Coop.

He rechecked his HUD, and caught a brief glimpse of the still-intact ships before they plowed blade first into the ground. The nearest landed less than five hundred meters from the spaceport. Civilians were thrown off their feet as the ground shuddered beneath them.

It was thought to see through the dust storm, and the new debris thrown into the air by the craft’s impact, but Coop could have sworn the ship looked unharmed.

“Get ready!” SSG Hightower suddenly appeared between Coop and Mike.

The three HI troopers presented a strong front at the gate, which was the logical avenue of approach. The rest of the troops redeployed in defensive positions to either side of the gate and targeted the craft. They painted the area between them and the craft with enough active sensors to make a man sterile.

“Guard soldiers moving into position, check fire!” LT Wentworth’s frantic voice announced as the space between the ship and Coop filled up with guardsmen.

Coop thought immediately about the guardsmen complete lack of situational awareness…but on the other hand,

They didn’t have to wait long.