Eve Berg

Location: North American Eastern Seaboard, Bethesda Naval Hospital, United Commonwealth of Colonies

It was quiet, too quiet. Eve had always thought that was a stupid saying. There was always background noise. In a city, it was neighbors or people on the street hooting and hollering. In the forest, there were animals of all types calling out to one another. Even on the vast, empty worlds waiting to be colonized, the sound of the wind passing over barren plains pierced the silence. As she waited for the enemy to appear, she finally understood what it really meant.

The area around the Bethesda Naval Hospital was lightly, and tastefully wooded. The Commonwealth spent good money to ensure a comfortable surrounding for its injured personnel. If Eve had her way, they would have cut down the trees for five hundred meters in every direction, but that call went above her head. Hell, even the battalion commander hadn’t been able to make that call. So, Eve and the battalion grunts on the front line had a line of sight of about one hundred meters before the trees started to block their visuals. In those light woods were hundreds of critters, who cries and scurrying could be heard from a sizable distance if she focused her audio sensors to pick up anything out of the ordinary.

As she sat there, there were no chirps, crickets, scurrying of little feet, or calls of warning. Everything out there had an overwhelming sense that something was about to happen; that something alien had invaded their territory, and they were hunkering down. That was the silence she heard. Soldiers all around her still shifted, coughed, scratched their crotches, and slammed home new powerpacks and magazines into their weapons. They were an island of activity in a sea of silence.

“OP-Two, SITREP. OP-Five, Six, anything?” she relayed the tight-beam messages forward.

OP-Two was as the cardinal east direction from the hospital, at the three o’clock position. OP-Five and Six were five hundred meters closer at the northeast and southeast respectively; about one-thirty and four-thirty on the clock face. The setup allowed the OPs to maximize coverage while ensuring no enemy was able to sneak passed them.

Right now, no one was answering. There were still two more OP levels between Eve and the missing outposts, so she took the initiative and went straight to them.

“OP-Eleven, anything…”

“…MOVING FAST!” the transmission cut through her own and came from the last OP before the hospital defensive lines.

“Tighten it up,” she yelled to the soldiers around her as the sounds of gunfire reached their position. “Here they come!” Who they were was still the key question, but she was more than comfortable finding that out while examining their corpses.

The first things she saw were a string of troops hauling ass back toward the lines. “Hold fire,” she yelled, but someone still let off a three-rounds burst in the direction of the friendly forces.

She ignored the NCO ripping into the dumbass who fired, and focused on the incoming personnel. None of them fell, thank whatever deity was watching over them, but they kept looking over their shoulders.

{Anomalous power surge,} her Battle AI informed a half second before a piercing white light activated her display’s tint.

she saw the white-hot beam of energy cut through the trees and stab into the backs of the fleeing grunts.

It was like whoever was firing it was a surgeon using a scalpel to cut away an infection. The grunts armor might as well have been tissue paper as the beam cleanly sliced through them. Forward momentum caused them to topple over, some in multiple pieces, about fifty meters from safety.

The shouts of frightened soldiers echoed as a few wannabe heroes tried to jump out of their trenches and go grab their buddies. The rational-minded NCOs made sure they didn’t and kept their heads down.

Then, Eve got the first look at their enemy.

It was a pair of bipedal creatures, both covered in armor that shifted with the environment they were in. Whatever the tech was, it made it difficult for her Battle AI to get a good read on them, even though they were within spitting distance.

The snapshot she did get before the imagery seemed to waver and shift was interesting. The first member of the pair looked to be big and bulky. Standing nearly three meters, it had two pairs of arms; the first were long and gripping a large-barreled weapon, while the second set were smaller and closer to the center of the torso. She didn’t know if it was a part of the armor’s exoskeleton or not, but they didn’t seem to have much of a neck, and the “head” was more oval in shape than anything Eve had ever seen. She would have categorized it as vaguely humanoid, but the legs bent the wrong way, and the smaller arms looked like they had two joints each: like an ant’s antenas, but ending in three digits. She couldn’t tell how many digits the bigger arms ended in.

The second figure was much smaller, maybe a meter in height, and seemed to be moving on all fours. It didn’t have the second pair of arms, and she didn’t see them carrying any weapons, but due to their armor’s cammoflague capabilities, she wasn’t going to rule them out as being unarmed. Judging by the glimpse she’d gotten of their cammo; it seemed the small ones were equipped for more clandestine missions. The only reason she saw it was because it had been close to the big one when it had opened fire. The area highlighted by the energy blast gave her sensors a brief look before it vanished.

“Will my shield shrug off a blast of that thing?” she queried her AI.

“Affirmative. We can sustain a sustained blast of that magnitude for three point six volleys.”

she hated when the AI gave her info like that. Three she was good, and four she was dead. There was no point-six of a hit.

“All units watch for infiltrators,” she relayed the message to all units around her, along with imagery of the smaller alien, and had them pass it along the line.

The troops around her were not equipped with the same type of shielding her MOUNT was. They had the old school squad, platoon, and company area force fields. Incoming rounds would be repealed, but a slow-moving grenade, or skulking commando, could get through them with no problem. The last thing the defenders needed was to have confusion in their own lines.

“Steady,” NCOs up and down the line were yelling to their troops. “Steady!”

Eve scanned her area of responsibility for targets, ready to lay down the hurt, when the world seemed to explode around her. Multiple laser blasts from the enemy’s heavy cannons struck the first layer of the defender’s shield in sustained beams. The enemy walked them across the front lines for several seconds, probing for weak spots.

There was an explosion and screams to her right as a squad-level shield failed, but she was backtracking the beams to their targets. “There,” she patted the missile launcher she was standing next to, transmitting the targeting data.

The missiles were in fire and forget mode. They were programed to fly straight to the target and detonate when they hit something; thus reducing the chance of getting hijacked and used against the defenders. The eight-missile launcher flashed as it sent one missile downrange. At a hundred meters it crossed the space in a heartbeat and exploded on target. There was a flash of blue energy as the enemy’s shield was tested.

“Lay it on them!” the seasoned NCOs caught the flash and highlighted the area so their squads and fire teams could bring the heat.

Someone also called for fire support. Eve heard the fire mission go in and the thump as one of the battalion’s HI troopers sent artillery screaming toward the target. Just like the missiles, it was using gravity and not GPS to hit its targets.

Explosions walked down the enemy position, with a five-round barrage covering the area. Soil leapt into the air, along with shattered trees, to fall and go straight through their shields to cover the defenders.

Eve thought with irritation as she shook the dirt from her armor with a giant shrug.

“Scan for any sign of the infiltrators,” she commanded her AI as she kept sweeping her gaze across the battlefield. Gunfire was dying down as the enemy had vanished during the barrage.

She hadn’t even fired a shot yet, and that was intentional. She would act as a QRF if the enemy looked to be threatening a specific position. The BN commander didn’t want to alert the enemy to Eve’s capabilities until she had to. Once Eve joined the fight, she would be a high priority target for those heavy cannons the enemy was carrying. Multiple beams hitting her at once would ruin her day.

Status reports were flying back and forth. It appeared the enemy had hit them from all directions. How they’d gotten around the other OPs was still a question mark, but none of the forward positions were responding. Eve was sure they weren’t coming back.

“Maybe we got one of them,” she muttered to herself. Small-arms, a missile, and artillery was a hell of a way to start the fight.

She fingered the toggle to her graviton cannon, eager to get in the fight, but still remembered her place.

“Possible infiltration detected…thirty-two percent probability at coordinates…” Eve didn’t wait. She sprinted down the line, and radioed ahead.

“What? I don’t…” the NCO began before a ball of fire erupted from the precise coordinates her AI had identified.

“Shields down!” a survivor screamed onto the net as a pair of white beams stabbed into the opening in their defenses.

Eve didn’t slow down. The infiltrator had taken down the squad’s shield so the heavies could cut them down with ease. They only things standing between those soldiers and certain death was Eve. She vaulted the last twenty meters into a roll. She detached her shield and activated it as she rolled into the opening the enemy’s cannons were ripping into.

Her AI was already shooting a reverse azimuth, and she assigned her swatters to the task of putting rounds downrange to find the enemy. She doubted the lighter rounds, meant to knock down incoming missiles or artillery, would do much damage, but if she could pinpoint their positions, the BN missiles and artillery could bring the hurt.

“Reroute all power to forward shields,” she ordered the AI, as her shield icon dropped precipitously after only a few seconds of tangoing with the enemy lasers.

Blue flashed in the distance, and the defenders engaged the enemy positions. The lasers cut off just as Eve was about to switch from her portable shield to her armor’s main body shields.

“On your six!” someone yelled, just as her armor screamed an alert.

The one-meter infiltrator, with its stealth armor, was less than five meters from her. A grunt had basically tripped over the damn thing, and then was gutted by some type of close-quarters energy weapon.

Everyone turned inwards and opened up; including Eve. With her finger already on the graviton cannon’s trigger, she turned and fired. The grunts were barely outside the kill radius of her weapon, so they’d get a little whiplash, but that was better that being skewered by someone you couldn’t even see.

The universe’s luck finally smiled on her. Her targeting icon was dead center on the infiltrator when she pulled the trigger. The super-dense ball of artificial gravity, propelled at fraction-of-light speeds, hit the alien mid-jump. The thing’s shield sizzled, died spectacularly in a burst of energy, and was followed a second later by ET. The graviton bolt hit the creature, they both hit the ground, the ground rumbled like a drunken god had just bitch slapped it, and then everything within fifteen meters got a fresh coating of green mist.

All the grunts around her were knocked on their asses, and a couple had their medical status go from green to yellow. It was nothing the medics couldn’t patch up in a jiff. What really mattered was all that was left of the enemy was finely dispersed matter.

she told herself.

“Where the hell did that fucker come from?” the NCO walked up to Eve’s metal calf and gave it a pat. “Thanks for the save, Valkyrie.”

She was about to reply when a gut-wrenching, spine-tingling roar echoed from in front of them. It was sadness and rage expressed in its most primal form. Even through her metal armor, deep in her womb, Eve shivered at the sound.

“Incoming!” someone yelled, and everyone open fired.

One of the big aliens was charging right toward them. Rounds from the grunts’ M3s smacked into its shield, eliciting a rainbow colage of light, but not much else. In contrast, the alien was rapid firing its own weapon. The white beam, stabbed into the still-unprotected position. Eve angled to protect the soldiers with her own shields. She saved some, but not them all.

{Portable shield at forty-two percent,} her Battle AI informed as she took multiple shots. Whatever the alien was doing, the shots weren’t as powerful as what was hitting her before. Not that it mattered to the NCO she’d just been talking to. He toppled over with a fist-sized hole in his chest.

The weapon ran out of charge halfway to their lines, but that didn’t stop the alien, which was looking more and more like a monster from a nightmare as it charged closer. It discarded the weapon like it was nothing and dropped down on all fours like a charging wolf, or, thanks to its size, a rhino. Its speed increased dramatically and within seconds it was among them. A strong arm reached out, grabbed a grunt firing on full auto, and tossed him like a rag doll. The man flew ass over heals ten meters before crashing down into another squad’s heavy weapon’s emplacement. An emplacement that would have been opening fire on the enemy if it wasn’t worried about mowing down friendlies.

The alien going berserk didn’t stop at chucking one grunt. From somewhere in its armor it produced close quarter weapons. One was a smaller version of the beam weapon. More like a pistol, that still packed a wallop. It was dropping grunts, but not killing them. The second looked like some sort of short sword, and that was killing people. It went through one grunt’s gut like a nano-blade through a birthday cake.

Even worse. It all happened in seconds. The alien had no business being that big and that fast, and every time Eve got a bead on it, it bounced away, or put friendly troops between it and her.

she thought to herself. She deactivated her guns and reached behind her back for her sword. A sword that was as big as the alien was. She also repositioned her shield. A check of its status had it recovered to fifty percent power, but she wasn’t using it for its ability to deflect projectiles and laser. It was just something to hit the damned thing with.

She stepped into the fray, and immediately received a burst of fire from the alien’s pistol. Her shield took it without a problem, and she swung at the creature with her sword. The alien leapt nimbly backward. Twisting in the air, and bringing its own blade down on a grunt trying to take cover. It cut him clean from the base of the neck down to his asshole. He didn’t even get to scream as his spine was severed and everything spilled out of him.

Eve pushed forward with her shield, trying to corner the alien, but it was too quick. It leapt in and stabbed at her, while deftly dancing around her attempts to trap it. At one point, she thought she had it cornered between her and a missile battery. The thing climbed up the battery’s side like a spider monkey and flipped over her head to escape. Since she was twice the thing’s height, and it had killed at least a dozen soldiers by now, she didn’t want to know how her species could possibly take on whatever the hell these things were.

She roared in frustration as time and time again the thing evaded her. Even worse, its friends were still attacking the perimeter while she was occupied. “Valkyrie, I’ve got a squad from the reserve heading your way. Deal with that thing.” The BN commander’s voice in her head had more than a hint of anger in it.

Eve didn’t blame the LCDR. She was trying to fight a battle while this thing was cutting through her people. Eve swiped at the creature, but it sidestepped and stabbed out with its sword, while firing into Eve’s face. The status quo remained unchanged. Its weapons didn’t have the power to penetrate Eve’s shield, and Eve wasn’t fast enough to catch it. They danced for another minute until the squad arrived.

“Don’t worry about me. Shoot this fucker until it dies,” she ordered, and the squad quickly obeyed.

Incoming weapon’s fire chewed up the space around her, with more than one round pinging off her shields. Eve thought two steps ahead and went with her gut. She moved to cut off the squad from the creature even before the creature pivoted with a twirl and threw itself at the newly arrived soldiers. With a half second more time to react, she swung her shield as fast as she could and clipped the alien around its hip area.

The thing’s roar of pain was like music to her ears. Even better were the squad’s weapons on full auto, plunging fire into the creature as it struggled to get back to its feet from where it had fallen. Eve seized the advantage and dove forward with her sword. The alien rolled to avoid her lunge, and almost got away, but Eve’s blade bit deep into its upper leg, spewing greenish blood all over the ground.

The roar turning into a squeal as it tried to limp away. The squad continued to hammer it with fire while Eve righted herself. She was about to deliver the killing blow, but the ET’s shield failed spectacularly, and the hammering from the squad’s heavy weapons started to blast chunks out of its armor. Soon, green blood sprayed from the creature’s mortal wounds and it dropped dead.

Eve felt a tiny twinge of regret that she wasn’t the one to kill the thing, but she was still glad it was dead.

“Enemy neutralized,” she sent to the LCDR. “Where do you need me?”

“Head back to the CP. The enemy looks like it finished its probe. I need your input on what to do next.” Eve nodded inside her metal womb and turned to the inner perimeter where the hospital’s lights had been extinguished to limit the enemy’s ability to target the vulnerable infrastructure.

Everyone but the greenest private knew what they’d just dealt with was a probe. The enemy wanted to see the firepower they could bring to bear, how quickly it could move troops to reinforce, and what kind of defenses were in store for their main force. Judging by the number of bodies Eve had passed in her fight with the ET, things weren’t looking good for the human defenders.

she turned her thoughts to the east where her daughter would soon be ensconced safe and sound in a medical clinic deep in the Smokey Mountains.

She just hoped there was civilization for her kid to return to when this was all said and done.