Prime Minister Deja Simmons (ADM Retired)

Location: New Washington, United Commonwealth of Colonies

The Prime Minister wrapped up her prepared comments and gave the traditional Commonwealth sign off for her public address, “May God bless the United Commonwealth of Colonies.” She held the practiced smile for several seconds until the camera tech told her she was clear. Then she made sure the red light on the device was off and turning away from her before she swept everything off the meticulously-arranged desk, and tossed her hard-copy notes at the wall. They fell impotently to the ground, much like she felt at the moment.

“Get the fuck out, now!” she roared, as her staff burst into motion and cleared the techs from the room.

It was the PM’s office in her government residence. PM’s had addressed the public for centuries from that location. It was welcome and reassuring, and for the first time, Deja had been able to reach out to all corners of the Commonwealth at once to deliver her message. It was a message of defeat and failure. It was message to say Earth had fallen to an unknown enemy. It was a message to state that nearly a third of the Commonwealth had decided to go it alone when the galactic superpower needed to unite and be strong together. It was a message she hoped had Thomas Gold and his cronies ready to crawl under a stone and hope she never came for him.

“Ma’am,” High Admiral Gilmore stood in front of her, his face a stone mask. “We’re ready for you.”

She took a moment to collect herself before nodding and following him out of the room, and down to the impromptu war room. No press lined the hall as usual after an address like this. She didn’t need the distraction. The press could think whatever they wanted, she didn’t give a shit right now.

Men and women in uniform jumped to their feet when she entered, but she waved the back to their seats. Everyone’s face was stoic, as it should be. This was the worst day in the history of the Commonwealth, and what they did now would determine the fate of humanity.

“Give it to me straight?” she stared at each man and woman levelly. “How fucked are we?”

“Definitely seriously, but not supremely, the woman at her right replied without missing a beat.

Deja recognized Admiral Rachel Azure. She was Admiral Garrett’s deputy. the thought stopped abruptly.

Garrett had been on Mars. By luck alone she’d been able to get out of there before the aliens cut off her ability to retreat. Garrett had not been so lucky. Last she heard, he’d been digging in with Admiral Reyes on Mars’s surface to coordinate its defense. Deja doubted the old war dog was still alive, which put Azure in charge of the Commonwealth Infantry Corps.

“Thank you, Admiral,” Deja remembered vaguely how blunt the tall woman was. She was sure she’d get to know the knew addition to the military’s chiefs intimately through the next few months ahead.

“Things do not look good,” Gilmore chimed in more respectfully. “Communications from Earth are completely cut off, and with Gold’s treason, we’ve lost the ability to communicate through his QE network. My guess is we’ll receive an envoy from this new Confederation shortly to negotiate return of that service and other treaties between the Commonwealth and Confederation.”

The ADM saying the words made Deja sick, and apparently Azure agreed. “Give me a few divisions and I’ll shove a rifle down Gold’s throat and pull the trigger myself.” The ADM was barely able to contain her rage. “We can hang his head on a plaque in the Hall of Representative with ‘Do not Fuck With Us’ written in big bold letters. Then, we can keep his tiny little dick as a personal memento of his colossal fucking mistake.”

“We might not have a choice,” Gilmore replied, and he sounded like he regretted it, but he went on to explain before Azure erupted again. “We can’t lose Earth, ma’am,” he said bluntly. “We can lose all these systems to the Confederation, but if we lose earth we’re done. The single planet holds a significant amount of humanities population, not to mention industrial capacity. Beyond that, it’s our home. Everyone shares a link to Earth. If we lose her to aliens, more systems will pull away, and you’ll be the prime minister of New Washington and nothing more.”

Deja gripped the armrest of her chair until her knuckles turned white and audibly cracked, but she knew the High Admiral was right. “What do you suggest?”

“We’ll need to negotiate with the envoy. We need communications access back. We don’t need to acknowledge the Confederation, but we need to talk to other systems. That’s step one, step two deals with the garrisons. Most of these worlds have a token fleet garrison. None have an active fleet base because they know we’d crush this kind of rebellion. Likely, some of the garrisons are going to join the Confederation, but the ones that don’t are going to be in a tense standoff with corporate forces of system militias. I advise we pull those garrisons and redeploy to Alpha Centauri.” A holo-tank sprang to life. “If we only get half the garrisons to return to us, that’s still sixty plus battleships that we can get back into action.”

Normally, that was a large amount of tonnage, but after ADM Berg’s description of what happened to First and Second Fleet; Deja didn’t even know if that could make a difference.

“Fifth Fleet is based out of Alpha Centauri, and they were scheduled to begin refitting their fleet with the more modern ships a month ago. They’re knee deep in the refit. We just need to push it to the next level; I call it Operation Turnaround. In the next six weeks I advise the Defense Production Act be put into effect. Every available mine, smelter, fabricator, arms manufacturer, shipyard, and their mother are going to produce one thing and one thing only: what we need to equip the largest fleet in human history to take back Earth.”

The holo-tank updated and Deja’s jaw dropped at the projections. her practiced eye noted quickly, but she liked it. It was decisive, showed violence of action, and better yet, gave humanity something to rally behind.

“Production on fleet upgrades will cease everywhere but these four anchorages. They will continue, and then their fleets will rendezvous at Alpha Centauri. Seventy percent of our fleet supply vessels will take our existing stockpile and make for Alpha Centauri the moment you give the order, and will continue to make round-the-clock flights to get the yards what they need.” The next slide popped up, and Deja became less enthused. “We go coordinate with the Euros and Blockies as well. Earth is their mother world as well. We convince them to bring as much force to bear as possible. It is unlikely they will be able to get as upgraded as us; they don’t have the infrastructure of agreements in place with the Hegemony, but each upgraded battleship is another few dozen energy cannons to point at the enemy. I’m confident I can convince some of my counterparts to contribute.”

“How?” Azure asked. “They’ll want us to shoulder the majority of the load, they always do.”

“Simple,” the High Admiral forwarded to the next image, and Azure’s eyes narrowed and a predatory smile split her lips. “Even when our combined fleet beats back the enemy. We’ll still need to uproot the enemy soldiers on the ground. We’re talking about several months of occupation. Judging by the numbers we were seeing from ships that size, there could be a quarter million enemy troops on Earth. If our technological disadvantage is taken into consideration, we’re going to need to deploy two thirds of the entire Infantry to take back just our territory. We’ll obviously help our European allies after we regain our lands, but we will not venture in Blockie controlled space. Everyone is going to need to chip in if they want to save their slice of home.”

“You’re an evil bastard, Gilmore,” Azure nodded to the High Admiral in respect.

“Ma’am,” Gilmore returned his attention to her. “We can only make this happen if we move now, with a purpose, and manage the chaos as effectively as possible. To get the Euros and Blockies to coordinate, we need a hard deadline. We’ll all need to move as one, and hit the enemy in conjunction. I’m going to need you to decide on a timeline and give me the go as soon as possible.”

Three options were presented, each with their pros and cons. The quickest deadline was six weeks; it offered less upgraded ships, less coordination with allies, but a quicker response for Earth’s population. Option number two was eight weeks, and was a solid middle ground. The data was still inconclusive if the combined human fleet would be able to bring enough ships to defeat the enemy. Option three was twelve weeks, three months, and twice as long as option one. It offered the greatest chance of success based on the data from Second Fleet’s battle, but who knew what would be left of Earth by then.

Deja took ten minutes to make a decision. “Option Two. You’ve got eight weeks to get me Earth back Admirals.” Her eyes bore into the leaders of the Commonwealth armed forces. The threat was clear. Come back victorious or on your shield. This was do or die.

“Get me, Berg,” Deja had to fire her old friend, but a change of command couldn’t happen in the middle of Operation Turnaround. “Let’s see if we can’t sneak anything in-system and get some intel to our fleet commanders.

The Commonwealth was committing five full fleets to the effort. Within the first week the Blockies had committed another three, while the Euro’s were coming forward with a full fleet and several assorted task forces. Those task forces were smaller ships, but the Euros would make up the entirety of the massive fleet’s screening unit.

Nine full fleets, thousands of ships, millions of men, not to mention the millions of marines that would be launching in the biggest orbital drop in human history. Everything about the planned assault was the biggest in human history.

Deja knew, and she would be crucified on the altar of public opinion for it all, but she didn’t care. She was an admiral first, a politician second.

Even after all that was done, she’d need to deal with Gold.

***

Mark “Coop” Cooper

Location: North American Eastern Seaboard, Smokey Mountains, United Commonwealth of Colonies

“Yeah, we’re totally fucked,” Coop rubbed his eyes and looked back at the holo-tank. If the CMDR disapproved of his defeatism, she didn’t say anything. In fact, Coop was pretty sure she was asleep with her eyes open.

“No,” Eve chewed her fingernail. It was a bad habit she’d started up in the last few weeks. In terms of bad habits, Coop couldn’t really judge. He’d taken to drinking heavily in his downtime.

It had been four weeks since Earth had fallen to the alien bastards. Hardline comms were still spotty at best, but intel came in from all over the globe of civilians being massacred. The ETs were slowly exterminating them, and there wasn’t much the remaining military forces could do to stop them.

The only place they were safe was behind their massive shields in the mountain bunkers. Those were stuffed tighter than a virgin on prom night, and they were taking in any refugees that happened to make it to their front doors. It had been three days since they had one of those, and the reason was right outside.

The main assault force of the alien invasion had completed a sweep of their AO and headed back to face any remaining opposition. Intel was still limited on the enemy forces, but Coop estimated anywhere between five and eight thousand enemy troops were camped on either side of the Blue //ridge mountains, and were doing their level best to smoke out the cowering humans.

the pain in his shoulder reminded him of that. Eve and him had been leading counterattacks to keep the aliens guessing and cautious. They’d just returned from one two hours ago, and it already looked like they’d need to leave within the hour the repel the aliens’ response.

Of the entire First Battalion ACR, only six MOUNTs were confirmed to have survived the enemy landing. Eve’s whole team was dead, and of Coop’s team, only Camilla survived and that was just barely. Her MOUNT was barely functional, and she was in a medically-induced coma, but she’d made it to a complex down in Tennessee.

The only other MOUNT on the east coast was in a bunker up in the Catskills, with the others hunkered down in the Rockies out west. The ACR’s officers were gone. CMDR Snow had been killed in an orbital strike on one of the many FOBs set up to respond to the alien’s invasion. He’d survived the strike itself, but not the landing wave of BAMF’s that followed.

Humanity had a heathy respect for the tech imbalance and lethality of the BAMF’s, but their own people had been doing their research. Coop had sat through more than one briefing on the biology of the ET’s trying to kill his homeworld. Most of it was standard bipedal, carbon-based life form crap. He’d seen the ugly fuckers face-to-face. He didn’t need a biology lesson when he knew running them through with his blade would kill them easily enough.

The part that had been interesting was when the science weenies came out and told them the BAMFs were actually female. Eve and grinned a little at that point, when Coop’s jaw just dropped in surprise. He said something about big-ass bitches and got a punch for his trouble. Even more interesting, the biologists had uncovered interesting parts of the aliens’ brains that suggested some type of bonding linkage between BAMF and roach. The scientists called it a bonded pair. Of the handful of nearly dead samples the MOUNTs had returned to them for study, there was an empirical connection between certain BAMFS and roaches. More interestingly, when a roach of BAMF in a bonded pair was killed, there was a massive dump of hormones into the surviving member’s body. They learned that the hard way when a just-about-dead BAMF broke through its restrains and killed two of the experimenting scientists. It took two HI troopers to put the thing down after that, but it gave Eve and Coop ideas.

Kill the roaches, and the BAMFs went into hormone-driven berserker rages, which made them more dangerous but less coordinated. It was tough fighting, but they’d come out on top every time so far; although, their armor had resembled swiss cheese a few times. If the BAMFs died, the roaches tended to suicide, so as long as you kept an eye out for the sneaky bastards you could kill them pretty easily. It was a fight they were slowly losing, but they were making the enemy pay dearly for every meter. The MOUNTs maintenance teams were keeping score of their charge’s victories, and notching kills on the servicing equipment. So far, Coop was up by two with a total of eighty-seven kills.

Their Battle AI’s had volumes of data on BAMF fighting styles. Enough that the two pilots could conceivably put the MOUNTs in autopilot and let the armor fight the battle. Neither warrior was entirely comfortable with that, but with them going on ninety-six hours without sleep, they might have to give in out of necessity.

“You saying no doesn’t make us any less fucked,” Coop yawned. “I’m going to go get a stim and suit up.”

“That’s your sixth stim today,” Eve frowned as he turned to leave.

“I can sleep when I’m dead,” he called back casually.

“You come back alive or I’ll bring you back to life and give you a good spanking before killing your ass again,” she shot back without any hit of jest.

“You promise?” Coop couldn’t help himself.

She gave him a hard glare, but her lips eventually slid up into a grin. Battles like this always got them both horny as hell. It probably wasn’t healthy, but they were going to die soon anyway, so neither really cared about their long-term mental health.

“Let me know if you need me,” she answered instead. They wouldn’t reveal their only other combat-capable MOUNT unless they desperately needed to. “Looks like you’ve got a company-sized force heading for Section Twenty-Two. The guns there are offline from some residual energy that leaked through in the last orbital strike. Maintenance said they should have them up within the hour.”

“Keep the bad guys contained until the big guns can blast them, check,” Coop gave her a lazy salute and headed out.

He had some ET’s to kill.