Mark “Coop” Cooper

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

“Pull back!” Coop yelled as he ducked behind a rocky outcropping.

A second before it looked like the world was nothing but beamer fire heading straight for him. Some of the grunts holding the perimeter followed his orders, others didn’t, or just weren’t fast enough. The barrage of energy was followed by dozens of beeps as his AI registered soldiers flatlining.

“Fuck!” he yelled as he poked his grav-cannon out and fired off some computer assisted shots.

For the past fifteen minutes, all they’d been doing was giving ground to buy time. The big guns supposed to be covering this sector needed to be fixed five minutes ago. They’d been hopping from cover to cover, gradually pulling back from shield barrier to shield barrier. They had one company-grade generator and a ton of squad-level ones to leapfrog the last kilometer back toward the mountain bunker’s entrance.

“Ballboy, Command, we need you to hold there,” the frantic voice of a PVT put on comms duty squeaked. “If they get any closer the cannons won’t have a bead on them.”

“Motherfucker!” Coop didn’t bother to respond. Half the force he’d come out with was dead, and the other half was cowering behind whatever cover they could find.

He toggled to his weapon’s menu and loaded up a shell from his next-gen accelerator. He needed to buy time with some boom-boom. In a not-so-smooth motion, he pivoted around the outcropping, smashed his heel-spike into the ground, and fired. Two beamers reached out to him by the time he got the AI-aimed shot off. Those quickly died as the ignited-atmosphere drew a line from Coop to the target.

“A pile of boulders?” Coop questioned the wisdom of the artificial brain until he saw the aftermath. “Clever girl.”

Piles of rocks were scattered all over the place leading up to the mountains. They’d provided decent cover for Coop and the grunts as they did their fighting retreat, but the AI saw another use for them. A beamer, with enough time, could burn through the rocks, but a hyper-dense projectile smashing into them created a claymore-like effect. Any BAMFs or roaches hiding behind the rock were obliterated, but the shrapnel created by the impact created a fifty-meter kill zone; and everyone out to a hundred meters felt it. The AI’s ingenuity had taken down at least a dozen BAMFs and just as many roaches.

The wailing of the BAMFs who’d lost their roaches resounded through the air. “Here they come,” he announced. This part they could deal with.

“Cannon’s going operational in ten,” Command finally announced back as Coop and company blasted the second wave of berserking BAMFs with everything they had.

“About fucking time,” a pair of shots to a BAMF to his left that a full squad of grunts was hammering with heavy weapons did the thing in, but it opened him up to take some punishments.

{Forward shields depleted.} His AI informed just as he pulled back. He earned a scorch mark across his chest for his trouble.

“Reroute power from rear shield. I don’t plan on getting shot in the back,” he punctuated the statement with his swatters swinging out to probe the enemy with hundreds of rounds.

He couldn’t really hurt a BAMF with the smaller rounds, but he could find any roaches trying to sneak up on him. That was exactly what happened as a shield sparked and camouflage failed less than a hundred meters from his position. He pounded the area with his grav-cannon until it was roadkill and then took out the BAMF that tried to avenge it. As he pulled back behind the cover of the rock, he felt an itch between his shoulder blades.

an eeriness settled over the area. It was quiet.

“Redeploying company shield,” the grunts lugging the bigger generator took the lull in the battle to move to the rear. “Cover us.” No beamers reached out to tag the grunts as the rushed toward the rear with the metal box carried between the four of them.

no sooner had the words formed in his mind than a whooshing sound told him all he needed to know. He turned his head to the sky and his sensors automatically dimmed. Three small suns were hurtling in an arch in their direction.

“Incoming!” he yelled. He threw a rally point up on the HUD of everyone in the AO. “I’ll cover you.” He covered the distance to another outcropping in a few bounds, slid into position, and scanned for targets as grunts hustled for his position.

As planned it had been right in the path of the generator team, who’d promptly dropped their heavy cargo and were busy booting it up. “Come on baby,” the SGT in charge of the team stroked the side of the box lovingly as it hummed to life. “That’s my girl.”

The glowing balls of plasma had reached the apex of their arch, and gravity was bringing them back down. “Hustle or die!” Coop yelled over the net as more grunts arrived.

The only thing working in their favor was the ET’s chosen form of artillery, large plasma balls, moved slower that its Commonwealth counterpart. Where it lacked in speed, the ET’s indirect fire weapons more for made up in destructive force. Anyone not inside the company force field, and the many squad-level shields being activated inside the company-grade shield was for sure dead. Coop put the rest of the grunt’s chance of living at sixty-forty even with all the shields. He’d probably be ok . . . he thought.

“Eight seconds,” he relayed to the grunts as the time ticked down in the corner of his vision.

As he stood there, using his bulk to shield a squad of grunts, he marveled at how indirect-fire tactics had changed in the last few weeks. Normally, it was scatter, hit the ground, find cover and hope you didn’t catch some shrapnel while praying the swatters did their job. Now, swatter-rounds just got turned to nothing by the plasma-artillery’s intense heat. Everyone had to huddle together under multiple layers of shields in the hopes they lived. If the shields failed everyone died, but anyone with several hundred meters of the balls not under shields was going to get cooked anyway.

“Shit, redirected power to rear shields!” Coop nearly forgot, and got a word into a prayer that the AI was fast enough before the world exploded around him.

Heat light and force blacked out his sensor array, leaving him in the darkness of the MOUNT’s womb. Since he was still breathing, and not boiling, he assumed the shields had stood up to the test. He’d have to wait for sensors to reboot before that happened.

That happened two seconds later as the world popped back into existence. {All shield emitters at ten percent power,” the AI informed.

and it looked like most of the grunts were as well.

“Company shield is shot, we should . . .” the SGT never even got to finish as a beamer flashed out of the destruction around them, punched through the degraded squad-shield and burned a fist-sized hole in his chest.

“Move!” Coop pivoted, putting his own bulk between the grunts and the beamer. He hammered the area with his grav-cannon and got the BAMF to maneuver. Unfortunately, two more lit him up from alternating directions.

“Fuck,” his shields were already down to five percent as he returned fire. “Get to the bunker,” he yelled, just as the first retort form the Commonwealth’s big guns reached him. The destroyed landscape in front of him exploded as something big, fast, and with a lot of umph hit where the beamers were coming from. It didn’t matter if they were spaced dozens of meters apart.

“Let’s move!” he continued to use his bulk to cover the grunts as the big guns walked fire in front of their defensive lines. Even with the big guns in the fight, the enemy wasn’t quitting.

A beamer reached out and tagged Coop as he was running. With his shields shot it punched through the outer armor and into the secondary shield around his womb. The BAMFs knew just where to hit them. He twisted as his secondary shield’s strength dropped. An angry red line drew itself across his chest as AI auto-loaded his accelerator. He sprayed the area with his grav-cannon, but the beamers had a larger effective range than he did.

“A hundred meters to go,” he growled to himself. It was getting toasty in the womb.

He needed to round a bend to get to the bunkers entrance. He crossed thirty meters of that space as his AI fired the accelerator without his command and threw him forward. His meters-long arms wind milled as he tried to keep his balance, and only partially succeeded.

“What the fuck?” he yelled at the machine, as he dug himself out of the soil and kept moving. The beamer had gone silent when its owner got pulverized by the hyper-dense accelerator round, but there was another ET there to take its place. The angle was a little difference, which made all the difference in the end.

All Coop felt was his environment suddenly got from warm-summer day to surface of the sun. Excruciating pain ripped through him, which immediately threw him out of sync with the MOUNT. The big war machine stumbled.

{Get us back,} was his last mental command to the AI before he blacked out still twenty meters from the bend.