Eve Berg

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

“Fall back by company!” the LCDR yelled over the net in panic.

Eve kept the reply to herself, but grit her teeth in anger. They had the enemy pinned and confused in their L-shaped ambush. They should be pushing now; showing a little violence of action, but the colossal alien tank was moving in.

She ignored the moving mountain as the BAMFs finally got their shit together. Most of the roaches were dead, killed by the mines and thermobaric artillery barrage, so the BAMFs were in full-rampage mode. That’s good. One of the bigger monsters’ charged straight toward the linchpin in the L-shape; right where Eve was standing. The grunts and HI around her hammer the ET with everything they had. A rainbow of color splashed the enemy’s shield but it kept coming.

she told herself as the nightmarish creature roared and powers through the incoming fire.

The BAMF was firing. The grunts in their entrenched position were well-defended, but they still took casualties. Men and women were torn apart at the BAMF’s beamers slams into, and pierced, the squad-level shields. When it was close enough, the alien leapt into the air, beamer on continuous blast in one hand, while it drew it’s wicked-looking dagger in another.

Eve had been tracking the enemy, and unloaded on it with her graviton cannon. The heavy ball of projectile gravity smashed into the BAMF’s weakened shield, penetrated, and blew chunks of the creature’s armor and torso into the air, while arresting its forward movement and throwing it backward. It dropped dead a dozen meters from the grunt’s front lines. They cheered the enemy’s death, but didn’t have time to celebrate. They shifted fire and kept bringing the heat.

Eve watched her sensor and saw the company farthest forward start to pull back. They’d filter behind the main defensive line and pull back to reinforce the shorter length of the L-shaped ambush. Gradually, all the companies on the long edge would pull back, until it shifted from an ambush to a blocking force. Depending on how the engagement commenced, they’d start to pull back from the blocking formation if things went to shit.

As if the universe was waiting for her permission, the first retort of the enemy’s mobile mountain split the air. The ball of energy discharged landed short, due to the friendly aliens being in close proximity, but it still killed several grunts with proximity splash, and acted as a giant flash-bang to the entire battlefield. Sensors went haywire, and Eve was forced to rely on her eyes to continue engaging the enemy.

Another sharp retort echoed through the air as the Commonwealth bunker’s heavy guns engaged the enemy. A second eruption of light as the big artillery round smashed into the enemy’s shield. It fails to penetrate, but it made a hell of a show.

she was more than happy to let the heavyweights duke it out. She needed to focus on killing as many BAMFs as she could.

She charged up her next-gen magnetic accelerator, aimed it right into the center of the enemy formations, and let loose. The air ignited as the round traveled downrange, smashing through weakened shields and bodies as it passed. Eventually, it hit something important that went boom. Her AI alerted her to the failure of an enemy area-shield, so she relayed the data to the HI troopers. The fire mission occurred in seconds, and more thermobaric rounds blew the enemy to smithereens.

she thought, just as an earth-shattering crack echoed behind her. She looked back and saw a chunk of the mountain sloshing off the range like dead skin off a burn victim.

Sensing an opportunity, the enemy artillery turned its big guns on the Commonwealth soldiers and opened fire.

***

Mark “Coop” Cooper

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

“Fuckety fuck fuck,” Coop’s MOUNT ate up the distance as he sprinted across the battlefield.

“Someone help!” the LT in command of the company on the left flank yelled as his troops continued to get slaughtered.

“I’m coming,” Coop replied evenly as he hurtled a small gorge and took beamer fire up the ass. Thankfully, his shield was full strength back there. “Stay calm,” he tried to talk the panicking officer down. “Keep sending fire missions to the bunker’s gunnery teams. They’ll fire danger close, so make sure to keep your head down.”

“They’re only fifty meters away. Jesus . . . I just lost all of second squad.” The man was on the verge of hyperventilating.

“Almost there,” Coop pushed his MOUNT as fast as he could. He crested a rise, his big metal ass making a giant target for anyone who bothered to look up.

His AI processed the battle in front of him quicker than he ever could. Under the protection of an artillery barrage, the ET’s had moved close to a company-sized force to the flanks and was giving the Commonwealth the squeeze. The troops there were well entrenched, supplied, and trained; despite the LT shitting his pants at the moment. They were holding on by their fingernails, but it didn’t take a genius to tell that the BAMFs numbers and weight of fire were just too much. If they didn’t get any help soon . . .

The AI analyzed the scene and targeting icons popped into Coop’s vision He didn’t question the AI. It had literally saved his ass. He just hit accept on the authorization request. Over a dozen micro-missiles popped free of his chest plate and screamed toward the enemy positions. They went from zero to hypersonic in the blink of an eye. Coupled with their explosive packages, they tore toward the enemy’s right flank. It was a risk to shoot across the enemy’s entire formation, but he had to take it. If he could make the push falter on the edge of the maneuvering element, that might give the Commonwealth grunts enough time to recover and counterattack.

The risk cost him forty percent of his missiles to anti-missile fire, but that still meant over half a dozen made it through. They went off with a boom, and brought the push to a halt. Only two BAMFs went down, due to already depleted shields, but it was enough of a shock to make the remaining forces look for cover . . . and then the fire mission finally arrived.

The earth shook beneath him; enough that his servos whined to keep him upright. As the shockwave spread, a mushroom cloud of destruction rose from the place where a tight grouping of explosive shells and energy beams had torn into the enemy formation. Over a dozen BAMFs were obliterated, and many more roaches were barbequed in the resulting destruction. The resulting confusion of BAMFs going berserk added to the offensive being broken. People still died as the BAMFs mindlessly fired their beamers and blasters into friendly positions, but it looked like the LT could handle it from here. The battalion commander was already moving a squad from their reserve troops to reinforce the flank. It looked like Coop had saved the day again.

“Ballboy, reposition to sector seven. We’ve got incoming artillery, and expect another push,” a comms specialist back in the bunker relayed.

“On it,” he pivoted on his big metal legs and started to crest the rise again to head back into the thick of it.

With one foot midair, all of his sensors suddenly blacked out. It felt like god himself had given Coop a push. The MOUNTs servos were unable to compensate, and he was flung forward, down the small hill, and toward the gorge he’d leapt over before. He felt the MOUNT smack chest-first into the ground and slide several meters before hitting a boulder that brought him to a stop.

“What the fuck was that?” he asked out loud.

“I’ve detected a massive energy discharge,” the AI’s voice sounded fuzzy, like it was trying to talk through static. “Rebooting systems.”

Seconds meant everything in combat, so the three it took for the sensors to come back online was way too long for his taste. Reality blinked back into existence, so he rolled to his side and came up with his graviton cannon scanning.

He didn’t find any targets, but . . . “Rear shields are down to ten percent,” the AI offered, which blew Coop’s mind. He’d only taken the beamer to the ass. How could he . . .?

“Incoming,” the AI warned, just as a downpour of soil and debris crashed down on him. His shields acted as an umbrella, so it didn’t touch him, but the sight of debris falling like rain for nearly twenty seconds underscored whatever had happened had been big.

“Bunker?” he inquired, but didn’t get a reply. His own sensors showed the energy discharge in the area was high, and it would take several minutes to clear enough to get comms back online.

Coop went to crest the rise and see what the hell had tossed him like yesterday’s leftovers, but there wasn’t a rise anymore. There was a crater. It spanned nearly a hundred meters and was still smoking. Part of the mountain was even gone. He could see the reinforced structure of the bunker still steaming, and imagined the whole place reeked of ozone. As for the company whose asses he’d just saved. They were just gone.

this could only mean one thing.

So far, the enemy’s orbital bombardments were sporadic at best, and usually only focused on occupying the bunker’s mountain guns when they were moving troops. The LCDR suspected it was because they weren’t a big target in the grand scheme of things. They were a small-to-medium sized bunker complex, and not a threat to anything not directly in front of them. Apparently, that had changed.

he tried to see the positive. He couldn’t think about the eighty troops they’d just lost. He still had a lot of fighting to do.

Several minutes later, he got a signal from the bunker. They confirmed a ship from orbit had taken a shot at them. Apparently, Eve was making their lives on the western front a living hell, and they wanted to put the puny human’s in their place. Everyone on the line was showing the ETs that they weren’t going to roll over and die.

***

Sonya Berg

Location: CWS Agincourt, Sol System, United Commonwealth of Colonies

“This is it,” Sonya stood next to ADM Ward on the flag bridge of Aggie. A damage control tech was still putting out a small fire on a control console and working on rerouting the wiring to get the sensor’s feed back up.

“Yep,” Ward answered calmly, as the might of the human fleet lined up against the alien invaders.

All the maneuvering and delaying for time was done for the ETs. They’d gathered everything they could and were sitting in the middle of the least-time-approach to Earth. Several of the Commonwealth task forces had been bloodied in the push forward, but they were now flanked by their Blockie and Euro counterparts. They were a mass of human ingenuity waiting to seriously fuck up the people who invaded their home.

Gilmore was set to give a ra-ra speech, but Sonya and Ward didn’t much care. They were studying the enemy, trying to figure out what they were going to do. They had advantages in acceleration, offensive, and defensive systems; but the human ships outnumbered them significantly.

“A lot of people are about to die,” she said with a sigh. Aggie was deep enough in the formation she might survive.

“We who are about to die salute you,” Ward quoted with a grin.

Sonya knew the reference, and felt a little like the gladiators of old. “Fuck it,” she breathed out all her anxiety. “Let’s get this over with.”