Chapter 37

Stuggart star system, inner system.

Stuggart Prime, Secure Berth Delta-31.

The assault team leader swore, and ducked back down into the hole the fusion charge had drilled into the hangar's floor, quickly followed by his men...not all of them in one piece.

"Persistent bastards aren't they?" Said one of his sergeants, and the leader gritted his teeth.

"I'd say they're a bit more than just 'persistent'." He spat out, before jerking his head towards the growing pile of corpses, both within and around the hole.

It was the third time they'd tried to break out. And for the third time they'd been repulsed. The first one had been a straight rush after the grenades, and the gauss turrets had ripped them to pieces. The second one had been done much more carefully, with armor piercing grenades and guided missiles taking out most of the turrets, and a group giving covering fire while a second one sought to get to cover and establish a foothold.

This time it had been the actual defenders that had retaliated. The assault team leader had heard the stories, but he'd never actually seen a pulser in action.

He did now. A single hit wasn't that bad. Nor a handful really. But the damned thing fired so fast it shredded even his men in power armor if they didn't hit the deck.

For the third rush they'd traded grenade fire with their opponents, and then used one of their precious short range grav missiles to take out the pulser totting bastard.

Their response had been to open up with their plasma guns.

"Sorry sir." Said the NCO, before looking up briefly as a grenade sailed through the hole, and their point defence system took it out. Not all of them were being intercepted, their gear was good but not that good, but at least it kept the enemy guessing and their casualties bearable.

Not least because these bastards were throwing fucking plasma grenades like the things grew on trees!

"It's alright." The leader sighed. "Alright, how are the other teams doing?"

"Beta and Delta have hit their outer perimeter defenses. Resistance is heavy, but completely automated. They're also reporting a significant amount of mines, they estimate they'll be through in 3 minutes."

"And Epsilon?"

"Still holding the perimeter. They haven't seen any response teams yet, but..." The NCO sighed. "They had to have gotten a message out, even through the jamming. Civilian traffic is vacating the area, and there's a lot of movement from the security hub."

"Well, the fusion charge would have had them investigating anyway."

"Yes, but-" The NCO froze, and looked up. "Energy spike! Get do-"

The sergeant was halfway through tackling his employer to the ground when the hypervelocity rifle finished charging, and fired where his leader's head would have been...and where his was now. The NCO shook as a slug of hyper-dense alloys was punched through him at a minuscule fraction of Terra's old lightspeed, and lay still.

*****

"One down." Said Larry, almost laconically as he methodically reset and aimed again with the hypervelocity rifle, before pulling the trigger again. "Two." Again. "Three."

"Good. Maintain suppressing fire! If we can keep their heads down we can destroy them! Come on marines!" Shouted Hector as he fired his plasma gun over the hole their attackers were covering in.

Normally it would have been over in seconds, but the damned people that had made the secure berth had done their jobs too well, and the floor was heavily armored enough they couldn't just dig their way to the enemy through sheer weight of fire.

Which was why he had Larry fetch the Bertha while Sally and the rest of them held the line. Sally's pulser had worked wonders....right up until a guided missile carrying a plasma warhead had hit her square on.

Now Alterian Marine Corps power armor could take that....but Sally hadn't been wearing that power armor. She'd been wearing her heavy assault high verge power armor.

There was no point trying to get her back into the fight. Her torso, or what was left of it, had landed a good 3 meters from the stumps of her legs.

"Sir! They're moving again!" Warned him one of his privates, and Hector swore as a volley of grenades flew through the air. Their own point defence systems fired, but most of them had been taken out in the earlier, overwhelming salvos. He dived to cover, followed by his men.

The curtain of fire that had kept their enemies penned in lessened. It was only for a second. But a second was enough.

Another missile sailed through the air, and one more of his marines fell, and Hector screamed in hatred as he pulled himself back up and opened fire.

*****

"We're going to lose this fight." Said Sarah as she paced on the bridge.

"Possibly." Said Elteria. Then the AI closed her eyes. "Kyre's medical monitoring system went critical. He's flatlining."

The curse Sarah uttered was so vicious it could have stripped the paint off of the bulkheads.

"Screw that!" She began grabbing her own rifle, when she received a communication request through her implants. "Turral?" She said as the channel opened, showing her the chief engineer in the ship's airlock.

"Captain. Permission to leave the ship?" Asked Turral.

Sarah opened her mouth for a sharp retort -which wouldn't have served any purpose anyway, she could talk through her implants without speaking aloud-, before closing it with a snap when she saw what her chief engineer was holding.

Screw wondering where she'd found a miniaturized pulser. She was going to have to sit down with her chief engineer and ask her what the hell she had in that private collection of her exactly.

Sarah gulped, looked to the side at Elteria, who nodded.

"Permission granted."

"Thank you captain."

*****

The assault team leader grunted as the gauss slug hit his chestplate, and ducked back behind the mobile shield his men had brought up, before quickly checking his armor systems.

No penetration...for now. He'd survived at least a dozen hit by now, but his armor was getting seriously battered, and secondary systems were getting strained.

Plus these bastards appeared to have seeded that damned hangar with so many sensors concealment didn't matter. The only reason they didn't shoot them through their cover was because their ammo couldn't penetrate. Except for that damned super gun of theirs-

His train of thought came to an end as the ship's airlock opened. Instantly his rifle was up and covering the door...and he hesitated.

Their orders had been very clear: not kill ANYONE outside of direct combattants, if at all possible. And the...whoever it was in an engineering hazmat suit didn't qualify.

Except that they were holding some kind of canister.

He just had the time to wonder what the hell the person was holding, before they threw it straight at him, and disappeared back into the airlock.

He dodged out of the way with practiced ease, and the cylinder rolled past him, and hit the lip of the hole they'd blown through the hangar. He was on the verge of ordering his people to take cover when it activated.

And the entire universe dissolved into pain and chaos.

*****

An interesting property of artificial gravity field generation was that an unstable, powerful grav generator didn't generate a single unified, fluctuating field, but rather many different small gravity fields, with widely different accelerations and vectors. This was generally something all civilizations discovered by accident when a damaged grav drive wasn't shut down properly or pushed beyond its limit. The gravitational fields started...warping, and shear zones started appearing, where in one place you were accelerated at 5g in a direction, and a few centimeters further you were accelerated at 100g in another.

A gravitational pulse grenade, or just pulse grenade for short, was what happened when a civilization had small enough grav drives and understood the theory well enough to intentionally weaponize that phenomenon.

Even then, the price of such a weapon was usually prohibitive, as was it's weight. But for ripping apart targets, any target, without an energy shield...there was no substitute.

The entire hangar dissolved into complete pandemonium, Hector's marine being given barely enough of a warning to dive for cover before being pelted with fragments of neoconcrete, steel, armor plating and less identifiable substances as the pulse grenade turned the neat, 10 meters across hole in the hangar into a 50 meters deep, more or less spherical crater.

The assault team was reduced to shreds in an instant. Their detonating ammunition, capacitors and in one case portable fusion core just finished eliminating anything remotely identifiable about them.

The only thing that survived the onslaught was the Eternal Seeker itself, the ship's maker having long ago learned how to counteract such weapons. At least up to a certain level of energy.

For a second, there was nothing but shocked silence. Then the marines slowly got up, and scanned the room around them.

"Holy shit...we still had those in the armory?" Asked Larry, almost shocked.

"We didn't." Answered Hector, before turning towards his men. "Helios, Lutz, grab Kyre and Sally, and get them to the medbay. The rest, with me! We need to make sure there's none of these bastards left and seal that damned hole!"

*****

"That was....resourceful, Turral."

"Thank you captain." Said the chief engineer as she stepped aside, letting the marines through as they ran in with the nearly vaporized remains of their comrades in their hand. "Sorry for not warning you, but...there was no time."

Or the chief engineer simply hadn't wanted to give the captain time to try and take the thing from her and try to throw it herself, knowing her subordinate. Still, it would hardly be polite to say so...especially as Elteria would have most likely stunned her and handed the pulse grenade back to Turral anyway.

"Indeed." Sarah frowned as she looked to the side to one of the holographic screens, which Elteria helpfully enlarged. "I don't know if we're out of the woods yet. Sensors say the hole is empty." The ground shook slightly as the marines rolled a crate filled with explosives they'd presumably been intending to lay in the perimeter defensive down the hole, and detonated it, sealing the tunnel in a cataclysmic explosion. "Not that it's going to matter anyway. But they still have at least two teams coming through out perimeter."

"Three." Interjected Elteria. "Well, the third one isn't going in, but they've deployed around us."

"Denying reinforcements?"

"Exactly."

"Wait." Sarah blinked. "How do you know that?"

Elteria smiled. Sarah had a wolfish smile that could make admirals shiver.

Elteria's psychotic smile had made Infinite Systems Federation officers take a step back.

"The first thing I did after telling our people to get to cover was link in with Aura. Believe me, they might take us out, but they are not surviving it."

"What did you girlfriend do?"

"Her? Nothing! She just...suggested that the defense force might want to worry about someone using fusion charges meant to clear the way for nuclear warheads on the planet." The AI's smile became even wider. "We have three entire divisions of marines dropping in from up high, ETA 5 minutes, and the orbital defense grid has been powered up."

Sarah swallowed, heavily. Stuggart's orbital defense grid wasn't the heaviest one in Thaumor, that honor went to Arrival Prime, the Protectorate's nominal capital.

It still encompassed enough satellites and battle stations to crush the entirety of a Dominion fleet several times over. Stations and satellites who were also equipped with orbital bombardment weapons to counter any attempted landing or ground side attack on the world above which they were standing guard. Together they had enough firepower to wipe out all human life on Stuggart ten times over.

And that was without using their anti ship weapons.

"So we just have to hold on."

"Precisely."

"Right. Status on our wounded?"

"Just got Sally and Kyre hooked up." Elteria winced. "They'll live. Probably. I'm pulling out the backup clones and preparing for emergency transplants." It was a standard operating procedure for every Near Verge warship to have a certain number of 'blank' generic clones they could transfer the minds of mortally wounded soldiers into. You had to get them in time to the medbay of course, and the procedure could fail, but there was a reason fatalities in Near Verge militaries were as low as they were.

And worse come to worse and they ran out of clones, or the person was too damaged for the transplant to take place....well, they had the equipment necessary to digitalize someone.

"Alright, now, Turral. Unless you have another trick up your sleeve, I have to ask you something."

"Yes ma'am?"

"How long do you think it would take you to gather every scrap of power we have an activate one of our point defence guns? I don't want a full power shot, or a second one." If nothing else, the first one would probably kill everyone in the hangar, which was definitely something they wanted to avoid. "We just need to make them hesitate."

"A minute. Maybe three. I'll get right on it!"

Sarah nodded as the connection cut off, quickly checking that the chief engineer was indeed running towards engineering, and not her quarters to grab another weapon from her collection, before turning towards Elteria.

"Can you forward Hector the data from the orbital defense grid." Sarah held up her hand. "We nearly lost two of our own. We still might lose them for that matter. I really couldn't give less of a shit if we're supposed to have them or not. Ask Aura if you must, we need that data."

Elteria nodded.

"Aura just...accidentally forwarded me one of the access keys to one of the secure data feeds. I'm forwarding the live data to Hector." Sarah licked her lips. "Aura also charged me to tell you to not pursue them if they retreat. The defense grid will take care of them."

Sarah reflexively looked up at the ceiling, and shivered, before nodding.

"Of course. Not that we'd be able to pursue them anyway." Sarah blinked as the airlock opened again, and Elteria automatically switched one of the holographic displays to show the camera feed from it.

And the three persons, two in their black, heavy assault power armor, and the last one is a chameleon suit of force recon armor, carrying a large cylinder and a tripod.

"And it looks like our newest recruit is going to help make sure they run away. Fast."