“You’ve probably learned in Military History all about how the Battle for Limux Grand happened, and how it lasted for six straight months, and how we lost millions of people and countless droids at the cost that passed tens of trillions of credits.

“What you cannot imagine, though, is what it felt to be dropped into that hell. At a time, I carried the rank of Two-Star-and-a-Half-Moon Lieutenant in First River, sixty of the finest special force storm troopers under my command. And you know why they called us First River, don’t you?

“Shit, you could not make that shit up,” Timothy talked as he moved down the transporter. Then took his shirt off, exposing his muscled body marked with scars he earned since his last rejuve.

"It’s not like we did not know what we were getting ourselves in. We started to take casualties even before we got close to the planet. Two class M5 battleships were blown to smithereens, over fifty thousand single and double sitters as well. Sure, we did not those numbers then, but when you fly in a special-unit frigate and see all the space burning around, you get to add things up really fast.

"Oh, yeah, we knew it was going to be a carnage from hell even before we got there. But one thing is to know, and the other thing is to see it with your own eyes. Never mind that none of my troopers were softies and only a few have not been combat-vetted already.

"At first, when we moved to our transporters and were dropped for the planetary assault, my girls and boys were all pumped up, almost cheering, trying to juice themselves up. I frankly was shitting myself. Even before I saw the planetary defense blow up the first of the transporters with two units of sixty people inside.

"Boom, and just like that. Blown to dust. Never to laugh, never to be seen again."

Timothy stood by the dark wall of the transporter and then looked at Marv.

“I need the suite,” he said, and Marv pressed a few buttons on the control for the wall to disappear, and half a dozen of shiny black trooper armors popped out, together with full helmets and power boots. Made Timothy whistle, eyes suddenly shining with a different glow.

"Many other transporters did not fare better. When they hit us, we were still some fifteen hundred feet up. I knew we were going to blow, so I ordered the drop. Rather take a chance that your power boots might not work right than to wait for the ship to completely cracks up.

"Luckily, my boots worked just fine, but you really could not activate them too fast or in a straight-line manner as that would slow your descent down and provide an easy picking for the sharp-shooters below. No, you had to use them to move the path of your descent in a zig-zag form, the tricks I taught my troopers weeks before.

"Except, many did not have a chance to master the technique, or they froze with fear, or their boots did not work right, or they just got unlucky. But that day, Linux Grand rained dead Union troopers, dropping like giant balls of hail made of bones and muscle and blood.

"You try not to see all of that, not then, not now."

Timothy took a deep breath and exhaled it.

"Marv later told me that their defense system was projected to be seventy-five percent effective, but in my experience, it was more like ninety-five percent effective because, by the time we landed and organized ourselves, there were only twenty of my troopers left and another dozen from the other units. Not a single transporter was able to land. Those who survived were the ones who followed our lead.

"Our objective was clear. We had to take down the main planetary missile battery. It was a few hundred meters down under the ground, deep enough that no ordinary planetary bombardment could ever hurt it. It was supposed to be a self-sustaining unit with silos doors opening only when the missiles would fly out. Now, we could have just dropped some explosives down the opening and be done with it. No, they do not send First River for a simple task like that. Because then, you understand, they would have to go to each single one of them batteries and do the same.

"The central battery was connected with all the other ones, coordinating firing all around. So, the idea was to get into its AI and load a virus into it, disabling the whole system. But to do that, we needed to get down. And nobody told us exactly how.

“We landed about a mile from the military base on Retron Island and faced hostilities before we could even organize ourselves. The small village we landed in... it was all in ruins already. The light bombardment that our droids did during the last few weeks took down the roofs and most of the walls of any ground-build structure, but-”

“I bet there was a lot of dead Miths around,” the young captain said and turned around to look at Marv who suddenly seemed to have a bone stuck into his throat. He was trying to loosen it up by making some strange noise.

“Oh, yeah,” Timothy said without paying them any attention, more interested to active a brast plate he just put on and see if it’s fully powered up. “There were a lot of dead bodies around. Mostly civilians. Droids plowed that area as best as they could. But we still came under heavy fire.

"Now, you know how the normal troopers would organize themselves. A group of fifty or hundred abrest, five to ten lines deep, activate the shield and then just march toward your objective and shoot down everything that moves as your shield prevents the ground fire to pass through, right?"

“Yes, there are a lot of variations, but that’s a textbook advance,” the young captain confirmed.

“Well, it did not go so well on Linux Grand as the Mith located many of their strategic resources inside deserts, where the ground was soft and they could use crawlers to sneak underneath the advancing troops and blow them up from below. Well, we landed on hard ground, but funny thing was that to get to their base, there was a clearing of more than a mile of sand only. I saw that trap right away, and I figured an assault of a few thousand soldiers would not be successful let alone a few dozen of us.

"My only objective back then was to survive. Call for reinforcements that probably would not come and try to stay alive for as long as I could.

“Seems you did very well.”

“Well, one thing I became good at was firing this gun,” Timothy said as he took one of the weapons from the opened armory. “Multiple Purpose Rifle Model R 25, or Classical MUP the way it’s often referred to. Now, mine was somewhat modified. I had triple energy storage which gives you enough charge to keep on firing it for two hours straight.”

“And I bet you used it all up there, didn’t you?”

“Yes, yes I did. Even before I landed. As I flew down, I nailed about half a dozen of the ground troopers shooting at us. And so did my other troopers. I taught them right."

Timothy kept on talking oblivious to the deepening of frowning on Marv’s face. And that bone in his throat seemed not to be going anywhere.

"Well, so, after gathering everyone around, we divided ourselves in a circle of ten each, activated our force-shields, and went through the main village street shooting down everything that moved. Xera, my second in command-”

“There he goes about his Xera,” Sornia suddenly joined in.

“Well, she really energy-blasted anything that moved. Walking next to her, I did not even have to fire a weapon. So, we walked to the edge of the village, and I saw that stretch of sand in front of me, and I ordered my troops to stop. I set up a defensive parameter and put together an energy-absorbing shield - you know those huge done-like suckers that charge your weapons and batteries every time someone shoots at you. Now you can see them everywhere, but back then, they were something of a novelty. It was supposed to give us an edge. Certainly saved my life there.

"So, I knew we could not stay there, but what the fuck, where was I supposed to go? The sky is burning above. Their air units are fighting off our droids, the planetary assault landing is all over the place, their missiles are being fired from the base a dozen at a time. I can’t go anywhere. If I move to the sand, they’ll just blow us up from underneath. The juice in our boots was almost completely wasted from the landing, so I did not dare fly the empty space, not with us needing our personal shields to be fully loaded up as well.

"The smartest thing to do was not to rush, to be calm and rational. That meant to position a dozen sharp-shooters on the ground and let them take down all the targets inside the base they could find. Let them have some fun, especially if that is the last thing they were to do. And, oh boy. Did I train them to shoot good and have fun, you know what I mean? I mean, those kids then had some fun, major fun.”

“Fun? Major fun???!” was what Marv intended to say, but it came out only as a growling of an angry bear ready to bite your head off.

But Timothy paid him no attention as he took his boots off and started to put their shiny replacements on.

“Now, I do not, in all honesty, consider the Mith to be stupid like many humans do. I actually met a lot of them that were smarter than me, and some that were just as dumb as some of us humans. Well, funny thing was that whoever was commanding the defense of that military base was of a later kind, the dumbest fucks you could find. Because you know what they did?

“Something very stupid?” the young Captain asked, obviously encouraging him to continue.

“Yes. It seemed our sharpshooters were pestering them so much they decided to do something about that. First, they started to fire at us,” Timothy said and then started to laugh. “Like those idiots had no clue what we had. Our energy-absorbing dome was just taking all that energy and feeding us! And when they saw that is having no results, they sent in a convoy of about ten vehicles at us!”

Timothy laughed at that as if that was the funniest thing ever.

“And when I saw those vehicles starting to come out of the base, I knew that was our way in. I mean, they blew up all our heavy ground armament in the sky, and then, they give us those.”

“So, what did you do?”

“Ordered the droids to start blowing the sand up so to create the blind screen and pulled my troops back in the village for an ambush. We did not have that much time to set it all up. But it proved enough. I marked the heaviest of incoming MECks for droid destruction, the ones who could hurt us with their met projectiles, while the ones with energy weapons I ordered to be shocked which meant…”

“Your protective EA dome would be taken down.”

“Not just EA dome. Our droids would need to move out as soon as they destroy heavy MECKs, all our guns would need to power down, our personal shields as well,” Timothy said as he stared at the young Captin with the crazy shine in his eyes. “We’d go dark age.”

“Yes, the electro-magnetic shock would toast everything down, yours and theirs,” the Captain said with understanding. "But I would not think it wise to go hand-to-hand combat with the miths."

“Exactly. And that's what they thought too. Too cocky. But my troops were not regulars like yours. Special forces, First River, meant to be sent in first to make the blood flow like a river. I trained them in martial arts and cold killing for a very long time. The Mith had nothing on us."

"Yeah," Timothy said as he took his belt-wrapped pistol he placed next to his duster and unwrapped it.

Then he made the cylinder roll a few times, looking at it.

"It was time for my pistols and swords and knives. It was time for cold steel. Cold steel to cut some Mith down,” he said with the craziest of smiles on his lips. Then he took the pistol, wrapped it up again, and placed it in a storage area behind his lower back.

"I bet you killed a lot of them, didn't you?" the Captain asked.

"The first I shot down was the one riding the Rec Vehicle, attending the heavy machine gun there. I shot him between the eyes, and his head exploded. That was the signal to activate EM blast and when we hit them with it, their electrical vehicles and guns just went dead. It took them a moment to realize what happened, but when they did, they ran out of their vehicles all furious and blood-hungry, swords and knives out, pissed beyond description. But their anger served them nothing. We waited for them."

Timothy got so deep into telling the story that he did not hear the crescenting of Marv’s growling, did not see how he got up from his seat and started to approach him. "After I blew a few dozens off and was left with no bullets, I took the sword out, and then some serious Mith blood-letting started.

“Mith blood-letting?!?” Marv said through his teeth as he towered over Timothy.

Suddenly, Timothy stared at Marv and only had enough time to put the helmet on before Mith’s heavy fist came down on top of his head.