Harvest, p.4
Harvest, page 4
part #14 of Odyssey One Series
"Dealers, this is Pit Boss," Jennifer 'Cardsharp' Samuels said calmly as she threaded the needle between two of the Imperial sensor pickets that had drifted just far enough apart to allow her through without triggering an alert. "Whale spotted. Stand by for our grand opening."
The Imperial system was one of the oldest space faring systems in the records, having been part of a space flight capable culture for at least the last thousand years or so, and it had the debris to prove it. Jenn could feel more than see the junk just spiraling around in the space her ship was flashing through, the feedback system making the solar wind feel like a warm sunny day on her skin even a dozen light hours out from the primary. The junk was like clouds moving around her, casting shadows and reflecting light from all angles.
Within the Casino, she could feel her Marines... her Dealers... readying themselves for the insertion.
"Target world ahead, performing overshoot... standby for crash deceleration. Brace! Brace! Brace!"
Jennifer killed their spacewarp just as the Casino blew past the inhabited world, just as they skimmed the upper atmosphere.
At a distance just over a hundred and forty kilometers, the Casino dropped out of warp and blew her fields inside out as the planetary gravity grabbed them. At that altitude, they were still close enough to feel more than ninety percent of the planet's gravity and since Jennifer had arranged their angle of approach such that they were pulling almost directly away from the planet as they emerged, everyone was slammed against the far deck at almost a full Earth gravity as she angled the ship around to put the acceleration where it belonged and the internal gravity systems adjusted.
Since their path was not an orbital one, there would only be so long before the pull of the planet won out and the Casino was tugged down into the atmosphere to burn up.
That was their clock.
"Insertion complete, no indication of enemy alert. Ears and eyes open, I want the eyes in the skies open wide," She ordered next. "The whale is here, time to fleece the bastard."
*****
Amanda Micheals shivered a little, maybe half due to the chill of the suit's climate control kicking in to counter the heat that was already building up, but the rest just due to her anxiety and eagerness for the mission.
This was the first mission that she was on that allowed her to face off with the Imperial forces. every Earth human in the sector wanted nothing more than to mix it up with the Imperials, everyone dreamed of payback.
That wasn't in the books on this Op, however unfortunate that might be, the job here was not to engage with Imperial forces but rather to extract intelligence without them even knowing that the Dealers had ever been in place.
"Lieutenant," The Colonel said, coming up beside her. "Your squad ready?"
"Yes Ma'am."
"Good, make certain that your neural scramblers are running." Colonel Keenan reminded her.
"Scramblers are up, the whole squad is covered, Ma'am."
"Good. Do not let those drop."
Amanda nodded firmly. The scramblers were part of the standard loadout for entering the magnetosphere of any world that Command even suspected might have developed an Entity.
The Entities were something that every Officer had a briefing on, straight from the Academy and then again before any operation such as the one she was about to start. They were believed to be gestalt consciousnesses, the sum total of every mind that had lived and died within the planet's magnetosphere.
Some, such as the Entities that currently existed on the Terran Cruisers such as the Boudicca and the Bellerophon, were almost infants in a way. Composed of merely a few hundred minds at most, but those such as Gaia on Earth and, as their best Intel was able to determine, the true power behind the Empire... Well, those were composed of billions of minds, or more. Within their environment, they were nearly omniscient and, while it was not often apparent, their control over the Spacetime that created them made each entity a formidable foe.
The Neural scramblers were designed to mask human minds from them, and were required kit for anyone who might even possibly step foot on such a world.
"My squad knows the op, Ma'am. We're ready."
Keenan leveled a stare that made her want to squirm in her powered armor, but finally nodded.
"Deploy in five. Move it."
*****
An orbital drop was one of the most exciting five minutes of terror Amanda had ever experienced during training. The freefall was bad enough, but there was a period as you entered the atmosphere where the burst of energy from interfacing with the space/air transition point meant that you lost all eternal feeds.
That meant no telemetry, no communication, and even no vision as the armor sealed everything that might be vulnerable to heat and electromagnetic interference. Until you were through the space/atmo interface, you were blind and vulnerable, with only your imagination whispering about everything that could possibly go wrong.
Then, in a shocking instant, it was over.
Cameras booted back up, radio crackled to life, and the previously distant world below that you'd only seen as a magnificent ball floating in the black of space was now world spinning wildly below, rushing up to greet you with all the enthusiasm of a really friendly dog who had no idea oh just how big they were.
"Squad Leader here," Amanda ordered as her network showed all links green. " Check in and confirm disposition for landing."
One by one her team followed procedure, but Amanda was only partially paying attention as she checked for mission updates that might have come in while they were blacked out. Everything was still in line with the briefing, however, so she checked that they were on course and did a remote diagnostic for her team to ensure that their systems were responding correctly.
By the time she was done with that, everyone had checked in by the numbers and they'd dropped another twenty thousand feet.
With the ground rushing to greet them, the entire team were just starting to slow below the speed of sound in local atmo, the shockwave of the transition running through them briefly as they hit thicker air on the way down.
"All squads," Keenan's voice came through the network clear as crystal. "Line up on your targets and proceed according to plan. Be advised, leave no sign that this was done by us. In and out, boys and girls, we have a job to do and part of that is not being spotted."
Amanda just keyed a tingle tone in response, acknowledging the order as she checked the telemetry before sending the command for her team to activate their grav chutes.
Unlike the older, first generation, models that had been in use early in the conflict with the Drasin and Empire, the new chutes were built into their armor and secured. It lost a little of the versatility of having them flying loose as observation drones, but the design change gave each Marine vastly improved mobility when operating planetside.
Not being true 'anti-gravity', the countermass technology in the chutes operated instead to reduce the effective mass of anything held within their field of effect. This meant that a hundred and eighty pound Marine, wearing four hundred pounds of power armor, weapons, and whatever other mission vital equipment they may have could be reduced in effective weight, depending on power applied, to numbers ever approaching... but never actually reaching... zero.
What happened to a Marine in power armor that slammed into the ground when they weighed less than a pound?
The same thing that happened to an ant that hit the ground at terminal velocity.
Not a damn thing worthy of note.
Amanda hit the ground at just short of the speed of sound, her knees barely flexing from the impact as the rest of her team struck down around her in an eerie, otherworldly, flicker of motion.
"Team Bravo, on the ground. Proceeding on mission." She said simply before waving the team forward as she let Sergeant Powell handle the disposition of the team.
"You heard the lady," Powell said firmly, "Danvers you take the lead. We have two hours to achieve the mission goals and get the fuck off this rock. Let's not waste any time."
The marines grunted their response to that and got on the move.
*****
Keenan watched the overview of the operation from her own armor, not only getting the feed from each of the Marines on the ground but also from the drones they'd seeded the AO with just ahead of the landing.
"Imperial response is sluggish, Colonel."
"Try nonexistent," Keenan responded dryly, "but that's why we picked this target. We need to know what the Empire is up to, and this is the only communications node that isn't covered by at least some fleet remnants. I am seeing locals moving in response to the marines' arrival, however."
"Roger that. Looks like Militia, maybe rebels?"
"They're armed, they're in our way, and they're Imps whether they're wearing a uniform or not." She said coldly. "Raise the black flag."
Those words had a taste as she spoke them.
It was like ashes and coffee grinds against her palette, a hint of exultation almost buried in the bitter disgust she felt for speaking them. There wasn't a human from Sol still living who really gave two shits about what happened to any Imp, even the civilians, not after what they'd done to Earth. She was a Marine, though, and her pride was tied to her own perceived honor.
Killing indiscriminately didn't sit with her, but she'd do what had to be done.
Hope they all choose to fight, just the same. Keenan thought dourly as she observed the enemy movements. You're all dead anyway. Go out in a blaze of glory.
"Black Flag, aye Colonel. Orders issued."
*****
Amanda didn't blink as the order flashed on her HUD. She'd expected it, they'd talked about it in the mission brief. No one was enthused about leaving no witnesses behind, but too much was riding on their mission.
They needed to know what the hell the Empire was up to, because it tied directly back to the information her team had pulled from the Imperial ship's hidden computer core and how the Empire had manipulated the Drasin. If those monsters were looking to slip whatever leash the Empire had shoved up their ass, it was worth a hell of a lot more than the lives of some militant Imperials, whether they were Empire regulars, Militia, or rebels.
"Bandits approaching, Ma'am." Powell advised calmly. "Orders?"
"Smoke them."
"Yes Ma'am."
The team shifted just into to form a quasi firing line, barely slowing their advance as they made certain they were out of one another's lines of fire. Then, just before the enemy combatants were in sight, they opened fire.
Burst fire, with guided munitions, was a devastating capability at the interpersonal level and a few dozen rounds of high-ex fragmentary rounds ripped from the EM powered rifles of the Marines, arcing around the corner ahead far too fast to be seen, leaving only the sound of wet splatters in their wake.
"Targets down."
"Proceed on mission."
*****
Jennifer Samuels looked over the board as she waited on news from the Marines. The mission was a high risk, high reward scenario, and it made her skin itch just thinking about what was at stake, what they were risking. She knew that there was no chance that Command would have given this mission a green light if the Empire were at its peak of strength.
It had been a slow crumbling effect, and had taken years... decades even... watching the Empire slump and fall after the war. Frustrating more than satisfying, but the effect had been inevitable in the end.
All empire's fall, we just get to watch this one happen. Can't happen fast enough, though. Jennifer thought with vicious satisfaction. After the final battle of Sol, anything the Empire had touched... well, it all needed to burn.
Watching the Empire slowly fray around the edges of its outlying systems had been frustrating and satisfying by turns, and profitable as it turned out. For people who'd lost their home and families to the very Empire they were watching, feeding off its crumbling leftovers just to survive... It was a bitter pill, but there was satisfaction in watching the slow death proceed too.
Earth may have died that day, but so too did the Empire.
The Empire just didn't know it yet.
Now, though, Jennifer and others were likely going to have to fight beside the shambling remains of their enemies against a greater threat, and that was what this mission was all about.
During their last mission, the Casino's Marines had the opportunity to do what no one else had done before. They'd boarded an Imperial starship, with the permission of the Imperial Commander. That had allowed them access to something that no one had ever previously even suspected existed. An entirely separate quantum computing core with enough data to choke any supercomputer ever built.
Of course, the downside of that was the fact that the Drasin were how they even discovered the damn thing, and those monsters wanted it badly.
It didn't take long to rip through the data that her team had intercepted during the Drasin attempt to draw data from the rig. The Empire had been holding the leash on these things all along, which came as no surprise to anyone of course. The confirmation that the Empire had put a generational limit on the replication of the beasts at least told everyone that the Empire might have been evil to the core of its bureaucracy, and arguably just as stupid, but at the very least they weren't completely insane.
Now, though, it was clear that the Drasin wanted to slip that leash, and they weren't likely to stop anytime soon.
So, once more, Jennifer and the other humans from Earth found themselves in the position of potentially fighting beside the evil bastards who'd pushed Earth's defenses to the point of collapse, who'd bombarded their homeworld... who'd forced the Admiral to activate their last defense.
The Kardashev Net.
Now, Earth was still there of course. There may even be people living on it, she supposed, though no chance of civilization to speak of, but it didn't matter. Nothing could get through the defense network, in fact, if the Drasin managed to jailbreak themselves... Earth might be the last planet left in the Galaxy come a thousand years from now, the only world left after the Drasin finished eating everything else.
They could throw wave after wave of bodies at the Admiral's middle finger, Jennifer thought with wry amusement, and all it would do is give the network more material to build more defense platforms.
Beyond Sol, however, she wasn't sure anything else would survive the plague that those things were, and so the orders were clear. Find the Imperial leash, and ensure that the Drasin never got control of it.
If that meant working alongside the Empire, that was the price. If it meant wiping the Empire from the face of the Galaxy... well, it was unfortunate about the Civilians, she supposed, but they allowed their government to unleash what it had. Every action had a cost, even... especially... inaction.
There was nothing quite so costly as sitting back and thinking that events had nothing to do with you.
"Skipper."
Jennifer broke from her thoughts, half turning, "What is it?"
"The Marines are at the AO."
"Good. Tell Keenan they have a green light. Move fast, we need to be clear of the region before the next patrol sweep."
"Roger that."
*****
"Green light. Move fast, break shit, come home."
Amanda nodded unconsciously in response to the confirmation, "You heard the Colonel. Go! Go! Go!"
The Sergeant echoed her orders as the team broke from cover and sprinted for the target building. It was a fairly unassuming construct, not quite normal to earth human eyes, but the architecture was nothing truly extravagant. Merely a megalithic pyramidal construction of fairly modest dimensions by the stature of Priminae construction at least, sheathed in wind scoured stone that had been polished at some point but now held years worth of abrasive scratches that gave it a matte finish from a distance.
Internal lighting made it clear that the building was in heavy use, but the real tell tale was the security stationed at all points. It was an important facility, that was certain, as if they didn't know that already.
Amanda checked her jammers, both the neural scrambler and the ECM system that should make any security systems deliver nothing but useless garbage to any watchers. They were both green on her suit and on the rest of her team, so she broke cover as well and chased after her team.
The CM system in her armor took the weight off, literally, as she jumped for the wall that served as the first line of defense for the pyramid. Floating over it in a slightly unreal manner, she let gravity have a hold of her again as she cleared the wall, landing with barely a crunch on the other side as she looked for her team.
The Sarge was with Smith and Bateman as she arrived, standing over several fallen Imperial guards.
"Did they get a call out?" She asked simply, otherwise ignoring the bodies.
"No ma'am," Corporal Richard Bateman said firmly. "Took them clean."
"Good. Get moving, we're on the clock now."
"Yes Ma'am!"
The three headed for the doors where the rest of the team was already working on the locks. Amanda watched calmly for a moment before she walked forward herself, the door starting to rumble open as she got within a few dozen feet.
"We're in, Lieutenant," The Sergeant said simply.
"So I see, Sarge. Well, let's finish this," Amanda said easily. "There's a few buckets of ice cream waiting for us back on the Casino, and I'm feeling peckish."
"As you say, Ma'am. Let's move, grunts."
"Ooh rah."
*****
Chapter Three
Imperial Cruiser Burning Rage
Deiven Shiran scowled as he looked over the tactical situation from the Empire Deck of his fleet's flagship.
The Drasin have begun their pilgrimage. Now of all times, they choose this moment in time to move on us. How far the Empire's strength has fallen.
His fleet stood ready to repel the Drasin formation, but whether that would be enough was another thing entirely.
"Enemy forward blade approaching contact point, Fleet Commander."
"I see them," Deiven said calmly. "Redirect fourth squadron to support the forward pincer. Instruct the pincer to hold until the enemy is within the red zone."
