Chapter Fifteen
Hayden’s World, Subcontinent
Cassius found that a lot of the color had gone out of this new world he had moved to, the joy he’d felt the first few weeks now almost a faded memory.
He still got up and did his routine, exploring Sorilla’s land grant and cataloging the animals there. That was more a favor to Jerry, though, and his students. They were still a long way from knowing every animal that lived on this world, even after decades of inhabitation, and those on the subcontinent were almost entirely unknown to most of the Colony.
He enjoyed the work, he really did, but since word had come back that Sorilla had opted to go native… as one military asshole had the nerve to tell him to his face, once. Just the once, mind you… well, since then he found that it was becoming something he did just because rather than something he looked forward to.
The sunrise was still lovely, though the deep red as the stellar orb rose over the horizon had him checking with the weather constellation and finding that, yes, of course there was a bad storm coming.
Storms on Hayden were serious business, more so than on Earth, especially after the climate modification constellation had been brought online.
Here, the storms were natural, and they were powerful.
Nothing insane, like one might find on some extreme worlds, but still significantly more so than Earth got up to.
Storms were essentially heat engines, taking the heat energy that was distributed unevenly through the planet and, in areas where there was enough of it, turning that energy into a raging beast that could uproot almost anything that wasn’t affixed to the bedrock.
“Looks like I’ll be tightening everything down for the next few days,” He said to himself as he stepped out of the home he’d picked for himself from those Sorilla’s mobile fabrication units had completed.
There were others in residence now, so he made his way over to the closest of the inhabited buildings, finding that the inhabitants were already up and getting ready to tackle the day.
“Morning,” He called, waving casually as he approached.
“Good morning, Mr. Aida,” the military engineer in charge of making required alterations to the SOLCOM facilities said genially. “It’s a lovely one.”
“It is,” Cassius said. “But we’ve got a storm moving in, so I’m going to make the rounds and ensure everything is battened down. Figured I’d give you a head’s up in case you hadn’t checked yet.”
“I hadn’t actually,” The engineer said. “Thanks. I’ll make sure I seal everything up before I call it a day.”
“Good man,” Cassius smiled. “Carry on then. Potluck tonight?”
“In the community hall, yep. Stew again?” The engineer laughed.
“I was thinking barbeque, actually. I’ve got some steaks from the assembler,” Cassius shrugged. “They’re not off the hoof, but…”
“We’re not in Texas, I’ll take what I can get,” the Engineer chuckled.
“Exactly. Make sure your kit is all battened down,” Cassius advised. “I’ll swing back around in a few hours to check up on you. Storm is about eight hours out according to the constellation.”
“Check on that, pal. See you around.”
Cassius nodded and headed off, waving as he did.
SOLCOM had sent in a team to make changes they didn’t want to entrust to him or anyone without active clearance. He figured Sorilla would have approved, though he wished they’d just get it over and done with.
Cassius rather liked the rank and file they’d sent in, but the guy in charge was a REMF all day long.
Speak of the devil.
“Mr. Aida. Good day.”
“Major.”
Major Barrow, no first name admitted, looked like he was ready for inspection at the Pentagon.
Or the SOLCOM Geodesic at Legrange Three.
Cassius wondered how many times the blasted idiot changed uniforms per day, dressed like that in the middle of the Hayden jungle.
“My teams will have the changes made by end of day. Most of us should be out of your hair tomorrow.”
Cassius smiled vapidly, “Not a problem, Major. Are you certain they’ll be able to finish up before the storm?”
“Storm?”
“Constellation is tracking a depression that’s starting to heat up, couple hundred kilometers to the south east,” Cassius explained. “Looks to be a bad blow.”
“I’m sure we can handle a little weather, Mr. Aida.”
Cassius pursed his lips, but refrained from responded the way he wanted to. “Just watch the blow, Major. This isn’t Earth.”
“I think we have it well in hand, thank you.”
Cassius nodded, “Of course. Be seeing you, Major.”
“Be seeing you Mr. Aida.”
Officious blowhard, Cassius thought as he walked off.
He always hated dealing with people who had to have failed their way upward, but somehow it always happened, whether in the military or political arenas, or even civilian life. Somehow, stupid always seemed to float upward.
Wasn’t his concern at least.
Cassius headed for the first stop on his pre-storm tour. Best way to clean up a mess was to keep it from getting messy in the first place. Less work too.
It is a beautiful sunrise, though.
*****
Portal Ship
Sorilla groaned as she slowly pushed herself off the floor, feeling like she’d just been hit by a truck.
That’s not far from the truth, she realized, eyes on the motion through the door.
The Ross had moved a Golem into the hanger ahead of her arrival.
The Golems had been a major pain in her ass back on Hayden during the initial invasion. The Ross used them for everything from combat to earth moving, and they were decent at both as well as everything in between.
Impervious to conventional small arms, it took anti-tank weapons to drop one, though she had managed it with a blade once. SOLCOM blades could cut through damn near anything if you had enough strength behind the blow.
Not an ideal way to handle the problem if you wanted to, you know, have a reasonable chance of survival.
Luckily, she had a little more than a knife this time.
Sorilla powered the Ross weapon up, manipulating the invisible controls as she rose to her feet and leveled it at the door. She started firing as she walked forward, putting increasingly powerful pulses through the gap, tearing chunks out of the big mechanoid with the first three pulses before it stumbled back, trying for cover.
She didn’t let it get there, ignoring the dizziness she was feeling from suddenly moving after the impact to ensure the Golem went down hard. Once at the door, Sorilla checked quickly inside for any more surprises before she fired three more pulses into the fallen Golem to make sure it was down for the duration.
Only then did she step inside, carefully making her way over and through the debris that had resulted from her assault, and got a look around the hangar proper.
Lots of equipment. Too bad I don’t know what any of it does, she thought sardonically, setting the pulse weapon down as she vaulted the big body of the Golem.
Using the full strength of her armor, Sorilla heaved it over to block the door. Figuring that would buy her a little time, she grabbed up the weapon again and quickly scouted around, looking for a terminal she could use.
She doubted it would have the level of access she enjoyed earlier, but she quickly found what was likely an inventory terminal, since it had to be a job and a half to actually find anything in the massive space she was standing in, piled high as it was with what looked like, well, literally everything.
Would be nice if there was something useful, she thought as she opened up the terminal and got the interface humming along.
It was, as expected, an inventory list. There didn’t seem to be any access beyond that, but she hadn’t expected it anyway. Sorilla had a few bits of Ross mathematical identification equations already saved from previous experiences, so she ran those first. Mostly it was just to be certain the system was what she thought it was, but quickly she turned up what looked like crates of Ross pulse weapons, along with various bits and bobs of more mundane items.
She wasn’t looking for anything like that, however. Instead, she focused on using the results to get a decoding algorithm mapped out for the search interface.
Well now, this is interesting… She blinked as she found what looked like an entry for captured technology.
Is that SOLCOM tech? Why would they have that on a ship in Alliance sp… Oh. Shit. Clever bastards.
There was only one reason she could imagine for them to have a supply of SOLCOM issue weapons and gear, and that was if they were planning on sewing a little discord between the Alliance and the human controlled territories.
Probably it wasn’t an immediate plan, Sorilla expected, but that was just speculation.
The inventory showed a pretty decent supply of infantry gear, including a few mobile combat platforms.
That gives me an idea…
*****
How can one individual be this difficult to eliminate when they’re active within our own controlled space?
The question before the conclave was one that several of them had been asking, quietly, to that point but none had a good answer for. The human was clearly better equipped, physically, than any of the Alliance species, including the People themselves. That sort of physical enhancement hadn’t been something any of them bothered with researching for quite some time.
Vessels of unmatched firepower won the day in every previous war they had engaged in. Thugs like the Lucians enjoyed playing around in the dirt, but they were humored by more advanced species. The Alliance allowed them to play their games, killing in dribs and drabs because it was less of an annoyance to let them have their fun than it was to deal with the irritating whining the species was prone to if forced to be more useful members of the stellar society.
The People themselves hadn’t bothered much with advancing the technology of ground combat for… well, not longer than racial memory, but certainly longer than living memory… and the People lived a long time.
Establishing control of a population was a simple matter, when it was something they needed to do, which was rare. Controlling the orbitals of a lower technology world ensured that no matter how they kicked and screamed and whined, you controlled them.
The humans were an oddly developed species, however. They were still primitive enough to use weapons that were generally only seen on pre-stellar worlds, yet they had built stellar jump ships before the People had met them… and once they’d begun tearing into captured technology, those same ships had advanced remarkably quicky.
They were still not truly a Stellar Force, however, by any measure the People might make.
In time, no doubt they would, but for the moment it was clear that the species was still mired in the mud of their ancestral roots.
Ironically, that made them rather irritating to deal with when it was effectively impossible to bring the full power of the People to bear on them.
Entropy was the ultimate example of that, as best the conclave could determine.
Stubborn. Clever, if not particularly intelligent. Equipped with environmental manipulation technology that excelled in areas that the People had long since ignored as irrelevant.
It was a problem.
Entropy is now within deployment sections of the ship. Dispatch additional heavy combat units to support security forces.
Agreed.
*****
The Heavy Combat units of the People, known to humans by the colloquialism ‘Golem’ were not quite the lumbering oafs that they often appeared. Capable of fine manipulation and dexterity in addition to the heavy-duty manipulations they were designed for, the Golems were the backbone of all planetary operations conducted by the People.
Within one of the ships used to extend the dimensional network, that dexterity was of much higher value than out in the natural environment where they were often deployed as large- scale construction movers.
With a swarm of what the humans called Goblins, running around their feet, a pair of Golems stomped through the massive corridors designed for their deployment, coming to a stop by one of the large access doors to the targeted hangar, pausing as the security figures below them moved into position and prepared to open the door.
An unusual sound caused them to pause, confused.
It was filtering through from the other side of the door, and they quickly checked but found no record that matched it in their records.
Requests for identification were sent up the network, but orders instantly came back to move in anyway and eliminate the intruder, so the paired Golems charged their own massive spacewarp weapons while the Goblins below did the same.
The command was given, the massive door flicking away.
The Goblins moved first, charging in as the noise got louder and more confusing. The Golems ran an analysis, noting the harmonics inherent in the sound even as they searched for the source, right up until the sound was drowned entirely out by a barrage of concussive blasts, heavy fire tearing the Golems apart almost instantly as the ship shook with the force of it.
*****
The strains of ‘Ride of the Valkyrie’ blared at maximum volume over the loudspeakers built into the Cougar Light Battle Tank platforms as the wheeled combat vehicles rolled out, their forty-millimeter autocannons firing on rapid-fire.
Sorilla briefly wished that she could have been riding on one of the tanks when the doors opened, but while she might be known for the reckless acts, that one was probably a bit beyond what she wanted to be pulling off, especially without any real backup.
The Cougars had been patiently waiting to be activated, their regenerative power supplies fully charged. Unfortunately, as they were captured kit, they didn’t have full loads, but she wasn’t going to be complaining too much about that.
At least most of them were at least partially functional, Sorilla mused as she followed along in the wake of the combat vehicles, cleaning up anything they missed before the enemy could properly regroup.
The tanks made for good fire magnets too, for all the good and ill that statement implied. At the least it kept the enemy from paying attention to her for the moment.
Sorilla had them fire off all their smoke cannisters, filling the decks with thick smoke of varying colors, with even a little Willy Pete mixed in, though she didn’t expect it to have much of an effect on the Ross forces given their mechanoid nature.
The burn might mess with them a little, though.
She got moving, though, taking advantage of the distraction to break for her next objective. In the wake of her departure, Sorilla sent a final command to the autonomous controllers of the light battle tanks, then encrypted, secured, and closed the link.
Have fun, boys.
*****
The frustration amongst the membership of the conclave was quickly growing to historic levels.
Few entire species had managed to quite so thoroughly infuriate so many of them at once, let alone single individuals. Certainly, the damage was relatively minor, there was only so much a single person could accomplish, no matter how talented, but not everything was about absolute numbers… not even for the People.
The planet should have been destroyed. This problem would have been dealt with!
Cease your faulty equations. Destroying an entire Alliance production world would be the same as declaring a new war with the Sturm, and the People are not prepared for that.
The arguing had been going on for many looped cycles of compressed time, as they watched the feeds over and over again, attempting to properly predict the next actions of the one they had so appropriately code titled ‘Entropy’.
The human soldier was inventive, acted seemingly at random and with no hint of a plan they could determine, and yet seemed to manage to consistently find and set in motion scenarios that caused a maximum of chaos for a minimum of effort on her part.
It was admirable, if she weren’t doing it to them.
The Conclave hadn’t even realized that human weapons had been stored locally, though the reasoning for it was obvious in hindsight. And even if they had they wouldn’t have considered that the equipment was merely dormant, or that Entropy would find it, recognize the potential, and activate it in the midst of the ship.
Where is she going now?
We lost contact.
We what!?
The smoke and scattered shrapnel that the humans caused chaff disrupted many of our scanners, while the… extreme use of pulse weapons disrupted the remainder. Our own security forces blinded us, and she escaped in the chaos.
Fitting for her title.
Cease admiring her and locate her before she destroys this vessel as well!
*****