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15 May 3047
Orbital Insertion Point
Shinonoi, Draconis Combine
It was a simple mission.
Get in, get the merchandise, get out.
Of course. That was what command always said, especially when they needed the job done real bad. But the job was never easy if they called him in, and Gabriel knew it. He was born Gabriel Alexander Dante III of the rather obscenely wealthy shipping magnate of the same name and one less ticker after. Now however, strapped immobile inside the ten foot cocoon of metal and ablatives he was simply War.
“Five minutes to drop point,” his pilot called over their secure hard line.
“War to Horsemen, sound off,” Gabriel called out into the stillness and smiled as their voices penetrated the dark of his cocoon each in turn.
“Famine, ready to get off this kite and kiss the dirt I land in,” his second rumbled. The man hated flying, hated drops and loathed orbital insertion the most. Doing it skinny in a wing suit instead of armored up in a mech had been especially trying on him.
“Pestilence,” his sensor and communications specialist called, her voice level and calm in the darkness. “All channels are free of suspicion, we have green light.”
“Death, ready to rock and roll,” came the voice of the last man in his unit. He was scarred, mean, and lived all too well up to his name, in and out of the mech. Which was why Gabriel recruited him to the unit in the first place.
“War to Angel One,” he called, satisfied that all was as ready as it could be. “Give us a thirty second warning and t-minus five on drop.”
“Roger,” the voice said, flat and emotionless as a robot. No one could doubt that both of the aerojocks were good at their job—they had to be just to reach a unit like the one they flew in—but Gabriel wondered how far he could trust them. He always felt that mistrust settle into the bottom of his gut on the final wait to drop.
They had trained him to trust no one but his brothers.
That training had stuck.
“Thirty seconds,” the calm flat voice said softly. Gabriel felt the slight tremor of a wisp of atmosphere, and grinned. It was time to go to work. “Five… Four… Three…” a soft clicking sound came from above as the locks on the pod were released. “Two… One…” there was a soft thump as the separation charges fired and the line went dead.
Gabriel switched to his local as he felt the pod slap into the atmosphere like a rock into a pond. It tumbled a few times and then settled feet down, the faint hissing roar of his drop pod’s reentry rumbling in the background as he hurtled toward the planet below.
“War to Horsemen, in atmo, forming up,” he snapped as the little screen in front of his face lit up. He tapped commands into the pads under his fingers and then settled his thumb on the tiny joystick and worked on getting into a loose formation. They were doing the same, and the four plasma soaked streaks of fire shot like torpedoes through the stratosphere.
“Ionosphere entrance in fifteen seconds,” Pestilence called. “We will lose comms for approximately thirty, then come back up.”
“Confirm, comms going down,” Gabriel called. Static answered him for a little over half a minute then cleared back up as the ride started to get rockier. A red light flashed in the corner of his screen and he noted it.
“Horsemen, first jettison, pop your outer.”
Tapping in the code, he felt the series of tiny pops and the first ablative layer of reentry pod disappeared into a thousand palm sized chunks of highly reflective chaff, the plasma heating up the second skin as they continued to slow. “Second jettison and ribbon deployment in fifteen,” he called as the timer hit the mark.
When the second layer disappeared, the little top cap pulling a long ribbon from the package at its apex, Gabriel grunted, slammed into the restraints hard as drag really kicked in. The third disintegrated around the ribbon, and the fourth popped the drag chute. Blinking his eyes and trying to focus, he waited till the numbers on the speed indicator hit seven fifty.
“Primary release!” he barked, and his finger jabbed the control stud. An earsplitting crack blew the last layer of the pod into six pieces. And then the wind caught him.
It flattened him out like a sledgehammer.
Gabriel blinked his eyes and looked around. The other three were all drifting a bit, and shaking their heads as well. The scrolling timer in his HUD told him they had all passed out for about fifteen seconds as they decelerated. Blinking the last of the fuzzy feeling away, he angled his arms and legs and steered back toward the group in the deepening twilight.
They had come down with the star-fall, and would have all night to drift in to the right spot, do the job and get clear. Just like they had planned it. “Check check,” Gabriel called softly as his got close.
“Passed out, back in the game though,” Famine rumbled.
“Here,” Death growled.
“I am picking up a little concern over the dispersal and destruction of the pods, War,” Pestilence called, already at work. “We descended forty clicks deeper into atmo than most, and they recorded some course correction.”
“Frak,” Gabriel cursed softly. Well, no plan survived first contact, and that old adage even meant the atmosphere of alien worlds hundreds of light years from old Terra. “Keep it frosty, but they shouldn’t be able to deploy in time to intercept.” Turning a little to correct his course, Gabriel headed for the target base. No time like the present to get out of unfriendly skies and back into a mech.
Tapering their bodies for maximum speed while retaining distance over ground, the four of them ripped off like bullets into the night.
* * *
“Flare out at two thousand,” Gabriel ordered. “Chutes at one, and aim for the roof of the mech barn if we can make it that far.”
Watching the numbers slip past like quicksilver in the corner of his helmet’s faceplate, he waited to the last second and then snapped his arms out. The wind caught the sudden increase in the area of the wingsuit and lofted him another three hundred feet before he felt the suit starting to stall again. Death and Pestilence being lighter shot farther, and when they snapped their black chutes into the night, he could tell they were going to make the target.
He and Famine were both well built and tall.
“Not going to make target,” Famine’s voice cut across his thoughts as he folded his arms in and slapped the release on his chest harness. He felt the thump of the compressed gas charge that jettisoned his parachute and then the snap as it unfurled into the air behind him. Pulled out straight, he heard the soft grunt of Famine no more than thirty yards to his left, as his chute did the same. Gabriel kept his eyes ahead however as he was making a beeline for a fuel tanker that was sitting behind the mech barn.
Pulling on the controls, he flared at the last second, and lofted to the top of the tank, but there were railings along the entire length, lining a narrow walkway. “Damn,” he swore softly as he yanked his knees up to his chest and felt his body jar with the impact on his left foot.
Not fast enough, he tumbled head over heels to the other side of the truck and slammed into the gravel with enough force to snap his head forward and down, his helmet hitting the ground with a reverberating thud that instantly yanked his world out from under him.
“War,” he heard Famine hiss in the radio. Something was yanking at his chest, trying to pull him sideways, but Gabriel couldn’t seem to get his feet under him. He stumbled, then rolled, flopping to the side and down as the odd tugging sensation dragged him further into the enemy camp. He felt something warm and wet dribbling down his temple and cheek and groaned.
This damn planet is unstable, Gabriel thought, still unable to right himself. They sent us down on a planet that was ******* unstable. Even then, he could feel the earth sliding around under him, his body slipping into the bowels of Shinonoi.
“War, ******* it,” Famine snapped. “Cut loose of your frakking parachute. It’s dragging you, moron.”
Gabriel tried to wrap his head around that for a moment, but another tug pulled him sideways and the thought tumbled away as he sprawled. Then someone was there, looming in his faceplate. Hands were on him and he felt the tugging stop abruptly, leaving his head reeling as the world stopped moving under him.
“Damn,” Famine muttered, rolling up a ball of black fabric hurriedly and tucking it behind the fuel cell on the truck that had accosted him. Then he was fumbling with the releases on Gabriel’s helmet. “Head wound on the boss,” he heard Famine say when the helmet finally came loose.
“Contacts moving to you,” another voice growled.
There was a sharp ***** in his arm and when he looked down Famine was pulling a syringe out of the meat of his bicep. Fire was starting to spread, and as it did, he felt the cobwebs starting to burn away, along with the ache in his head. He heard boots and looked at the corner of the building. Not far.
As his brain checked back in, racing along on the rocket fuel of combat stimulants, he rolled sideways under the truck to get out of sight, tucking back under the rear axels as Famine ducked around the back bumper. Not good, his mind chimed as he watched three men trot around the edge of the mech barn, looking for the source of the sounds that had brought them off their regular patrol to look.
He felt Famine back in beside him and held his breath. Without his helmet on he couldn’t say anything without risking that they would hear him. Simple and the mission that he had been given didn’t belong on the same planet… To hell with the same sentence.
“Three contacts, moving slow and looking,” he heard Death report. “I can bead on two of them in another five or ten seconds, but the third will shout for sure…”
“No he won’t,” Famine rumbled softly in the shadows of the massive tires that hid the two of them. “Which one?”
“The one closest to the front of the truck.” Death said, his voice little more than a breath in Gabriel’s ear.
“I got him,” Famine said, his voice still low.
Turning to look behind them, Gabriel froze. His pack was laying beside the truck. The cord had snapped and it had fallen there in the open. He palmed the side of Famine’s helmet and pointed, pulling the vibroblade from over his right shoulder. Moving carefully as his head was still throbbing a little, he wormed around and belly crawled to the front of the truck, waiting for the feet to pass.
It happened fast.
It always happened fast in combat.
The soft coughing sound of Death’s submachine gun sounded, and the man turned back to see what had happened at the same instant that Gabriel rolled under the truck’s front bumper and into the open, silenced pistol in his left hand and the vibro blade in his right. There was no time for a scuffle, no time to even think. His pistol yanked twice in his grip and the man got a shocked look as he gurgled.
Holding hands to his chest, he coughed up blood that was pink and foamy. The two holes there began to well with a growing stain as he looked into Gabriel’s face. Narrowing his eyes, Gabriel lined the bridge of the man’s nose up in his sights and the gun yanked again.
Messy. Unprofessional.
Not how he liked to plan his missions in the least. Grabbing the still twitching corpse’s leg he dragged him quickly around the truck and tucked him behind the rear tires in the hopes that no one would miss him until it was far too late for it to matter. As he stood up, Famine held out his pack and helmet.
As he shrugged into the pack, Famine stepped past him, scuffing his boot in the gravel and dirt to cover the trail of blood and bits that the corpse had left behind as Gabriel had dragged him to cover. Once his helmet was secure again, he slipped under the trailer and sighed. The other two men had fallen over each other and were lying in a fair sized puddle of their own blood as well, and no amount of kicking gravel was going to hide that.
“Game is up,” he called softly. “Famine, help me stash these two meat-bags and let’s move before someone finds the puddle.”
“Roger,” came the curt reply.
His leg hurt, his head was bleeding and there were three dead guards on an enemy base two full jumps into enemy space. This was not going well at all. They probably should have just smashed in with their mechs and done a proper job on the place, but command was convinced there was lostech involved and wanted the mechs grabbed from inside to minimize damage to them, in the name of science of course.
After the two corpses were tucked, Gabriel shook his head, feeling the wisps of cobwebs at the edge of his awareness. He had to pilot a battlemech in the next fifteen minutes and he had a damned head injury of all things. Not really a good idea with your brain not scrambled, but the fog in the background was worrying him. He limped up to the door in the back of the mech barn and nodded to Famine on the opposite side of the portal.
“Can you two find any ladders up?” he asked softly, praying silently that they wouldn’t have to fight their way in.
“Yeah,” Death said, disgust thick in his voice. “I am standing on the top of it looking at the inside of the barn, and it is crawling with snakes.”
“Frak,” Gabriel cursed softly. “The day just gets better and better. Famine, let’s do this.”
“No time like the present,” Famine said, his hand closing on the handle to the door. It swung in on oiled hinges and the two of them turned into a room at the back of the offices. The guy at the desk, wearing the uniform of a DCMS military police officer looked up, but surprise was as far as his face got before it evaporated, along with most of the back of his skull, the three round burst from Gabriel’s submachine gun killing him instantly.
Peeking around the corner, Gabriel spotted two more, guarding the end of the hall. His eyes flickered across the three other doors in the hall and he sighed. Unless they opened and checked, enemy soldiers could come out at their back, but if they did, there was an extremely high likelihood that the two guys guarding the end of the hall would hear them, and then they would be screwed from the other end.
Turning back to Famine, he held up two fingers and then drew his index across his throat indicating that they had to go silently. Pulling his vibroblade he slipped out into the hall on feet shod in soft rubberized soles. He never heard Famine move, but he knew the man was there, at his back and a step to the left.
When he got to the end of the hall he never even looked, he just drew back his arm and snapped out a strike, his thumb triggering the weapon’s power source just before the blade made contact with the base of the poor sod’s skull. He reached around the man’s chest, lifting him off the ground and flicking the vibro weapon off but leaving it planted as the guy kicked his feet disjointedly, his eyes rolling as his mouth opened and closed noiselessly.
Beside him, Famine was already backing into the shadows as he took his first step back and then another. It wasn’t terribly hard, but it was still exceedingly dangerous to go in hand to hand with a soldier in the DCMS as most were trained in more advanced forms of hand to hand and blade work than any of the Horsemen… Except Death, maybe… he thought his eyes shifting to the ceiling briefly as he backed into the office they had come in through and laid the man he carried out on the floor.
He smiled as he looked at the blades over the man’s shoulder, but refrained from taking the Katana as he didn’t want to hear it from Pestilence about the importance of the weapon to them on a spiritual level. The sword would go on in the family, handed to the next in line much like the nobility of the Fed-Com handed on their lands. Cleaning his blade on the dead man’s shirt, he looked over at Famine and nodded.
It was time to move.
They had been on the ground for more than ten minutes and they were still nowhere near the mechs. By now they should have been buttoning the doors quietly shut behind them and getting ready to slap the startups. And Pestilence and Death were supposed to tbe going through the offices to find and access the computer core that the Dracs had supposedly dug up.
“Sit Rep,” he called softly as they emerged back into the hall. Moving to the end, Gabriel found a stairwell and turned up it. He had to get to the upper levels and the access ways to the mechs that were waiting for him there.
“We are in,” Death growled softly in his ear. “She is with the core and making a copy to take with.”
“Can’t she grab the thing and make good with it?” Gabriel asked, his voice quiet but harsh in the hallway they were trotting down.
“It’s like six feet tall, man,” Death growled. “And it is holding the mechs in standby while putting in some diagnostics on them…” he trailed off.
“Standby is good,” Gabriel said with a grin. “Less time before we can tear it up.”
“They are running checks on the new drivers for the upgrades in the targeting gear,” Pestilence said, her voice low and words clipped. “They replaced the computers in the four mechs in the back of the barn. Should be easy to spot considering they are going to have a communications buss headed into the cockpit.”
“Alarms?” Gabriel asked.
“Don’t disconnect them till I tell you,” she snapped. “I don’t know what kind of alarm systems are on them yet, and I want to be clear of here, and in a mech before we set anything off, if you don’t mind, War.”
“Roger,” Gabriel said slowing at the top of the staircase and peeking around the corner.
A soldier stood on the gantry a few feet down, watching something on the main floor. Gabriel looked around carefully and located three more soldiers spread out in the gantries that accessed the mechs’ cockpits.
“How did you guys get in and leave four targets up here?” he hissed.
“Ladder is on the front of the offices, in an alcove,” Death said. “And they are rather occupied at the moment with the match on the main floor of the hangar.”
“What match?” Gabriel asked, straining to get a view without being seen. A pair of men were dancing about the main floor with what looked like wooden swords.
“Looks like Kendo,” Death said softly. “There are four guys there, figure the lance on watch, killing time.”
“Makes sense,” Famine said softly.
“Movement,” Gabriel called as someone strode in and barked orders. He couldn’t hear what the man as saying, but the rapid fire gestures and the scowl made it evident that he wasn’t happy. Men were starting to look around, and he glanced up at the soldier right around the corner. His hand was to his ear and he was obviously listening to the tirade.
When the man started making gestures at the offices in the back of the hangar, Gabriel felt the ice hit his veins followed by the surge of adrenaline. It was officially go time, they had been discovered somehow.
“We are out of time,” he snapped into his comms. “Grab what you got and move. Kill anyone in your path and don’t slow down.”
“Roger,” Death said. “Button that **** up, I am planting the charges now.”
“I have a minute and thirty seconds till I am done with the downloads,” Pestilance snapped. “We wait till that is finished and untangling this **** is going to be a thousand times easier.”
“That will put you overtime,” Gabriel said as he stood and stepped around the corner into the face of the turning soldier. His vibro blade was already in hand and he trust it up through the man’s throat and then into his brain. Twisting and pulling back, he dropped the fellow to the grates with a clang, wiping the blade clean and tucking it as he drew his left pistol again.
Ducking into a bit of cover behind the mech that he was closest to, he brought the gun up and waited. One of the men at the far end of the gantry was trotting back toward the stairs when his eyes caught on his fallen comrade. His hand started to his ear, but never completed the motion as a neat hole appeared in his forehead and he dropped.
“Two down,” Gabriel called.
“Another down here,” Famine said. “Fourth one in the gantries went for cover. Position is compromised. Get clear of the computer core and blow it.”
“Thirty seconds,” Pestilence toned. “Death, are you wired to blow it?”
“Done,” Death snapped. “I am hot, and we have company.” There was a soft grunt and Gabriel spun to look at the top floor of the offices. There was a group of men ducking into cover and a rain of fire Death was spewing from the doorway they were in.
“Leave the information and get clear, now!” Gabriel snapped. Movement brought his head around and he saw the look of grim determination on the face of the Draconis soldier beside him. The man’s sword was drawn and raised high, and the world seemed to slow down. Gabriel felt the muscles in his arm bunch and pull, saw the pistol in his hand start to swing. It was never going to be fast enough, he knew, but he had to try.
A staccato roar from behind him in the distance broke the spell, and time seemed to flash by then. Red blossoms opened up in the man’s chest and arms as the sword dropped like death incarnate, the bullets tugging him back and throwing him to the gantry with a clatter. The sword missed, clanging over the edge and into open space to fall fifteen meters to the floor.
More gunfire sounded and he felt a tug at his right shoulder followed by a flash of heat as he rolled for cover and came up facing the other direction. He was hit, and it hurt, but he had to hold out till they were clear. Bringing up his submachine gun, he felt the bones grind and winced. Not good at all.
“Clearing the hall,” Death said.
Gabriel saw the tiny ball of the grenade as it flew into the area where the enemy had dove, and he smiled as one of them jumped up to grab it. Finding center mass in his reticule took less than half a second and then he watched as blossoms of red opened up all over the *****. Rounds from Famine and Death struck home along with him and the man dropped.
The grenade on the other hand never struck the ground, Death having held it for a prime before he tossed. The carnage was regrettable, considering that none of them were in the mechs yet, but then things had been going wrong all day. Death popped out of the doorway hosing the hall down with gunfire before he tossed two more grenades after the first. One ricocheted into another room, and the other bounced to the end of the hall.
Pestilence ducked around the corner, her pack on and her gun up, sprinting for the stairwell. Death followed slower, backing up as he went, his submachine gun in one hand and a grenade in the other. Two minutes and they would be home free, but in combat, two minutes was a long thing.
“Grenade out,” Gabriel called, arcing one of the four that he carried over the edge of the walkway and watching it detonate. It would help keep the enemies heads down. With the mechs throbbing on standby, they could be secured and drop off the gantries as soon as they shrugged into their cooling vests and plugged in their helmets so he wasn’t as worried about a sapper getting a satchel charge on the hatch as he was about getting his men out alive.
“I am blowing the gantry stairs,” Death grated, his voice tight.
“I am taking the Warhammer,” Gabriel said, hosing the walkway below down with an extended burst from his submachine gun. “I want you and Pestilence in the Archers, and Famine in the Marauder.”
He turned away from the walkway and pulled off his pack, feeling a little lightheaded as he stepped up to the access to the Warhammer’s cockpit. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been, he decided, scrambling into the couch and yanking the cables from the main computer. It took some work to throw them back out the hatch, and then he was secured.
They could wreck the hangar and the other mechs in it with a few well placed shots on the way out the door, and while the enemy was doubtlessly readying their company of tanks, and rolling out the infantry to meet them, four heavy mechs were going to be chaos in that line up.
All he had to do was not bleed out from the bullet hole in his shoulder in the process.
Chapter One coming soon.
Edited by Gabriel Alexander Dante III, 25 September 2012 - 03:53 PM.
