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baelpenrose · 6 months ago

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Project Praetorian 60: Arrival, Part VI

The Battle of Philidelphia finally ends, with a maneuver that sees the Praetorians take the fight out of Earth's gravity well, and the enemy finally withdraw.

Beta-read by @canyouhearthelight and @writing-with-olive

Mark

“Okay. Here’s the plan.” He was looking at the radar, which exhaustingly revealed that the aliens were coming in hot on more dropships - though not the command shuttle. He had to find some way of stripping their shields again, even if it nearly killed him, to try to stop off that trickle of reinforcements.

Which meant that he’d probably be out of action for a while, but it also meant he could do the most damage on the ground - with Xavier and him splitting focus to rip apart the enemy assault.

Which, in turn, led to the conclusion that Echo would be leading the attack on the ship, but while she was actually doing techy shit, she’d need someone else managing the operation…

He glanced at Jared. From what he’d seen so far, Jared was capable of balancing risk and reward, and good at improvising. He wasn’t sure he liked the ex-Nazi, yet, but Jared had been an excellent and ruthless fighter, and one who’d repeatedly proven willing to put himself on the sharp end. The fact that Jared was, in his own right, a decent tactician, and had done the math Mark had hoped after their initial confrontation…

Mark made his snap decision and divided his command.

“Okay. Two teams. Ground team, for discouraging alien landings and tearing apart any Ascendancy trooper who manages to touch Terran soil: me, Seraph, Boombox, Deadeye, Mags, and Titan. We’re going to support the troopers on the ground and keep them alive as best we can. Cipher, you and Frost are in command of the Shuttle Assault team. You will take Siren, Whiplash, Cat and Glitch. Get aboard the carrier, and take it down. Return alive. Do not waste any time or take any unnecessary risks. Skyflower, do not leave the shuttle.”

Jared looked at him in surprise, and Echo blinked.

“Yes. I trust you two to manage. Frost, do not let Cipher come to any harm under any circumstances. This war, as it stands, hinges on her as our most vital strategic asset. Keep her alive.”

Jared looked him up and down, then glanced at Echo, pale eyes inscrutable. Then he saluted. “Understood, Lieutenant.”

Echo shot him a look. “They’re gonna get the guns back online before too much longer, you know that, right? And once I’m on, I’ll be too busy to take them back off before we take the carrier down.”

“Then take it down fast, because I’d rather do that than wind up retreating and have them glass this place off the map once they get the guns online again anyway.”

Echo nodded. “Got it. I’ll get the shuttle online.”

Mark was already looking at the GPS, already praying he hadn’t sent friends to their deaths, and was already hearing Vergil note the positions of more alien dropships coming in, the screams of troopers minding radar. Bastards couldn’t even bother hiding from radar, like they knew human interceptors weren’t a…hm. No, wait. Shielding itself made radar irrelevant, but it also increased radar profile because of the way it projected…hm. If things were already locked…

He sprinted over and started drawing in the standing static from all the plasma shots. “Skyflower, hold takeoff. Mags, standby with AED.”

Then he raked the sky with lightning again.

And this time he dropped, seizing, vision gray, arm alight with agony, chest burning, and found himself breathing again, his arm no longer destroyed. He could barely stand, his nerves having been regrown a second time in less than a day, and Shiloh was shaky.

But the sky above Philly was now being torn with interceptors, and as he watched another dropship was blasted from the sky.

And their captured shuttle streaked skyward, under the cover of hundreds of surface-to-air missiles.

“Okay. Start the battle. Fuck this. This city is fully evac’d, right?” He said, thinking. “There a gas main along any of the avenues they’re advancing through?”

***

Molly

She was still buzzing with anxiety when she climbed into the shuttle. But felt, without knowing how, that this ship would be the death of someone she loved, maybe herself, maybe others. Needed to say it. As Echo booted the drives up, and Amaryllis touched the controls, she strapped in, nervously.

“Skyflower, are you sure?”

“I don’t love that Storm decided my first flight on this thing should be in live fire combat, but I’ll manage. Fly in, fly out. Survive. Hold on.” They started heading up, and Molly held on.

She had read somewhere that astronauts usually got sick when they started breaching the atmosphere, but whatever this shuttle was built from, whatever alien machinery it had, was keeping her from feeling the acceleration.

She didn’t dare look back, but she saw, on the instruments, that they were clearing atmosphere. Echo had forced her language model onto the alien computer. “Approaching alien ship. Cipher, send the signal, let them think we need to dock.”

Echo nodded, then did something Molly couldn’t see. She had to pray that it was going to work. She could see - through the viewport, that thing had to be enormous - the carrier. Massive, sleek, grey-green, with weapon emplacements all over. The ship loomed, shaped like a massive claw, in orbit - though absent the beacon, it now seemed a little less perfectly orbiting than it had, as though the navigators were trying to actively keep it on course.

Molly bit her tongue as Echo nodded. “We’re clear for landing. Docking port at your 2.”

“10-4.” Amaryllis was already steering in.

Jared nodded. “Unstrap, everyone. Lock and load, we’re probably dropping hot. Siren, get ready for another one of those interference frequencies - I don’t want us eating plasma on entry. See if you can’t spray down whatever their hangar security is with your carbine while you do it.”

Echo nodded. “Right. Looks like our first stop is along this wing by the hangar - there seems to be a shaft we can take almost straight to the main reactor. We could make a play for the guns to try to get pressure off the team if…”

Almost as if on cue, the massive ship shuddered and a massive pulse of actinic fire erupted from a weapon emplacement on it’s belly. Molly didn’t see what it hit, but she knew the guns were back online.

To her surprise, Jared shook his head. “Longer we can go without them being aware we’re here, the better. I don’t like our chances if we have to fight our way in and out of this place. Honestly, Micah - how far can you straight teleport us? Like if I ask you to get you and me to the reactor, can you do it from the hangar?”

Micah thought. “Cipher, how far from the hangar to the reactor?

“Just pure space? About half a klick if you could go in a straight line. Problem is you can’t.”

Micah thought. “Yeah. I can do that. If I only have to take one person.”

Amaryllis was almost in. Skyflower gently set the ship down. Molly bit her lip, then stopped. She took a breath in as they landed. Their hangar port was slowly repressurized - and she took a breath as a group of aliens moved into the hangar - a handful of the big Hulks, who mostly seemed to be here to check on the machinery, one that was carrying what looked like power cells - and many, many Croaks who were carrying containers of something else.

None of those were what had Molly worried. None of those, in fact, were even armed. No, what had Molly worried was the team of Spikes, almost twenty of them, that had moved into the hangar as a security team, blasters at their shoulders. She took a breath, warmed up her voice, and double-checked her rifle.

Then Amaryllis dropped the ramp and she desperately cried out the note, twisting it as it ripped through the air, hoping to stall the aliens before they could fire. If even one got a shot off, she knew, they were all dead.

Jared snap-threw a grenade out through the gap in the door, and even as she started singing, she heard the horrible buzz that meant an alien was trying to shoot but couldn’t, that buzzing itself would mess with her frequency - but then they were in sight and already they were out of the hatch, moving, guns blazing. She felt her heart pounding as she kept the note up, firing as rapidly as she could, Spikes dropping. She found her magazine empty, then rapidly reloaded, took a breath, and dove as a plasma bolt struck the shuttle they’d taken in. She fired again and saw a Spike’s leg blown off at the knee before Jared executed it, then saw Mia run around the side of the shuttle and lit up more of them.

Then Kimmy was among them SMG blazing, and the last of them were down. The Croaks were running and before she was even aware of what she was doing she was throwing a frag into the midst of them, and watching as Jared and Micah coldly gunned down the bigger worker aliens. After her grenade exploded in a rough thump, Molly walked over and began gunning down wounded Croaks.

Maybe, maybe once it would have bothered her.

But that was before one of these things had turned Annette into a smear on the wall. One of the aliens tried to crawl away, its forelimbs burned and damaged, one of its back legs missing entirely.

She raised her pistol and executed it without pausing. Only after the last of them was dead did it hit her that the girl she’d been when she’d arrived would never have recognized the girl she’d become.

Jared was already grabbing Micah. “Okay. Can we get to the reactor?”

“Are you certain we can take it solo?”

Molly watched as Mia zipped over to the hangar door, and checked it. “No company!”

Kimmy was breathing hard, but all the blood drying on her armor right now was the wrong color to be hers. The gymnast gave her a weak smile. “You okay?”

Molly nodded, blushing a little at the acrobat’s grin. “Doing fine. You?”

“So far.”

Jared and Micah had apparently reached some kind of decision, one that Micah clearly didn’t care for. They were talking to Echo and with barely an effort Molly brought the sound of the conversation to herself and Kimmy.

“-Just keep on the comms. Guide us in, and tell us when we’ve cracked it so we can get out.”

“Take out the pylons, then I’ll turn the shielding off once you’re clear. Once that’s taken care of, I upload a virus that takes them offline while the ship fails.”

Mia screamed. “Guys we have company!”

Molly rushed to the bulkhead, deeply amused to finally, finally, have a place where cover existed against the alien machines. She saw, out of the corner of her eye, Jared and Micah vanish.

Vergil

Headshot. Another Spike slumped down, brains splattered over a wall behind it. The eye not close to the scope picked up movement, and Vergil twitched his crosshairs just a little over, then fired again. Another Spike dropped, the round having slammed straight through its spine and leaving an exit wound the size of a small plate.

Jonathan was raining hell, but Vergil’s concern was far more precise. Spot enemy elites, kill them. Honestly, at this point, he was starting to note indicators of rank. Some of what seemed to be the officers wore adornments on their horns, or slight changes in the limited armor the aliens wore, and Vergil was learning to target those.

“Deadeye, check west?”

He did - “Uh…Scope’s clear. No contact. Wait, small fireteam setting up north of west. Four blocks. Be careful on approach.”

“Understood. Start potting them. There’s a bigger force coming up and we want to cut it off.”

Vergil was still confused about why the higher ups weren’t just letting Mark call down artillery on the bigger groups, but Mark seemed like he already had a plan.

That sounded entirely too ominous for Vergil’s taste, but he dutifully focused his fire on the advancing squad. It was at that point he actually started seeing the force that Mark was worried about - a small group of armored vehicles, at least a few tanks, a huge group of Croaks. Dozens of Spikes. Not in formation, but Croaks were being used as infantry screens even as the Spikes were moving along the buildings.

Mortars were still pounding other avenues, further off - and Vergil dropped another of the Spikes that was trying to reposition.

Then he got a sight of Casey and Xavier, acting stealthy for once. That surprised him. He could see from here that Mark was checking some kind of map, then indicating something to Xavier. Xavier raised his launcher, focused, and fired.

A thump, a crack, then a roar. Vergil saw something blow, beyond just the grenade, or even what Xavier could do with it. Then a blast of flame, one that tore open part of the street, one that raced up the avenue, ripped the fronts off buildings as the noise escalated and the flames ripped down the street towards the aliens.

The aliens had turned towards the formation - and Mark whipped the bits of shattered building with magnetism, raking them deeper into the damaged cover, flushing out any enemy hiding in them, and Vergil watched Spike blood trickle out the broken store high rises as Mark turned the now burning buildings into blenders.

It hit him all at once what had happened. Xavier had blown open a gas main and then he and Casey had turned it into a fuel-air bomb. Mark had taken metal blown loose by the explosion and used it to flush out anything too well covered to be killed.

Vergil snapped out of it, head pounding from the noise. They were already pulling away from the tanks, calling for Jonathan over the comms.

He was already redirecting his own fire, knowing that when Jonathan moved he’d need to start fucking up the alien officers to let Jonathan reposition and disrupt the Ascendancy enough that they’d be off balance when the other three jumped into the force Jonathan and Shiloh had been standing off with more conventional arms.

He didn’t get the chance to see what happened next - a blast rocked his bones, and he glanced over.

“Alien orbital fire back online!”

“Yeah, no shit. Just keep Titan covered. I need that switch to go smooth. Leave downtown to the US Army - unless they were the ones that just ate that shot.”

Jonathan was racing across, smashing something out of his way. Vergil was reloading, then firing, keeping up. It was strange to watch Jonathan serve as the mobile anti-armor, but it was what they had, even as Mark used plasma static to fuck up the tanks’ ability to target Jonathan.

Xavier and Casey were already repositioning to start firing on the alien forces that Jonathan had pinned down - but they’d circled from the north, and when they descended, they began slaughtering with fire and thunder like murderous angels.

There were a small group of troopers - Imperator troopers - fighting their way up the avenue. Shiloh rushed towards them. Vergil immediately saw why. Leading that squad was Curtis, face blistered and armor splattered.

That group was already pushing back into cover, engaging an advance with light machine guns and rifles, and Vergil added the weight of his fire to them. A plasma blast tore open a building and sent shrapnel flying, ripping one man’s face open, and Shiloh almost casually threw him to the ground, healed him, and shoved him back into cover.

Curtis flashed the kids a grin as Shiloh began firing at the aliens, face distorted in a savage snarl. Vergil saw a strange blur in the window and for a moment felt a surge of panic - then he fired, and saw a spray of dark blood. He kept his weapon closely trained on them. Not a chance were those invisible fuckers coming near his family again.

Micah

Being alone with Jared wasn’t exactly the most comfortable. Neither was flying into space with a totally untested craft they’d just captured. Neither was teleporting into an unknown part of a starship with unknown opposition.

Actually, almost every part of this had Micah ready to have a full tilt panic attack, and when they appeared in the reactor room, only for Jared to immediately shoot the two Spikes in the room and then immediately turn on the Croaks…

He started hyperventilating. Then he saw something new. An alien they hadn’t seen yet. There were the big ones, the Hulks - Jared was already firing on them, and grimly, Micah joined - but there was a species they knew existed but hadn’t seen.

Skinny, extremely gangly, with oblong, sloping skulls that looked almost like beetles in shape, with bodies that resembled upright salamanders, limbs more akin to those of a sloth…These must be the Slenders that had become the Ascendancy’s ruling caste. Supposedly incredibly intelligent, but physically weak. Used high technology to compel the allegiance of the Spikes, who had then…

Jared, face distorted in hate, was already walking over, and smashed one of them in the face with his rifle butt. It raised it’s hands, too slowly, and Jared smashed it again. And again. Micah was hyperventilating, but there was a rage in him. All the Spikes, all the death - it was the fault of these things. Being taken from his home wouldn’t have happened if not for the things standing in front of him. He shouldn’t have been here and next thing he knew he was screaming at them and had pulled his combat knife.

The ruined bodies of the Slenders would have been useless for Koleth to autopsy, but Jared grinned savagely at it. “Damn. Okay. Micah, I want it out loud and not just because of what we just did. I am sorry I ever called you a pussy. You are a badass.”

Micah looked at what he’d done to an enemy incapable of defending itself and felt sick. He started checking his ammunition, started checking the distance from here to the hangar…Jared put a hand on his shoulder. “Dude. You alright?”

Micah gave a half-hearted laugh. “No! We just murdered those things! We’re going to be doing this til we die or we’ve gone so insane that that makes sense! Allah yagfir lana, Frost, that doesn’t terrify you?”

Jared paused. “I’ll answer that on the way down. For now…” He keyed the comms.

“Cipher, we’re in position.”

“Yeah, uh…checked the schema. We’re holding out. Fuck up the pylons before I take down the shielding, and have Glitch move you the minute the pylons are down. There’s gonna be enough free-flowing radiation once both those are out that you don’t want to be there without shielding.”

Micah nodded. He looked around. There was some kind of dome of translucent material he didn’t know, and inside glowed a sphere that looked like a tiny sun. It didn’t hurt his eyes to look at it, though it was painfully bright. Surrounding that were several things that looked almost like…he’d seen a Tesla coil at a museum once, and this almost looked like that, but the connections looked…off.

Jared picked up the blaster and began heating the pylons. “Okay. Here goes. Keep anything that comes in off me.”

The next few minutes were the most tense in Micah’s life as Jared did it over and over. Shattering and melting one pylon after another. He let the sounds of cracking, screaming metal wash over him, collected the vibration, collected the sound, focused on the distance, and when Jared at last tore free the last one, it felt loud. Too loud. Like the ship was starting to shake. Jared grabbed him and they both shook, he went dizzy, and they were back in the hangar.

The first thing he saw was Kimmy backflipping. Then he saw that she’d done it to get away from a Spike. She pulled her pistol and shot it - her rifle had been shattered and lay away from her. Echo was still at a distance. Mia had picked up one of those fast-firing needle weapons that some of the aliens carried as sidearms and was spraying it down a corridor.

Echo cursed. “Okay, shielding down, can’t keep them from just flushing the airlock, get on the ship, NOW NOW!”

They bolted for the ship, Kimmy, then Micah heard Jared shout for him to get Echo. He sprinted to Echo, on the far side of the hangar from the boarding ramp to their captured shuttle.

He saw Jared go for Mia - start covering her as she bolted back, then back up onto the boarding ramp.

And Jared still wasn’t aboard the ship, even as Mia sprinted for it, starting to cover him, and Kimmy grabbed Amaryllis’s SMG and started covering them too.

Micah grabbed Echo as she started running and they warped back onto the ship.

“SKYFLOWER GET US OUT OF HERE!” Jared jumped aboard and the ramp came up.

Echo grinned as they took off. “I lied. I had started the depressurization when I said it. I didn’t want them evacuating. We’re out.”

They started falling through the atmosphere, Amaryllis laughing. “Holy shit. WE just took it down.”

Micah was laughing - but he saw how Jared looked at him, and fist bumped the other boy. He saw Mia looking at Jared, and he saw Kimmy and Molly staring at each other.

Jared muttered to Micah. “No. It doesn’t bother me. Because long as I’m here, I never have to go back to where I was, the people I was dealing with that made my cousin look good, and I can stick with you all. Probably going to die, but before I do, maybe I score with someone I would have been too stupid to notice before I got here. There’s definitely worse ways to live.”

“We’re coming down - Cypher, help me out, this is gonna be a trick. I know it was helpful but I do wish we hadn’t trashed that beacon.”

Xavier

“Almost got them!”

The aliens were now fully panicking. Groups of them were falling back, retreating, or otherwise bolting. The Army had managed to push it’s way out of an attempted encirclement and repay the attack, and now the Imperator troopers they were fighting alongside were pressing the attack.

Shiloh had been heroic - after Curtis’s squad had arrived, almost all of them were swearing up and down that the medic was the only reason most of them would be serving, and not a one was exaggerating. They now moved as a living screen around Shiloh when the medic broke cover, ignoring Shiloh’s pleas for them to stop.

Then Mark said something. “Colonel, General, I’m going to switch to all channels and ask you to repeat that, if it is convenient.”

“Acceptable, Lieutenant,” Xavier suddenly heard someone say. “The enemy are routing. Additional forces are surrounding the remainder. There seem to be some kind of pods dropping from the destroyed ship - your team is closest. Can you retrieve them? Once you do, fall back to base. You’ve already won this battle.”

“Understood, Colonel.”

Echo’s voice rattled over comms on their way over to the indicated coordinates. “Carrier eliminated. We’re all okay! We’re coming down, Amaryllis wants her normal gunship back.”

Xavier started laughing.

The drop pods turned out to contain a species whose existence Echo had confirmed but which Xavier had never seen. A handful of them, only. Sloping, large heads, slothlike limbs, and salamander-like bodies. The creatures panicked when captured. But they did now have prisoners - ones they hoped could be exchanged or used as diplomatic tokens.

When they got back aboard the gunship - with the prisoners in tow - they looked out over Philly. Over half the city was in ruins, and God only knew how many had died.

But their first major battle had been a victory, at least on paper.

Echo cursed as she glanced at the data pad. “‘Report. Multiple Ascendancy super carriers detected. Predicting simultaneous arrival within the month.’”

The team froze. Multiple supercarriers.

All of that had just been with one.

Molly glanced at Kimmy, and Xavier saw her desperately reach out a hand.

Casey spoke. “Not over, is it?”

“Not close. We’ll need to make some kind of statement. Ideally before they get here. People are scared. Let’s give them something to believe in.”

At that, Xavier smiled. It was time for them to commit. To really go for broke on keeping that promise to each other, made under the stars when they’d first heard the rumor of what was coming. To make themselves the public face that couldn’t be ignored.

#writblr #writers on tumblr #Project Praetorian #my writing #original fiction #science fiction #traumatized characters #found family #my fiction #sci fi #fiction #tw: guns #tw: violence #tw: explosions

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