FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Comments welcome! Let me know if the story is seeming to drag, or if this is exciting and maintaining your interest :) Thanks.

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Chapter 20

With fire whipping up the nose cone of his fighter, Void Shadow prayed to the aeronautics gods that his adaptive camouflage would somehow survive the burning re-entry. Tracers exploded into view from the smog cloud below, burning up past him in flaming light-trails as the flak operators spotted his heat signal and tried to zero him in.

A quick mental-impulse jerk of the virtual 'control stick' would have brought him level and cut the friction flames off his hull, but doing so would expose the much slower and cooler-burning but still fiery re-entry of his partner and teammates. Void Shadow shifted his right wing instead, and whirled into a barrel roll that would have dizzied a normal fur.

Instead, he felt a rushing sense of exultation, the neural jack interface making him feel as if it were his own arms spread in the air, hurtling through the sky at fire-trailing speeds through a bomb-filled sky of acrid acidic ash and slaughter.

A moment of visual light-blindness and he was through the heaviest parts of the smog layer. Below him, rushing up fast, the broken city-scape of Irontown loomed, the snaggleteeth of a zombie metropolis reaching up to welcome him into its crushing embrace. Instead, master of the sky, Void Shadow dipped his nose-cone downward into a dive, then leveled out with an explosive, thunderous boom of solid sound that blasted what little unbroken glass was nearby.

The plan had unraveled already, he realized - Their re-entry flare would alert enemy ground forces, and he didn't have long to draw their attention off. If he was lucky, and showy as hell, they might assume the re-entry flare was from a resistance fighter, not a precursor to the SOG insertion that was in fact occurring.

Ahead of him, the first target limned in blood crimson and cherry red outlines as his cloaked fighter dipped below the jagged city sky-line. Flying just a thousand feet above hard deck, Void Shadow let out a soundless roar of jubilation and laughter, as orange and yellow concentric circles swarmed in on the 16-wheel flat bed that was still several kilometers away, at least thirty seconds at his rapidly declining speed, straight up the open main road of the city.

There, on its back, a six-barreled flak gun was dumping out thousands of shells per minute, filling the sky with chaff and detonation, as unknown allied fighter craft struggled valiantly to evade it and a dozen other sources of triple-A cover. Around the truck's base, a pair of heavy hover-tanks idled, unable to take part in the low-orbit and air combat, merely waiting and guarding their otherwise defenseless anti-air emplacement.

"Tanks, Solo. They have tanks down here. I think our intel might have been off."

"How many? What kind?"

"Heavies. Shit."

His HUD, which filled his entire field of vision, popped up a miniature window in the bottom right corner, listing off statistics, weapons, and armoring of his target.

"K-73's, those are main battle tanks. I'm going to engage them to draw attention off our re-entry plume."

"Understood." A brief pause. "Team lead gives go-ahead."

In his cockpit, the unconscious body that was a simple biological support system for the uplinked mind of Bill Verman, Void Shadow, grinned. In the virtual reality of his real mind, Void Shadow let out a rolling vicious laugh, as he made quick calculations, and then roared out the command to fire.

With a burping ripple of air and sonics, heavy solid-state rail ammunition poured from the rotary rail guns mounted beneath his nose cone. With no tracers to back-track him by, Void Shadow wasn't sure he'd hit until the first K-73's turret flew off, the tank torn in half like tissue paper. His fusillade continued, hurling columns of rusting ferrocrete a hundred feet into the air, powerful rounds slamming through the triple-A gun, reducing its crew to ash and pink mist, before ripping the left track right off the second K-73.

"Two targets destroyed, one immobilized, whooee!"

Randy's voice came back over.

"Good shooting, Tex. Checking the LZ now."

Void blew past the remaining K-73 just moments after he'd fired, still somehow cloaked, and pulled up hard to avoid slamming into a low-lying building half a click down the street. As he crested it, flashing by at almost incomprehensible speed, an entire column of IFV's came into view.

"Shit, Randy, we have a fucking problem. I'm seeing at least half a brigade of enemy troops down here."

Derry frowned, overhearing the cockpit banter, and sat up straight in his harnessed seat. The fact he'd nearly vomited three times since they entered outer atmosphere was irrelevant now, the acid sternly commanded to wait its goddamn turn in fucking up his day. Right behind the sudden appearance of a couple thousand enemy troops after their atmospheric entry had gone detected.

"Tell him not to open fire on them. They'll have anti-air weapons, and he won't be able to do enough to matter before he has to bug out." Or get shot down, the wolf thought. His head was already aching with nerves and adrenaline. Others around him were performing final checks on their weaponry, clicking clips into place on the weapons that required them, re-affixing power packs on those that didn't.

"Mr. Kerrick, how long till LZ?"

The lieutenant commander piloting their ride spoke into the headset before answering.

"Void, Dragonslayer Lead says no-go on strafing the column. Stay out of sight."

Then the lizard leaned into the aisle, the now-open cockpit door allowing him to talk directly. In space, it stayed sealed, in case of a decompression.

"One mike, Lead."

"Alright everyone, get your head in the game. We've got a half brigade of enemies down there, and we're going to need to sneak around them. Understood? Sneak. Do NOT fire on them unless our infiltration is discovered."

"Understood, Lead," came from Candace Waters, as she pulled the adaptive camo helmet down and dogged it. Nivea just patted his shoulder by way of confirmation, and similarly slipped her own rather less familiar helmet down.

As the others responded in the affirmative, Derry reached up to the cache above his head, and removed the helmet device. For optical camouflage to be truly effective, it needed to cover his entire body. That said, the idea of encasing his head in the thing gave Derry the willies. Images of being trapped in a shrinking suit, slowly crushed to death, filled his head, squeezed his lungs.

The thing was a simple matte-grey to look at it from afar. This close, he could see tiny polygons built into its surface, hundreds of thousands of microscopic fiberoptic displays designed to transmit real-time images of what was exactly behind him around to his front, effectively creating a form of invisibility.

He forced himself to get over the gut-clenching claustrophobia, at least for the moment, and pulled the helmet down with vindictive strength, wincing as one of his ears was painfully folded. A quick jostling of the helmet allowed his abused cartilage to straighten out, just before a hissing sound and a sudden deadening of external noise indicated his seal was now good.

"All numbers, this is Dragonslayer Lead. Sound off to check communications."

"Dragonslayer Two, here." That came from the squirrel flying mad-cap over the wreckage-strewn cityscape, chased by tracers that couldn't pin his invisible fighter down. To Derry's ear, it sounded as if the squirrel were standing right next to him, maniacally proclaiming his presence.

"Dragonslayer Three, here," their transport pilot spoke up with an odd and almost inhuman calmness given what he was flying through.

"Dragonslayer Four, here," the cultured, harsh voice of the crippled otter in their walking heavy weapons platform responded.

"Dragonslayer Five, here," Corpsman Derkin uttered, the big affable armadillo re-checking his medical kit as he checked in.

"Dragonslayer Six, here," the silk-and-steel voice of his best friend, Nivea Gordon, as she punched him lightly on the shoulder, barely felt through the advanced kinetic armoring in their stealth suits.

"Dragonslayer Seven, here," that grunt came from the oft-silent Kerr, as the human sat fully-suited and already invisible near the back of their compartment. Being so close-up and knowing where to look, Derry could see a slight warping effect around the edges of the Corporal's body. He made a note that the camouflage wasn't perfect, and moved on mentally as the last call-sign spoke up.

"Dragonslayer Eight, here," that last spoken with the purry voice of Candy Waters, the shadowy master spy and strategic leader. Any changes in mission would come straight from her lips. She, in her charcoal-grey suit, gave him a quick nod, while double-checking her SMG one more time.

"On the ground in three...Two...One."

The shudder Derry had expected was brief and slight, enough so that he felt a brief moment of disorientation, his body expecting further movement. Then the exit ramp opened silently, signaled to them by a green light on the wall panel. Olliver Tense, in his camouflaged and deadly Black Jack, stepped out onto the cracked asphalt and scanned the street.

The rest of the Dragonslayers swarmed out around him, five fast-moving deadly blurs, covered against the empty street by Olliver's terrifying firepower.

"My nano-machines aren't like normal military ones. Those take weeks or days to heal what I will in minutes or seconds. Also, theirs have an automatic self-destruct. A sort of count-down timer, so they do not risk multiplying out of control and causing cancer."

Tenh drew the razor-sharp old combat knife up his arm, as Trisha winced and covered her muzzle with both paws, barely able to watch as the old fur who'd been like a father to her slit himself open. Blood ran for maybe a second or two, before nearby fur simply decayed to crumpled dust and flesh re-sealed as if it had never been sliced.

"Nano-machines need materials to work. They start by taking it from my hair. Then from my fat stores. Then the less-important muscle groups and organs. I can survive almost anything, if I have enough food."

His stomach gave off a growl, and the ancient mountain sat upright, frowning as he unfolded to his full height. It would have been graceful, except for the arthritic shot of pain up his legs. For the Eva-machines to complete their work, to completely revert his body to its top shape, he would need more time and calories.

"Mr. Tenh...How is that possible? I mean...If the military has stuff less good than this..."

"It would take a long time to explain." Normally taciturn and quiet, the old lion was stalking about their hiding place, picking through the rubble, careful not to let large pieces slide and make noises that might be heard outside their haven. Trisha guessed that the furs in black were nearby, hunting for them, and tried to keep from panting. Panting when sitting still led to hyperventilating and panic, Tenh had told her.

"The other reason modern nano-machines are programmed to die is so that they do not prevent people from aging. If no one ages, too few die naturally. Overpopulation would occur too quickly."

She stared after him, as he stalked about, rooting through the heaps of garbage and refuse, occasionally picking out some arcane bit of metal or another and slipping it into a pocket of his coveralls. Their hiding place was large, big enough to hold a dozen cars, work benches, lifts...But in their first moments after arriving, she had not found another exit. They were effectively trapped for now, while their enemies combed the nearby tunnels for any sign of the two targets.

"S-so...Why do you have them?"

He paused, midway through lifting a chunk of machinery, and glanced over his shoulder briefly before turning back to his rummaging.

"I made a mistake. I volunteered for science."

She wanted to press for more. Would have. Something heavy thudded against the outside of their haven, and both furs went stock-still. Her heart tried to leap out her mouth, the urge to shriek in startled terror just barely controllable as the young woman clapped both filthy paws over her soiled muzzle.

The seven foot and change lion had frozen stiff, muscles tense as cables. Trisha imagined she could hear gears and blobs of grease shifting, somehow, over the thunderous beating of her heart. The knocking continued, another bang along the wall, then another a few seconds later.

Tenh was across the room before she even noticed him beginning to move, wrapping a steely arm around her skinny middle and lifting her, before spinning and padding up and over one of the rubble heaps. In a strange and frightening soundlessness, they moved, until Tenh hunkered down with her, pushing her cheek into the grimy ground behind a pile of engine parts that stank of old, burnt fuel.

His big, calloused paw clapped over her muzzle like a steel vice, and as her frightened, widened eyes met his, he conveyed a sense of urgency, shaking his head slightly to indicate silence, lack of motion.

Silence that was mirrored, sinister and unknowable, in the tunnels behind that knocked-upon steel wall.

Even in the silent void of space, battle was never quiet. Sati Anwar, otter, newly promoted to Petty Officer 1st Class via brevet increase, lay in her hospital bed watching the computer systems in her commanding officer's private quarters, hoping for some way to contribute.

With her body burned so badly, she couldn't return to engineering any time soon. She could barely feel her fingers, and certainly couldn't move with the sort of agility and seamless grace necessary for her normal work on engines and warheads.

She wasn't to be denied, though, and had not yet felt the touch of despair so many would suffer under her circumstances. Even wrapped up in antiseptic-soaked bandages, her injuries immune to the repairs of nano-surgeons, the determined little otter had resolved to stay useful and stay alive.

Commander Forza had recommended this post for her, as a sort of tactical think-tank backup, in case those on the bridge missed something critical in the chaos of officers hard at work, in the 'noise and smoke of battle.' As grateful as she was for the very important job, her paws itched for a grease-covered wrench or a laser cutter, something she could do other than watch computer screens for signs of anything wrong.

One screen showed the fleet's positioning, hundreds of green blips of varying sizes and shapes by ship class, in constant motion, swirling in the chaos-dance of naval battle. Interposed among their front ranks, the red blips of enemy ships were likewise displayed by size and type, with small yellow lines splaying across the display to show firing paths and torpedo targeting.

A second screen showed readouts from critical systems aboard the Fist of the Nascent Dawn, appealing to her more mechanically-oriented professional mind. Chief Karnen would have all of that battened down tight, though, so that display needed little babysitting unless Engineering took enough damage that its displays became unreliable.

A third screen, off to her right, showed the motions of troops on Centauri VII's surface, as relayed and interpreted by those vessels of the fleet that were close enough to pick up such information. Things looked grim on the surface, for now, but allied forces wouldn't begin landing until the battle had pushed enemy forces back in space.

Odd flaring from a few ships in the enemy's formation had her raising brows, after a few seconds of considering them, and she reached out a bandage-covered paw. Though the screens were several feet beyond her range of movement, immobilized as she was by her badly wounded body, she was still able to control them thanks to motion-recognition cameras.

A slow swipe of her mangled finger shifted the three-dimensional battle display, spinning it to face from the enemy's rear. Then, she brought two fingers together quickly and dragged them apart slowly, commanding the computer to zoom in and give her better sensor reads on those ships.

A poking motion with her off paw brought up a direct link to Command Forza.

"Commander, I'm seeing four Hercules-class medium cruisers towards the back of their formation giving...Odd readings. Drive core spikes, I think."

More subtle finger motions sent the images to Forza's displays, and a few seconds later his all-too-pleasant musical baritone came back over the communicator.

"Hm. Good spotting, Ms. Anwar. Any idea what it means?" She shivered slightly, and tried not to laugh at herself, at how easily his praise made her flush.

"Either their drives are having a chain reaction malfunction and nobody's doing anything about it, or they intend to drive those things right into us and blow them up."

Forza's voice was tinged with curiosity when he responded a second later.

"Medium cruisers seem like a bad thing to sacrifice. Are you sure?"

"Absolutely, Commander. Unless they're low on parts or their mechanics are incompetent, the only other option is that they intend those to be a nasty kamikaze surprise for us."

"Understood, keep up the good work, Sati."

If her damaged skin could blush, she would have.

If the Fist was an awe-inspiring demigod of stellar combat, agile as an eagle on the wing and lethal as asps and cobras, the Sword of Sol was a true god, a Greek deity of old, ancient Helios, come to bring death and destruction to its foes with the lethality of striking lightning and exploding volcanoes.

Captain Leith watched in rapt fascination as the enormous, blocky elongated vessel built not for grace but for sheer firepower, rolled itself along its axis and filled the void around it with lancing blasts of white-hot plasma lances and sleek silvery torpedoes, rivers of anti-fighter point defense flak and searching dull-red pulses of pin-point laser fire.

Thus, she had confidence the fleet would survive her absence, when the order came.

"Captain Leith, my sensor crews agree with your assessment. Those kamikaze cruisers need to be destroyed now. You're certain the Fist can handle that concentration of fire?"

What he was asking would be suicide for any other vessel. Even small, nimble destroyers and frigates couldn't possibly beard the lion in its den and hope to survive in this sort of battle. The enemy fleet was arrayed in a flying wall, six ships high and many in each row, spewing out fighters, bombers, torpedoes, and refusing to merge ranks with their enemy now. Having lost their first few probing frigates and fighter wings to First Fleet's superior point defenses and close-range weaponry, they were now fighting conservatively and maneuvering their vessels for a double-pronged attack along either flank. Their tactic had the additional advantage of refusing First Fleet the option of getting near the planet to disgorge troops or offer fire support to the resistance fighters First Fleet's comm. systems had been hearing desperate calls form for hours.

Those four Hercules cruisers Ms. Anwar had detected were concentrated in a diamond pattern directly behind the screen's dead center, to all appearances set up as a tactical reserve in case of a breach in the line. In reality, they seemed likely a part of some counter-offensive gambit being held in reserve for an as-yet-unseen endgame plan.

First Fleet's vessels were in a classic double-chevron formation, maintaining enough distance that rail cannons and other solid-state unguided munitions would remain worthless, giving them the opportunity to swat down as many enemy fighters and torpedoes as possible without taking serious losses.

A stalemate was emerging, and the ground invasion couldn't wait for a battle of attrition. Trying to break into that line with a single ship in an attempt to spring the enemy's trap early was extremely risky. They would be flying right into the teeth of the enemy's heaviest weaponry.

"Admiral, if we wait a few more days to invade Centauri because we're being overcautious up here, our allied resistance fighters will likely all be dead. You know the statistics on troop loss in planetary hot drops. We can't afford heavy losses this early in the campaign. Risking the Fist is the right call. I'm confident we can get those four cruisers. You just have to be ready to make an offensive big enough to let us back out when their other tactical reserves corner us behind their lines."

Rear Admiral Vernier's wolfhound face stared, hard-eyed, from her communications console for a few seconds, as he made quick mental calculations left inscrutable by his masterful poker face. One of his fuzzy, heavy ears flicked to the side, as someone called out a report that the communicator's background noise buffers filtered out.

"Captain, your father sacrificed himself in similar fashion. Don't make me attend two Leith-family battlefield burials in my career. I want you to cripple or destroy those cruisers, then put every bit of your ship's engine power into pushing straight towards the planet. Either they'll break off their tactical reserves to give chase, or you'll be left alone and in position to render support planetside. Keep your vessel and crew alive, do you hear me? Make your move in ten minutes."

Adriana Leith snapped a hard, fast salute, quickly and crisply returned by the wolfhound admiral with his white-streaked fur.

"Understood, Admiral! We won't let you down."

His face vanished, the Admiral off to coordinate the coming offensive breakthrough-attempt. Meanwhile, Adriana keyed her comm. over to Chief Karnen in Engineering.

"Chief, in about twenty minutes, we're going to come under heavy fire from fore, flanks, and aft. Do you think you can get all three gravitic rings moving in a deflection pattern to handle it?"

Clanking whirring noises filled her communicator as the Chief called back, his voice sounded like she'd just taken him by surprise. That, and he was laughing, which made Adriana's ferocious battle grin splay itself across her delicate face.

"Are you crazy? We'll lose all gravity on ship if we do that!"

"Yeah, I know. We'll still have inertial dampening, but I think our boys need some exercise in zero-gee. How about you, Chief?"

"Hahaha! Captain, you're crazy! Okay, here, I'll make the necessary movements to the gravity rings, but you'll need someone to control where the deflection is strongest. Give me ten minutes to make the programming arrangements. I hear you have Sati Anwar up there. Give control of the shield vectoring to her. I'll be struggling just to keep the engines running at 110%."

"Understood, Chief. Make it happen."

The Dragonslayers moved quickly through Irontown's burned-out streets, boots making hardly a sound as they soft-footed over broken cement, crumbling asphalt, glass broken so long ago its edges had rounded off. The enemy was near, and had been for twenty minutes, blocked from sight but not hearing by a long line of sagging apartment high-rises abandoned a century and more on the polluted planet's blasted surface.

Getting their Walker moving without significant noise had been a challenge, given its sheer weight was enough to break through the old, brittle sidewalks. The cracking would have sounded like small arms fire beneath the lithe but heavy machine's bulk. So he'd had to walk straight down the center of the road, completely bereft of cover, as the rest of the team trail-blazed ahead looking for any threat between them and their target zone.

Derry scowled, as he crouched at a street corner and peeked around it, watching as a pair of I-37 infantry fighting vehicle half-tracks rolled by on the parallel street. A quick signal, visible to his squad thanks to the computer-assisted vision in their goggles as a green line around his camouflaged form, told them to stop.

Even knowing the helmets were sound-proofed well enough that the squad could speak in normal tones through the mics, he still instinctively kept his voice low. Long experience had taught the young wolf that being loud in the Overcity was suicidal. Once, because of the gangs that had ruled this area of the half-ruined city. Now, because the enemy was close.

"The map was wrong. We're another click away from our entry point."

His gut churned, to look around at the blasted cityscape. Their intelligence was already wrong, and they hadn't even engaged yet. Better yet, the city had clearly seen significant fighting. Before he'd left home, Irontown's surface had been rent with gang warfare, but not blown apart like artillery had shelled it. Some of the skyscrapers had been leaning giants, condemned and abandoned, but most had been stable and in use by corporations with their own independent security armies.

The better to defend corporate workers, who lived in the high-rise buildings and never left them, their every need supplied by the towering edifices' self-sufficient service industries. Even their transports left by air, from hangars built into the sides of towering skyscrapers twenty or more stories off the filthy ground below.

Now he didn't see motion in any of the nearby buildings, many of which had clearly been hit by artillery or ballistic missiles, whole segments of façade blown out, wires and bits of furniture hanging out precariously. The helmet's sensors told him the air stank of rotting corpses, his best guess being that the corporate private security forces had tried to resist and been slaughtered for it.

Corporal Kerr touched his shoulder, and spoke.

"I've been checking radio frequencies. Sounds like the locals are resisting as hard as they can. Fighting's moved into the underground, near something they keep calling 'the greenhouse.'"

Derry frowned, and nodded, before starting to move again with careful foot-falls to avoid noisier debris.

"The Greenhouse is subterranean food processing factory, about five clicks west of us. I'd say about half the legitimately employed furs here that aren't corp-tower livers work in it, for it, or in something that services it. Massive place. Supplies like 4% of the USF military's MREs."

"No wonder intel didn't see enemy troops. They must be coming in and out of the underground all the time."

"Yeah, which means we're late. Okay people, stay stealthy but we've gotta move faster. Double-time, follow me!"

He took off at a run, keeping the line of buildings between his squad and the massive enemy column not a quarter mile away. If the enemy forces had known of their presence, Derry knew, he and his people would be utterly and irrevocably fucked. Swatted like flies. Then his sister would be dead or worse, eventually, and he wasn't about to let that happen.

The Dragonslayers jogged, double-timing for fully a kilometer without complaint. Behind him, Derry knew everyone was in their position, all professionals despite their lack of in-unit training. Even Olliver had no complaint to voice, though Derry kept trying not to wince when the walker's feet landed on something particularly crunchy or metallic. The enemy, in their rolling cacophony of IFV's and transports didn't seem to hear a thing.

Then Derry paused at a corner, leaning around it to look down one of the old city's main thoroughfares. There, to their left, a platoon of enemy infantry were guarding barricades, durocrete barriers laid down to block the road and act as cover against potential enemy attack. He frowned, tail twitching with agitation as he realized their situation.

"Lieutenant, how good is the optical camo?"

She slid forward, putting a paw to his shoulder as she leaned over him to get a look. Then she pulled back, frowning slightly.

"We'll have to move very, very slowly, and hope to hell none of them spot us. Is there a way around?"

"Not really. The alleyways behind us are all collapsed, and we don't have time to clear them. Our entry is straight up the street, with them to our backs."

The fox-monkey grunted softly, accepting the information.

"Your call, Sergeant."

Derry chewed it over a second, then frowned and looked back and up at the massive shape of their walking tank, Black Jack, as somewhere inside the green-outlined shape a crippled otter watched back at him through the thing's metallic eyes.

"Olliver, on the cross-street here, there's a full platoon of infantry and they're looking right in the direction we need to go. I'm pretty confident us infantry can keep invisible even with them staring right at us, but your walker's going to dent the ground as we go. Thoughts?"

A few seconds passed as the mech turned its head back and forth, looking at the surrounding, half-crumbled skyscrapers, many of which leaned precariously toward the street as if they might suddenly give up and fall. Derry knew from experience that such things virtually never happened, thanks to the sheer solidity of their internal design.

"Get moving, Sergeant. I'll back up a few blocks and crash through a building's back end. By the time they arrive, I should be able to hide again and catch up to you. So far as they will know, a building collapsed and that's all."

Derry nodded his head at the suggestion.

"Alright. Be careful, Four. Sending the coordinates of our rendezvous to your computer."

Quick taps on the wrist computer attached to his suit sent the map to his whole team. Then he stood up, shouldered his rifle, and took a deep breath before continuing.

"Okay folks. One paw on your tails to keep them still. We're going to walk right out in front of them and trust the optical camouflage. If we get made, head for cover immediately and scatter, then meet up again at the rendezvous. Understood?"

"Understood, Sar'nt," was murmured back. Then he turned and began to walk, straight out of cover and in front of an armed and ready enemy platoon.

First Lieutenant Bradley Stevens raised his rangefinders and scanned the wrecked and smoggy city-scape for the umpteenth time that evening, switching through infra-red and thermal imaging as he did. His unit had been fired on intermittently by amateur snipers all of the previous day, the resistance fighters having crawled up through innumerable holes that existed between the surface and the tunnel-hive below.

He frowned, tall pointed coyote ears swiveling forward in the hopes of catching any sign of the enemy, as his platoon continued maintaining their alert, guarding the convoy route as critical supplies and reinforcements moved from one of their supply dumps to the west towards the front to the east. Urban warfare was hell on the nerves, he mused, as someone guided a warm mug of shitty coffee into his off paw.

"Sir, checkpoint eight just reported a car bomb. Suicide attack, someone tried to drive right through the checkpoint and got blown up half a block away."

"Thanks, private. How are the demo charges coming?"

"Give us another hour, sir. Its not easy knocking down a skyscraper and having it fall just where you want it."

"Yeah, I know. Do your best, it's too quiet out here. Let Sergeant Hurren know about the car bombs."

The private jogged off, Lt. Stevens never having lowered the rangefinders. Somewhere out there, enemy troops were massing. He could feel it in his bones, as a sense of uneasiness, unable to sit still despite ten hours of being shot at, yelled at, run around, and generally treated like a mushroom by his commanders.

Nevermind the coming orbital drops. He knew as well as anyone that the fleet might just not win their engagement. If that became the case, his entire Army corps would be trapped on this rock, cut off from supply and reinforcement until someone could dislodge the 'First Fleet' mutineers from space over them.

The Lieutenant sighed and sipped his coffee, grimacing at the bitterness. Everything here tasted like ash and plastic, even the food they'd brought along with them. The second a package was opened, it seemed like this horrible shit-hole of a world slithered right into it like airborne slime.

He was just lowering the rangefinders when something shifted. With a snap, he brought them back up, blinking, wondering if he'd just been seeing signs of his own exhaustion. Narrowing his eyes and furrowing his brows, the coyote set his coffee down on a concrete barrier and brought the extra paw up to stabilize his rangefinders.

Slowly scanning, he noticed the motion again, blinked, and realized what he was seeing. The range readout in his binoculars had suddenly changed, just for a moment, from 60.8 meters to just 35.4. First he checked to make sure there wasn't an odd-colored bit of debris standing up in the way of where he was looking. There wasn't. It was as if some invisible object were being detected by the rangefinders' sonar-like pulses. Grumbling, he lowered the things, cursed, whapped them with his paw a couple times, then brought them back up just in time to see a shadow forming in the early-morning smog mist.

"Chambers, Wilson, get on the 30-cal, we might have incom..."

A school bus exploded out of the mist, the roar of its oil-burning engine suddenly un-muffled by smog and distance. Worse, the mist behind it filled with other shadows, as more oncoming vehicles hurtled towards view.

"We're under attack! Incoming contacts, front!"

The veteran commander threw himself to the deck a second before a large caliber bullet blew a chunk off the barricade right where he'd been standing, letting the rangefinders go on their lanyard, as he grabbed at his rifle and yelled for his half-asleep troops to open fire.

The Dragonslayers had been walking with all the caution of a long-tail cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Her heart thundering at a death-metal beat, Niece could feel her suit filling with sweat, the moisture-wicking fabric just not good enough to handle the sheer nervous water flowing out of her fur.

All around her, the green outlines of the Dragonslayers were moving, crouched low to reduce their profile, as armed and tired-looking but wary enemy soldiers stared right at their backs from less than a hundred feet away. Up ahead two blocks, she could see the street Derry had told them to turn onto, to their left, after which there would be another block and a store front that hid the entry they had been looking for.

Still a half mile from their turn, Derry suddenly stopped, dead still, and spoke into the unit's lash system while making paw symbols.

"Movement ahead of us, I think veh-"

Loud as thunder to her big, lupine ears, the unmistakable report of a 50-calibre anti-materiel rifle firing sounded. Her eyes going wide, she hurled herself to the ground, tackling Lt. Waters' hard unyielding body to the concrete, as the battery of machine guns behind them opened up.

In front of her, Derry flew forward, as one of the machine guns strafed right over him, smashing the Sergeant into a heap of rubble fallen from the building looming over them.

"Shit, Lead's hit!"