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Chapter 26

Blood and iron filled the air, as the Ix'kat war party swarmed from the open hallway, straight through the front line of enemy defenders, and swooped down on the enemy's bulk with the wrath of a thousand angry thunder storms. Terrible shrieks, sound so powerful it sent dozens into screaming fits, burst ear drums and stunned dozens of the enemy's number, giving Clicks the moments she needed.

She smelled a scent - a familiar scent! - and had every intent to go protect it.

Despite the urge to stay and fight, slaughter the enemy attack swarm until it or they were no more, far more urgent was the desire to defend their human allies. The musky, leonine-human scent ahead was familiar, angry, clearly displaying the pheromones she'd learned to associate with plans of a suicidal nature.

Meanwhile, all she got from the attacking squishy-beings was terror and rage, which made her burble with clicking chittering manic laughter as she sliced through enemy after enemy, ignoring their pathetic attempts to injure her in return.

Then she was free of the enemy, having crashed through two of their lines and bypassing hundreds more as the squishy foe struggled with the disorienting Ix'kat war screech's effects on their ears. Behind her, the drones swarmed, rending flesh and tearing at their enemies in the queen's wake, guarding her advance as their genes had programmed them to do.

She landed in the docking tube after one last hop, and fluttered diaphanous wings to keep her balance in the sudden gravitational shift, faceted eyes hunting for the male she was looking for. He was there, at the curve in the tube, holding a bloody knife and a short pop-gun that couldn't hope to penetrate her chitin.

Clicks grinned her savage grin, as SSGt Herrin gave an incredulous look.

"Clicks? Private, get your people in here, we've got a job to do!"

"Yes, Staff Sar'nt!"

"KREEE!!"

Battlewas joined just above the main engines, as massed Marine boarding parties from the Star of Aden breached into Engineering through the ceiling and two bulkheads. Debris flying, slagged metal hurtling from the bomb-blasts, the air filled with noxious fumes from damaged equipment and flash-bang bombs, the enemy came in their overwhelming droves.

In response, the assembled Marines of the Fist of the Nascent Dawn opened up with a roar, filling the air with lead and plasma and death, many firing blind as their eyes were filled with flare and flash-burn. Others, in advanced tactical gear, picked their targets and sewed death among the enemies' heavy weapons crews with directed, accurate fire.

The enemy's savage barrage felled Fist Marines in return, and then they were too close for massed fire. Marines fast-dropped from holes in the ceiling, straight into defensive positions, and with the suddenness of a tidal wave, everything was a chaos of close combat brutality.

A deck below, Chief Karnen heaved against a heavy chunk of machinery, knocking it over with a thunderous clang and a heavy equine snort. Then, along with his engineers, a few dozen wounded Marines, and a hundred various Seamen, he forted up, rifle ready, and waited as the Marines did battle above them. Clanging noises, like the ringing of bells, vibrated through the heavily armored ceiling above, as explosives went off and heavy weaponry was brought to bear in the battle.

One of his engineers handed up a wired headset, which the horse Chief slipped over his long ears.

"Cap'n, fighting in Engineering is gettin' heavy. You got any good news for us?"

Captain Leith's voice came back almost instantly, which had the horse's tail flicking in surprise as he tried to figure out the meaning behind her tone.

"Hold tight, Chief. We're not done yet. Keep those engines ready at all costs."

"You got it, Captain."

Derrywatched as Derkin worked, immobilized by the tiniest of weights as Derkin had firmly told him it was now his job to keep Trisha's footpaws elevated. The wolf knew this was his Corpsman's way of letting him help, of giving him something to do, however trivial. His sense of gratitude toward the life-saving armadillo was strong, but deeply overwhelmed by how tired he suddenly felt.

It wasn't the exertion. Gods knew he'd been worked far harder than this in his life. Maybe it was the wound, he thought. More likely, he realized, it was coming home to find out everything he had left behind, however awful and tawdry, was now dead or gone or blown to bits. Now, he was watching as the burly armadillo operated on his little sister, who'd been skewered through the chest with a combat knife probably just minutes before he and his unit had slaughtered her attackers.

"Collapsed lung," Derkin commented, then added to it with a grimace, while working with bloody fingers, "and I'm pretty sure her spleen's fucked. Derry, we've got maybe ten hours to get her to a real surgery."

He nodded, numbly, and gently fingered the filthy feet that rested in his lap, feeling the engine grease and soft fur squelch between his fingers. Trisha stirred a little, caught in the dream-state that existed between unconsciousness and the blinding pain that would otherwise have made operating impossible. Derkin had explained that he couldn't afford to give her more, that the pain-killers sometimes shut down a wounded fur's lungs. Even lessened, the pain would be nearly unbearable.

The big wolf felt tiny and useless, and wished he could take the suffering for her. Somewhere deep inside, he knew he'd already tried to - in becoming a Marine, he'd been inculcated with the idea that Marines suffered so others didn't have to. Somehow it didn't seem good enough or painful enough.

Sometime during the surgery, as Derkin tried to stitch her up and get the lung re-inflated, Nivea put a gentle paw on Derry's shoulder, and spoke through the headset's link in such a way that it sounded as if she were talking softly straight into his ear.

"Kerr found tracks. About a size seventeen boot tread, with a lot of smaller feet in pursuit, headed south."

Derrynodded, and stroked those filthy footpaws again, wondering at just when his sister had grown so much. He had only been gone a bit over a year, and everything had changed. The wolf felt like the ground had moved under his feet, and the world wasn't so stable as it had once been. Nonetheless, he responded with professionalism, and inwardly blessed the military trainers who'd worked him so hard, for how well they'd taught him to fight on through stress and pain.

"Okay, good. The tunnels south of here are pretty much a dead-end. Two ways out. One right through here, and a second one through the hab block. We'll check the dead-end then move on. Have Kerr check to make sure they didn't come back this way, and if they didn't, we can plan on checking the hab area."

"Which is a warzone right now. Combat central."

"Yeah," the wolf replied, feeling a strange sense of anticipation building in his chest, as he watched Derkin work on his helpless, bloodied sister. "Good. We owe these assholes some payback."

Cassy slowed, and the grav-lift carrying Shadow Four's wrecked corpse slowed with her. The headset she wore linked directly to her heartbeat sensor, and at Stalker's insistence she had been using it to look for pockets of enemy activity so they could obtain a map.

For the last twenty minutes, activity had been fairly minimal, as they made their way through the unknown and claustrophobic tunnels, having to make a dozen back-tracks when they ran into tunnel after tunnel that were too small to carry their cargo. She hadn't bothered insisting that the dead lion wouldn't mind being bent around a bit to get through. Her boss hadn't suggested it, and she didn't want any more of his attention than she already had.

The other dozen soldiers in the Stalker's personal guard moved on past her, as she shook her boxy device, hoping it was displaying an error. When a quick re-boot of the thing didn't clear her visual display of what she saw, she scowled and switched the thing off, while continuing to hold it out front as if she were still reading signals.

That act of rebellion had come so easy. One moment of disobedience. Seconds later, her heart suddenly clenched, her chest cramped as if she'd been hit by a champion boxer, and she found herself leaning against the dirt-covered steel wall, gasping into her headset as the enormity of what would happen when Stalker found out occurred to her.

She saw what he would do, beaten into her head by so many examples, so many times walking in on his 'fun' before they had left for Centauri. He would start with a chase, his favorite game to play, hide-and-go-seek as he would cheerfully call it. She would live in terror for a long time, running, unable to sleep or rest, with the evil jaguar on her tail, giving her little cuts with his savage claws whenever he found her. Eventually, she would tire, and the rape would begin.

If she were lucky, he would slit her throat when he was bored with her. If she weren't lucky, he'd be feeding her bits of her own body, forcing her to choke them down until the blood run out.

When a voice cut through her morbid, horrid reverie, she almost screamed, almost spun and attacked, almost ran away like a terrified feral.

"Why...Do you...Spare them?"

Impossible, she knew. She was hallucinating, the tigress decided. A rational part of her mind recalled that extended time spent underground could disorient a person, destroy their sense of time, make them exhausted and prone to hysterical delirium. It certainly wasn't possible that a hamburgered corpse had opened one eye to a slit and was now whispering directly into the ear piece of her headset, without moving his lips.

She felt like she was dreaming, looking down on herself and the mangled creature strapped to a floating table. Her body was wracked with panic, she could see, trim breasts heaving as she hyperventilated into her face mask. The other troops were ahead of her, likely having assumed Stalker had given her some order or another.

"Wh...What?"

"Why do you...Spare them?" the voice in her head whispered, labored, as if struggling for breath.

"Sp-spare whom?"

"Your heartbeat detector...Those life signs were...Small...Children...You switched it off...Didn't report...He'll kill you if he finds out..."

"You're dead. Y-you c-can't be talking to me...I'm hallucinating..."

"I am...Near death. Still alive...Need food...Need iron...Help me and I will help you."

From up above, out of her body, detached and dreaming, Cassy watched her body shivering, folding its arms around her chest protectively, closing off. Logic said she was having a near-psychotic event, that she was in fact in control of her own form and actions, but it felt so hard to believe. Yet another symptom, that logical part said.

"How? You can't fight...You c-can't walk...You can't protect me from him!"

"He will...Detect the hack soon...If I keep talking...Yes or no, young lady? Yes or no?"

She staggered under the possibility of escape, the weight of fear, knowing Stalker would come for her even if they somehow managed to get away. The black gulf of terror, knowing what he would do to her, her family, her friends...Yet a glimmer of hope now shone in front of her, and any hope of being free of him before he'd eaten her very soul was worth the risk.

"I'll...I'll help. What do I need to do?"

"For now...Catch up with the group, and continue...Following orders. I will tell you when to act."

SSgt Herrin stayed behind cover, as the insectoid swarm blasted past him on Clicks' ratcheting orders, shrieking so loudly that the elastic docking tube bulged and rippled with harmonic resonance. The old lion grunted, covering one ear with his shoulder, the other now ringing, his paws occupied by holding up his rifle.

They slammed through the halfway-open airlock doors, to the yelled surprise and dismay of the guards. Herrin didn't miss a moment, throwing himself into the instantaneous sprint he'd learned over so many years as a Marine. When he reached the airlock door, the grizzled Marine fetched up against it, leaning around the side while using the heavily armored rolling door as a shield.

Clicks and her insect swarm had split into two groups. Four had stayed behind, at the breach into the Fist, to slow enemy troops coming at them from behind. The other eight, along with the insect queen herself, had torn into the landing action chamber like a hurricane. In moments, the half-dozen sailors inside had been reduced to blood and gobbets of flesh, now being devoured by the scarab-like drones.

He ignored the carnage, and advanced, rifle leveled as he moved swiftly toward the exit door from their chamber. Finding it locked, which was expected, he knelt down, leaning his rifle against the wall.

"Private Clicks, give me a claw over here."

A sick, wet, sucking tearing sound met his ears, and the lion turned to give her a flat, unamused look as she held out a torn-off paw to him, pressing the back of the feline limb to push its hooked claws forward.

"Allow me to clarify. I need you to tear open a wall panel for me."

"Oh okay!" she chirped. The Staff Sergeant pointed to the panel, behind which he knew exactly what he was going to find. Her claws made short work of it, ripping through the old-style steel platting and wrenching it back with a squeal of steel that sounded very much dismayed, as if the old ship were trying to protest its treatment.

The old NCO wondered at his own mental health, idly, as he crouched around Clicks' side, and began fiddling with wiring so old he actually understood how it functioned. She'd just basically stuck a dismembered paw in his face, and he hadn't batted a lash. The lion made a note not to mention that to the company shrink later.

"Where we going, squishy-queen?"

"That's Staff Sar'nt, Private."

"Where we going, squishy-queen Staff Sar'nt?"

Herrin knew enough of the Ix'kat to realize it wasn't intentional disrespect. In fact it was just the opposite. As he fiddled with wires, hotwiring the security door's decades-old electronic access, the old Marine reminded himself not to get cross about it.

"This old battleship's main gunnery computer isn't far from here. If we can knock it out, it'll give the Fist a better chance of escape. The Star of Aden's crew will have to manually plot their firing solutions, which takes longer and is less accurate."

He didn't bother mentioning how poor their chances of survival were. It didn't matter to him at this point, so long as he could save the lives of his junior Marines, and the Naval crewmen whose safety he was partly responsible for. The bug queen didn't bother to ask, unconcerned with her own survival when the flying metal hive's survival was at stake.

The door gave a thudding sound, as the electromagnetic locks inside lost power. Between his paws, the wires fizzled, sparking, and the old lion grunted as a shock zapped through his fingers, shaking them out before sucking on them.

"Private, get this door open, and send your drones out there and to the left. There'll be Marines trying to stop us fortifying up already, and we need to distract them."

She answered in a series of buzzes and clicks that had her berserker insect drones shivering and flexing their limbs, bobbing up and down in alien pleasure that would have made a lesser Marine shudder.

Rear Admiral Ryan Vernier boarded the shuttle with just his personal adjutant and a pilot. In moments, he was flying past the Sword of Sol, the massive Hadrian-class battleship covered in dents and scratches from its pitched battle with the Junta's main battle fleet. As he watched, it slowly spun in the void while hundreds of remote-controlled repair drones scudded over its surface, picking away like fish in a tidal spa, removing broken bits of armor so that the EVO-suited repair crews could patch and cover over the worst areas.

Despite her battle damage, his ship was still the most potent, violent combatant on this battlefield, outnumbered or not. She bristled with enormous heavy guns both plasma and rail cannon, with torpedo bays for a dozen sizes and types of missile, laser-focusing dishes for melting enemy torpedoes and fighters in flight, and hundreds of tiny point-defense guns for anything that got past those.

The pilot moved his shuttle slowly, maneuvering around a roiling field of debris from the Sword's most recent skirmish. Four Junta cruisers had made an end-run toward her, trying to close so their torpedoes would have a chance to hit before the point defenses turned them to so much space dust. It had ended for them in much the way a fight between four tree sloths and a giant tiger would have. All four cruisers and every one of their fighters were now nothing but twisted corpses, slowly spinning in the void, smoking hulks and masses of debris.

As instructed, his pilot flew slowly, carefully, toward the rendezvous point. The Rear Admiral took a moment to straighten his formal blues, toying with a lapel until it was appropriately placed, laden with his many decorations from thirty-three years as an officer. He was on his way to an official parlay. The Irish wolfhound wasn't about to do so looking shabby and battle-worn, as his sub-species' fur already tended toward when not properly groomed and trimmed.

In the seat across from him, the Rear Admiral's adjutant sat sternly upright in his primly-pressed Naval blues. The Lieutenant was a lanky grey-furred field mouse, with a swimmer's build Vernier had annoyedly found himself less and less able to emulate as the years passed by.

"So, Lieutenant. Thoughts?" the Rear Admiral drawled out, his voice utterly at odds with the upright and stiff posture in which they both sat. The mouse responded in far more clipped tones.

"Centauri was a trap all along. They are requesting surrender in hopes of adding to their fleet rather than losing from it taking us."

Vernier gazed out the port hole near his head, at the armada arrayed against him.

Of the vessels they had come here to battle, few remained. His fleet had taken perhaps twenty percent losses, mostly among medium-weight ships, leaving him a lopsided task force of frigates and destroyers with only a few larger capital ships. He wondered how they were going to retrieve all the fighters and bombers, whether his remaining capital ships would be able to handle the extra craft.

His eyes tracked to the Fist of the Nascent Dawn, where she was locked in a murderous embrace with the Star of Aden, so far behind what was left of the enemy line that his own forces would be unable to reach her before the deadline. That combat was ongoing in the boarding action was a foregone conclusion, ceasefire or not. He knew Captain Leith's record too well to think she would capitulate. She'd die with a pistol in her hand, if it came to that, and spitting defiance all the while.

"Pilot, be careful with the debris fields. I'd rather be late than torn to pieces."

It was a convenient lie, a code to tell the pilot to take his time. Vernier wanted to test the enemy, to see just how badly they wanted his ships intact. His adjutant spoke again.

"They will think you are too proud to face surrender, and will laugh, sir."

Vernier's smile was a ghost so faint that the adjutant only noticed it because of their long association. The mouse didn't need to shift, to recall that his pistol was firmly strapped to his hip. It gave him comfort, knowing the weapon was there, however puny it was against modern armor and Marine outfitting. If it came to a fight at the rendezvous, he intended to die defending his commander.

The beeping of Vernier's watch got the mouse's eyebrow rising. Meanwhile, his commander just raised the watch, glanced at it, and nonchalantly clicked the alarm off as if nothing unusual had occurred. A few moments of sitting, thinking, and taking slow deep breaths later, he undogged his straps and walked into the cockpit.

Reaching past the pilot, he pulled open a panel on the flight console, reached inside, and yanked a bit of green wiring free with a fizzling of sparks.

"S-sir? Hey! That's autopilot control!"

"Calm yourself, Ensign. I want you to send an open communication that we are having autopilot distress. Then continue toward the rendesvouz point at half speed."

"Sir?"

"It's called a delaying tactic, son."

The Ensign moved to do as told, though he gave his admiral a very curious expression. The adjutant merely half-smiled, and shook his head at the two in the cockpit.

"That beep was your ten-minute alarm sir. Ten minutes until what?"

Rear Admiral Vernier looked back over his shoulder, and shrugged.

"You'll see."

Void Shadow drifted in the empty endless black, engines cut to reduce the chance of being spotted, as the combat around him swirled and waned, a dying whirlpool in a river running dry of reinforcements. He scanned the new enemy fleet with his electronic eyes, as he hovered over the Star of Aden's axis of rotation, a spindly, tiny sword of Damocles waiting for the string to break.

He couldn't help the comparison, though his ever-pumping love of adrenaline told him to stop thinking and start shooting. It was as if a gale had blown through, whipping the sea and sky into a torrent of rain and thunder, calamity and catastrophe, as the two terrible naval forces had crashed together and blasted one another apart. Vernier's fleet was the clear winner, having broken the Junta fleet's formation and scattered them, inflicting at least three times their own losses in those frantic hours of combat, battling the storm-tide of plasma and torpedoes to strike down their foe in kind.

Then, the gale had broken into eddying storms, little swirls of battle where war continued, surrounded by hordes of recovering ships whose fights were over. In a moment, a new storm had occupied the horizon, a hurricane greening the sky with tornado-sign and apocalyptic proclamation.

Surrender, the tempest had told them, and you will be spared.

First Fleet's naval force had spent the last thirty minutes pulling back from the remaining battles, consolidating, conducting frenzied field repairs upon holed hulls and slagged armor. Crippled fighters and ejected life pods had been gathered up, swooped by the pelican-like rescue corvettes that launched from the larger mother ships.

He had elected to wait, silent in the shadow of endless night, for the moment parlay broke down. Even though Vernier was outnumbered by a vast margin, his fleet was flush with victory and still had enough teeth to make their enemy suffer for every victory they took this day. What was more, he knew Vernier by reputation - the dog was no coward and no fool, and to lose this battle would be tantamount to losing the war. First Fleet would not survive, if it lost fully a third of its operational fleet in a single battle. Especially if the Titan Shipyards fell or were heavily damaged by the battles raging there.

Void Shadow had met Grand Admiral Kerrick a number of times, though never while either were on duty. Randy Kerrick was well-loved by his family, and the squirrel loved his boyfriend enough to put up with their strange, unemotional dinners and over-intellectual banality. Even if every sweater-vested 'meet the family' event made him want to claw his eyes out with boredom.

Grand Admiral Kerrick, for all of his cold fish demeanor, would follow Rear Admiral Vernier to the very gates of Hell to throttle him for a defeat like this. So, Void Shadow waited and watched, his computer plotting the trajectory of Vernier's shuttle as it passed toward what looked to be a rendesvouz point almost precisely at the mid-point between the two great fleets.

Meanwhile, the Junta's original invasion fleet was limping away, their ships savaged and morale shattered, disorganized as if their leading officers had been killed. Perhaps they had, Void Shadow mused, as his eyes scanned over the destruction-strewn cosmic battlefield.

If he'd been in his body, he would have jittered in surprise, when the action started, abrupt as a summer thunder storm and a thousand times as destructive.

Captain Leith had strapped herself back into the command chair, though the pain of pulling one strap over her wounded collarbone was almost enough to make her black out. Panting, red-faced and with her jaw trying to clench shut against the fiery stars burning in her vision and upper body, she sat back in the chair and spoke in a crisp no-nonsense cadence.

"Staff Sergeant Herrin is out of time. If we don't break free now, the Junta's ambush fleet will be on us before we can get clear. Assuming the projected losses are correct," she nodded, painfully, to Adeling at his barely-functioning sensor station, "we will be one of First Fleet's few remaining capital ships in the sector within two hours. We have fought against overwhelming odds before and come out victorious, thanks to your skill, professionalism, and ferocity."

Her officers stood at attention near their stations. Around them, repair crews were hard at work, struggling to get everything functional again by pulling circuits that had been fried by the EMP, replacing what they could, bypassing what they couldn't. Luckily for all of them, even the super-potent electromagnetic pulse wake of a singularity torpedo had only knocked out a certain percentage of the Fist's systems. Otherwise, they would have been far more fucked than they already were, byLeith's estimation.

Captain Leith nodded, and they took the que, turning back to their stations for final preparations and calculation. She closed her eyes a moment, and took slow, deep breaths, as she played out the scenarios in her head, to the meditative background of machine hum and workmen hard at repair.

If the barrage had the desired effect, Fist of the Nascent Dawn would be able to rocket free of the Star of Aden, giving her crew a chance to mop up the enemy boarders. There would then be a chase, not unlike the one her ship had just survived in the Atria system. Assuming they were able to get free of the debris fields, they could activate theRT Drive, fly into the vast empty gulf between star systems, and wait for instruction from First Fleet's headquarters aboard Admiral Kerrick's flagship.

If the barrage failed to momentarily stun the crew and systems of the Star of Aden, the gravitic moorings that held their two ships together would hold. The Fist of the Nascent Dawn would drag Star of Aden a short distance before her engines overloaded from the strain. Then, knowing that the Fist had power again, Star of Aden would either blast her full of holes until she was crippled or torn to pieces, or else continue swarming her with boarders and call her fighters back to begin blowing holes in the hull to vent sections full of defending Marines and Naval personnel. The fight wouldn't last long.

Commander Forza had returned to the bridge minutes ago, and took a break from manning the defensive barricades to come over and take his seat again. His right foot moved over, and kicked her left lightly, hidden by the two foot barrier that ceremonially separated the command area from the rest of the bridge.

"Captain, everything is as ready as it's going to get," his comforting rumble told her. She wanted to bury herself in that voice, rich like chocolate, comforting and serene and secure while her own mind was full of doubt and fear. Not for herself, but for her ship and the crew that manned her.

"I know, Galen," she said back, voice low so others wouldn't catch it. His presence was soothing to her, which she knew was a red flag. He'd nearly kissed her, back when the bridge had been blacked out, and she wasn't entirely certain she would have stopped him. It wasn't proper, for an officer to be romantic with a subordinate. Such a relationship, or even the perception of such a relationship, would be bad for morale. Accusations of favoritism had torn crews apart before, ruined their ability to work together in a streamlined fashion.

His laugh still made her stomach clench up, though, and she couldn't deny her attraction to the big handsome wolf. She could hear the easy smile in his voice, the serenity in his face as he spoke.

"If we do nothing, they overwhelm us. If we do something, maybe we win and maybe we lose. Do you want my advice, Captain?"

She smiled, wanly, and opened one eye to peer at him. He looked amused, un-traced with fear, his ears forward and attentive, tail wagging slowly where it was pushed through the slot in his chair. His eyes looked happy, amused, excited...Filled with desire, whether for her or for the excitement to come she wasn't sure.

"You wouldn't be here if I didn't, Galen."

"Adri, roll the dice and do it now."

It was as if the exhaustion were pushed away, suddenly lifted off her like a veil. She sat forward, reassured by his agreement with what her internal monologue had been shouting at her despite her misgivings and the risks.

"All stations, begin in thirty seconds."

"Aye, Captain!" echoed across the bridge. The technicians redoubled their speed, as her flag officers began flexing paws, shifting their weight from paw to paw, nervous but ready.

"If this goes wrong, Galen," she muttered to him out the side of her mouth, "I'm blaming you."

He snorted, crinkling his long, powerful and somehow elegant snout.

"And if it goes right, Captain? What do I get?"

"I don't know. A free doggie bone?"

The raised brow made her pale skin flush, as she realized the double entendre she'd inadvertently made.

"I can live with that," came the uttered response.

The thirty second mark came, and she spoke in a hard command, the heat Galen raised in her chest and lower flowing through the rest of her body in her habitual pre-battle flush.

"All stations, engage!"

Derry's limping, loping pace broke into a painful run as they turned a corner in the tunnels, only to hear the chattering chaos of heavy fire somewhere ahead of them. Directly in front of the unit, finally in the formation they had discussed hours ago before it all went to hell, Olliver trotted, Black Jack's multi-ton footfalls shaking ancient dust from ancient walls as his terrible god of war strode towards the pitched battlefield ahead of them.

Behind him, Corpsman Derkin ran ran in the center of the unit formation, hunched forward with the tiny bundle that wasDerry's critically injured sister wrapped up in blankets in his arms. He cradled her, head to his chest, like she was a tiny infant, though the girl was somewhere near five feet tall. Derryknew the cradling was to protect her, to put as much of his armor between her and anyone who fired on the Dragonslayers.

At the rear of their group, Candace Waters and Corporal Kerr spun, slowing to fire on the Junta reinforcements they had just cut in front of, thundering death down-range into the utterly flat-footed and un-covered soldiers and cutting them to bits. Then they were running again, pell-mell toward the hellish chaos of the hab blocks.

To his right, Nivea Gordon kept pace, steady as if she could run forever. WhereDerrywas their training unit's best speed runner, Gordon put him to shame in the long-run department. Her long, powerful legs, slender potent body, and patient demeanor made her the perfect marathon runner, and it showed. Where he was sweating and hurting, muscles burning, bullet wound shrieking at him for being an idiot, she looked like she was having fun.

When she turned her head toward him, he could imagine the stuck-out tongue she was giving him, though she didn't break professional character by transmitting the "mleeeh" sound she was probably making. Sergeant Darryl Blake rolled his eyes, then put his attention back on the conflict ahead.

Olliver hit the steel grate covering their entrance with all the force of a siege ram, and the quarter-ton piece of rusting metal took flight, ripping chunks of masonry off the walls as it went. He exploded through the breach just behind it, invisible thanks to his adaptive camouflage for a moment, until his guns opened up with barks and chatters of death and flame, grenades and carnage, on the rear area of Junta soldiers they'd just broken into.

Derry looked up as he exited the tunnel, immediately ducking low and rushing into a makeshift entrenchment already abandoned by the advancing enemy. Around him, the hab dome climbed precipitiously upward, a grand artificial cavern in which a miniature city had been built, complete with its own cyclopean, twisting, columnal skyscrapers carved straight from the living bedrock by centuries of underdwellers with any tool they could make, find, or steal.

Home, he thought. Home, where the sky was made of stone, solid and immovable. He didn't remember it feeling so small, nor feeling as if it would come crashing down on him at any moment. This was where he'd spent the bulk of his childhood, learning from Mr. Tenh, or jury-rigging ancient public terminals to go read from the internet libraries, playing with other children in the filthy back-alleys when regular brown-outs shut down his connections to cleaner, safer worlds of the mind. As he raised his rifle and fired off a double-tap of rail-accelerated iron missiles into an incoming soldier, blood splattered on a hydrant he'd once broken open with a wrench, creating a brief pool for other kids to play in for one happy overheated evening.

His squad needed no instruction here. They knew what needed to be done. As Olliver covered their advance, the invisible spec ops infantry ducked low and jogged, trench-running around corners and firing short, accurate, lethal bursts into the enemies they found there with rifles up against chin and shoulder. Bringing up the rear, Derkin herded their four paws-bound, gagged prisoners, keeping them moving and heads low with his sidearm pointed at their backs andDerry's sister on a makeshift litter behind him being pulled by virtue of a cloth harness around his chest.

Invisible, Nivea Gordon popped up during a lull in the shooting, and whispered back what she could see.

"Heavy enemy troop concentration at what looks to be a hospital. Fifteen stories tall, at my three o-clock, maybe two clicks out. Looks like combat been's ongoing for a while. Building to building with plenty of light anti-tank ordnance."

Olliver's response sounded wan, yet almost excited in his dry sarcastic way.

"Oh bloody wonderful."

Nobody bothered arguing or discussing. Their target was too large to be easily moved through a battlefield, and the trail of soldier boots away from the auto-shop had eventually made its way here. The most logical place for enemy special forces teams to take a prisoner would be the most fortified spot on the battlefield.

What they were going to do when they arrived,Derrywasn't yet sure. That they had to go that way was a foregone conclusion, though, and as crumpled concrete and broken stone crunched under his boots he wondered if Tenh were alright. The evidence of combat they had found along their trail had been disconcerting to say the least, as if an invisible killer had been slaughtering their enemies like cattle, right up until that cave full of blast scarring.

Kerr, the resident tracker and outdoorsman of the group, had definitively stated the scenario. A large, well-armed and dangerous opponent was chased and cornered in that cavern, then grenaded with multiple high-yield fragmentation devices. The chance of survival was zero, in such an environment, unless the person in question were wearing some seriously high-tech full body sealed armoring.

Derry hadn't allowed that to internalize yet. He wasn't giving up on Mr. Tenh until he saw the body himself. The same as he hadn't given up on Trisha, though she hovered on the barrier between life and death, patched together as best Derkin could with the resources at their disposal.

Ahead of them, the hospital loomed, grey and ominous, half-concealed by smoke that billowed from burning ground vehicles and accumulated in the firing of heavy rail weapons. The entrenchments dug hastily around its base swarmed with Junta soldiers, a lethal wall of dedicated, embattled warriors firing away with everything they had, using discipline and training to counteract the overwhelming numbers of under-dwellers that seemed to come out of the very ground at them.

The Dragonslayers continued moving through trenches, mopping up small, surprised units of Junta soldiery that stood in their path with all the mercy of an auto-tiller ripping soil. Somewhere along the way,Derryrealized, they had passed a point of emotional exhaustion beyond which enemies were just threats, no longer people. For the moment, it was useful, for in warfare hesitation was often synonymous with death. A sour sense in his gut told him the price they would pay for it would come much later, and be far too high.

Finally, they stopped their forward advance, hunkered down in an entrenchment that crowned a hill overlooking the hospital's expansive blacktop parking lot. On either side of it, like the gatehouse on an ancient castle, parking structures rose five stories tall, full of soldiers struggling to establish sand-bag and concrete defensive positions as enemies swarmed the defenses on ground level, trying again and again to overwhelm and whittle down the invaders.

"Niece. Kerr. Give the locals some help."

Both sharpshooters nodded and trotted off together, seeking a good vantage point. Meanwhile, the four prisoners hunkered down in a corner of the circular entrenchment, as Derkin walked up and put a paw toDerry's shoulder.

"At this rate, we'll need to get into that hospital undetected and take one of the surgical theaters. This battle won't be over in less than ten hours, and I don't like your sister's chances if we try to sneak through the middle of it. Better to operate here, and take our chances once things start calming down."

Derry nodded, and reached up to pat the medic's paw companionably, as he looked over the bristling defenses surrounding the enemy's makeshift base.

"They haven't been here long." He pointed at the hospital's upper floors, where electrical lights were still operational, on emergency generator power. "Most likely just a few hours, so the fortifications will be shallow. Olliver, when we're ready, you'll split off and make a solo attack on their western front. Use everything you have. Make it like Hell just opened its mouth and vomited havoc in their faces. Withdraw when things get too hairy."

Olliver snorted into his mic.

"You have such a genteel way with words, Sergeant."

The anticipation in his Whip's voice was palpable. Olly hadn't yet had the opportunity to truly let loose with his terrifying metal beast. Derrycontinued.

"The local resistance fighters will notice something's up and will probably move to take advantage. When the Junta start moving reinforcements to that area, we'll assault from the other side and try to get through with maximum stealth. With any luck, there'll be enough of a lull in the fighting that we won't be taking fire from both sides. I'll see if I can't arrange something with the locals. Some of 'em owe me favors."

Kerr and Nivea quickly modified the energy settings on their rail rifles, and set up next to one another, laid flat out on ground shielded by a concrete slab that protruded up at an angle from the ground. Their opening shots made hardly any sound, the down-powered rail accelerators failing to quite break the speed of sound. Somewhere down-range, two soldiers manning a heavy machine gun slumped over, foreheads smashed in and the back of their skulls blown off by the impacts. With soft-spoken words, they selected new targets, moving up to officers now.

Derry grinned despite himself, pushing down the sense of guilt at the carnage they were wreaking. But for politics alone, these furs and other humans were fellow service-people, the same uniforms and weaponry they themselves had trained with in some cases.

War made enemies of friends and friends of enemies.

Derry spoke his signal to Olliver.

"Go ahead and find a good spot to start. Give me ten minutes, then start when ready."

"Understood, Sergeant."