Post by ingen on Apr 6, 2023 14:49:56 GMT
Sunpike/Gauvins - Beef
Imaginarium - Chris
ABOVE THE PLANET OF TX-426-50
Unsurprisingly, prime real estate in the Tuvian Arm was not easy to come by. Following the Diet of Chinon, the Conclave had been searching for a planet to settle as the homeworld of the planned Alliance of Sunpike, but finding territory that was both suitable for habitation and sheltered from the Jade Empire's wrath was not as easy as it sounded.
TX-426-50 seemed like a blessing. A fertile planet with a rainy temperate climate, it was perhaps a little gloomy for the liking of some, but what was best was that probes showed it was home to the ruins of an ancient, pre-FTL civilisation. The abundance of stone shelter, along with the overgrown roads and pathways and the crumbling quays, would make it easier to explore and work on the planet.
The first freighter rumbled down through the foggy clouds, rain hammering at its cockpit and viewports as it came to a gentle stop on a large field which had at some point prior been an assembly area or perhaps a sporting venue of some kind. The huge landing ramps descended and the first vehicles began to roll down it, followed by people on foot who gaped at the ruined stone city beside which they had landed.
Ysoude Duvallier took a breath of the chilly, damp air, inhaling deeply and then letting it go slowly. She paused and then stepped off the ramp and onto the thick, moss-like field. Her first step on Sunpike.
She glanced around. She did not know why, but mixed with her excitement was a sense of trepidation, an uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. She watched as the men and women assigned to security detail moved towards the ruins, their eclectic collection of weapons clutched tight. At least they had uniforms; their secret benefactors, an obscure branch of the Imaginariumese bureaucracy, had provided them with an endless supply of non-military gear to help with their endeavour.
_
The thick, fleece-lined overcoats with their synthetic micro denier filament yarns had a compacted weave structure which effectively made them waterproof, even though to the touch they felt like simple leather. The hundreds of mahogany brown coats had been earmarked for the newly-founded 'Alliance Guard' and, together with repurposed jetbike helmets that had had HUD systems installed post-market, formed the crude beginnings of a uniform.
Their first night was going to be an interesting one. They were planning to map as much of the city as possible, on foot and using drones, and take more detailed geological surveys to begin zoning the land outside the city. A team had been tasked with selecting and securing a building for the two hundred members of the first wave to stay overnight, and then tomorrow the landings would begin in earnest.
Duvallier climbed atop a broad-wheeled offroader, its flatbed fitted with a roll cage and benches, and raised her voice, the golden torc at her neck automatically picking up the raised volume and amplifying it.
"Children of Neusattar! Bravest of nations! I have no doubt of your courage, and none of your victory. Your spirit does not require to be roused, for by nature we are bold and unflinching. Raise your standards, my comrades, and set neither measure nor limit to your merited pride, for today we build a new world!"
There were cheers in response, oddly muffled by the light rain, and the Sunpikers set to with a will, visible even in the distance as faint pinpricks of light dancing through the mist and in the puddles of water.
Duvallier dropped down and offered a warm smile to her Imaginariumese advisors.
"I stole that from a history book. It is a momentous day for us, to finally be free from the Jade Empire and treading soil that is ours for the taking."
General Denys Bezus inhaled a deep breath, breathing in the fresh air of TX-426-50. The cool air made his lungs feel alive, as the first tastes of fresh oxygen for weeks (rather than the recycled gas on the starship) darted through his body. He removed his hat, a woven military cap, the same grey/green colour as his fatigues, and ran his hands over his balding head. He felt the cold damp touch where his hair had once grown (a long time ago), it’s moisture creeping into the lines of age that spread across his face.
He looked upon Duvallier, the ‘innocent smile of the noble ideologue’ he thought to himself, and he returned the gesture.
“Fine words indeed. A momentous day for you and your people. There is work here to be done but let us enjoy for a moment these first breathes upon a whole new world.”
‘What a troublesome mission this is.’ The General thought.
-
Officially, the Socialist Republics and the Jade Empire were many centuries into a budding friendship. Their alliances had once run amok across the face of the Planet Laptev, the Laptev Axis being one of the most formidable military might’s in the known universe. Diplomatically, that was how it always was. Underneath it all, however, was the pushing and pulling of influence. Both parties knew the other’s politics didn’t sit well with each other at heart. The Socialist Republics was founded on the very bloody execution of it’s own Emperor after all. And so whilst politeness and genuine friendship could be found in face to face relationships, behind the scenes sat a more clandestine movement, attempting to change the other.
It was through this that Bezus, General rank of the Komitet (Committee for the Defense of the Revolution), found himself and his force, the majority of which currently sat idly orbiting the planet from the Imaginese Starship above, wilfully providing support for the Conclave. It had been hoped that such a movement would provide the impetus for change within the Empire itself. When that had failed however, Imaginarium had become the main backer of the revolutionary band’s journey to find a new home.
Behind him, that support was being shown. The first landing ship, the one which Bezus himself had touched down upon the planet’s surface with, was parked behind him, it’s cargo; vast arrays of supporting technology, were being unloaded and unpacked by Imaginese soldiers.
“So Comrade Duvallier. The world is yours. What would you have us do first?”
Duvallier let out a breath, watching the industrious Vaettra and their Imaginese allies as they busied themselves about the landing site.
"A good question. We've planned well, and everyone knows their task, so you and I are at relative liberty. Hop in," she said with a smile, her Suedian accent langorous, and climbed into the back of the vehicle, perching on one of the benches and gripping the roll cage with one hand. Once the General and his aides had joined her and a couple of her people, the driver gunned the engine, rumbling over the untouched ground, the generous suspension making the ride a little less unpleasant though the cold air stung their faces.
The offroader clambered up a rocky bluff that lay to the south of the city, turning back north towards the edge to give them all a good view over the ruins. It was an impressive sight even now, cyclopean structures of dark slate-like rock built seemingly without mortar. Many of the buildings had partially collapsed, whilst others seemed to have melted, especially in the vicinity of a large plaza that looked like the centre of the town, but plenty still stood, enough to give an idea of the grandeur of the place when it was still standing. They had yet to date the city, but their best guess was that it was built for a species that stood perhaps eight feet tall and had housed anywhere between 10,000 and 50,000 people from the size of it. Recon drones had found no evidence of the builders, other than some scattered bone fragments that had not yet shed any light.
Duvallier recounted all this as they drove, dismounting with a squelch as her boots hit the damp moss once they reached the top of the bluff. Stepping close to the edge, she took a look out over the city.
"We don't know what happened to the original inhabitants, but we think they were somewhere in the Iron Age." she said, leaving unspoken her concerns about what hidden dangers Sunpike might hold for her people.
Chris (Imaginarium SR) — 02/12/2021 01:56
Bezus watched over the rocky remains of the ancient ruins, the cold wind blowing in his face as he scoured the scene for any possible signs of the previous occupants missed by the relentless scouting that had already come before them. The architecture was fascinating. Duvallier’s description of the previous dwellers was no overestimate; the doorways showing signs of a much larger life form.
“This will do for now.” He shouted over the wind blustering through the vehicle. “Once we get our base camp established, we should think about organising closer reconnaissance of the surrounding areas. I know we have scouted it heavily with the drones, but a physical inspection of what we are dealing with should help us greatly.”
He paused again, taking in another look at the stone buildings that made up the city’s structure.
“There’s good shelter here, long term however, what is your plan? Will you use this region as centre?”
Duvallier nodded. "Yes, but not for long. It looks like the river has shifted since this city was built, so we plan to cite a new city closer to the river, using this place as a base from which to do so."
She turned and hopped back into the offroader, with Bezus following. They rolled down the far side of the bluff, the terrain getting rougher as they reached a low plain nearer the river, covered in thick waving ferns. The offroader turned north along the riverbank and eventually drew near to the city. The original inhabitants had not built suburbs. Right at the outskirts, the buildigns were just sa large and imposing as those further in, almost like sheer walls or cliffs pierced here and there by the overgrown streets.
"Once we have basic shelter and a perimeter, our first goal is to build a medical facility, a proper shuttleport and start work on the brightstone operations to bring in some revenue. We have seed money, and your generous support, but Sunpike needs its own industry if it is to succeed."
The vehicle suddenly jerked to the right, away from the river, and as the passengers grasped for the rollcage and tried to steady themselves they caught a glimpse of a large shape bursting out of the water towards them. As it receded into the distance behind them, they saw a quadrupedal creature with water running off its furred back. It paced into the tracks their wheels had left behind and let out a furious bellow, surprisingly loud, before sitting to watch them as they kept going.
"Local fauna," explained Duvallier, brushing hair from her face, "they're herbivores but they've been hostile to our drones. We'll need to keep an eye on them."
The vehicle eventually arrived at what looked like an old plaza, marked by a central fountain around which the remains of a stone pavilion lay. One side of the plaza was taken up by a large building which bustled with activity.
The building consisted of two squat towers, two storeys tall but nearly 40 feet because of the giant size of the former occupants, linked by a central bulwark. Windows that looked like they may have once held horn or glass panes glowered out at the plaza, lit from inside by the equipment of the newcomers, whilst the huge front doors already had a deployable barricade in front of them behind which stood a couple of Alliance Guards, whilst people bustled to and fro lugging equipment inside. Several other vehicles were parked outside, their beds filled with all the gear necessary to turn the hulking building into a home for two hundred people.
Crossing inside, they found that things were already well underway. The main hallway was filled with supplies, equipment, and weapon racks, whilst to their left and right the towers had been filled with cots and more stored equipment. Opposite the main door, a narrower corridor led to dark, windowless room which had been converted into a command center. Holes had been drilled to allow sensors and comms through the walls, and around the edge of the room were consoles at which sat Alliance members, whilst a large central display had been set up in the middle of the room and showed little dots as expedition members explored the city in detail.
She crossed over to speak with one of the people hunched over the table, a younger man with thick mustaches. They spoke for a few moments about their discoveries, and the man told them that one of their patrols had had to shoot a quadruped after it got too close to them, but otherwise everything was going to plan. Duvallier turned to Bezus.
"Well, you've seen our fine new capitol," she said with a hint of irony, "and I'd be remiss in not offering you a place to stay overnight, unless you already have your own campsite in mind?"
Bezus took in the surroundings of the makeshift base, deep inside the stone building. He watched as men and women scurried around, unloading supplies, preparing the living quarters for it’s coming occupants.
The news of the quadruped had alarmed him. He hadn’t expected the local fauna to be hostile.
“If it is ok with you, we would happily accept your gracious invitation for accommodation. This ‘area’ looks as good a foundation for us to build our advance on. The remains of these buildings will be useful against any further ‘infiltrations’ by the local wildlife. Might be worth mentioning to our night guards to be extra careful. We don’t want to be caught off guard by some rampant nocturnal carnivore.”
A man in Imaginese fatigues approached him. He stopped, saluted the rank of the general, and spoke, in common, clearly to show transparency with Duvallier.
“Comrade General, the last of our initial landing party has unloaded from the drop ships. Over Command want to know whether we still plan to go ahead and let the rest of the forces drop down in the coming days, or whether we need more manpower now?”
“Very good Comrade…Comrade Duvallier. What say you? We have an entire regiment sitting above us in space…do we let them rest, or call them down?”
Duvallier thought for a moment then shook her head. "No, we will need them to provide security for the Brightstone mine whilst we set up, and work is set to commence tomorrow."
She turned and called to a young woman working on a datapad. "Kassandra, set our guests up with a suite." she said, nodding towards Bezus' trooper. The Vaettran woman nodded in reply and gestured to the Imaginese soldier to follow her, leading him up to the south-east corner of the second storey of the eastwards tower, indicating a section of bunks that the 'advisors' could take for themselves. Nearby Sunpikers smiled cheerily and called out greetings, happy to see support from foreign powers after two years of hiding in the shadows and fleeing from Jade law.
Elsewhere, Duvallier and Bezus went over some more logistical details, discussing the developments on the planet before turning to more general discussions of state policy. The Alliance were completely out of the shallow end, essentially trying to forge an entire functional nation-state from scratch, and the Conclave had increasingly been leaning on Imaginese thought and the Semenov school of collectivism, so the opportunity to directly chat with a senior Socialist officer was an opportunity Duvallier could not pass up.
Some time later, as night was falling, the Sunpikers had set up a pair of bonfires in the courtyard outside. The rain had slackened off, and Alliance members had set up campchairs and dragged crates, breaking out field meals and rations that they washed down with weak ales and watered-down wines. Fresh drinking water, at least, was in abundance here.
Duvallier led Bezus to a couple of chairs by the smaller fire, squinting towards the faint glow of guard pickets before settling down and accepting a mug from someone in the darkness. Nearby some people were enthustiastically singing a folk song.
"So, comrade, what do you think of our flowering experiment?" she asked wryly, a smile tugging at her lips.
Bezus smiled at Duvallier’s question. ‘How to answer this?’ he thought.
Certainly, he felt total conviction in the support of the new state. He would not have committed himself and his men to the journey to the unsettled planet if he did not believe entirely in the project. But this project had a bit of everything. Settlement in a wild frontier. Nation building. Survival. The journey ahead was tough, that is for sure.
He reached down into box that he had brought along with him that evening. A wooden crate of sorts, as he unfastened glassware reflected the firelight into his eyes. He removed 2 small glasses, placing them delicately in front of him, and returned to the case, removing a sealed bottle of Krakohzian Vodka.
He continued to smile, gesturing to Duvallier as he removed the lid, offering to fill one of the glasses for her.
“What do I think…” he began “Well…to continue your analogy…the ground is fertile. We can build very strong roots here. The job we have in front of us will be long and arduous, and I dare say, like flowers, it will take preening and care. The right environment will need to be curated so that we do not lose the very spirit of what brought us here.”
He filled both glasses, before raising his own.
“I think that we have good people here. They will have to be. If history has taught us anything, it is that these early days of “revolution” are the hardest embers to keep lit. Thankfully, you have a willing supporter in Imaginarium…at least on a financial and material front…the diplomatic is…complicated. You have your ideas for this world though…where would you begin your statehood? What is the first action of a government led by Comrade Duvallier?”
Duvallier reached out a hand, swathed in a woolen fingerless glove, to accept the drink. She could smell it from here, but took a sip and pursed her lips, fighting against the urge to wince at the strong liquor. The aftertaste was surprisingly nice, however, and she could feel the warmth spreading through her as a tingling sensation against the prickle of cold, nodding as she listened to Bezus' comments.
"There's so much to do," she laughed after holding in a breath for a moment, "dieu. We need to get the Brightstone mine running to give us some purpose and income, we've got to set up basic infrastructure like running water and power, we've got to find places for everyone to sleep, the list goes on."
She shrugged. "It'll be a busy year, for sure, but my people are nothing if not hard workers, and this planet is a blank canvas..." she said, but then she stopped, the glass halfway to her lips. She thought she had heard something, yelling in the distance, but after a moment she wrote it off as nothing. She drew breath to speak again and the night was suddenly riven by a gunshot in the distance.
Heads whipped around, trying to pinpoint the origin as the sound echoed through the strangely barren ruins of the alien city, before more gunshots rang out, clearer this time, followed by yells from the darkness.
"What the....Kassandra, what's going on?" Duvallier asked over comms, but from inside the building Kassandra's reply was confused. "I dont'...one of the patrols is heading your way, fast, I..."
”What is going on? Report…please.” Bezus loudly spoke, concern in his voice as he stood up from his seat, looking around the room with increasing worry.
No reply…just crackling at the other end of communications.
“I do not like this…YOU!” he shouted over at half a dozen Imaginese soldiers, who were gathered around a fire of their own.
“You 6, secure the northern and eastern entrances to the courtyard…I want visuals on the streets beyond…Comrade Duvallier if I may presume some cooperation here, may I suggest you have some of your people cover the south and west? We need to get eyes into the darkness here…and my communications are playing havoc.”
The plaza became a bustle of activity, Duvallier standing uncertainly, but before anyone could make any significant moves they saw the light of someone's brankule appear in a street to the west. The little orbs of light did not glow brightly enough to illuminate the scene well for the onlookers, but they could heard the thud of boots and desperate yells as the fleeing guard rounded the corner, and suddenly the bark of a Burnham railgun split the night again, the flames of its discharge illuminating the alleyway briefly, nothing visible beside a large bulk, long hooved legs lashing out.
The soldier turned to keep running, and there was a strange blaze of blue light. What looked for all the world like a jet of water, glowing in the darkness, sprayed from the general direction of the alleyway and there was a scream, rapidly cut off.
"What in the name of..." trailed off Duvallier as around her people panicked and ran for the building or scrambled to fetch their weapons
“I SEE SOMETHING!” shouted over one of the Imaginese soldiers standing guard, gun outstretched pointing towards the darkness.
“IT’S MOVING…IT’S…BIG…FAST!”
There was a mumble of tension amongst the soldiers, as they stood firm. The overbearing urge to panic kept in check by their years of training, although for how long would remain to be seen. Noises came from all around, and as the blue lights illuminated the side streets, they cast huge shadows, which played in the imaginations of the soldiers as they still did not have a clear look of the ‘thing’ now encircling them.
Bezus stood by his fire side, watching the chaos around them. He withdrew his Revolver from its holster, and held it aloft, ready to fire.
“YSOUDE!!” he shouted over to Duvallier, looking in her direction. “What do your eyes see?”
Around them there was chaos as Sunpikers rushed back to the towers to grab weapons or simply seek cover, whilst others turned over benches or simply stood and fired at the shadowy shapes. Sporadic gunfire from the sidestreets was intermingled with screams, inhuman roars and the strange hissing blasts of their mysterious attackers. From one wider side street came a thunder of hooves and suddenly a group of giant beasts burst into view, illuminated by the flickering light of the fires and the floodlights on the corners of the towers.
Eight feet tall at the shoulders, they had shaggy cloven hooves and long heads with forward-facing eyes beneath tall, pointed ears. The lower half of their jaws split into two mandibles, long and prehensile like elephant trunks. Some of them carried strange objects, little brassy icons that glowed in the dark, and they bellowed in a strange language as they came, more of the strange bursts of glowing water lashing out at the humanoids in the plaza.
A man next to Bezus fired a bullpup pistol at the oncoming group, causing one to stagger and wail in pain, but its neighbour shouldered it aside and raised a little shard of bronze gripped in one of its chin-trunks, the strange otherworldly glow already gathering around the object. The jet crashed into the gunman and lifted him off his feet with a scream of pain, landing on the hard flagged ground with an audible crack as his brankule, the little light orbs on his horns, began to fade.
"Oh my gods," said Duvallier, not combat trained and not ready for this "they're organised! What do we do?" she replied to Bezus as more of the supposedly harmless animals began appearing in the other entrances to the plaza.
“What in the name of the Gods…” Bezus questioned aloud, staring in horror at the carnage and violence be folding around him. He watched as an Imaginese soldier to his right was scooped out of the way by one of the huge beasts attacking them. He lost focus, the sound around him a blur as I tried to focus for a second and gain his bearings.
He focused. Composed himself, and took in their surroundings. In the briefest of seconds, as he saw Duvallier shouting at him, he thought back over his training.
“If your enemy has the advantage on the field, change the field.” The phrase popped in his head from ‘Ilyich’s ‘Imaginese Battlefields’ Manual’. He glanced around again at his surroundings.‘We are being butchered in the darkness…we need to take away that disadvantage.’
“PULL BACK!” He shouted across the courtyard. “PULL YOURSELVES BACK. BACKS TOWARDS THE FIRE! FORM A RING AROUND THE HEAT…BRING THEM INTO THE LIGHT!”
He looked across to Duvallier.
“We need to create a shield wall in the first instance! KNOCK ANYTHING OVER AS YOU MOVE! CREATE ROUGH TERRAIN!”
The monsters seethed and boiled around them, the surviving Imaginese and Sunpikers falling back around the bonfire even as screams and roars echoed around the plaza. Huddled behind benches, crates and barrels, the survivors returned fire. Mercifully, the enemy's beams seemed to take a moment to charge up, giving the remaining defenders chance to duck into cover. If they saw the shot coming, that was.
From the windows of the towered building behind them, gunfire began to flare in the darkness, the sharp rumbling of Burnham railguns interspersed with the cracks and bangs of more exotic weaponry. Duvallier, still weaponless, glanced back at the building and saw lances of blue watery light spear up against the walls, splashing harmlessly against them for now.
At the wide double doors, a cluster of Alliance Guards took up position behind the deployable barricade, firing in tight bursts to keep the area clear. Around Duvallier and Bezus, the cluster of allies was slowly being whittled down in the confusion. A huge monster, already bleeding from the flank and with blood on its hooves, scrambled over a pile of chairs to reach Bezus, its long chin-tentacles flailing as it snarled in incoherent rage.
The Imaginese soldiers pulled back, firing with their array of weaponry at the ongoing stampede. Soldiers fell, screaming in pain, their comrades using covering fire as another pulled on those wounded, trying to pull them out of the fray. As they rushed, a runner began distributing ammo and weaponry to those who had not kept their guns beside them as they relaxed. One such soldier, a woman with reddish hair, short and squat, in Imaginese dress scurried to Duvallier, pressing a rifle into her arms as they ran by.
“HERE! TAKE THIS!”
The creature rapidly descended upon Bezus as he retreated backwards towards the bonfire. The light illuminated the monster, the shadows darkening the lines in it’s face, creating a vision of true horror for the General. He held his revolver, outstretched, aiming at what he believed to be the monsters face, letting rip with 3 shots.
The rifle was heavy in Duvallier's untrained hands, and she struggled awkwardly to heft it. Beside her, the creature rushing at Bezus twitched at the first shot as it punched into its shoulder, then staggered as the second slammed through its upper thigh. Its movement stilled enough for Bezus' third shot to land true, drilling straight through its head. Its screams of pain were cut short as it collapsed, its huge bulk splintering a bench beneath it, one of its tentacles unfurling slowly to stop just a few inches from Bezus' boot.
"We're too exposed here!" Duvallier yelled over the din. They were too far from the tower doorway - those lucky enough to be near it had rushed back inside already. She glanced about her and saw a large, one-storey building with one doorway and what looked like a window facing the plaza, only a half-dozen metres away. She edged towards Bezus and called into his ear.
"There! We should get inside! Then we can cover the tower doorway and they can cover us!"
Bezus looked around. Duvallier was right, things were far too exposed here, and the opportunity the doorway now presented them with seemed to be as good a chance as any.
“Ok!” he exclaimed “You get your people through the doorway first! We will provide covering fire!”
He turned towards the Imaginese soldiers left standing around the Bonfire.
“COMRADES! Covering fire for our Sunpike friends please!”
He motioned for the Imaginese forces to lay down a barrage of fire at the creatures as he motions for Duvallier and her kin to make for the doorway.
Duvallier sprinted for the door, followed by some of her comrades. One man stopped to fire a burst at a beast that was cutting across their path, but was snatched away himself by a beam of energy.
They kept running, one woman outstripping Duvallier and ducking inside, slipping her rifle through the window and laying down cover fire.
A MAZ-50 truck, loaned from Imaginarium and driven by Sunpikers, veered into the plaza, trailing flame. It's pintle gunner poured fire into their attackers but the vehicle tipped over and cartwheeled in a burst of smoke, flames and debris, cutting a swathe through the centre of the plaza.
Before the roar of the crash had settled, the clatter of an LMG filled the air as someone inside the other building finished siting it and opened up. Tracer rounds stitched the air as a soldier yelled for Bezus and his troops to join them inside cover
The fire and smoke coming from the wrecked MAZ-50 began to choke Bezus. He stood firmly, watching his soldiers give cover as the rest of the gathering dived into cover. Once the last person was through, he shouted his commands.
“IN IN IN! EVERYONE INTO COVER!”.
One by one, those Imaginese soldiers left in the courtyard withdrew, their backs towards the doorway as they sought shelter in the building. Bezus came last, catching one last glimpse of the courtyard before hiding behind the doorway of the stone building. He looked his soldiers up and down, counting how many he had within the space. He moved on to look at the Alliance contingent. He noted the terror in everyone’s eyes, before resting on Duvallier.
“We need to secure this building. We need to get in contact with our people in the rest of the city, find out where these things are coming from.”
A half-dozen Sunpikers had made it to the building. It was hard to tell through the confusion, flames, and smoke, but at first glanced it looked as if there were far more dead monsters than people in the plaza, but this was an illusion caused by the great bulk of the beasts. A rough count suggested that perhaps thirty people lay prone across the plaza, with maybe as many of the strange beasts.
A watery beam lanced through one of the windows, missing the defender who ducked down at the last second, then edged his rifle over the lip to return fire and was rewarded by a scream. Duvallier stared wildly at Bezus as if not understanding, then nodded and pulled out her holo.
"Serge! Serge it's me! Can you hear me?"
After a few moments a reply came back, clear but accompanied by background shouts and clamour. The voice was langorous and spoke of a lifetime of wine and cigarettes.
"Yeah I'm here. In the towers. Where are you?"
"We're in the building uh..to the...the south of the plaza, with the truck crashed outside."
There was another moment of silence and then the voice returned.
"Oh, so that was you? Good, I think most of our people are off the streets now. We're piling up these bastards around the towers. Just stay put."
She glanced at Bezus, who had overheard it all.
"Okay...we can hold the front here if you want to check the rest of the building?"
Bezus ran a hand across his balding head, and took a glance once more into the courtyard, taking in the wreckage and carnage that had unfolded before them. He once more took count of those left standing amongst them, before looking back at Duvallier once more, overhearing her conversation.
“You two!” he charged, commanding to Imaginese soldiers who looked shock up. “Take the windows looking out onto the courtyard.”
He shifted his head to another collection of people, a mixture of Imaginese and Sunpikers who were sat, also trance like. “You lot…on your feet. We need to check and clear this building.” He pointed towards a doorway at the back of the room, ushering them to check that the adjacent room was safe for them to spread into.
Finally, he softened his resolve, turning back to Duvallier. “Are you hurt?” he questioned.
Frozen for a moment, the Sunpikers roused themselves and followed their Imaginese comrades. There was no rear exit to the building, only a large room with what looked like a dry well in the centre.
To the east side of the first room was another room with no windows but a single staircase, wide by their standards but probably small for the original inhabitants.
The upstairs was much the same, just two empty rooms, only with windows facing south into the street behind as well as north into the plaza. A Sunpiker fired a burst out of the south window, elicting a scream from below.
"They're falling back!" she yelled excitedly, firing again, then staggered back with a cry as a burst of blue shattered part of the window frame. True enough, however the pressure seemed to be easing off.
Below, Duvallier patted herself down.
"I'm fine, comrade, and you?"
Bezus looked over Duvallier, and then the rest of the room, and the scattering of living bodies still standing, even if they certainly looked to be worse for wear.
“Yes…” he sighed “Thank you.” He paused again, taking stock of the situation, and the quietening of noise from outside. He motioned towards a soldier stood by the door way, catching their breath “You there, see if anyone needs medical help. Is the outside clear now, can anyone report?”
“Yes sir, they’ve withdrawn from the courtyard.” Said another Imaginese soldier, stood surveying the courtyard from the doorway.
“Let us move back outside…be alert though, I want weapons at the ready in case those ‘things’ return. Let us take stock of what has just occurred.”
What HAD just occurred? These creatures had totally blindsided them. He turned once more to Duvallier.
“Did any of our reports suggest any life forms like that? We need to find out where they came from.”
Duvallier cautiously approached the window beside the door, peering out into the evening. The fog was thickening, made strange by the dancing flames spread sporadically across the plaza, the crackle of fire and the moans of the injured muffled and echoing in the weird space.
"Get some flares into the plaza!" they heard someone yell from the towers, and the hiss of thrown flares was accompanied by the hum of drones which began searching through the night, followed by cautious footsteps and reassuring yells as Sunpikers began to carefully push out into the courtyard, trying to find their wounded comrades.
Duvallier turned to Bezus. "We saw one, remember? The animal that lunged at us from the river. All our reports...they were just dumb animals, herbivores...grazing at ferns and....they were just animals."
The guardswoman by the window chimed in, more helpfully. "They've never acted like this before, nor used tools. All our observation indicated they were just wild animals, dangerous enough if you were stupid but not malicious or intelligent. This is absolutely fucked up."
She glanced back and noticed Bezus' uniform. Though technically a foreigner, the Imaginese were definitely a part of their mission and his general's stars winked even in the odd evening light.
"Uh, sir." she added apologetically.
Bezus remembered back to their tour of the city from earlier that day, and the creature that Duvallier now mentioned.
“That was…the same thing? It beggars’ belief, their natures were so…different?”
How could he have missed that he wondered. Why had he missed that? He would not be so careless again as to discount anything on this planet. He looked to Duvallier and the guardswoman by the window.
“You’re right. This entire situation is FUBAR as our ancestors used to say.” He smiled at the guard, and nodded, appreciating the touch of using his rank. Good discipline from that from soldier, even in trying times, he thought. He stood upright, propelling himself into command.
“Those of you with Medic training, go see what help you can provide, the rest of you, I need medic teams to be covered. Let’s get into the square, form a perimeter.”
He turned once more directly to Duvallier. Lowering his voice he said:
“Comrade. I noticed you were uncomfortable with firearms. This is understandable if you have not received training. I say this not to be condescending, but if you would prefer to stay in here, where it is safe, whilst we check the square, then that is absolutely fine.”
TWO DAYS LATER
After the fiasco of the first night, security had been massively tightened and additional materiel and bodies had been ferried to the planet. Several times concerted efforts by the beasts, formally known as Gauvinus Equstris but commonly called 'gauvins' or 'beasties', had lapped against the newly-erected defenses, but unlike the first night the visitors were ready and the animals were driven off with minimal casualties.
Their efforts, which seemed bizarrely co-ordinated, were a serious problem, however, forcing every scouting party to travel armed, every geological or infrastructure survey crew to move with an armed escort, and a constant sortie rotation of aircraft to respond to ambushes and attacks.
Consultation and study suggested that the gauvins were not as mindless as initially believed, especially as evidenced by their use of the strange bronze objects which seemed to channel magic. The leadership had elected to try and de-escalate things, and their scouts had identified a valley littered with caves from which many of the attacks seemed to originate.
Duvallier herself had elected to go in person, despite the risks - she could not ask another comrade to walk into that haunted gorge in her stead. She and her small party were on foot, only one of them carrying weapons whilst the others carried baskets of food, thick vegetables and grains as well as flowering plants and fruit, as a peace offering. They moved slowly and calmly, making no attempt to hide themselves, hoping to draw a non-aggressive reaction.
Overhead, loitering in the clouds above, a quartet of VTOL gunships and a dropship waited in case things went south....
The two days had passed with quiet reserve from the Imaginese contingency on Sunpike. The first night’s events had shocked the force, and whilst Bezus himself was not committed to asking for more forces to be brought down from the fleets above just yet, he was wary of the enemy they now faced.
Whilst the Alliance went about securing the city and settlements for their growing state, the Imaginese force took care of securing defensive positions within. They fought hard through the nights, but nothing hit them as badly as that first night’s surprise, and soon the diplomatic forces of the alliance had hatched a plan to bring peace to the newly christened planet.
Bezus hated the idea, and felt that the march into the wilds with food as a peace offering was nothing short of ridiculous. He expressed his disapproval at length to Duvallier, but this choice was not his, and with that path committed, he felt it necessary to accompany the alliance on their wild adventures.
Duvallier felt the moss crunch under her boots and suddenly the basket seemed unbearably heavy. The valley was eerily silent, a faint fog rolling down one slope as the party struggled on.
Suddenly there was movement ahead of them, and Duvallier stopped momentarily. A single beast emerged in the mouth of one of the caves ahead and stood watching them.
After a second, glancing around at her colleagues, Duvallier started towards the animal again. It was not particularly large for a gauvin, but its blue-grey hide showed streaks of white indicating its age. In one of its mandibles it held a shard of bronze, but it held it loosely, its baleful eyes watching the humanoids approach. Perhaps forty yards away, she stopped and laid the basket down with exaggerated care before taking a couple of steps back. She urged the others to lay their baskets down and they did the same, creating a small pile of goods that the beast watched intently. Duvallier turned to Bezus, waiting for him to add his to the pile...
Bezus fixed his eyes on the creature, watching for any betrayal in its body language that would show its true intent. What was it that made these animal produce such frenzied hostility to them in the night, and yet be so restraint in the day he pondered. He did not like the situation one bit, and as Duvallier turned to him, ushering him to lurch forward and leave his offering to the creature, he could think of no story as ridiculous as the potential story of a high-ranking general being killed giving fruit to a beast.
He moved forward, keeping eye contact on the beast, slowly stepping forward, before reaching the pile of offerings, where he bent down to place his own collection of foods.
What a waste of rations if this goes wrong he thought.
RoastBeef — 11/02/2022 13:45
The beast huffed, and then took a cautious step forwards, its orange eyes glowering at them. It whickered, tossing its head, then approached slowly, its hooves crunching wetly on the damp moss underfoot, sending small rocks skittering as it passed over patches of bare slate.
There was an air of expectation, a tension that hung in the overcast valley as the world seemed to shrink to the ring of mountains around them. The gauvin approached them, its dappled blue-grey hide dull in the gloom. Powerful muscles moved as it stepped closer, still staring intently.
For a moment, barely a dozen feet away, its shoulders at head height, it simply regarded them, and then it dipped its head to examine the baskets. Tenderly, its free mandible trunk sorted through the items, clearly recognising some. It plucked an apple and took a bite, closing its eyes appreciatively for a moment.
Duvallier was about to speak, but the moment she opened her mouth it snorted angrily, dropping the apple and stamping a hoof. She flinched, and after a moment's silence it pointed with its mandible, first at the foreigners and then at the sky, emphatically.
The Imaginese jumped at the sudden movement of the beast. Bezus spotted the handful of soldiers with weapons, dotted on the edges of the group, go to raise their weapons at the creature. He threw hands into signals to calm the situation ‘hold…hold’.
‘What does this creature mean?’ he questioned internally, as he watched it motion to the sky. He stepped forward to the side of Duvallier, looking the Gauvin in the orange eyes. Keeping eye contact, he mimicked the creature, pointing to the group, and then to the sky. He then opened his mouth, silently motioning to speak, asking for permission to use his voice.
The beast whuffed as Bezus stepped forwards, tilting its head uncomprehendingly as Bezus copied his motions. It did not quite seem to understand, but instead nudged the nearest basket of food back towards the offworlders.
Bezus, having no idea what to make of the body language, and not wanting to enrage the creature further, continued to stare into the creatures’ eyes. He lowered himself down, reaching for the basket with his left hand, pulling it towards him once it was within reach. He turned to Duvallier, giving a shrug, before turning back to the creature, once again bringing eye contact to the beast, before walking backwards, basket in hand and getting some distance between himself and the Gauvin.
The beast snorted in apparent anger, then settled as Bezus took a step back. It tossed its head again, stamped its hooves, and jabbed at the sky with a mandible angrily. Duvallier raised a hand placatingly, but the movement seemed to startle the beast and it reared up with a roar, blue energy welling around the brass icon gripped in one mandible.
One of Duvallier's companions reacted just in time, hurling up a protective screen using his Creation training, but the blast still threw Duvallier and two of the others backwards through its sheer explosive force, tumbling the group outwards
Bezus watched as the creature reared up, a fear ravaging through him as once more. The blue energy that cost the lives of so many of their forces but a few nights before began to swell, the eventual explosion throwing him backwards and onto the ground.
He lay for half a second that felt like an infinity. His brain rushed. Was he hurt? He certainly didn’t feel it, aside from a sore back from his fall. He realised that the quick thinking of one of the companions had saved his life, something he would recognise at another time he thought, as now he glanced across at the creature, who was once again rearing up.
He reached down instinctively for his revolver, realising it missing, left back at base as part of the Sunpike peace mission. He cursed aloud, before shouting to the few armed individuals littering the sides of the convoy.
“SHOOT. FIRE ON IT!” he bellowed, as they launched a volley at the Gauvin.
The monster screeched as automatic weapons opened up on it, dancing in the crossfire before collapsing, its huge bulk sending spats of mud flying as it fell. The ground shook as one of the Yamakazi VTOLs flying cover opened fire, a ripple of clementine-orange explosions stitching their way across the entrance of one of the larger caves as the 30mm gun got to work, trying to hold back a flood of gauvins that erupted from the head of the valley.
Behind the delegation, the Sverkhu dropship graciously donated by their Imaginese allies dropped to the deck perhaps fifty yards away, its hatches and ramp popping open as it hovered ready to pick them up.
"Run!" yelled someone, as Duvallier scrambled to her feet, and they began a haphazard dash across the slippery moss and mud towards salvation, whilst behind them the bestial bellowing and thud of hooves betrayed the emergence of yet more of the terrifying gauvins
Bezus, unarmed, had no choice but to back away under the barrage of covering fire. He continued to shout his orders, adding in additional “Get to the Ships!!” as he his ran towards the Sverkhu. He could hear the stampede of hooves crescendo behind him as he ran, holding his breath as if to preserve it until he was within the safety of the ship.
He glanced to his left and watched an Imaginese soldier, who had been firing a continuous barrage get engulfed in the blue energy from the Gauvins. Another to his right began to turn and flee towards the ships, matching Bezus for speed.
Each foot step felt heavy, as if running in slow motion, allowing Bezus to take in the whole chaos around him. He knew a Gauvin was gaining on him, if only he could make it a few more steps. Just…a little…further…
Something tackled his left ankle. It caught him off balance, and he felt himself descend to the ground. He scrambled, but he knew that the Gauvin would be upon him soon…
A Sunpiker scrambled back towards Bezus, drawing his handax and hurling it clumsily at the beast behind them. It thudded into the animal's flank, and it stumbled as the Sunpiker grabbed Bezus and hauled him to his feet.
The two of them scrambled into the back of the Imaginese-built dropship even as a woman on the landing ramp fired over their heads to keep the monsters at bay. The survivors were secured by the dropship's crew, their weapons stored safely in the racks just feet away.
"Go low," called out one of the men with Duvallier, "lead them on," and sure enough the VTOLs fluttered down the valley ahead of the flood of monsters. Angling around a sharp mountain that sat at a corner in the valley, they screamed over the heads of a contingent of infantry, emplaced and ready for just such a situation. The vehicles banked and took position over the line of hastily-made sandbag positions.
Serjeant Wulfhere focused down the barrel of the heavy railgun, forcing his trigger finger to remain still as the large aliens poured around the flank of the mountain ahead, their hooves pounding up clods of mossy turf. They seemed to draw unbearably close before the bellowed orders finally arrived to open fire.
The crack and thud of multiple guns opening fire at once deafened all other sounds. It was like the ringing of a god's hammer, and the heavy weapons struck like the wrath of a god. Blood and screams issued from the fog-wreathed valley as the gauvins were cut down in their scores, whilst behind the firing line a quartet of MRAPs assembled, ready to advance into the chaos, heavy grenade launchers on their pintles.
Bezus, having been within a second of instant death, found himself to be visibly shaken, as he was pulled from under the hooves of the Gauvin, and into the dropship. Lifting himself to his feet, he swirled around at the Sunpiker responsible for saving his life, grabbing them by the shoulder, and motioning a wordless symbol of gratitude, the noise of the chaos around them rendering any words meaningless. Bezus made it a point to find this person later, once, if they made it to safety, and to thank them properly.
The VTOL floated above the Gauvin herd, Bezus himself clinging to the open doorway of the dropship, watching the creatures flop and fling themselves in a violent dance before the railguns opened fire, dropping the animals one by one. Once more, despite the massacre, the shooting did not seem to deter the creatures, who launched themselves further and further into the killzones.
‘What utter madness this whole endeavour had been’ Bezus thought. ‘We need to find some way of dealing with this problem, or the Sunpike project would have to be abandoned before it had really begun.’
He searched through the dropship for Duvallier, finding her on the opposite side of the craft. Making eye contact, he gestured to show he had something to say, before moving to speak directly to her ear.
“We cannot afford another mission like this. I do not believe these beings will share this planet comrade. We have to eliminate them…”
As the VTOL lifted them away, the passengers felt a shift in the motion beneath them. The waves of creatures began to abate, but the blasts of gunfire and energy kept up. More and more Gauvins were holding back, chary of the gunfire, and some began to congregate along a wide stretch of ground that provided some small cover in the form of a little one-sided gully, using their bronze tools to send bolts of energy over the lip towards the Sunpikers.
Duvallier nodded mutely in response to Bezus' comments as a gunship formed up and strafed the position, foiling the attempt to rally...
TWO WEEKS LATER
The fighting had become a constant on Sunpike. The Gauvins were slowly adapting, now much harder to bait into suicidal charges, instead striking from shadows, skirmishing and raiding. Daily, they seemed to learn from their battles with the Sunpikers, who in turn expanded aggressively, pushing ever outwards and staking out more and more territory, garrisoning it with paths, outposts and waypoints.
A four-man patrol had returned the previous night short two members. One had been killed in a vicious, short exchange of fire, but the other had gone missing, his holo no longer responding, disappeared into the mist. A force was being assembled to go search for him, a half-dozen Alliance Guards bundling into a pair of light trucks. Sergeant Aelflaed glanced up as the Imaginese advisors approached, and waved a greeting. She was bundled up against the damp morning, thick fur-lined coat beneath a dew-rimed helmet.
Bezus grew increasingly despondent. Since the incident in the valley, he had had to explain daily to central command ‘how’ the operation to colonise a planet with no advanced civilisation was failing, each time to someone higher and higher up the chain of command who had not been briefed on the losses both the Imaginese and the Sunpike were taking on the ground. His request for additional support had been rejected, at least at the current time, through fears that more commitment to aid the Sunpike cause would be “not tolerated” by the Jade Empire. Some sympathetic ears of colleagues did promise that they would “see what they could do”, though Bezus knew these to be words of appeasement more than commitments.
Alongside this, Bezus had watched patrol after patrol leave with more men than they would bring back. The Gauvin’s grew in their tactics and confidence, and with absolutely no idea as to their numbers, Bezus feared that soon the alliance band would be swarmed. With all these factors now playing on his mind, he felt despair when a party of men was gathered to attempt to rescue one soldier left behind. He understood the sentimentality, but the truth of the matter, as he saw it, was that it was once again another mindless mission.
Sergeant Aelflaed, the officer in charge of the operation stood amongst trucks preparing to leave. Bezus watched as she casually waved to him as he approached. He returned the gesture, gave a small warm smile, the least he could do before diving into what he considered to be a negative conversation.
“Good morning, Sergeant. How goes the preparation?”
Aelflaed grinned, an expression entirely devoid of humour. "Sir. We're ready." she said, gesturing towards the vehicles. In the morning gloom Bezus noticed that the outlines of the vehicles didn't quite look right, and peering closer he realised that they were festooned with non-regulation equipment.
'Equipment' was what it would be recorded as in the books, but it was bones. A giant gauvin skull was mounted on the hood of each truck, whilst long limb bones hung from the beds. Runes and symbols had been spray-painted onto the dull matte bodywork of the trucks, an ominous carmine colour against the plain greys. Looking back at the sergeant, Bezus realised she too was wearing paint on her face, the same dark red across her forehead whilst wide black curves swamped her eyes and curled down her cheeks towards her neck.
"We are going hunting today," she said confidently, a brittle edge to her voice as if she were excited to go. Though their mission was formally search and rescue, it did not seem like that was what was on the mind of the gathered Sunpikers. There was something primal about their appearance, as if they had been unleashed onto an inviolate world still in its infancy, at home in the anarchy and uncaring emptiness of these new horizons.
Aelflaed gestured for Bezus to mount up, a space saved for him in the lead truck, and hauled herself up into the drivers' seat. A glimpse into the bed of the truck showed several heavy weapons laid up.
"We were ambushed whilst trying to scout out what we think is one of their nests. We think Guardsman Rogvir was taken alive - we're heading back to pick up the trail from there."
Bezus took in all of Aelflaed. He was taken aback, and, as he admitted to himself, impressed by their primal approach to their mission. Certainly, if he feared that the Sunpikers were approaching their mission with naivety, he recognised now that he was mistaken. He did however still worry for their success rate of their mission, and when Aelflaed gestured to the empty space aboard their Gauvin adorned truck, he flinched at the thought, despite the large menu of heavy weaponry laid out in the back.
“I see, I see.” He began, pausing briefly, considering his words, before continuing. “You all seem suitably motivated, and I do appreciate the décor. It will certainly anger our enemies…if indeed they have capacity to recognise such displays. In truth, I worry for our numbers. I do not doubt your abilities, but we have found ourselves outnumbered by these beasts at each turn. How many are you?”
"A dozen," she replied airily. Behind her, other Guards were loading up the last of the equipment whilst two of them took turns applying warpaint to one another. One of them said something in their guttural language and the other laughed, revealing they were from the forests of fog-bound Aegge on Neusattar.
‘A dozen?’ Bezus repeated in his head. ‘A dozen wasn’t bad, but it could do with more’.
“I see, a dozen. Ok. I would feel more comfortable if there were more…let me see what I can do.”
He stepped aside, tapped away on his own data pad, and within moments was connected to the Imaginese central command, located in the centre of the ever-growing city base camp. The face of a grizzled man, head shaved to the scalp, thickened black beard with sunken eyes almost the same colour, starred back.
“Comrade Leftenant Egorov. The Alliance are sending out a hunting party as part of a rescue mission, I want you to take 3 of your commandos and support them. Meet at the vehicle assembly ground ASAP. Understood?”
“Yes, Comrade General Sir.” Came the short, baritone reply.
Bezus turned back to Aelflaed, relaying the news.
“I have asked 4 of our PKK Units to come and support on this mission. This is not a reflection of your abilities, Comrade, but I would certainly feel happier if we gave some support on this,…rescue mission.
.
20 Minutes Later
Before long, an Imaginese vehicle, a MAZ 54 Armoured Car, rushed around the corner, and into the assembly yard where the meeting was rallying. The car came to a screeching halt, the doors opening to reveal 4 large soldiers, dressed head to toe in the black armour of the PKK, red stars emblazoned upon their shoulders. 3 men, and 1 woman approach the assembly group, all carrying their standard issue helmets under their arms. The large, bearded gentlemen led the group, giving a stern look as he eyed up the general.
“Comrade General,” he saluted. “We are ready, sir.”
“Very good. Comrade Aelflaed, this is Leftenant Rolan Egorov of the Pastukh Krysinyy Kommandos, and who else do we have…ah yes, Corporal Olya Kovaleva, and 1st Privates Sergei Kuzmin and Spiridon Dmitriev.”
The group nodded as they were introduced. Egorov was a large man, slightly older than his 3 colleagues. Kovaleva herself was a slight women, clearly very toned. She had the look of someone in her 30s, thick, curled mousey hair, tied back tightly in a bun. Her angled face showing little emotion in this moment. Finally Kuzmin and Dmitriev were the youngest of the group, mid 20s at most. Their faces portrayed less experience than their colleagues, but still, with a scar or two laden across them, they had clearly seen their fair share.
Aelflaed nodded to the newcomers. "Ready to hunt some cattle?" she asked in Common, her face impassive as she gauged their reactions. Behind her, her troops had become impatient, eager to hit the foothills and begin their hunt as the sun began poking narrow rays through the slowly fading morning mist
“We are ready and eager.” Egorov said in his deep, accented voice. He looked from her eyes down to the assault weapons the troops carried; large, metallic weaponry that looked to as raw and destructive as would be necessary on such a hunt. He hunched it over his shoulder with some effort. His own seemed to be an LMG of some kind, the strings of ammo held within a box held on his belt.
“Let us go kill some beast.”
It was several hours later when the convoy rolled onto a long upland plain, flanked by higher hill ranges to the north and south whilst to the west it fell away to woodlands. They pulled up to an outcrop of rocks and the Alliance fighters began to pile out, their boots thudding softly on the damp moss.
"It was around about here he got taken," explained Aelflaed, glancing around at the high valley. There was no fog or mist, a refreshing change from Sunpike's usual, but it was still a forbidding place, the thin air still except for the faint rustle of wind.
The vehicle containing the four special operatives came to a sudden halt, as the convoy emerged into Gauvin territory. The occupants disembarked, weapons at the ready, now adorned in full facial mask and helmet, the only identifier of their individuality being the painted markings upon their armour of their left bicep showing rank and division, and their voices, which now appeared heavy in treble as they spoke through their mask modulator.
They scouted the surroundings as a unit, switching from checking the high ground to low, moving towards the Alliance fighters who were grouping together.
Leftenant Rolan Egorov stood upright next to Aelflaed, relaxing his holding of his weapon as he spoke.
“They are close, the Gauvins. We should tread carefully, leave the vehicles here and proceed on foot.”
“Leftenant!” rang out the voice of Private Dmitriev. “Tracks, comrade.”
The group hurried to Dmitriev’s positions, where the man crouched over prints laid out in the dirt and moss.
“See, five sets of prints. Going off in that direction.” He pointed off into the distance. “But look, alongside, these…these are not Gauvin.”
He was right, the final set looked more humanoid than hooved.
“I think your man may still be alive, Comrade.”
The Guards hefted their weapons. Instead of the usual assault railguns, they were all carrying heavy weapons of some sort, mostly anti-tank rifles, although one had a device hanging on straps from his shoulder that looked for all the world like a broom with a cable running to a backpack. Another two were lugging some kind of crew weapon between them, wrestling it over the heath.
They formed up either side of a cave mouth, the uneven entrance dropping sharply on one side whilst falling away more gently on the other, where hoofprints showed regular use. From deep inside came a glimmer of light, and the faintest of sounds.
"That's new," said Aelflaed in faint surprise. So far, although the Gauvins had shown signs of rudimentary tool use and were definitely smarter than your average horse, they had not been known to make light themselves other than the strange beams they cast in combat.
Egorov came to Aelflaed’s side, staring down into the depths of the cave, the faintest of light visible to him through the lens of his mask, the slightest of sounds rumbling and echoing in the distance.
He glances around the mouth of the cave, and between his own troops. They were casting a look, surveying their surroundings, as he would have expected, and whilst their faces were covered, he could recognise their wary stances, weapons held tight in expectation of trouble.
“I do not like this.” Egorov said, the muffled treble voice emerging from the mask’s small voice box.
“That’s the same light we’ve seen when they attack…weapons at the ready.”
The force slowly made its way down into the cave, which after a narrow turn opened out through a jagged crack into a paved, square corridor perhaps six meters a side. To their right, the corridor ended abruptly in a pile of fallen stone and masonry, whilst to the left it led to a large pair of double doors, slightly ajar, from which spilled forth bright light and the sound of movement.
Aelflaed stared in wonder at the corridor, resting the butt of her heavy rifle on the ground a moment as she peered around.
"It looks like this used to lead right to the surface, but something collapsed the tunnel...the gauvins must have found this side entrance somehow and made a nest..."
“All roads lead to the light room then…great.” Private Dmitriev muttered, in a dismissive and annoyed tone.
Egorov moved once more to Aelflaed’s side, glancing into the blocked corridor, then to the double doors, and then back. He wrestled with an attachment clipped to his belt, quietly unfastening a device, which he produced within his right hand. The item was small, a tiny disk like device. An optic lens sat above what appeared to be a fan, which lit up, and sparked to life with a tap.
“This…we call it “Shmel”. Tiny little drone. It reports right back to my optics in my helmet. Lets see what this light is all about.”
The tiny device fluttered into the air, travelling towards the doorway, and the gap of radiant light.
The team waited in silence as the little drone hummed quietly towards the open door, its sound almost immediately swallowed by the rustling and vocalisations from beyond.
What the optics revealed was stranger than anyone could have predicted. The space beyond was sprawling and high-ceilinged, built with vaulted cyclopean masonry beneath which several smaller buildings stood, some in states of disrepair. At seemingly irregular spacing, bronze objects were mounted or wedged into the walls and on surfaces, glowing with the same pale blue.
Throughout the space Gauvins, of all different sizes, were resting, relaxing or else gathered in clusters. A large group was gathered around an open space in which a ring of lights surrounded a larger, elderly Gauvin to whom a crowd were obviously paying attention. Several other Gauvins were flanking the elder, as if protecting it...
“This is…interesting.” Egorov summarised, as he watched the projected vision of the device through his wrist projector. “They’re gathered in social groupings. Look, the older looking one there, seems to be leading a sermon almost. They’re smart, that is for sure.”
He looked to address the group on his summations.
“As I see it, we have 2 ways of dealing with this. We can either try and find a way to distract this herd, and find a way inside to find your man. Alternatively…” he looked at the large arsenal of weaponry the Alliance troopers now held “…well, we came for a fire fight. We have the element of surprise…we take the fight to them here and now.”
He looked directly at Aelflaed.
“This is your man we are looking for. Your mission. Your choice I would say.”
Aelflaed looked at the group and then nodded as if coming to a decision.
"Let's finish this."
She opened a projected map of the interior as mapped so far by the drone and painted positions for the team to move to, mostly close to the entrance. Once everyone had their orders, two of the Guards moved to the door and readied Thunderstorm grenades, high-charge LTL weapons that would blind, confuse and daze anything within range. Waiting for their visors to polarise, Aelflaed counted them in and they tossed the bombs through the open door. After a beat, there was a deafening series of cracks, booms and whining explosions as light flared through the gap, and then the soldiers poured through the door, firing as they went...
Egorov nodded, referring the action to his 3 comrades, who lifted their weapons and prepared to breach the room beyond.
They charged into the fray, the Thunderstorm Grenade creating a dazzling display that lit up the Gauvins, and put them at the mercy of the firing squad, who launched at once with a hail of bullets, upon the beasts.
The noise erupted, screams and shouts from the Gauvins, explosions bouncing off the walls, and light, bright light bursting from guns, and the blue hue of the Gauvin’s own bio-weaponry.
Egorov, and Dmitriev went left, Kuzmin and Kovaleva right, diving for whatever cover they could, amongst the troop of Alliance soldiers. Beasts fell to the ground as they moved, the element of surprise working to the force’s advantage.
The noise was thunderous as gunfire echoed around the cavern, mixed with the screams and bellows of the creatures and the yells of their attackers. To Aelflaed's left, two of her marines clunked an HMG into position behind a fallen slab of stone and began hammering rounds at the crowded animals. Even more so than the battle at the canyon weeks before, this was a massacre. Aelflaed tracked one gauvin with her Burnham, hosing it down and then putting more rounds into it as it flailed on the floor. She twitched the muzzle upwards and fired again at movement behind her target, catching a juvenile in the neck. It screamed and collapsed, pandemonium reigning as the assembled gauvins fled desperately, only a few trying to resist, errant blasts of blue magic splashing towards the Guards and their Imaginese allies.
The Imaginese joined their Alliance comrades in the merciless fire, reigned down upon the Gauvin. Round after round thudded into the creatures, who screamed, fled, and fell in a chaotic dance. They moved from target to target, the gleeful expressions hidden behind the black masks of the troops.
Egorov took a second to gather his thoughts, and glanced about the room, looking for any signs of the lost Sunpike trooper, though the flail of Gauvin obscured the details of the room. The creatures seemed to be retreating, though individuals remained committed in some primal instinct to putting up a fight.
“Quickly! Gun down the retreaters. Any we do not kill now will only cause us problems later!” He shouted over the fire.
The screams gradually began to fade away, replaced by sporadic bursts of gunfire as the humanoids finished off the wounded and the last few survivors they found hiding. Picking over the wreckage, picking up the odd bronze object and then tossing it aside, the Guards made their way deeper into the cavern.
There was a curse and then the sound of someone being sick. The Imaginese heard muttering and angry voices, raised in consternation, and as they joined their comrades it became clear why. They had found Guardsman Rogvir.
Halfway up a stone wall, spreadeagled, the guardsman seemed to be almost glued to the wall. His outline was fuzzy, making the viewer think at first that the low light was playing tricks, but on closer inspection it became clear that the man had been fused with the stone beneath. Extreme heat had melted his flesh and the stone beneath, before somehow being rapidly cooled, leaving him trapped high off the ground, contorted and warped. The agonised look on his face, blistered by fire, made it clear his death had not been easy.
"Fucking animals," snarled one guardsman. Others were silent, wondering at how such savages could have done this.
Aelflaed's face went stony as she saw the gruesome sight. She turned away, calling in for reinforcements and a demolition team.
"We're getting him out. And then we're burying this place." she snarled to the others
“What in the living fuck?!” Egorov muttered, looking upon the captured guardsman, the sight truly horrific. “These fucking vermin. They…they must be wiped out.”
He turned to the rest of his unit, the sight of the splayed man causing them to stop and stare.
“Hey! HEY! Keep an eye on that tunnel. If the beasts return, I want you to break them. Understand me?”
They reacted, instantly, lifting their weapons once more, aiming down the Gauvin’s escape route. A purposeful anger in their action. Egorov turned to Aelflaed.
“Let’s not just bury this place, let us eviscerate it. Call in the air force, bomb the entire cave system, the valley…let us create a tomb for these…animals.”
The guards milled around for a while, unsure how to extricate the unfortunate Rogvir from his tomb, until finally Aelflaed snarled and snatched a flamethrower from its sling on a soldiers' back. Giving it a few moments to charge up, she yanked Rogvir's dogtags from around his neck and then stepped back, hefting the flamer. There was the distinctive snap-snap-snap of a pilot light before flame gushed forth from the blackened muzzle, washing blistering heat over the corpse. The immediate stench of the roiling grey smoke that ensued caused everyone to gag, shuffling away, but Aelflaed kept the stream of fire up until a warning buzz on the grip indicated the auto-shutoff. In the silence that followed, someone muttered a prayer. Cremation was the proper form of burial for Adfyrans, but typically it wasn't done by high-capacity combat flamer.
"This is ridiculous," said one of the marines. "Wasting good men and women chasing these monsters, down here in this filth. I wouldn't even send a 'droid down here."
Aelflaed shot him a look - legally, especially according to the principles of the Revolution, synthetic intelligences were equal citizens, but centuries of belief weren't going to be overturned by a few months' worth of political instruction. Before she could retort, however, the ominous sounds of bestial howling from deeper in the cave system silenced them all. A single echoing noise at first, it quickly swelled into a chorus of wild and overlapping vocalisations, quickening their heartbeats.
"Time to exfil. Let's go," she said, and almost before she had finished speaking the first guards were moving towards the exit, weapons ready and nerves jangling as the alien howls sounded louder and louder all around them...
The whole scenario was sickening. Egorov ran through the situation in his head; how him and his squad had been brought here in clandestine support by the Imaginese for the Sunpike. How the operation was meant to be peaceful. How they were meant to support the Alliance in building their new home. How it had turned into a bloodbath.
He hated it here. He was pretty sure the Sunpike also regretted picking the planet as their base. The smell of burning tinted his breathing apparatus, the taste staining the back of his throat as the group began to exit the caverns, moving towards the noise of the creatures.
He moved up beside Aelflaed, who was looking with scorn at her own men.
“Comrade, I am serious when I say; we should evacuate the scene and request a large scale bombing campaign against the region. Nuclear weapons if need be. We know where their nest is now…let us finish this.”
The joint group began moving back the way they had come, through the broken gap of masonry and into the dark tunnels that led up towards the light. Behind them, the roaring grew louder, until it was almost on their heels. Aelflaed paused, and then barked orders. "Mercier, Corsa, set up here. Everyone else move up to the entrance and hold it."
Two of her soldiers hustled back, setting up a huge machine gun with a blackened muzzle, aimed directly at the jagged gap in the stone they had just come through. A blue glow was already flickering in the passage beyond, and the bolt on the squad weapon had barely thunked back when the first nightmarish shape appeared in the gap.
"Open fire." said the sergeant calmly, her lip curled faintly in contempt. The boom of the automatic gun was deafening in the narrow rock tunnel, enough that it almost drowned out the butcher's noises as gunfire tore into the flesh trying to push itself through that slim entryway. After only a few moments the way was choked with giant corpses, spilling from the darkness beyond. Aelflaed's rifle was ready in case any managed to slip past, but none did. The pile heaved, a plaintive lowing audible in the silence after the gun stopped firing, though whether it was from survivors or from those behind the horror she could not tell.
Either way, not all the riches in the world could convince her to stay in this nightmare. "Let's go. Leave the gun, just go," she ordered, and she and the two guards set off at a flat sprint, catching up to the others and bursting out into the light, passing a semi-circle of nervous soldiers whose weapons pointed back towards the subterranean maw they had just escaped.
"Calling in a fire mission," the sergeant said between lungfuls of air...
The Imaginese followed tightly amongst the pack, as the group evacuated the tunnel system. The screams of more dying beasts and machine gun fire did little to stop them. Egorov did not need telling twice. Aelflaed’s command was solid, and as soon as he judged they had room enough to make the call to command, he patched himself through.
In his native tongue, he barked his request. To the Alliance soldiers amongst, not speakers of the Imaginese language, the words were hard, and spat off the tongue, even if they were muffled through Egorov’s face mask. Even to a Sunpiker who had never heard the language, it was obvious that he was making a request. Details of coordinates, split by syllable told them that he was precisely marking down where the fire mission should be guided towards. They could only hear one side of the conversation, Egorov’s, but it was clear that he was being very precise, and to the point.
The conversation ended, and Egorov returned to the common tongue.
“Fire mission is called in. ETA 5 minutes. Let's push on out of here.”
The soldiers burst into the gloomy evening light, drawing in lungfuls of clean mountain air, rejoicing in the mud and heather beneath their boots. The hole from which they had just emerged took on a menacing quality, like a lurking beast. None of them dared turn their backs on it, edging away until they reached their convoy of vehicles. The lead driver gunned his engine with a little too much enthusiasm, churning mud everywhere, but the footsloggers still clambering into the vehicle were so focused on leaving that they didn't raise a complaint. As the growling trucks rumbled away down the valley, back the way they had come, the telltale sound of aircraft in the distance began to grow louder...
SOME TIME LATER
To Duvallier's relief, the inferno of strikes that had reduced that high mountain valley to a glazed mass of glassy rock seemed to have been the death knell for the Gauvins. It had been nearly a week, but since that raid by Sergeant Aelflaed and her Imaginese comrades, the intensity of Gauvin attacks on Sunpike holdings had dwindled to almost nothing. In the last two days not a single casualty had been reported among the settlers, for the first time in a long while.
Her researchers were exploring deeper and deeper, making stranger and stranger discoveries. Caves and hidden mountain villages, rudimentary but clearly inhabited until recently, now emptied of inhabitants, populated only by corpses of the young, the weak and the old. It seemed that the Gauvins had been more of a civilisation than they had ever realised, but that that same civilisation was running out of souls even as the newcomers watched. Perhaps the destruction of that great underground hall had been more than just a physical blow to the Gauvins. Had her soldiers unknowingly destroyed some centre of worship, some cultural hub? Had they buried a great, irreplaceable leader with their airstrikes?
She took a sip of brandy and turned to look out of the window.
She found that she did not care.
Bezus was relieved that the Gauvin problem was finished with. As stories of cities, civilisations discovered by the Sunpike explorers, and some questioned the ethics of what they had done, he simply shrugged it as “the better side won”. In the battle for conquest of the planet, this new home for the Alliance, it had been a fight to the death, and the fledgeling state needed to be ruthless in its approach if it were to survive beyond its early days. This was the job he had been assigned to do, and he felt that with the Imaginese assistance, they had been the fierce storm the Alliance needed on the planet, and now a new day had arrived.
He however, would not be around to see it, nor would the majority of the Imaginese assistance. With tensions overflowing in the galaxy, with war raging, and importantly, with the Laptev Axis strengthening ties, the endeavour to support the upstart rebellion’s transition into statehood was seen as “risky.” Not long after the victory over the Gauvin, the orders had come for the ILA to pull out, and return to Tatiana for reassignment.
And so whilst a handful decided to stay and found new lives amongst the Sunpikers, the majority of Imaginese soldiers found themselves once more on the move, back aboard the Imaginese ships, carrying off to Tatiana, and undoubtably more conflict.
Imaginarium - Chris
ABOVE THE PLANET OF TX-426-50
Unsurprisingly, prime real estate in the Tuvian Arm was not easy to come by. Following the Diet of Chinon, the Conclave had been searching for a planet to settle as the homeworld of the planned Alliance of Sunpike, but finding territory that was both suitable for habitation and sheltered from the Jade Empire's wrath was not as easy as it sounded.
TX-426-50 seemed like a blessing. A fertile planet with a rainy temperate climate, it was perhaps a little gloomy for the liking of some, but what was best was that probes showed it was home to the ruins of an ancient, pre-FTL civilisation. The abundance of stone shelter, along with the overgrown roads and pathways and the crumbling quays, would make it easier to explore and work on the planet.
The first freighter rumbled down through the foggy clouds, rain hammering at its cockpit and viewports as it came to a gentle stop on a large field which had at some point prior been an assembly area or perhaps a sporting venue of some kind. The huge landing ramps descended and the first vehicles began to roll down it, followed by people on foot who gaped at the ruined stone city beside which they had landed.
Ysoude Duvallier took a breath of the chilly, damp air, inhaling deeply and then letting it go slowly. She paused and then stepped off the ramp and onto the thick, moss-like field. Her first step on Sunpike.
She glanced around. She did not know why, but mixed with her excitement was a sense of trepidation, an uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. She watched as the men and women assigned to security detail moved towards the ruins, their eclectic collection of weapons clutched tight. At least they had uniforms; their secret benefactors, an obscure branch of the Imaginariumese bureaucracy, had provided them with an endless supply of non-military gear to help with their endeavour.
_
The thick, fleece-lined overcoats with their synthetic micro denier filament yarns had a compacted weave structure which effectively made them waterproof, even though to the touch they felt like simple leather. The hundreds of mahogany brown coats had been earmarked for the newly-founded 'Alliance Guard' and, together with repurposed jetbike helmets that had had HUD systems installed post-market, formed the crude beginnings of a uniform.
Their first night was going to be an interesting one. They were planning to map as much of the city as possible, on foot and using drones, and take more detailed geological surveys to begin zoning the land outside the city. A team had been tasked with selecting and securing a building for the two hundred members of the first wave to stay overnight, and then tomorrow the landings would begin in earnest.
Duvallier climbed atop a broad-wheeled offroader, its flatbed fitted with a roll cage and benches, and raised her voice, the golden torc at her neck automatically picking up the raised volume and amplifying it.
"Children of Neusattar! Bravest of nations! I have no doubt of your courage, and none of your victory. Your spirit does not require to be roused, for by nature we are bold and unflinching. Raise your standards, my comrades, and set neither measure nor limit to your merited pride, for today we build a new world!"
There were cheers in response, oddly muffled by the light rain, and the Sunpikers set to with a will, visible even in the distance as faint pinpricks of light dancing through the mist and in the puddles of water.
Duvallier dropped down and offered a warm smile to her Imaginariumese advisors.
"I stole that from a history book. It is a momentous day for us, to finally be free from the Jade Empire and treading soil that is ours for the taking."
General Denys Bezus inhaled a deep breath, breathing in the fresh air of TX-426-50. The cool air made his lungs feel alive, as the first tastes of fresh oxygen for weeks (rather than the recycled gas on the starship) darted through his body. He removed his hat, a woven military cap, the same grey/green colour as his fatigues, and ran his hands over his balding head. He felt the cold damp touch where his hair had once grown (a long time ago), it’s moisture creeping into the lines of age that spread across his face.
He looked upon Duvallier, the ‘innocent smile of the noble ideologue’ he thought to himself, and he returned the gesture.
“Fine words indeed. A momentous day for you and your people. There is work here to be done but let us enjoy for a moment these first breathes upon a whole new world.”
‘What a troublesome mission this is.’ The General thought.
-
Officially, the Socialist Republics and the Jade Empire were many centuries into a budding friendship. Their alliances had once run amok across the face of the Planet Laptev, the Laptev Axis being one of the most formidable military might’s in the known universe. Diplomatically, that was how it always was. Underneath it all, however, was the pushing and pulling of influence. Both parties knew the other’s politics didn’t sit well with each other at heart. The Socialist Republics was founded on the very bloody execution of it’s own Emperor after all. And so whilst politeness and genuine friendship could be found in face to face relationships, behind the scenes sat a more clandestine movement, attempting to change the other.
It was through this that Bezus, General rank of the Komitet (Committee for the Defense of the Revolution), found himself and his force, the majority of which currently sat idly orbiting the planet from the Imaginese Starship above, wilfully providing support for the Conclave. It had been hoped that such a movement would provide the impetus for change within the Empire itself. When that had failed however, Imaginarium had become the main backer of the revolutionary band’s journey to find a new home.
Behind him, that support was being shown. The first landing ship, the one which Bezus himself had touched down upon the planet’s surface with, was parked behind him, it’s cargo; vast arrays of supporting technology, were being unloaded and unpacked by Imaginese soldiers.
“So Comrade Duvallier. The world is yours. What would you have us do first?”
Duvallier let out a breath, watching the industrious Vaettra and their Imaginese allies as they busied themselves about the landing site.
"A good question. We've planned well, and everyone knows their task, so you and I are at relative liberty. Hop in," she said with a smile, her Suedian accent langorous, and climbed into the back of the vehicle, perching on one of the benches and gripping the roll cage with one hand. Once the General and his aides had joined her and a couple of her people, the driver gunned the engine, rumbling over the untouched ground, the generous suspension making the ride a little less unpleasant though the cold air stung their faces.
The offroader clambered up a rocky bluff that lay to the south of the city, turning back north towards the edge to give them all a good view over the ruins. It was an impressive sight even now, cyclopean structures of dark slate-like rock built seemingly without mortar. Many of the buildings had partially collapsed, whilst others seemed to have melted, especially in the vicinity of a large plaza that looked like the centre of the town, but plenty still stood, enough to give an idea of the grandeur of the place when it was still standing. They had yet to date the city, but their best guess was that it was built for a species that stood perhaps eight feet tall and had housed anywhere between 10,000 and 50,000 people from the size of it. Recon drones had found no evidence of the builders, other than some scattered bone fragments that had not yet shed any light.
Duvallier recounted all this as they drove, dismounting with a squelch as her boots hit the damp moss once they reached the top of the bluff. Stepping close to the edge, she took a look out over the city.
"We don't know what happened to the original inhabitants, but we think they were somewhere in the Iron Age." she said, leaving unspoken her concerns about what hidden dangers Sunpike might hold for her people.
Chris (Imaginarium SR) — 02/12/2021 01:56
Bezus watched over the rocky remains of the ancient ruins, the cold wind blowing in his face as he scoured the scene for any possible signs of the previous occupants missed by the relentless scouting that had already come before them. The architecture was fascinating. Duvallier’s description of the previous dwellers was no overestimate; the doorways showing signs of a much larger life form.
“This will do for now.” He shouted over the wind blustering through the vehicle. “Once we get our base camp established, we should think about organising closer reconnaissance of the surrounding areas. I know we have scouted it heavily with the drones, but a physical inspection of what we are dealing with should help us greatly.”
He paused again, taking in another look at the stone buildings that made up the city’s structure.
“There’s good shelter here, long term however, what is your plan? Will you use this region as centre?”
Duvallier nodded. "Yes, but not for long. It looks like the river has shifted since this city was built, so we plan to cite a new city closer to the river, using this place as a base from which to do so."
She turned and hopped back into the offroader, with Bezus following. They rolled down the far side of the bluff, the terrain getting rougher as they reached a low plain nearer the river, covered in thick waving ferns. The offroader turned north along the riverbank and eventually drew near to the city. The original inhabitants had not built suburbs. Right at the outskirts, the buildigns were just sa large and imposing as those further in, almost like sheer walls or cliffs pierced here and there by the overgrown streets.
"Once we have basic shelter and a perimeter, our first goal is to build a medical facility, a proper shuttleport and start work on the brightstone operations to bring in some revenue. We have seed money, and your generous support, but Sunpike needs its own industry if it is to succeed."
The vehicle suddenly jerked to the right, away from the river, and as the passengers grasped for the rollcage and tried to steady themselves they caught a glimpse of a large shape bursting out of the water towards them. As it receded into the distance behind them, they saw a quadrupedal creature with water running off its furred back. It paced into the tracks their wheels had left behind and let out a furious bellow, surprisingly loud, before sitting to watch them as they kept going.
"Local fauna," explained Duvallier, brushing hair from her face, "they're herbivores but they've been hostile to our drones. We'll need to keep an eye on them."
The vehicle eventually arrived at what looked like an old plaza, marked by a central fountain around which the remains of a stone pavilion lay. One side of the plaza was taken up by a large building which bustled with activity.
The building consisted of two squat towers, two storeys tall but nearly 40 feet because of the giant size of the former occupants, linked by a central bulwark. Windows that looked like they may have once held horn or glass panes glowered out at the plaza, lit from inside by the equipment of the newcomers, whilst the huge front doors already had a deployable barricade in front of them behind which stood a couple of Alliance Guards, whilst people bustled to and fro lugging equipment inside. Several other vehicles were parked outside, their beds filled with all the gear necessary to turn the hulking building into a home for two hundred people.
Crossing inside, they found that things were already well underway. The main hallway was filled with supplies, equipment, and weapon racks, whilst to their left and right the towers had been filled with cots and more stored equipment. Opposite the main door, a narrower corridor led to dark, windowless room which had been converted into a command center. Holes had been drilled to allow sensors and comms through the walls, and around the edge of the room were consoles at which sat Alliance members, whilst a large central display had been set up in the middle of the room and showed little dots as expedition members explored the city in detail.
She crossed over to speak with one of the people hunched over the table, a younger man with thick mustaches. They spoke for a few moments about their discoveries, and the man told them that one of their patrols had had to shoot a quadruped after it got too close to them, but otherwise everything was going to plan. Duvallier turned to Bezus.
"Well, you've seen our fine new capitol," she said with a hint of irony, "and I'd be remiss in not offering you a place to stay overnight, unless you already have your own campsite in mind?"
Bezus took in the surroundings of the makeshift base, deep inside the stone building. He watched as men and women scurried around, unloading supplies, preparing the living quarters for it’s coming occupants.
The news of the quadruped had alarmed him. He hadn’t expected the local fauna to be hostile.
“If it is ok with you, we would happily accept your gracious invitation for accommodation. This ‘area’ looks as good a foundation for us to build our advance on. The remains of these buildings will be useful against any further ‘infiltrations’ by the local wildlife. Might be worth mentioning to our night guards to be extra careful. We don’t want to be caught off guard by some rampant nocturnal carnivore.”
A man in Imaginese fatigues approached him. He stopped, saluted the rank of the general, and spoke, in common, clearly to show transparency with Duvallier.
“Comrade General, the last of our initial landing party has unloaded from the drop ships. Over Command want to know whether we still plan to go ahead and let the rest of the forces drop down in the coming days, or whether we need more manpower now?”
“Very good Comrade…Comrade Duvallier. What say you? We have an entire regiment sitting above us in space…do we let them rest, or call them down?”
Duvallier thought for a moment then shook her head. "No, we will need them to provide security for the Brightstone mine whilst we set up, and work is set to commence tomorrow."
She turned and called to a young woman working on a datapad. "Kassandra, set our guests up with a suite." she said, nodding towards Bezus' trooper. The Vaettran woman nodded in reply and gestured to the Imaginese soldier to follow her, leading him up to the south-east corner of the second storey of the eastwards tower, indicating a section of bunks that the 'advisors' could take for themselves. Nearby Sunpikers smiled cheerily and called out greetings, happy to see support from foreign powers after two years of hiding in the shadows and fleeing from Jade law.
Elsewhere, Duvallier and Bezus went over some more logistical details, discussing the developments on the planet before turning to more general discussions of state policy. The Alliance were completely out of the shallow end, essentially trying to forge an entire functional nation-state from scratch, and the Conclave had increasingly been leaning on Imaginese thought and the Semenov school of collectivism, so the opportunity to directly chat with a senior Socialist officer was an opportunity Duvallier could not pass up.
Some time later, as night was falling, the Sunpikers had set up a pair of bonfires in the courtyard outside. The rain had slackened off, and Alliance members had set up campchairs and dragged crates, breaking out field meals and rations that they washed down with weak ales and watered-down wines. Fresh drinking water, at least, was in abundance here.
Duvallier led Bezus to a couple of chairs by the smaller fire, squinting towards the faint glow of guard pickets before settling down and accepting a mug from someone in the darkness. Nearby some people were enthustiastically singing a folk song.
"So, comrade, what do you think of our flowering experiment?" she asked wryly, a smile tugging at her lips.
Bezus smiled at Duvallier’s question. ‘How to answer this?’ he thought.
Certainly, he felt total conviction in the support of the new state. He would not have committed himself and his men to the journey to the unsettled planet if he did not believe entirely in the project. But this project had a bit of everything. Settlement in a wild frontier. Nation building. Survival. The journey ahead was tough, that is for sure.
He reached down into box that he had brought along with him that evening. A wooden crate of sorts, as he unfastened glassware reflected the firelight into his eyes. He removed 2 small glasses, placing them delicately in front of him, and returned to the case, removing a sealed bottle of Krakohzian Vodka.
He continued to smile, gesturing to Duvallier as he removed the lid, offering to fill one of the glasses for her.
“What do I think…” he began “Well…to continue your analogy…the ground is fertile. We can build very strong roots here. The job we have in front of us will be long and arduous, and I dare say, like flowers, it will take preening and care. The right environment will need to be curated so that we do not lose the very spirit of what brought us here.”
He filled both glasses, before raising his own.
“I think that we have good people here. They will have to be. If history has taught us anything, it is that these early days of “revolution” are the hardest embers to keep lit. Thankfully, you have a willing supporter in Imaginarium…at least on a financial and material front…the diplomatic is…complicated. You have your ideas for this world though…where would you begin your statehood? What is the first action of a government led by Comrade Duvallier?”
Duvallier reached out a hand, swathed in a woolen fingerless glove, to accept the drink. She could smell it from here, but took a sip and pursed her lips, fighting against the urge to wince at the strong liquor. The aftertaste was surprisingly nice, however, and she could feel the warmth spreading through her as a tingling sensation against the prickle of cold, nodding as she listened to Bezus' comments.
"There's so much to do," she laughed after holding in a breath for a moment, "dieu. We need to get the Brightstone mine running to give us some purpose and income, we've got to set up basic infrastructure like running water and power, we've got to find places for everyone to sleep, the list goes on."
She shrugged. "It'll be a busy year, for sure, but my people are nothing if not hard workers, and this planet is a blank canvas..." she said, but then she stopped, the glass halfway to her lips. She thought she had heard something, yelling in the distance, but after a moment she wrote it off as nothing. She drew breath to speak again and the night was suddenly riven by a gunshot in the distance.
Heads whipped around, trying to pinpoint the origin as the sound echoed through the strangely barren ruins of the alien city, before more gunshots rang out, clearer this time, followed by yells from the darkness.
"What the....Kassandra, what's going on?" Duvallier asked over comms, but from inside the building Kassandra's reply was confused. "I dont'...one of the patrols is heading your way, fast, I..."
”What is going on? Report…please.” Bezus loudly spoke, concern in his voice as he stood up from his seat, looking around the room with increasing worry.
No reply…just crackling at the other end of communications.
“I do not like this…YOU!” he shouted over at half a dozen Imaginese soldiers, who were gathered around a fire of their own.
“You 6, secure the northern and eastern entrances to the courtyard…I want visuals on the streets beyond…Comrade Duvallier if I may presume some cooperation here, may I suggest you have some of your people cover the south and west? We need to get eyes into the darkness here…and my communications are playing havoc.”
The plaza became a bustle of activity, Duvallier standing uncertainly, but before anyone could make any significant moves they saw the light of someone's brankule appear in a street to the west. The little orbs of light did not glow brightly enough to illuminate the scene well for the onlookers, but they could heard the thud of boots and desperate yells as the fleeing guard rounded the corner, and suddenly the bark of a Burnham railgun split the night again, the flames of its discharge illuminating the alleyway briefly, nothing visible beside a large bulk, long hooved legs lashing out.
The soldier turned to keep running, and there was a strange blaze of blue light. What looked for all the world like a jet of water, glowing in the darkness, sprayed from the general direction of the alleyway and there was a scream, rapidly cut off.
"What in the name of..." trailed off Duvallier as around her people panicked and ran for the building or scrambled to fetch their weapons
“I SEE SOMETHING!” shouted over one of the Imaginese soldiers standing guard, gun outstretched pointing towards the darkness.
“IT’S MOVING…IT’S…BIG…FAST!”
There was a mumble of tension amongst the soldiers, as they stood firm. The overbearing urge to panic kept in check by their years of training, although for how long would remain to be seen. Noises came from all around, and as the blue lights illuminated the side streets, they cast huge shadows, which played in the imaginations of the soldiers as they still did not have a clear look of the ‘thing’ now encircling them.
Bezus stood by his fire side, watching the chaos around them. He withdrew his Revolver from its holster, and held it aloft, ready to fire.
“YSOUDE!!” he shouted over to Duvallier, looking in her direction. “What do your eyes see?”
Around them there was chaos as Sunpikers rushed back to the towers to grab weapons or simply seek cover, whilst others turned over benches or simply stood and fired at the shadowy shapes. Sporadic gunfire from the sidestreets was intermingled with screams, inhuman roars and the strange hissing blasts of their mysterious attackers. From one wider side street came a thunder of hooves and suddenly a group of giant beasts burst into view, illuminated by the flickering light of the fires and the floodlights on the corners of the towers.
Eight feet tall at the shoulders, they had shaggy cloven hooves and long heads with forward-facing eyes beneath tall, pointed ears. The lower half of their jaws split into two mandibles, long and prehensile like elephant trunks. Some of them carried strange objects, little brassy icons that glowed in the dark, and they bellowed in a strange language as they came, more of the strange bursts of glowing water lashing out at the humanoids in the plaza.
A man next to Bezus fired a bullpup pistol at the oncoming group, causing one to stagger and wail in pain, but its neighbour shouldered it aside and raised a little shard of bronze gripped in one of its chin-trunks, the strange otherworldly glow already gathering around the object. The jet crashed into the gunman and lifted him off his feet with a scream of pain, landing on the hard flagged ground with an audible crack as his brankule, the little light orbs on his horns, began to fade.
"Oh my gods," said Duvallier, not combat trained and not ready for this "they're organised! What do we do?" she replied to Bezus as more of the supposedly harmless animals began appearing in the other entrances to the plaza.
“What in the name of the Gods…” Bezus questioned aloud, staring in horror at the carnage and violence be folding around him. He watched as an Imaginese soldier to his right was scooped out of the way by one of the huge beasts attacking them. He lost focus, the sound around him a blur as I tried to focus for a second and gain his bearings.
He focused. Composed himself, and took in their surroundings. In the briefest of seconds, as he saw Duvallier shouting at him, he thought back over his training.
“If your enemy has the advantage on the field, change the field.” The phrase popped in his head from ‘Ilyich’s ‘Imaginese Battlefields’ Manual’. He glanced around again at his surroundings.‘We are being butchered in the darkness…we need to take away that disadvantage.’
“PULL BACK!” He shouted across the courtyard. “PULL YOURSELVES BACK. BACKS TOWARDS THE FIRE! FORM A RING AROUND THE HEAT…BRING THEM INTO THE LIGHT!”
He looked across to Duvallier.
“We need to create a shield wall in the first instance! KNOCK ANYTHING OVER AS YOU MOVE! CREATE ROUGH TERRAIN!”
The monsters seethed and boiled around them, the surviving Imaginese and Sunpikers falling back around the bonfire even as screams and roars echoed around the plaza. Huddled behind benches, crates and barrels, the survivors returned fire. Mercifully, the enemy's beams seemed to take a moment to charge up, giving the remaining defenders chance to duck into cover. If they saw the shot coming, that was.
From the windows of the towered building behind them, gunfire began to flare in the darkness, the sharp rumbling of Burnham railguns interspersed with the cracks and bangs of more exotic weaponry. Duvallier, still weaponless, glanced back at the building and saw lances of blue watery light spear up against the walls, splashing harmlessly against them for now.
At the wide double doors, a cluster of Alliance Guards took up position behind the deployable barricade, firing in tight bursts to keep the area clear. Around Duvallier and Bezus, the cluster of allies was slowly being whittled down in the confusion. A huge monster, already bleeding from the flank and with blood on its hooves, scrambled over a pile of chairs to reach Bezus, its long chin-tentacles flailing as it snarled in incoherent rage.
The Imaginese soldiers pulled back, firing with their array of weaponry at the ongoing stampede. Soldiers fell, screaming in pain, their comrades using covering fire as another pulled on those wounded, trying to pull them out of the fray. As they rushed, a runner began distributing ammo and weaponry to those who had not kept their guns beside them as they relaxed. One such soldier, a woman with reddish hair, short and squat, in Imaginese dress scurried to Duvallier, pressing a rifle into her arms as they ran by.
“HERE! TAKE THIS!”
The creature rapidly descended upon Bezus as he retreated backwards towards the bonfire. The light illuminated the monster, the shadows darkening the lines in it’s face, creating a vision of true horror for the General. He held his revolver, outstretched, aiming at what he believed to be the monsters face, letting rip with 3 shots.
The rifle was heavy in Duvallier's untrained hands, and she struggled awkwardly to heft it. Beside her, the creature rushing at Bezus twitched at the first shot as it punched into its shoulder, then staggered as the second slammed through its upper thigh. Its movement stilled enough for Bezus' third shot to land true, drilling straight through its head. Its screams of pain were cut short as it collapsed, its huge bulk splintering a bench beneath it, one of its tentacles unfurling slowly to stop just a few inches from Bezus' boot.
"We're too exposed here!" Duvallier yelled over the din. They were too far from the tower doorway - those lucky enough to be near it had rushed back inside already. She glanced about her and saw a large, one-storey building with one doorway and what looked like a window facing the plaza, only a half-dozen metres away. She edged towards Bezus and called into his ear.
"There! We should get inside! Then we can cover the tower doorway and they can cover us!"
Bezus looked around. Duvallier was right, things were far too exposed here, and the opportunity the doorway now presented them with seemed to be as good a chance as any.
“Ok!” he exclaimed “You get your people through the doorway first! We will provide covering fire!”
He turned towards the Imaginese soldiers left standing around the Bonfire.
“COMRADES! Covering fire for our Sunpike friends please!”
He motioned for the Imaginese forces to lay down a barrage of fire at the creatures as he motions for Duvallier and her kin to make for the doorway.
Duvallier sprinted for the door, followed by some of her comrades. One man stopped to fire a burst at a beast that was cutting across their path, but was snatched away himself by a beam of energy.
They kept running, one woman outstripping Duvallier and ducking inside, slipping her rifle through the window and laying down cover fire.
A MAZ-50 truck, loaned from Imaginarium and driven by Sunpikers, veered into the plaza, trailing flame. It's pintle gunner poured fire into their attackers but the vehicle tipped over and cartwheeled in a burst of smoke, flames and debris, cutting a swathe through the centre of the plaza.
Before the roar of the crash had settled, the clatter of an LMG filled the air as someone inside the other building finished siting it and opened up. Tracer rounds stitched the air as a soldier yelled for Bezus and his troops to join them inside cover
The fire and smoke coming from the wrecked MAZ-50 began to choke Bezus. He stood firmly, watching his soldiers give cover as the rest of the gathering dived into cover. Once the last person was through, he shouted his commands.
“IN IN IN! EVERYONE INTO COVER!”.
One by one, those Imaginese soldiers left in the courtyard withdrew, their backs towards the doorway as they sought shelter in the building. Bezus came last, catching one last glimpse of the courtyard before hiding behind the doorway of the stone building. He looked his soldiers up and down, counting how many he had within the space. He moved on to look at the Alliance contingent. He noted the terror in everyone’s eyes, before resting on Duvallier.
“We need to secure this building. We need to get in contact with our people in the rest of the city, find out where these things are coming from.”
A half-dozen Sunpikers had made it to the building. It was hard to tell through the confusion, flames, and smoke, but at first glanced it looked as if there were far more dead monsters than people in the plaza, but this was an illusion caused by the great bulk of the beasts. A rough count suggested that perhaps thirty people lay prone across the plaza, with maybe as many of the strange beasts.
A watery beam lanced through one of the windows, missing the defender who ducked down at the last second, then edged his rifle over the lip to return fire and was rewarded by a scream. Duvallier stared wildly at Bezus as if not understanding, then nodded and pulled out her holo.
"Serge! Serge it's me! Can you hear me?"
After a few moments a reply came back, clear but accompanied by background shouts and clamour. The voice was langorous and spoke of a lifetime of wine and cigarettes.
"Yeah I'm here. In the towers. Where are you?"
"We're in the building uh..to the...the south of the plaza, with the truck crashed outside."
There was another moment of silence and then the voice returned.
"Oh, so that was you? Good, I think most of our people are off the streets now. We're piling up these bastards around the towers. Just stay put."
She glanced at Bezus, who had overheard it all.
"Okay...we can hold the front here if you want to check the rest of the building?"
Bezus ran a hand across his balding head, and took a glance once more into the courtyard, taking in the wreckage and carnage that had unfolded before them. He once more took count of those left standing amongst them, before looking back at Duvallier once more, overhearing her conversation.
“You two!” he charged, commanding to Imaginese soldiers who looked shock up. “Take the windows looking out onto the courtyard.”
He shifted his head to another collection of people, a mixture of Imaginese and Sunpikers who were sat, also trance like. “You lot…on your feet. We need to check and clear this building.” He pointed towards a doorway at the back of the room, ushering them to check that the adjacent room was safe for them to spread into.
Finally, he softened his resolve, turning back to Duvallier. “Are you hurt?” he questioned.
Frozen for a moment, the Sunpikers roused themselves and followed their Imaginese comrades. There was no rear exit to the building, only a large room with what looked like a dry well in the centre.
To the east side of the first room was another room with no windows but a single staircase, wide by their standards but probably small for the original inhabitants.
The upstairs was much the same, just two empty rooms, only with windows facing south into the street behind as well as north into the plaza. A Sunpiker fired a burst out of the south window, elicting a scream from below.
"They're falling back!" she yelled excitedly, firing again, then staggered back with a cry as a burst of blue shattered part of the window frame. True enough, however the pressure seemed to be easing off.
Below, Duvallier patted herself down.
"I'm fine, comrade, and you?"
Bezus looked over Duvallier, and then the rest of the room, and the scattering of living bodies still standing, even if they certainly looked to be worse for wear.
“Yes…” he sighed “Thank you.” He paused again, taking stock of the situation, and the quietening of noise from outside. He motioned towards a soldier stood by the door way, catching their breath “You there, see if anyone needs medical help. Is the outside clear now, can anyone report?”
“Yes sir, they’ve withdrawn from the courtyard.” Said another Imaginese soldier, stood surveying the courtyard from the doorway.
“Let us move back outside…be alert though, I want weapons at the ready in case those ‘things’ return. Let us take stock of what has just occurred.”
What HAD just occurred? These creatures had totally blindsided them. He turned once more to Duvallier.
“Did any of our reports suggest any life forms like that? We need to find out where they came from.”
Duvallier cautiously approached the window beside the door, peering out into the evening. The fog was thickening, made strange by the dancing flames spread sporadically across the plaza, the crackle of fire and the moans of the injured muffled and echoing in the weird space.
"Get some flares into the plaza!" they heard someone yell from the towers, and the hiss of thrown flares was accompanied by the hum of drones which began searching through the night, followed by cautious footsteps and reassuring yells as Sunpikers began to carefully push out into the courtyard, trying to find their wounded comrades.
Duvallier turned to Bezus. "We saw one, remember? The animal that lunged at us from the river. All our reports...they were just dumb animals, herbivores...grazing at ferns and....they were just animals."
The guardswoman by the window chimed in, more helpfully. "They've never acted like this before, nor used tools. All our observation indicated they were just wild animals, dangerous enough if you were stupid but not malicious or intelligent. This is absolutely fucked up."
She glanced back and noticed Bezus' uniform. Though technically a foreigner, the Imaginese were definitely a part of their mission and his general's stars winked even in the odd evening light.
"Uh, sir." she added apologetically.
Bezus remembered back to their tour of the city from earlier that day, and the creature that Duvallier now mentioned.
“That was…the same thing? It beggars’ belief, their natures were so…different?”
How could he have missed that he wondered. Why had he missed that? He would not be so careless again as to discount anything on this planet. He looked to Duvallier and the guardswoman by the window.
“You’re right. This entire situation is FUBAR as our ancestors used to say.” He smiled at the guard, and nodded, appreciating the touch of using his rank. Good discipline from that from soldier, even in trying times, he thought. He stood upright, propelling himself into command.
“Those of you with Medic training, go see what help you can provide, the rest of you, I need medic teams to be covered. Let’s get into the square, form a perimeter.”
He turned once more directly to Duvallier. Lowering his voice he said:
“Comrade. I noticed you were uncomfortable with firearms. This is understandable if you have not received training. I say this not to be condescending, but if you would prefer to stay in here, where it is safe, whilst we check the square, then that is absolutely fine.”
TWO DAYS LATER
After the fiasco of the first night, security had been massively tightened and additional materiel and bodies had been ferried to the planet. Several times concerted efforts by the beasts, formally known as Gauvinus Equstris but commonly called 'gauvins' or 'beasties', had lapped against the newly-erected defenses, but unlike the first night the visitors were ready and the animals were driven off with minimal casualties.
Their efforts, which seemed bizarrely co-ordinated, were a serious problem, however, forcing every scouting party to travel armed, every geological or infrastructure survey crew to move with an armed escort, and a constant sortie rotation of aircraft to respond to ambushes and attacks.
Consultation and study suggested that the gauvins were not as mindless as initially believed, especially as evidenced by their use of the strange bronze objects which seemed to channel magic. The leadership had elected to try and de-escalate things, and their scouts had identified a valley littered with caves from which many of the attacks seemed to originate.
Duvallier herself had elected to go in person, despite the risks - she could not ask another comrade to walk into that haunted gorge in her stead. She and her small party were on foot, only one of them carrying weapons whilst the others carried baskets of food, thick vegetables and grains as well as flowering plants and fruit, as a peace offering. They moved slowly and calmly, making no attempt to hide themselves, hoping to draw a non-aggressive reaction.
Overhead, loitering in the clouds above, a quartet of VTOL gunships and a dropship waited in case things went south....
The two days had passed with quiet reserve from the Imaginese contingency on Sunpike. The first night’s events had shocked the force, and whilst Bezus himself was not committed to asking for more forces to be brought down from the fleets above just yet, he was wary of the enemy they now faced.
Whilst the Alliance went about securing the city and settlements for their growing state, the Imaginese force took care of securing defensive positions within. They fought hard through the nights, but nothing hit them as badly as that first night’s surprise, and soon the diplomatic forces of the alliance had hatched a plan to bring peace to the newly christened planet.
Bezus hated the idea, and felt that the march into the wilds with food as a peace offering was nothing short of ridiculous. He expressed his disapproval at length to Duvallier, but this choice was not his, and with that path committed, he felt it necessary to accompany the alliance on their wild adventures.
Duvallier felt the moss crunch under her boots and suddenly the basket seemed unbearably heavy. The valley was eerily silent, a faint fog rolling down one slope as the party struggled on.
Suddenly there was movement ahead of them, and Duvallier stopped momentarily. A single beast emerged in the mouth of one of the caves ahead and stood watching them.
After a second, glancing around at her colleagues, Duvallier started towards the animal again. It was not particularly large for a gauvin, but its blue-grey hide showed streaks of white indicating its age. In one of its mandibles it held a shard of bronze, but it held it loosely, its baleful eyes watching the humanoids approach. Perhaps forty yards away, she stopped and laid the basket down with exaggerated care before taking a couple of steps back. She urged the others to lay their baskets down and they did the same, creating a small pile of goods that the beast watched intently. Duvallier turned to Bezus, waiting for him to add his to the pile...
Bezus fixed his eyes on the creature, watching for any betrayal in its body language that would show its true intent. What was it that made these animal produce such frenzied hostility to them in the night, and yet be so restraint in the day he pondered. He did not like the situation one bit, and as Duvallier turned to him, ushering him to lurch forward and leave his offering to the creature, he could think of no story as ridiculous as the potential story of a high-ranking general being killed giving fruit to a beast.
He moved forward, keeping eye contact on the beast, slowly stepping forward, before reaching the pile of offerings, where he bent down to place his own collection of foods.
What a waste of rations if this goes wrong he thought.
RoastBeef — 11/02/2022 13:45
The beast huffed, and then took a cautious step forwards, its orange eyes glowering at them. It whickered, tossing its head, then approached slowly, its hooves crunching wetly on the damp moss underfoot, sending small rocks skittering as it passed over patches of bare slate.
There was an air of expectation, a tension that hung in the overcast valley as the world seemed to shrink to the ring of mountains around them. The gauvin approached them, its dappled blue-grey hide dull in the gloom. Powerful muscles moved as it stepped closer, still staring intently.
For a moment, barely a dozen feet away, its shoulders at head height, it simply regarded them, and then it dipped its head to examine the baskets. Tenderly, its free mandible trunk sorted through the items, clearly recognising some. It plucked an apple and took a bite, closing its eyes appreciatively for a moment.
Duvallier was about to speak, but the moment she opened her mouth it snorted angrily, dropping the apple and stamping a hoof. She flinched, and after a moment's silence it pointed with its mandible, first at the foreigners and then at the sky, emphatically.
The Imaginese jumped at the sudden movement of the beast. Bezus spotted the handful of soldiers with weapons, dotted on the edges of the group, go to raise their weapons at the creature. He threw hands into signals to calm the situation ‘hold…hold’.
‘What does this creature mean?’ he questioned internally, as he watched it motion to the sky. He stepped forward to the side of Duvallier, looking the Gauvin in the orange eyes. Keeping eye contact, he mimicked the creature, pointing to the group, and then to the sky. He then opened his mouth, silently motioning to speak, asking for permission to use his voice.
The beast whuffed as Bezus stepped forwards, tilting its head uncomprehendingly as Bezus copied his motions. It did not quite seem to understand, but instead nudged the nearest basket of food back towards the offworlders.
Bezus, having no idea what to make of the body language, and not wanting to enrage the creature further, continued to stare into the creatures’ eyes. He lowered himself down, reaching for the basket with his left hand, pulling it towards him once it was within reach. He turned to Duvallier, giving a shrug, before turning back to the creature, once again bringing eye contact to the beast, before walking backwards, basket in hand and getting some distance between himself and the Gauvin.
The beast snorted in apparent anger, then settled as Bezus took a step back. It tossed its head again, stamped its hooves, and jabbed at the sky with a mandible angrily. Duvallier raised a hand placatingly, but the movement seemed to startle the beast and it reared up with a roar, blue energy welling around the brass icon gripped in one mandible.
One of Duvallier's companions reacted just in time, hurling up a protective screen using his Creation training, but the blast still threw Duvallier and two of the others backwards through its sheer explosive force, tumbling the group outwards
Bezus watched as the creature reared up, a fear ravaging through him as once more. The blue energy that cost the lives of so many of their forces but a few nights before began to swell, the eventual explosion throwing him backwards and onto the ground.
He lay for half a second that felt like an infinity. His brain rushed. Was he hurt? He certainly didn’t feel it, aside from a sore back from his fall. He realised that the quick thinking of one of the companions had saved his life, something he would recognise at another time he thought, as now he glanced across at the creature, who was once again rearing up.
He reached down instinctively for his revolver, realising it missing, left back at base as part of the Sunpike peace mission. He cursed aloud, before shouting to the few armed individuals littering the sides of the convoy.
“SHOOT. FIRE ON IT!” he bellowed, as they launched a volley at the Gauvin.
The monster screeched as automatic weapons opened up on it, dancing in the crossfire before collapsing, its huge bulk sending spats of mud flying as it fell. The ground shook as one of the Yamakazi VTOLs flying cover opened fire, a ripple of clementine-orange explosions stitching their way across the entrance of one of the larger caves as the 30mm gun got to work, trying to hold back a flood of gauvins that erupted from the head of the valley.
Behind the delegation, the Sverkhu dropship graciously donated by their Imaginese allies dropped to the deck perhaps fifty yards away, its hatches and ramp popping open as it hovered ready to pick them up.
"Run!" yelled someone, as Duvallier scrambled to her feet, and they began a haphazard dash across the slippery moss and mud towards salvation, whilst behind them the bestial bellowing and thud of hooves betrayed the emergence of yet more of the terrifying gauvins
Bezus, unarmed, had no choice but to back away under the barrage of covering fire. He continued to shout his orders, adding in additional “Get to the Ships!!” as he his ran towards the Sverkhu. He could hear the stampede of hooves crescendo behind him as he ran, holding his breath as if to preserve it until he was within the safety of the ship.
He glanced to his left and watched an Imaginese soldier, who had been firing a continuous barrage get engulfed in the blue energy from the Gauvins. Another to his right began to turn and flee towards the ships, matching Bezus for speed.
Each foot step felt heavy, as if running in slow motion, allowing Bezus to take in the whole chaos around him. He knew a Gauvin was gaining on him, if only he could make it a few more steps. Just…a little…further…
Something tackled his left ankle. It caught him off balance, and he felt himself descend to the ground. He scrambled, but he knew that the Gauvin would be upon him soon…
A Sunpiker scrambled back towards Bezus, drawing his handax and hurling it clumsily at the beast behind them. It thudded into the animal's flank, and it stumbled as the Sunpiker grabbed Bezus and hauled him to his feet.
The two of them scrambled into the back of the Imaginese-built dropship even as a woman on the landing ramp fired over their heads to keep the monsters at bay. The survivors were secured by the dropship's crew, their weapons stored safely in the racks just feet away.
"Go low," called out one of the men with Duvallier, "lead them on," and sure enough the VTOLs fluttered down the valley ahead of the flood of monsters. Angling around a sharp mountain that sat at a corner in the valley, they screamed over the heads of a contingent of infantry, emplaced and ready for just such a situation. The vehicles banked and took position over the line of hastily-made sandbag positions.
Serjeant Wulfhere focused down the barrel of the heavy railgun, forcing his trigger finger to remain still as the large aliens poured around the flank of the mountain ahead, their hooves pounding up clods of mossy turf. They seemed to draw unbearably close before the bellowed orders finally arrived to open fire.
The crack and thud of multiple guns opening fire at once deafened all other sounds. It was like the ringing of a god's hammer, and the heavy weapons struck like the wrath of a god. Blood and screams issued from the fog-wreathed valley as the gauvins were cut down in their scores, whilst behind the firing line a quartet of MRAPs assembled, ready to advance into the chaos, heavy grenade launchers on their pintles.
Bezus, having been within a second of instant death, found himself to be visibly shaken, as he was pulled from under the hooves of the Gauvin, and into the dropship. Lifting himself to his feet, he swirled around at the Sunpiker responsible for saving his life, grabbing them by the shoulder, and motioning a wordless symbol of gratitude, the noise of the chaos around them rendering any words meaningless. Bezus made it a point to find this person later, once, if they made it to safety, and to thank them properly.
The VTOL floated above the Gauvin herd, Bezus himself clinging to the open doorway of the dropship, watching the creatures flop and fling themselves in a violent dance before the railguns opened fire, dropping the animals one by one. Once more, despite the massacre, the shooting did not seem to deter the creatures, who launched themselves further and further into the killzones.
‘What utter madness this whole endeavour had been’ Bezus thought. ‘We need to find some way of dealing with this problem, or the Sunpike project would have to be abandoned before it had really begun.’
He searched through the dropship for Duvallier, finding her on the opposite side of the craft. Making eye contact, he gestured to show he had something to say, before moving to speak directly to her ear.
“We cannot afford another mission like this. I do not believe these beings will share this planet comrade. We have to eliminate them…”
As the VTOL lifted them away, the passengers felt a shift in the motion beneath them. The waves of creatures began to abate, but the blasts of gunfire and energy kept up. More and more Gauvins were holding back, chary of the gunfire, and some began to congregate along a wide stretch of ground that provided some small cover in the form of a little one-sided gully, using their bronze tools to send bolts of energy over the lip towards the Sunpikers.
Duvallier nodded mutely in response to Bezus' comments as a gunship formed up and strafed the position, foiling the attempt to rally...
TWO WEEKS LATER
The fighting had become a constant on Sunpike. The Gauvins were slowly adapting, now much harder to bait into suicidal charges, instead striking from shadows, skirmishing and raiding. Daily, they seemed to learn from their battles with the Sunpikers, who in turn expanded aggressively, pushing ever outwards and staking out more and more territory, garrisoning it with paths, outposts and waypoints.
A four-man patrol had returned the previous night short two members. One had been killed in a vicious, short exchange of fire, but the other had gone missing, his holo no longer responding, disappeared into the mist. A force was being assembled to go search for him, a half-dozen Alliance Guards bundling into a pair of light trucks. Sergeant Aelflaed glanced up as the Imaginese advisors approached, and waved a greeting. She was bundled up against the damp morning, thick fur-lined coat beneath a dew-rimed helmet.
Bezus grew increasingly despondent. Since the incident in the valley, he had had to explain daily to central command ‘how’ the operation to colonise a planet with no advanced civilisation was failing, each time to someone higher and higher up the chain of command who had not been briefed on the losses both the Imaginese and the Sunpike were taking on the ground. His request for additional support had been rejected, at least at the current time, through fears that more commitment to aid the Sunpike cause would be “not tolerated” by the Jade Empire. Some sympathetic ears of colleagues did promise that they would “see what they could do”, though Bezus knew these to be words of appeasement more than commitments.
Alongside this, Bezus had watched patrol after patrol leave with more men than they would bring back. The Gauvin’s grew in their tactics and confidence, and with absolutely no idea as to their numbers, Bezus feared that soon the alliance band would be swarmed. With all these factors now playing on his mind, he felt despair when a party of men was gathered to attempt to rescue one soldier left behind. He understood the sentimentality, but the truth of the matter, as he saw it, was that it was once again another mindless mission.
Sergeant Aelflaed, the officer in charge of the operation stood amongst trucks preparing to leave. Bezus watched as she casually waved to him as he approached. He returned the gesture, gave a small warm smile, the least he could do before diving into what he considered to be a negative conversation.
“Good morning, Sergeant. How goes the preparation?”
Aelflaed grinned, an expression entirely devoid of humour. "Sir. We're ready." she said, gesturing towards the vehicles. In the morning gloom Bezus noticed that the outlines of the vehicles didn't quite look right, and peering closer he realised that they were festooned with non-regulation equipment.
'Equipment' was what it would be recorded as in the books, but it was bones. A giant gauvin skull was mounted on the hood of each truck, whilst long limb bones hung from the beds. Runes and symbols had been spray-painted onto the dull matte bodywork of the trucks, an ominous carmine colour against the plain greys. Looking back at the sergeant, Bezus realised she too was wearing paint on her face, the same dark red across her forehead whilst wide black curves swamped her eyes and curled down her cheeks towards her neck.
"We are going hunting today," she said confidently, a brittle edge to her voice as if she were excited to go. Though their mission was formally search and rescue, it did not seem like that was what was on the mind of the gathered Sunpikers. There was something primal about their appearance, as if they had been unleashed onto an inviolate world still in its infancy, at home in the anarchy and uncaring emptiness of these new horizons.
Aelflaed gestured for Bezus to mount up, a space saved for him in the lead truck, and hauled herself up into the drivers' seat. A glimpse into the bed of the truck showed several heavy weapons laid up.
"We were ambushed whilst trying to scout out what we think is one of their nests. We think Guardsman Rogvir was taken alive - we're heading back to pick up the trail from there."
Bezus took in all of Aelflaed. He was taken aback, and, as he admitted to himself, impressed by their primal approach to their mission. Certainly, if he feared that the Sunpikers were approaching their mission with naivety, he recognised now that he was mistaken. He did however still worry for their success rate of their mission, and when Aelflaed gestured to the empty space aboard their Gauvin adorned truck, he flinched at the thought, despite the large menu of heavy weaponry laid out in the back.
“I see, I see.” He began, pausing briefly, considering his words, before continuing. “You all seem suitably motivated, and I do appreciate the décor. It will certainly anger our enemies…if indeed they have capacity to recognise such displays. In truth, I worry for our numbers. I do not doubt your abilities, but we have found ourselves outnumbered by these beasts at each turn. How many are you?”
"A dozen," she replied airily. Behind her, other Guards were loading up the last of the equipment whilst two of them took turns applying warpaint to one another. One of them said something in their guttural language and the other laughed, revealing they were from the forests of fog-bound Aegge on Neusattar.
‘A dozen?’ Bezus repeated in his head. ‘A dozen wasn’t bad, but it could do with more’.
“I see, a dozen. Ok. I would feel more comfortable if there were more…let me see what I can do.”
He stepped aside, tapped away on his own data pad, and within moments was connected to the Imaginese central command, located in the centre of the ever-growing city base camp. The face of a grizzled man, head shaved to the scalp, thickened black beard with sunken eyes almost the same colour, starred back.
“Comrade Leftenant Egorov. The Alliance are sending out a hunting party as part of a rescue mission, I want you to take 3 of your commandos and support them. Meet at the vehicle assembly ground ASAP. Understood?”
“Yes, Comrade General Sir.” Came the short, baritone reply.
Bezus turned back to Aelflaed, relaying the news.
“I have asked 4 of our PKK Units to come and support on this mission. This is not a reflection of your abilities, Comrade, but I would certainly feel happier if we gave some support on this,…rescue mission.
.
20 Minutes Later
Before long, an Imaginese vehicle, a MAZ 54 Armoured Car, rushed around the corner, and into the assembly yard where the meeting was rallying. The car came to a screeching halt, the doors opening to reveal 4 large soldiers, dressed head to toe in the black armour of the PKK, red stars emblazoned upon their shoulders. 3 men, and 1 woman approach the assembly group, all carrying their standard issue helmets under their arms. The large, bearded gentlemen led the group, giving a stern look as he eyed up the general.
“Comrade General,” he saluted. “We are ready, sir.”
“Very good. Comrade Aelflaed, this is Leftenant Rolan Egorov of the Pastukh Krysinyy Kommandos, and who else do we have…ah yes, Corporal Olya Kovaleva, and 1st Privates Sergei Kuzmin and Spiridon Dmitriev.”
The group nodded as they were introduced. Egorov was a large man, slightly older than his 3 colleagues. Kovaleva herself was a slight women, clearly very toned. She had the look of someone in her 30s, thick, curled mousey hair, tied back tightly in a bun. Her angled face showing little emotion in this moment. Finally Kuzmin and Dmitriev were the youngest of the group, mid 20s at most. Their faces portrayed less experience than their colleagues, but still, with a scar or two laden across them, they had clearly seen their fair share.
Aelflaed nodded to the newcomers. "Ready to hunt some cattle?" she asked in Common, her face impassive as she gauged their reactions. Behind her, her troops had become impatient, eager to hit the foothills and begin their hunt as the sun began poking narrow rays through the slowly fading morning mist
“We are ready and eager.” Egorov said in his deep, accented voice. He looked from her eyes down to the assault weapons the troops carried; large, metallic weaponry that looked to as raw and destructive as would be necessary on such a hunt. He hunched it over his shoulder with some effort. His own seemed to be an LMG of some kind, the strings of ammo held within a box held on his belt.
“Let us go kill some beast.”
It was several hours later when the convoy rolled onto a long upland plain, flanked by higher hill ranges to the north and south whilst to the west it fell away to woodlands. They pulled up to an outcrop of rocks and the Alliance fighters began to pile out, their boots thudding softly on the damp moss.
"It was around about here he got taken," explained Aelflaed, glancing around at the high valley. There was no fog or mist, a refreshing change from Sunpike's usual, but it was still a forbidding place, the thin air still except for the faint rustle of wind.
The vehicle containing the four special operatives came to a sudden halt, as the convoy emerged into Gauvin territory. The occupants disembarked, weapons at the ready, now adorned in full facial mask and helmet, the only identifier of their individuality being the painted markings upon their armour of their left bicep showing rank and division, and their voices, which now appeared heavy in treble as they spoke through their mask modulator.
They scouted the surroundings as a unit, switching from checking the high ground to low, moving towards the Alliance fighters who were grouping together.
Leftenant Rolan Egorov stood upright next to Aelflaed, relaxing his holding of his weapon as he spoke.
“They are close, the Gauvins. We should tread carefully, leave the vehicles here and proceed on foot.”
“Leftenant!” rang out the voice of Private Dmitriev. “Tracks, comrade.”
The group hurried to Dmitriev’s positions, where the man crouched over prints laid out in the dirt and moss.
“See, five sets of prints. Going off in that direction.” He pointed off into the distance. “But look, alongside, these…these are not Gauvin.”
He was right, the final set looked more humanoid than hooved.
“I think your man may still be alive, Comrade.”
The Guards hefted their weapons. Instead of the usual assault railguns, they were all carrying heavy weapons of some sort, mostly anti-tank rifles, although one had a device hanging on straps from his shoulder that looked for all the world like a broom with a cable running to a backpack. Another two were lugging some kind of crew weapon between them, wrestling it over the heath.
They formed up either side of a cave mouth, the uneven entrance dropping sharply on one side whilst falling away more gently on the other, where hoofprints showed regular use. From deep inside came a glimmer of light, and the faintest of sounds.
"That's new," said Aelflaed in faint surprise. So far, although the Gauvins had shown signs of rudimentary tool use and were definitely smarter than your average horse, they had not been known to make light themselves other than the strange beams they cast in combat.
Egorov came to Aelflaed’s side, staring down into the depths of the cave, the faintest of light visible to him through the lens of his mask, the slightest of sounds rumbling and echoing in the distance.
He glances around the mouth of the cave, and between his own troops. They were casting a look, surveying their surroundings, as he would have expected, and whilst their faces were covered, he could recognise their wary stances, weapons held tight in expectation of trouble.
“I do not like this.” Egorov said, the muffled treble voice emerging from the mask’s small voice box.
“That’s the same light we’ve seen when they attack…weapons at the ready.”
The force slowly made its way down into the cave, which after a narrow turn opened out through a jagged crack into a paved, square corridor perhaps six meters a side. To their right, the corridor ended abruptly in a pile of fallen stone and masonry, whilst to the left it led to a large pair of double doors, slightly ajar, from which spilled forth bright light and the sound of movement.
Aelflaed stared in wonder at the corridor, resting the butt of her heavy rifle on the ground a moment as she peered around.
"It looks like this used to lead right to the surface, but something collapsed the tunnel...the gauvins must have found this side entrance somehow and made a nest..."
“All roads lead to the light room then…great.” Private Dmitriev muttered, in a dismissive and annoyed tone.
Egorov moved once more to Aelflaed’s side, glancing into the blocked corridor, then to the double doors, and then back. He wrestled with an attachment clipped to his belt, quietly unfastening a device, which he produced within his right hand. The item was small, a tiny disk like device. An optic lens sat above what appeared to be a fan, which lit up, and sparked to life with a tap.
“This…we call it “Shmel”. Tiny little drone. It reports right back to my optics in my helmet. Lets see what this light is all about.”
The tiny device fluttered into the air, travelling towards the doorway, and the gap of radiant light.
The team waited in silence as the little drone hummed quietly towards the open door, its sound almost immediately swallowed by the rustling and vocalisations from beyond.
What the optics revealed was stranger than anyone could have predicted. The space beyond was sprawling and high-ceilinged, built with vaulted cyclopean masonry beneath which several smaller buildings stood, some in states of disrepair. At seemingly irregular spacing, bronze objects were mounted or wedged into the walls and on surfaces, glowing with the same pale blue.
Throughout the space Gauvins, of all different sizes, were resting, relaxing or else gathered in clusters. A large group was gathered around an open space in which a ring of lights surrounded a larger, elderly Gauvin to whom a crowd were obviously paying attention. Several other Gauvins were flanking the elder, as if protecting it...
“This is…interesting.” Egorov summarised, as he watched the projected vision of the device through his wrist projector. “They’re gathered in social groupings. Look, the older looking one there, seems to be leading a sermon almost. They’re smart, that is for sure.”
He looked to address the group on his summations.
“As I see it, we have 2 ways of dealing with this. We can either try and find a way to distract this herd, and find a way inside to find your man. Alternatively…” he looked at the large arsenal of weaponry the Alliance troopers now held “…well, we came for a fire fight. We have the element of surprise…we take the fight to them here and now.”
He looked directly at Aelflaed.
“This is your man we are looking for. Your mission. Your choice I would say.”
Aelflaed looked at the group and then nodded as if coming to a decision.
"Let's finish this."
She opened a projected map of the interior as mapped so far by the drone and painted positions for the team to move to, mostly close to the entrance. Once everyone had their orders, two of the Guards moved to the door and readied Thunderstorm grenades, high-charge LTL weapons that would blind, confuse and daze anything within range. Waiting for their visors to polarise, Aelflaed counted them in and they tossed the bombs through the open door. After a beat, there was a deafening series of cracks, booms and whining explosions as light flared through the gap, and then the soldiers poured through the door, firing as they went...
Egorov nodded, referring the action to his 3 comrades, who lifted their weapons and prepared to breach the room beyond.
They charged into the fray, the Thunderstorm Grenade creating a dazzling display that lit up the Gauvins, and put them at the mercy of the firing squad, who launched at once with a hail of bullets, upon the beasts.
The noise erupted, screams and shouts from the Gauvins, explosions bouncing off the walls, and light, bright light bursting from guns, and the blue hue of the Gauvin’s own bio-weaponry.
Egorov, and Dmitriev went left, Kuzmin and Kovaleva right, diving for whatever cover they could, amongst the troop of Alliance soldiers. Beasts fell to the ground as they moved, the element of surprise working to the force’s advantage.
The noise was thunderous as gunfire echoed around the cavern, mixed with the screams and bellows of the creatures and the yells of their attackers. To Aelflaed's left, two of her marines clunked an HMG into position behind a fallen slab of stone and began hammering rounds at the crowded animals. Even more so than the battle at the canyon weeks before, this was a massacre. Aelflaed tracked one gauvin with her Burnham, hosing it down and then putting more rounds into it as it flailed on the floor. She twitched the muzzle upwards and fired again at movement behind her target, catching a juvenile in the neck. It screamed and collapsed, pandemonium reigning as the assembled gauvins fled desperately, only a few trying to resist, errant blasts of blue magic splashing towards the Guards and their Imaginese allies.
The Imaginese joined their Alliance comrades in the merciless fire, reigned down upon the Gauvin. Round after round thudded into the creatures, who screamed, fled, and fell in a chaotic dance. They moved from target to target, the gleeful expressions hidden behind the black masks of the troops.
Egorov took a second to gather his thoughts, and glanced about the room, looking for any signs of the lost Sunpike trooper, though the flail of Gauvin obscured the details of the room. The creatures seemed to be retreating, though individuals remained committed in some primal instinct to putting up a fight.
“Quickly! Gun down the retreaters. Any we do not kill now will only cause us problems later!” He shouted over the fire.
The screams gradually began to fade away, replaced by sporadic bursts of gunfire as the humanoids finished off the wounded and the last few survivors they found hiding. Picking over the wreckage, picking up the odd bronze object and then tossing it aside, the Guards made their way deeper into the cavern.
There was a curse and then the sound of someone being sick. The Imaginese heard muttering and angry voices, raised in consternation, and as they joined their comrades it became clear why. They had found Guardsman Rogvir.
Halfway up a stone wall, spreadeagled, the guardsman seemed to be almost glued to the wall. His outline was fuzzy, making the viewer think at first that the low light was playing tricks, but on closer inspection it became clear that the man had been fused with the stone beneath. Extreme heat had melted his flesh and the stone beneath, before somehow being rapidly cooled, leaving him trapped high off the ground, contorted and warped. The agonised look on his face, blistered by fire, made it clear his death had not been easy.
"Fucking animals," snarled one guardsman. Others were silent, wondering at how such savages could have done this.
Aelflaed's face went stony as she saw the gruesome sight. She turned away, calling in for reinforcements and a demolition team.
"We're getting him out. And then we're burying this place." she snarled to the others
“What in the living fuck?!” Egorov muttered, looking upon the captured guardsman, the sight truly horrific. “These fucking vermin. They…they must be wiped out.”
He turned to the rest of his unit, the sight of the splayed man causing them to stop and stare.
“Hey! HEY! Keep an eye on that tunnel. If the beasts return, I want you to break them. Understand me?”
They reacted, instantly, lifting their weapons once more, aiming down the Gauvin’s escape route. A purposeful anger in their action. Egorov turned to Aelflaed.
“Let’s not just bury this place, let us eviscerate it. Call in the air force, bomb the entire cave system, the valley…let us create a tomb for these…animals.”
The guards milled around for a while, unsure how to extricate the unfortunate Rogvir from his tomb, until finally Aelflaed snarled and snatched a flamethrower from its sling on a soldiers' back. Giving it a few moments to charge up, she yanked Rogvir's dogtags from around his neck and then stepped back, hefting the flamer. There was the distinctive snap-snap-snap of a pilot light before flame gushed forth from the blackened muzzle, washing blistering heat over the corpse. The immediate stench of the roiling grey smoke that ensued caused everyone to gag, shuffling away, but Aelflaed kept the stream of fire up until a warning buzz on the grip indicated the auto-shutoff. In the silence that followed, someone muttered a prayer. Cremation was the proper form of burial for Adfyrans, but typically it wasn't done by high-capacity combat flamer.
"This is ridiculous," said one of the marines. "Wasting good men and women chasing these monsters, down here in this filth. I wouldn't even send a 'droid down here."
Aelflaed shot him a look - legally, especially according to the principles of the Revolution, synthetic intelligences were equal citizens, but centuries of belief weren't going to be overturned by a few months' worth of political instruction. Before she could retort, however, the ominous sounds of bestial howling from deeper in the cave system silenced them all. A single echoing noise at first, it quickly swelled into a chorus of wild and overlapping vocalisations, quickening their heartbeats.
"Time to exfil. Let's go," she said, and almost before she had finished speaking the first guards were moving towards the exit, weapons ready and nerves jangling as the alien howls sounded louder and louder all around them...
The whole scenario was sickening. Egorov ran through the situation in his head; how him and his squad had been brought here in clandestine support by the Imaginese for the Sunpike. How the operation was meant to be peaceful. How they were meant to support the Alliance in building their new home. How it had turned into a bloodbath.
He hated it here. He was pretty sure the Sunpike also regretted picking the planet as their base. The smell of burning tinted his breathing apparatus, the taste staining the back of his throat as the group began to exit the caverns, moving towards the noise of the creatures.
He moved up beside Aelflaed, who was looking with scorn at her own men.
“Comrade, I am serious when I say; we should evacuate the scene and request a large scale bombing campaign against the region. Nuclear weapons if need be. We know where their nest is now…let us finish this.”
The joint group began moving back the way they had come, through the broken gap of masonry and into the dark tunnels that led up towards the light. Behind them, the roaring grew louder, until it was almost on their heels. Aelflaed paused, and then barked orders. "Mercier, Corsa, set up here. Everyone else move up to the entrance and hold it."
Two of her soldiers hustled back, setting up a huge machine gun with a blackened muzzle, aimed directly at the jagged gap in the stone they had just come through. A blue glow was already flickering in the passage beyond, and the bolt on the squad weapon had barely thunked back when the first nightmarish shape appeared in the gap.
"Open fire." said the sergeant calmly, her lip curled faintly in contempt. The boom of the automatic gun was deafening in the narrow rock tunnel, enough that it almost drowned out the butcher's noises as gunfire tore into the flesh trying to push itself through that slim entryway. After only a few moments the way was choked with giant corpses, spilling from the darkness beyond. Aelflaed's rifle was ready in case any managed to slip past, but none did. The pile heaved, a plaintive lowing audible in the silence after the gun stopped firing, though whether it was from survivors or from those behind the horror she could not tell.
Either way, not all the riches in the world could convince her to stay in this nightmare. "Let's go. Leave the gun, just go," she ordered, and she and the two guards set off at a flat sprint, catching up to the others and bursting out into the light, passing a semi-circle of nervous soldiers whose weapons pointed back towards the subterranean maw they had just escaped.
"Calling in a fire mission," the sergeant said between lungfuls of air...
The Imaginese followed tightly amongst the pack, as the group evacuated the tunnel system. The screams of more dying beasts and machine gun fire did little to stop them. Egorov did not need telling twice. Aelflaed’s command was solid, and as soon as he judged they had room enough to make the call to command, he patched himself through.
In his native tongue, he barked his request. To the Alliance soldiers amongst, not speakers of the Imaginese language, the words were hard, and spat off the tongue, even if they were muffled through Egorov’s face mask. Even to a Sunpiker who had never heard the language, it was obvious that he was making a request. Details of coordinates, split by syllable told them that he was precisely marking down where the fire mission should be guided towards. They could only hear one side of the conversation, Egorov’s, but it was clear that he was being very precise, and to the point.
The conversation ended, and Egorov returned to the common tongue.
“Fire mission is called in. ETA 5 minutes. Let's push on out of here.”
The soldiers burst into the gloomy evening light, drawing in lungfuls of clean mountain air, rejoicing in the mud and heather beneath their boots. The hole from which they had just emerged took on a menacing quality, like a lurking beast. None of them dared turn their backs on it, edging away until they reached their convoy of vehicles. The lead driver gunned his engine with a little too much enthusiasm, churning mud everywhere, but the footsloggers still clambering into the vehicle were so focused on leaving that they didn't raise a complaint. As the growling trucks rumbled away down the valley, back the way they had come, the telltale sound of aircraft in the distance began to grow louder...
SOME TIME LATER
To Duvallier's relief, the inferno of strikes that had reduced that high mountain valley to a glazed mass of glassy rock seemed to have been the death knell for the Gauvins. It had been nearly a week, but since that raid by Sergeant Aelflaed and her Imaginese comrades, the intensity of Gauvin attacks on Sunpike holdings had dwindled to almost nothing. In the last two days not a single casualty had been reported among the settlers, for the first time in a long while.
Her researchers were exploring deeper and deeper, making stranger and stranger discoveries. Caves and hidden mountain villages, rudimentary but clearly inhabited until recently, now emptied of inhabitants, populated only by corpses of the young, the weak and the old. It seemed that the Gauvins had been more of a civilisation than they had ever realised, but that that same civilisation was running out of souls even as the newcomers watched. Perhaps the destruction of that great underground hall had been more than just a physical blow to the Gauvins. Had her soldiers unknowingly destroyed some centre of worship, some cultural hub? Had they buried a great, irreplaceable leader with their airstrikes?
She took a sip of brandy and turned to look out of the window.
She found that she did not care.
Bezus was relieved that the Gauvin problem was finished with. As stories of cities, civilisations discovered by the Sunpike explorers, and some questioned the ethics of what they had done, he simply shrugged it as “the better side won”. In the battle for conquest of the planet, this new home for the Alliance, it had been a fight to the death, and the fledgeling state needed to be ruthless in its approach if it were to survive beyond its early days. This was the job he had been assigned to do, and he felt that with the Imaginese assistance, they had been the fierce storm the Alliance needed on the planet, and now a new day had arrived.
He however, would not be around to see it, nor would the majority of the Imaginese assistance. With tensions overflowing in the galaxy, with war raging, and importantly, with the Laptev Axis strengthening ties, the endeavour to support the upstart rebellion’s transition into statehood was seen as “risky.” Not long after the victory over the Gauvin, the orders had come for the ILA to pull out, and return to Tatiana for reassignment.
And so whilst a handful decided to stay and found new lives amongst the Sunpikers, the majority of Imaginese soldiers found themselves once more on the move, back aboard the Imaginese ships, carrying off to Tatiana, and undoubtably more conflict.