Fan Fiction ❯ Aliens: Genocide ❯ Children of Chaos ( Chapter 1 )

Aliens: Genocide

By: bsmart

 

Disclaimer: Why the hell am I writing this? Nobody reads them and they have no legal weight. It's a complete waste of time and bandwidth and yet I'm still typing. I'm going to take a shot in the dark and rate this fic R, violence and language, the good stuff.

“…” Normal Speech

`…' Thought

 

Chapter One: Children of Chaos

 

The snapping hiss of an ungodly amount of power discharging from the capacitors and into the electromagnets surrounding him announced the catapults firing in no uncertain terms. Only his suit's velvety smooth but vice-like grip kept his body from being crushed as the skipship's launcher hurled his drop pod into the vacuum. He grunted hard trying to keep the blood in his head and avoid passing out under more than thirty times his own body weight, he'd only blacked out once, on his first drop in training, he had no intention of letting it happen again.

 

The contrast between the shrieking roar of tortured electrons that stabbed into his ear drums during launch and the sudden utter silence when he finally cleared the barrel were startling. Only the hiss of the gel sacks releasing their death grip on his body disturbed the peace. He knew that there was nothing to hear but his ears still strained for something to focus on, eventually they began to invent things to listen too.

 

All too soon he heard the first whistling of the air whipping past his droppod as he fell from the stars towards the ground below. Even cocooned inside this ceramic shell he knew that by now the skipship had finished shooting off the rest of the company. Like the other eight ships making their runs right now it would let classical mechanics guide its course and allow the atmosphere of their target shove them back out into space where they would try to look as harmless as the asteroids they were impersonating, drifting away silently, for the moment.

 

The whistling soon grew to a howl as he plunged deeper into the atmosphere, the skipships had held onto them until the last possible moment, only firing them off just when the atmosphere of the target planet was about to start pushing them back out, assuring that the droppods would spend as little time in the sky as possible.

 

The urge to try and reach out and touch the sides of his pod was almost overwhelming, but in more than ninety drops he'd never been able to, the techs were always diligent to ensure that his suit was strapped down tight, he could barely move his fingers, much less his arm. It was a good thing, but still frustrating, the urge was always inexplicably there.

 

People always thought that drops would be exciting, plunging down from outer space to the surface of a world like a bolt from heaven, leaping from a starship and landing on the ground. In truth it was one of the most mind numbingly boring times imaginable. After spending three weeks cooped up in a ship two sizes to small, drifting along with a bunch of asteroids in a comm blackout he'd wanted to space himself, but this was worse, he was locked in this ceramic pod with no sensors, no communications, and he couldn't even move, it was like sensory deprivation but without the nice feeling of disconnectedness. There was nothing to do but sit and stare at an altimeter that was only guessing anyways. Every one of the dozens of sensors on his suit was useless until he got out of this ceramic wrapper.

 

He knew that a few hundred meters away the other members of his platoon, Red, Tingirl, and Snakes were all in the same position, just waiting, knowing that if they died now they'd never even see it coming. One moment they'd be plunging towards their objective and the next some lucky Skinnies' particle cannon would turn them into incandescent vapor, they'd never even see it coming much less do anything about it. That made it worse, on the ground he could do something, he could fight back and he could ensure that they stayed alive, in the air like this he couldn't do a damn thing except pray that the Skinnies stayed as stupid as fleet intel said they'd be.

 

****************

 

"The drop on PX478 should come as a complete surprise," the young lieutenant assured them. His dark green fatigues were starched and pressed with razor sharp creases, every medal and badge was perfectly in position.

 

"When did they start letting babies join the service," Red asked quietly from their place in the back of the auditorium. Her own fatigue pants were a wrinkled mess, just like every other pathfinders, only her boots were immaculate, her loose gray tank top was within the regs, but only as underwear.

 

"Hell if I know."

 

"Our approach..."

 

"What 'our'? That twit won't get within fifteen light years of 478 until the fleet's done glassing the place."

 

"Red would you just shut up," Snakes scolded her.

 

"...will go unnoticed because we will be using a cluster of asteroids for cover. We will drift in with them all the way to the planet where the skips will release their droppods and then drift out."

 

"No high speed run?" one of the pilots at the front of the auditorium asked.

 

"No, PX478 is a vital resupply and repair base for the Dral; it's equipped with a formidable array of orbital guns and a quick response planetary shield. Even if we could plot a course that got us as close to the surface as possible the chances that they could get the shield up are too great to risk it for obvious reasons."

 

One of the spacers sitting next to the pilot balled up a fist and smacked it into his palm.

 

"Precisely, bugs on a windshield, once we drop out of hyperspace behind PX478-3 we're in full blackout. Now our objectives are here," the young operations office said pointing to a huge map of a military base. "This is the primary base on the planet. There are some other installations but those are mostly long term storage and food processing for the crops the Dral harvest here. This base is at the bottom of their skyhook's tether. They transfer material and such up the hook's central elevator to the station in geo-sync orbit and from there to the ships that dock at it. The base is defended by a division of Dral regulars but these are their B level troops, not the A's we usually fight. The reason is these orbital defenses."

 

The map shifted to a series of recon images of the skyhook and the several large shapes around it. "As you can see there are four of their heavy battle platforms arrayed around the skyhook," a chorus of whistles and awed whispers greeted this news, "and in addition they have a network of battlesats ringing the planet in addition to some very large orbital guns, finally the Dral have a rather sizable starfighter base on planet. And on that note I'll turn the briefing over to Colonel Ramiz."

 

The short thick commander of their battalion stepped forward and started to address his troops, he was obviously one of them as his own uniform was as much in disarray as any of theirs, and not a single indication of rank adorned the rumpled green clothes. "If they have to the fleet can crack this nut, but it won't be pretty so it's our job to soften things up for them. The Dral don't see this coming, they think this planet is too far behind the lines to be attacked so they don't have much of a garrison here, we're going to show them how wrong they are."

 

The Colonel started to pace. "As always it's up to the Pathfinders to go in first, ahead of the rest of the Legion and even the fleet, you're going to knock the Skinnies on their asses and you're gonna keep them there until the rest of the Legion finally gets their shinny metal asses planetside." A chorus of cheers greeted the usual jab at the rest of the Legion. The Pathfinders were proud of their elite status, there was only a battalion of them in the whole Legion and they always went in first to soften things up for the rest of the troops.

 

"So here's what we're going to do!" The images on the screen behind him shifted back to the over view of the main base but this time it was covered in multicolored notations. "Alpha company, you're hitting the shield generators at grid FD82. It will be up to you to make sure their shields go down and stay down; I'd rather not have to wait for the rest of the Legion to show up while the Fleet beats down the planetary shield. Bravo Company, your target is the airbase and garrison at BH05 and 07, make sure they don't bug us. Charlie, those battlesats are too small for their own power sources, there are three transmitting stations in the area that keep those sats juiced while they're over the base, HA34, GD12 and CE31, level'em and the fleet's job is a whole lot easier. Delta, I want those orbital guns down before your feet even hit the dirt, those things could make a mess of the rest of the Legion's a landing so it's up to ya'll to make sure that the rest of the Big Red One makes it down. As always once your primary targets are taken care of I want you causing as much mayhem as possible out there, anything without a red star on its side is a target! See your company commanders for the details of your missions."

 

The Colonel stopped in the center of the stage with a satisfied smile on his face, gazing out as his troops one fist shot into the air. "PATHFINDERS!"

 

"LEAD THE WAY!" the crowd roared back.

 

**************************

 

On paper it was simple, routine even. Just like every other combat drop he'd had as a Pathfinder, not that it mattered. The same feeling of helplessness was there, the sure knowledge that until his feet hit the ground his fate was out of his hands. All it would take it one trigger happy Skinnie gunner or one alert fighter pilot and he'd be dead, all he could do was wait.

 

The G's were starting to pile up quickly as his pod plunged lower and lower into the atmosphere. The howling of the air as his pod ripped it asunder had long ago grown to consume his reality, there was no sound in his world aside from the screeching winds, and no sensation but that of a groundcar sitting on top of him as the G-meter went past ten.

 

Just when he felt for sure that it was over, that the skip pilot had finally screwed up and sent them in too steep the crushing feeling started to subside, slowly, agonizingly the roar of the wind quieted and he traded the ground car for a swoop bike and finally nothing.

 

The feeling of sensory depravation just started to creep back when a soft beep announced the next leg of his journey.

 

With a blinding flash the pod around his split apart like some giant flower, the shell that had encased him peeling back and flying away like leaves in the wind. The straps that held him to the base of the pod popped loose and with a slight movement forward the pod base tipped spilling him off and leaving him in free fall.

 

Even as the pod was falling away a deluge of information started to pour into his senses. His screens came alive as his passive sensors took in the area around him and fed him the important details. He breathed a sigh of relief as all three members of his platoon had made it through. He was so busy consulting his sensors and checking his comms that it took him a solid ten seconds to finally just look.

 

The view was incredible, twenty kilometers up and falling like a brick he was able to see the whole of the complex they were about to assault. The planet's primary had set long ago and the only illumination was the star shine and the lights that were on in the base itself. The bluish colored lights favored by the Dral made the whole place seem like one giant jewel set in a sheet of navy blue velvet. He could see a river snaking its way down from the mountains off to the west and a huge forest that stretched out as far as he could see to the south. His revere couldn't last long though, the soft beep of his proximity sense told him that his platoon had formed up on him and it was time to go to work.

 

Sadly he couldn't afford to keep gazing at it. With a disappointed sigh he activated his optics sweet. The confused mishmash of greens and blues, reds and yellows would have been indecipherable to any untrained person and there were some who could never get used to it even after months of training. Combining a three hundred and sixty degree field of vision in vislight, infrared, low light, elec scan, LADAR, and mag scan sensors into a single field and then overlaying it with a heads up display was a quick way to induce a migraine until you grew used to it, but once you did it was obvious where the phrase "....like trying to sneak up on a Pathfinder..." in the Ankari military came up on. As horrid as it was to look at the view made it possible for a Pathfinder to achieve nearly perfect situational awareness.

 

His suit quickly determined where their landing zone was supposed to be and gave him a steering cue. He adjusted his body shape and glided towards their target. Even though there was no exterior sign that anything was going on as he fell inside his suit things were happening quickly. With ease born of hundreds of repetitions he brought his weapons on line, charging capacitors, chilling magnets, and chambering rounds. With ten kilometers left to fall his platoon spread out a little more to give each other room for the next stage.

 

All the manuals said that at ten kilometers you popped your chute.

 

Nobody payed attention to the manuals.

 

Every drop he tried to push it a little farther, wait a little longer to pop his chute. Every second he waited brought him more than two hundred meters closer to the ground and two hundred meters fewer he'd have to drift down under the canopy. The last drop he'd waited until five kilometers to open it, he figured he could push it another five hundred meters this time. He held the over ride right down to four point two. There was no quick jerk accompanying the opening of the chute, he weighed too much for that. The deceleration was almost gentle and took nearly ten seconds to complete. Two kilometers wasn't much room to slow down in and he knew he was pushing it but he didn't want to spend one second more in the air that necessary.

 

The Skinnies wound up staying dumb longer than he thought they would, he was five hundred meters from touch down when the first beam of concentrated energy lashed his metal skin. "They know we're here now!" he yelled across the comm link, not even the anti-sensor coatings applied to their armor could defeat that much energy at that short of a range so breaking comm silence didn't matter. The airbase stretched out before him and if he continued down like this they'd land right in the middle of one of the landing pads.

 

With three hundred meters left to drop he reached around behind him for his auto cannon, at two hundred he released the lines connecting him to his chute.

 

For a hundred meters he let himself fall before stomping on his jumpjets. The black of the night and the blue of the lights was momentarily overwhelmed as all four members of the platoon lit up their jets and bathed the landing pad in the pure white light of eight plasma jets.

 

He didn't want to land in a puddle of liquid permacrete so ten meters from the ground he killed his jets and dropped. The thundering boom of four thirty five ton metal monsters landing echoed through the night.

 

"Red down and ready to go."

 

"Snakes down, let's roll."

 

"Tingirl down, ready to rock."

 

He smiled to himself, everyone was down and fine. "Zombie down, let's rock."

 

********************

 

"Alright, as you can see this is a pretty standard airbase one of those prefab things they just let their droids build. Two landing pads, about a four hundred meters square. On the North and South sides of both you've got their hangers and on the East sides you've got the armories. Zombie, take your platoon and hit the northeast one, Star you hit the southwest one. They're separated by about a click so just be careful that you don't send something nasty each other's ways while you hit them. Mac and Sandman will work over the garrison here."

 

"Oh, and it's weapons free people, you can crank your hellbores all the way up and take thermal detonators."

 

********************

 

Zombie didn't bother to pick out a target as he dumped his mortars, he just told both tubes to fire off everything they had and trusted that the mortar rounds little electronic brains would be smart enough to pick out something important to hit. The rest of the platoon did the same and the first warning the base had that anything was wrong was the booming roar as nearly a hundred and twenty mortar rounds detonated all over the base.

 

One of the rounds wasn't an electronic kamikaze though and at the top of its arch it had deployed a small set of props and took up station, the electronic eyes of the little recon drone scanning for anything of interest to report to its master and the other drones like it starting to pop up all over the area.

 

Even as the automortars on his back were still flinging fifteen centimeters shells out Zombie was already moving towards the northern hanger with Snakes while Red and Tingirl went after the southern one. Supposedly the rest of the company was off to the north raising hell with the garrison but if any of the Skinnies got by he wanted to be the first to know about it.

 

The hanger was a big building, thirty meters high and nearly three hundred long, it had to be to hold as many fighters as it did. Since they just used repulorlifts and needed a rack to hold them since they had no landing gear the hanger was able to hold hundreds of them, stacked up in their racks with only a meter between them. Each of the little green ships looked like three crystalline shards flying in close formation, a central pod that held the pilot and the weaponry and the two outriggers that were all engine, all three held together by a pair of runners that were maybe ten centimeters thick at their widest. They looked incredibly delicate and without their shields to protect them and their structural integrity fields to reinforce their structure they were.

 

The first burst of thirty seven millimeter slugs shattered the entire back half of the first ship he fired at but he knew he'd never be able to take out the entire hanger no matter how satisfying it was to watch. Snakes hadn't wasted any time with her autocannon and had gone strait to her shoulder mounted hellbore. The first bolt of fusing hydrogen detonated at west end of the hanger and gutted a fifty meter square section of it.

 

Bowing to the need for expediency Zombie shouldered his own rifle and reached for his hellbore. Judging by the hole she'd made Snakes had kept her hellbore turned down, Zombie cranked his all the way up, this is what he loved about his job and without a single civie on the planet there was nothing to hold back for.

 

His first shot clipped a fighter and then detonated. Like the miniature sun that it was the detonation swelled outward consuming all, its heat and light swamped some of his sensors but he was able to watch as roiling plasma consumed nearly a third of the gigantic hangar. The blast wave shattered dozens of fighters in the surrounding areas but the hangars structural integrity field was able to withstand the shock.

 

As a blackened wall collapsed to the ground Snakes muttered over the comlink, "Show off." Her next shot similarly devastated the south end of their hangar and a moment later their combined fire eliminated what little was left of the tortured structure.

 

"Shit!" Red hissed. "Runner!"

 

Zombie spun around but Snakes was quicker, so quickly that it was hard to believe she was encased in nearly forty tons of war machine. A single green crystalline fighter had apparently been manned as it was darting out of the hanger Red and Tingirl had been working over. The little starfighter was accelerating rapidly but it had never been designed to operate at high speed but low altitude. A stream of autocannon fire tore up the ferrocrete in its wake but it was moving to erratically to get a good shot at. Snake's Daemon missiles had no such problems as a pair of the anti-armor missiles found the wallowing ship and ripped it apart.

 

"Good shooting Snakes," Zombie said.

 

"South clear," Red reported.

 

"North clear," Zombie replied. "Let's hit the ancillaries."

 

Red and Tingirl jogged to catch up and in a wedge they advanced towards the north end of the base, towards the barracks, the machine shops and the armories. With the fighters destroyed there really was no reason to get in a rush about taking out the support system for them. Instead of hellbores and thermal detonators they'd use their autocannons and flamers.

 

Zombie didn't know if it was the meds his suit was pumping into him or some sort of conditioning that had been part of his training or if he was just the sort of sociopath that the Pathfinders looked for but...this was one of the times he truly felt alive. Striding across the battlefield, five meters tall, he felt like he was invincible, unstoppable, the avatar of some long forgotten war god, he would crush and destroy and lay waste to his enemies and there was nothing they could do about it. Unbeknownst to him the same evil smile that adorned his face caressed the faces of his three charges.

 

As they approached the auxiliary buildings all four of them fanned out, Red for the maintenance shops, Tingirl towards the motor pool and fuel tanks, Snakes for the armories and Zombie, he headed towards the control centers and barracks.

 

In one of those quirks of similar evolution the Dral, like most humanoid species had arrived at the conclusion that a tower was the best building design to oversee an airbase. While the Dral's version of a control tower looked more like it was grown out of crystal its function was obvious. In quick succession all six bombardment rockets erupted from the hip packs they had resided in and slammed into the base of the tower. In six quick blasts the towers supports were destroyed and it toppled to the ground and shattered like a vase dropped on the floor. Stepping over broken pieces of tower the size of a ground car Zombie moved deeper into his assigned area, turning the control center into a glowing crater with two quick hellbore shots.

 

With the control center destroyed Zombie paused for a moment near one of the barracks buildings to take stock of what his platoon was doing. Tingirl chased a fleeing transport truck with a line of autocannon fire until it caught the fleeing groundcar and cut it neatly in half. In the distance he saw Snakes let loose with one of her Lance missiles. The big missile had been designed to help drop small gunships and good sized mechs, the door to a weapons cache wasn't that much of an impediment. There was a small flash when it hit the door and nearly a full second later the entire bunker lifted nearly two meters before the top of it erupted in a volcanic explosion that sent clods of dirt and ferrocrete into the sky. He was just turning to see what Red was up to when he heard her yell, "Zombie, skinnie on your ten!"

 

*********************

 

Seev-tijc was happy with his life. Others were off winning glory for whichever god their Kitth venerated most just like the clerics said they should desire to but he was perfectly happy on Siprac garnering no glory and living to tell about it. The war against the Ankari wasn't going well by most accounts. Of course the clerics and their pawns claimed they were winning great victories, bringing glory to the gods and crushing the infidels but he knew better. You couldn't watch single ships, ships so savaged that they were more use as scrap, ships that used to be with entire squadrons, whole fleets, limp back here for refit and actually think they were winning. The crews were almost always quarantined, prevented from coming planetside but rumors still came out. The officers said that it was just one ship with a run of bad luck that needed some minor repairs. The rumors said that they were actually the lucky ships.

 

Still Seev was happy with his lot. Siprac was too far from the fighting and too well protected to be a target anytime soon, no the clerics would realize their error, sue for piece with the Ankari, and call it a great victory long before the first Ankari cruiser showed up in orbit. So long as he continued to make himself useful, but not too useful, his place and person were safe.

 

His unease with the war wasn't entirely with his odds of survival. Unlike many of his comrades Seev wasn't particularly religious, at least not religious in the since of following the clerics. In his mind they had too much personally involved in the worship of the gods to truly be the impartial emissaries they claimed to be. His unease came from somewhere else; it came from the very word Ankari, or rather in his tongue, Ankar-i. In the modern tongue it meant nothing, just a name, but in the ancient tongue...in the ancient tongue it meant something. The oldest histories, the ones that no one was allowed to read or even speak of told of a time long long ago, so long ago that the very mountains were different. A shining time, a time when the Dral had been a mighty people, when the Dral had had an empire that had spanned the stars, and empire bigger than they had today but hundreds of thousands of years before the first Dral should have even looked outside of his cave. They told of a war, a war between the gods in which their servants had been pitched against one another. The servants of the gods of order had been know as the Taidan and many had flocked to their banner, including the Dral, the gods had favored them and blessed them, before the war it had been a glorious time. Then came the war, for millennia, for generations the Taidan and their allies had warred against the servants of the gods of chaos. The war had gone in their favor for an age with many worlds converted, with many servants of the dark gods thrown down, then they had come. They drove back the alliance of light and for a time it looked like they might triumph, like the entire galaxy would fall before them and only a final suicidal assault by the Taidan ended the war in a stalemate, a stalemate that drug everyone into a dark age that was only know ending. The dark ones who had thrown back the servants of light and who had nearly triumphed were known as the children of the war god.

 

The Ankar-i.

 

None of this was on Seev's mind when the first rippling explosions tore the peace of the night apart it wasn't even on his mind as the hangars disappeared into miniature suns, but it was most definitely on his mind as he ripped open the door to his barracks. In the distance he saw a twelve gyt tall red humanoid marching through the machine shops which were already burning. The red monstrosity was belching flame from its arms and its weapons ripped apart buildings left and right. Another one that was covered in a writhing mass of serpents caused the earth to rip itself apart before it destroying the contents of a bunker. Behind him he heard but couldn't see the footfalls of another of these monstrosities. Both sets of his knees weakened and he gripped the frame of the door trying to steady himself as he began to lose control of himself to his terror. It was only when he looked up again that he realized one of the monsters had been but a few dozen gyt from him the entire time. Backlit by the flames of the red one and illuminated by the blast of the serpent covered one's weapons he finally saw it.

 

The terror was black as night, it seemed to drink in the light around it, but as another flash illuminated it he realized he was wrong. While much of it was black, deep rents were cleaved into the creature exposing it's entrails to the night. Green and blue ichor leeched down its body. As almost a final insult to all that was good the creature's skull was laid half bare, the gore of its last kill staining its bone and skin a sickening azure and verdant green. Splashed across the things chest in blue blood and stilted Dral was the phrase, 'Abandon all hope'. As he sank to his knees Seev-tijc did just that, even the whirring of some hidden machinery that revealed the thing to be a machine was little comfort, the dark one's had returned. His silent prayer that he would die before having to witness it was granted as Zombie's point defense chain guns ripped him in half.

 

**********************

 

"Neutralized," Zombie said emotionlessly across the comm.

 

============================================================

 

Author's Notes

 

Acknowledgements:

 

Notes:

 

1) Yes, this has next to nothing to do with Aliens so far and is one of the biggest sci-fi cluster…you knows well ever.

 

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