Warlord's Invasion (Starfight Book 1) (7 page)

“Chief of police is online, sir,” the grim faced lieutenant said. “He reports that all police squads have been assigned defensive positions according to your orders. He thanks you for adding the marines to his cities.”

Streit nodded. “Are there any problems with the integrated datanet?”

“No, sir. Command and communication with their units and ours are all nominal.”

“Good. Update the main display by wiping the unnecessary projections concerning our destroyed missile and laser turrets. Update the main display with all infantry, armor, and artillery pieces including the civilian police.”

“Yes, sir.”

Streit stared at the main holoscreen at the center of the room. He wondered how the aliens would fare against conventional ground tactics. It was time to find out.

Bajor City, Southern Continent, Meerlat

Main Hospital Complex

Rooftop, Building 2D…

“What do you think they look like, sarge?”

“Big, green, ugly,” Sergeant Will Kubersly grumbled as he rubbed his chin using his oxygen filter. The XG-29 Spartanian Armor Exoskeleton Suit was big green and ugly in itself. It weighed two hundred pounds and wrapped the skin with a thick layer of nanocarbon armor similar to those used on starships. He gazed at his platoon through his in-head display, most of them raw recruits trained during the last recruitment drive less than a year ago. Meerlat was a new system, whose marine detachment came from one of the core worlds as well as from the native colonists.

Everyone positioned around him wore the same exoskeleton armor. They looked like mean killing machines.

His position on top of a hospital wasn’t much for cover, but it allowed him to see everything within a mile. Not that he needed the direct line of sight, however. His datafeed allowed him to see through all the cameras from every aerial recon probe around the city.

From the probe data, his computer would naturally update the position of enemy units on the map that displayed inside his helmet. And when the time came, his recon probes would fight the enemy’s recon probes if they had them. He didn’t know if the enemy used recon probes like humans did or had sensor technology that circumvented them altogether.

“Do you think Bajor City will survive this, sarge?” Private Dawson asked.

“We survived everything so far, Dawson. It doesn’t look like the enemy wants our civilians dead or they would have nuked us hours ago.”
Kubersly returned his attention toward one of his helmet’s displays. At this very moment, he could see those giant hundred meter long alien dropships falling from the sky outside the city.

When they reached the ground, they slowed until they were hovering. Then, they smoothly landed onto the soil using their abundant black insect legs. They didn’t waste a second before opening up their hatches and deploying their ground units out of those black buglike drop ships. Soon, he saw them...their vehicles, their infantry, their aerial fighters, everything.

His platoon members started chattering. “Wow, those are big.”

“So they’re humanoid, like us.”

“They’re huge! I wonder what they look like inside that armor.”

Kubersly gazed at their basic infantryman who had just deployed outside their dropship. It—they wore armor much like his. Black, a bit bigger than his own. Their armor covered its entire body. He gazed at what
it
was holding. Hmm...Its weapons didn’t look so much advanced that his platoon couldn’t put up a fight when the time came.

Their infantrymen deployed readily outside their dropships in the plain grass as if on lookout for enemy units. Little did they know that all the human units had been deployed inside the city.

Then the rounds rained down on the enemy. Human artillery pieces started firing the moment those enemy ground units exited the drop ships. Kuberly wondered why the artillery rounds hadn’t been fired on the dropships themselves but then realized they had. The dropships’ gravity shields had protected them against tactical nukes. But what type of protection did the enemy ground units have?

Immediately, his view of the enemy ground units flashed brilliantly as the tactical nukes hit their mark outside the city. Giant mushroom clouds appeared in his helmet view. It took a while but once those mushroom clouds disappeared, Kubersly gasped. The enemy wasn’t invincible! Their ground units had been decimated. Everything outside the dropships had been turned to black debris. Only the dropships survived.

It certainly looked as if the humans finally scored one.

Then, the dropships opened their top hatches. Suddenly, aircraft exited out of the massive dropships and began moving in the direction of the city. Miniature troop deployment vehicles, much like helicopters from ages past. Probably carrying assault troopers.

Suddenly, Kubersly could hear enemy artillery shells landing throughout the city. The big dropships countered with their own version of artillery and small missiles, but thank god, they
weren’t nuclear armed.

“We’re being hit!” came the cries. “Our positions are being bombarded!”

So, the enemy had recon probes after all—or something similar.

Kubersly wondered what was inside those aircraft and concluded that they were no doubt carrying alien infantrymen of their own.

“Hold on, guys,” Captain Bewcock stated over the command net. “Their assault fliers are coming! Prepare to fire! Fire!”

“Fire at will!” Kubersly relayed the order to his platoon.

Immediately, the battlefield in and around the city thundered with rounds of missiles and shells going in every direction. The alien dropships threw their artillery and missile fire at human positions in the city. The alien aircraft did the same. Alien ground vehicles no doubt carrying troops headed inward towards the city, surrounded by alien tanks roaring with their massive guns. Human artillery, tanks, and aircraft outside and inside the city countered with their own version of hell.

It seemed, to Kubersly in that moment of intense excitement, that alien ground-based technology was not much superior than humans. He was glad. At least in this regard, they were equal. The alien’s small scale ground units did not have any of the superior gravity-enhanced technology that made their atmospheric dropships and the much larger kilometer wide troop transports invulnerable. But what the enemy did have was quantity. The enemy outnumbered the city defenders ten to one.

Kubersly gazed as alien aircraft passed by overhead. Things dropped away from the alien aircraft.

Alien foot soldiers!

Kubersly, still standing on top of the hospital complex, aimed his magnetic rifle at one of the free-falling enemy soldiers and—suddenly, everything around him exploded as enemy shells rained down on his position. Debris flew everywhere. His vision became clouded. Things ricocheted onto his armor and thankfully, none of it penetrated. He quickly activated his rockets and leapt using his chemical-propelled thrusters and now he was skyborn, away from the mess. Now he was an easy target just like the enemy soldiers falling from above!

He fired directional thrusters while he was in the sky, allowing him to fall onto another building. He continued firing his magnetic rifle at the targets. A hit! One of the aliens above exploded in a dazzling fireball.

“I’m hit!” someone’s voice cried out over the platoon’s channel. It was Private Falk.

Kubersly attention suddenly came back to his own platoon. His platoon display section inside his helmet was blinking. His platoon members died off one by one. Their unit statuses changed color when they were hit. Three gone. Now four. “Keep firing!” Kubersly ordered all his platoon members positioned several hundred meters around him. “Don’t let up!”

“There’s JUST too many of them!” another one blinked away. Private Rogers.

“Keep firing!”

Now, the alien infantrymen landed all around him. It was no longer an up versus down battle. His helmet map display read over
eight hundred
new enemy dots in every direction within a kilometer radius. On top of rooftops, on the city streets, around buildings.

“Oh shit,”
Kubersly muttered. He dove for cover just as an armor-piercing hypervelocity round swooshed past his shoulder. He brought his rifle onto the nearest target that he could see—he
could see them everywhere. He fired…And fired….And fired.

Planetary Defense Command, Meerlat

Operation Room…

There were just too many of them.

Colonel Streit eyed all the enemy positions on the planetary holomap and knew they outnumbered human numbers by as much as twenty to one. Fighting enemy positions outside the cities was easy. Since all human forces had withdrawn to the cities, all he had to do was nuke enemy positions outside the cities. But once those alien troopers got inside, it was impossible to take them out except through street fighting, and there, his numbers disadvantage truly manifested itself.

It was a good thing that enemy ground-based technology wasn’t much superior than humans. Their infantry armor was just as vulnerable to armor penetration rounds. Their tanks and aircraft were just as limited in speed and durability due to technological restraints as the human variants. But their numbers made all the difference.

It became obvious the aliens could distinguish between military and civilian targets. They left the civilians alone. But what did
they
want with the civilians? Until he knew what they intended to do with them, he had to do everything in his power to protect them. Even then, Streit sighed, there was only so much he could do to accomplish that. His ground forces were being whittled down by the onslaught. He estimated that within days, he’d be down to the last man, both in terms of military units and civilian police forces.

All around the planet, battles waged on city streets, around street corners, and inside buildings.

The truth was his men were
dying
.

The mood inside the command room was desperate. All around him, regional leaders sitting in front of computer interfaces were shouting orders to those who were actually in the battlefield. In the past hour, over 6000 military and policemen died. That was over 1/12
th
of his entire planetary force in the first hour alone.

The worst part was—there was nothing Streit could do except—surrender. As things were, he estimated that his losses were actually low compared to what they could have been. With so much unknown about the enemy initially, his losses could have been far more devastating. In a way, his subordinates down the chain of command were doing a good job, given what they knew about the enemy. Now, everything was up to the lieutenant colonels and majors who commanded entire battalions. They would be the ones in charge of how the battles were fought in the streets.

Bajor City, Southern Continent, Meerlat

Main Hospital Complex

Inside Building 4A…

Sargent Kubersly was mad. Downright crazy mad. So many good men had died one by one, as the street battles roared through the night. As a soldier, he’d been taught to accept losses and to concentrate, despite the constant roar of explosions and gun blasts around
him, but this wasn’t acceptable casualties—it was decimation. Over the past four hours alone, he had lost five platoon members.

His platoon...his platoon was now down to three men...from eighteen.

Kuberly lay cowering inside a hospital building. Rubble and debris scattered everywhere. The building burned from the thermal impact of explosions that had blown holes throughout the premises. The corridor he was in smelled of death. Dead alien bodies littered the neoplastic floor.

Worse,
they
were still in here.

He didn’t know how many of them had entered the building because he couldn’t see them in his helmet display as the all the human recon probes inside the building had been taken out. The aliens had recon probes of their own and theirs had won. Those little flying mites, so crucial to telling where the opponent was, were now working in their favor.

For all he knew, the enemy could be encircling him and about to attack from both sides of the corridor.

He had messaged the lieutenant to send more recon probes into his building, but the answer he had received had been to wait. Who knew those tiny nanomachines would be so pivotal in a battle like this.

He breathed deeply and stood upright. His feet moved past the dead alien corpses with their bulky black armor that had been pierced by his hypervelocity magnetic rounds. Their friends were still here. He could sense it. At times like this, he relied on intuition.

He neared the end of the passageway. He took out a tiny camera that operated on his fingertips and fingered it around the corner.

His helmet display saw through the camera. There was nothing around the bend.

He turned the corner and kept walking through the new narrow corridor.

A clicking sound echoed, very faint and very alien compared to the cracking sound of neoplastic burning.

Kuberly stopped moving and aimed his rifle at the end of the corridor.
His helmet display scanned through the dust and could see everything within a hundred meters clearly in all spectrums, including infrared. He saw the sudden movement of a bipedal as it ran into opening of his corridor from the opposite end. He saw it limp with its hands clutching its elbow. He saw the fear in its eyes, as it looked straight at the black armored monster that was Kubersly. It was about to turn and run, when Kubersly waved in a friendly gesture.