getting hit by whatever the armoured suit decided to toss.
'Fire everything! Bring it down! Bring it down!' Colonel Ratner shouted as he fell back behind the armoured units for cover.
Major Cumberland had other ideas. He turned and ran for the express elevator.
'Get your ass back here Major!' shouted Ratner, furious.
He let his boots lose traction on the deck so he could drift at speed towards the elevator. When he hit the back of the large cargo car he re-affixed them and turned towards a wide eyed soldier just outside the lift who was breathing so hard he was fogging up his visor. “I need you and your hand scanner, get in here,” Cumberland ordered, gripping the collar of his breast plate and drawing him inside.
The soldier didn’t have to be told twice, and moved as quickly as his boots would allow, handing his scanner over on the way. In a few key strokes Cumberland adjusted the focus and began inspecting the deck behind the railgun loader suit who was charging the heavy armour. The first line of the unit fired their rockets, four of them missed, exploding against the upper hull. The other two were right on target.
The loader suit took damage and hesitated, faltering with a backwards step. It rocked forward onto its right foot and broke into a dead run, closing the distance between it and the heavily armoured soldiers at an alarming rate. The second line fired their rockets, and by the time three of them impacted, the loader suit was so close that the heavy armoured units took peripheral heat damage.
The suit was in their midst then. It picked up a heavily armoured soldier in each hand and used them as cudgels, breaking both men and armour. When the improvised cudgels missed the scattering heavily armoured soldiers, the loader suit slammed the soldiers in its grip against the solid deck, cracking protective plating wide open. A burst of air told everyone who witnessed it that the man inside would die of exposure in seconds if he hadn’t already been crushed.
The several swings connected with the nearby armoured units, knocking them all off balance. Then one of them fired a rocket, missing the loader suit and striking one of the heavy armoured units dead on.
As Colonel Ratner shouted, 'Cease fire! Cease fire!' and ran in the other direction, reinforcements began drifting between the battlecruiser above and entering through the many apertures that had opened to decompress the massive compartment.
Major Cumberland's heart sank as his scanner picked up openings in the deck. Bursts of air escaping from the dozens of deck storage and access compartments were the first warning. The second warning was the size of most of the compartments. 'Colonel! We're standing on the storage compartments for those loader suits! There are more coming!'
'We have reinforcements en-route, Major. This'll be over in no time.'
Major Cumberland swept the scanner from left to right and counted as quickly as he could while reading the results. With great ease and agility thirty loaders suits came up from their storage compartments along with four other three and a half meter tall suits he recognized immediately.
He targeted one of the brown and black camouflaged suits again and ran a concentrated scan. He broke into a cold sweat the moment it completed. 'Colonel! They have Sol Defence Advanced Encounter suits! Order the Battlecruiser to fire directly on the four targets I'm marking!'
'Negative, Major! Our orders are to take this ship in one piece! I'm not going to call in a strike at point blank!'
The Advanced Encounter suit. It was something he'd seen in a movie called Breaking the Belt when he was a boy about the last time a government tried to make a claim on the outer edge of the Sol solar system. According to the film the Sol Defence Fleet believed in countering an attack with force that outweighed the offense by multiples in the hundreds. In that instance the Sol Fleet led the counter strike with Uriel fighters just like the ones he saw launch when they were about to take the Triton. In the movie, the fighters loaded with two of those Encounter Suits each. They dropped them on the hulls of destroyers, of carriers, of the munitions and supply ships and they tore into their hulls like savages. When they were finished with the hulls, they clawed and burned their way into their ships. There was no mercy, no hesitation, and no humanity. They were shock troops with more firepower per man than anyone had ever seen, and more armour.
When he saw one in a museum as a boy, it looked like a brown and black demon. Its thin, hard black hands were like talons, ready to rip anything in its way apart. The pulse guns on its arms were the same size as some he'd seen in the space flight museum, on full blown starfighters. He recalled the statistics on the machine. Able to heft seven thousand tons, with armour that could withstand a one thousand kilometre orbit with a standard yellow star, armed with a high powered particle beam cannon on one arm and an energizing shard cannon on the other. It was fuelled by a pair of shielded cold micro fusion generators, had an energy shield and focused fusion ion propulsion. He remembered looking up at the captured relic in the Soner Museum as a boy and how small he felt.
That feeling, along with a deep fear threatened to completely unman him as he watched the four machines stand tall and begin a long charge up the deck from the rear. The four he was seeing looked more advanced, newer, slimmer, and far more dangerous. 'I need my unit to fall back to the cargo lift. We're going to survive this.'
'Major! I'll have your commission for this!'
'I'll defect before I put my men into combat against this bunch! This fight is already theirs.'
The four Encounter suits opened fire with their particle shard weapons first, and what he saw in that old movie paled in comparison to what they did to the soldiers in reality. Thin shards of slow moving, excited particles moved across the broad deck and sliced through the Colonel’s heavily armoured units as though they were wearing tissue paper.
Major Cumberland waited for his retreating soldiers impatiently; 'Move! Move! Move!' he shouted, though he didn't have to. Several of the Colonel’s men followed; a few of them in heavy armour. Those were the ones who would be left behind; there was no way Cumberland would hold the lift long enough for their slow bulks.
The Encounter suits stopped firing at the soldiers on the deck and turned their attention to the Battlecruiser above. The loader suits charged. They were so agile, so quick; it was like watching several lines of runners break from the starting line. Behind them rose one hundred fifty or more men and women with personal shields and heavy particle rifles. They all fired on full automatic, lighting the deck with tens of thousands of rounds. Half of Colonel Ratner's forces were gunned down in seconds. Major Cumberland saw the last of his men steps away from the lift car and hit the close button. 'Command, I’m in retreat with some of the Colonel’s men. Deck twenty one is a complete loss and you have heavy armour mounting a counter incursion on your vessel. Please acknowledge.'
'Acknowledged. Do you have any chance of preventing the incursion?”
“I could try harsh language.”
“Pardon?”
“Not a chance in hell. What about Ratner? Doesn’t he have access to anything heavier?”
“The Colonel is dead, Major,' came the reply. They had gotten away, but Major Cumberland was left with a difficult choice and a dozen men and women whose morale was nearly shattered.
'Major Cumberland. This is Command.' It was a different voice that time, one he’d never heard before.
'I'm receiving you.'
'Can you verify what we're seeing? It looks like all our people were just gunned down on the upper deck during a comms blackout.'
'That's the correct assessment. They have Sol Defence Encounter Armour. You should pick them up on Battlecruiser 1109's hull any second now.'
'What?'
'Look for cutters. There's a counter incursion going on right now. I was just telling your subordinate the same thing.'
'Your new orders are to proceed to the command deck to assist. Fighting has broken out on the bridge.'
'Yes sir. I thought they’d already taken the bridge, sir.'
“That’s need to know only, Major.”
“Bullshit, you’re going to tell me what we’re getting into, now.”
“They let us take the bridge twice, both times were a trap. We’re taking it for good.”
“Acknowledged. Keep me in the loop Command, this operation is too out of joint for this need to know crap.”
“Secure that attitude and get on mission. Command out.”
