Red Sun at Dawn (TGG Story).

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Red Sun at Dawn.

Introduction: This story introduces the universe of the Archduchy of Great Carina and the associated powers of the old German Confederated Empire in that universe to the broader TGG multiverse. It is a collaborative work between myself and Eris (Aleph Nought), who invented the Carinids. It uses names and certain elements from an old RPG called Times of Tribulation, but all details have been substantially modified as components of a completely original work, and names are themselves not eligible for copyright as part of works of fiction, making their use here permissable, though the work is published without intent to receive revenue regardless.

Chapter One.


17 January, 3038
ETFHhr 89.17263.614
0.85 AUs from system primary

The bridge of the K-23855 was serene. All of the damage inflicted on the slender corvette had been done superficially, failing to penetrate down to the heavily armoured interior, and all of the bridge crew were plugged into their interfaces, churning through damage reports, simulations, and relaying about information all done virtually within the ship’s computers. When she thought about in these moments while not herself connected to the network, Rayna Bajer could appreciate how creepy foreigners might find it, if they were used to a bustling command centre filled with usual directed chaos that followed a fight.

Her reverie was interrupted by an incoming report on her control board. Not bothering to hook in for a report that wasn’t in person, she brought up a transcript on the display. Her communications officer had finished the deep scan of the system and come up with no artificial bodies within a range that could have been pinged by the Tianxia vessel during the scuffle. Bajer allowed herself a bitter smile at that. Then at least the fight would go unreported until one of their governments noticed their scouts had not reported back for at least a few weeks.

A second light came on and this time she did reel out the cable and log herself into the network. Alicia, what news from engineering?

The harried, ethereal voice of her chief engineer came back, We’re baked. The interior of the primary engine chamber suffered severe embrittlement, and the last burn more or less gutted it. The reactor still can provide near full power and the jump drive is repairable, but otherwise we’re on manoeuvring thrusters only without a stay in a repair yard.

A repair yard that they didn’t have, of course. Can we get far out enough to jump on manoeuvring thrusters? She knew before asking that it would have taken months or more, but the ship was fitted for a long voyage, and the little thrusters could provide some movement, especially since they were ever going to run out of reaction mass with the main engine’s hydrogen reserves redirected to them.

We’re way too deep into the system. Nor can we get into a stable orbit over any body given our current trajectory. The good news, such as it is, is that the second planet is confirmed as habitable. The iffy news is that it’s inhabited. The weird atmospheric conditions were confirmed as sapient made after we came in view of the dark side – there are cities down there, if not too many.

Bajer breathed out. There were no records of colonisation anywhere near here in their libraries, and the Carinan databases were the most complete on the matter in existence. Well, I always fancied myself as a first contact sort of person. Chances we’ll survive the crash?

There was a noticeable pause as Alicia Kergeulen tracked down the relevant simulations. Better than surviving the crash into the primary. The hull is still spaceworthy, and we can make up for the lack of a working engine some by diverting the free power to the condensers. They’ve been used before as control surfaces so we can glide in as best we can. I give us three in four that we don’t break up coming down, and one in four that we don’t simply crater – we have enough left in the thrusters to line us up to skip along an ocean to bleed off any velocity left after entry.

Bajer gave the virtual equivalent of a nod, biting her lip. She wasn’t even a real captain, just a post captain holding what was perhaps the least distinguished command in the entirety of the fleet. She wished there were someone more qualified to handle this kind of emergency. Do it. Receiving confirmation, she flipped off the connection and glanced down at the new timer that had appeared on her board. T-14 hours. She turned on the ship’s PA.

“All hands, this is the Captain speaking…”


*******


16 day of K'redak, 797 After Landing,
Sabattani Coast

“Do you think there will be any of them alive, Comrade Colonel?”

“I don't know. We can only hope.” Yellow eyes looked down to a dead, dying sea, in the middle of a die-off of epic proportions. “We can only hope, and if not, that we can reverse-engineer enough to make their sacrifice something not in vain, but with greater meaning for our people.”

“Of course, Comrade Colonel,” the Captain turned to descend from the flag bridge, leaving the tall woman with her elegantly long crimson hair on the top to look down and below at the waves they rushed through, the only sign of life being the phosphorescent bacteria or other tiny life that, living off the sun and with not much left to eat it, now consumed the seas themselves whilst the rusted hull forged ever-onward. Then she too followed the Captain below.

The ship was old. The PNS Sidd Nivarr was eighty-five years old, which meant she had already been a respectable seventeen years old during the fall. She had, however, survived. That meant the ship was still in use with the unified Church forces, though she technically remained a part of the navy of the component state of Perdoxx, but Perdoxx scarcely existed except as an organ of the government of the Church of the Nuclear Messiah. It was unsurprising that she was off the coast of the far continent, standing off the great ruined capital city of Sabattan, the eponymous Sabatt City.

It had possessed sufficient anti-ballistic missile laser emplacements during the war so that the core escaped total destruction, though it had been engulfed in a Claw of Death of nuclear strikes on surrounding military installations had sent radioactive clouds into the city which killed most of the residents, and the aftereffects of which still affected those who had clustered there by the millions. It had been the largest city on the planet with a population of around 40 million; now there were about eight million desperate survivors packed into the vast reaches of the shattered megapolis, most from outlying areas of Sabattan being turned to desert by a combination of the nuclear attacks and runaway global warming.

The old cruiser still had some advantages. She was capable of 62km/h, which was pretty fast by the standards of a naval vessel of 35,000 metric tons displacement. There was, at least, no need for escorts. She had four anti-missile laser mounts on the points, and a very large anti-satellite and anti-aircraft particle beam forward, with a pack of cells for missiles, sixty-four in number, half four-packed with anti-missile missiles, and thirty-two with a swarm of anti-ship missiles; the particle beam was effective enough against warships at close range as well, though not particularly powerful with her elderly nuclear reactor at work. It was, however, supplanted by two twin 57mm automatic cannon, one to either beam, and anti-torpedo rocket launchers and anti-submarine torpedoes. In her prime she had been a terror to anything that dared show itself over the horizon, and even a few things beneath it.

That was not her real purpose these days; most of those weapons systems simply didn't work anymore, lying rusted and abandoned and doing nothing more than to add to the vessel’s silhouette; the same was true of many of the radar emplacements. What kept her useful enough to justify the repairs to keep her limping along was the flat space on her aft deck connected to elevators leading down to the hangars. She had the capacity for operating eighteen huge four-fan tilt-fan flyers, still called helicopters despite being fundamentally a different vehicle. In a world where almost all the infrastructure had been destroyed, the ability of the ship to handle eighteen helicopters made her worth her weight in gold. While other ships her size were being scrapped as uneconomical, her ability to carry and deploy a full response battalion kept her afloat.

The fact that it was being deployed now was evidence of the seriousness the Church was addressing their latest problem. The object which had crashed had not been detected in time by the limited network of satellites, nor could they intercept it with any of their anti-satellite weaponry in time to bring it down. Analysis after the fact, however, suggested that may have been a blessing in disguise. It was certainly huge, larger than anything they had known to be in orbit except several old space stations whose movements were well-calculated, but it had made a remarkably gentle landing. Aerospace command had been bracing for another titanic hit to the ecosystem, but the object had skipped along the water, coming to rest in a way that was impossibly unlikely for an asteroid.

It was beginning to prove to be a bit of an outside context problem; they of course remembered that they were not natives of Rydynn, but the past their ancestors had fled was hazy at best, but it did ensure that the possibility of the object being a probe of some kind was at the front of everyone’s minds as they followed the descent.

The landing could not have happened in many place worse, however. The entire region was only nominally within Church control, and Colonel Svetlanna Lukachenko herself had been involved in pacifying outright rebellions by local warlords some years before: nasty affairs involving extensive urban demolition and gas attacks before things quieted down. Even in the aftermath everyone was aware that no real solution had been come upon, the place was simply now a quiet seething sore instead of a loud and noxious one.

Even so, the object had come from somewhere, and finding out where was worth the deployment into the region. So the Sidd Nivarr had cruised in closer to the coast after a seven-day response time; identifying, making the decisions, deploying the troops to the ship from their on-shore garrisons and bringing the helicopters to full readiness, and four days of hard sailing down the coast. Now, from the bridge of the aviation cruiser, standing next to the captain, she and everyone else had their binoculars focused on the immense, tangled, twisted pile of wreckage which stood at the end of a long gash in the coast they could clearly see, an area of deeper water where before it had been shallow that disappeared off into the deeper sea.

Whomever had been piloting had tried to bring them in at a shallow angle, to skip off the ocean several times to bleed off momentum, and had at the same time aimed for the coast, presumably to facilitate survival if they had no rafts aboard. They'd almost succeeded in balancing the two contradictory efforts, but the impact with the shallow bottom off the coast had ripped the object to pieces, it was clearly visible, the wreckage trail standing kilometers out, pieces of hull sticking up out of the bottom like metal sea-stacks. It was an incredible and horrible sight as the immense superstructure of the cruiser afforded them an impressive vantage from many tens of kilometers yet distant of the main wreck.

"Captain Russell? Do we have a radiation report yet?" Svetlanna asked mildly from the far side of the bridge, high-peaked and brimmed cap looking particularly intimidating with the classic Atom symbol instead of a national simple right forward, and in the dray olive-gray of the Church intelligence forces uniforms. Her hair was long, true, but in a severe pony tail. It was the unique yellow colour of her eyes that caught the attention of most, the only way she was different than in her mother, and the way it seemed they sometimes flashed into glowing disks, like the eyes of a cat. More apparent were the six fingers on each hand; there were plenty of rumours about where she had come from, and more that she wasn't alone, but nobody dared ask her, let alone her notorious mother... But the whispers that she was a genetically engineered clone of Alexandra Lukachenko and that there were others were certainly believed, even if none dared cross the Director of Intelligence.

"Yes Comrade Colonel,” Russell answered, rubbing a hand against his clean-shaven face regretfully. The time everyone spent in gas masks forced them all to go without beards, and it was a pity, for he'd always thought a proper little one accentuated well his eyes. Of course, as far as ladies went, Svetlanna Lukachenko had never shown the slightest sign of an interest in being charmed, and he was balding and a bit too old for her, anyway: She'd made Colonel young, and there were whispers about that, too. So he continued as succinctly as he might. “The levels are significantly elevated from normal background radiation, but not significantly greater than what miners can expect these days. Atmospheric sampling, however, suggests a fair number of heavy contaminants.”

“Of course,” Svetlanna answered. “Are the preparations complete, Comrade?”

Captain Russell answered as he turned away from some of the readouts on the bridge. Most of the electronics here worked, at least. "The helicopters were prepped in the hangar, and we can remain here indefinitely as long as the positive-pressure systems on the ship work." Which was a serious consideration as the Sidd Nivarr was not in good repair. "You can operate in the area for a couple of weeks in NBC gear with no long-term threat to health, however. Maybe you can even get those idiot beachcombers away from the wreck before they fatally dose themselves. You'd think people would have learned by now..."

"They don't have access to the technology they need, Comrade." Svetlanna shrugged. "But you're right. We can do it, assuming radiation levels aren't significantly higher in the hull itself. And those fools on the beach are useful anyway, for all that we might have to eliminate them in a worst-case scenario; they might have already recovered things we can use, which will be less risky than sending men into the ship. I wish we had a damned ROV...."

"I wish I had an operating air defence system," the Captain replied with the usual litany that present circumstances could only allow, and he noticeably paled and moved quickly to change the subject at Svetlanna's uttering of 'worst case scenario', very clear in context. "Lieutenant Anders?"

"Comrade Captain!"

"I want you to put together a group of reactor personnel in heavy contamination suits. They can do the initial screening of the wreckage while Colonel Lukachenko's ground-pounders go after the witnesses. Try to control anything on the reactors if they can, tie off leaks and so on. We'll use boats so she can keep the helicopters to herself."

"Understood, Comrade Captain."

As Anders stepped away, Russell glanced to his intelligence counterpart. "Going to send over your battalion?"

"Just a platoon for the moment. The rest can follow up other leads as necessary--we don't know what's been dragged away in the past week. Particularly..." A pause, and as she let her binoculars drop to the cord on her neck, she hastily brought a pair of sunglasses up to cover her eyes, sunglasses she frequently wore even at night. "The possibility that there were survivors is more than just idle musing. Another reason for you to keep everyone leaving the positive-pressure areas under the strictest of NBC regimes. It isn't just radiation and heavy metals. As you may guess, the 'worst case scenario' is that we've also got to consider the consequences of a pandemic."

"Right, Comrade Colonel. I'll make damn sure no idiot conscript leaves a door open."

"It would be a poor way to die, Comrade." Svetlanna sighed, chuckled grimly, and stepped off the bridge without another word, which was not particularly reassuring to anyone.

Several hours later, while the burning intensity of the twin suns sank lower into the ground, the first entirely obscured, the second, halfway below the horizon, Svetlanna stood on the coast, staring through the facemask of her NBC combat suit at the terrified old man who had seemed to be the leader of the scavengers, who had told her the most incredible tale after he'd been frightened into wearing a mask of his own. "So you're saying that there were two survivors of the wreck, short, like children, and the Warlord Michael Iykumbo just took them away as slaves after plundering the wreck? Five days ago?!" The sharpness of her voice at the end terrified even her own soldiers.

"His people were angry, very angry, Colonel!” The old man was speaking in desperate haste to soothe the faceless terror in full NBC gear before him. “All their crops had burned! He raced to the coast in trucks, following the trail of fire up the coast, he shot at us when we came close, and claimed that he had the right to everything he could from the wreckage, on account of it having destroyed the livelihood of the people he protected. He took the girls, he took everything of value he could send men to find in one day--then he left. He must have known you were coming..."

"And you were greedy and desperate enough to stay, Mister Fitssgerald? Like pigs at the trough? You're lucky we came before your children got lethal doses of contamination from the wreck, you stupid idiot. Now..." She paused, the black facemask—the effect was achieved by tinting the eye pieces for desert operations—still serving to intimidate. "Mister Fitssgerald, I need actionable intelligence. Where did Iykumbo take them? I'll tell you which way you need to safely walk to get out of the contamination zone in exchange for that. Don't you dare haggle with me when I hold all the cards. If you lie to me, I can time on target down on your head from the cruiser even when you're a day away."

"The town of Kithmayao has a great slave-market, Colonel. His caravan like enough brought them there for auction. Such soft-skinned young girls net a high value in such a place.."

"I suppose you've sold a few of your own to feed the rest?” The menace of the voice was reinforced by one of her men idly cocking a gun behind her. They were quite used to this, after all. But it prompted reckless rage, not terror.

"I was born before the fall! I still have a shred of dignity left in my body!" The man screamed out in anger and looked as though he might strike Svetlanna, who actually took a step back, just listening. "You in Perdoxx and Demm still have some means of living decently--but by the gods above, I'd starve to death myself first before I sell my daughters to whoredom! I am just an honest scavenger of wreckage and food from the sea, to live and die as best I might!"

"Very well, Mister Fitssgerald. Due north along the coast, best marching speed for your people. You have at least eight days to get out of the zone safely, though to walk clear should only take three. But don't dally--we all know what radiation can do can do to the unprotected human body. And by the way, there are no gods waiting in the sky above. Just, apparently, whomever built and sent that ship." She turned away, stepping back to her subordinates. "Pull our data-records for Kithmayao, Lieutenant. Got any coordinates?"

"One moment, Comrade Colonel," Lieutenant Rodgers started conversing rapid-fire over the radio with the ship, and then turned back. "Pre-fall township of that designation, small farming town without a major marshalling yard, so it probably survived intact. Population pre-war was four thousand. Just the sort of place to turn into a hive of scum and villainy now, Sir. It's about two hundred klicks inland."

"Then order Comrade Captain Racinko to prepare the battalion! We fly with the night."


*******


It was early morning on the eighth day since the ship had crashed, several hours before dawn. Eighteen heavy multirole tilt-fans were coming in with their lift fans at the end of two heavy, sponson-like wings, four in all, carrying them forward with thrust vectoring for manoeuvring and a speed of 525km/h. Their distinctive whine would give their enemies some warning in the midst of the night, but not much, and not nearly enough. Svetlanna's command bird led the way, everyone in full NBC gear plus crash/combat helmets because they weren't sure about the possibility of the idiots carrying away parts of the reactor, or about the possibility of a pandemic, and their own birds would have been exposed during launch prep anyhow, so it was the safest way.

They were the best rapid-reaction battalion the Church had in Sabattan, the 149th “Borzaya”, or Quick Dogs, and it showed from the crisp way the strike was organized, and even the rather laid-back way the door gunners handled themselves, one to each side and one to the rear with their good old fashioned lightweight 14.5mm's, sponsons loaded with rockets and anti-tank missiles, and the 27mm twin autocannon turret forward, everything 'ready to rumble', as the Demmese territories of the Church would say it. Four helicopters split off one at a time, each carrying a short air-assault platoon of 48 soldiers, until just six remained in the main group, one short company and the command element. The others swung around, out of the hearing of the town wit the prevailing wind conditions, and took up approach positions from each point of the compass.

Svetlanna Lukachenko needed to say very little to her trained soldiers in such a circumstance, and she was not a woman of many words. "Go."

The Church had been trying to keep control of revolts in its own territory by those angry with its rule, or religious fanatics; to control the small states on its borders; and to control at least parts of Sabattan. They had gotten good at the only way they could keep everything under control: Excellent helicopter assault tactics. They had night-vision goggles and FLIR, and that was enough to give them an incredible advantage, as the militiamen that had been left there as the town's garrison--the Warlord himself was surely long gone, unfortunately--rushed out to their vehicles and readied their machine-guns to shoot back as they heard the tilt-fans only seconds before they opened fire.

Once upon a time, that might have had some effect in fighting back, but this was a special mission by Church intelligence; the paucity of guided weapons the Church forces normally had to suffer through due to constant production shortages was nonexistent here and the troops were extremely experienced and highly trained. Guided missiles deploying cluster munitions swept around the vehicle park and demolished it with a frightening precision while other munitions exploded with shrapnel in the streets. In instants a vast majority of the makeshift gun trucks had been destroyed before they could be manned.

Coming in at near top speed, they were on top of the town in another minute, even as the fans began to tilt upwards and the flyers slowed, and now the machine-guns and autocannon opened up, NVGs and FLIR directing everything from the door guns to the main autocannon as they cleared their landing zones, sweeping them with fire as initial teams leapt out of the open aft doors of the 'birds and the side doors as well, using repelling cords to reach the ground in seconds. As usual there was no ROE except what the battlefield commander dictated on the scene, and the goal was fire suppression at all costs as the city was indiscriminately torn to shreds by the first incredible salvoes of the massed rocket pods.

"See that cluster of buildings and the covered area?" Svetlanna pointed abruptly to her helicopter pilot toward the east side of the town square. "That looks like the appropriate setup for an auction block and slave pens. Take the reserve platoons and converge on it with them." She flipped over to the next channel. "Captain Racinko, house to house. Clear these pig-fuckers out. Anyone armed, take 'em down. Any resistance, blow the house up. You know the drill."

"Roger that, Comrade Colonel," the laconic Serb answered. The Church had long since forgotten the idea of preventing collateral casualties in military operations. Securing their objectives was the only purpose of the raid, and Racinko could be counted on to do just that.

"Then you have the advance guard, Captain! I believe we've sighted our objective, so the reserve platoons are with me." She glanced to the pilot, eyes flashing with her own excellent night-vision, better than a cat's, out the windows at the town whose outskirts were now smeared with smoke and explosions and occasional streams of tracers. "Misha, take us in!" Another channel: "Reserve platoons, A, C, D, E, proceed to designated target on our comp. Prepare to repel and storm." Outside the rockets were still salvoing off of the helicopters, demolishing mud-brick homes in the cold of the desert night with terrible intensity as the autocannon tore through the walls with casual ease, only the muzzle-flash betraying a single light, night-vision obviating the need for the flares, and the defenders never had the chance to get any off, though their traces lit up the air.


*******


The first explosion saw Mallory jerking awake, trying to come up off her back only to be jerked back down by the restraint. A split second later came the deafening rattle of submunitions going off, then secondary explosions as ammunition stockpiles cooked off and fuel tanks detonated. Before the series of roars had even subsided, it began again, the next series of submunitions punctuating the first as the night exploded outside. Finally the noise died down, leaving Mallory's ears ringing, just barely able to make out the staccato of gunfire outside mingling with the yells and screams of a camp under attack, only to resume a moment later with the characteristic whoosh of unguided rockets being fired and yet more explosions and secondaries, and that time it just kept coming.

A glance at the door revealed their guard had already fled, whether to seek shelter or man the defenses it didn't matter. Without even waiting for her hearing to recover she turned around and gripped the section of pipe that she and Sara were handcuffed too. It was not in great repair - nothing she had seen so far had been, from the trucks and rifles down to the patched clothing the natives wore. Not stopping to count her blessings she braced herself and pulled. For a long moment nothing happened, then finally a corroded segment of the pipe gave way, sending Mallory tumbling to the floor in a cloud of rust.

"Your leg?" Sara was already helping her to her feet, looping an arm around her to help distribute her weight. Mallory tentatively put pressured down on it. The fall hadn't made it any worse than it was when it was first broken in a scuffle with the natives back at the K-23 at the very least.

"Bearable." She let Sara help her limp to the door before waving her back. Tapping it open she glanced out, hoping that the noise of their impromptu escape attempt hadn't alerted anyone. Fortunately the sounds of a pitched gun battle seemed to be holding everyone's attention. She gestured for Sara to come up behind them and started picking her way across towards the village edge, skirting the edge of the square and hoping that they could avoid the bulk of the fighting.

God only knew where they were, but almost anywhere was better than an active war zone. And a war zone filled with more modern ordinance than what they had seen so far – the rugged chemical assault rifles of the slavers were the kind that could be all but made in a shack in the desert. But the helos were bearing more sophisticated weapons, and Mallory had no intention of becoming a victim of the indiscriminate carnage they tended to leave in their wake.

She glanced across the remains of the village. They couldn’t move too far too fast, not with her leg and Sara still weak as a kitten from radiation poisoning. But Mallory was good at finding cover, having practiced for environments far harsher than this, and she set a loping pace that let them support each other while they picked their way to somewhere with less gunfire.

They had nearly made it half way to the spot Mallory had picked out to stop for a rest when a searchlight from one of the attacking helos washed over them. Mallory felt as though her heart would stop as every moment she expected the sting of automatic cannon fire. Tensing and bringing Sara closer to the ground, she glanced around frantically for anywhere they might seek concealment. Nothing but light debris surrounded the buildings, let alone something that would stand up to cannon fire. But when the fire finally came, it was the light chatter of an assault rifle rather than the tearing cloth sound of a machine-gun. Someone had spotted them and let loose with a careless burst. Mallory’s surprise grew when the helo spun around to let its door gunner respond with a volley that cut the man down.

Moments later rappel ropes snaked down from the craft, a pair of figures—one male one female—sliding down to land not ten metres away from where Sara and Mallory were crouched in a depression. One of them began a lightning-quick spring over towards them, while the other stayed there, his gun blazing as he laid into the surrounding defenders. As the woman entered the pool of light, it finally flicked off, leaving her silhouette looming over the two. She began speaking rapid fire, running through Russian, English, Dutch, Chinese, and then, finally, German, waiting for a flicker of recognition at one.

"Between us, I think we have most of those," Sara responded in Russian, guessing that the list was ordered by familiarity. If that would help at all - by the sound of the linguistic drift heard so far, the locals here had been developing their own languages for a fair while now. “Although I can’t assure they’ll be anything like your proper speech.”

Svetlanna made a noise half like a grunt and maybe a laugh. "Perdoxx Russian is the most conservative and unchanging language on the planet. Ironically, had you stayed in your cells, you would already be rescued. As it is now, we must get you back to that perimeter my reserve platoons have formed, So." The commands were barked next--it was clear that Russian was the Perdoxxian language of command, into her integral helmet comm: "Take out a couple blocks of houses with your rockets." The order had barely finished leaving her lips when staggered mass salvoes of rockets from the packs on both helicopters swept out several blocks down into an unoccupied section of the town, easily levelling twenty of the packed shanties that served as homes. The fact that innocent people had just been killed in considerable numbers was oblivious to those around. Svetlanna simply reached out for Mallory, whom she had seen favouring her leg. "I'll help you, there, to keep up. Sergeant Reynolds... You'll need to cover us again."

"As always, Colonel."

“Good man.” She glanced to the Carinids. “So, trust me to help?”

Mallory shook the offer for aid away. "Not that; no need for it. My leg's just cracked. The Fähnrich needs it more, and I can help her alone."

“As you wish. Let's go!”

As they prepared to dash, Reynolds reloaded a grenade into the underslung launcher on his rifle, unperturbed by Svetlanna, as he knew her combat abilities quite above those of anyone else--and not because she was unique or exceptional. Quite the contrary. But she got the job done, and Sergeants knew better than to ask why their commanding officers had six fingers on each hand. Several blocks of the city, in the meantime, were horribly being ripped to pieces with full-load salvoes of unguided rockets from the helicopters, distracting the defenders at great cost in human life as the buildings were smashed to rubble with a horrible shriek of rockets.

Sara was already looking paler than she had a few hours ago, and that already was paler than the normal Carinan skin tone, untouched by any regular sunlight; it was really starting to bother Mallory, but there was nothing else to be done for the moment except escape, and live. Stubbornly, Mallory moved to support Sara, and waited for what she hoped was Reynolds catching the enemy's attention before sprinting in the direction Svetlanna had indicated. The speed at which she ran not only sending sharp pains up her leg, but also flagrantly ignored how fast a pair of diminutive invalids ought be able to run. Svetlanna of course was able to keep up with them, and in this fashion they worked their way back toward the perimeter until the sweep of an emplaced machine-gun halted their progress. Svetlanna flicked up her radio. “Misha, building fifty meters to my right, machine gun nest—kill it and then come in for us! To much opposition to reach the secured perimeter, we'll evac directly to the helicopter.”

More rockets whipped down from above, and the machine-gun nest was demolished in screams as the crew was buried rather than incinerated by the near-misses bring down great piles of mud-bricks upon them, and autocannon raked the areas of the heaviest rifle fire from the ground to boot. No mercy and no restraint were shown with their mission so close to success, and the remaining guided missiles were used to smash through the walls of more of the primitive buildings that even seemed like they might be harbouring combatants and the death continued to fall all around from above, killing all alive in its path.

It was enough, though, for the small group to make the spring towards the rope. Pleasantly surprised to find herself at the rope unscathed, Mallory knelt on the ground for a second, letting Sara wrap her arms around her. Ignoring the pain as she stood up, she shimmied up the rope at a breakneck pace, all but flying into the relative safety that the helicopter body offered.

Svetlanna was right behind them in reaching the rope, though she paused and loaded another clip rather than ascend it herself, quietly impressed at what their visitors had managed in ascending it. They were certainly unusual. Instead of climbing up directly after, she stayed to cover Reynolds’ return from where he was still gamely keeping the locals’ heads down, the door-gunners calmly sweeping the area with their guns above, stopping only long enough to help pull the two Carinids up into the craft. Svetlanna appeared not long after, and then Reynolds.

From the moment Svetlanna got aboard, she had slid back to her command position chair in the internal body of the tilt-fan. "Pull everyone back, systematically, no hurry. But we've got our objective secure, Captain Racinko, so pull the men out. We're going to ascend to seven thousand meters and orbit at three hundred kmh to protect them from MANPADs."

"Rodger that."

Svetlanna looked back to her crew, as the fans shifted position and the whine grew to the point where she was screaming to be heard--with the doors open, the soundproofing didn't exactly work. "GET THEM MASKS! WE'RE STILL IN AN NBC ENVIRONMENT!" Then she looked back to the two Carinids, smiled slightly, and offered them a long overdue introduction. "I'm Colonel Svetlanna Lukachenko, Fifth Sub-Directorate, Church of the Nuclear Messiah's Directorate of Intelligence. And, yes, that was a battalion-scale helicopter raid that was sent after you two. Welcome to New Rydynn.”

Mallory looked up from hovering over Sara, her companion already on the verge of passing out. She smiled wanly. “Thank you. Sergeant Mallory Dziura and Ensign Sara van Leuven of the Archducal Starfleet of the Great Nebula in Carina.”

“I’m afraid I have never heard of this polity, but that is not surprising; we have been out of contact for many centuries now. Sorry about inhospitality of your arrival. As you've learned, the religious fanatics who reside in the former Republic of Sabattan are not famous for their hospitality to strangers. To us, on the other hand, well... You're more precious than gold. We've been dreaming of this moment for centuries.”

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Updated and corrected version with a prologue now posted.

[fgalkin]

This universe is concentrated AWESOME.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin