Nova Wars

Come get some. - Every Terran Ever

The dropships, full of the Marines of 7th Telkan Marine Division, broke atmosphere and accelerated, using the Ornislarp cruiser division in near orbit for cover from the enemy ships, intending on getting on the other side of them to use them for cover from any ground fire.

Heavy bodied, with foldable wings that were loaded with weaponry, the dropships were capable of flight in atmosphere and in the gulf between planets, sported battlescreens that most races used on a light cruiser, and armed well enough to hold their own in a duel against most destroyers. Their armor was thick, a necessity born of having to dive into a gravity well and through enemy fire to deliver their cargos intact and then provide close air support during combat operations planetside.

Chief Warrant Officer Grade Two Jerry Jeanette Mawksawl was in the lead in the "Angela's Wrath", moving between the Ornislarp ships that made up the cruiser division that had provided them with fire support and cover during the initial planetary assault. Handshakes were exchanged between the vessels and the battlescreens gave up their algorithms and frequencies, allowing the dropships to move between battlescreens.

The whole squadron, all fifty ships, were moving between the cruisers when the boards went crazy. Alarms started howling, warnings started sounding out, and the lights in the cockpit and in the troop bay went from amber to red.

Mawksawl cursed as he saw he was being locked up from the Ornislarp vessels, that had now gone to active targeting.

The icon went live, letting him know his communications specialist had an open channel to the Ornislarp vessels.

"MISSILE OFF! MISSILE OFF!" the commo specialist barked into the channel for the rest of the dropships.

"BUDDY SPIKE! THIS IS QUIET DRAGON FOUR FOUR TWO! BUDDY SPIKE BUDDY SPIKE!" Mawksawl called out to the Ornislarp vessels.

It went from two vessels having him locked up to six.

"CHECK YOUR FIRE CHECK YOUR FIRE CHECK YOUR FIRE!" Mawksawl chanted even as his hands moved to flip the covers up from the firing studs on his joystick. "BUDDY SPIKE BUDDY SPIKE BUDDY SPIKE!"

The EW specialist immediately downloaded the frequency codes and frequency agility algorithm from the Ornislarp vessels, barely managing to pull them before the Ornislarp vessels rotated commo codes and locked him out.

"Going to active jamming methods! All Quiet Dragon elements, go to active jamming!" Mawksawl called out. His thumbs hit the studs, using his cybernetic piloting jack to select, prepare, and encode the counter-measures.

"ALL DROPSHIPS BREAK!" came over the commo from Dominion Fleet.

The split second hovered, going still to Mawksawl.

He'd need to go nearly one point five million miles to reach the safety of the Dominion Fleet.

The entire time the Ornislarp cruisers would be able to fire on the dropships of Quiet Dragon.

The dropships of Quiet Dragon were in the middle of the Ornislarp formation, half already inside the battlescreens of the cruisers.

Ornislarp vessels were updating on his HUD and IFF as hostile with full release codes.

The Amaru Class dropships were heavily armored, with heavy battlescreens and heavy weapons designed to hit fortified enemy positions like bunkers.

All of it went through his brain in less than a thousandth of a second, jumping ahead of the cybernetic linkage.

There was only one thing to do.

He activated the Riprukitu jammer, his vessel's signature not only multiplying but dancing and jumping around like crazy. He hit the Ch’aki-Wayra jammer and multiple balls of fuzz covered the vessel and the phantom images, expanding rapidly into multiple balls of static jumping around crazily on the Ornislarp sensors.

One of the Ornislarp officers slammed his feet against the floor in frustration.

"They cannot do that! Their ships are too small! This is a heavy cruiser, not some skiff!" it protested.

Mawksawl threw out two decoys, one if which emulated the dropship, the other copied the dropship's unshielded signature and started pulsing it out as it moved out on the tractor-pressor beams to almost a mile away.

He made the decision.

"Soaring Penguin, this is Quiet Dragon!" he called out through the static as formerly friendly EW went hostile. His commo was linked to the Fleet Operations Command.

"Go ahead Quiet Dragon," the voice on the other side was calm, unruffled.

"We're boarding. We try to run, they'll pop us like lice on an elephant's ass," he snapped even as he rolled the dropship to the left, narrowly avoiding anti-missile counter-missiles. "They've got us locked."

"Will inform. Enemy cruiser division marked Bogey-Eighteen is now out of firing queue," FOC advised.

"Going in," Mawksawl said.

"Good luck, Quiet Dragon. Soaring Penguin out," the voice replied.

Mawksawl ignored the static filling his commo, threading the dropship through the fire. His dropships were taking fire as they banked hard, using the graviton system to pull nearly ninety degree turns, in some cases pulling nearly a one-eighty. The dropships headed toward the cruisers.

The EW specialist ran a high power ping, scanning the ships. Wireframe popped up as the paint blistered on the Ornislarp vessels. The EW tech ran the data to the rest of Quiet Dragon's dropships.

"Battle Bridge, Main Bridge, Engineering, Engine control, fire control, all in the rear third of the vessel," he said, forwarding the data to the rest of Quiet Dragon.

"Going in hot," Mawksawl said. He pushed the stick down and the dropship shuddered and creaked as it took more point defense fire, the battlescreen now soaking up enough fire that it was visible. He hit the commo, hooking into the channel for one Captain Kemtrelap, Kilo Company, the OIC (Officer In Charge) of the nearly one hundred Telkan Marines in the crew compartment.

"HANG ON, CRAYON EATERS! WE'RE GOING IN HOT!" he yelled over the howling jamming across the channel. "WE'RE BOARDING ORNISLARP VESSEL! WIREFRAME AND OBJECTIVES INCOMING!!"

Captain Kemtrelap jerked as the human's voice roared out over his command channel. He looked at the icon as it flashed with the weird little square icon with a circle in the middle that was the Terran icon for saving data. It blinked and he opened the file.

A wireframe with the spaces for engineering, engine control, both bridges, communications, damage control, and fire control highlighted. There were five possible dropship landing zones on the hull of the Ornislarp vessel.

Vak-tel jerked awake when the dropship banked hard and he almost puked. The restraining bar over his lap locked tighter, the auto-deploy restraints held tighter to his armor.

"621, what's happening?" Vak-tel asked.

--under fire from ornislarp-- 621 answered.

"What? Why?" Vak-tel blurted out. "I thought we were helping them."

--something stupid i'm sure--

The dropship shook again and seemed to corkscrew around a point in the middle of the troop bay, making Vak-tel want to puke again.

He looked around. The whole of Kilo Company was strapped into the bay, with ten large bodied Terrans wearing only a face mask and adaptive camouflage, no armor or weapons despite the fact the ship was under vacuum, at the back of the troop bay by the rear loading doors. At the front were ten more Terrans in some kind of thick plated brutalism armor. There were also two on either side of the two doors on each side of the bay, in standard armored vac-suit.

The dropship took a hard thud that made the whole troop bay ring. A hole blew in the side, taking off PFC Pollut's head and leaving his body hanging in the restraints.

Mawksawl saw the ship had taken four hits but a quick check showed that the rest of the flight was fine, their stealth systems engaged giving them the sensor profile of a flying insect compared to the massive ball of jangling static that made up his point ship.

Two more hits and one of the wings blew free.

All six greenies were down.

His control rig fly by wire system went dead.

--hang tite--

Vak-tel saw the protective shell crack open and 621 scurried up the wall in his hardshell suit, holding a welder. The hole was spraying some kind of reddish fluid all over the interior of the bay from a ruptured conduit.

"Deadwire! Deadwire! Deadwire! Going stick!" Mawksawl chanted out, opening his eyes and staring the smart armaglass cockpit windows which had the warsteel shutters flipping open enough for him to see. The stick went from weapon's control to having a stiffness in it that told him he was entirely on hydraulic systems.

But the system was bleeding out, the stick starting to feel mushy.

621 ignored the fact that beyond the hole there was nothing but empty space, slapping a seal down on the rip in the conduit and running the fusion welder quickly around the seal. He moved over to another ruptured line, pulling a patch free from his implanted nanoforge, working quickly.

Mawksawl felt the stick go firm again and rolled the dropship in time to avoid the last ditch effort.

"BRACE FOR IT!" Mawksawl called out.

621 jumped for it, flying down, hitting the protective shell.

He got it closed right as the dropship hit hard. Enough kinetic shock gel was filling the shell that it only made him feel like he'd slammed into a heavy pillow.

Vak-tel wasn't the only one who barfed from the hard hit.

He looked up to see the two irises in the floor open, showing a blue energy field and something extending down to the hull of the warship the dropship had landed on.

Mawksawl hit the release, grabbing his weapon from where it was stored and tapping the middle of his chest.

Nannies coated him, creating armor plates over weak points in his armored flight suit.

The rest of the flight crew joined him as he moved to the opening of the troop bay.

The extending pressure tube buzzed and the hull dissolved into vapor that was sucked away into the dropship's mass tanks.

Pollut's mantid, 745, got out of the shell with his tools and scampered up the wall, starting work on fixing the huge gaps in the fly by wire system. Three other Telkan had been killed by enemy fire and their greenies joined 745 in starting repairs.

The harnesses released and Vak-tel stood up.

"Targets loading," came Captain Kemtrelap's voice.

The big humans moved over to the hole, dropping inside. Then the ones in the heavy armor. The dropship crew and the ones by the door stayed out of the way as the Telkan moved toward the entry sally ports depending on what they were ordered.

Vak-tel found himself his standing next to his squad leader, Sergeant Letrill, when the CO had relayed to the LT what third squad's objective was.

Port forward fire control.

"Let's go," Sergeant Letrill said, motioning.

One of the big humans moved up, still wearing only the facemask that covered his nose, mouth, and eyes only, wearing adaptive camouflage and acting like he wasn't standing inside a starship entire under vacuum.

"I'll lead the way," he said, looking around.

The big human, one Corporal Hawkton, rolled his shoulder. "Don't worry about hitting me, just keep the slappers off of me."

Vak-tel blinked.

The squad hustled down the strangely shaped corridor, moving past the open hatches in the bulkhead, going through the twisting corridors. Where it seemed like everyone else used standard straight corridors, the Slapper ship had twists and turns that seemed without reason.

The corridor dead ended in an armored blast door.

The human sighed.

"We can go back three intersections, that passageway might be cleared," Sergeant Letrill said. "We don't have cutting tools."

The Terran chuckled. "Don't need them," he said. He rolled his shoulders again. "Give me thirty seconds to get into uniform."

Vak-tel frowned.

The Terran tabbed the tank at his waist, taking a deep breath from the mask. He put the mask on his belt and stood up straight. He slapped himself in the side of the head.

"He is just a low-down, double-dealing, backstabbing, larcenous, perverted worm," the Terran mumbled, his voice slowly raising.

Vak-tel saw the uniform start to get tight as the human seemed to get larger. "Hanging's too good for him! Burning's too good for him!" the voice got louder but deeper, turning into a rumble. The seams on the shoulders and the legs of the pants split to reveal thick heavy muscles covered by gray skin.

Several the Telkan moved back nervously.

"He should be torn into pieces and buried alive!" the human's voice was louder and the uniform had largely torn away, leaving behind only shorts and a vest with a belt and a pair of boots.

"I'LL KILL THEM! KILL THEM!" The human suddenly roared. Spikes erupted from his skin, he threw his head back and roared. Red hot warsteel drooled from the human's mouth, staining the sharp daggers that had replaced his teeth. His eyes burned red.

The Terran slammed a fist into the blast door, all the way up to the elbow. He yanked his arm back, putting his hands into the hole and pulling the hole wider as the metal screamed and deformed. Laser beams and plasma packets screamed through the hole, hitting the human's chest and face and having no effect as far as Vak-tel could tell.

"WHAT IS THAT?" Vak-tel screamed.

He wasn't the only one.

--eeeeeeeeeee-- 621 screamed. --monster monster monster--

"I'm Mike Wallace, I'm Morley Safer, and I'm Ed Bradley! All this and Andy Rooney tonight on 60 Minutes! HEEEEEEEREEEEE'S PACO!" the Terran roared out, shoving his face into the hole even as he tore it further open. The muscles on his back, under the vest that the adaptive camouflage uniform top had become, all bunched as the Terran ripped the door open, slamming the six inch doors back into the walls.

The Ornislarp were firing, hitting the Terran, who was laughing "Hoo hoo hoo hoo!" as he stomped forward. "MY NAME IS LITTLE PACO! ON YOUR DOOR I WENT KNOCKO KNOCKO!"

Vak-tel, in the lead, tried to get a bead on the Ornislarp past the human, but between his shocked brain and the sheer mass of the Terran he couldn't get a clear shot.

The Terran took four steps forward and stomped on the lead Ornislarp, which was in armor and firing a laser rifle frantically.

The legs blew off the Ornislarp, gore spouted from the leg-holes and out the front of the armor as the faceshield shot off in a fountain of guts on gore.

"I HAVE SOME SPIKES UPON MY FIST THAT I MAKE GO SOCKO SOCKO!" the Terran roared, stomping into the Ornislarp. They were low enough that the Terran stomped and kicked them.

A kick made them bend wrong and pieces fly off. A stomp left spatters of gore ahead and behind the armor and across the walls on either side. The blood, gore, and offal froze in the vacuum, but there was so much of it it was still semi-liquid as it hit the walls. Ones that hit the wall the human drove a spiked knuckled fist into, caving in the wall and leaving the armored Ornislarp crushed into the dent, usually gore vomiting out of the helmet.

Vak-tel swallowed to keep his gorge down.

Less than ten seconds and the Ornislarp were reduced to crushed wreckage.

"OOOH YEAH!" the Terran roared, slamming his fists into the walls on either side of him.

The armored bulkheads caved in.

The Terran kept moving forward and third squad followed.

Part of Vak-tel hoped that no more Ornislarp would try to stop whatever the fuck that thing was.