Nova Wars

War is never clean and easy. Anyone who tells you it is probably has damp air where their cerebral tissue should be. - From "The Hasslehoff's Bloody Jaws", Admiral (Upper Decks) of the Warsteel (Formerly Grand Most High Executor) Mru'udaDa'ay, New Singapore Press, TerraSol, 12 PTE (Post Terran Emergence)

The Chernobog was down on one knee, ducking down behind the low hill, trying to remain unseen.

Which made Impton chuckle as he jogged up.

Behind him the Slapper artillery was still hammering the parking lots of the corporate park even though First Telkan Marine Expeditionary Force had cleared the parking lots.

Which told Impton that the Slappers didn't have drones, sat, or forward observer eyes on the parking lot or they wouldn't be wasting ammo on the cars.

Impton banged on the Chernobog's foot.

"Chernobog! Hey, Chernobog!" Impton yelled out.

The commo was largely full of squealing and static, the Slappers having blown the network out as soon as they went belligerent.

A panel slid back, revealing a pair of standard 2D LCD screens. An eye blinked on the upper one, a mouth appeared on the lower one.

"What?" the lower screen asked as the upper eye blinked.

"Rifle. Mine's gone," Impton said.

There was a hissing noise and another panel slid open, revealing a standard magac rifle.

"You need three-eighteen? Mah Deuce? SAM? Maybe want Bowie Spike?" the Chernobog asked.

"No. Rifle good," Impton said.

"Bah," the Chernobog shut all the panels and Impton moved up to where some of the Telkan were gathered up. Their IFF's were off and Impton wasn't sure who was who, but he recognized the paint-scheme of one of the brigade commanders.

"What's bogging us down?" he asked.

He realized the Old Man was present when the wildebeest skull on the helmet turned to look at him.

"Tanks. Seven-fifty ton range. Heading east to twenty-second armor division. Slapper reinforcements," the Old Man said.

Impton nodded. Those were the big Slapper tanks. Heavy energy and kinetic weapons, missiles, mortars, point defense and APERS defense strips, battlescreens.

Tough enough tanks to go toe to toe with Confed tanks one on one and pull out a victory almost half the time.

"Not problem," the Old Man said. He handed Impton a small dataslate.

Impton looked at it and frowned.

It was focused past the five-wide column of tanks and on what looked like a suburb.

Strikers were coming in low, dropping cluster bombs and napalm. There were armored vehicles firing back, the stilting jerky movements showing that they were robotic or heavy robotic assist.

But the strikers seemed to be more interested in the apartment complexes than the armored vehicles.

"We have troops there?" Impton asked.

The Old Man shrugged. "Waiting for Fleet to respond. Channels hash."

Impton nodded. He handed back the dataslate and moving up the hill until he could lift his rifle over the dirt and scan beyond.

More tanks were moving by, with infantry carriers mixed in. They looked pristine to Impton's eyes, with the battlescreens faintly glimmering, showing they were at minimum power.

Probably to keep the emitters hot.

Past the tanks was a short mile to two klicks of forested park. Then the housing development.

There were troop carriers being covered by tanks, air defense vehicles, and robots.

But rather than hit at the ADV's, the Slapper strikers were pounding the housing blocks with guns, missiles, bombs, and napalm.

Impton frowned. The vehicles were definitely pre-2PW Confed. He could see the glossy-matte contradiction of warsteel mark-one. The strikers were Slapper, without a doubt, with the bluish-gray of Slapper armor and the faint bluish glimmer of Slapper battlescreens.

Impton tossed it back to the Old Man and waited.

The Old Man tried getting a hold of Fleet again and was startled when someone picked up.

"Breastasteel here, go ahead ground," came the whiskey-roughened voice of the Fleet's Commander in Chief.

"Konnitsa here," the Old Man said. "Commo is jammed, called Ground Operations."

"Welp, you got me, General. Go ahead," the Admiral said.

"We have assets in grid Kilo-Lima-Seven-Seven-Three-Niner-Four-Tree?" the Old Man asked.

Breastasteel glanced at her Ground Operations Officer, who was working with General Rippentear closely. The officer shook his head.

"None on our notifications, General," Breastasteel said. She paused to light a cigarette.

"Hmph. Slappers attacking nobody. Slappers attacking enemy robots. Advise," the Old Man said, reaching up to rub one of the horns of the wildebeest skull.

"Your First Telkan Marine Expeditionary Force. Your job is to close with and destroy the enemy," Breastasteel said, exhaling smoke as she rotated the globe in the holotank and focused in on where 1TMEF was located.

"Aye," Konnitsa said.

"Proceed under own initiative. Destroy the enemy, General," Breastasteel said. She glanced over. "Get me drones in there, I want to know what's happening."

The Ground Operations Officer nodded.

"By your command," the Old Man said.

Breastasteel cut the link and the Old Man looked around.

"Straight into teeth. Knock out tanks as go by. Close and destroy," Konnitsa said.

The two regimental commanders nodded, using the commo lasers to lase the Chernobogs, who then spread out the orders.

Impton nodded when he saw his job.

Point man. Full offense. Hit and push through.

His Company Commander Field Captain Hredvip and Platoon Leader Senior Lieutenant Grewol gave him several recommended routes.

He loaded them all up on his HUD, approved right up until he came into view of the enemy when he crossed the top of the hill, then erased everything after. He sent it back.

It came back improved.

"Are you ready, my friend?" he asked his green mantid.

--am ready-- the greenie replied. The green mantid pulled down the EM profile as far as possible, keeping the integrity fields built into the heavy armor online and the battlescreens on standby. The sensor systems were on standby and the only thing Impton was getting was standard visual through his transparent faceshield and the HUD overlay.

The countdown timer appeared and Impton raised up slightly. He let the rifle go and the mag system pulled it around to his back even as he pulled out both of his waraxes. The salt crystals filling the engravings began to glimmer even as he rocked back slightly, his hocks and knees flexing.

The counter hit zero and Impton exploded into movement. He kept low, the old Telkan Marine 'spring and move' training suppressed after long years of fighting in the Siberia tundra. He cut directions twice, putting on more speed.

The greenie was taking into account the length, caliber, and angles of the tank's weaponry as Impton closed the distance, estimating the firing arcs the weapons could move into within a second or two and putting them on Impton's HUD so he could dodge the fields of fire. He was working fast, doing most of the work himself.

Death or glory, I ride this Telkan, he thought to himself.

Nobody else but the other point men, one per battalion, broke cover as Impton crossed the 200 meter line and kept moving. The tanks weren't reacting to him yet, battlescreens hadn't begun to spin up from standby where the tankers kept it at so that the battlescreens didn't rub each other and collapse.

300 meters.

There was some fire. Someone fired off an APERS strip too early and did nothing but blow apart grass, shrubbery, and a public transportation kiosk.

A zippergun fired but Impton was to the side of its field of fire, his battle buddy having already spotted the mag-coils along the barrel energizing and warning him. Another step to the left as he moved forward and he was out of the firing arc of another weapon.

400 meters.

The rest of the Division burst out of the foliage at the top of the hill, going to flank speed.

500 meters and Impton changed course. He jumped forward, hitting the side of the tank, smashing his axe deep to create a hand hold. He smashed a battlescreen emitter even before it left the socket, pulled himself onto the back deck and ran across, deliberately stomping two of the exposed heat sinks, then kicked out another battlescreen emitter before jumping down.

The tanks had twenty-meter intervals.

A single second across. The one behind him blew off its APERS strip but his greenie had the low power battlescreen up and the APERS strip wasted its pellets.

He was up on the second tank, smashing emitters and heat sinks as he moved across. Two swipes with his axe and he damaged the phased radar array and a commo array, then was off.

His grenade launcher was chuffing, dropping out masking. Thermal smoke, prism mist, radar and LIDAR scattering smoke, ferrous laden mist, everything. The greenie was firing the rockets at a steady pace, roughly one every three secondds.

Third tank and the hatch opened, the TC lifting up on the elevator.

Impton side handed a grenade into the opening and jumped off, still running.

Fourth tank and the one behind him exploded, the turret popping off. Two hacks with the axes and the wiring for the reactive armor was dead.

He jumped, two steps, onto the fifth. Three hacks and a kick and he was off, sprinting for the far woods.

Behind him was running the rest of the Expedition Force, three divisions worth the combat troops and four divisions of battle trained support personnel.

He was in the woods, his battlescreens coming online, allowing him to just charge through the trees as the battlescreens blew the wood into chunks of burning coals. His rocket launcher swiveled from behind him to forward and up, firing two rockets his greenie had retasked as surface to air, one missile streaking ahead of the other.

He was partway through the woods when the first exploded, a triple-warhead charge that dropped the battlescreen. The second had a dual-stage. First to shotgun the armor with pellets, the second slapped discs that adhered to the armor. The disks had air holes and passages inside that created turbulence inside the palm-pad sized disks.

The piece of armor it was on peeled away from the striker's body as the speed and turbulence shook the armor, the piece sucking into the turbine intake. The airstream was pulled into the missing section, pulled under the armor.

The striker flew apart as wind sheer and turbulence worked against it.

Impton didn't know, exiting the woodline even as his rocket pack fired again.

His battlebuddy saw what was going on and did a priority recon data pulse.

Streaming out of the buildings were small, furry creatures that only came up to Impton's waist, many of them gathered into small groups and roughly every fifth one laden down with smaller versions holding tightly to the clothing of a plumper one.

"Civvies! Civvies in the line!" Impton called out, barely managing to kick off and jump over a group that screamed and ducked, still running for the robots on either side of an infantry carrier's opened doors.

The Old Man saw the push and forwarded it.

Breastasteel saw it appear in her holotank from Konnitsa and stared at it.

It was the same creatures that were showing the boarding parties that the ships were 'breaken' or 'broken', all of them bowing and scraping even as they pleaded for assistance.

She cursed, reaching for her pack of smokes.

"Protect the civvies," she snapped.

"Konnitsa acknowledges," she got back.

The Old Man, the Konnitsa, spiked the orders back.

"Protect civilians. Civil war happening. We choose side now," he said.

Impton didn't think, just planted his feet, activating his grav-spike and his greenie cranked his emissions up to full even as he brought online Impton's battlescreens, point defense, and shifted the rocket launcher to full air defense mode.

The robots ignored him, all of them moving in fits and jerks. He could see into two of the infantry carriers, see that the positions were manned by the little hairy creatures, all of them sitting on boxes or crates or stacked up cushions.

That's what's going on, he thought to himself, all if it suddenly making sense.

The little guys had obviously stolen the old TerraSol gear and were trying to make a break for it.

Impton slapped his waraxes onto the grav-locks at his lower back then pulled around his rifle, checking the loadout.

Standard high-vee gyrojet antimatter with solid rocket fuel boost.

His rearview HUD window showed the top of the hill's rise. He had two drones still in operation and he could see the rest of the division was through the tanks and either into the woodline or coming out his side of the woodline. The rest of the MEF was joining him in firing rockets at the strikers, who had suddenly discovered they didn't get to pound on the buildings with impunity any longer.

"CHERNOBOG!" was roared from nearly a hundred throats as the massive full conversion cyborgs stood up to full height, the hill only coming up to their mid-thighs as they started climbing the hills. Their weapons went live, their heavy guns pounding the tanks, most of which had lost battlescreen emitters as the Telkans had rushed through their lines. The heavy missile and rocket launchers of the Chernobogs hammered the strikers out of the air even as their heavy guns blew tanks apart.

Impton's grenade launcher was firing out masking agents, putting them a good fifty meters into the air. He was joined by the other point men, even as the air defense rockets streaked from their launchers.

His HUD suddenly flashed, updating. Six buildings were highlighted, he was to choose one.

He tabbed the one he wanted, already moving, letting the rifle swish back around to his back and grabbing the waraxes. He used them to climb up the side of the building quickly, coming out on the roof.

Impton could see more than a few striker flights incoming. His grenade launcher chuffed out some drones, the casing blowing free and the drones rolling to unwrap their wings. The stealth drones got air, moving up, linking up with others that were being fired out.

The Chernobogs were firing on the tanks and the strikers both.

Impton grinned as he moved to the edge of the rooftop. He tapped his axes against his thighs as he walked up and looked down.

The little fuzzy guys were streaming out of the doors, running for the infantry transports.

Up in the sky the strikers were getting knocked down by the air defense rockets and the Chernobog's fire.

"Not so easy when targets shoot back, yes?" he asked nobody.