Dire Contingency
Copyright© 2025 by Snekguy
Chapter 39
Science Fiction Sex Story: Chapter 39 - A disillusioned special forces group stages a violent insurrection, stealing experimental weapons from a Navy black site and using them to take over a remote colony. With help months away, the only person who is in a position to oppose them is Ruza – an old veteran of the Kerguela war. The planet is plunged into a brutal conflict, with local resistance groups hellbent on breaking the occupation.
Caution: This Science Fiction Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa Consensual Romantic Heterosexual Fiction Military War Science Fiction Aliens Space Oral Sex Petting Size Politics Slow Violence
DAY 56 – HADES – PETROVA
“The charges are ready to go whenever you are,” Reed whispered as he hunkered down beside a prefab. “Just give the word.”
“We’ll wait until we hear gunfire near the gate,” Brenner replied. “I just hope Ruza, Silverback, and Deacon were able to help. If the main force never arrives, we won’t have the distraction that we need.”
The team was taking shelter in the prefabs a short distance from the rear wall of the garrison, sticking to the darkness as they waited for the signal. The burning warehouses that belched dark smoke into the sky were not far away, the blanket of black smog compounding the growing darkness. The sun had all but set now, and night was falling, even the light of the moon and stars stifled by the fires. At least the darkness gave them cover. The anchor was the largest landmark now, towering above everything like an artificial mountain.
Petrova had long ago switched on her suit’s night vision and thermal imaging modes, and she was able to see the city almost as though it was daytime. It shielded her from the smell, but she could see the ash in the air, and it wasn’t hard to imagine the stench of burning plastic and rubber.
Her confidence in Ruza had grown, and if he and Lily were successful, it would mean that Roach and Crow were finally dead. Only Barbosa would remain. Even after everything that had happened, she wasn’t sure that she could pull the trigger if the opportunity arose, but nor did she want to leave the work to others. Barbosa had been her friend and confidante for what felt like a lifetime, but he was also her responsibility – her burden. She both dreaded their meeting and knew deep down that it was inevitable.
She glanced through her arrays of cameras at the small team surrounding her suit. There was Reed, Harlequin, Brenner, and the remaining members of his SWAR team. Alongside them was an agent named Flatline and a pair of Trogs who had traveled from the carrier with Reggie, and a squad of Marines were taking up the rear. It didn’t feel like much, but if they could get the drop on the enemy, they could do a lot of damage. Who knew how many hostile SWAR were still inside the garrison protecting Barbosa as his entourage. With her PCE, perhaps she could turn the tables on them. Without heavy weapons, she would be hard to take down, but the overconfidence that had made her former teammates feel invulnerable had been beaten out of her early. She still remembered the feeling of that AMR slug punching through her shield and burying itself in her armor during the boarding action on the carrier.
The sound of gunfire suddenly filled the air, and she snapped back to the present, her suit’s sensors already pinpointing its direction.
“That’s our cue,” Brenner said. “Move up. Reed – go make a hole.”
Reed hurried ahead of the group, weaving between the prefabs until he reached the perimeter of the garrison. Keeping low, he tossed a satchel across the road, then retreated into the shadows again. “Property damage in three, two,” he began as he primed his detonator. “One...”
An explosion rocked the city, the blast wave washing over Petrova’s suit and carrying a cloud of displaced dust with it, the sound of small fragments of carbcrete raining down on the metal roofs of the nearby prefabs following. When the smoke and dust began to clear, a massive breach in the wall was revealed, surrounded by pieces of shattered rubble.
“Petrova!” Brenner ordered, waving her forward.
She piloted her suit towards the breach, feeling smaller fragments of carbcrete shatter beneath her boots, smoke engulfing her as her comrades tossed grenades to cover her approach. The SWAR agents and Marines formed a tight column behind her, staying close as she began to climb the heap of rubble. Almost as soon as she had crossed the threshold, fire began to pour into the swirling smoke, her suit’s shield igniting as it intercepted the slugs. Petrova could feel them hammering the suit like hail, aware of the PCE’s armor as though it was her own skin, each round like a dull pinprick. She made sure to put herself in the way, protecting her team like a giant umbrella.
The smoke did nothing to impede her sensors, the cameras extending her sight, picking up the thermal silhouettes of the gunmen beyond. Some of them were only partially visible, hiding behind cover and structures, but it didn’t matter. The suit’s systems were linked to the heavy XMR held in her hands, guiding her aim and doing most of the work, her HUD showing her where and when to fire. To call the PCE a stable firing platform was an understatement – the lack of recoil made her weapon as accurate as a laser beam. The figures vanished from her HUD one by one as she moved between targets, some of them turning into splashes of color on the thermals. One of them ducked behind an obstacle that obscured their shape, but the suit’s software predicted their position, letting her fire straight through.
As she stepped clear of the smoke, she emerged into the compound, her visible light cameras kicking in again. This wasn’t her first visit to Garrison One, and it looked just the way she remembered it. The only real difference between it and the other garrisons was its size. Its courtyard was two or three times as large as its counterparts, ringed by the same ten-foot wall, each corner tipped with a guard tower that doubled as a machinegun nest. Within were rows of carbcrete structures and prefabs serving as barracks, armories, garages, hangars, and storehouses. There were multiple entrances to the underground shelters that rose up from the sand like molehills, and in the middle of it all was a tall control tower, its windows looking out over the large landing pads below. Other than the open parade ground, there was scarcely any part of the base that wasn’t shielded by walls of gabions.
There were PDF running everywhere, scurrying for cover, swarming between the buildings and sandbags. Some attempted to stop her, and she cut them down, the heavy XMR punching through their sparse armor like it wasn’t even there.
Her team was able to pass through the breach behind her, fanning out and securing a small perimeter, a row of sand-filled gabions serving as cover as they organized.
“Petrova – move with the Marines and get them to the gate!” Brenner ordered. “First priority is to get Fuller’s people inside the compound! Agents, Trogs – track down enemy teams and neutralize them. Barbosa is a priority target, so if you see him, broadcast his position!”
They split into two groups, the special forces going off in one direction with Brenner in the lead, and the Marines following her as she led them in another. Most of the enemy attention had been focused on the larger force laying siege to the gate, but they were reacting to the breach now, sending more troops in their direction to secure their rear. All of their leadership was dead, save for Barbosa, but she shouldn’t underestimate the tactical acumen of the agents who remained. Each of them was just as battle-tested as she was.
“Ladies first,” Reed said as they neared the end of the wall.
Petrova stepped out of cover and was immediately beset by shooters, two dozen PDF led by a team of SWAR engaging her. The Marines were forced to retreat further back as half a dozen grenades landed around her feet, Petrova barely registering the blasts as they went off all around her, using her body to protect her comrades. The shields neutralized the shrapnel, and she strode through the dust, taking down PDF with short bursts of computer-assisted fire. The heavy XMR was the definition of overkill, each shot tearing its target apart, blowing holes the size of her head in torsos and severing limbs with its immense kinetic energy. Half of their number died in seconds, and the rest broke, scattering for safety.
The SWAR agents were not so easily dissuaded, rushing towards her, vaulting over sandbags and obstacles on their prosthetic legs. Like tribesmen trying to bring down an elephant, they flanked left and right to surround her, keeping her shields active with bursts of gunfire. One of them got close on her left, Petrova trying to turn to track him, the operative priming a grenade and trying to force it through her shield. The polymer housing on his arm melted down to the wrist, but the grenade made it through, his closed fist protecting it.
Petrova swept him aside with a backhand strike, a hand the weight of a sledgehammer catching him in the helmet, lifting him off his feet and sending him sailing into a nearby gabion. If he wasn’t dead already, the grenade went off, lifting him into the air and depositing his torn body on the sand.
An assailant to her right tried the same maneuver, but she was wise to their strategy now, catching the man by his arm before he could make the attempt and raising him off the ground. She pressed her XMR against his torso and fired, the burst ripping him in half, a swing of her arm sending what remained of his torso slamming into one of the PDF.
An agent scaled the nearby gabion, scrambling ten feet up the stacks of sand-filled sacks and chicken wire, using it to leap onto Petrova’s back. The operative was going for her canopy, a shaped explosive not unlike Reed’s satchels clutched in her hand, the woman braving the burning shield in her bid to plant it. Like swatting a mosquito, the PCE lifted its left arm and slapped the agent, crushing her between the mechanical hand and the armored panels. The squashed body sloughed off her, fresh blood seeping down her sloping canopy in rivulets as she engaged the remaining agents, killing another four in so many seconds.
Her heart had not been in the fight during the boarding action on the carrier, and she had avoided killing the crew as much as possible, but she was unbridled now. The Bullshark’s sensors were her eyes, its armor was her skin, and she could feel the weight of the XMR in its metal hands. Her camera dome swiveled, pinpointing another SWAR agent carrying a grenade launcher, and she landed a two-shot burst on his torso that turned him into a pink mist. She could even see the estimated trajectories of enemy rifles swaying across her HUD like lasers, calculated in real-time by the PCE’s onboard computers.
A friendly Marine leaned around the corner of the gabion behind her to take a pot shot, one of those lasers moving over his torso, and Petrova reached out her left hand to catch the slug like a softball before it could find its mark. Without missing a beat, she fired the XMR held in her right hand, its recoil inconsequential as she took the head off the shooter.
It was no wonder that the PCEs had been able to rampage through the resistance forces with such impunity. Without heavy anti-materiel weapons, they were almost impossible to bring down, and normal squad tactics counted for little.
“Move in!” she ordered, Reed and the Marines pouring in past her. She tagged the remaining agents on her HUD, broadcasting their position to her team, keeping the enemy pinned behind the sandbags with intermittent bursts of fire. A grenade from one of her squadmates flushed them out, and the team moved in to finish them off.
“Not so fucking tough now, are they?” Reed declared as he fired a few more shots over the sandbags.
“Keep moving towards the gate,” Petrova said, striding past them. “I know the way – follow me. We’ll go behind the armories on the right side of the compound.”
As she lumbered along, the chaos of battle erupting all around her, she realized that the ammo count readout on her HUD was getting low. She asked a nearby Marine for a magazine, and he handed her one, Petrova once more marveling at the dexterity of the suit as she plucked it from his hand and reloaded the weapon. The XMR family shared common ammunition – the heavy frame could simply accommodate heavier barrels with denser coils, letting it reach higher velocities. Song might have been devoid of any humanity or empathy, and Nilsson might have been a mad scientist, but they were both geniuses in their own way. These production model suits were just as impressive as the prototypes in many respects, only falling short with the power plants and some of the sensors. It was amazing that they had been able to achieve so much with such limited resources.
She had to keep herself grounded and remember her limitations. Being connected to a PCE was intoxicating – it made her feel like a God, but this same feeling must have preceded the deaths of Hoff, Song, Roach, and Crow. They had all felt invincible, and they had been punished for that hubris.
The team headed behind the row of armories that hugged the right wall, the tough carbcrete structures hiding them from view and shielding them from gunfire. They encountered more PDF, rolling over them almost without resistance. Barbosa must have deployed most of his forces to try to maintain control over the city, along with many of his SWAR teams. How many were still here? How many rogue SWAR were even left alive at this point? Fifty? Fewer?
Petrova emerged from behind the armory and spotted the gate maybe halfway across the compound. The massive metal doors stood tall, rising to the same ten-foot height as the walls, wide enough to accommodate large cargo trucks and MBTs. Extending from the door and reaching maybe twenty meters into the compound were two walls of gabions. They were stacked high and tipped with sandbags, ladders allowing the defenders to climb atop them and fire down on whatever was entering through the gate, like a medieval gatehouse. At the end of each wall was a machinegun nest positioned to watch the entrance, supplementing the two watch towers that flanked the gate.
It would be a tough nut to crack for any attacker, intended to funnel Betelgeusian Drones into a deadly kill box. For a PCE, it was less so.
“Give me some cover!” she said, breaking into a lumbering run. She left the armories behind, crossing the open ground that was the landing pads, only one of them still playing host to a dropship. She passed close by it, using it to shield her from some of the incoming fire. It didn’t take long for the defenders to notice an eighteen-hundred-pound killing machine striding across the compound, and they coordinated their fire, but even several squads of PDF didn’t possess enough combined firepower to bring her down.
The machineguns were another story. The two watchtowers that flanked the gate and the two nests of sandbags at the end of the makeshift gatehouse were equipped with heavy XMRs mounted on tripods, equipped with long barrels and fed by belts. They were operated by two PDF troopers – a gunner and a loader. Said troopers were scrambling to lift the heavy weapons and turn them in her direction now, their superiors shouting orders and gesturing at her.
She leveled her rifle as she ran, the suit keeping it remarkably stable, aiming at the nearest of the sandbag nests. It took only a short burst to cut down both men, her targets slumping over their newly repositioned gun. The others had a bead on her now, and they opened up. Streams of high-velocity rounds harried her, Petrova’s heart beating faster as she watched her suit’s battery begin to drain faster, the shield burning brighter and working harder to protect her. Unlike the prototypes that had a self-replenishing fusion reactor, these production models had a finite battery charge, and she couldn’t keep this up forever. Where the rifle rounds had felt like pinpricks on her metal skin, these hit harder, hammering her like hail. She raised her left arm to help protect herself reflexively, firing around it.
Reed and the Marines opened fire on the guard towers, Petrova watching a stream of molten tungsten draw trails above her canopy, chipping chunks out of the carbcrete and impacting the sandbags with little puffs of dust. They were well-defended, and the guns continued to fire down on her, forcing her to retreat back behind the cover of the dropship. Reed’s men shifted their attention to the gatehouse, taking out the two remaining gunners, but the watchtowers kept her pinned as the slugs hammered the ship’s armored fuselage.
There was a sudden explosion, Petrova watching as one of the guard towers erupted into a spray of dust and flame, one of the shooters toppling from the nest to fall to the ground some fifteen feet below. The same happened to another, what looked like a salvo of grenades hammering the tower, one of them landing inside and blowing it open. The men outside the gate must be coordinating to help cover her.
Petrova ran out from the shadow of the dropship, crossing the courtyard as quickly as her suit could carry her, a few errant PDF who had been moving on her position fleeing as she barreled past them. There were more slugs hitting her suit from all sides, but they had neither the volume nor the velocity to worry her, and she was soon passing the ruined machinegun nests at the end of the gatehouse. She lumbered between the walls of gabions, the troopers atop them firing down on her and tossing grenades, but her PCE shrugged it off like so much rain.
Her goal was not the gate controls embedded in the wall beside them, as they could be overridden from any number of locations inside the garrison, but the mechanism itself. She dumped a slug into the panel, shattering the touchscreen and leaving it sparking and fizzing, then activated her suit’s thermal imaging. It allowed her to see the conduits that ran through the ground and up into the walls, carrying power to the doors, ending at the machinery that opened and closed them. She dumped more slugs, tunneling through the carbcrete, her rounds eventually reaching the mechanisms and destroying them.
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