Chapter 15: Redacted

The Courser drifted idly, Borealis little more than a sand-colored marble hanging against the inky backdrop of space, lit by the glow of its parent stars. At such a great distance, the swirls of white clouds, and the shimmering of its blue lakes were almost impossible to make out with the naked eye. Well, naked was perhaps not the best description of Lieutenant Brenner’s eyes.

He had lost his organics long ago, seared away by Bug plasma weapons, his organs replaced with prosthetic equivalents. Most men would have gone for replicas, perfect recreations of their original eyes that wouldn’t draw stares, but Brenner had always been one who favored practicality over aesthetics. He peered through the cockpit canopy, frost clinging to the glass, the lenses in his implants focusing. He preferred to think of his maiming as an opportunity, a chance to improve himself. He could see in wavelengths beyond the visible spectrum of light now, he could see clearly in pitch darkness, in infrared. Sure, he might look like he had a pair of helmet cams pushed into his empty eye sockets, but what of it? He was a soldier, not a model.

The pilot made a few adjustments, tapping at his control panel, keeping them on course. They were staying well out of range for the time being, assessing the situation before jumping in any closer. The craft was not part of the UNN fleet that had been assigned to protect the planet, and it had made no moves to join the formation, nor to identify itself until the time was right.

It was shaped like a giant knitting needle, the prow pointed and streamlined, housing the cockpit and limited cargo space. It was connected via a skeletal frame to the engine section at the aft, naked beams that resembled the jib of a construction crane keeping the volatile fuel and nuclear reactors at a safe distance from the crew, its massive engine cones projecting out from the rear.

This class of ship was engineered for speed and range, a perfect balance between mass and power capacity that allowed them to make long-range superlight jumps, leapfrogging between the stars. They were commonly used to ferry VIPs or to carry important messages where normal methods of communication were not available. A radio signal or a laser pulse could not travel faster than the speed of light, but a Courser could.

This was no messenger, however. Its sleek hull was encased in layers of armor plating, the angular surfaces painted with a black, radar-absorbing stealth coating that made it almost invisible against the darkness. Missile pods and jutting railgun batteries had been installed wherever there was room, the craft bristling with weaponry, seemingly at odds with its philosophy of low mass and high speed. Black Ops was a very descriptive term.

“There’s a hail coming through from Fleetcom,” the helmeted pilot said, Brenner tearing his expressionless gaze away from the field of stars beyond the canopy.

“I’ll take it in the bay,” he replied, turning about. The electric motors in his prosthetic limbs whirred as he made his way to the door, reaching up to open it with a prosthetic hand. There wasn’t much of the original Brenner left, all things considered. While his arms were designed to closely mimic their organic counterparts in both form and function, preserving his dexterity, his legs were little more than skeletal frames. Their molded polymer housings protected the motors and batteries within, filling out his thighs to a more natural degree, before tapering into simple rods at the shin. His feet were springy, flexible pieces of carbon fiber with rubber treads, their skid-like design affording him more agility than one might expect.

It was technically illegal to have healthy limbs and organs replaced if there was no medical justification for the surgery, and Brenner had only lost his legs in battle, but the Special Weapons and Advanced Recon division usually managed to find ways around such restrictions. Medical records could be forged, and less scrupulous surgeons could be bribed. SWAR recruited quadruple amputees exclusively, men who were willing to go the extra mile to make themselves more effective soldiers, either due to injury or a simple desire to transcend their Mk Is. Their augmentations afforded them superior strength and agility, they even ate less, but the paper pushers in charge of the UN were more concerned with abstract moral philosophizing than creating effective soldiers.

The Courser’s passenger section was cramped and claustrophobic, the dim lighting strips in the ceiling casting dark shadows. The metallic hull material was bare in places, exposed pipes and electrical cables snaking across the walls, the deck made from textured sheet metal. It was an industrial design, the Courser was a precision machine engineered to perform its functions as efficiently as possible with little concern spared for the comfort of its crew.

The two walls were lined with a dozen crash couches where the passengers would sit during a jump, the spaces between them occupied by equipment racks. They were loaded with an arsenal of weapons and military gear, from railguns and caseless rifles to small drones and replacement prosthetics. Sitting in the seats were a few members of the dozen-strong SWAR team. They were all quadruple amputees, each one sporting a slightly different style of prosthetic suited to his or her needs. Some wore boots over realistic recreations of their original feet, while others preferred skids. Some had their arms and legs fleshed out with molded housings that mimicked the shape of a natural limb’s musculature, while others preferred a simple skeletal frame. Some had engravings and laser etchings, the cybernetic equivalent of a tattoo, but they were all colored the same black to match the ceramic body armor that they all wore. The only constant between the soldiers was their hands. Everyone always went for the top of the line models, wanting to preserve their dexterity and sensation as much as possible. The prosthetics were linked directly to the wearer’s nervous system via tiny wires that hooked into the severed nerves in the stump, and if their gear was advanced enough, they could reproduce the sensation of touch almost one-to-one.

“Eyes up,” Brenner said, a nearby soldier holstering the handgun that he had been cleaning. “Where the hell are Callaway and Petrova?” he continued, peering about the bay.

“Probably in the crew quarters,” the man replied. There was a synthetic, slightly tinny quality to his voice. Hoff’s larynx had been damaged when his throat had been slit by a Betelgeusian’s knife, and it had been replaced with an artificial substitute. Below his chiseled jawline was an ugly scar that the man refused to get lasered off, he said it was a reminder never to let his guard down while on the job.

Brenner put a rubber fingertip to his earpiece, calling in the rest of the team. They emerged from the far end of the bay, returning to their seats, the Lieutenant crouching to set a sphere about the size of a softball on the deck. A cap on the top slid aside, and a hologram began to project into the air, a man’s face flickering into view. He must have been in his late fifties, a pair of cold, grey eyes peering out from his weathered face. He was wearing a white cap with the UNN’s golden wreath emblazoned above the shiny rim, his immaculate, white uniform adorned with colorful ribbons and medals.

“Admiral,” Brenner said, greeting him with a salute. His team members stood to attention, the quiet whir of electric motors and mechanical joints joining the hum of the projector.

“At ease,” the Admiral replied. “Lieutenant, the situation on the ground has changed, and the Admiralty has finally seen fit to deploy your team to the surface. The Rask have been using vehicles called crawlers as mobile bases, they’re designed for moving cargo in spaceports, and other industrial applications.” The hologram shifted, showing a schematic of one of the massive, tracked platforms. “After doing some digging, we learned that the Krupp-Marion corporation sold six such vehicles to the Matriarchy. They needed no special permission to do so, as the crawlers are not intended for military applications, but the Rask have never the less retrofitted them for that purpose. One of those six has already been hunted down and destroyed, and we have just discovered the location of a second.”

The view switched again, this time showing a grainy, fuzzy video recording. It seemed to have been taken during a sandstorm, blocky artifacts dancing in the airborne dust, a sepia haze obscuring the landscape from view. The camera’s operator crested a shallow dune, revealing one of the crawlers in the distance, its immense hull shrouded by the storm.

“It seems that this one is experiencing technical difficulties,” the Admiral continued. “It’s stranded, and we can safely assume that the Rask will be launching an operation to recover it as soon as possible. We don’t know how much time it will take for them to reach it, nor do we know if the crew will be able to complete their repairs, but the scouts who are on-site report that it hasn’t moved for the better part of two days. We have an opportunity here to capture the vehicle and gain some valuable insights into its capabilities.”

“I take it the mechanized companies won’t be able to reach it before the Rask do?” Brenner asked, crossing his prosthetic arms as he examined the video. Were those Naval railguns mounted on the hull? The feed was of such poor quality, and the storm was so dense that it was hard to make out anything clearly.

“We believe that to be the case,” the Admiral replied. “Either way, we can’t afford to sit on this. Your team is to deploy to the following coordinates with the objective of capturing the crawler and eliminating its crew. You will defend the location until Alpha company arrives to reinforce you.”

“Understood, Sir,” Brenner replied.

“With the storm the way it is, you won’t be able to land a shuttle. I trust that you can find another way to reach the target?”

“It won’t be a problem, Admiral,” Brenner said with a nod.

“I didn’t think so. I’ll have all of the relevant files transmitted to your ship’s computer. Proceed at your own discretion.”

He closed the connection, Brenner stooping to retrieve the projector.

“Finally, I was getting tired of sitting on the bench,” Hoff grumbled.

“I take it we’re going to be taking the express elevator down?” another asked. It was Petrova, easily identifiable by her Russian accent. She was sitting with her prosthetic legs crossed, their polymer housing sculpted to give them a feminine appearance, the toes on her robotic foot flexing as she bobbed it in the air impatiently. Like most of the men, her pressure suit was cut off at the thighs and shoulders. It made their prosthetics easier to access, and they didn’t require any protection from the elements. She wore her dark hair short, her porcelain skin clean of scars thanks to cosmetic treatments, her eyes a shade of ice blue.

There weren’t many women in the special forces, but SWAR was the exception. When one’s body was augmented far beyond the capabilities of a normal person, the differences in strength and endurance between the genders ceased to be a factor.

“We’ll be riding the capsules down,” he confirmed, Petrova sighing.

“Blyat, I hate those damned things...”

“We’re charged for the jump,” Brenner continued. “As soon as we’ve gone over the details of the plan, we’ll drop.”

The team was gearing up, tightening the straps on their chest rigs, loading their holsters with sidearms and knives. Nothing that SWAR carried into battle was standard issue, it was all heavily customized, its members afforded a lot of freedom when it came to their loadout. Brenner had always been a fan of the XMR platform, its simplicity made it extremely reliable, and a railgun’s effective range was pretty much as far as one could see. The attachment points on his rifle were loaded with imaging devices and sensors that could hook directly into his helmet, feeding data to his HUD in realtime. His rig was loaded with spare magazines, and he was wearing a belt of concussion grenades, as they were expecting to be fighting in close quarters. He had elected to attach a shorter barrel to his XMR for the same reason. It would make maneuvering in the corridors of the crawler a little easier, and having a few less electromagnets wouldn’t make it any less deadly at those ranges.

Petrova had one of her boots on the seat beside him, Brenner watching her attach a sidearm holster to a hardpoint on her thigh. There was no need for belts when you could slap gear directly onto your prosthetics. She favored PDWs, lifting her bullpup weapon and slotting a magazine into the well, the copper-colored electromagnets that lined its stubby barrel glinting under the lighting strips. She put on her helmet, fastening the pressure seal at the neck, linking it to her suit.

“We got five minutes, people,” he called out. He turned to find that all eleven members of the team were prepped, save for Hoff. The burly man finished adjusting the forward grip on his rifle, then slotted on his helmet, giving the Lieutenant a thumbs-up.

They marched down towards the rear of the passenger compartment, accessing the capsule launch bay via a short umbilical. This was another out of place addition to the Courser, a module mounted on the underside of the connecting gib that housed four reentry capsules. They were designed to carry three passengers and their equipment to the surface of a planet as rapidly as possible, dropping from the belly of the ship in low orbit. There were four of them mounted to the launch bay, enough to transport all twelve team members.

The vehicles were shaped like truncated cones with a rounded base that was coated with heat tiles, tapering to a dome at the top. At a little over four meters wide at the base, and three and a half meters tall, they were about as compact as they could reasonably be made. The capsules relied primarily on aerobraking to slow their descent where a dense enough atmosphere was present, a drogue chute helping to steady them. Once they reached the appropriate altitude, thrusters embedded within the belly of the craft would fire, shedding velocity to allow for a softer landing.

“Hoff, Petrova, you’re with me,” Brenner said as he waved them over to a nearby hatch. The capsules were docked to the sides of the bay, projecting out into space on short booms. This way, they could remain inside the artificial gravity field of the Courser prior to launch, making them easier to load up.

The door slid back to expose another umbilical, little more than a couple of meters of metal walkway that was enclosed in a flimsy, white material that bore a worrying resemblance to a tarp. Color-coded cables wound their way along the walls, linking the capsules to the ship’s systems. Brenner led the way, the deck creaking beneath his skids, his two companions following behind him. The hatch to the capsule was already open, and he ducked inside it, stowing his weapon on one of the secure racks before climbing into his seat. The crash couches faced the ceiling, forcing him to lie on his back with his knees raised, an optimal position for enduring what was often a hard landing.

He gripped the joystick on his right armrest, beginning to tap at the touch panel on the left, the bank of monitors that was mounted above him flickering to life. The capsule was a rudimentary spacecraft, and the occupants had some limited ability to make corrections and pick the most favorable landing site during the descent.

His companions climbed into the seats to either side of him, stowing their weapons and fastening their harnesses tightly. As he closed the visor on his helmet, his HUD flared to life, status indicators flashing. He patched into the capsule’s comms, putting a call through to his team.

“Begin jump prep,” he warned, Hoff reaching under his seat and locating a plastic bit. He slotted it into his mouth, shifting it around with his tongue before biting down on it. Superlight travel wreaked havoc on the nervous system, there was just something about being flung out of conventional spacetime that didn’t agree with living things. It got a little easier with every jump, but even experienced spacefarers experienced some degree of muscle spasms and lapses in consciousness. It was the price that one paid for daring to violate the laws of physics.

The pilot’s voice came through, Brenner checking his harness one more time.

“Drive is charged and ready, Lieutenant. This is going to be a hot drop. I’m going to jump into low orbit over the target, release the payload, then I’m booking it before the MASTs can lock on. Doubt the fuckers can see a Black Ops Courser, but that’s UNN tech, I’m not taking any chances.”

“Roger that,” Brenner said, bracing himself. “Initiate the jump.”

He felt the hairs on the back of his neck beginning to rise, as though he was being exposed to static electricity, then his vision suddenly went blank. It was a different sensation to having one’s eyes closed, something more akin to having them removed. They had simply stopped functioning. Unconsciousness quickly followed.

After an indeterminable amount of time had passed, Brenner began to awaken, his awareness slowly returning to him. It was a little like recovering from a really bad hangover, his mind foggy and sluggish, his head pounding. As soon as he remembered where he was, he willed his prosthetic hand to stop trembling, ignoring his twitching facial muscles as he gripped the joystick.

“Report in,” he grunted, hearing three ‘readies’ from the other pods. “Begin launch sequence.”

The rubberized grips on the ends of his prosthetic fingers tapped at the touch panel on the armrest, the capsule’s systems coming online one by one. Thrusters, navigation, hull temperature probes. The cameras on the belly of the craft showed a view of the planet below, they were so close that there was no visible curvature. It almost looked like a gas giant, nothing but swirling patterns from the continent-sized sandstorm.

“All systems green,” Brenner announced, waiting for the other capsules to report the same. “Asynchronous launch, follow me in. We want to deploy the drogues late, or the wind might carry us pretty far off-course.”

“Going down,” Petrova muttered, the capsule shuddering as it detached from its umbilical.

Brenner’s stomach lurched as they transitioned from the Courser’s AG field to the planet’s gravitational pull, beginning their fall. He examined the chase cam as he made small corrections, watching the view from beneath the Courser as the three other capsules detached from their booms one by one. Puffs of gas shot from their directional thrusters as they took up formation behind him, accelerating towards the ground in a staggered line. He turned his attention back to the main display, the computer plotting a reentry corridor for him to follow, displaying it as a green tube that was overlaid over the video feed.

“Two minutes to splashdown,” he warned, “brace for reentry.”

He watched as the Courser popped out of existence, leaving an expanding cloud of multicolored gas in its wake, like a drop of colorful ink dispersed in water. They were on their own now, the only way to get home was to accomplish the mission and rendezvous with Alpha company.

As the atmosphere grew thicker, the capsule started to shake, the passengers gripping their armrests as they were jostled around in their seats. The ablative heat shield on the bowl-shaped belly of the craft began to glow red, warmed by the friction of the air, bright flames beginning to lick at the small portholes. The shaking became ever more violent, the G-forces tearing at the crew as it hurtled towards the ground like a blazing meteor. The risk of blacking out was far less for a member of a SWAR team, however, as they had no limbs for their blood to pool in.

The comms suddenly went dark, but that was to be expected. The hot, ionized gas that was currently shrouding the capsule was blocking their transmissions, acting as a natural radio jammer.

Brenner scanned the displays, but he couldn’t see the ground. This could be a problem, he’d usually select the most viable landing site at this stage, making the necessary course corrections before they got too low. In these conditions, the only information that he had was the altimeter, there was no way to tell exactly where he was going to put down.

He waited until the last moment to deploy the chute, the capsule shuddering as it unfurled, shedding even more velocity as they hurtled towards the planet’s surface. The thrusters began to fire, adding their roar to the rushing wind as they belched plumes of hydrogen flame from beneath the craft. It felt like the entire capsule might shake apart, but the G-forces slowly abated, the vessel slowing until it was practically hovering. There was a thud as it touched down, Brenner immediately noticing that something was wrong when they began to tilt. There was a sensation of motion as they started to slide, the three crew gripping armrests and harnesses as the capsule spun on its axis. They must have landed on the side of a dune, their descent finally halting as they reached the bottom.

“I hate these fucking things,” Petrova grumbled as she climbed out of her seat, reaching for her weapon. Brenner did the same, the motors in his legs whirring as they compensated for the extra gravity. He suddenly felt so much heavier, like someone had slung a rucksack full of bricks onto his back.

“Glad I don’t have any joints to ruin,” Hoff complained, moving to the hatch with his rifle in hand. He popped it open, the door sent flying away from the capsule by a set of explosive bolts. With his weapon shouldered, he leapt out onto the sand, sweeping the barrel around. Brenner followed him out, the airborne dust pounding on his armor, the heat starting to bake him.

“What a shithole,” he muttered, scanning his surroundings with the sensors on his helmet. Visibility was about seventy meters, there was nothing around but sand. He turned to get a look at the capsule, its heat shield still glowing red-hot from the friction of reentry. It was listing on its side at the bottom of one of the dunes, having left a trail of melted sand in its wake. Petrova hopped out after him, turning her helmeted head as she took in the vista.

“Pizdets, I cannot see myself taking shore leave here,” she said as she jogged over to take up formation with her comrades.

“Where did the others land?” Hoff asked, tweaking the controls on his helmet as he tried to clean up his vision. “I feel like I’m on the inside of a fucking hourglass.”

“This way,” Brenner said, following the blip on his HUD. They trekked through the desert for a couple of hundred meters, Brenner’s skids sinking in the loose sand, until another capsule appeared in the haze. It was nestled between two dunes, its hull scorched with black streaks by the heat of reentry. Three more of the team members walked over to greet them, falling into formation as they proceeded to the next pod. They were spread out fairly evenly, the twelve-man team able to reassemble before long. All things considered, it wasn’t that bad of a drop. There was usually somebody shooting at them by now.

They made their way to the target coordinates, struggling across the dunes, their eyes peeled for enemy scouts. The Rask would certainly attempt to reclaim their stranded crawler, and in such low visibility, the prospect of stumbling across an armed convoy in the open desert was a real one. As Brenner crested a dune, their destination finally came into view. He dropped to his stomach, gesturing for his squad to do the same, everyone hunkering down.

The crawler was even more massive than it had looked on the grainy video feed, eighty meters long, its deck at least fifty meters off the ground. The storm was already starting to bury it, sand drifts consuming its titanic tracks. Upon its deck, he could make out the barrels of the railguns through the haze, three of them jutting from the port side. There were probably three counterparts on the starboard, but they were obscured by the sepia fog. Towards the rear was a tall conning tower that had been fashioned from prefab buildings, a large comms dish protruding from the roof. There were lights on inside, he could see the glow that was bleeding through the slatted windows.

Hoff whistled, sidling up beside him. He took a knee, shouldering his rifle and examining the behemoth through his scope.

“Gotta admire the ingenuity,” he said. “Picking up movement on the platform that rings the deck, looks like they have a couple of cats keeping a lookout. Good job we had the storm for cover, or they would have seen us drop from miles away.”

“What’s our approach?” Petrova asked.

“According to the schematics,” Brenner began, “the only way to get inside is via a descending gantry. Looks like the crew have raised it, they probably think there’s no way for any intruders to scale that height. We’ll take out the guards, then grapple up and breach through one of the hatches that lead inside the vehicle. I want a second team to climb up onto the deck and make their way to the prefabs. There’s no way to know what additions the Rask have made to the crawler, but my money’s on their comms room being up there, close to the dish. Priority one is to prevent them from sending a distress call. We want their backup to waltz straight into a kill zone when they show up.”

He tapped at the side of his helmet, increasing the magnification, watching the two Rask patrol along the platform. They were wearing the usual gear, a blend of armor that the UNN had supplied to them, and leather clothing. They both had XMRs in their hands, meaning that the crew was probably well-armed. It didn’t matter what kind of armor you wore, it wouldn’t be stopping a two-kilometer-per-second projectile.

“The first thing we need to do is take out those guards,” he muttered. “Those fuckers have good ears, the report of a railgun might alert them. Stevens, you’re up.”

Another member of the team climbed the dune, lying prone on the sand by Brenner’s side. Brenner tore his optics away from the crawler for a moment, watching the man bring his rifle to bear. It was an older weapon than the railguns that were favored by most of the team, a CR-58, the service rifle used by the UNN during the latter years preceding the Betelgeuse Incident. It fired a caseless round, making it several magnitudes less powerful than an XMR, but unlike the electromagnetic railguns, it could be fitted with a silencer.

Stevens checked the top-loading magazine, then braced the stock against his shoulder, aiming the fat suppressor in the direction of the crawler. He reached out to make some small adjustments to his scope, then shifted his weight, settling in. The Rask guards were only about seventy meters away, but the visibility was poor, and the wind was howling. One had to take the time to account for such factors when firing a conventional projectile.

There was a muffled crack as he squeezed off a shot, the first Rask crumpling. The second heard his companion hit the deck, spinning around to see what had happened. He barely had time to raise his weapon before Stevens had put him down, the alien toppling over the human-sized railing, tumbling fifty meters to the sand below.

“God damn,” he chuckled, his Southern accent pouring into Brenner’s helmet. “Feels good to finally be able to just shoot the bastards. I’m likin’ this war already.”

“This has been a long time coming,” Hoff added.

“Hoff, Stevens, Petrova, Bates, Wachowski, you’re with me,” Brenner said. “The rest of you, get up onto the deck and make your way to the prefabs. We’ll clear out the lower level, you guys secure the comms equipment.”

They split off into two groups, climbing over the crest of the dune and making their way down the sheer face, sliding in the loose sand as they went. The storm never let up, whipping against Brenner’s visor like he was being sand-blasted, the howling wind audible even through his helmet.

“How the hell does anyone survive in this shit?” Hoff muttered, taking up the rear. He was speaking over the team’s ad-hoc network, they wouldn’t even have been able to shout to make themselves heard over this gale. “The place is barely habitable, even the most ruthless mining corp would probably think twice about throwing down a colony here.”

“Why do you think the cats are so damned tough?” Brenner asked. “They have a saying here, ‘the strict mother raises disciplined children’.”

“The fuck does that mean?” Hoff scoffed, scanning the walkway again with his rifle.

“It means they believe the planet makes them strong,” Petrova added. “The planet is their motherland, and they are her children.”

“That’s right, Petrova,” Brenner continued. “High gravity, harsh environment, fierce competition. There’s a good reason the UNN uses them as shock troopers.”

“Never took you for a cat person, LT,” Hoff muttered as they approached the crawler.

“It’s worth knowing things about the people you’re being sent to kill,” Brenner replied. “But if you must know, I’m more of a dog guy...”

The twin tracks situated beneath each corner of the massive vehicle were about as large as Kodiaks in their own right, the sand now beginning to form drifts around them, as though the desert was trying to reclaim them. The longer this thing stayed in one place, the harder it would be for it to dig itself out. If the crew had ever managed to fix whatever mechanical problem had stranded them, they would probably have needed a whole army of Rask armed with shovels to free themselves.