Chapter 6

Captain Thoros was watching the stars from the roof of the admin building. The sky was clear that night, and you could see the galaxy shining brightly through the crisp night air. He took a long drag on his cigarillo and let the cool sahjat smoke waft through his lips. The old thought crossed his mind, as it always did. He longed, for this brief moment, to return to the freedom of the stars. But, again, as always, he realized that that part of his life was behind him. He was a different man now, with a different life. He smiled for a moment as he watched a shooting star burning through the sky. It was beautiful, zooming towards him in a trail of blazing light. With its ... four friends? The calm wistfulness in Thoros’s mind turned instantly to cold fear as he jumped up and slammed his hand on the alarm button fixed to the post he had propped his folding chair against.

“AIR RAID! AIR RAID!” The old alien bellowed into his earpiece, leaping off the roof and landing sure-footedly in the sand. Klaxons swelled to life across the base as lights came on and soldiers swarmed out of buildings. Thoros barged into the building and made tracks for his office. He found the carefully concealed wall panel and ripped it off. It had been a long, long time, but his hands were still practiced and sure as he slung the old battle jacket over his shoulders, buckled down the chest plate and strapped the belt with it’s long pistol and well-worn freq cutlass to his hip. It was heavy, but the weight was familiar and comforting. He pulled on the operating gloves, and connected them to the power supply cables in his sleeves, then yanked the 10 gauge slugthrower off the rack and started loading frag rounds into it as he made for the door.

When he reached the outside again, the chaos had gotten into full swing. His ears flattened instinctively as the base’s massive anti-air guns shed their camo nets and lit up, hucking hundreds of blazing tracers into the sky like roman candles. Missiles soared high and made a beeline for the approaching dropships, but it was futile: bright pinpicks of point defense laser fire found the weapons and lanced them out of the air as carelessly as swatting flies. The defenses were too little, too late. The dropships slipped effortlessly under their fire envelope and cruised towards them, skimming the sand at an angle too low for the guns to engage. They opened up with their own weapons, sending flights of missiles and torrents of rail cannon fire into their prospective landing zone. Adobe buildings were ripped apart and blown to pieces before the onslaught, men ducked, scattered, and were thrown about like playthings.

The braking thrusters of the dropships flared as they reached the outskirts of the base, slowing them rapidly until they were hovering less than a yard from the ground. Hatches fell down, and the massive armored bulk of Humans in Overlord suits spilled out of their vessels and into the sand. The Overlord armor was one of the technological marvels that had allowed Humanity to conquer the galaxy; close to two tons of titanium and ceramic gorilla which could operate in almost any environment and mount a wide variety of heavy weapons while protecting the wearer from most small arms fire. They were very intimidating, and very hard to kill.

The enemy quickly moved into the base, gunning down anyone who tried to stand in their path. As they entered his line of sight, Thoros shouldered his slug thrower, placing the dot reticule of its sight in the shoulder of the nearest Overlord as he took cover behind a stack of sandbags. He pressed the program button on the trigger guard, waited a millisecond for the beep, then shifted his aim and slam-fired three rounds in quick succession. The frag rounds just missed the merc’s pauldron, then exploded directly behind it. The Overlord lost partial motor control as his suit worked to bypass the circuits damaged by the blast, and fell over on his face. Thoros hadn’t pushed the pump forward after the last shot, and quickly slipped an armor-piercing, high-explosive round into the magnetic chamber before doing so. He leveled the weapon and fired, the slug punching through the vulnerable neck area and exploding inside, blasting the Human’s head from his body. The Captain chambered a new frag round, but one of the other Overlords had spotted him, and opened up with its own primary weapon: a 20mm chemical-assisted rail cannon supported by an articulating arm attached to the Overlord’s hip.

The aging Sha’dee dived into the sand as 20mm explosive rounds ripped his cover apart. He rolled over and fired off a couple rounds blindly, but without time to program the rounds and the element of surprise, the Overlord simply took both blasts directly on the thickest part of its chest plate and shook it off. But it was enough of a distraction to give Thoros a moment to sprint for more cover. Just as the Overlord was about to re-acquire him, he heard a crackle of railgun fire and saw the Tyrant’s gun shot to pieces out of the corner of his eye. Reaching his goal, he turned to see Sargeant Drane charging the Overlord, hosing it down with fire from his own 12.7mm heavy railgun. Say what you like about Kodo, they could handle recoil. The massive alien slammed into the Human merc, taking him by surprise just long enough for Drane to jam the muzzle of his gun against the Overlord’s neck and empty the rest of his magazine.