Sphereberrant: Rules of War Part 4

Green Reef Base

The light Haraway's Primary, Mnemosyne, was beginning to go out of the sky, leaving only the brightness of distant Tethys to light the evening sky. "Elysium-Black to Tower, on final approach." The drop in brightness was marginal until full dark, Pane knew she'd be quite able to see even without her visor. Green Reef base spread out below, an artificial island built out of the shallow tidal mud flats, it had been originally built in the aftermath of the Compact War to monitor any insurgent activity. Any insurgents were long gone however, now it was one of the Harawayan military's three main bases near Beta-Continent, along with Betasport Fortress and the Crown Hill's Defensive Research facility.

"Copy, welcome to Green Reef Elysium." The helicopter touched down and Pane stepped out, looking back as Sergeant Jan and Liya helped the still nameless girl out of the helicopter and led her over to the waiting medics. Green Reef had been picked by a process of elimination. Betasport was too populous, Crown Hill was too sensitive.

Pane felt numbed by the day's events. She could still function, training and psychological conditioning would keep her functional through most things, but part of her still hadn't come to accept she'd never see eight of the people she'd trained with and known for so long would never speak to her again. Perhaps we'll meet again, when my time comes She looked up at the sky and took a deep breath, then headed towards where she could see her company commander Major Lith, and the battalion commander waiting, respectfully giving her space.

"Sir." She saluted. The Colonel returned the salute, beside her, Major Lith did the same.

"Good job out there Lieutenant Ansh, I'm sorry about your people." The Colonel looked Pane over, nodded "Are you ok?"

"Truthfully sir, no. I'm not." Pane looked up at the stars again "I don't know what the hell happened out there, except it killed eight of my people."

"I reviewed your video of the battle. I don't understand it either, but I know it's never easy to lose people. You and your platoon served to the highest level we could have expected though." She extended a hand and Pane shook it "Assemble your platoon, I'd like to shake their hands before I go out."

"Go out sir?" Pane looked up as a pair of jets shot off the base's runway.

"We're at high readiness, and deploying patrols out into the jungle now. It's possible the enemy you encountered, whoever the fuck they were, will make a try for this base. If so it'd be better if we counter intercept them... or counter attack them.

"Well then sir, my platoon will need more ammo and refills of..." Pane stopped, realizing what she was saying.

The Colonel laughed "You've been fighting all day Lieutenant. Take a rest, get your wounded seen too. Take a rest. You can go out again tomorrow if you still want to."

"Sir." Pane said, then lead the Colonel and the Lith over to the platoon, introducing each one, the Colonel exchanged a quick word with each of them and then dismissed them heading for the flight line. Pane watched her go, then looked out over the sea for a moment. On the horizon she could see a pair of surface corvettes, UAVs forming in a cloud around them. Closer in, a sub was moving out of the channel, its cobalt coloured upper surface all but invisible against the ocean. Pane turned and led her platoon towards the base.

The Jungle

"This doesn't make much sense." Lora said. "As far as any of us can detect, everyone on this planet is a neutral, yet their technology is extremely resistant to the electrokinetic crashing, probably too psionics in general."

"Their heads are pretty resistant too, I think they have some kind of neural implants." Fan-Jei frowned "We should have ripped through those guys, no matter how good they were, but instead they ended up fighting us off."

Manual nodded, then frowned "You've appended this to your reports right?"

"Of course." Lora nodded. "So what's the next move?"

"We wait for orders. Most likely Trinity is putting a full strike team together. I have no idea if they'll even want us involved." Failure was a bitter pill. The psions sat around, except for Paul, still treating the wounded, and meditated slightly, regaining their strength.

They waited like that for an hour, then two. Manual was beginning to think Trinity had forgotten them when a data slate popped out of the air and dropped in front of him. He picked it up and read the contents, then nodded "Alright, we're still in the game, but we're acting as backups now."

"Backups for what?" Emma asked, rubbing fingers down her new arm. Paul had eventually managed to regrow the limb, though Manual was worried at just how much power the doc was using. He claimed to be fine, but Manual still worried.

"Trinity didn't tell me, but we're to infiltrate the base where they're keeping the aberrant and finish it off if their operative fails. The open strike team will try also, but Trinity is reluctant to nuke a military base of a group we know absolutely nothing about."

"Does that mean you can leave that ugly thing?" Makemba asked, glancing at the SDM Manual still carried.

"Fraid not. Asuman, find us a point near the enemy base for a port in." He looked at the remaining Proteus commandos "Move to the extraction point. There's no way a large force can sneak in there."

The commando leader nodded silently and began to lead his troops away.

Near Green Reef Base

Green eyes watched the activity of the base, drawing back as a patrol on foot began to move near their position. They were certainly busy. Indeed it seemed they anticipated an attack. He'd been assured that the enemy... no, the natives, that was the polite term, were entirely made up of neutrals, without any psions or aberrants to protect them. Despite this, they'd managed to beat back an earlier Proteus team, despite all its Psions.

The watcher was not going to suffer a similar failure. Adopting the form of a snake quite foreign to this world, he began to move forward, confident in his quantum powers to bend sensory detection around him as he burrowed through the mud, carefully probing the line of sensors as he moved.

Chiraben was one of Proteus's oldest operatives and he didn't intend to fail at this.

Green Reef Base

Pane had eaten, showered and changed, then not known what to do with herself. Eventually her feet had drawn her down into the depths of the base, into the viewing area where the girl was being questioned. The guard had let her through without protest. She was after all one of the unit who'd bought her in. She walked down the corridors to the large one way mirror that covered the medical room in which the nameless girl was being questioned.

In the viewing gallery she found Tan-Xuan, Liya and Rain watching the interview. "Hi Lt." Lilya's usual bubbliness was subdued tonight.

"Did I miss anything good?" Pane sat down on one of the chairs.

"Her name is Arianne. She says she's from another universe. Also, she's not really human, like, she's got a giant tumour in her head and her organs and DNA don't really match a baselines, or any sort of transgenes."

"A tumour?" Pane couldn't keep the disgust out of her voice. Cancer was an old nightmare for most Transgenics, it had a way of cropping up in new transgenic builds.

"She claims it's the source of her abilities, including to shift universes." Tan-Xuan shrugged "Doesn't fit any science I know but you saw the same as out there right."

"Right." Pane frowned, then the four quieted as the interview resumed.

"So Arianne, please tell us in your own words why you came here."

"Mmm. I wanted to live an escape." Arianne frowned "They were hunting me, they hunt us all, no matter what we do. I just wanted to live in peace."

"Who was hunting you, and why?" The interviewer, an attractive green with PSD tags asked.

"They call themselves Aeon, they rule earth and most of human space, and crush any opposition to them. Ages ago there was a war, a war against, well people like me. Some of us got mad, and earth got damaged, so now they hate us more than anything."

"I don't know who she's trying to fool with the little girl act" Tan-Xuan frowned "She's older than I am by the looks of her." She looked at the other three "There's something really off about her."

Pane tried to put her finger on what the blue meant. There was something off about the girl. She was almost too cute, too cuddly, unreal.

"So these Aeon are the one's hunting you? They kill people for being like you?" The green asked. Arianne nodded "You said you came to warn us about something?"

"Yeah." A vigorous nod "Something happened. It's way easier to travel now, between this space and that space and vice versa. They'll invade, Aeon and the angry ones of my kind. You'll need to be ready or they'll take over."

"I see. Well, can you tell us about them in more detail then?" The green asked.

Pane watched "I think you're right Tan... it's like, she knows way more than she's letting on. She's so cute it's almost mesmerizing."

"Like a super green." Rain spoke up for the first time.

"Yeah, well... we should flag it into the comment section." There was a AR tag you could post comments on if you noticed something "but oversight has probably noticed if we..." and then the attack siren suddenly screamed across the base.

Corvette Nereid

Major Nina Tem, Captain of the Nereid adjusted her uniform cap as she stepped into the Nereid's combat information centre. "Report!" Most surface vessels of the Harawayan navy were refered to as Corvettes, to differentiate them from the destroyers, frigates and cruisers of the Harawayan space force. It had always slightly annoyed Nina.

"Two boogies Skipper. Negative IFF, they're at twenty klicks altitude, separation one thousand kilometres, south west." Lieutenant who had been commanding the watch reported with a salute.

"Any transmission from them?" Nina asked, calculation. At that range they were probably being picked up by the various off board platforms supporting the Nereid. She saw from the board that weapons was already starting up a plot, and the self protective jammers were going. On the screen, the boogies seperated, splitting from two to four.

"None yet. The shore station is sending while they have a channel open they don't seem to be sending data."

Nina frowned "Lock them up and prepare to fire on my order." She sent an automated fire request to the four ship group's flag ship. The Harawayan navy was rather ahead of the army in adopting such automated cues but then again, the systems were complicated and the army was mostly staffed by Reds, not Greens and Blues.

The fire at will icon lit, just as the enemy craft began to light up what had to be fire control radar, and the first missile pair left the tube. On the plot, more missile icons lit away from each of the four friendly corvettes. "Vampire Vampire!" Enemy missiles were in the air "Siren reports laser strikes." The computer reported it all in a calm, business like voice. They'd localized the stealthy corvettes awfully fast. Nina winced, these guys were no mugs.

"Rig for laser defence and begin evasive manoeuvres." Nina ordered "Tactical, what do you have for me?"

"I don't like this sir." The Tactical officer was a fresh faced young green who'd scored top marks at the academy, Nina was pleased to have her. "This whole scenario feels wrong. If you can make your craft appear anywhere, and the reports I read of the action on the mainland suggests they inserted infantry without us seeing any kind of a landing, so they probably can, why put them all the way up there?"

Nina frowned, realizing this had been bothering her too. "Radar, is there anything..." and then the world turned to fire.

Frigate River of Dead Leaves

The Frigate's forward sensors cut off momentarily as the nuclear flash destroyed the four enemy surface ships ahead. "This may not be the best time to mention this." Captain Silvia Reynolds sat back "but this is by far the strangest mission I've ever been on."

The other two frigates, directed by their onboard ISRA psions, had teleported in low into a gap in the enemy sensor coverage and come in low, waiting for the enemy to give themselves away by launching on the two higher, more obvious Frigates. Even then the jamming had been tricky to bypass, but with nuclear weapons you didn't need to be all that close.

Her first officer and fellow Legion Psion a bit Thai by the name of Klahan Metharom shrugged "Yeah. Ours is not to reason why, but shouldn't we have talked to them first?"

"Who'd be more believable? Us or the aberrant?" Silvia shook her head "No, this is the only way." She pressed a button "All crew, rig for VARG drop." Fire was beginning to pulse out at them from the base ahead, a bright beam of pink slashed out and one of their escorting Locusts was carried away with a flash. Laser, coil gun and missile fire flashed out in return, plumes of smoke rising out of the base. The decision had been made not to nuke the native base on several basis, first to avoid loss of life, and second the worry the aberrant might survive in the rubble somehow.

Dropping in troops was better. The two frigates curved up in front of the base, racks on their bellies opened and the first VARGs hurtled free, crashing into the enemy base. Behind the frigates, assault shuttles with more VARGs and legion marines followed close behind.