I stared out the forward drop pod window as the planet below expanded from a curvature cutting across our view to a dark, rugged blot. The nearer our descent the closer that blot revealed discernible surface features: mountains, trees, bodies of water, blast craters; swathes of land scoured black by thermal bombardment. Much of those areas encompassed space where population centers once existed.I soaked in the grim scene, tallying the numbers of dead Vingin in my mind. Reverse thrusts kicked in bringing about the drop pod’s near instantaneous deceleration. High gear inertials prevented that deceleration from turning myself and the hundred Tac-Assault Troopers onboard into a bloody stew. I swiveled my restraint chair around to face my soldiers. One hundred pairs of eyes burned resolutely into mine. I knew what these men and women were thinking. I knew what they felt. Beneath that implacable sense of duty that our society had drilled into us since birth, that the military had so vigorously reinforced, throbbed a lust for vengeance. The Tacherins’ murderous rampage through this sector was about to come to an end. The operation we were going to embark upon on the planet below signaled the beginning of the end of a vile and merciless enemy.No pep speech. My soldiers didn’t need one. They knew what the stakes were.I slapped my helmet visor in place.My soldiers did the same.I checked the capacity dial on my ME5 rifle. Full charge. I flicked a switch on my wrist band and a 3d map of a specific area on the planet stenciled itself across the top of my vision in perfect HUD placement.The map displayed a network of underground transportation arteries. Uin was an occupied planet. Several days of sustained orbital bombardment by human warships had targeted every known Tacherin position, pounding it to dust. Fierce ship to ship engagements had already cleared the skies of Tacherin fighters, granting humans complete atmospheric/near space superiority. It was now left to several divisions of TATs to exterminate the estimated five million Tacherins who had withdrawn beneath the surface.The pod doors whisked open, ushering in a blast of wind. We were about three thousand feet above the surface and closing at a vastly reduced rate of descent.I disengaged the restraint harness, stood up and grasped the overhead bar for balance. My soldiers followed suit.“Go!” I shouted, the heady expectation of battle infusing zest into my voice.Kelte, my second-in-command was first out of the pod. He was always the first. The others followed, two at a time, and then finally, as protocol dictated, me. Once airborne, hundreds of nodes, embedded in my elasti-armored suit, kicked in, surrounding me in a countergrav field. I exalted in the sheer thrill of this type of flight, more so the death dealing power we were bringing to bear against the enemy. Heavy compression tanks were already on the ground, doling out devastation in planet wide search and destroy missions. Roving tri-claw fighters, designed for close ground support, dominated the lower atmosphere picking off any Tacherin foolish enough to be in the open, or destroying any air defense system that dared offer challenge.Heavy artillery and missile launchers were ravenously active. I could see the distant fury of thousands of projectiles, their blazing contrails slicing the sky. Explosions flickered compulsively across the horizon where those projectiles impacted. Whatever Tacherin presence the orbital treatment failed to neutralize would surely have not stood a chance against the wrath of ground based fire.We landed uncontested amid the ruins of a once thriving city. Scorched rubble piles made for rough footing as we rapid-paced toward our objective: an entryway to one of thousands of underground thoroughfares across the planet. The entrance was an enormous oval shaped tunnel. The wide opening was obstructed by massive debris, save for a few narrow gaps.I spotted one of those gaps, called a halt, and turned to Kelte. “Make that hole bigger.”I could imagine the mischief-laden smile forming on Kelte’s ruddy face. He loved mayhem.“Fire Teams One and Two in position!” Kelte’s voice boomed through my audio receptors.A near instantaneous flurry of activity erupted around us as up to three dozen TATs, wielding rec-barrel beam launchers, clambered light-footedly up a perilous debris slope.Kelte relayed target data to the fire teams. As one the fire teams responded, high yield weapons leveled on the gap. The next second three dozen rec-barrels erupted, their lambent output blasting enormous furrows through tons of twisted metal, fused rock and glass. It took only four seconds for that relatively tiny gap to be expanded into a glowing entryway large enough to accommodate 50 soldiers abreast.“That big enough for you, sir?” Kelte queried, his voice brimming with mirth.“I suppose it’ll do,” I returned with equal mirth. I consulted my map of the underground complex we were about to enter. A mental blink clarified the chart to a stinging vividness. The picture before me was a vertical, convoluted network of transit lanes. I called up real time images of that same network, fed to me by recon probes. 220 probes we sent underground before our landing; 211 destroyed by enemy action. That wasn’t a major blow to our tactical Intel. Not in the least. The remaining 9 probes I tapped into told me everything I pretty much already knew: The underground was teeming with Tacherins. Every conveyance tube, every passenger terminal; every intersecting lane, every empty transit car; all reeked with the enemy.To say that the Tacherins were arrayed in open order formations was an understatement. There was no order in their positioning, no attempt at cover, no visible signs that they were going to maneuver upon contact. They knew they had lost this world. They knew any effort by their comrades to extract them was futile. They knew they were not going to surrender in spite of our impending victory.I dimmed the map, then switched my helmet’s com frequency to a private channel. “What’s your status, Dagger One?”“Ready on your mark, Commander,” replied a female voice.I glanced at Kelte and gestured forward. “Let’s go!”We advanced toward the tunnel mouth, fire teams in the van guard. The whine and shrieks of beam fire flooded my audio receptors before I plunged into the tunnel’s darkness. My helmet’s enhanced visual adjusted abruptly to the change in lighting. Blue white flares of beam fire, interspersed with vivid streaks of relativistic rounds zipped above our heads. So far, no TAT had been hit. Flashes of rec-barrel discharges ahead told me that the fire teams were mowing a deadly path. The path we were on started out as wide as the tunnel mouth, narrowing into a steep, downward slope.Electro-static traction in my boots enabled me to maintain superb balance even as I raced at full speed. Enemy fire grew heavier. Three soldiers in front of me and one on my right took hits from FTL projectiles. Each soldier was stopped in his tracks as if he’d run headlong into a full powered repulser field. Our armor proved resilient against shrapnel and all but the most powerful of Tacherin small arms. The Tacherin standard FTL-ejecting rifle was as formidable a weapon as any small arm our soldiers had faced. Thankfully, the enemy didn’t possess too many of those.More TATs fell. A helmeted head in front of me exploded. But for the heavy output of the fire teams, our fatalities thus far would have been much worse. This out and out frontal assault was not how I wanted to engage the enemy. I cursed DefenseCommand for concocting a strategy where thousands of its best troops were needlessly exposed to enemy fire just to prove that humans could best Tacherins in a stand up infantry fight.Nearing the bottom of the inclining lane I saw fire and smoke arising from the remains of transit vehicles the Tacherins had put in our path. Rec-barrel toting TATs hosed the barricade, turning it into a boiling inferno. A lethal flock of mortar discs sailed from the other side of the flames.“Get down!” I yelled, diving forward maybe a second before a rapid succession of thumps shook the ground. Someone tugged at my arm.“Come on, Commander,” urged Kelte. “A little soon to be relaxing don’t you think?”I muttered a profanity as he helped me to my feet. We continued our run.The bodies and body parts of an indeterminate number of TATs were scattered within the radiuses of small craters gouged by the mortar discs. The ground was slick with blood and entrails.We reached the outskirts of the barricade. Tacherins, many unarmored, emerged from the tangled heap of their cover, hundreds of long, lanky silhouettes pasted against an unforgiving wall of conflagration. Instead of falling back deeper into their makeshift defense, the Tacherins charged us, weapons blazing.I raised my ME5 and unleashed a scorching chatter of disruptor pellets into the oncoming enemy mass. I hit four Tacherins dead on, injuring a fifth when a flickering line of pellets severed the unarmored soldier’s arm at the shoulder. The smoke trailing limb plopped to the ground, its owner shockingly oblivious, continuing forward at a staggered pace.I finished the Tacherin off with a single pellet to the head. I spared perhaps two seconds to ponder the insanity, the unmitigated hatred that kept a grievously wounded Tacherin on its feet. Added to our disruptor pellet barrage were the sun bright crimson of rec barrel bolts. Tacherins by the dozens were reduced to disintegrating stick figures when hit directly by those highly combustive beams. Others caught in the vicinities of rec-barrel blasts were burned alive in rippling torrents of energized flame. Still, enemy fire, though diminished, exacted its deadly share. Even as the Tacherins charged relentlessly, we pushed forward into this savage mass, carving a sweltering pathway littered with their dead.More TATs fell, struck by FTL rounds. Mortar disks, the enemy’s only effective answer to our rec-barrels, were too few to be more than the irritants that they were. But wherever they impacted across our lines, the invariable results were TAT casualties. More often than not, the mortar disks claimed Tacherin lives. As we began negotiating flames to push through the barricade, the fierce press of opposing soldiers slowed our advance. TATs in the most forward positions reported hand-to-hand engagements, in spite of our best efforts to kill the enemy at arms length. But a fanatic resolve, demonic in its murderous manifestation, enabled some Tacherins to overcome the worst of our fire to come to grips with us.
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