Novella Marine's Last Redoubt

Marine's Last Redoubt
Author	Alex

Chapter 1: Dark Clouds

USN Dropship Peorna Doone

Time: 1155 ST

Place: Triarche

Staring through a reinforced glasteel observation port on the starboard drop-pod bay of the Dragoon class troop transport Hawkbill, marine sergeant Malcolm Bryon watched the tiny droplets of condensed water wick away from the dropship’s window as the heavy craft plunged through yet another of Triarche’s year-round thunderstorms. His combat-suit’s helmet automatically dimmed to filter out much of the intensity of the zig-zagging trails left by arcs of lightning as they passed around the ungainly ship to strike some minute point on the planet’s surface. Turning his attention from the window, the marine eyed the holographic status-readout being lasered directly onto his retina by the helmet’s computer-system. He mentally ticked through the various points in an identical fashion before every deployment. Environmental-status, check. Magazine storage, check. Heart-rate and blood pressure, nominal. Technically, it was something every marine was supposed to do, but Malcom had turned it into a ritual.

He turned slightly in his harness to look down the line of suited marines facing the dropship’s armored insertion-pods. Regina Evans sat directly to his right, the supple marine corporal had her helmet-mic off, but Malcom could see her lips moving silently behind the helmet’s faceplate. Probably praying, he thought to himself. He had no interest in gods, if he lived or died he wanted to be on his own terms.

On his left, First Lieutenant Denton Maxworth sat with his head back, resting against the thin seat-backing, arms folded, and with his usual sour expression clearly visible even through tint of his helmet. Malcolm felt the bile rising in his gut. If Maxworth were any kind of commanding officer, he’d be reviewing the sit-rep and deployment documentation, or at the very least communicating his intentions with the other officers on board. During the planning session, he’d seemed content with the rudimentary plans drawn up by Lieutenant Colonel Phillips and Captain Butler, despite the fact that even at that time, the intelligence those plans were based upon was already over eight hours old.

However, Maxworth was an ineffectual dolt, and the fact that he’d been fast-tracked to lieutenant over the heads of many senior marines irked Malcom to no end. It would have been one thing if the man had even made a semblance at displaying command competence, but time and time again Maxworth had proven himself incapable of leading men into combat. Only by shear luck and happenstance had such incompetence managed to avoid getting anyone killed.

So far.

More rain raced past the transport, which now shook a bit as it passed through the thick cloud cover on its way to the planet’s surface. Triarche should have been a desolate place. By all accounts, its climate was unpredictable, offering clear skies and monsoon rain within the same hour. The abundance of ground water across much of the planet’s surface could have yielded lush vegetation and cultivatable terrain. However, due to the porous nature of the sedimentary material that made up a majority of the planet’s surface, much of this water was lost to underground streams and channels. This left only narrow bands where plant life could be found dense enough to form forests. The rest of the world was covered in craggy mountains, tough, jagged scrublands, many pockmarked wastelands bordered by broad coastal plains.

The planet’s original settlers had come in several imigratory waves, all lacking terraforming equipment which would have transformed the otherwise barren sections of world into usable terrain. Population centers had sprung up in small clusters, each within the bands of farmable terrain. Later improvements allowed these settlers to begin converting much of the surrounding land into suitable areas for farming, thus insuring the original settlements a wealth of food, water, and local power. Had Triarche remained a principally agricultural world, it would have been utterly unremarkable and most likely unimportant. It wasn’t until the discovery of huge deposits of gielcam, a key mineral in the production of warship grade armor, beneath the planet’s surface that the quiet world had been transformed into a major industrial power.

This boom was not without its price however, as the world grew and gained in prestige, so did the rivalry between the various groups of settlers, as each major continental power sought to control the lucrative mining business. Eventually, the northern city-state of Helbourne made an alliance with several other major colonial settlements on it’s corner of the world’s main continent and managed to come to some measure of dominance over external trade. Helbourne boasted the only full-sized landing pads and docking facilities on the planet and thus maintained a stranglehold on local exports. This fact angered many of the other continental city-states which in turn formed alliances designed to break the hold which the Helbourne Alliance, or HBA, enjoyed over offworld trade.

This touched off a series of planet-wide conflicts which over a hundred years. Being a fractious, but ultimately neutral world, there had been little reason for the ULP to even consider conquest. Still a minor agricultural power during the Unification Wars, it wasn’t until nearly a hundred years afterwards that the gielcam deposits were discovered. Their wealth gave many of the planet’s sovereign nations the unique position of being able to bargain with the ULP on relative parity, and as there was never a true representative planetary government, there was also no way to truly absorb the planet. Which was why the League Army had been happy to intervene in the planet-wide struggle.

It had taken five years to quell the raging violence, and another five years before planetwide elections could be held with any degree of security. Being the pre-eminent power on the planet, the HBA’s representative, Paul Jai-Saunders, easily swept the polls, becoming the planet’s first prime minister, with an ironic term of five years. In that time, the League had seen fit to install a permanent “peace-keeping” garrison. This title was in fact a misnomer, as it was common knowledge that the ULA forces on the ground were there to quietly safeguard the new office, as well as to ensure the flow of gielcam off-planet remained uninterrupted.

This did not sit well with many of the locals, but with no way of matching the League superiority on the ground and in the skies, there seemed little choice but to accept this new reality. That is until conflict flared between the ULP and the Antareans.

As near as a grunt like Malcom could tell, the situation on the ground had unfolded something like this. Oberon Incorporated, a well-known Federation arms developer, had bought up a large chunk of real-estate groundside prior to the war, most likely intending to exploit the mineral wealth offered by this rich prospect. By chance (or possibly design) the area the corporation occupied lay just southeast of the continental equatorial line, which served as a defacto border between the land controlled by the HBA, and its various enemies. Unfortunately, this meant that the corporation was subject to the outrageous tariffs imposed by the HBA and its business partners for moving freight and raw-ore off-planet. Somehow, Oberon’s facilities escaped much permanent damage during the fighting, and over time had built up an extensive complex as and many warehouses and sub-orbital storage and transport facility. Oberon’s CEO, one Tobias Marthal, was a vociferous Antarean patriot, and his company was suspected of having deep ties to the Crusader resistance movement. Oberon itself was relatively unscrupulous, and never above using underhanded tactics to drive its competitors out of business. The corporation also maintained a standing army of private “security officers” (a.k.a. career mercenaries) that gave it (arguably) the combat capacity of a small nation, something not illegal within the League but at the same time highly troubling. When fighting broke out between the League and the Federation, Oberon took its chance to flex its muscles, seizing several installations owned by its corporate rivals.

Nearly three weeks ago, elements of so-called “security” units had landed on-planet, ostensibly to protect the corporation’s business interests. This news was made more troubling by reports of Imperial scouting units discovered sniffing around the outskirts of the system. The AISN had hit worlds up and down the Treadway Line, and Triarche sat just outside’s its zone of relative protection. Since the world was still technically neutral, a direct attack by the AISN seemed unlikely. But with news of rogue Crusader elements sighted in action once again, naval command had deployed the Medea class carrier Egret and its small flotilla to the system to support the ULA forces on the ground as well as defend against a possible Antarean attack from outside the system. Hypothetically, the force was supposed to be sufficient enough to deter the small AISN raiding parties that might menace the orbital facilities in-system, and prevent any kind of ground landing that could damage the mining operations taking place on the planet’s surface. However, this is exactly what appeared to have happened.

Nearly a day ago, Egret’s sensors had picked up a fairly large group of hyper-footprints slightly beyond the edge of the hyper-limit. Assuming a major Antarean push was under way, Commodore Anislov Promiya ordered the majority of the taskforce to sweep out and engage the enemy forces before they could reach the range to make cee-fractional strikes on Triarche’s planetary targets. He left the frigates Battleaxe and Auger of Fate behind in low-orbit, to deter any smaller vessels that might break through, and to secure a backdoor in case the fighting on the system’s fringes went sour.

Apparently, this was all the opening the Antarean’s had been waiting for, and nearly ten hours ago, five unmarked military dropships exited hyperspace via a pirate point and made a mad dash for the planet’s surface. The League’s hastily setup planetary defense guns managed to knock out one of the transports, while the ‘Auger’s gun swatted a second, but three made it through, and disappeared in the wastelands in the south of the continent.

Eight hours ago, Battleaxe detected at least one of the dropship’s within the HBA’s defensive perimeter. Soon afterwards, all contact had been lost from the League garrison’s command post. Reports of scattered fighting all over the northern continent had just begun to filter up to the remaining navy vessels in orbit before all off-world communication was lost. Fearing the worst, Commander Jurgen, now the ranking local CO, dispatched his marines under Lieutenant Colonel Phillips to support the remaining concentrations of ULA forces across the continent. Malcom’s unit, commanded by Captain Anton Butler, had been ordered to assist in the defense of Helbourne, and to extricate Prime Minister Jai-Saunders, who was reportedly trapped in the city by unknown attackers.

The transport shook again as the ominous growl of thunder rolled through the tight confines of the cabin. Down the line of fidgeting marines, a spare canteen shook loose of its overhead compartment and rattled down the deck, eventually thumping against the far bulkhead, just before the closed aperture of the engineering section. Still lost in thought, Malcom didn’t even bother following its path with his eyes, even as the other marines twisted their heads inside their helmets to get a better look at the crashing object. Nervous tension filled the claustrophobic confines of the drop-bay as the host of armor suited soldiers ran through their various pre-battle rituals. The grim realization that some of these seats would soon be empty only exacerbated the feeling of dread.

Making a hot, high-altitude drop into an urban combat zone with an unknown quantity of enemies in support of friendly units, which may or may not still be alive was a poor enough prospect already. But factoring the poor weather conditions and the lack of solid intelligence made this more like a suicide mission than a valiant rescue attempt. Still, Malcom noticed more than enough faces rigidly fixed into stony smiles to be assured that his men wouldn’t break so easily. But the storm was worsening.