Extinction (67 page)

“We're down three more operators, a few
injuries but nothing that will hinder the operation.” Cadet continued his
report to Surgeon. “We have a fair amount of ammo and explosives left. We can
handle probably five more assaults of the same intensity of the last one. After
that we're going to have to go with edged weapons or try to lug around the
plasma rifles that these guys are carrying. Their operation is fairly simple
but we'll definitely be at the disadvantage if we have to resort to them.”

Surgeon looked around at his men. “Without
their personal shields, they are no match for us. We have seen in our limited
engagements that their training is superb and nothing to laugh at, but, they
obviously have limited field experience and that's where we are proving to be
the better fighters.

“Stay out of their reach. They have a
drastic advantage in hand-to-hand combat. From now on, if at all possible, we
will engage each one of them in two-man teams, just like room clearing. That
way, if one of them does get a hand on you, your buddy can help you out.

“We still don't know where we are in
this complex but we happened upon several of them at once, so hopefully that means
we're on the right track. We've lost good men and great friends. Let's make
sure it wasn't for nothing.”

Cadet got a small nod from his mentor
and he took over. “All right guys, there's only one direction to go in this
hall so that's where we're going. The fact that we haven't heard an alarm or
had more defenders come our way means that either these guys didn't trip an
alarm or the guy in charge is keeping his troops in one location and waiting
for our final push.

“If they are all together in one place,
then we need to do our best and treat the final contact as a near ambush and
push through it. Our resources are limited and we have to assume that theirs
are not. We can't afford a lengthy firefight. To that end, push hard but smart.
Don't waste ammo or more important, your lives.”

With the updated ops plan in place, the
group simply moved out: silent in their resolve, silent in their pain, silent
in their mourning.

The Debrief

Wilks and Bloom sat at the conference
table with the base command staff and Captain Netid and his senior officers.
Also in the room via video conferencing was the president of the Coalition, the
Detrill emperor and the Nortes empress.

Bloom felt a little out of his comfort
zone as he spoke to the extremely high-ranking audience that seemed to hang on
his every word. Between the information passed along by the Detrill, the Nortes,
and Bloom's virtual memory stroll, the group had a fairly detailed account of
what had taken place a thousand years ago.

The president spoke after Bloom finished.
“To sum it up, and please let me know if I get anything wrong here: Several
thousand years ago, the Nortes were conquering the galaxy as they progressed
through it. They had a lab-created warrior species that was the muscle behind
their operation but it was led by a Nortes military structure. Every species
they encountered was subjugated and used for particular skills that suited them
or were made to suit them, and if the species was deemed not useful to the empire,
they were destroyed.”

The president paused as he looked around
the group to see whether he was on track so far. “Then, a thousand years ago,
give or take, the emperor wanted to create a peaceful empire that was devoid of
the warriors and conquering. But due to the genetic programming of his
warriors, he couldn't do that because it would be seen as the destruction of
the empire and the warriors were created to protect the empire at all costs.

“So the emperor made a final push into
what is now our area of the galaxy and he faked a plague that killed a large
portion of his population. He quarantined his people from the established empire
with the idea that without a royal family and very little Nortes military
support, the warriors would live out their relatively short lifespan and then
the defectors could return home and build a new empire based on cooperation and
not slavery.”

Empress Hugany shifted in her chair a
little. Bloom finished the story. “Yes, Mister President, that is correct.
Unfortunately, the royal cousin in charge of being the guardian of the warrior
birthing planet suspected an internal coup and launched fifty million warrior
birthing pods to a safe planet where they could later be recovered. The warrior
caste has been replenishing their numbers from that pool of pods ever since.
They've also used a stasis rotation cycle that allows them to keep their senior
warriors around longer to lead them all. The stasis rotation only gives each
one an extra ten to fifteen years each but every little bit helps.”

“And we don't know their current
strength, correct?” The president directed his question to his top military
advisor.

“No, sir, we don't. We can't even take
an educated guess. We are attempting to use Sergeant Bloom's decryption and
sifting program to go through the newest vessel we captured but so far we don't
have anything. There's no reason to believe we'll find detailed information in
the memory of a fighter craft.” The advisor turned and gave a slight nod to
Bloom, an acknowledgement of his contribution to the mission.

“Sir,” Bloom started, “we can throw
around some simple math but we still don't know what we're up against. It's
been one thousand years since the purge; if they have an average life cycle of
fifty years each, they have gone through twenty full life cycles in that time.
If they were conservative and birthed one million warriors every fifty years,
they would still have thirty million in reserve.”

“What about training time? Wouldn't they
have to account for that in their cycle?” the president asked.

Bloom sighed. “No, sir. The warriors are
born fully ready to go. They do gain experience and ability with every life
experience, just as we do, but most of their abilities are trained via
implanted genetic memories.”

“But we do know that they had a
devastating war with a species known to them as the Cherta. Who knows how many warriors
they lost during that conflict? We could be looking at millions of warriors or
a relative handful of a few hundred thousand.”

The empress was handed a tablet from one
of her aides standing outside the camera's view. Her face slackened and she
interrupted. “The birthing planet's origin is probably the most heavily guarded
secret in all of my empire. The warriors are genetically engineered to have an
aversion to its location. They are not supposed to be able to set coordinates
to or near it.”

The president looked over as she paused.
“I sense a rather large 'however' coming.”

“Yes, Mister President.” The empress steadied
herself. “The coordinates have always been guarded but there is a deeply
embedded and highly encrypted line of programming in our surveillance systems
that if any ship is detected going near the coordinates, a simple message of
'Inform the royal house of incursion' is given to the ruling member of the
royal family. The message does not state the coordinates or the nature of the
incursion but the message is clear to whom it was delivered.”

“And you just received that message?”
The military advisor shifted his chair towards the empress.

“I just received six hundred forty-seven
counts of that message.” The empress handed the tablet back to the unseen aide
on her side. “It would seem as though a large portion, or maybe the entire
warrior fleet, has found their way home. If they have found a way to overcome
their genetic programming to stay away from the birthing planet, it's
reasonable to believe that they have also found a way to access the planet or
at the very least, they believe it to be possible.”

Without waiting for anyone to ask the
obvious, Bloom spoke up. “That would give them access to billions of already
grown warriors and presumably the ability to grow more.”

“Fuck.” And when that comes from the president
of the known galaxy, you kind of want to piss yourself a little.

The Warrior Interrogation
Planet - The Rescue Continues

The last warrior fell and Surgeon's team
suffered no worse than an injury that had to be battle-stapled before they
moved on. Everyone teased Reaper because he always smiled, a little too much,
when he got to staple someone after a firefight. With the twenty staples in
place and a good layer of a skin adhesive tissue growing compound, they were
back on the move.

They had encountered mild resistance on
their way towards what seemed to be the center of the complex. Surgeon thought
that Cadet's assessment was correct: the guy in charge was pulling his forces
back to defend a single location. All of the warriors they encountered were
obviously trying to tactically retreat to the same location. None of them were
on the offensive or trying to hold their position. The tactical retreat might
have worked in most situations but with Cadet's plan to treat everything as a
near ambush and push through it, a standard peel-off maneuver couldn't survive
an aggressively forward-moving unit of highly motivated and angry soldiers.

As they were clearing the rooms in the hallway,
Joker came over the comlink. “Surgeon, Cadet, come to my location. I found what
I think is a map of this structure.”

When they reached the room Joker was in,
he pointed to the wall. “I think this is a security office by the look of it.
This map shows the complex, checkpoints, barriers, and other stuff. Of course,
we can't read any of it but the symbology looks fairly straightforward.”

“I think this shaded room represents
where we are.” Seth traced his finger along the map. “And that is where we need
to go.” A confident finger tapped the map.

Surgeon took in the whole map and could
see in his mind's eye the battles they just fought in the different areas. His
mind saw his friends' dead bodies on the map where they had left them. “I
agree. Once we move through the section just ahead of us, we'll have two
corridors to choose from to assault the area that looks like our target.”

“I think we should assault from both
corridors at the same time.” Seth pointed to two locations on the map.

Joker shook his head. “If we split up,
we risk hitting hardened locations in either or both corridors with reduced
manpower at each. If they are pulling back to protect one location, it would
make sense that they would put a contact team in both hallways.”

“I agree”, Seth began. “But there are
also advantages. They probably won't think that we know the layout of the base.
They will probably be expecting us to come through the main entry point on this
side, probably with a plan to shift defense to the other location if we happened
to hit that side instead. If we hit the more obvious entry point first, they
will focus there and hopefully not be ready for a secondary attack from behind.”

Surgeon was thoughtful for a moment. “You
two are like the right and left sides of my brain.” He smiled. “I swear with
you two around there is no need for me because you always think of everything I
ever could. Valid points all. I don't think these guys have encountered humans
fighting as aggressively as we have been and it's throwing them off their game.
They kicked our asses at every colony they attacked and I'm sure the colonists
had purely defensive postures. That's what they were expecting and that's not
what we've been giving them. We need to keep moving with what's been working
for us so far.

“We go with Cadet's plan and push from
both sides. We'll move to these positions here.” Surgeon indicated points just
before the final hallways to their objectives. “We'll go in a little lopsided: eighty
percent of the team on the main assault and twenty percent on the secondary
point. We just need the second assault team to throw the defenders into chaos
and then we'll push through with the greater numbers in that moment.