Alpha and Omega

By X9

-= 1 =-

After-Action Report: OPERATION: Odin’s Demise Delta Anmor III, Delta Anmor System SUBJECT: Bravo Team

OPERATION: Odin’s Demise was a demolition strike mission executed by Terran Dominion forces against Terran Confederacy insurgents on 4.4.2451. On 0140 hours, Taskforce Agamemnon entered the Delta Anmor System in far perimeter orbit from Delta Anmor III. Taskforce Agamemnon consisted of the Mammoth-class Carrier Agamemnon, five Colossus-class escort frigates, and the Hermes-class Exfiltration Subprowler Meriwether Lewis. While Taskforce Agamemnon engaged the Confederate outer perimeter patrol, the Meriwether Lewis infiltrated rebel orbital forces and was able to successfully deployment Bravo Team on Deployment Zone Foxtrot and then moved to extreme low orbit to observe and provide in-field tactical support via tight-beam laser transceiver communications.

Bravo Team consisted of two Ghost-trooper commandoes, Commander 871/7 and Lieutenant Commander 218/8.

Bravo Team was able to infiltrate Confederate security and detonate the massive subterranean Vespene deposits under Industrial Zone B-33 with a MJOLNIR tactical nuclear device. They then maneuvered to Exfiltration Zone Richter...



Near Exfiltration Zone Richter, Bravo Team, Terran Dominion Alpha Squadron Delta Anmor III, Delta Anmor System 4.4.2451

The clattering of an MK06 assault rifle dropped abruptly in decibel level as a small spray of red splattered over a Confederate Marine’s face and slightly ricocheted off the semi-polarized faceplate. The soldier’s last action, the priming and tossing of a DP-10 fragmentation grenade, was completely awry, and only a small plume of dust washed over Lieutenant Commander 218/8, Bravo Two.

She tossed away the spent assault rifle onto the superheated dirt where the grenade had detonated. “Out, sir. You?”

Bravo Leader, Commander 871/7, hefted his C-10 canister rifle - a massive elongated shotgun that was strikingly uncovert for the Ghost stealth commandoes. It essentially propelled a variable-load canister at medium-long range into an enemy. Typically, the heavy rounds were HE: High Explosive. With a practiced reflex, he checked the ammunition display on the side of the heavy weapon. “Three more canisters, Ghost. And then I have my sidearm.”

Bravo Two, otherwise known as Janice, nodded curtly, reaching for the professionally holstered semiautomatic pistol at her hip. Their brief exchange of words was rudely interrupted by the staccato stuttering of a nearby heavy machine-gun. The two commandoes instantly made calculations within their cerebrums. The aural profile matched that of a Vulture reconnaissance bike, and close-by.

The commander, whose first-name was David, tapped his index finger and thumb together through the semi-flexible gauntlet he wore. Integrated circuits connected, current pulsed, and his HUD, fed by an array of complex goggles that read in various wavelengths, changed from real-color vision to thermal. The Vulture was on the far side of a small, sagging shop that hadn’t fared well when the Confederacy wrested control of this world away from the Zerg. Goliath armor-penetrating rounds had profusely sprayed the metal building, slaughtering half a dozen hydralisks that had used the Terran-built emporium as an improvised bunker.

A jolt of alarm rippled through the battle-wrought psionic connection between the two Ghosts. Reflexively, forged by innumerable hours of live-fire combat situations and fifteen years of intensive training in weapons, David roughly removed a corrugated suppressor sheath from the muzzle of his canister rifle, his nerves drenched in hyperborean ice water as time seemed to accelerate for him as the Vulture swiveled around, its fragmentation grenade launcher whining to propel an explosive...

With a burst of psionic energy from his partner, his gauntlets shoved a lockdown round into the now cut-down barrel of his weapon, and barely clearing his left hand from the muzzle, fired. Liquid fire sank into his reinforced chestplate as Janice crudely propelled him to the side of the irregularly patched tar road and a fragmentation grenade detonated nearby. The acuminous, steaming shards drove into his armor. Their acute angle and trajectory made them eviscerate the first two armor and stealth layers, and they firmly lodged between the last layer and his bare flesh over his lungs. As he moved upwards, his arms shaking uncharacteristically, fueled by the fire of adrenaline from his near death encounter, they drove even further into his flesh. His vision was so blurred, a mirage of flickering shapes, that he barely registered Janice firing with pinpoint precision into the prow-mounted launcher of the disabled bike. The Vulture sparked and detonated with a plume of sparks and rising dust, its flaming remnants as mangled as its demented namesake.

As blood ran down his chest, some absorbed by the tight body glove he wore under his Ghost Environmental Suit, he bit his molars together, the jigsaw-like pieces firmly settling along each other in a brief venting of agony. His suit, with electrodes gingerly adhered to his bare-shaved head, easily received the surface alpha waves resonating on the nerves of his skin, decoded the digitalized signals as pain, and initiated a sequence of analgesic injections through osmotic skin patches.

Janice also uncovered his pain, offering a hand. “Sir?”

The commander refused to be helped on the battlefield by a lady. Even though it had been demonstrated on numerous exercises and combat situations that some female Ghosts could clean his clock, he could not dislodge the primal human instincts that males were more physically and emotionally hardened that girls. It simply didn’t compute in his adolescent mind.

Brandishing the shield of Duty and Service against the raging pain, he stood, taking the fallen suppressor and screwing it in again on the muzzle of his rifle. It made contact with the rest of the gun with a reassuring metallic ping, and his HUD flickered to show a new ammunition counter for his C-10 canister rifle: two HE rounds and the familiar targeting reticule.

David waved his right gauntlet at the exfiltration zone. The angles of his fingers, decoded, commanded “Move to location at highest speed.”

Without an affirmative, the lieutenant commander reoriented herself and sprinted, taking several seconds for the adenosine triphosphate and their molecular energy to fully surge through her calves and bring her to her fastest running speed. Her hands were tensed, at her sides, moving like an Ancient Earth ninja’s sinister blades as she sprinted.

As he steeled himself against the prospect of running to the evac zone with a chest wound, typewriter-font text scrolled across the ghastly static-laced viridian HUD: MERIWETHER LEWIS AT HOLDING POSITION OVER ZONE RICHTER. STATUS: ON STANDBY.

The metallic crackle of gunfire behind him shook him out of his rapid tactical translation of the text: gauss rifles, heavy weapons. The ordinary grunt was no cannon fodder for the animalistic Zerg, instead a living human, a soul, encased in integrated titanium/molybdenum alloy armor and equipped with an intimidating, fearsome D-14 “Impaler” gauss rifle. Standard-issue might the colloquially termed Impaler be, but its effects were ravaging.

Janice halted her rapid advance, in a single, sweeping motion coming to her knees behind the dubious cover of a conveniently located traffic display and firing her handgun sidearm. For her, it was reflex, just as a toddler cringes from an open flame. Not lower-aim-shoot, but a graceful, single maneuver. Her pistol was automatically aimed at the visor of the leading tango, as if mechanically aligned there by a computer. As the dirt erupted beneath David’s feet and his muscles tensed for a blow in the back from a rifle, two crisp, muted reports sounded, amplified by his aural headgear and his ears, accustomed to registering the sounds of any suppressed firearm. The first shattered the faceplate, impacted between the eyes, lancing through white matter and cerebrospinal fluid and then edging to a stop at the aft of the cranium with a contusion of shattered bone, fragmented brain, and a gathering puddle of fluid. The second was overkill, but an automatic practice, simply because the time between the two shots, accelerated by the phobia rampant in combat, was insufficient for Janice to judge the accuracy of the first shot. Yet, all Ghosts had been trained sufficiently to kill any Terran infantryman at reasonable ranges with a maximum of two shots from any firearm. Standard operating procedure.

The first soldier fell as David himself fell to the ground and activated his personnel cloaking field as his fingers tensed in reflexive fear of Hades, not from combat damage, but from, once again, operating procedure. As the two other Marines in the fireteam widened their eyes in dismay at the loss of their corporal and took precise aim at the petite female figure crouching behind the traffic sign, unwilling to not fill the intruder with depleted uranium, David, a wraith in the air, used his momentum to swirl on the tarred road and to lunge forward. It was not to somehow magically soar into the air and slice a Confederate’s throat, yet, to move his two gauntlets forward and project an invisible psionic lance into one of the pursuing marines. The swiftness of the necessary maneuver did not allow the Ghost to expel a thrust of lethal energy, but to simply stun the weak mind of the man.

The last marine’s automatic aiming at Janice, also drilled into his mind by practice, was punctuated with a new obstacle. His drills did not have fluctuating variables, such as the apparent death of a nearby comrade. Of course, he had been instructed in the Academy to continue aiming even in the midst of that scenario, but it hadn’t been real...the horrifying shrieks of dying men as they fell from the world, the chattering automatic weapons around one...a moment’s hesitation resulted in the planting of a canister rifle round through the area between his torso and upper chest. The HE round penetrated the frontal armor and detonated, literally blowing the man into two irregular halves, with gore rife in the air.

Janice did not pause in her relentless attack. Her mind, encased in tunnel vision and not realizing the fall of the other marine, mind focused on her death, yet her last action, the taking out of the other Confederate, was broken from those trappings as the Ghost realized her target was falling...information entered her tactical mind, formerly submerged in a barricade of stoic fatalism, and she reconfigured her firing solution to a single handgun round, as the target was apparently incapacitated. By what means, her mind didn’t compute then, but those thoughts were terminated, along with a Confederate’s life, as her round impacted squarely between the eyes, a common Janice surgical kill.

David’s gaze fell on Janice as he uncloaked and thrust his last round into the canister’s rifle into the firing chamber of his gun. He felt a yawning sense of utmost respect, and fueled by combat adrenaline, the simple...fire...that drove on during combat, the speeding-up of the temporal axis from the contradictorily bland mayhem raging around them...those thoughts somehow were transfigured into a love, the kind that results from one to a savior.

However, the air deadened, and Janice made a brief hand signal behind him. He whirled to find...

More text: ENEMY CONTACTS INBOUND AT VECTOR ONE-EIGHT-FIVE. ADVISE IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWAL TO ZONE RICHTER.

A dozen nimble Vultures swept ahead of the mechanized support group, their pilots judiciously acting prudent to avoid any sort of trap set by the Ghosts. A price of overestimation, but with no less than five Goliaths and ten retrofitted Jeeps, the Confederates could afford the loss of several seconds.

Or at least in a normal situation.

The armada maneuvered boldly, with the Vulture line acting as a carrier’s interceptor screen in starship combat, essentially diminutive gnats screening the main group. Or, perhaps their shifting forward-arc screen did not account for any attack from the southern hemisphere.

After all, what trap could eliminate even a single Goliath? An automated rocket launcher emplacement? The audacious Ghosts hadn’t even used a single heavy explosive during their penetration raid, and the odds that they would set such a snare were astronomical.

David’s analytical mind calculated distances as the Confederate group advanced down the asphalt street, past ravaged cars and decimated sodium vapor street lights and advertisement hologram projectors. They wouldn’t have time to make it to the extraction zone before the Goliaths loosed an inferno of Hellfire missiles and vaporized them in a firestorm.

Janice also came to the same, fatalistic conclusion.

The seventeen-year-old commando’s mind flicked to the Meriwether Lewis, just several hundred meters away in standby position. However, sobering facts settled like O157:H7 Escherichia coli within his colon - the exfiltration starship was only lightly armed. Even though it had a fair chance of eliminating the Goliaths, the air support which would swiftly come as a retributive strike from the nearby looming titan of Roosevelt Base would annihilate the Terran Dominion subprowler.

The lieutenant commander hissed over the psi as the Goliaths drew into maximum bombardment range, far beyond even the finest marksman’s canister rifle range, We must buy time.

His eyes flicked to his rifle, with a single HE round remaining, and nearly floundered in his hopelessness. Running was futile. The walkers merely had to fill the street with missiles. They didn’t even have to aim. A single bombardment would eradicate Mark II Ghost-troopers 871/7 and 218/8. Unacceptable.

That was when his acute vulnerability was processed by his strategic mind. He flicked his helmet-mounted mike to local Confederate frequencies in operation, and immediately tactical cross-chatter filled his helmet: of which one was the preparation to wipe the two teenage Ghosts off of the slate. His peripheral vision registered a slight dotted line superimposed on his optical sensor’s image on the HUD, and Bravo Leader broadcasted with such agility that his swollen tongue lost his words, and he mumbled, “Confeds, we surrender. Don’t shoot.”

Janice caught his idea immediately, and raised her hands and roughly tossed away her nearly depleted handgun. His muscles taut from stress and innumerable close gauss rounds, David gingerly placed his C-10 canister rifle on the floor, and too raised his hands, crossing them behind his head.

A curt, aristocratic reply came over, and the Ghosts, pale and vulnerable within amorphous metal armor that seemed to juxtapose with their youthfulness, “We hear you, rebels. Now, get down on your knees.”

Spotlights mounted on the quick assault vehicles burned to life, their luminosity barely illuminating the teenagers with the blazing corona of Delta Amnor Alpha already lighting the scarred battlefield. From the perspective of an external observer, it seemed almost comical, like a parody of the patheticness of the Confederate military, that twenty-seven battle vehicles were necessary to subjugate two teenagers.

The commander of the Meriwether Lewis at last recognized the crafty handiwork of Bravo Leader. Mirroring the words of the nuclear physicist Richard Feynman at the first detonation of an atomic bomb on Ancient Earth, at New Mexico, the United States, he whispered over cracked, desiccated lips, “Now I have become Shiva, the destroyer of worlds.”

With a tap of two thumbs and germanium semiconducting circuits, nuclear fire billowed from the heart of Industrial Zone B-33, and a new sun was birthed in the cradle of the stars momentarily...before the two prostrating commandoes were awash in charred ash. The yawning Vespene deposits underneath the urban section were transformed into pure fire, and the major pipeline system that channeled the gas to Roosevelt Base was the channel for such destructive force...

The scrolling words BRAVO ZULU. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. and their meaning slowly jerked their way into his deadened mind as he was bathed in the EMP shockwave. Fortunately, he and Janice had deactivated his suit’s electronics before the blast, so the pulse did nothing.

The two young titans straightened from the accumulated ash, their suit Geiger counters blaring alarms of Curie limits and heavy particle emissions. However, it was not immediately terminal, the fallout. Flash radiation treatment would revitalize their cells with such speed that the commandoes were likely to not develop any permanent DNA dysfunction.

The Meriwether Lewis descended, its hull plating sparking with multicolored light and errant shapes as the EMP temporarily overloaded the external stealth technology, the radiation bombarding and fluxing the texture buffers and photoreactive plates of the subprowler as the two Ghosts rose, armor covered with dark jags of splotchy, wavering black. The same particles that were assailing the exfiltration starship’s stealth electronics had also interfered with the stealth coating of the environmental armor of the Ghost-troopers.

Yet, David felt utterly dehydrated, even over tens of thousands of fallen enemy soldiers. His mind was deadened, its acuminous wit shaved off. It was only a stratagem, a ploy, to allow Bravo Team to escape. However, he had not considered the ramifications from a non-tactical perspective, from the viewpoint of living men, of families that would grieve for all eternity from loved ones burned from a distant battlefield…

His feet mechanically moved as his eyes, pupils dilated, hastily shifted from object to object, the scorched, fused glass behind him, the fading mushroom cloud that had arced into the sky, the superheated particles losing integrity and descending into the entropy of a billion cascading subatomic fissions…the automaton-like fashion his limbs were pumping sharply contrasted with his unfocused thoughts, the last thoughts and words of the Confederates he’d killed resonated like a demon’s shrieking, grating cries in the inferno of hell within his mind, except multiplied a thousand-fold.

His world was glazed, a blur of cubist art and voices somehow materalized into sight, and he didn’t even register the gangplank sealing behind him and the gentle pain sweeping down his body as the acceleration generated by the Meriwether Lewis thrust him into the atmosphere, a fading spectre amidst hundreds of dueling Terran warships…

“Hey, boss.”

A brief shaking of his scarred shoulder pauldrons wasn’t even sufficient to dislodge him from his fractured mental world, how he’d slaughtered soldiers by the battalion with a single commandment: to preserve Janice and his lives.

A soft hissing sound of compressed air, and his vision reasserted itself: an ammunition counter, motion sensor, targeting reticule, and in his sights…a departing ONI medic in shaded technician armor moving to the minute Engineering section of the starship. He shook his head, struggling to keep his sight unblurred.

“You feelin’ better?”

Finally, the voices of the phantoms faded into the background sounds of a million fighting soldiers, and beyond that curtain into nothingness. His mind seemed to automatically reboot, and he construed what the quiet sound had been: the joining of an external syringe to one of his armor’s intervenal ports and the injection of the standard post-battle antishock cocktail.

Janice reappeared before him, and his lethargy, like what he would find after a twelve-hour sleep after an intense torture training session, evaporated like ice exposed to napalm. The energy reinvigorated him, shaking off the last of his mental constraints. Her eyes were soft, with a touch of sincere concern, the kind that could only be generated for a comrade. Few civilians can recognize from their external vista the camaraderie forged in fire and the looming presence of Death itself amongst soldiers, men and women of war.

David squinted, though. Surely something else lurked behind those cold azule eyes, so like gray ice with pale watercolor paint splashed over them. David’s eyes blurred as they attempted to widen and focus, only to be met with shrieking white lights and the cold, blank tile of the subprowler’s inner sanctums. Not that it mattered; David was, after all, a Ghost-trooper. He brushed out gently with his mind, meeting the usual N/B/C protected, triple-reinforced, titanium-wrought, rigid and virtually indestructible walls surrounding the fortress of Janice’s mind.

They crumbled like they had a multiple personality disorder—the second personality, the walls of Jericho. No trumpets, however, blared and no chariots raced around these walls, they simply fell, dissolving into nothingness, and releasing a tidal wave of flooding emotions. David’s mind was rocked by anger, joy, sorrow, and…love. David did a double take. Love? A ghost in love? And why was she showing him this, unless…

It all clicked into place. Suddenly, the stubborn shields around his own mind vaporized; not the huge, hulking outer layers, but those to a small sanctuary that David never entered, for fear of compromising a mission. With a start, David realized that they were the walls to his heart’s desires. But these emotions, they were more powerful than any he had ever experienced. They blew through his outer defenses and came out to meet the clear surface of Janice’s mind.

In the half-second this had taken, David blinked his eyes to clear them of the light-induced tears, and saw that Janice was closer, much, much closer than she had been before, but before he could realize anything else, he felt the most unusual sensation of them all - the loving caress of human contact, as Janice leaned over to brush her lips against his. Instinctively, David reached up with his hands to take her body and bring it closer to his own. The brush became a connection. He felt her tongue flicker forward, and opened his mouth to accept it.