u/Frostdraken

This is a bit of a longer one(about 7.4k words) so I had to break it into two posts.

[ Part 2 ]

This is a short story set in my wider TOC(The Oblivion Cycle) setting, more information, lore and even art can be found at r/TheOblivionCycle if you are interested, and I hope you enjoy!

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Havoc on the Battlefield

The air crackled overhead with the sound of distant rocket detonations as some manner of atmospheric aircraft screamed overhead before turning skyward once more with a supersonic crack. Debris were thrown a hundred meters from the blasts and in the shadow of a broken supermarket a human woman wearing standard union military gear threw herself prone in the shadow of a partially collapsed row of shelving and cursed out loud.

 

“Fracking fuzzers!” Charlie Kirzgat grunted as she hit the ground hard enough to leave bruises on her knees through her armoured kneepads. She rolled over and out of the open as the pinging of rocks and red-hot shards of shattered duracrete echoed all around her and then slammed her back against the shelving as she pulled herself fully into cover, gasping.

 

She checked the charge on her Electrolyzer rifle, the promethium powercell read a healthy eighty-percent charge. Good, she still had some fight left in her after all. She had been afraid she would be left toothless, such was the speed with which the attack had come. She shook her head as more explosives rained down from somewhere over the horizon, these ones seemed to be falling much farther away to her right at least. Maybe it was even friendly incoming fire.

 

She didn’t hold much hope for that though. They had been attacked out of nowhere by some hostile force calling itself the Hegemony of something. The name felt vaguely familiar. She thought she had heard of them before, but she could not place where in that moment.

 

“Luck-cursed rebel wannabes.” She muttered to herself before tensing.

 

Had that been ruble shifting nearby under booted feet? Or was it just more debris?

 

Charlie hunched into the shadow of her cover a little farther, for once she was not annoyed by her short and squat stature. The high gravity of Nesket Prime had shaped its people into compact and powerful powerlifter forms. She had been called ‘dwarf-like’ before and always railed against the term. But now as she huddled in the dimness of a ruined city, she wished she was miles underground mining for gold and jewels. Which was saying something given her fear of those mines.

 

Nesket was particularly wealthy in minerals; the lower density of the super-sized planet made mining operations easier than its higher gravity would suggest. The population of the planet was primarily human and nerivith, though there were small scatterings of other Union races to be seen if one knew where to look such as the slaaveth holdings near the northern sea. She fingered the trigger of her weapon as she heard the sound again, closer now. A faint scuffling, like a noppin rooting through dry leaves.

 

After another minute she saw it, it was a soldier in a strange uniform that she almost recognised. She could not place the soldier’s race as they were wearing a fully enclosed helmet that covered their more obvious features, but the heavy plates of ceramometallic-laminate over a ballistic hyperdiamond buckyweave nanofiber mesh was unmistakable as the heavy assault carapace armour she sometimes saw special operations members of the planetary defense forces use.

 

She balked at that, her weapon was effective against light armour at close range, but those plates were specifically designed to absorb and distribute heat and shock over their full surfaces. It was likely her directed energy weapon would not even penetrate them at this range, giving the unknown soldier plenty of time to fire back and obliterate her at their own discretion.

 

She fumbled at her tactical gear for a grenade, but found her fingers empty. She had been caught unawares by the attack like most of the planet and had only had time to gear up in her most basic equipment before the PDF base on the edge of the city had been wiped out from orbit by heavy bombardment. She had been lucky she was stationed in a smaller outpost to the edge of the town when it happened or she would have been immolated in the kiloton-range kinetic impacts that had flattened half the city and left it a burning ruin.

 

She blinked tears from her eyes as she fought to forget the screams of civilians and soldiers alike as the sky had been torn by the flashes of the orbital strikes. Streaks of falling ordinance had reached down from the sky like ghostly fingers and high in the distance she had been able to make out the pale outline of a large ship in the upper atmosphere as it rained death and torment upon the planet below. The shots had felt deliberate, but the destruction they had wrought had been indiscriminate, destroying military barracks and children’s schools alike.

 

Charlie felt her fingers tighten on her weapon. She would make them pay for this atrocity. For this unprovoked attack on her home. Her people.

 

She knelt slowly and then poked out from her improvised cover, looking for an opening in the unknown soldier’s guard. She had time to notice a strange symbol painted on the pauldron of their heavy armour, a strange black fist and star motif on a field of red. Not a symbol she recognised and so she ignored it as she pulled the trigger to her weapon three times in rapid succession.

 

Now Charlie wasn’t an expert marksman by any means, but like all members of the Nesket PDF she had passed her range time with the best of them. So she was unsurprised when her shots landed exactly where she had aimed. Two to the lower side of the torso where she knew the carapace armour was thinnest and the third she planted in the back of their knee in the hopes the concussive force would twist or fracture the joint even through the armour.

 

She was partially successful, the knee shot breaking something with an audible hissing snap that caused the soldier to scream and fall. Their arms flailed as the rifle in their hands fired when their finger jerked the trigger spasmatically. But as the wounded rebel dragged themself into the cover of a nearby refrigerator display she cursed. Her shots had injured them, but not put them down, and now they were out of sight and in solid cover.

 

What was worse she thought she could hear more movement rushing in her direction. She hunched further into the cover of the ruined structure and crawled as silently as she could towards the rear of the partially collapsed building. She was at a major disadvantage inside the structure she realised. These enemies seemed to have assault gear, meaning they were immune to the darkness, loud sounds and chemical agents. Hell, they might even have acoustic and lidar tracking systems in those damn things as well for all she knew.

 

She crawled into the darker spaces at the rear of the building, as she did so she felt an old, familiar fear begin to grip her. She stopped moving and closed her eyes, taking deep breaths as she had been taught by her mother after she had lost her father in a mining accident many years ago.

 

A small hole seemed to drop out of her middle, all the fear and rage and pain of the last hour flowing into it as she took a deep and steadying breath. She had learned to meditate when she was a child, her father worked long hours in the mines and she had been asked to go down with him on more than one occasion as there were ways children could be made useful in the crushing blackness down below. She had been trapped in the same cave-in that had taken her father’s life, and the lives of twenty-two others. But her small stature and low metabolic needs had saved her from death that day.

 

She poured all these negative emotions into that hole she had formed in her mind. She pushed her hope and sense of self into the hole for good measure while she was at it. If it was her destiny to die on this day, she would need to be as icy cold as space itself if she was going to take them with her to the crushing deep.

 

She grinned as the calm replaced the fear, then she opened her eyes again.

 

Gone was the wild look of a woman pushed to the edge, instead her face was a mask of focus. Her mind sharpened by her mental exercise. She gripped her weapon, she had no spare powercells for it, but there was a chance that somewhere in the back of the store they had a powercell refilling station. It might not be military, but she was sure she could at least jury-rig some manner of adapter for a civilian one if she needed to. As long as there were recharge sticks in it then she would be fine, they were standardised and should fit her weapon’s powercell.

 

Charlie climbed to her feet and then stopped as she heard the unmistakable sound of something clattering to the ground at the front of the ruined supermarket where she had been only a minute before.

 

No time left to worry, she moved towards where she knew the employee area to be. There in the back, the door was closed and locked as she pulled on it though. She cursed under her breath and then glanced around to see if there was an office or employee nearby. No time to look for a key she suddenly realised as the clanging got closer, she took aim at the locking mechanism and fired her rifle once.

 

The searingly bright beam of green energy lit the darkness with a strobe of light and there was the sound of something flashing to steam followed by the distinct tang of burning metal. As her eyes cleared she saw that her shot had largely done the trick. There was now a neat, brass-splattered hole where the simple locking mechanism had used to be. She thanked the builders of the structure for being too cheap to use more robust locking systems and kicked the door inwards.

 

It took her two tries, the doors creaking and then smashing inwards with a clatter as she forced the remains of the lock to shatter with her heavy boot. She ducked inside quickly and turned on the light on the side of her helmet. The room was dark, the power was out it seemed. But she knew what kind of layout to expect having worked in similar locations before she had joined the defense force.

 

She smirked at that even as she moved deeper into the room and around a corner towards a door labeled ‘maintenance personnel only’. She had only joined up in the PDF to help pay for college, she had never really expected to be in a fight like this. Weekend warriors, that was what the career soldiers called people like her. And she had grudgingly accepted the label as they were right. But she was no slouch, she always poured one-hundred-percent into everything she did. If she could not be the best she might as well be the best that she could be, just like her father used to tell her before.

 

She stopped, something in the half-illumination of her helmet had caught her attention. She looked back and had to suppress a shout. Yes! There in the back corner of the small, cramped maintenance room, was a promethium powercell exchanger.

 

She rushed to it and cursed as she realised that the civilian powercells were far too bulky to fit into the slot on her own weapon. But they would have recharge rods in them. She grabbed the first one and checked it, groaning. The indicator was solidly red. Useless.

 

She tossed it back onto the table and checked another. A dark amber, less than ten-percent.

 

She cursed aloud. “Shit!”

 

There had to be a box of spares around somewhere, she looked as fast as she could all the while acutely aware of the noise she was making. The promethium core of her own powercell was still healthy, if she could just find a few recharge rods to put in it.

 

Charlie stopped as a small yellow box caught her attention.

 

“Yes!” She whisper-yelled into the darkness and reached for it.

 

It was a small and comically decorated carton depicting a smiling grey rod with cartoonish features. Eyes, nose, mouth, complete with a bowtie and the slogan, ‘Roger Recharge is always ready!’. She opened it and grunted, it had only a single compressed metallic hydrogen recharge rod inside.

 

Well, it was better than nothing. And she had overstayed her welcome already. Her weapon’s charge was about three quarters still, so she wasn’t desperate just yet. She jammed the thick silver rod into one of her pouch pockets and stepped towards the exit.

 

Something made her pause though. Some small sense other than sight or sound, the tiny short hairs on the back of her neck standing on end as she threw herself back into the cover of the room as the air was filled with smoke and fire right where she had been about to tread.

 

“SHIT!” She cursed again, louder this time as something red-hot slashed her exposed lower cheek and caused a trickle of blood to stain the collar of her uniform. The intensity of the fire waned, the red beams of a laser weapon stopping as a few more regular bullets whipped through the now shredded doorway. She heard a small sound, something so simple that on any other day she might not have thought twice about it. A small pop followed by the tinkle of something small and metallic impacting the floor out in the darkened hall.

 

‘Grenade!’ she screamed in her own head even as she rolled for the cover of a heavy toolbox. She heard the grenade hit the far wall, she saw it bounce into the farthest corner of the room and land on top of the very work bench she had been standing at before.

 

She slammed her head down and curled into a fetal position as the small bundle of hate detonated. If she had not been wearing the protective ear coverings of her helmet the sound alone would have rendered her deaf. As it was, the pressure wave in the enclosed space pummeled her body from all directions at once. She screamed as something inside her seemed to tear, she tasted blood in her mouth and her eyes refused to focus. But she was alive, somehow.. someway.

 

There was a ringing in her ears that would not go away and no matter how much she seemed to blink her vision was still grey and swimming with fizzing sparks. But then she lifted her hand to cover her face and realised two things at once. Her helmet visor had caught a jagged piece of metal, stopping it less than a centimeter from her left eye but breaking a large part of the smart display in the process. And her eyes were blinking as the harsh orange sun now shone in them unfiltered by the broken, polarised visor.

 

She frowned at that in mild confusion. Sunlight? She was inside the back of the building, how was there sunlight in her eyes.

 

She looked again, blinking rapidly and losing a few precious seconds as she made sense of the scene before her. The grenade had blown a hole clear through the thin back wall of the store and sunlight was streaming through the torn metal. ‘Escape!’ a small part of her brain screamed at her, and to her credit she shuffled forwards towards it at the best pace she could manage in her battered state.

 

But she was wounded and disoriented, bleeding internally in all likelihood as well and to make matters worse it tasted like she had bit the crap out of her cheek too as the taste of copper filled her mouth. Charlie shuffled forwards as the bloody saliva dribbled down her chin, all sense of time drowned out by the pounding of blood in her head and the ringing in her ears. She stumbled suddenly as something seemed to push her forward violently from behind, a dark spot of blunt pain blooming in the space between her shoulder blades. Arms flailing, she tumbled into that bright circle and out the rear of the structure.

 

Her fall was far from graceful and she groaned in pain as she ended up on the ground in a tangled heap. But her gun was still in her hand, and she was not dead yet.

 

She shuffled a few meters from the gap and into the cover of some manner of low electrical box before she tried her best to stanch the flow of blood in her mouth. She grabbed a small quickheal capsule made especially for mouth injuries from her medical pouch and crunched down on it, spreading the tingling gel across the inner surface of her partially flayed cheek. It hurt, and she hissed at the sting of it, but gritted her teeth as it began to work its way into the wound.

 

Within a few seconds the bright spot of pain that it had been in her mind began to fade to a dull background ache and the bleeding slowed. She bared red-stained teeth in victory at the tiny win and leaned out from cover slightly. Without the polarising visor of her helmet, the bright orange dwarf sun above tinged everything around with a harsh sepia tone, but it was not too bad and she could still see. She knew that leaving her eyes exposed to the harsh glare for too long could lead to permanent damage.

 

There was another clatter near the hole that had been made and she saw the tip of something poke out of the wall. It looked like the barrel of a rifle, perhaps a light machinegun of some sort. There were gunshots nearby and the thing pulled back into the building as she leaned back into cover. She breathed out and started to shake a little as the adrenaline that had been keeping her going started to fade a little.

 

She couldn't let herself go into shock, if she passed out she would die. Simple as that.

 

With a groan, she pushed herself to her feet and aimed her Electrolyzer G66 over the top of the electrical box. But the hole stayed silent, no carapace armoured nightmares flooded through the gap to assail her again. None of these strange soldiers and their unknown black-star sigils accosted her position.

 

Charlie looked around, more gunfire and the sharp snaps of a beam rifle sounding from two streets over. She was reminded that she was not the only one in trouble and her sudden good fortune would not last long. She might be alone, but she was still part of a greater whole, if she could just find other elements of her own company to link up with.

 

She stopped at that. Her company was gone. Burned to ashes in the fires that had struck them without warning from on high. She had only survived as she was seen as a non-integral asset and moved to the side. She frowned as the pain and fear tried to crawl their way back out of the hole she had put them in earlier.

 

“No.” She said aloud, gripping the butt of her laser rifle tighter into her shoulder as she did so. She was still a Union soldier. Duty bound to defend its people, even if she had never really expected to be called to fight. Her father would not have hesitated from such a gargantuan task, and neither would she.

 

Charlie took a step, it didn’t hurt nearly as much as she had feared it might. So she took another, bolder this time. Something in her left leg shifted uncomfortably, but held. So she ignored it and kept walking. Step by step, her gun raised and ready to fire, her eyes squinting in the harsh light as she looked for danger or allies.

 

She crossed the open street near the corner of the supermarket. Walking by the remains of a crushed van she saw the carcass of a dead civilian still smoldering in the driver's seat. She coughed but ignored the smell of burning hair and meat as best she could and crouched in the shadow of a partially collapsed building nearby. The scene before her was so dark and full of horror that it scratched at the corners of her sanity just to witness it.

 

In front of her was a field of corpses. Men and women, multiple species, lay dead in the street where they had fallen. What was worse were the bodies far too small to be adults, she looked away lest she lose what tenuous grip she still had over herself. It looked to have at one point been some manner of public space, maybe a food court or rest area. It must have been packed when the first strikes hit. Now it was a graveyard.

 

Who would do this? Who would commit such atrocities and why? What was the purpose? Recognition seemed to tug at her memory, but she was too distracted to pull at the thread.

 

Her hands clenched again at the sheer brutality on display as she ground her teeth to keep from screaming. Tears filled her misty vision and she was forced to stop and wipe at them, but it was hopeless. More tears came to fill the spots left behind till they streamed from her face openly. The drops of liquid rage left burning trails on her dirty cheeks as she tried and failed to suppress the horror that was tearing her mind apart from inside.

 

She stumbled over something and stopped as she looked down. It was a scorched toy noppin. The small plushie animal looked to have originally been a bright yellow croc noppin, the wide head and thick arms unmistakable. It was black now, charred and partially melted on one side with a rear leg missing.

 

She reached down and gingerly picked it up off the ground, looking around blindly as if she would be able to return it to its rightful owner. Somewhere amongst the horror that her reality had become.

 

It was while she was so distracted that the snaps of supersonic rounds alerted her to danger. One bullet tugged at the hem of her uniform as it narrowly avoided hitting her in the thigh and she dropped the small stuffed animal. She started running towards the nearest cover she could see. A scorched looking decorative shrub surrounded by a knee-high retaining wall of neat concrete blocks. As she dove behind it her face contorted with pain as bruised and battered muscles took another beating. She felt the sore spot in her side grow sharply as the pain increased, but it was get down or die. But she refused to give up so easily, it was only pain. And pain was an old friend to her.

 

Hunching behind her sorry cover, she peeked out around the side and was dismayed to see a group of no less than eight hostile combatants heading her way in tight military formation. They were bunched close enough together that had she thrown a grenade she might have effected real damage to their number, but alas she was grenade poor. She could see the reddish horns of at least one nerivith and the bulky frame of a yeown amongst them, even the raised and armoured frill of a slaaveth warrior. A multitude of species was arrayed against her then it seemed.

Continued in [ Part 2 ]