Mark “Coop” Cooper

Location: Harper’s Junction, Star Kingdom of Windsor

“That was a shit sandwich with a side of ass fries,” Coop grumbled as he pulled himself up the last few ladder rungs and into the dilapidated factory.

After dispatching his two uninvited guests, Coop’s getaway had been uneventful. He made it to the rebel bar and descended down into the subterranean maintenance tunnels that were the circulatory system of any modern city. The rebellion’s main component were the working class folks who worked these tunnels, so the areas were clear as Coop passed through them and walked the few kilometers back to the factory district.

“We heard,” the SGM replied from a table not far from the access hatch. “It’s been all over the police frequencies.”

“Any idea who they were?” The GYSGT deposited a crate of components down in front of their boss.

Coop, like all the other straight men in the room, couldn’t help but stare. The GYSGT had stripped down into basically a sports bra and workout shirt that had enough holes in it, it didn’t count for much. Unlike all the rebel soldiers drooling and tripping over themselves, Coop knew he didn’t stand a chance. Plus, he was taken.

“I didn’t stop to ask,” he snapped back. His nerves were still a little raw and his pride was wounded from being spotted. The rest of the SRRT team had taken a crack at surveilling the palace, but only he’d been caught.

“Next time do a quick pat down and look at their credentials,” the SGM advised without looking up from the box of goodies the GYSGT had brought him. “It’ll help to know if that was a Windsor intelligence asset or just a local detective you iced.”

Coop nodded because he knew he should have done that in the first place, but with the chef standing there looking like he was ready to bolt, Coop made the executive decision to get the hell out of dodge. “Roger that,” he replied as he walked up to the table. “What do we have here?”

“Don’t touch,” there was a warning in the SGM’s tone that Coop knew better than to disobey.

“That insurgency class is finally come in handy,” the GYSGT joked as she brought over a chair and spun it around to sit in it backwards.

“This isn’t the first time,” the SGM left it at that, which meant the rest was probably classified.

Coop just stared dumbly at the two of them until the GYSGT brought him up to speed. “About twenty years ago the infantry panicked about planets getting lost to the Blockies. We were just starting to expand meaningfully into a few sectors and we were rubbing elbows with our esteemed neighbors to the East more often. The brass got a bunch of snake eaters together, like the Sergeant Major here, and had them study up on insurgency warfare. They then went around to the militias on these newly founded worlds and taught some select units these tricks,” she grinned. “Nothing major ever happened beyond some naval skirmishes, and we were ten years from rediscovering the Windsor’s, so they cut the whole program after a few years.”

“But look at me now,” the SGM cracked a rare smile as he completed some component and the electronics blinked to life.

“What is it?” Coop asked as he reached forward, only to have his hand slapped like a child by the GYSGT.

“It’s a detonator, Cooper,” she chided as the SGM put it into a completed box. Looking in the box, Coop saw about a dozen of the devices.

“See if you can get some more components?” the SGM requested.

“Shit,” the GYSGT exclaimed as she checked the time. “Let’s go, Cooper. We’ve got to move.”

She tossed off the ratty shirt, getting catcalls from around the room, and got into her CMUs. She threw a jacket over to conceal the Commonwealth Military Uniform before giving everyone the finger. Everyone laughed, and Coop could feel the positivity in the air. They were planning to hit the Windsor’s where it hurt, and that gave these people hope.

Coop knew better than to just rely on hope as he hopped into the passenger seat of a garbage truck. The meeting with some off-planet weapons smugglers, who’d unfortunately been trapped on Harper’s Junction by the invasion, was happening at a waste disposal center. Again…people tended to not look too closely at people’s random shit, so it was the perfect cover.

Getting to the location was more of a nail biter. Traffic was getting heavy as the sun started to set and the work day ended. On one hand they were using the mass of people as cover. Public outrage tended to keep checkpoints at a minimum during rush hour, but on the other hand, they were in a big, slow moving target that anyone could point out to the Windsor’s and then they’d be totally fucked. After his recent run in with the law, Coop wasn’t keen on being in public right now, so he sat quietly in the passenger seat and fiddled with his pistol.

The pea shooter was nothing compared to his Buss, much less a M3, but when going to meet with illegal contacts, there was a certain protocol. Number one on that was don’t show up with big guns the other guy can’t match. Someone is going to start something and then everything goes to shit, so a little pistol it was.

he had to be thankful it was an EM propelled model. Most of the rebel foot soldiers coming with them had old-school slug throwers,

For about the millionth time Coop missed having his LACS. He was willing to do just about anything to get back in one.

After nearly an hour of driving, and one heart pounding episode where they thought they were getting pulled over by the cops, they arrived at the plant. As promised, it smelled like shit mixed with fouler shit, and a side of rotten onion rings. That would have distracted Coop if not for the two men at the gate with barely concealed sub-machines guns.

The GYSGT had a word with them, flashed a smile, and they were through the gate and rumbling toward a warehouse that looked nearly identical to all the others in the factory district.

“Ok, Cooper,” she threw the truck in park and turned to him. “I’m not the Gunnery Sergeant here. We’re Gwen and Mark, just a couple of people out to buy some guns. Understood?”

“Yes, Gunn…I mean Gwen,” the words sounded blasphemous rolling off his tongue.

Apparently, Gwen agreed. “We’ll work on it.” She opened her door and hopped down.

Coop doubted the gun smugglers would be thrown by them not using their ranks. They were too big to be anything other than enhanced military personnel, but he’d learned that concealing anything you could from the enemy was a good thing. Even if it was just your rank.

The other resistance soldiers gathered around the two SRRT members and headed for the large, metal double door that was cracked open. They heard voices from inside. Some of the rebel troops went in first before Gwen and Coop squeezed through the opening.

“Ho-chi-mama,” a man at the center of a rag-tag group of individuals stated when he saw Gwen. “I’d like me some of that.”

Coop ground his teeth and clenched his fists at the comment, but a warning look from Gwen made him stand back.

“Hello, boys,” the sweet voice that came out of her mouth was one Coop hadn’t heard since meeting her at Basic. “I hear you’ve got something long, hard, and capable of breaking a few hearts for me.”

The gun smugglers laughed as the innuendo, and just like that she had them relaxed.

Coop just stood back and watched the master work.

There was some haggling over the price, and a lot more haggling to get her to have a beer with them, but she fended them off with the skills of a beautiful women who’d been hit on by horny men for decades. Finally, an agreement was reached, and money exchanged hands. She waved her hand and Coop came forward to grab some of the crates. The rebels needed two guys per crate, while he could take on in each hand.

As he picked up his two, he couldn’t help but take a peek to see what they’d be using to storm the gates of the fortified palace. What he saw made his heart stop.

In his crate were dozens of AK-89s. The AK-89 was a Blockie weapon developed and deployed as their main assault rifle in 2089. They’d manufactured tens of millions of the model and had used it in combat for nearly a century and a half. Unfortunately, 150 years still meant they’d moved away from it in the 2230s, a solid two hundred years ago.

The AK models were known for their resiliency and dependability, and there were so many floating around in human space that everyone knew how to use one thanks to all the action they’d seen in real life and in holos. Thankfully, they were an EM powered model, but they were the first mass produced model after that tech really got rolling, so its performance numbers were nowhere near the current M3s model. It made up for it by firing a 2.5mm round, a lot bigger than the M3, and it looked like the smugglers were giving them plenty of ammo. It had a hundred round magazine, which was going to be needed. They’d need a ton of rounds to take down a regular Windsor grunt in their armor. Coop wasn’t even sure they’d be able to breach the enemy’s shields, and he knew there was no way in hell they were going to take down a mech if a V4 LACS couldn’t handle the task.

he tried not to let his despair show, but one of the smugglers caught on.

“Hey, kid, these are dependable guns right here. They’ll get you out of a bind and make whoever is fucking with you think twice about trying again.” The smuggler clearly wasn’t clueing into the fact that Coop and Gwen were military and they could only have one real target on this planet.

“Sure,” Coop shrugged as he grabbed his two crates and headed back toward the truck.

As he reached the double doors his IOR pinged him. Since it was in standby mode, it was a surprise and he nearly dropped his crates. When he checked the message he did drop his crates.

{Incoming.} The text looked so innocuous he would have assumed it was a joke if not for the setting he was in.

“In…!” he didn’t get the word out before the world exploded with light and sound.

He stumbled backward and tripped over the crate. He banged his head against the metal door, which didn’t help his already discombobulated senses. The only good part was that it gave him a reference point of where the weapons were.

As his eyes continued to adjust, his hands reached out and grabbed one of the AK-89s. The hundred round clip was harder to find and harder to insert, but as he fumbled with it he got in a prone firing position while using the crates as cover. When the blur started to dissolve into more concrete shapes an icy fist gripped his stomach.

A dozen men in black tactical gear were spreading out through the opposite side of the building. There was also a big hole in the ceiling where the large-area flash-bang came crashing in from. The men had on obsolete helmets by modern Commonwealth military standards, but it was still allowing them to coordinate and would increase their fire’s lethality. Plus, most of the smugglers and rebels were still rolling around and trying to get their bearings. Only him and Gwen seeming to have regained function.

{Lay down cover fire and I’ll move to you,} her voice popped into his head. They weren’t supposed to use the IOR, but they were up shits creek.

{Roger,} he targeted one of the lead men with the AK-89s old iron sights and pulled the trigger.

The weapons had some kick to it, but not enough to overwhelm his enhanced strength. He kept the barrel on target and three rounds hit the enemy in the chest. He went down, but Coop saw him crawl behind cover.

{Aim for extremities,} he relayed to Gwen as she popped up from her own cover and engaged another enemy.

It looked like the Windsor’s had moderately upgraded the capitol’s SWAT team. That was why the 89’s heavy round didn’t blow open that cop’s chest, but their arms and legs were a different story. Gwen’s rounds hit their target, and he went down in a spray of gore.

{Moving!}

Coop popped up and sprayed the area. He depleted the magazine in seconds, but it stopped the SWAT teams advance and allowed the GYSGT to make it a dozen meters closer to safety. She took cover behind a shelving rack.

{At your three o’clock,} Coop warned as the cops advanced farther into the warehouse and attempted to flank her position. He lost sight of her as she moved down the row, but the 89s powerful retort rang out seconds later.

That was all the time he could spend looking because the SWAT team had zeroed in on his position. Rounds started to chew up the ground and crates around him. He reached in a grabbed a handful of magazines before retreating back.

“Shit!” fragments of the faux wood kicked up by the incoming rounds dug into his hand. He popped up to spray the area again before bounding for the door.

Any of his instructor, including the GYSGT, would have chewed his ass out for firing blindly without acquiring a target. However, he didn’t think they’d expect him to be on an enemy held planet, without armor, HUD, or any modern targeting suites, and using a three-hundred-year-old Blockie assault rifle.

He expected rounds to tear through him as he squeezed through the door, but none came. He silently thanked the gods of war watching over him before using the door as cover to rain down fire on the enemy. He lost track of time as he burned through his ammo, but thankfully the smugglers and rebels were starting to get into the fight now.

Someone somewhere had grenades because stuff started to randomly explode on the far side of the warehouse.

{Gwen, where are you?} He scanned for any sign of the GYSGT. {Gwen!} He thought she was down and he was going to have to go back in to haul her ass out, when she appeared on the far right of the warehouse.

She was ducking behind a container as rounds tore into whatever garbage they were storing there. Coop aimed diagonally across the space, where he thought her attacker might be, and unloaded twenty rounds. She saw the opening he’d created and took it.

For a second, he thought she was home free, but then a puff of red erupted from her thigh, quickly followed by a second from her lower abdomen. Her face screwed up in pain and she faltered and fell.

{Gunney!} He desperately wished he had a grenade or something bigger to give him cover. He tried to squeeze back through the door, but rounds dinged into the metal and he took a ricochet in the forearm.

“DAMN!” he shook out the pain and droplets of blood flew everywhere.

She was down, but she wasn’t out. She was pouring fire back in the direction she’d been shot from and she must have hit something because that fire ceased.

{Get the truck ready,} her orders were clear over the IOR.

He looked over his shoulder and saw the rebel soldiers not caught inside standing like a bunch of frightened school children hanging around the big truck.

{They don’t seem to have a perimeter up, so we need to get the hell out of here before they tighten the noose,} she continued. {Fire up the truck and I’ll meet you there.}

{Yes, Gunney,} Coop’s training kicked in and he followed his orders.

“Stow that shit and keep an eye out!” He yelled at the rebels mulling around.

They’d gotten all but the two crates of 89’s that he’d been carrying, which was better than nothing, but a billion of those crates didn’t equate to one GYSGT Cunningham.

Coop hoped as he executed his orders. All they needed was the GYSGT.

That small glimmer of hope immediately extinguished as something glinted overhead. “Incoming!” Coop did the smart thing and put as much distance between himself and the truck as possible.

A missile streaked from above and straight into the cab of the vehicle. It went up in a ball of crackling flame. Even worse was when the originator of that missile crashed through the roof of the warehouse. Coop would never forget the look of a Windsor mech, and even though this was a slightly different design there was no mistaking its destructive potential.

{Run!} The GYSGT’s command came through before the mech’s five meter figure disappeared into the warehouse.

{But…}

{Get the fuck out of here, Cooper. That’s an order!} He knew there was no way she could possibly enforce that order. Her ass was grass, but her sheer willpower had Coop’s feet moving before he knew what was happening.

The truck was a smoldering wreck, all the weapons were gone, the GYSGT was about to be KIA, and their emergency egress plan involved wading through a manmade river of literal shit to get to the access tunnels that would take him out of there and to safety.

There was no better word to describe the total disaster this mission was becoming.

He sprinted for the shit river and safety.