Mark “Coop” Cooper

Location: North American Eastern Seaboard, Earth, United Commonwealth of Colonies

Darkness and pain, that was Coop’s universe right now.

It felt like he’d taken a donkey kick to the chest by Eve, but instead of laying off like a loving baby momma, she’d proceeded to kick the crap out of every inch of him.

he thought at no one and nothing in particular.

{Synchronization disruption detected.}

{Reboot Initiated.}

A sharp spike of pain in his head was all the notice he got before the world went white and a high-pitched whine filled his ears. The sudden change brought on a severe case of nausea. He barely avoided blowing chunks all over his small enclosed space. After a few seconds everything equalized back to normal, and the world snapped back into focus. Or at least it was supposed to be the world. It looked more like some hellscape.

Coop was on his back with his head facing away from the coast. There was a narrow cone of green shooting backward, while the rest was chared black. The trees that had been there were ripped out at the roots and thrown out of sight. Even the hill where the comms relay bunker had been was flattened. Coop could make out the crumbling concrete and duro-steel foundation sticking out of the scorched earth.

Coop knew the effectiveness of the missiles his own MOUNT carried, and they wouldn’t do a tenth of the damage around him.

{Synch rating ninety-one percent,} a short burst of text across his vision signified he was back in action. He immediately ran a system check and queried his AI.

“Play back from the point the missile was launched in a separate window, half-vision,” he ordered.

His vision split, one half showed his current surroundings, and the other showed his point of view facing the enemy aircraft after taking the shot at the flying cone. He watched as the escort fighter broke off, came at him, and fired. The missile streaked in, and he stood his ground. He saw his swatter open up, and the sparks of impact as the rounds hit the missiles shield.

as he thought it, he was sure he’d thought it before.

The swatter continued to pour rounds into the missile as he deployed his shield, powered it up, and put it between himself and the incoming danger. The grunts were bunched behind him, about fifty meters back near the base of the bunker, but not all of them. A few had been fanning out at the sight of the incoming ordinance. That was SOP. Disperse to avoid a total squad kill, but Coop cringed a the missile traveled its final hundred meters.

His swatter continued to pour rounds into it, hoping to break through the shield. He looked at the ammo count and grimaced. He’d wasted a thousand rounds on the missile with no effect. He forced himself to keep his eyes open as it closed the final gap…and then it exploded.

“Replay and slow down,” Coop thought he caught something.

The footage rewound and started again at a crawl. The missile inched forward, aimed directly at the center of his shield. He followed it closely until it suddenly exploded a small distance from him.

“Distance from me at the time of explosion?” he asked the AI.

{Enemy missiles detonated at twelve meters.} That made Coop pause.

“Did it detonate or did I kill it?” he asked.

{Sensors show the shield on the incoming missiles dropped and was impacted by a round from your anti-missile weapon system .0001 seconds later.}

“So, I killed it,” Coop looked back at the mayhem and destruction surrounding him, and remembered the face the blast had still knocked him on his ass. “Can’t imagine the damage it would have done if it hit me?” he said to himself.

{Probability of total destruction is low, but serious hardware damage is estimated at seventy-two percent,} the AI answered his question anyway.

Speaking of damage, Coop looked over the results of his diagnostic. Most systems were green, but a few critical ones weren’t. His swatter had minor structural damage where the explosion leaked through a seam in his directional shields. He deployed some repair bots from an internal compartment to see if they could fix the damage. All his missiles were still offline, corrupted by the hack that almost took over his whole MOUNT. Frontal shield array was down to thirty percent, while his portable shield was at five percent. There was even some light scorching on the duro-steel. He put that on the queue for the repair bots to take a look at. If he got in another fight, he was sure he’d need it.

All in all, he’d survived with no permanent damage. The same couldn’t be said of the grunts.

“Anyone still alive, rally on me,” he blasted over his external speaker. With STRATNET offline, he had no locational data on any of his force. The node they’d been using for commo was also a lump of charred carbon now. He wouldn’t be calling for reinforcement any time soon.

“Over… here…” the statement was punctuated with coughing.

Coop rushed over and started pulling at some of the rubble. A meter of digging and he pulled a chunk of soil and concrete block off of two grunts. One was the SSG, and the other was a PFC whose name he didn’t know.

He placed his fingertip on the SSG to form a hard link so he could read the man’s armor data. a yellow identifier came back, along with elevated blood pressure, heartrate, and list of issues his medical systems were working on.

The worst of it was a dislocated shoulder, which Coop thought the SSG should be eternally grateful for. Painkillers and generic nanites were already in his system to dull the pain and try to repair the damage. Coop moved onto the other soldier. His identifier came back black, flatlined.

“Fuck,” Coop grumbled, as he gently removed the PFCs body and started to dig around the recovering SSG.

Only two other soldiers were still alive. A PVT was red, with bad internal bleeding that was struggling to be fixed my his medical nanites, and surprisingly, a PFC who was green. A big chunk of concrete had fallen over him, but avoided crushing him by another piece of rubble. The two pieces had shielded him from the blast, and he’d just needed a chunck to be removed so he could move again.

Coop chuckled at the tiny bit of good news. There weren’t any more, everyone else was gone. He didn’t even find the bodies of the ones who’d been outside his armor’s protective cone.

“Now what, sir” the SSG grimaced as he tried to shrug in his armor. The green PVT was standing protectively over the unconscious PVT clearly not knowing what to do.

Coop didn’t have a good answer. He replayed the sensor footage that was taken after he was knocked on his ass and he lost synch. The fighter circled the destruction, but made the decision not to waste more ammo on taking out something that looked destroyed. It had rejoined the convoy of ships and slowly escorted the damaged cone vessel inland. The AI pegged its heading as southwest of Coop’s position.

“Let’s head north,” Coop decided. He didn’t want to go anywhere near those fighters. His shields were slowly recharging, but another missile hit would turn the MOUNT into his tomb.

“What’s north?” the SSG asked, “And how are we getting there?”

Coop immediately thought, but he couldn’t tell that to the grunts.

“Other members of my outfit are stationed throughout the eastern seaboard. If we head north, I know one who’s positioned with a garrison at the Bethesda Naval Hospital, along with a full battalion of ass kickers. If we can get to them, we’ll have a fighting chance.”

“And our mission?” the SSG’s tone held uncertainty.

“Our mission was to hold the coast against incoming landers. We did out best, and damaged their force, but then they blew us to hell and bypassed our position. With comms out, we have no idea how everyone else is faring. We can either fallback to the mountain positions, or see if there is a pocket still holding out. If anyone is, it’s the folks at the hospital. If we make contact, or get a signal, we can always turn west and head for the new lines that we’re probably establishing there right now.”

Coop had no intention of heading west until he checked on Eve, and saw whether or not his unborn child had been evacuated yet, but the SSG didn’t need to know that.

“Sounds like a plan to me, sir. Just the problem of getting there. We’re a couple hundred klicks away, and I don’t think Gilroy here is walking anywhere anytime soon,” the SSG gestured at the unconscious PVT.

“Call me your personal taxi then,” Coop made some selections on his HUD and portions of his armor popped open.

Like the tanks of old, sometimes troops rode them from battle to battle, so Gold Technoligies’ engineers had made sure that could happen again. It wouldn’t be the most comfortable ride, but it was better than walking.

“Help me get Gilroy up there and let’s get the hell out of here,” the SSG ordered the other PVT.

Just like Coop, no one else wanted to stay in this graveyard longer than they had to.

Eve Berg

Location: North American Eastern Seaboard, Bethesda Naval Hospital, United Commonwealth of Colonies

“Comms are still down, ma’am.” A SGT on the team the LCDR of the defensive battalion had assigned to Eve answered the unspoken question. It had been the same answer for the last day.

“Thanks, Ricco,” Eve made sure to learn the comms specialist’s name.

STRTNET and TACCOM might be down, but repeater relays had been placed through the battalion’s AO, so everyone had comms with everyone else. The BN S6 had even established enough bandwidth for everything down to squad-level nets. That would be priceless in the coming battle. You didn’t need the battalion commander trying to shift troops while an assistant squad leader took over the channel to designate new firing lanes.

Even better, Eve had been folded into the defensive plan. While the rest of the battalion dug in, or erected hardened fighting positions, she was a mobile force that could be anywhere on the battlefield within a few minutes. She was both tip of the spear and the reserve. The LCDR already told Eve she’d be counting on her to go above and beyond during the coming fight, and Eve had all the motivation in the world to do just that.

She kept her eyes on target toward the coast, but pulled up a rear-facing camera in a smaller window of her vision. Spyders and other craft were constantly coming and going from the facility. An air-ambulance was lifting off one of the many rooftop landing zones and taking a critical patient farther west. All traffic up to the waiting refugee fleet had been suspended an hour ago. They were long gone by now.

The combined human fleet was getting pummeled by the aliens that were settling into orbit and blocking that fleet from coming to assist in repelling the invaders. Eve didn’t know the specifics, and didn’t really care. All that mattered was a tiny embryo marked in canister OBGYN-B-129486912, that was currently awaiting transport on Spyder Dogface-One-Three, from landing zone six, to bunker complex Sierra-Mike-Eight, that was scheduled to depart in four minutes.

she watched the internal countdown that dominated her HUD.

A shudder went through her. For the next four or five minutes her kid was at its most vulnerable. After that, Eve would be able to hold up any fucker that tried to kill her kid.

“Raider to Valkyrie, SITREP, over.” A call came in from the BN HQ stationed in the hospital itself.

Eve shook her head when she heard her call sign, and tried to push the bubble of fear in her gut away. The time was still ticking down, and no sign of the enemy.

“Valkyrie to Raider, still no contact on long range sensors,” she sent back.

“Roger that, Valkyrie, stay frosty, out.” The line went dead, and Eve went back to watching the countdown clock.

Eve wasn’t sure how the other defenders were doing things, but the LCDR in charge here was well aware that the enemy’s cyber capabilities far outreached the Commonwealth's, and had planned accordingly. She was taking nothing for granted. Nothing was interlinked and open to enemy intrusion, and there were breaks everywhere to stop any intrusion in its tracks before it reached anything vital. The long-range scanners were just one example.

They had OPs stationed every five hundred meters out for two kilometers. Those OPs had portable sensor arrays that took in the information and scanned it. The information was evaluated before being tight beamed along a chain that led back to HQ and the defending units around the hospital. If a sensor array was compromised, they’d just shut it down, and when the team didn’t report in, or came running back to the defensive lines, they’d know the enemy was coming. Not necessarily the enemy’s disposition, but it was better to know something and be able to communicate effectively, than to have all the data and not be able to tell the soldiers in the trenches where to shoot.

Eve walked past an entrenched missile battery and gave the soldiers there a nod. They all looked nervous. Rumors of the enemy taking control of drones and missiles after they were fired were circulating throughout the defenders. Eve hadn’t heard anything verifiable, but just the thought of your weapons being used against you was enough to rattle any soldier.

“OP-two report in,” Eve forwarded a transmission up the line. In addition to everything else she was doing, her comms suite was also being used as a relay.

She stood where she was for several minutes, a sentry over the nearby missile launchers, and waited for the reply to make its way back. When nothing came, she knew it was game time.

“Look alive people!” she roared over his external microphone. “Looks like this is it.”

NCOs started screaming, soldiers started double and triple checking everything as they settled into their fighting positions; all while Eve stood tall and watched her surroundings.

She’d lost tracking data on Dogface-One-Three after it passed beyond the farthest OP to the west. Since OP-Two was to the east, she was confident her baby was out of harm’s way.

she reminded herself as she checked her own weapons and waited for the enemy to show themselves.