When Alexander got the alert that the enemy had been spotted, Eden’s End had been put into lockdown, and everyone hurried to their designated shelters.
He figured they would have a few hours at a minimum, but the enemy jumped in behind the defensive screen and opened fire before the alert could be forwarded to the fleet.
The facility shook with each plasma and missile impact, but the improvised defenses were holding, at least until the nuke went off.
Alexander picked himself off the floor and looked around. The air was filled with dust, but the dome they were standing in had survived. He wasn’t sure how the rest of the facility was doing, and he couldn’t focus on that. He would leave damage control to Lucas and the others monitoring the control center. “Is everyone alright?”
Heads nodded, and suited figures confirmed they were fine as they picked themselves up off the floor. All of the suit icons in Alexander’s display were green, but that only covered the small group assigned to him.
Alexander adjusted his own augment suit, feeling a bit awkward wearing it, but it added another layer of protection that he didn’t quite feel that his human form provided. It was probably overkill, but it gave him and Yulia peace of mind. Speaking of, he looked at the bright yellow suit nearby. Yulia had refused to stand by and hide while he was risking himself.
Demanding that she stay protected while others fought hadn’t worked. She argued against hiding since the other academy students were also suited up for the defensive operation. He could still force her, but if he did, she would hate him forever, and he couldn’t even say that she was wrong. Since there was no convincing her otherwise, Alexander did the next best thing and made sure she was in his group along with the other cadets from the academy.
Nobody could argue against that because he was likely the strongest individual taking part in the direct defense of the facility, even if he wasn’t the most skilled fighter.
He glanced at the other academy students, all of whom were outfitted in their own black suits with white trainee badges painted on the shoulders. They were far too young to be risking their lives, but if they couldn’t keep the Shican out of the facility, nobody would survive.
Every single man and woman who wanted to help with the defense had been given a set of the armor and an FE rifle. Alexander wasn’t taking any chances. The enemy had almost succeeded in nuking the facility already, but the excessive preparations had saved them.
“The fleet’s here, Alex,” Lucas said over the crackling radio channel.
Alexander let out a breath of relief and thanked Lucas for the information.
A few minutes later, Lucas came back on the comm. “Uh, Alex, we have a problem.”
“What sort of problem?” he asked on the private channel.
“The entire enemy fleet is diving into the atmosphere. It looks like they are heading straight for the facility, possibly to use it as cover to prevent the fleet from shooting them down.”
Alexander’s brain went blank. When he had prepared for a ground battle, he assumed maybe a few enemy destroyers would land. Knowing the Shican, it was only logical to assume they would try to leverage their melee capabilities. Never in his mind did he consider that their massive dreadnoughts would try to land. There was no way those vessels could support their own weight, and once they entered the atmosphere, there was no going back. It was insane, but it was happening, and there was little they could do to stop them.
He was about to order everyone into the bunkers and hope for the best when Rush cut in on the private comm. “Alex, let us handle this. We can redirect the ship from hitting the facility if they are disabled, but not from landing.”
“You can?”
“Probably,” the man muttered in reply before cutting the connection.
Alexander wanted to demand more information, but the facility shook, and more dust rained down from the ceiling.
The Shican were still firing. He heard a crack and looked over to one of the adjoining halls just as it collapsed. The hallway had sat directly in one of Yi Na’s red zones.
“Seal your suits!” one of the strike team leaders called.
Most were already sealed, but a few of the volunteers had been leaving their helmets open as they nervously looked around.
“Brace!” came a shouted command over the emergency system and all comms.
Everyone dropped down or grabbed something solid, and a moment later, it felt like the ground leaped into the air to smack them.
“Atrium C has collapsed,” Lucas said over the radio. “One of the enemy destroyers struck it directly.”
“Fuck!” Alexander said before he could stop himself. The energized armor was tough, but it wasn’t designed to absorb an entire ship crashing into it. And that was only one vessel. The enemy had hundreds.
The world continued to rock around them as more enemy vessels impacted the surface, then it stopped. Shockwaves rolled over the facility, followed by shrieking winds from the collapsed hallway. The wind brought choking dust, leaving the atrium looking foggy. If it was that bad inside, he couldn’t imagine what it looked like outside.
An exhausted-sounding Rush came over Alexander’s radio. “We did what we could, but most of the enemy ships were able to wrestle control back from us and land instead of impacting the surface. We got lucky, however, about half of the enemy vessels broke apart during the descent. Their debris will miss the facility entirely.”
“You did more than enough. Thank you.” Alexander replied.
“Good luck,” Rush said, before cutting the call.
Alexander turned to his group and activated the global comm. “We have Shican on the ground. I don’t know about all of you, but I don’t plan on letting them set foot in our home.”
Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.
There was a roar of approval as everyone raised their weapons in the air.
The plan to meet the aliens outside of the facility wasn’t his, but he agreed with it. The Shican were far more dangerous in close quarters, and the main advantage of the FE rifles would be lost if they were forced to fight inside the facility. Perhaps if all of the defenders were as skilled as the strike teams, instead of something more akin to National Guard forces, who only got basic training a few times a year, he would reconsider his position. Alas, that wasn’t the case.
He motioned for the strike team leaders to take command, and soon enough, their group was racing toward the exit. With any luck, the other strike teams would be doing the same.
***
Thesska picked himself off the floor and groaned. “What happened?”
After realizing his fleet was doomed, he knew forcing the humans into melee combat would be his best bet to cause them as much damage as possible before all forces were killed. Anything he could do to slow them down would make his future return that much easier.
Thesska was more than willing to kill humans in single combat, but it irked him that the armada had lost the orbital advantage. His plan to jump behind the human defenses had worked, but he had not factored in the debris preventing his fleet from withdrawing.
Only a sparse handful of ships had managed to form warp fields and jump away, while the rest were stuck. More vessels were destroyed by the remaining surface weapons, the orbital defenses, and the human fleet, but those weapons fell silent as the sky burned upon their entry. The few surviving ships would rendezvous with his technologue, and he could rejoin them later, hopefully as the victor of this little hunt, but with the enemy controlling orbit, he doubted that would be the case.
Had he been able to pull out a victory in orbit, it would have been one of the greatest battles of his entire life, but he knew they wouldn’t escape the unfortunate situation he had trapped them in.
“The humans infiltrated our computer systems,” someone said with a cough. “They redirected our flight path slightly and tried to crash us into the surface. We managed to recover control, but not all of the armada was so lucky.”
Thesska growled in annoyance as he stood and dusted himself off. “How many other ships survived?”
“I’m not sure, Emperor. I’m getting readings from a few dozen, but our external sensors are damaged, and visuals are being obscured by all the dust in the air.”
He would have preferred it if more captains had crashed into the massive ground facility when they realized they were doomed, but he would take what he could get.
Thesska grunted. “Tell everyone to arm themselves. It’s time to hunt.”
He didn’t wait for a reply as he hurried to the nearest airlock. The external hatch was already open, and crew members were already jumping out before he even arrived. Everyone’s bloodlust was peaked, so it was no surprise. He jumped out of the opening only a moment before something invisible burned through the choking haze above and cut into the top of his ship from bow to stern.
The defensive field must have collapsed in the crash landing because something inside the vessel exploded, and a fireball blew through the opening he had exited a moment earlier.
Thesska growled in annoyance. He had been hoping that the dust would obscure the surviving armada ships for a bit longer before the humans started targeting them from orbit.
He could hear other explosions in the distance, but he ignored them as he joined the growing crowd of Shican warriors as they raced across the dusty ground on all fours toward the barely visible building in the distance. The air was thin and tasted foul, but the basic cybernetics that most Shican had, such as augmented lungs, took care of any issues there.
More Shican joined them, appearing from the dust like ghosts, turning the small crowd of warriors into a tide of death heading toward the frantic humans who were trying to set up some defense.
Thesska snorted when he saw the humans pouring out of the facility to face them in open combat. If they wanted to fight, he would give it to them. He slowed and stood, pulling the rifle from his back. Not all of the Shican used ranged weapons, but Thesska was a proponent for using any tool he had access to.
He picked out a target hiding behind a damaged defensive fortification and fired the heavy projectile. It should have smashed into the human and brought him down, but instead, the projectile stopped short of the target, and the human slapped it out of the way and brought up their own gun.
***
Alexander cursed as he exited the building. The defensive fortifications that had been set up had been completely obliterated by the shockwave from the nuclear weapon or the ships crashing, not that it mattered. A few groups were attempting to rebuild them with anything at hand, but the enemy was already rushing out of the thick dust hanging in the air.
Weapons fire cracked across the flat terrain, and Shican fell in droves, but more kept coming. Alexander fired until his rifle ran out of ammunition, then he reached for one of his spare magazines.
The sounds of gunfire were punctuated by explosions as the fleet carved into the crashed vessels with lasers, trying to reduce the number of Shican spilling out of the ships. He would have called them soldiers, but it looked more like every single Shican aboard was overcome with madness and racing toward them.
Lucas must have been directing the fleet’s fire, but it didn’t seem to be helping much. One group of Shican reached a hastily assembled barricade and simply bounded over the ten-foot-tall wall to tackle the defenders. That group wasn’t even composed of any of the Shican cyborgs.
The armor evened the odds against the alien felines, even for those less skilled in close combat, but it wasn’t perfect.
A large group bounded toward Alexander and his group. Alexander’s rifle clicked empty once more as he fired round after hypersonic round into the Shican soldiers, burning through ammo as fast as he could reload the weapon. It wasn’t enough. He went to reload once more, but was forced to use the rifle to intercept the Shican blade aimed at his skull. Before the hissing alien could pull back for another strike, Alexander bashed it in the face with the butt of the gun.
There was a crunch, and the individual fell to the ground and didn’t get up.
Alexander looked around frantically for Yulia. She was locked in melee combat with an unenhanced Shican warrior. Her rifle knocking aside strikes, but unlike him, she hadn’t run out of ammunition. When she knocked the enemy’s weapon aside, she had done so in a way to angle the barrel at her adversary. The gun fired, and the Shican fighter fell, along with the three coming up behind it.
Those weren’t the only corpses surrounding his daughter. She had killed six other Shican while he had been fighting off one.
All of that training he had forced upon her with Damien was paying dividends, but he wished it had never been necessary.
He wanted to go help her, but more Shican were coming out of the dust cloud, and she appeared to have everything well in hand.
Alexander reloaded his gun. He was already on his last magazine. Had they known how many Shican would reach the ground, he would have quadrupled the amount of ammo each person carried. The Shican weren’t going to give him time to retrieve more from the ammo crates.
He was halfway through his last magazine when he saw the first enemy cyborgs emerge from the dust cloud. They weren’t hard to spot. They all wore black armor and held ranged weapons that very few of the other Shican seemed to use. The cyborgs were also quicker than the normal Shican.
Alexander targeted one that stopped to shoulder a large laser. The FE round zipped across the distance in barely a heartbeat, and the target’s head exploded. He scanned the enemy and found a few more targets carrying the deadly lasers. As he fired, he told the other defenders to focus on those individuals.
The Shican had projectile rifles as well, but the armor’s upgraded defensive fields were far more effective against those. The individual fields still had a short duration, but with the help of Rush and the others, he had managed to give each field generator a series of five stored charges without having to do a full redesign of the system.
He knew the changes were saving lives, but he wished he could have done more. Now that Cyborgs were joining the attack, those fields wouldn’t hold up for long, but he couldn’t focus on that.
In the moment Alexander took to lower his rifle and glance around, someone took a shot at him. He slapped the projectile away after it was caught by his defensive field in case it was explosive and snapped his weapon up to return fire.
As always, thanks for reading! And thanks for the support! If you enjoy the story, please rate it and comment below!
Series finale is now available on Patreon!
