The Door, Copernicus Caldera,

Einstein, Deep Periphery,

14^th March 3068

 

Contrary to the expectations of the assembled mercs, honed by years of indoctrination by holovid movies and Immortal Warrior episodes, the doors did not just creep open slowly, like some ancient dinosaur that had not moved its body for centuries.

The initial opening was slow, but the Door suddenly accelerated, the two huge sections sliding into hidden grooves on either side. There was hardly a sound after the initial rumbling.

One moment they were staring at a widening crack in the side of the mountain, the next they were looking into a vast tunnel, illuminated by bright lighting from an incredibly tall ceiling.

Must be some really great door lubricant. Score one for alien tech, Frank thought distractedly. He did not move, like everybody else, their tasks forgotten by the abruptness of the event. Somehow, when opening doors, especially those for long lost bases, such situations practically guaranteed a slow gradual revelation of the entrance, thus giving the discoverers some sort of mental preparation.

They did not have that luxury. The huge opening remained where it was, beckoning them into its cavernous interior. Finally coming to his senses, Frank started issuing his orders.

“All units, this is Raider Lead. Raider Nine, move in. Lancer Toad, cover their rear. Everybody else prepare to follow in. The Falcons are burning in fast, so we gotta step it…”

“Uh, Raider Lead, this is Nest One.” The comms operator sounded very nervous, unlike his earlier report. “We’ve picked up more contacts, and they seem to be from the sea, sir.”

“Nest One, repeat all after more contacts.” Frank couldn’t believe his ears.

Meanwhile, the various units, shook out of their reverie by Frank’s orders, started moving purposefully for their assigned positions.

“Frank, this is Nest Two.” It was the Nile. “We are definitely picking up a large paint from the ocean heading here fast! We better get moving. Forsen says he doesn’t want to find out who the newcomers are!”

“Affirmative. We’re moving as fast as we can.” Frank checked his scanners. Bryan’s team had moved into the base, with Drenner and his elementals right behind them. The rest of the merc infantry were advancing into the base, along the walls of the corridor. The tanks and Kety’s lance were getting ready to follow, while Ian had collapsed his lines, falling back to amongst the dropships, ready to follow the others into the safe sanctuary.

A call came in from the Battle’s Bane barely thirty seconds later. “Raider Lead, the new contacts have engaged the Falcons! It’s a real mess out there!”

 

Star Captain Daniela Mattlov stared intently at the information flowing over on her screens, transmitted to her mech from cable feeds from the dropship while it was still nestled within the mechbay. She wanted to keep appraised of the dropship status, the status of her trinary, as well as a radar feed from the dropship sensors to check for any surprises.

Ten aerospace fighters were accompanying the Sword of Buhallin, commanded by one Star Commander Galietra Binetti. Composed by a mix of heavy and assault fighters, they were tasked to destroy the remaining mercenary fighters.

Out of nowhere, a huge spot suddenly appeared on the radar feed screen, directly under their dropship’s present position. She did not even have time to react before there was a sudden lurch from the dropship.

She was flung forward, and only the tight safety straps prevented her head from a skull jarring collision with her control panel.

“What happened…” She barely had time to finish her question before the frantic call came in from the bridge.

“Galaxy Commander, there’s several large vessels emerging from the sea below us. They appeared without warning and started firing at us! We have sustained several hits, and damage is moderate. Galietra Binneti is engaging, but the vessels are launching fighters as well, dozens of them! Prepare to drop once we’re over land! I don’t know how long I can keep the dropship in the air!” The use of contractions by the Star Captain further reinforced the urgency of the situation. The sounds of desperately shouted orders could be heard in the background. The ship shuddered violently.

Daniela heard Lizabet Danforth’s reply. “Inform the Star Commodore immediately. Any idea who the enemies are?” The ship shook again, probably from the impact of weapons fire.

“Neg. We’ll be approaching land in 20 seconds, get ready to drop!”

All around the bay, Daniela could see mechs slowly being pushed in their cradles by huge movers to the dropship doors. She checked the status of her attached jump packs, not wishing to end up splattered on the ground due to the jump pack failure.

A hover drop maneuver was already tough enough in the best of circumstances. Now they were being asked to drop right in the middle of a dogfight, with a damaged dropship and Kerensky knows how many enemy fighters swarming over them. Daniela shuddered. The whole thing was turning out to be a fiasco.

The shaking from enemy fire had not paused in those twenty seconds. If the extent of the shaking was any indication, the dropship was getting pummeled.

As the counter on her HUD counted down to zero, the bay doors opened, revealing a sight of a huge caldera below the ship, while numerous black fighters swarmed the air.

There were far too few green painted fighters in comparison for her to feel comfortable. This was no longer just a fight to destroy the mercs. It had turned into a fight for sheer survival.

“Good luck!” The dropship captain yelled as he cut them loose.

Her Masakari was shoved out of the bay door, into the fiery skies, into the storm.

 

The terrifying visage of a Scytha assault fighter slashed through the skies, its ER PPCs blazing particles of vengeance at its enemies, the hordes of black fighters that had boiled out of the huge saucers that had emerged from the oceans.

Its pilot, Star Commander Galietra Binneti of Clan Jade Falcon, was normally a calm and assured officer who had proven his skill and worth in dozens of border skirmishes since the Coventry campaign, where he had his first taste of combat.

His calm had failed him this time. His fighters had been accompanying the dropship when their radar had picked up contacts below them.

Galietra had an uncanny sense for detecting danger, and the present situation had certainly looked threatening. Before he even realized it, however, he had suddenly ordered his Star to break and roll away. The movement saved his command, as hundreds of laser beams and missiles pierced the air where they would have been if they had not carried out Galietra’s order.

The sight of several huge saucers rising from the sea came next, as they disgorged a mass of black fighters. Each saucer was four hundred meters in diameter, almost half the length of their Jade Falcon Warships! They rose with amazing speed, heading towards the caldera, while the black fighters appeared as almost a solid wall, filling up the sky with fire and steel as they attacked his pilots.

That scene had nearly sent him mad. While he had kept a shaky hold on his mind, half of his Star was not as fortunate. They had gone berserk, disregarding their heat levels as they attacked the enemy with wild abandon, firing at anything that moved in the skies. While this might have been a real problem in a normal fight, Gal had since decided that the sheer number of enemy ships gave them plenty to shoot at, so it was not exactly a bad idea.

After downing three bogeys in one minute since the start of the action, Gal had managed to claw his sanity back from the brink. While there were a lot of enemies, they were poorly armed in comparison even to Inner Sphere fighters and seemed to be poorly piloted. That had helped him regain a great deal of his confidence.

The drop of the mechs had also helped to some extent. He had been involved in defending the dropship while it was still making its way to the drop zone, so that had forced him to forgo certain kills to concentrate on his mission. With the omnimechs safely out, he felt they could defend themselves now, and he could finally fight unrestrained by mission orders. The Sword of Buhallin had likewise turned its direction of attack decisively towards one of the giant saucers, scattering the numerous black fighters before it as it burned forward the enemy at full speed, its weapons blazing at its tormentors.

He glanced at his rear camera screen, triggering his small pulse laser at a black fighter on his tail before going into an Immelman that brought him firmly on his former pursuer’s six. Two Gauss slugs slammed into his target, literally punching through the enemy fighter.

Two more enemies swung in on his flank and above him. He did not flinch, cutting his speed and going into a wild scissors with the other two fighters before he emerged with both bogeys on his targeting cursors. He fired as soon as he had lined up his shots, one PPC at each target as he shifted the nose of his Scytha through each opponent. Both ships exploded in air.

He ignited his afterburners, the sudden burst of speed throwing off more enemy shots. He knew that against such odds, to stay in a straight line at a fixed speed for more than two seconds was akin to a death sentence. Maneuver was the only way to survive for long. There was no way for them to fight in formation, his wingman having left long ago, being pursued by at least four other enemies. It was one desperate free for all in the crowded skies.

“Arghhh! My fighter is on fire! Going down!” A help call for help over the comms, as Pilot Triwer’s Visigoth careened into a saucer at incredible speeds. There was a tremendous explosion from the collision, and the saucer shuddered once, but managed to recover its progress towards the mountain peak.

Gal did not know about who his enemies were, or what they were after. He only knew that they shot at him, and therefore are his enemies, and by extension enemies of the clan. He would attempt to stop whatever they were trying to do, regardless of whether he knew their actual objectives or not. And since they were going to the mountain peak, then by the Kerenskys he was going to stop them! All thoughts of the mercenaries had by now been thrown out the cockpit.

Maintaining his acceleration as he gained on the slightly damaged saucer, he opened up at extreme range with all his forward weapons. Electron bolts and iron nickel slugs raced from his wings to the enemy ship, all the shots hitting precisely on the same point, a flat area of blackened and scorched armor, where Triwer’s fighter had crashed into. The heavy attack eagerly devoured all the protection on the hull.

The saucer listed again, seemingly losing power to whatever was keeping it aloft. Gal had no idea what its propulsion systems are, and one corner of his mind was inquiring curiously about that very subject. There was no obvious exhaust port, nor was there a long tongue of fusion flame that indicated a fusion power plant. And very interestingly, there was not even a single weapon visible on the saucers. He shoved them back into he recesses of his mind. There would be time for such thoughts later. It was do or die right now.

They were still over the sea, although he judged that the saucer would be passing over land in another thirty seconds. It did not matter to him where it was. All he wanted now was to bring it down.

Dancing his Scytha from side to side, he dodged the numerous shots from the fighters on his rear sizzling past his fighter as he tried to get another fix on the same location he had struck before. The reaction of the saucer to the previous attacks, and especially Triwer’s crash, had given him some hope that the giant unidentified flying object could be brought down.

A shot from his many pursuers finally connected, pulverizing armor over his left wing surface. The suddenly sluggish controls and the damage sensors told him the rest of the story, that one of the ailerons had been hit, and that maneuvering was going to be a real problem.

Ignoring the shots that are passing ever closer to his fighter, Gal sighted at his target once again. He had approached to almost close range for his guns now, and he was virtually assured of a hit. As soon as he got a steady tone, he fired his guns again.

All four main guns blasted into the same spot again, this time completely bypassing the ruined armor into the saucer’s inner components. Galietra did not know it, but his shots had been extremely lucky; they had hit the location containing the main power feed for the anti-gravity generators keeping the ship in the air.

The saucer suddenly lost all propulsion, plummeting towards the tiny strip of beach. Before Gal could congratulate himself on the kill, a flurry of shots slammed into his fighter, stripping most of the armor off. Cursing intently, he pushed the Scytha into a dive, jinking erratically all the way.

He glance at his damage screens once, and what they told him was bad. He was losing fuel fast, and the engine’s had been hit. He realized belatedly that the Scytha was actually flying faster than it ever had. The engines must had been on overload.

That was a godsend in disguise for him, because it had allowed him to momentarily outdistance his pursuers. It was not going to last though. Either the engines would blow up from the stress, or the fuel would be completely consumed by the runaway engines or lost through the numerous holes in the fuselage.

Firing his rear mounted pulse laser to discourage close pursuit, Gal tried to move his stick, but the wing surfaces seemed to be stuck fast, fused and locked into place by the melted armor which had re-solidified, the bane of aerospace pilots everywhere. The only thing he could control was his pitch. Yaw and roll were out of the question. Even his speed was at the mercy of his engines and fuel.

Refusing to panic, he simply dived even lower, almost touching the ground with the belly of his fighter, flying nape pf the earth. Two black fighters failed to compensate sufficiently as they were flying so closely behind the Scytha in low atmosphere that they crashed into the ground.

He could feel the fighter begin to shake violently, a clear sign that the engine was going to blow any moment soon. He persisted, knowing that every second he remained in the air meant that there would be five less fighters in the main battle.

“This is the Sword of Buhallin.” A transmission broke in. “We are too damaged to stay afloat, and are going down! We’ll still take one of those motherships with us! For the clan!” A final roar of defiance. It broke up into static.

Gal paid the message little heed. He had his own problems. He was headed straight for the mountain, and in about thirty seconds he was about to crash right into it. He could not shift left nor right to avoid the huge peak. He quickly thought of a plan to wipe out the fighters behind him, which were gaining distance again. It would probably not work, but that was all he had at the moment, other than the small pulse laser.

Pushing the fighter for all it was worth, Galietra lifted up its nose and headed for a point about a kilometer above the ground. He noted the presence of the mercenaries scattered below him, but he could not give them a damn after what he had been through. All he wanted now was war against the black fighters which had started the battle in such a dishonorable manner. He only hoped that the freebirths would not shoot at him.

He held his nerve, as the crippled Scytha neared the massive wall of stone and rock. The black fighters stayed closely on his tail, leading him to suspect that their pilots must be incredibly brave or stupid to do so.

The mercenaries began to throw up anti-aircraft fire, a pattern of laser and PPC beams rising up before him from the mechs, tanks, and dropships. His Scytha passed through the pattern unscathed, but three of his pursuers were hit and exploded in midair.

At the very last moment, about two seconds before the Scytha hit the mountain, Galietra punched out. With his fighter in a slightly tilted upwards direction, he was flung back away from the explosion of his fighter. He was still able to see the effects of his gambit, as the following black fighters plowed into the mountain one after another, leaving a huge crater in the mountain slope.

What sort of fools would fly their fighters into a mountain? He stared in disbelief. He had fully expected his last gamble to fail, not succeed so outrageously!

As his parachute opened up above him, he took out his pistol from his G-suit and checked its ammo. He would be dropping into the midst of the dezgra mercenaries.

 

Warship Blue Aerie, In Orbit System,

Einstein, Deep Periphery

14^th March 3068

 

Seated snugly in his command chair, Star Commodore Valten Folkner barked at his crew, exhorting them to speed up the fighter launch. The entire bridge had gone on red alert the minute the massive armada appeared on their scopes. The order to launch all available fighters had been given even before they had received the distress call from the planet below.

Each Black Lion class battlecruiser carried twenty fighters in their bays. Valten Folkner had managed to wrangle another star of fighters for each of his precious ships, as he had wanted more fighter support for the warships, traditionally deficient against fighter attack.

His precautions had been well founded. They had picked up more than 500 airborne signatures engaged in a furious dogfight with the remaining fighter escorts for the Sword of Buhallin. One by one, the IFF readings from the overwhelmed fighters blinked out on a nearby panel, signs of a dead, dying, or ejected pilot and one scrapped omnifighter.

The sixty fighters from the warships were flung into space, followed by another sixty fighters that were assigned to Rho Galaxy. Valten took the decision to override Lizabet Danforth’s authority, due to the urgency of the situation. They would be heavily outnumbered, and even though the indications from the initial contact showed that the newcomers had paid a high price for killing the Falcon escorts, Valten did not favor his warriors’ chances when outnumbered almost five to one. He sought to even the odds as much as possible.

“Star Commodore!” The sensor tech called for his attention. “We have lost all our fighters near the caldera! The enemy fighters are entering the upper atmosphere! I think they are going to attack us!”

Valten punched in several buttons on his console, bringing him into communications with his fighter commander. “Star Captain Rocaz, enemy fighters are heading towards the warships. Keep them away as much as possible. I am releasing the Turkina’s Fury to assist. Enemy numbers are estimated at about six to seven hundred fighters. Conserve your ammo.”

“Aff, Star Commodore!”

Turkina’s Fury was one of the relatively new Noruff class assault dropships, heavily armed and even more maneuverable than many omnifighters. Its addition to the fighter screen was easily worth another thirty fighters.

Looking out at the forward view with his enhanced eyesight, Valten could pick out tiny specks in the planet’s atmosphere, flying up amongst the clouds. His fighters advanced in a smaller wave, but no less potent.

Within seconds, the two forces slammed into each other, the initial exchange completely in favor of the Falcons as their heavier armor and weapons took a heavy toll on the black fighters.

The initial headlong charge had dissolved into a swirling melee, on a scale not seen since the liberation of Terra by the armies of Kerensky, three centuries ago.

Valten had refused to think about the implications of this latest development. He did not want to admit that the mercenaries might be correct after all; there was indeed extraterrestrial presence on the world below, of which the black fighters were simply a manifestation.

In any case, he was assured by his warriors’ continuing success. The black fighters had numbers on their side, nothing more. In terms of skill, daring, armor, and weapons, they were completely outclassed by the human fighters.

“Sir?” The tech manning the system-wide probes, different from the one surveying the planetary atmosphere, spoke up. “I am receiving weird readings from a probe stationed at the fourth planet, the gas giant. It is… Savrashi! We have lost the probe!”

“How?” Valten asked.

“Checking now… By the Kerenskys… This is not possible, this is not possible.” The tech started stammering, muttering to herself in shock as she sat back in her seat, terrified.

“What is it?” Valten roared.

“Another… warship. She croaked out. “Hidden in the gas giant. But… but that’s impossible, isn’t it?”

Valten jumped up from his seat, and kicking out with his legs against his chair, floated to the tech’s console. He snarled once at the petrified tech, hoping that she would oblige him by showing the visual image from the destroyed probe. Seeing no reaction, he hammered in the commands himself, to replay the last transmission from the probe.

Only to confront an image of an ugly black monstrosity with bulging weapons ports and numerous bulbous structures all over. The image showed the unknown ship approaching the probe, then one of its guns flashed once. The image broke up into static.

Well, he thought to himself darkly, he had asked for a warship battle. It looked like his wish would be granted soon. The fourth planet was still pretty far away, so they would have quite enough time to mop up the enemy fighters and prepare for the warship battle.

As he turned back to his seat, there was a sudden rocking of the bridge. He barely avoided having his face smashed against a bulkhead as he used his arms to cushion his movement into a bulkhead.

“What happened?” He twisted himself around and flew to the holotank, hoping to get a clearer picture of the battle. He thought it was a fighter that had slipped past his screens.

He was stunned to see a new signature in the space around the planet, a designation “Unknown” by his sensor techs. It was rated as being as big as the Blue Aerie itself. The visual on a small screen below the holotank showed a picture of the enemy warship itself.

It was indeed the same ship that had blasted his probe apart. The implications of this was staggering.

Any transmission over the huge distances in space was generally limited to the speed of light. Even the final message from the probe had taken five minutes to reach the Blue Aerie. That the enemy ship had appeared so soon after the probe was destroyed gave Valten a real fright. It meant that the ship had non Kearny Fuchida Faster-Than-Light capability.

He knew that it did not have KF capability because if it did, the jump appearance would have been heralded by intense IR radiation beforehand. The only other explanation was that it had some form of movement that allowed it to reach speeds approaching that of light, which was unknown to humanity.

The unknown warship had taken a series of cheap shots at the port sides of the two Falcon warships. Interestingly, and quite a relief for Valten, the hits were standard naval laser blasts and particle beams, not the death ray weapons he had expected after dredging up memories of science fiction shows on late night cable holovids in a rundown motel on an Inner Sphere world. Valten determined that the previous hits would be the first and only open shots available to the enemy ship.

“All gunners, weapons free! Fire at will!” He yelled as he quickly clambered back to his command chair. The warship shuddered slightly as the side naval autocannons fired their massive projectile loads towards the enemy ship. The huge launchers ejected their enormous multi-ton guided missiles. The White Aerie did the same, its weapons firing in a pattern almost identical to that of the Blue Aerie.

The missiles and heavy slugs streamed through space, heading for the starboard hull of the black ship. Suddenly, a slight blue shimmer pulsated around the impact area as the shots hit the target. The autocannon rounds exploded onto the blue lighted area, as did the missiles. Untouched, the enemy ship continued to advance menacingly towards the two Falcon warships.

Everyone on the Blue Aerie gaped in disbelief. As they watched, more small black fighters burst out of the black warship, angling for the human ships.

As he felt his guts twist upon themselves, Valten Folkner remembered the old saying. Be careful what you wish for… you might just get it.