Austronaut — Roleplayer Guild

“Charlie Six, this is Item Three Six,” Seargent Tashha Cole said, tripping the communications link to the task force commander. Faster than a man could blink, her helmet transmitted the words to the communications suite of her combat car, Indigo Girl. Without a perceptible pause the cars electronics fired it up to a commo satellite, which then relayed it back down to the task force commander. Captain Torren, officer commanding taskforce Tambre, sat in the armoured turret of a tank some sixty kilometres distant.
 
“Natives seem restive, but nothing overtly threatening going on,” she continued. The thirty ton, iridium armoured, combat car slid slowly down the paved roadway, held aloft by the cushion of air in the plenum chamber. Civilians gave it a wide berth. People felt their mortality when they were close to a howling monster like a combat car, which, she supposed, was the point. Her wing gunner panned his weapon, a heavy tri-barrel power gun across, the crowd in the middle of the square. They did their best to ignore it. They had spilled out of the mosque after prayer and doubtlessly their contempt and hostility for the foreign mercenaries was at its height, whipped up by preachers in the pay of the Wheat Barons.
 
Hammer’s Slammers had come to Trabzon three months before. Hired, for a change, to stop conflict from breaking out. Trabzon had become wealthy these past few generations, mostly by electronics manufacture and some limited agriculture. They exported to worlds that couldn’t afford to by premium equipment from places like Calth or New Friezeland, cashing in on those more desperate than themselves. As always, money had bought with it it’s own problems. Trabzon had traditionally been ruled by a tight knit oligarchy of rural magnates. Wheat Barons as they were known, who had largely missed out on the new wave of economic prosperity. The result was a rising urban elite who were slowly displacing the traditional leaders. Exacerbating the problem was the religious unrest. Trabzon had been settled largely from Turkey and the Islamic tradition, long dormant when they colonists had been fighting for their lives against the hunger and privation of the early days, had returned full force. The Wheat Barons spent a lot of time denouncing the nuevo riche urbanites as decedent and apostate and out here in the region capital of Calnagah it was working.
 
President Jamal Israhimi had recently come to power but the general feeling was that he had stolen the election by a mixture of intimidation, bribery and outright fraud. He believed that the presence of the Slammers would prevent any serious hostility from breaking out and it seemed to Cole that he had been right. Her platoon, third platoon I company, had spent the majority of that time just driving around, letting themselves be seen. Occasionally there were reports of dissident gatherings in the woods and I-3 would make a sweep of the forest, usually discovering a few intoxicated ‘rebels’, a few burned out campfires and buggerall else. It was easy money, a rest for the Slammers after their last few contracts, heavy fighting had taken its toll on vehicles and men. This was a chance to train new troops and replenish losses in a relatively safe, if unprofitable, peacekeeping role.
 
Calagahn was an ugly city. Its population of a few hundred thousand squatted on the eastern edge of the world’s only continent. It served as the transport hub for a large hinterland, its extensive spaceport allowing the gigantic bulk haulers to settle down, collect crops and minerals from the interior and carry them to market wherever they should be required. The architecture was largely adobe or knock off industrial plastic versions of adobe, bringing to mind childhood tales of the Arabian nights. The effect was somewhat ruined by the fact that the place as located on a tropical flatland, rather than a desert, but it didn’t seem to bother the Trabzonis unduly.
 
The people themselves dressed in loose robes often cinched up around their waists with colourful silken cords. Supposedly, there was a whole language that went on with the cords, conveying status, political affiliation, and profession. Cole didn’t care, after four years in the Slammers, she had ceased to care about the peculiarities of her employers, reserving her attention for the capabilities of her enemies.
 
“Roger that Item three-six,” came Torren’s voice over the commo circuit.

“I doubt…” whatever Torren doubted remained a mystery as, with shocking suddenness, an alarm claxon began to wail. A panic seized the crowd as people began to push and shove each other in their haste to leave the square. In her peripheral vision Cole saw her gunners tighten their grips on their tri-barrels, transforming from bored caution to laser focused alertness.
 
“Charlie Six…” she began but Torern’s voice came back, the AI squelching her transmission in favour of a more senior officer.
 
“All Tambre elements, Camp Abel is reporting distress signals from a bulk freighter, it is attempting an emergency landing at the space port." Instinctively, Cole craned her neck to look skyward. Nothing was visible to her naked eye. She flicked a control in her helmet with her tongue, switching the view to infrared. Sure enough there was a pulsing heat signal up there, plasma discharge from a large starship.
 
“Item three six,” Cole began, keying the link to her platoon. Only six combat cars after the heavy casualties they had endured on their last assignment.
 
“Three-two and, Three- three, move west to the heights above the governor’s residence, see if you can get some trajectory data on this ship so we can avoid it if it augurs in.” She was about to give her own driver orders when her infrared view gave her a brief flicker of movement on a nearby rooftop. Just the kind of flicker you got when someone in camo-cloth shifted or moved too rapidly. Camo-cloth was a sophisticated synthetic material used by commandos providing near invisibility when the user was stationary. If not for her visor being set to infrared, she would never have seen a thing.
 
“Bandits!” she yelled, hauling on her tri-barrel, trying to swing the big weapon around to point at the suddenly revealed target. Before she could overcome the inertia of the big gun a bloom of heat flashed on her visor. A moment later there was a colossal bang as something tore through the splinter shield with a sound like mountains screaming. Indigo Girl slammed sideways as if struck by a giant anvil. Metal shrieked and buckled around her. With spectacular violence the rear nacelle blew itself apart. Electrical lightning leapt and danced through the crew compartment, whickering like pale fire over the burning electronics. Her left wing gunner screamed and pitched away from his gun with a flash of scarlet as something ricocheted through his chest. A giant explosion pitched the crippled combat car into the air, slamming Coles’s ceramic armour against her chest. She screamed, but the sound was a weak anemic thing against the destruction of the combat car. The noise was unimaginable, the fans slaming into the casing, the crowds screaming, her helmet cut in sound cancellation to try to save her hearing.

 Dimly she was aware of other sounds, fans howling as they went into the red, powerguns firing, buzzbombs snapping. With a warbling scream the combat car’s surviving nacelle slammed it into one of the cheap prefab buildings, a shop of some kind. Thirty tons of iridium armour smashed the flimsy structure to match wood. Dust billowed everywhere and the heat overload dumped Coles visor to save her eyes. Not that it helped, the air was opaque with a great billowing cloud of dust. With a rumbling crash several hundred tons of building collapsed on top of the stricken Indigo Girl and the last thing Cole saw before blacking out was an  avalanche of concrete and wood rushing down to meet her.
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