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Grass Eaters 3 | 01 | Way of War I
🕑 Added 2024-10-25 16:47:01 +0000 UTCSchpriss Confederacy: 13 star systems.
Malgeir Federation: 51 star systems.
Znosian Dominion: 582 star systems.
Where our people go…
(Fade to dark.)
Your star system…
(Mark IV exosuit powering on sequence.)
It belongs to us.
(Title text: NOTHING BEYOND YOUR REACH)
(Subtitle text: Your Republic Needs You.)
“We Only Need One”, Terran Reconnaissance Office Recruiting Commercial, December 2125
Note: Pulled after two days airtime due to protest from Malgeir Federation Embassy over contested map and star system count, which omitted occupied systems at the time. Rather than remove access to this content from the Office of Republic Archives, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it, and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together.
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Quist City Outskirts, Quistqueu-3
POV: Astkort, Znosian Dominion Marines (Rank: Three Whiskers)
Like most of the earliest settled colonies in the former Granti Alliance, the planet of Quistqueu was a temperate one. But contrary to popular belief among predators in their media, planets generally did not just have one biome and one climate. Rare was the “tropical planet”, the “tundra planet”, or the “lava planet”. Most planetary bodies had features of all of the above and more, especially ones settled for habitation.
The Znosian Marines’ 115th Combined Arms Division was chosen to garrison the former capital city of Quistqueu near the equator. Located in a deep basin, the surrounding hills trapped the heat, and in summer, the temperatures in the capital could get up to 40 degrees Celsius. Before the occupation, most of the Granti residents would stay indoors during the summer to stay cool.
Their new Znosian occupiers did not prioritize air conditioning for the Granti people who had now become prisoners on their own planet.
Luckily for those that still drew breath — not for the Znosians’ lack of trying — the summer season was passing. The capital basin was entering the much more bearable transition season before the cold seasons arrived. At 30 degrees on a clear noonday, it was still uncomfortable. But not deadly so.
With their lightly colored, thin fur that cooled their fragile bodies efficiently, the Znosians were much better adapted to the uncomfortable heat. But that didn’t mean it was comfortable, especially not in the trenches that were now snaking for miles around their division headquarters.
Three Whiskers Astkort didn’t complain about the heat. Such behavior was unbecoming of a Znosian Marine. And if she didn’t want to do her job, there would be another twenty paws ready to step into her place.
But the people in her squad were dropping like bugs to the oppressive heat rolling off the nearby hills, even with the electric fans they’d recently installed along some of the trenches. Readiness suffered, and her squad of ten was down two rifles to heatstroke. More than acceptable for a predator squad, with their ridiculously low standards that obviously came with their barbarism. But it was unthinkably disastrous for the civilized Servants of the Prophecy.
The four whiskers above her had to take full responsibility, as a proper servant of the Prophecy would. As did the five whiskers. And the six whiskers. And the seven whiskers who was supposed to be in charge of capital defense. Astkort hadn’t anticipated her troops would need to be out here, hurriedly digging trenches on a planet that was thought completely secured by the Dominion over six years ago.
As Astkort entered the covered anti-artillery bunker, she blinked as a blast of coolness hit her whiskers. The bunker itself wasn’t properly insulated or anything fancy, but there was a loud fan unit blowing cool air around. She looked around the room at the familiar faces of her fellow three whiskers resting in the shaded sanctuary.
These were the three whiskers who got things done in the Marines. Known among some as the three whiskers warren.
At the sweet spot between skill and responsibility, three whiskers was about as high a rank as one could achieve in the service without a gram of responsibility over other paws. Even as a well-disciplined prey species, they were the paper that smoothed over the rough cracks of real life and the tape that held everything together.
Need an electric fan installed in a bunker thirty kilometers from division headquarters? Call a three whiskers.
Forgot where you left your datapad as you’re going to a briefing? Your three whiskers probably had it.
Looking for someone to mop up your mess after you exterminated a clan of predators off-schedule? The three whiskers warren could— well, they’d temporarily take care of your duties while you attended your assignment-of-responsibility hearings.
“Astkort!”
Astkort looked at the source of the call, another three whiskers by the name of Fslizm. He was lounging around on a straw mat in a corner, right next to the big fan. “Fslizm,” she said in greeting. “Where are my batteries?”
She had asked him to find a fresh batch of batteries for her helmet after the ones sitting in their squad locker turned out to be defective. Without new ones, their power armor had barely an hour of juice in combat, and that was during the day. At night, they would be incapable of seeing in the dark without draining them in minutes.
Fslizm shook his head sadly. “All out. No one in my supply unit has seen surplus in days.”
Astkort waited a moment for him to continue, and when he didn’t, she asked irritably, “Aren’t you going to take full responsibility for that?”
“My unit already has. As has the Navy nine whiskers in charge of the entire star system. Would you like me to do that again?”
She sighed. “No, that’s— that’s fine. What’s going on upstairs with the Navy supply lines?”
“Haven’t you heard?” he asked.
“Heard what? I’ve been digging for my machine gun emplacement all morning.”
“We’re officially cut off. The fleet has made the decision to retreat from the star system, and word is that the predators have moved in upstairs.”
“Retreat?” she asked, startled. “They reported that things were going bad with the Lesser Predators in the Gruccud axis, but I didn’t think the abominations would move so fast given—”
“Yeah, uncharacteristically fast is how my superiors described it. It is probably the new Great Predators they have telling them what to do. Anyway, their ships are here in Quistqueu now,” he said, shrugging. “And nothing is getting in or out. Not people. Not supplies. Not batteries. We’re all stuck here now.”
“Our lives were forfeited to the Prophecy the day we left the hatchling pools,” she muttered.
He lowered his head at her comforting utterance out of habit.
“So what will be our new directives now?” she asked.
“I’m not your superior officer or your squad’s combat computer,” Fslizm sniffed. “But your orders are probably going to be the same as ours.”
“SEER protocol?” she asked hesitantly, referring to the standard but barely familiar contingency she’d been trained on.
He nodded. “Sabotage, Erode, Exterminate, and Raids. We’ll make the predators pay for every meter of ground they take here.”
“Are we going to disperse?”
“Not at first. We’ll remain organized while we can. Then, when the combat computer says we can be more effective as holdout cells, we’ll be given the order to disperse,” Fslizm predicted.
Astkort looked out the fortified openings of the bunker, toward the flat, empty stretch of nothing that stood between them and wherever the enemy would come from. “So that won’t be a problem for us, then, given our position. After all, if the predators are here to take this city, unless they’re stupid enough to drop directly on the city — not totally improbable — we’re at the very front of the defensive lines outside the city… By the time we’ll need to scatter, we’d already have rejoined the Prophecy.”
Fslizm shrugged. “Huh. I guess you’re right.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
It took another week for the predator ships to finally enter low orbit over Quistqueu-3. And they had the sense to not drop their Marines directly onto the well-defended capital. Seconds after they arrived, they shredded the few orbital and suborbital defenses the Marines in the city set up. And for the next two nights, Astkort watched as the horizon glowed with the burning engines of their shuttles, landing troops and equipment far beyond the range of their now-diminished defenses.
“You think they’re coming tonight?” Fslizm asked in a low voice, himself nervously clutching a rifle in the trench next to Astkort’s machine gun nest.
“That’s what the combat computer says,” she said, not taking her eyes off her sights as she looked into the darkness. “They took out our communication network. None of the FTL radios are working anymore. They’d only do that if they were coming soon.”
“I heard a rumor,” he began to say, “from one of the other cities—”
“You can’t believe everything you hear on the radio anymore, Fslizm,” she scoffed. “They say the predators are tapping into that… somehow.”
“It was from our own people,” he insisted. “They said… that the predators have brought their elite troopers.”
“Elite troopers?”
“There was a rumor… from when our Grand Fleet went for the Great Predator Nest,” Fslizm said in a low voice. As such a transparent, responsibility-loving species, they all knew that the fleet had probably failed in its primary mission, but that didn’t mean they had to talk about it happily. “There were some of the new elite predator troops. They’re not like the ones we normally face.”
“What about them?” Astkort asked, slightly unsettled.
“They’re… different.”
“Different how?”
“Stronger. Faster.”
Astkort snorted. “Predators are all stronger and faster than us. You’ve seen the locals around here: the Slow Predators. They aren’t actually slow when they get into a real physical fight. They’re twice as big as we are. A quick punch from them, and we’d be dead if we’re not wearing armor. Without equipment, one of them could probably tear any of us into pieces. Thank the Prophecy they don’t move faster than a kinetic projectile and their hides aren’t thicker than Longclaw armor.”
“No, that’s not it,” Fslizm persisted. “One of our Grand Fleet ships was boarded by their troops during their extermination mission.”
“And?”
“They said some of the troops were Lesser Predators, but these were not the Lesser Predators we faced before. They were working with new equipment. There were… combat robots,” he said in a hushed voice.
“Combat robots? Hasn’t the Dominion seen them before? A long time ago? We have procedures—”
He shook his head. “Not like these. They went through a battlecruiser’s crew in twenty minutes. Spacers and Marines. They chewed through everyone, got what they wanted, and they left.”
“One of our battlecruisers? How many people is that?” Astkort was a ground pounder, and she was not one of those who constantly daydreamed about how their bloodlines could one day become space Marines or even actual Navy spacers. The only thing she knew about fancy space ships was how to hop on and hop off one between her deployments.
“At least a thousand Marines. And about a hundred of them Exterminator Marines.”
Astkort did some calculations in her head. “A hundred Exterminator Marines, huh? In twenty minutes? They must have landed thousands. How many of theirs did we get?”
Fslizm shook his head. “The few surviving crew who ejected reported there were less than three hundred of them. Real predators anyway. And they didn’t take any serious casualties.”
“Three hundred of them? And no casualties?” she scoffed. “Must be predator lies.”
“There is video.”
“That— that too can be faked now. Apparently,” Astkort replied with less certainty.
“The videos were from our own people. We were supposed to learn from them, but I’m not sure what there was to learn from— from whatever the footage showed.”
Astkort looked away without dispute this time. She’d heard about those videos too. Apparently, they were not pretty.
Fslizm shuddered and continued, “I just hope they didn’t bring those robots here. On the video, I saw one of them lose its arm to a grenade… then, it calmly picked up its own severed metal arm and threw it through the helmets of one of our Marines.”
“Like a primitive spear?”
“Like a primitive spear.”
Astkort pondered the image in her head for a moment. “At least it’ll be quick.”
Fslizm nodded reluctantly. “At least it’ll be quick.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Thirty minutes later, the enemy arrived.
The first warning they had of the predators was the base klaxons going off loudly, warning them of an impending air attack it saw in its approach radars.
The warning came too late for Astkort — and Fslizm next to her — to get to the anti-artillery bunker. They dove into their improvised cover, hunkering down in their freshly built trench. A moment later, the trench line’s short-range anti-air defenses activated. The six autocannons in the defensive line roared, stabbing thousands of tracers into the night sky, their lines converging on… dark blurs in the sky.
It didn’t work.
Boom.
Astkort gaped in shock as a massive explosion rocked their command bunker in the distance, throwing dirt and stone hundreds of meters into the air. A half second later, the deafening sound reached their position, along with the shockwave. She held tightly onto the ground as it rumbled from the impact.
A few seconds later, the air defense guns were silenced by identical detonations. And as the last one was struck, she finally saw one of them.
In her machine gun nest, she aimed her weapon optics into the sky to see a tiny, triangular-shaped device; it must be smaller than the size of her head. It had no lights, no identifiable markings, and it barely registered as a moving blur on her thermal scope. But her infantry bloodline had been bred to identify dark shapes far away — not better than a natural-born predator, but not much worse either.
“Flying machines!” Astkort shouted into her short-range squad radio. Next to her, hundreds of rifles and machine guns opened up at the night sky with their bright red tracers, each Marine desperately engaging a target… any target they could see above them.
As she was about to pull the trigger herself, the erratically moving target she was tracking dove towards the trenches. Smaller explosions rocked the fortified positions next to her, buffeting her with the heat and sound of their detonations. She could hear the screams of her people as their radios transmitted their gurgling dying noises and death prayers.
For an instant, Astkort lost track of the target she saw. All she could do was fire her machine gun towards the sky as everyone else did, hoping to substitute volume for accuracy—
She finally found it. One of their cold metal machines. As she swiveled her gun towards it, she noticed it getting bigger. And bigger. And bigger.
Kabooooooom.
She dove away from her machine gun nest at the last possible second, her uncharacteristic survival instinct saving her from being vaporized as her former position turned into an explosive fireball. Astkort screamed in pain and fought to maintain consciousness as she felt something cold stab into her back between her ribs.
As Astkort picked her snout out of the dirt, she could see Fslizm lying there next to her, his limbs missing and his chest still. The rest of her squad laid silent where they stood just a minute ago.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
There were more concussive blasts in the trenches next to her.
A few more guns opened up into the sky sporadically from a distant foxhole. Then, more explosions. Just a minute later, the night was quiet save for the crackling of the fires burning in the trenches next to her.
Astkort spotted her dropped radio in the dirt next to her and crawled towards it, the shrapnel embedded in her back stabbing into her body with every grunt, every exertion. With trembling paws and her breath getting shallower, she dialed it to an emergency channel she — and every Marine in the trench line — knew by heart: the one that contacted the next defensive lines.
They need to know we’re under attack.
“Second defensive line, come in,” she coughed into the transmitter. “Second defensive line, we are under attack. We are under attack! Our position is being overrun!”
There was no reply.
“Second defensive line, come in. Second defensive line!”
Nothing.
“Second defensive line—”
A male voice cut into the radio network, “Second defensive line, this is Five Whiskers Brunkt from the first defensive line. Come in.”
Oh, thank the Prophecy. Someone else here has a working radio transmitter.
A female voice replied, “First defensive line, this is Five Whiskers Prinik at line two. We read you loud and clear. What’s your latest status? We heard some loud noises in your direction. Do you need assistance or fire support? Are the predators coming?”
The voice reported, “False alarm, Five Whiskers. A couple of our two whiskers got jumpy at a clan of locals near our position. False alarm. No sign of the predator troops here tonight. We’ll keep an eye out for you. Over.”
What?!
There was a relieved sigh on the other end. “Good to hear, Five Whiskers Brunkt. Thanks for letting us know. Second defensive line, out.”
Astkort pressed the transmit button on her radio as hard as she could. “Second defensive line, this is Three Whiskers Astkort from the first line! They’re through our lines! They’ve gotten through us! Don’t trust the radio—”
The voice that identified himself as Brunkt came back on the radio. It made a grotesque, rhythmic noise.
It’s one of the predators doing their laughing thing, she realized. Their translator must not be able to accurately convey—
“Don’t worry, Grass Eater Three Whiskers Astkort. They can’t hear you… Ah, there you are. Stay still for me for a second.”
Astkort was still processing what the enemy operator said when an anti-infantry drone carrying ten kilograms of plasma incendiary dove onto her signal, melting her and her radio into slag.
Comments
Christian
Moar! :)
Josh Delgado42
Thanks for the chapter!
