Deployment
A Thursday Prompt story
© 2021 by Walter Reimer


Prompt: function
Thumbnail art by  baroncoon



Several cargo pods had been loaded aboard the freighter Fox Winning and a few others at the Imperial support station in the This Far system. Each pod was roughly four meters tall by twelve wide and seven deep, and wholly self-contained. When the Fox’s captain asked what the pods contained, the kam superintending the loading tersely told him to not ask questions.

Being a rather intelligent person, the captain accepted the advice without demur. Practically every merchant captain had accepted a cargo with ‘no questions asked;’ if the shlani wanted to play this close to their chests, that was smooth.

After loading and securing the pods, the freighters carrying them headed in convoy to Wangguan, where the containers were offloaded into a variety of Kashlanin warships. The receiving ships ranged from frigates to light cruisers.

Again, the captain of the Fox Winning had questions, but refrained from asking them, and as soon as they were loaded the Imperial ships moved off and inphased.


***


The Lalande System, at roughly eight light-years from Sol, was one of the four closest star systems to the heart of the Terran Confederacy. The Kashlani had already taken Wangguan.

The Confed was determined that the Empire would not take Lalande, causing both sides to devote ever-increasing numbers of ships to the fight for overall control of the system. As a result, there were large clouds of debris scattered throughout the system.

The Imperial light cruisers, destroyers and frigates outphased and moved in toward the Terran positions, breaking away as the Confed ships came forward to engage them. The Kashlanin ships evaded the Confed attacks and inphased, making good their escape.

However, due to the debris fields confusing their sensors, the Terrans missed detecting several cargo pods being jettisoned by the Imperial ships.


***


“Open,” came the order, and the leading sergeant in each squad touched a control on the arm of their armored suits. Feline eyes blinked as the doors of the pods opened, bathing them in the ruddy glare of Lalande. One by one, the nine armored shlani in each of the eighteen pods emerged from the cargo containers, propelled by brief bursts of cold gas and fading from sight as their adaptive camouflage activated.

The shlani, one hundred sixty-two in all, made their way slowly through the debris fields and held position, waiting.


***


“They ran?” the Terran admiral echoed, the whitetail buck’s ears swiveling to match his skeptical expression.

“Yes, sir,” his aide replied. “As soon as our guard ships approached, they turned tail.” The younger tiger grinned. “I think they’re getting ready to cut their losses and leave.”

“Hmm.” The buck had become increasingly convinced over the past weeks that his aide was a politically connected young man with less intelligence than what the admiral had left in the toilet in his quarters earlier in the day. “Have the force move to the interception point.” He peered at the flag plot. “Task Group 17.2.1 will remain here on alert.”

“Yes, sir!” and the tiger began relaying the orders as the Terran flagship, the battleship Cao Lo, and its escorting group moved around the planet toward the debris field.


***


“Target,” the captain’s voice whispered in each soldier’s armor.

Each of the armored shlani acknowledged the order, hiding among the fragments of ship’s hulls. The Terran battleship was huge and getting bigger as it approached.

When it reached the closest point to the debris, the word came.

“Deploy.”


***


Senior Private Kirian r’Vam reached out his armored hands as he gently fell toward the looming side of the gigantic ship. His fingers made contact with the hull and his arms flexed to take up the impact and bring him to rest a body-length away from one of the ship’s lateral sensor arrays.

“Contact,” he breathed into his microphone, mimicking the others as they reached their quarry. Clinging to the hull, he recalled where he was in relation to his designated post and began to move aft.

The rest of his squad was waiting for him, five viri and three kami gathered around one of the airlocks closest to the battleship’s engineering spaces. As soon as he arrived, they all started taking tools and explosive packs from the panniers in their armor.

Shaped charges, designed to punch clean holes through the hull plating, were set up in a ring aft of the airlock. According to the tactical plan, r’Vam knew that other squads were preparing to render the ship blind, deaf and mute, targeting its sensors and communications arrays. His own squad were to breach the hull and – aka.

It is a misconception that Trackers are simple killing machines, stripped of the veneer of civilization and trained to kill without remorse or pity. The fact of the matter is a little more complex.

Trackers are trained to kill without remorse or pity – but always with thought. Any Tracker, from the most junior private to the general commanding all sixty-four divisions, must always stay focused on the plan but always able to think fast in order to respond to the changing conditions of the battlefield.

R’Vam had been part of the infiltration unit that had taken Argus Station on Pluto. He and the others in his unit were good at what they did. They had a purpose as part of the Imperial Army, knew their purpose, and were prepared to act to complete that purpose.

“Ready,” he said as the squad gestured, and he could hear the other squads report their own readiness.

“Execute,” came the order.

Atmosphere hissed out into space as the charges fired, the escaping gases flinging out bubbles and streamers of swiftly freezing metal and composite before the entire circular section of the Terran ship’s hull came loose and began drifting away. Propelled by the escaping atmosphere before emergency bulkheads could close, one Terran followed the piece of hull out into space. It wasn’t wearing armor or an environment suit.

Fool.

R’Vam twitched and a repeating cannon swung into place on his arm as he led the way, flinging himself into the ship and followed by the other eight shlani in his squad.


***


Alarms shrilled in the Cao Lo’s command center as the crew tried to make sense of the cacophony of reports coming to them. The sensors had been damaged, communications with the rest of the fleet had gone down, and there were scattered, panicked messages about hull breaches and boarding parties making their way through the ship.

A pitched firefight was underway inside the main engineering spaces, with internal security imagers showing ghostly images firing at the Terran defenders.

The admiral twitched his flag and ears irritably as his aide flinched at an explosion somewhere aft, and asked the battleship’s captain, “Status?”

The fox grimaced. “They knew exactly where to hit us, Admiral.” The entire ship shuddered and the lights went out, red emergency lights immediately replacing the standard illumination as the artigrav stopped working. “That tears it,” he growled. “We’ve lost the engines. Helm?”

“Far as I can tell, we’ve lost station-keeping, and are starting to drift.”

“Shit.”


***


Red Terran blood was smeared across the walls and decks, and blobs of it bobbed about in the lack of gravity. The corpses had been shoved into a storeroom to stop them or scattered body parts from drifting around and getting in the way.

So far, r’Vam was pleased. He’d personally killed ten Terrans, and the rest of his squad were uninjured. They had encountered two more squads, and all twenty-seven shlani had succeeded in overcoming resistance and powering down the battleship’s engines. One section was busily ejecting the reactant assemblies to ensure that the surviving crew couldn’t use a self-destruct.

The captain asked over the suit intercom, “Engines secure?”

“Secure, ma’am,” r’Vam replied, and heard the responses from the other squads.

He felt proud; proud that he’d carried out his orders, proud that his squad had made it this far without any injuries.

Proud of a job well done.


***


“Captain?” The communications tech’s nosepad was pale. “No response to our surrender.”

“Which means they’re not interested in taking prisoners,” the fox said. “Admiral, I recommend abandoning ship.”

The whitetail buck’s ears went down as he flagged. With the Cao Lo blind and deaf, there was no way of knowing what had gone on since the ship was boarded. Still, if the shlani were not taking prisoners . . . “I concur, Captain. Let’s leave this ship to the shlani,” and he grabbed his aide, shook him like a rag doll, and half-dragged him toward the nearest escape pod gallery as alarm klaxons began to sound.


***


“Rally here,” and a dot appeared on a ship schematic in r’Vam’s helmet display. The kam gestured, and his squad began making their way to the meeting point for extraction.

This ship had been the largest enemy unit in the system at the time, and it was out of action now.

Lalande would fall.