Hossin: Loyalty Until Death (part one)

[Firefly]

This took me a couple of hours to write, proofread, and check for errors. It's six pages on Times New Roman font-10 for MS Word. So have fun. Please provide as much imput and critique as possible.

CREATIVE LIBERTIES: I am a practical-minded person and do not believe in a lot of the "in-game" plots, ideas, or storyline elements. I took creative liberties with the following:

I don't agree with the whole respawn thing. When you die, you die. I changed it into a "transporter" sort of thing, which helps explain creating weapons out of thin air. I also tinkered with darklight, because in 'real life' you wouldn't have some giant glowing icon near your name. I took creative liberties with the motion alarm and the Spitfire turret, and a majority of this was done to make it somewhat more feasible.

Like the Spitfire turret: if it's ammo-based, when where is the ammo coming from, stored, ejected, etc? Same with the ACE... that's Transformers bullshit. I made them all separate devices. MAYBE the Boomer would have a two-stage mode where it was a standard mine and also a triggered mine.

As far as the MAX acronym, I changed it because exo-suit was used for all of the personnel armor. How is the mechanized assault exo-suit any different from the reinforced exosuit, if you were just reading it without knowing the turf? So I went with exo-armor... it was a toss between that and exo-skeleton, but exo-skeleton sounds more like a framework design than a MAX armor unit.

As far as damage goes, it's impossible to fathom, tolerate, or believe that some of the in-game weapons do limited damage. So I went with realistic damage, where a bullet is a bullet. No such thing as dumping a dozen missiles into something and it not killing it outright. Kinda like when the Reaver rocket was a piece of shit and it took two 24-shot salvos to waste a MAX at point-blank range.

LEGAL DISCLAIMER: I did not create Planetside, I do not own stock in SOE, I do not work for SOE, and this work is titled "fan fiction", meaning no profits will ever be made from it. Please refrain from suing me because I am a soldier and thus have no money to give.

===============================================

CAUTION: may contain graphic violence and profanity.

Hossin. For the most part, the continent was swampy bug-infested backwater or a solid mass of jungle-covered muck. The Terran Republic had carved out select portions of its highlands and then established bases made of pre-fab shelters, which were ringed by thick steel-plated concrete walls to keep out the jungle predators and bayou beasts.

When rebellion erupted and spilled across the planet of Auraxis, the anarchy forces under the New Conglomerate stormed onto Hossin and overran the few manned bases, using the empty facilities as the lynchpin in their assault. Such was the rapidity of their swift assault that the Terrans on that continent were completely and utterly caught off-guard and split in two. One group of soldiers massed around the Ishundar warpgate to the northwest, while the other group hid in the hills to the southwest, a small concealed force consisting mainly of irregular forces and mercenary units.

Major James Baird of the elite irregular outfit Black Widow Company took command of the cut-off remnants. He had at his disposal only a hundred or so rag-tag warriors, most of them bloody and battered from fighting the horde of gold and blue New Conglomerate traitors. He had no heavy armor, no air support, and one solitary Advanced Mobile Station. The AMS was currently deployed in a deep, narrow cut along a series of high hills. Its cloaking field had been tweaked by an enterprising technical engineer to give a broader field base, allowing the hundred men and women to cramp inside the translucent bubble- all of them just barely fitting in.

�We have a unique opportunity,� the officer said to his troops assembled around him. He termed them �his� men because, as ranking officer among them, the combat field doctrines of the Terran Republic allowed him to temporarily consolidate them under his leadership and will.

�The NewCons have left a small garrison at Zotz, which is just west of here. I have scouts watching the walls and they report a platoon guarding the base at best, backed only by a pair of Enforcers. If we can secure Zotz, we can raid their weapons lockers and use them against the enemy. We also may be able to set it up and defend it until help arrives.�

A hand shot up. �Sir, how do we know help will come?�

Baird grinned. �Ever heard the term �Loyalty Until Death�, son? There are still loyal troops here on the continent. There�s no way that every soldier on Auraxis abandoned the Republic. Ever hear of radios? We announce on Republic Command that a base is ours, and our brothers will come to rescue us.�

They broke down into small squads of ten soldiers each. Those who could not operate the heavy mechanized assault exo-armor would carry rifles and wear armor. Those who were trained scouts and could perform recon would use infiltration suits and slip into the base. Stealthers were generally solo operators, specially-trained commandos who were used primarily as scouts, demolitions experts, assassins, and hackers.

Major Baird knew how to use those, in particular.

A young lieutenant in the Terran Elite Guard by the name of Geoff Donal had volunteered to lead the stealthers into the base. There were a dozen of them, and at Lt. Donal�s signal they keyed their cloak fields and disappeared with a shimmering metallic hum.

The infiltration suit was nothing more than a form-fitting body glove arrayed with thousands of miniscule warp conduits that bent light around the suit. The "stealth suit" allowed the wearer to cloak themselves on the battlefield to avoid visual detection. It provided no armor protection and had very little space to carry anything, and the wearer could not holster anything larger than a pistol. Despite those limitations, it was an extremely useful suit for reconnaissance and stealth. A cloaked stealther could remain completely undetectable by the naked eye if they but remained perfectly motionless. Moving had its drawbacks- rapid movement did not permit the conduits to bend the light fast enough to synch with surroundings, and a faint shimmer was the indicator that a quickly-moving stealther was nearby. Only by running slowly or walking were they less than slightly visible, and even then highly-trained troops had a chance of spotting them.

A cloaked infiltrator survived by his wiles to save him from death- the body glove offered no protection from anything but rain. As such, only a handful ever elected to lead life as a stealther, and only the smartest survived long enough to claim mastery of the trade. The ranks of the Republic war machine was full of men and women who�d had near-death experiences from going to war as a stealther. Most who made it through recon school and the Republic Army�s infiltration course gave up on wearing the suit once they�d been in battle a few times.

Lt. Donal was one of them. He spent four years as a supply puke, ferrying equipment and materiel around in a converted Sunderer heavy transport. After his mandatory stint in the Republic war machine, he attended the officer�s academy and then joined the Terran Republic Special Forces, where he learned all he needed to know (and more) about the art of unconventional warfare. After being recognized for his elite skill and innate grasp of battle tactics, the War Department transferred him to the Elite Guard.

Donal led his commando team out of the hills and down into the thick, stagnant muck of the swamps. Zotz was situated on a low island in the center of that filth, and the assault force would be cut to ribbons by the base�s automated defenses trying to traverse the ooze. Lt. Donal�s job was to kill or incapacitate the base defenders, neutralize the automated defenses by hacking into the computerized command infrastructure, hack into the communications grid to gain continent-wide radio coverage, and lower the drawbridges and tank-trap guards that acted as gates to the base. Four tasks for his twelve-man squad meant that three troops could cover each task.

--to be continued--

[Firefly]

As the muck clamped down on the one-piece body glove, their pace became much slower and more measured. Each man had his standard-issue chainblade out for silent takedowns. Several of the troopers had their implants turned on, in case the enemy had scouts out on patrol.

Trooper Abnett, also of the Black Widows, was on point. He keyed his comlink and called a halt. His whispered voice sounded in everyone�s earpiece and the column ground to a squelching halt. Crouching was not an option- the mucky water was deep enough to threaten to spill down into the interior of their infiltration suits at the face hole opening.

�There�s a motion detector ahead,� he signaled. His advanced targeting implant had picked the device up- had he not been slowly sweeping his gaze across their path of advance, he might have missed it and allowed the base�s radar to illuminate the team. That would have spelled quick doom for the unprotected team.

A motion detector operated on Doppler radar, which was like land-based sonar. Ambient noise was picked up and relayed back to a simple ground surveillance radar, and any field-deployable Spitfire turrets would fire on the target if they were radio-linked and within range. The sensor also patched itself into the base�s radar array and security personnel could sound the alarm. Having just committed a huge criminal act such as rebelling against the lawful government, the New Conglomerate anarchists were doubly-sure to have at least one man watching their radar.

�Anyone here want to volunteer to neutralize it?� Donal whispered over the squad net.

�I�ll do it,� a sergeant from the Republican Guard replied. She sheathed her knife and slipped a pair of wire-cutters off her tool belt, then slithered forward. All that her team saw was an imperceptible trail in the slimy ooze.

Sergeant Mbadiwe reached the sensor without so much as a whisper. The detector was placed on a small hillock that barely cleared the surface of the swamp. She crept up the bank and lay on the ground, half out of the swampy sludge. Working slowly and quietly, she quietly pulled the sensor�s access panel free. After silently discarding it, she reached in and seized the power unit wires and pulled them free of the socket, then clipped the alarm transmitter wires. The power unit wire leads were back in the socket in under a second.

�Advance forward,� she whispered over the comlink.

The squad broke into teams of three and they slowly crept past the lines of field-deployable Spitfire turrets, which were automated and slaved to the base radar, which fed them data from a variety of detection sources. A Spitfire turret was a fire-and-forget weapon- it operated on a small nuclear power cell, had its own short-range targeting radar and a slave-link to a greater system. It was an energy weapon, meaning that it needed no ammo and had few internal working parts to get dirty and gummed up. It was a simple, high-tech weapon that could thoroughly shred a target in seconds. No laughing matter to lightly-armed, unarmored scouts.

Fully half of the team crept along the base of the walls and around to the back of the base. The other half maneuvered through the pop-up blast-barrier tank traps that protected the front archway. Luckily the base hijackers had yet to deploy the forcefield shield barrier that could stop all bullets, armor, and infiltrators from penetrating the base. Every trooper eyed the wall-mounted Phalanx gun turrets with nervous apprehension. There were no signs of anyone manning the turrets, and while in automated mode the turrets could not detect stealthers. Only human eyes or easily-tricked motion alarms could find them- but no one wanted to run the risk of being shot at, especially by the rotary-beam weapons.

Lt. Donal led two teams up to the massive steel plate that served as part of the wall. The steel plate jutted a few inches out of the rest of the wall, as it covered the back wall entrance. The officer drew his remote electronics kit and held it up to door friend/foe identification matrixing panel. The IFF panel array twittered and chirped- Donal prayed there were no sentries within earshot. In record time, Donal�s REK had cut through the coding and the thick steel blast door whirred to life. It slid along its track into a recessed housing, giving the team access to the foyer where the inner door lay waiting-

- guarded by a hulking gold and blue New Conglomerate MAX. The mechanized assault exo-armor was perched right in the center of the small foyer, and its triple-barreled auto shotgun was resting in their direction. A defensive energy shield enhanced its defensive capability, but the capacitor light on the armor�s chest array was not on. And best of all, the man inside the heavy exo-armor was sleeping, his closed eyes plainly visible behind the faceplate.

Donal exhaled rapidly, his eyes lifted to the heavens. �Republic be praised,� he breathed.

One of the other stealthers shouldered his way forward. He reached into his beltpouch and withdrew a small triangular device. Everyone slowly backed away and out of sight as the trooper deployed two of the triangular Boomer heavy charges behind the MAX suit�s armored legs.

Once clear, the trooper squeezed one of the charging handles and vaporized the MAX in a blinding flash of light. Chunks of armor and gobbets of superheated flesh spewed around the foyer. Flames and smoke licked around the edges of the inverted porch.

Donal whooped, but not too loudly, and swept past the armored remains. One of his trooper hacked into the inner door�s IFF array and they all slipped down the stairs just as the base�s computer figured out why the door was open and slammed it shut with a crash.

Trooper Derman led off on point, his audio amplifier implant picking up every single noise. Derman carried a captured NewCon scatterpistol in hand- any fights here would be determined who fired first, and with what. Essentially a sawed-off hand-held shotgun pistol, the Mag-Scatter was the heaviest hitting hand cannon, designed for close-quarters combat. It fired slower than the Terran Republic�s Repeater handgun but it could punch through any personnel armor in short order. Most stealthers preferred it over the Repeater.

Derman peeled off and led his team straight to the control console located in the basement. The console was the interface hub into the base computer core. It controlled the active base defenses and the radar array, as well as all the base defenses, power dispersion, and most importantly the doors- a majority of the base�s vital areas would be controlled by IFF-locked doors, and many of them had alarms that would sound if any sort of electronic signal was applied to the sensors. Disabling that feature would make sneaking around much easier. While Derman hacked into the console, his two teammates pulled guard.

Donal led his men into the armory, where one of the NewCon rebels was checking his weapons and loading ammo into magazines. Donal�s chainblade came up and he thumbed the blade from idle to max power. The noise startled the soldier, but whirring adamantium blades coupled with the steel dagger made short work of him. Donal was no weakling, but what his muscles and sheer inertial force couldn�t do, the chains took care of. The rebel died a messy death.

�Loyalty until death,� Donal growled, spitting on the corpse of the traitor.

The two troopers with him grabbed the body and dumped it into one of the matrixing matter-reconverter respawn tubes. Anyone looking to transport from one base to another would find the corpse, but by then it would be too late.

Outside, Sergeant Mbadiwe skulked along the walls with her team. One group would go up onto the ramparts and head for the comms shack at the top of the base, while the other team would drop into the drawbridge control housing built into the walls. The swamps were traversable by troops, but the AMS would never be able to ford them. Incoming Republic vehicles would also be halted by the neck-deep water, which could be fatal if they were being pursued.

�Abnett� Mbadiwe called over the comlink, �take the comms room. Take down anyone you come across.�

Abnett and his two invisible comrades skulked under the gate archway and froze. Two NewCon troopers were standing in the courtyard next to an Enforcer four-by-four. A trio of steel-plated pop-up tank traps were staggered under the archway, and ringing the dead spaces between them were anti-armor and anti-personnel mines. A pair of Spitfire turrets backed them up, and a motion detector behind them provided the local short-range detection.

�Dammit,� Abnett swore. �We can�t get in this way.�

Mbadiwe came back over the link. �Low-crawl if you have to, but Donal is relying on us. So is Major Baird and so is the rest of the Republic. So get moving.�

Abnett, Cline, and Toora dropped to their bellies and slithered between the mines, past the humming turrets and into the yard.

�Let�s get those two traitors,� Abnett hissed. He drew his chainblade from the thigh sheath and rolled into a crouch. Cline and Toora followed suit, and they scuttled over to the anarchists. Toora went around to the side of the Enforcer and broke out his REK hack tool, then hacked into the security panel.

Abnett and Cline struck as one. They clamped their hands around the mouths of the two men, jerked their heads back and to the side, which helped to expose the jugular vein by pulling the skin tight and bringing the vein close to the surface. The razor-sharp blades were engineered by master weapon smiths, and those men had honed the blades down to the molecular level, better than razor sharp. The blades bit deep into the meat, chopping through tissue and veins and coming close to complete severing of the head.

[Firefly]

�Filthy traitors,� Cline snarled savagely as one of the NewCon men put a gloved hand to his neck, his brain trying vainly to staunch the flow of blood while the heart tried to sound that it was dying. The other troop thrashed around on the ground, his blood spurting across the ground and making it slick with ichor. They died noisily, like slaughterhouse pigs. Neck wounds were not like in books- they were far from silent, and they were slow and painful. Both men sounded like weak train whistles as air escaped their windpipes.

�Burn in hell,� Abnett added with disgust. He wiped his blade on their gold fatigues while Cline rummaged their corpses. He came up with another Mag-Scatter pistol and a frag grenade, but nothing more he could use. He tossed a clip of his own ammo onto the ground and slipped the scatterpistol in his beltpouch.

The three men ran back to the wall in a crouch, moving just slow enough not to draw the Spitfires� attention. They slipped up a casement stairwell and then headed across a walkway to the main structure. Meanwhile, Mbadiwe and her two troopers crawled along the path that Abnett�s team had cleared. As they crept along the ground, the rumbling of a five-litre engine through dual exhausts caught their ears.

"Uh-oh..." the female sergeant said ominously.

The other Enforcer was patrolling along the walls outside, and by the decreasing sound in pitch, it was slowing to come inside. Wasting no time, Trooper Setth scuttled across the empty courtyard and jumped into the Enforcer�s gunnery position. With a grunt, he loaded a rocket into the Firebird TOW missile launcher and primed it. Mbadiwe and the other trooper pulled the rebel bodies behind the Enforcer and hid, waiting.

The unaware New Conglomerate four-by-four buggy crept into view, the driver concentrating on navigating around the deployable turrets and walls so he didn�t slam into one. The gunner was lounging idly in his chair�

Setth fired. With a brutal crunch of compressed air, the wire-guided missile raced forward and slammed into the vehicle�s engine compartment, nearly stopping it dead. Alarmed, the gunner jumped up and tracked for a target.

Setth reloaded. His second missile vaporized the four-by-four, reducing the two occupants to flaming cinders in the twisted, burning wreck. The blast detonated a few mines, adding to the cacophony on the ground. Pieces of the archway broke loose as sonic vibrations or intense heat caused them to fall away.

Abnett tore up the stairs and stormed into the comms room at the top of the base. A sole radio operator was firing up a radio terminal. Not even blinking, Abnett drew his automatic machine pistol and squeezed the trigger. It wasn�t overkill that caused the Republic trooper to empty the magazine. It was that the automatic had an insanely high rate of fire. Gore and bone splattered across the control panels in mute protest as the bullets chewed apart the secessionist soldier�s chest.

�Comms secure,� Abnett whispered into his comlink.

�Roger,� Lt. Donal replied. �Stay in place and hold the room. Lock the door, mine the fuck out of it, booby trap it with grenades, but don�t let anyone get into the room.�

�Copy,� Abnett answered. �I�ll give my life for the room.�

�Give it for the Republic,� the officer answered automatically. Unswerving loyalty in its beliefs and doctrine, that�s what the Republic taught. Anything else was sedition, treason, subversion.

Two alert blue-and-gold-clad troops in heavy reinforced armor blitzed past Donal and his men, intent on finding the source of the havoc outside. So still were Donal�s men that one of them was nearly bowled over by the passing NC trooper.

�Take them,� Donal whispered, not bothering to use the comlink. Both men nodded their invisible heads as a reflex reaction and swept after the traitors like invisible angels of vengeance. The sounds of full-auto small caliber rounds from machine pistols and big-bore shotgun blasts told the tale of quick combat.

�Ramp is down,� came Mbadiwe�s breathless feminine honeyed voice.

�Hack complete,� Derman crowed, buried deep in the command console room. �We took out three of those coward backstabbers, too!�

Donal did a quick tally. �Everyone down to the console room! Prepare to defend!�

Derman stole out of the control room and hacked into an equipment terminal, forcing the matter-replicator arrays to spit out Boomer mines. He liberated the triangular metal discs from the replicator chamber and slipped back to the console quarters. He placed one on the inside wall next to each of the doors, and then hid the third on the console mount�s back side.

�Everyone out,� the trooper ordered. �Hide outside, they�ll be coming fast and hard like a teenage boy at a sorority party.� He touched a metal stud imbedded in the side of his shaved head, feeling it beneath the rubber of his suit just behind his right ear. His audio implant kicked in with a small feedback loop, and he could hear the racking of shotgun slides and the drawing of rifle bolts, in tune with the clanking of heavy boots on iron decking.

Three men swept into the outer chamber, their eyes glowing a fierce ultra-blue like possessed holy-warriors on an anarchistic crusade of chaos. Derman hissed and shrank back behind a large metal crate. The NewCon rebels were using darklight implants- with that, they could see the glowing off-white and coronal blue image of a cloaked infiltrator, almost like a picture negative.

Trooper Artepp disengaged his stealth mode and vaulted off a stack of long metal pipes, somewhat invisible to the darklight implants reversal of light. He appeared as a black shadow in their field of greenish gray vision, and the New Conglomerate shock troops were caught off-guard. Artepp howled like a scalded dog as he drove his blade into one of the troopers, his momentum adding lethal momentum to his swing. Derman choked down the urge to cry out- Artepp had signed his death warrant and it would be foolish to give up the element of surprise, and it would be futile to try and save him.

The man being stabbed howled and spun, his free arm catching Artepp�s blade hand in a vice. Artepp thumbed on the blade�s secondary mode and the chains spun to life, pulping the man�s skull and bursting it like a rotten watermelon. Artepp drew his Repeater service pistol and took aim at a second trooper, fired a handful of rounds. The big gun boomed in staccato rhythm as bullets tore into the man�s chest armor.

That trooper brought his triple-barreled Jackhammer auto-shotgun around and blew three bloody, smoking holes in Artepp, knocking the wiry man against the metal pipes. At point-blank range, the muzzle gases alone were enough to ventilate Artepp. The enormous slugs did the extra damage, blowing Artepp�s guts all over the stack of pipes. The Republic loyalist collapsed without a word, his eyes open in silent staring accusation.

While the wounded rebel tended to his wounds, the other uninjured man briefly checked their dead comrade. His helmet had done nothing to protect him. Turning to his comrade, he began to apply plas-steel salve to the holes in the armor. Finished, they stormed into the control console room. With his advanced augmented hearing, Derman could hear the twitter of the hack tool as one of the New Conglomerate men fought to neutralize and reverse the damage that the malignant Terran override virus coding was doing.

He counted to five and squeezed the clacker to the mine hidden behind the console. The Boomer erupted with full force, deflected by the recessed housing walls and redirected around the console. The plastic synthetic explosives tore through the two men like a hot knife carving through butter. The blast triggered the other two mines, and they too detonated, adding their destructive energies to the explosion.

�Long live the Republic,� Derman snarled, watching the doors buckle as the heat and the blast worked their magic inside the small room.

[Gigabein]

omg... a diamond in the rough!

[TheN00b]

Bloody masterful.