[GZG] [GZG Fiction] Southern Decoy

Southern Decoy
 
She opened the door and reached up to grab the can of black paint. Too
late she realised she had caught the edge of the paint stand, pots
cascaded down on her. Peppering her head and bouncing away across the
bedroom floor, rolling under the bed, coming to rest by the drawers and
bookcase. The cascade didn't stop, pile after pile of pots came down,
out of the cupboard until it felt like she'd flounder and be
overwhelmed.
 
"Ruth"
 
She could hear someone coming to her aid, but was certain they'd be too
late. She was being dragged down, overwhelmed by the deluge of pots
spewing from the cupboard.
 
"Ruth!"
 
Struggling to save herself, she kicked out hard for the surface of the
pool of pots.
 
"RUTH"
 
She woke with a start; wide eyed; right arm sweeping across her in a
defensive swipe at imaginary paint pots. 
 
"You ok kiddo?" Danny's, dusty, smiling face queried. The creases at the
corners of his laughing eyes standing out as the dust fell away.
 
"Yeah, yeah" Ruth waved him off a little irritably, casting around her
surroundings to make sure all was where she'd left it. "Just a dream.
That brew for me?"
 
"No. But given you look like shit, I'd say you'd better have it" Danny
said still smiling, offering her his steaming mug.
 
"Oh thank you, sarky bastard." Ruth answered, accepting the proffered
mug with mock gruffness, her humour returning. 
 
Danny shuffled over to the fire and poured himself another coffee. "Wish
this bloody rattle would shut up. Then we could all get a decent kip.
We'll be on live again soon and me without me beauty sleep."
 
It was then that Ruth really registered the continual hammering, like
hail stones on a tin roof. She took a long pull from her mug, both hands
wrapped around it for warmth and eyes going involuntarily to the roof,
as if checking for flaws. The Vaks had had them under steady fire for
what seemed like days now. In reality it'd only been in the last 18
hours since the combined human forces had started their attack. Wave
after wave of aircraft, vehicles and troops throwing themselves against
the Arda approach to Tsuru. 
 
"TJ was right" she thought as Ruth zipped open the front of her pack and
started sorting through her gear. "Vaks" rolled off the tongue much more
easily than Kraks and it suited those vac-loving monsters to the ground.
She was aligned with TJ in his desire to vac them all in fact. Truth be
known she was aligned with TJ in many ways she thought to herself, a
smile rushing her face and a tingle running down her back. Glad she was
faced away from Danny, who would inevitably ask what had tickled her,
she briefly wondered where TJ was now. In orbit somewhere no doubt or
maybe on deployment in the Arda Valles itself. Their brief time in the
eateries and bars of Landon seemed a lifetime ago.
 
TJ was a zero-g rated marine. His job was to vac the bad guys and that's
exactly what he'd been doing for months on end as the humans and Vak
fought for control of the Martian orbit. It had been a close run thing,
as the UN lead forces couldn't afford to strip away too many of Earth's
defensive line to reinforce the Martian effort, or cut off Vak reserves
coming in from out of system, but if the struggle didn't end quickly the
Vak's bombardment would knock the teetering Martian climate into a tail
spin. While there had been random strikes on most of the larger Martian
cities, the majority of the orbital strike potential had been
concentrated on the battlezone and the immediate threats to the Vak's
ground holdings. Theories abounded as to why the aliens hadn't struck
much further a field. At one extreme were those who emotively argued
that the Vak did not want to destroy future food resources, at the other
those who claimed the Vak were intentionally minimising collateral
damage to the human populace out of some higher motivation and respect
for sentience. The military elite presumed it was simply a need to use
ammunition as effectively as possible, given its limited supply and the
intermittent nature of the Vak logistics line out of the solar system.
What ever the real reason, the irony was that the strikes weren't
directly threatening to the human forces in the immediate battlezone, as
the Wars of Independence had taught the Martians to go deep in defence
and those old works were still down there, again being put to good use.
The slugs falling from orbit were really only served at chopping up the
ground and undoing over a century of hard-won terraforming advances.
 
Ruth remembered quite clearly the almost eerie silence that had
enveloped the Line three months ago, the night of the "Battle of the Two
Moons". Two substantial space fleets had been jousting in orbit or close
by the planet since Mars was first invaded nearly a Martian year and a
half (roughly 30 Terran months) earlier. The UN lead force, under
Admiral Miyake, had inexplicably moved to a high orbit, the Vak
paralleling them out in an effort to prevent their return. With the two
lines of ships passing Deimos and about 6200 metres apart, the human
fleet opened fire. This marked the beginning of the end of the blockade
of Mars. With the Vak ships concentrating their fire on the human's main
line an immense cloud of fighters started to stream from Deimos.
Scatterguns and psycho Vak pilots had typically seen human fighters and
ordinance left out of most Vak engagements. But those engagements hadn't
had a 15km planetoid ordinance base to call upon. It remains a deep dark
secret how the UN pulled it off, but Deimos had been hollowed and made a
floating fighter and missile storage base. Admiral Miyake had gained a
vital early advantage, surprise. Then came the next surprise, the small
shuttles which had been running the gauntlet to resupply the fleet had
brought in new AI gunnery systems, the improvements were tangible. Vak
firepower had won out before, now human precision was reversing the
score. The human fleet was suffering damage, but not like that of the
Vak fleet, which lost its Yu'Kas, two Ko'Vol, a Ti'Dak and four Ko'Tek
in the opening three hours of the battle. In the hours after that the
human losses started to mount, their fighters badly mauled were
beginning to dwindle in effect, the Vak becoming more effective as a
result. Admiral Miyake had lost a third of his fleet and was personally
wounded, but refused to leave his bridge. Then he pulled his last cat
out of the bag. Another fighter and ordinance stream, this time from
Phobos. If the Deimos base had been an astounding accomplishment, the
equally secret Phobos base was more so, at just 4800km from the surface
of Mars. It proved a master stroke, with the additional quick loss of a
Va'Dok, Do'San and six more cruiser-sized vessels the Vak fleet broke
off. Disappointingly many of the remaining ships moved to join the Seige
of Earth, but it was noted with satisfaction that all of the largest
surviving Vak vessels withdrew from the system completely. Limping to
the jump horizon before leaving the system for good. 
 
It had been a nervous few days and then weeks watching to see if they
returned or the fleet around Earth fractured, sending a new force to
Mars. But no such moves were made and the skies of Mars were once again
in human hands.
 
Dirtside, while the Vak didn't seem to be making use of the subterranean
compounds to any great degree and so should be vulnerable to orbital
strikes, it was decided by the UN in a joint sitting of the remaining
and contactable members of the Interstellar Assembly that further
degradation of the Martian atmosphere could not be risked; as the
greater Seige of Sol meant the Martian populace could not be evacuated
if catastrophic climactic collapse occurred. If that happened, tens of
millions more would be added to the list of fatalities in this long
inter-species war, something the UN wasn't prepared to stomach. The Vak
would have to be rooted out the old fashion way. The hard way. The
deaths of soldiers in battle easier to sell than the deaths of infants
and the elderly asphyxiating in their homes. 
 
It would all start with a strike in the Arda Valles. If this
multinational effort was successful, it would damage Vak forces in the
area and see them pushed back from the once valuable agri- and e-com
centres of Tsuru and Yokaichi, maybe they'd even reach the main Vak
bases in and around Ojika Jima. If they were really successful, they
would draw alien forces down from the north to help defend this southern
hot-zone, leaving chinks in their armour just as the massed main human
strike launched into the north across the water from Canelli, Harper,
Halab and Asinoes.
 
Ruth stood there, sipping her coffee, eyes pointed at the ceiling,
staring into the middle distance, willing the attack forward for a few
minutes. Then with her cup drained she turned to the task at hand,
filing her latest report. 
 
"An embed's work was never done" she joked to herself as she pulled out
her cell pack and fired it up her hvid-camcorder. "Danny do we have live
upload today?" Ruth called over her shoulder as she booted up the tiny
device. The tiny projector was a black Teflon coated stick, oval in
cross section and roughly 2cm by 5cm. It could be hand held or slotted
into her helmet when she was on the move. As it booted its tiny light
flickered and then settled into its muted green "ready-status" mode. 
 
"Yeah they finally got some free waves, though micro-bursts and no
'loose lips' is still standing" came Danny's muffled reply, as he dug
through his pack.
 
Wow, she'd be able to "head and shoulders" an intro before reverting
back to simple text. That's the advantage of owning orbit now I guess,
thought Ruth. Though obviously they couldn't secure system-level
transmissions, or the broadcasts back on Earth apparently. Hell no one
could say whether Vaks understood human tongues at all, so back to the
old "don't say anything the enemy doesn't already know" routine. After
the relative freedom of reporting in the first few years of the war this
order had gotten old fast, even if she understood it. She found it so
hard not to share all of the thrill and horror of the situation with her
audience. They could only get the most superficial of glances from what
she could say. Though they probably thought they were being rocked to
their very core by it all.
 
Ruth squeezed the stick and said "Record now", which activated the
little unit and a ghostly, translucent reflection of her head and
shoulders formed in the air in front of her. She briefly ran through her
opening in her mind. Somehow she didn't think she'd tell her listeners
that her first memories of this fateful day would always be of reaching
for a can of black paint...

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