[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...