The shuttle seemed to go black for a terrifying second, then it was suddenly buffeted by the atmosphere as it materialised in the air. The craft lurched suddenly, dropping several feet before the drive systems caught on and powered it through the air, leaving him feeling delighted. They’d survived the jump! He linked back into the Marine combat network and noted the absence of two shuttles, both having vanished during the jump. If they were lucky, their drives had failed or they’d reappeared somewhere else. If they were unlucky, they had materialised within the planet and had been killed before they’d had any time to realise that something had gone wrong.
“I am picking up enemy sensors,” the pilot reported. Through his mental link, Neil could see them as red bands of light sweeping through the sky. As he had hoped — when he had sold Admiral Walker on the plan — their sudden appearance had alarmed the Blackshirts. “They are attempting to lock onto us.”
“Good,” Neil said. He laughed, knowing that non-Marines would consider him insane. “Go to evasive manoeuvres and call in strikes from high overhead.”
“Don’t teach your grandma to suck eggs,” the pilot countered. The gee-forces increased as the shuttle started to slip into evasive manoeuvres. The small formation was coming up on Freedom, the city that had served as the capital of Jackson’s Folly. It looked like a war zone now, even from the shuttles. “Time to ejection is two minutes and counting.”
Neil grinned. This, the chance to make a forced landing on a hostile planet, was what he lived for. It was what war was all about, something that the Imperial Navy would never understand. And as for the Blackshirts… his grin widened. Killing them never got old.
“Sir, we have incoming enemy shuttles,” the operator reported.
General Branford cursed. He had hoped that digging into Freedom — the absurdly-named city — would provide a degree of protection from orbital strikes. His men had trapped most of the city’s population in with them, using them as shields against both insurgents and rebels. As far as he could tell, there had been no link between Jackson’s Folly and the mutineers, but now one was definitely forming. Besides, Public Information had to get some things right, if only by accident.
“Order them to open fire as soon as the enemy enters range,” he ordered, coldly. The enemy commander had to be a Marine. No one else would be insane enough to flicker into the atmosphere, just to mount a raid. It had to be a raid. If the rebels had the firepower to defeat the Imperial Navy, they’d be off trashing Camelot or even Earth, rather than liberating Jackson’s Folly. No, it was a raid. “And then order the forces on the ground to disperse.”
He clenched his fist in outrage. As a loyal servant of the Empire, he knew his duty; he had to bring Jackson’s Folly into the Empire, whatever it took. It hadn’t been a peaceful deployment. The locals were armed to the teeth and reluctant to bend the knee to the Empire, forcing him to deploy his forces and strike back at rebels and insurgents. The bastards wore no uniforms and fought without honour. They were to blame for the massive death toll. Branford took no pleasure in slaughtering hostages, or in exterminating traitors, yet there was no choice. The insurgents had made it so.
“The enemy shuttles are entering range,” the operator said. Branford nodded. Some of his encampments had been struck from orbit, but others had been spared, spared because of the human shields gathered around them. “The defences are opening fire… now!”
“They’re opening fire,” the pilot said. “Prepare for ejection.”
Neil braced himself as his suit was picked up and thrown down through the hatch, out into the open air. The sky was filling with green flashes of light as plasma cannons attempted to smash the shuttles out of the sky, yet they were already too late. The men and women of his Marine Regiment were already deploying. The enemy were clearly reacting too late to prevent it. A handful of shuttles vanished in fireballs — others launched missiles back towards their tormentors, hoping to knock them out before more shuttles died — but the remainder kept going, turning away from the enemy base. Neil barely had a second to see the ground coming up towards him before he landed, feeling the jerk even through the compensator field enveloping his armoured combat suit.
He fell into the Marine command network at once, deploying his suit’s weapons and looking for targets. A group of Blackshirts were already running towards them, trying to deploy, when they were scythed down by the Marines. Moving as one, their training coming to the fore, the Marines attacked savagely, heading directly towards the Blackshirt base. The Blackshirts, instead of using armoured suits, preferred to use armoured vehicles. It was a mistake, Neil knew, one he intended to exploit. The plasma cannons his Marines carried could punch through anything the Blackshirts had on hand.
The fighting grew more savage as they raced through the city, as if they were all of one mind. The locals, at least, had the sense to stay out of the way, although fragments of chatter his suit picked up suggested that some of them were taking the opportunity to attack the Blackshirts and score a little payback for the suffering and torment they’d undergone. Neil was right in the heart of it, fighting alongside his men and feeling a little bit of himself die when a Marine fell. The Blackshirts had broken out their heavy plasma cannons, powerful enough to burn through a Marine armoured suit, firing almost at random. The cannons didn’t survive long when the Marines saw them, hitting them with their own weapons and causing them to explode with colossal force, but it hardly mattered. A handful of Marines were killed before they could react. Neil saw a running Blackshirt, his body ablaze with white fire, and felt sick. The Blackshirt had been too close to one of the plasma cannons when the containment field had exploded. He snapped off a mercy shot and put the poor bastard out of his misery.
“Onwards,” he snapped. The fighting had become kinetic, with the Marines responding to threats as they appeared, but they kept pushing towards the main base. The Blackshirts had taken over the city’s governmental buildings and converted them into their headquarters. The level of defences around them looked oddly paranoid, but then the locals had been very good at slipping explosive devices and even armed men through the gaps. He wondered, absently, why the Blackshirts had bothered to place their headquarters there, yet it hardly mattered. Perhaps they’d seen it as a way to mark their claim on the local real estate.
The fighting became a blurred series of impressions as they assaulted the main base. They tore through barriers intended to keep out vehicles, running right into the Blackshirts and their final stand. Neil realised that they were using their drug injectors, rendering themselves largely immune to pain and fear. Marines didn’t use the drugs, largely because they affected the brain as well, turning the Blackshirts into soulless killing machines with little sense of right or wrong. He saw a Blackshirt run right at them, firing madly, and cut him down. Others resisted the temptation to seek self-immolation and held out until the Marines cut through them, like a knife through butter. The final defences were destroyed and the Marines pushed onwards, into the building. Neil checked the map he’d downloaded and installed in his HUD and smiled. If he knew the General’s reputation, he would be in the main office, the one that had belonged to the planet’s President.