Twelve
May 2252
Tarbos
Admiral Isaac Gauss was uncharacteristically cheerful. Seated in Senator Mike Crider’s office with another cup of Forestian coffee, he was grinning ear to ear at the news from the privateer Shade Tree.
“I’m not sure I understand your obvious satisfaction.” The Senator was just a bit confused. “You just destroyed several ships yourself, including an Occupation ship. Why is the Shade Tree’s kill so special?”
“It’s simple, Senator,” Gauss exulted. His energy was such that he couldn’t remain seated; he bounced to his feet and gestured with his coffee cup as he spoke, “You see, those skinny bastards hit us hard right off. They probably have a pretty good idea of our strength, and they probably know we don’t have a very good idea of theirs. They thought they had us by the short and curlies. Well, we showed them different at Fortune; we showed them that we could plan and execute an ambush just as well as they can. But the Shade Tree did us one better.”
“How?”
“The way they snuck that mine in right under their noses! That was a work of art, Senator, a goddamn work of art. I wish I’d thought of it myself! But they did more than destroy an Occupation ship, and they did more than remove the main source of support for their troops down on the surface at New Albion. The Grugell lost a ship and had another badly damaged, and they don’t know how or why. All they know is that a nuke went off right against the hull of an Occupation ship, wiping it out of space and banging up a cruiser. Don’t you see? They don’t know what happened. They’ll start to doubt themselves now, to doubt their capacities, to wonder what they’re overlooking. I can use that, Senator. Now’s the time to press ahead, to bear down on those bastards, to make that doubt grow stronger.”
“Well, that may not be so easy. The Senate has cut your funding bill down by almost twenty percent. We’re trying to push through a series of amendments to get some projects funded piecemeal, but it’s not looking good.”
Admiral Gauss thought about that for a moment. “Damn. You know, Senator, if we lose this war, it won’t be for lack of fighting spirit, or brains, or guts. It will be because Congress tried to pinch pennies. We can do this if you’ll give us the ships and the supplies!”
“I’m working on it, Admiral.” Crider didn’t look too convinced. “In the meantime, we’ll have to make best use of what resources we’ve got.”
The ‘we’ wasn’t lost on Admiral Gauss. “Well, that privateer sure helped us out at New Albion,” he replied.
New Albion
Night on the outskirts of Glengarry, a small band of men moved silently through the tall grasses towards the city. Lacking a hyperphone, the guerillas had no idea why the Grugell seemed to be in disarray; regular patrols were no longer regular, and enemy forces had been pulled back into the city.
The Marines led the party carefully into the outskirts of Glengarry, past abandoned houses, apartment blocks, and warehouses. Slipping silently from shadow to shadow, the raiders moved carefully towards Off-World Mining’s main office building.
Three nights previously, Sergeant Tinker Morris and Jason MacFeeters had reconnoitered the building. In several hours of creeping and darting from shadow to shadow, the two had planted a number of remote sensors, thimble-sized devices that stuck to walls to send timed burst pulse transmissions to a shoebox-sized receiver. That receiver had been left behind at a hidden guerilla camp in a cave network in the Crow Ridge Mountains, but the data gathered had revealed the Grugell’s main headquarters to be the Off-World building.
Pausing at the corner of a deserted supermarket a block from Off-World, Lieutenant Jerrold took a small object from his pocket, twisted a tiny dial on the top, and laid it on the concrete of the darkened alleyway. A tiny red light glowed on the top of the ten-centimeter-wide oval; eight thin mechanical legs unfolded from the sides of the device with a faint clicking sound. Rising up on its legs, the mechanical spider scuttled off around the corner towards the Grugell Occupation headquarters.
“Cover me,” Lieutenant Jerrold whispered. Behind him, Jason MacFeeters raised one fist and snapped his fingers open. The other guerillas melted into the shadows, weapons at the ready.
Jerrold dropped to one knee, fished around in a capacious cargo pocket in his jacket, extracted a device that looked like a pair of very dark sunglasses connected by a cable to a small pad and joystick. Donning the virtual reality glasses, he picked up the control and prepared to guide the spider-droid to its goal.
The tiny droid scuttled forward, its half-millimeter eyespot sending a low-powered transmission back to the Marine controlling it. In the VR glasses, the Lieutenant could see what the droid saw; with the control pad, he could tell it what to do, where to go.
Scuttling much like a real arachnid, the droid slipped between the booted feet of a Grugell guard at the main door, who noticed the scuttling object but had no idea that it didn’t resemble any life form indigenous to New Albion. The door swung open for a moment as the guard’s section leader stepped out to speak to him, and the tiny droid slipped in.
Across the main foyer, down a hallway, the droid ran along the edge of a wall until it came to a polysteel fire door. “That ought to be the fire stairs,” Jerrold whispered to himself. He pressed a contact on the control pad, and a fine spray of a powerful acid shot from the droid’s slightly pointed nose. A moment later, the machine scuttled through the hole eaten in the door. At the top of the stairs, the droid took to the wall, needle-pointed feet gripping as the tiny machine ran around the circular stairwell to the building’s lower level.
At the bottom of the stairs, Jerrold paused the tiny machine and looked around. As he turned his head, the eye-spot on the droid turned to mimic his motion.
“There.” Off-World’s blueprints for the office building had listed two large hydrogen fuel cells, backup power for the crucial computer systems of the Company’s largest office on the planet. Jerrold moved the stick again; inside the building, the droid scuttled under one of the tanks.
One button on the control pad was set a little apart from the others. Jerrold removed the VR glasses, stowed them in a pocket, replaced the tiny comlink headset in his ear. Courtesy of the Confederate Marines, all the guerrillas wore similar comlink sets.
The Marine Lieutenant whispered into the tiny boom mike, “Fire in the hole.” He pressed the final button.
Inside the tiny droid, a tiny swirl of magnetic force held a tenth of a gram of anti-matter in an eddy of energy, encased in a bubble of vacuum. When Lieutenant Jerrold pressed the button, the magnetic field dropped, exposing the anti-matter particle to the ordinary matter of the droid’s interior.
The resulting explosion was impressive, amplified as it was by the hydrogen in the emergency cells. A loud crump sounded inside the building, and on the lower four levels all of the windows were blown outward a split second before the building sagged, slumped, and finally collapsed in on itself. Only one Grugell escaped. At the sound of the first dull roar, the guard at the door sprinted into the street, only to be dropped by a single rifle shot from the alley across from the supermarket. Three minutes after the explosion, two silver Grugell scout craft turned up, scanning the area with all sensors, but the guerilla band had faded into the night, leaving most of the Grugell Occupation leadership dead behind them.
To see more of Animal’s writing, visit his page at Crimson Dragon Publishing or Amazon.
loving the story.
humans can be such devious bastards.
Boom.
Good stuff. I thought that they were going to blow the fuel cells, not the entire building!
Fuel cells go boom.
Big bada boom!
Saint Bernie wants to issue a decree that the workers may only work 32 hours a week before being owed OT. And that total compensation cannot be lowered.
It’s a foolproof plan.
Make it 20 hours, that way employers will need to hire twice as many people to get the same amount of work!
I have solved unemployment!
Billionayahs!
Bernie is already 14 years old than Graham. Don’t think he’ll be around to see this come true. Maybe President AOC will be able to push it through the Central Committee?
All hours should be overtime. The default is not working at all, a person who shows up at the job (employer input is not needed, just show up and you work there!) deserves time and a half and the minimum wage is $50
If you said that to Bernie he’d tell you that you can’t out Bern the Bern and set that minimum wage to $100. Try him.
It doesn’t matter everyone went out of business at 25, we’re at the shooting people for growing tomatoes in their yard as hoarders stage.
What! When you pry my cold dead hands off my tomatoes. I don’t grow them as a hobby.
EXPLOSIONS!!!!!!11!111!
Apparently, the Grugell have no concept of asymmetrical warfare in their history.
I hope that the troops cleared out the non-combatants from that particular downtown block – a 0.1g matter/antimatter reaction would release about 2.15kT equivalent explosive force. For those times when you just want to say, “Fuck you, fuck your buddies, and fuck everyone else in the neighborhood…”
Is fucking everyone else in the neighborhood another one of ES’s kinks?
Only when it involves nuclear explosives.
For those times when you just want to say, “Fuck you, fuck your buddies, and fuck everyone else in the neighborhood…”
So Mondays
Graham didn’t have a sudden illness. He croaked because of a long-term problem that wasn’t managed properly.
Thus, incompetent medical care and/or total indifference to his health.
An aortic dissection is a life-threatening medical emergency where a tear in the innermost layer of the aorta allows blood to surge between the vessel’s walls. This creates a “false lumen” and separates the layers, cutting off vital blood flow to organs
Causes and Risk Factors
The primary underlying trigger is chronic high blood pressure (hypertension), which weakens the aorta’s walls.
Other risk factors include: Atherosclerosis: Plaque buildup and high cholesterol.
The weather sucks outside. So, I was stuck indoors for my noon walk. 1.2 miles in 26 minutes.
there is no bad weather just bad clothing? or is that just in germany
The issue is working indoors in modern American Air Conditioning and then going outside to walk in high temperatures and very high humidity.
There is proper clothing for both activities, but not for doing those activities sequentially while wearing the same clothes.
I think the Germans now consider heil bad weather
if americans are so smart invent air conditioned clothes
We already did, they even work in space
I have to go to a meeting . . . Or I would look those up. There are definitely clothes with fans integrated into them.
OnlyFans?
in the nineties in Romania you could by Chinese hats with a solar panel and a small fan. they were shit.
That makes sense, obviously you need a coolie hat for this.
Don’t tell me how to capitalism commie.
I think Trump should appoint an AC Commissar with a five year plan to address this.
AC Commissar is bad idea comrade. When Commissar is, shortage is.
You’re being shortsighted. Just appoint a Commissar in charge of AC. Then tell the left that you’ve solved global warming and the answer was always to combat it with technology.
He was alive, until he was suddenly dead.
ALASKA MAN MONDAY.
I like the tweety bird.
How do I search this so that I can start at the beginning?
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BMTVHM7G
Can recommend.
Thanks!
A federal judge held Monday that President Donald Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS was manufactured simply to justify its settlement, including a multibillion-dollar “anti-weaponization” fund for political allies and a shield from IRS scrutiny.
UNPRECEDENTED ABUSE OF THE LEGAL SYSTEM!!!11!!!1
Which is completely different from the dozens or hundreds of lawsuits against various regulatory agencies setting up “settlements” and the many slush funds set up from settlements brought against various industries.