One Among Many: First Strike

Chapter 1: Hellbound

A transport vehicle sped silently across the open sky, casting rippling shadows across the canopy of the forest bellow. Like a ghost, the colossal mass seemed menacing, masking it's speed with it's great size while dwarfing any landmark around it. The city of Maara, the ship's destination, was just peaking over the horizon, threatening them to come closer with it's mirrored buildings which reflected pollight in all directions. The ship contained an army of soldiers, none of whom were trained enough for what they were about to experience. Official looking men in jumpsuits shouted at each other through large computer monitor screens and, in turn, manual adjustments were made with help from the onboard artificial intelligence.

This is what Jack saw when he took a moment to look at his surroundings. The sight of the city after so many days of suspense had put the ship into an uproar. Flashing red lights from every display only added to the panic as the transport's crew attempted to do a day of work in fifteen minutes. Jack sighed and went back to work, trying to find out what the weather conditions were like down on the ground. This was to no avail. The sensory data was fluctuating constantly, and since the virtual intelligence was already being heavily taxed, it was hard to get a clear reading. Despite this annoyance, Jack had realized that his job, he had concluded after a short few days of working here, was the easiest, or so it seemed. This was no indicator of the difficulty of this task however, because all the calculations had to be converted to EarthForm, the official system of measure based on conditions recorded back when Earth was inhabitable. A new "Sun" named "Pol", bizarre weather conditions, and the blistering heat of this new planet, officially named NeoEarth but affectionately named Kaman, were just a few things that made his job that more daunting.

He turned back to his computer screen, studying the data as it poured in from sensors placed on the ship's hull. Why was he even doing this? His superiors didn't care about any of this, only what to pack on the trip down to fight their war. He tore his eyes away from the screen, disgusted. Most people on this ship knew that this was a suicide mission, the overwhelming odds were making the troops drop like flies even before they had gotten to Maara. Fights had broken out among the crew, fueled on by fear and doubt about the upcoming battle. This entire ship was one big tool for the Marines, a way to see what the odds were. The sensors placed on the hull, for example, would serve a different purpose as they drew nearer to their destination, they would focus their attention toward Maara, scanning every nook and cranny before feeding all that information back to HQ in Skaabul. The troops were to be outfitted with basic sensor arrays themselves, to be used as human instruments so the main bulk of the army would be prepared when they got here.

He, Jack, knew that this could very well be the end of all of them, but he was not afraid to die today. While most of the crew were picked without choice to fight this battle, he volunteered. Ever since he had joined the corps, he had been ridiculed for being the brains, not the brawn. He had worked as the backbone in crucial operations and he was only listed as an assistant to the "Real Heroes”. These were the guys who ran in guns blazing, losing half their battalion but ending up alive in the end, their enemies at their feet. "What fools," he muttered to himself. If they had listened to him everyone would have lived, to the same end. Those men didn't need to die, and to a point he blamed himself for not convincing the thickheaded thugs to stick to his plan. This battle, this last push into enemy territory was his final hurrah, the one thing in his life he could be proud of before having his guns blazing moment.

He grinned to himself, he liked the sound of that. He had always wanted to be the hero, the man who took down incredible odds and this was the day. Whether they succeeded or lost was irrelevant to him, what mattered was that he was a part of it.

Chaos still engulfed the cabin of the ship as every second drew the crew nearer to the enemy Capital. They had been flying cloaked for weeks, dodging in and out of Maara's many sentinel camps located at strategic "high-traffic" areas. Trading had been closely monitored by the Maarians, and since having arrived on this planet they had non-verbally agreed on a stalemate. This truce was broken, however, when the humans detected that Maara was self sustaining, and made it’s own resources from some unknown source inside the Mirrored City. That was when the first marine spys, called Infiltrators, were deployed to find out the secrets of the native race. A week later a signal was sent back to Skaabul in the form of a video transmission. Jack had remembered watching that same video the night before as a prep for what we might be up against and what our goals were. The video showed a massive room, in which entire cities back on Earth could have been built. In the center was a machine, humming softly and giving off a blinding, pulsating white light. A man in full black stood at attention in front of the camera, showing his acknowledgement to the authority that would be watching this recording later.

“This is Sergeant Joseph Klemski, First Infiltrator Unit, Special Ops Division, reporting to base at about 0400. We’ve breached the enemy stronghold and have reached our target. We believe that this is the machine responsible for the enemy’s resource generation. We’ve had some time to look around and we’ve found no input into the target, including any kind of power source. The target itself seems to be a mix between biological and mechanical parts, culminating in the generating of the resources you see here.”

Klemski motioned with his hand to his left, and the camera follows it. Giant conveyor belts carried mountains of raw substances to several openings in the room, presumably bringing those resources all over the city. “We will be taking samples of the output of this machine, and will give you a full analys-“ He cut off, looking slightly over the camera and taking a few steps back. “What the…“ he said, squinting into the darkness behind the camera. Gunshots were fired off camera, and Klemski pulled out a pistol and pointed, adding his bullets to the barrage of sound. The last recorded sound on the transmission was a deafening screech, and the tape ended.

Morale had never been worse than the night they showed that transmission. The Infiltrators were as highly trained in the military as anyone could hope to get, and they had been either captured or, more likely than not, killed. That night there was no sleeping, no man could sleep comfortably knowing their mortality was going to be proven very soon. Even Jack had to admit, despite his volunteering for this mission, that he could not make his brain turn off that night. He had always been the one that had to know everything about everything, and if he didn't, he would think about possible solutions for hours on end. Matching that screeching sound with a face was not something he wanted to do, but his mind seemed to take him hostage, creating gruesome pictures of creatures he had seen on television as a boy. He was scared, and he had a right to be.

While the Marines had more advanced technology, Maarians had the element of the unknown, and it was already scaring the pants off even some of the older, more grizzled Marines. Over the past few months, they had planned their attack; trying to find a weakness in the enemy's defenses that they could take advantage of.

This was impossible without new information, so more infiltrators were sent out. All of them were dead before their first transmissions. So it had been decided, in desperation, that a cloaked transporter, equipped with top of the line sensory equipment, would be sent inside Maara. It had been documented by infiltrators that Maara had the capability to detect cloaked vehicles, while it's many outlying settlements could not. There was no time for this information to become validated, so they were taking the lead head approach to battle, charging straight at the Capital. The idiocy of this plan was not wasted on Jack, who in his time alone had come up with several better plans in a matter of minutes. But this battle wasn't about the efficiency of who lived and who died, it was about how much information could be transmitted to HQ before they were wiped out by the enemy brigade.

New, more panicked shouts were now bouncing off the reinforced walls of the cabin. The enemy had deployed drones as soon as they saw the oncoming ship, and they had latched onto the hull. The artificial intelligence, Libby, was tasked just to the point of overload, and was having a hard time being effective versus the swarms of fly-like machines. Fortunately for the crew, these machines were very lightly armored and had almost no firepower. Their goal was to overwhelm and destroy, and if split up they could not do this efficiently. Soldiers rushed to the manual controls for the hull turrets and picked them off in droves. The ship's size was something that could not easily be overwhelmed, and this first victory in the battle of Maara proved to boost the morale a bit of the more downtrodden troops. Jack switched his view screen to a camera of the main bridge of the ship to watch the panic ensue there as well.
What he saw, however, surprised him. The bridge was unusually calm, the orders were spoken without any sort of emotion to the other high-officers of the crew, and were carried out quietly. Why were they so calm? There was more that he didn't know, and this more than anything scared him the most.

He needed a clue, something that could tell him why these highly esteemed men were not afraid to go head-on into the waiting arms of the enemy fortress. They were certainly going to die, right? But what if he was wrong, what if this wasn’t a suicide mission? He shook his head to clear it. Not once had he stopped to consider that all of this talk had been paranoid hype about our military practices. Yes, they were surely going to die. He needed a second to think, a moment to process all the information and put it together. He willed himself to use his neural implant, the one thing he had over these army brats and thugs. This is what he was good at.

Jack was not a typical marine. In fact, he had barely succeeded in getting through boot camp. His family had come from a long line of war heroes and medal winners, and his family name proceeded him wherever he went. His brothers were highly ranked, and had basically rejected him as their brother. No, they had laughed at him when he had said he was considering joining the Marines. He was lanky and tall, with no muscle mass and pale skin. He wore his wire framed glasses at the tip of his nose at all times and tipped his head backwards when he talked to someone, to catch your image in the lenses. Despite his first impressions, however, he was actually somewhat sociable and enjoyed the company of the people he called his friends, although only a few could really claim to receive this title. Even without the esteem of his brothers or the respect of his fellow Marines, he had achieved more than most of them. When he was young, he was put into the highest classes his school could offer and was unchallenged by them. His intelligence caught the attention of the brightest minds of this age, the ones who had made the new age of space travel and weaponry. He worked with these men on a new military marvel, a chip that could be inserted into the brain that would increase brain function and store solid, accessible memory. More tests, more trials, more experiments. It was concluded that only young brain tissue was compatible with the chip, and even then it would take a developed brain to exercise the chip’s large range of features. Being the youngest and most obvious choice, Jack was chosen to be it’s guinea pig. It was a huge success, but he could only use it in small bursts, and finished with a pretty decent sized headache at the end.

He shook his head clear of these thoughts. This was his one weakness, over-analyzing situations and weighing out the pros and cons for way too long. He closed his eyes and concentrated hard, opening up his conscious mind to the implant. The effect was immediate. The world seemed to stop as the chip exploded into life, filling his brain with details, memories, and analysis in fractions of a second. He opened his eyes and looked slowly around, people stood frozen in time, their movements slowed down to under the range that he could notice with his human eye. The strangest sensation when he was in this state was the fact that, besides blinking, he could not move. His mind was trapped inside his motionless body, both processing and analyzing at speeds that exceeded twenty times the human brain. In the past, he had used this to stop during battles to analyze the enemy’s position, predict their actions, and devise what the best plan of action against them would be. This time he needed something more complex. He needed answers to his questions, and no one was going to give them to him. The answer was in the events leading up to this mission…he just knew it.