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THE BATTLE OF ALPHA CENTAURI, DAY 19

Planet Centauri Prime; Federated Territory, West Coast District
The Alpha Centauri System
AUG 3 2416/2416.215; 2255 Hours (FST)

“Fall back, Marines! Everybody down!"

The other Marines gathered in the trench felt it coming. Call it a sixth sense. As it closed in on their position, it no longer required a soldier’s crack-hardened senses and intuition. You could hear it coming.

"Oh, shit!"

"Fire in the hole!"

"Good go—"

In theory, the twenty year-long conflict with the savage Yan race near the turn of the last century should have brought humanity closer together. Perhaps in many ways it did. It justified the fledgling Terran Federation, which had just consolidated itself as the World Economic Consortium’s military branch just weeks after Doctor Shari Akwende’s research from 2214 gave mankind Jump Drive.

Yes, the World Economic Consortium; WEC, formerly the United Nations. The name was a curse to all Confederates who wore their defiantly crafted uniforms with pride.

Corporal Dawn McKenzie wore hers. She wore it well. Even for what the most enlightened Confederate tactician feared was a suicide cause; for a comparatively slim-numbered, ill-equipped military; for a chain of command that even in the twenty-fifth century did not treat women as true equals.

Private Pete "Hell’s Bells" Phearson felt a moment of courage and lunged above the mound, taking the mounted plasma cannon and dishing out raw firepower across the scorched battlefield. His trigger finger holding, the kid took a stray round to his chest and was hurled over the lip of the other side of the trench.

The smoke from the last grenading to the trench still clearing, Dawn remained huddled behind the still-warm bodies of Lieutenant Colonel Bradford, the OIC’s senior NCO, Gunnery Sergeant Raheem, the XO, and the bodies of Marines that could no longer be identified... all of them still clutching their assault rifles and firearms. PFC Jamie Dean was there, too, the only other woman in her unit. Alive, but barely.

Jamie had taken a plasma bolt to the side and a piece of shrapnel to the neck from an exploding shell. In the words of the fearless lieutenant himself, she was "a goner." The quivering woman hugged her knees, rocking back and forth as the blood flowed down her soot-blackened body. She had an excuse to hide from the heat of the ongoing battle. Dawn didn’t.

The freckled youth took notice of her fellow woman and blinked her eyes drowsily, unable to focus on Dawn. Dawn hid from her gaze.

Her eardrums ringing with the continuing explosions and gunfire, Dawn noticed her own body was starting to go jittery. Straight out of some of the old war holofilms she had watched as a younger woman, she felt her right hand begin to shake as she held it out in front of her, one of the first signs of shell shock.

"Die, Federate fucks!" came a voice from just above the trench wall, followed by salvos of rapid plasma fire. It sounded like Lance Corporal Causey, eager for blood as ever. It would be the death of him.

Dawn found the men and women of her regiment often shouted such things as they waded into battle, but she always kept to herself.

"Long live the Confederacy!" she heard another bellow. This voice was chock full of the grand, heart-throbbing stuff that pumped through every soldier on a battlefield with a sense of patriotism.

Dawn had been something like that. Once. Not long ago, even.

If only humanity had never encountered the Yan. It all came back to the Yan. Mankind as a people had been at its peak—its apex—at the beginning of the twenty-fourth century. New technologies and medicines were popping up left and right, and the sky was the limit. The ecocatastrophe on Earth ended four years ago; the quarantine lifted following the reestablishment of shipping lanes to the rest of the planets in the system. The aloof Pilgrims and their Pilgrim Alliance, former McDanielite colonists with visions of grandeur, had taken their leave of Sol System altogether, disappearing into solar systems unknown in completion of their "Final Exodus." With the Pilgrims gone, humanity was now its own keeper, this in itself ushering in a bright new age. One with hope for tomorrow.

"Mother... mother..."

"Shut up, Hendricks!"

"Mother... help me..."

"Shut the fuck up!"

It was then that the Yan race reared its ugly head over Sol System. The Terran Federation was caught off-guard, and despite the efforts of the best in the Diplomatic Corps, war had been inevitable from the start. Twenty years of hostilities, the billions of deaths. It had been the first space-based conflict in history, pitting the awkward hot fusion-powered crates that had been the only suitable craft for warfare of any kind against the "Yan cans," as they had been nicknamed by vets. If the technology level had stood in the Yan’s favor, the war could and likely would have gone in an entirely different and tragic direction. It was truly fortunate that the Yan and Federation had been roughly at the same point of advancement into the vaunted Space Age. By 2388, the pendulum of war at last swung to the battered Federation. The Yan were wandering nomads that traveled system-to-system looking for easily-had habitable worlds to deposit colonies and supplies. The Federation, though merely a birthing space power of the WEC at the time, gave the Yan the fight of their lives. So they left. The war ended.

"Aw, Jesus fucking Christ! They got the lieutenant! They got the—fucking shiii—"

If only it had ended there, with the Yan in full retreat. But it didn’t. During the war, independently owned and operated factories, plants, and shipyards couldn’t keep up with demand on the front lines. In addition, civilian unrest reached an all-time high with psychics, self-proclaimed prophets, and even holovision newscasters calling the then-grim conflict "the beginning of the end," or worse yet declaring, "the end is here." Planetary police proved insufficient to contain a civilization that was convinced they had only days to live. The Armed Forces Committee of the World Economic Consortium revealed their solution: Emergency Decree 242.

Martial Law.

The "military authorities," subsequently granted "extraordinary powers," seized complete control of the populaces on Earth, Venus, and Mars, transferring all citizens from the moons and habitat space station colonies to the planets so that the moons and stations could be put into use as containment centers for those opposed and the more unruly—concentration camps in disguise.

It almost would have been tolerable if it had been rescinded with the conclusion of the war. The World Economic Consortium, in their increasingly imperialistic wisdom, decided things worked better under Martial Law. The people were all in line. Control was maintained. The official excuse was that humanity would be better prepared to handle any other hostile race, or even the Yan, should they return. As the years slipped by, it became clearer and clearer the WEC and the powers within its ruling Terran Federation government body had no intention of lifting Martial Law. Five years after the war a rebel Confederacy was already brewing in underground civilian circles.

"Somebody hand me my gun... my... gun... must have dropped it somewhere... oh, god... god... my arm..."

The invention of Akwende Jump Drive and Superluminal Flight, though in a limited sense—even now it was projected to be a century before Akwende Drive would be cost and energy-efficient enough to have its installation anywhere near commonplace, leaving Morvan "Hopper" Drive still the standard—made people forget the state of injustice they were living in. For a time. The Alpha Centauri System and its planets was opened up with the coming of Jump Drive, and soon the busy Exploratory Services had Centauri Prime ready for colonization, following in the Pilgrims’ footsteps. No sooner did a growing colony become established on the newly staked world that a Federation garrison arrived. In the days that would follow, after support was gained and rallied from Federation officers and brass who disagreed with continued Martial Law and a shipyard was seized, the Confederacy declared itself before the WEC Senate, demanding an immediate end to Martial Law.

A new war began.

That was 2419. Already eight years of bloodshed into the Galactic Civil War, the Federation still clung to Martial Law. Not willing to negotiate; not willing to compromise.

"I am a freedom fighter," Dawn told herself. She could scarcely hear her own voice under the deafening noise, but the reminder infused her with newfound confidence, as it had in the past. Confidence and patriotism. The comfort in staking one’s life for a cause that is just and right.

Like "Hell’s Bells" and a handful of other brave souls, Dawn made a go for it. Her Marine-issue dual C-17 plasma caster assault rifle in-hand and ballistic sidearm pistol strapped at her hip, she grappled up the trench wall with difficulty, having to drag aside the bloodied bodies of her comrades. Some of them were still twitching.

"Semper fi," she muttered, moving on. Whatever emotion she felt was bottled up tight. Perhaps it was best that way.

It had to be.

Clomping her way up the muck of the wall, her boots now sloshing with gravel and mud, the battlefield stretched itself out before Dawn. Flak grenades and the exchange of plasma bolts and railgun fire from their trench to the dark, blurred structure on the horizon that marked the Federation garrison base almost a mile away lit and pierced the misty night sky. Dashing in a zig-zag across the grounds, the sporadic hurtling of plasma gunfire streaked by her, painting the fog air with comet-like trails.

Dawn’s nerves, keeping her on the edge, were her enemy. Fear could be brushed aside—she had already dealt with that in her own way. The same with physical pain—a sudden railgun flechette discharge had speared her through the ribs a day ago just after the drop, leaving her to wonder at the severity of internal injury and bleeding she was suffering. But pain could be shut out, ignored. Emotional pain, however...

A muffled beep rang at her side, replacing fearlessness with combat instinct and common sense, if only for a moment. Hoping she had that moment to spare, Dawn dove to the side. Scraping face-down across the crispy, hot gravel, the explosion threw debris over her back, raining fragments all across her armored body.

Forcing herself to her feet, she trudged on. As she did so, however, she was heaved forward by some invisible force and nearly thrown back to the ground again, this time from behind.

It took a moment for what had happened to sink in, but when it did, she knew her fate was sealed.

A tactical neutron warhead had hit the mark on Dawn’s trench, detonated some two hundred meters above the target before coming down and carving a twenty meter radius out of the ground where it struck. It spelled immediate flash incineration for the lucky and agonizing, fatal radiation exposure deaths for the rest. She wore the standard anti-RAD armor, but her proximity to the blast was too close.

Nothing she could do for anyone left in the trench. Not even herself, now. Nothing. Why did knowing this make no difference to Dawn? She knew the answer, but would not go there again.

Footsteps. A sweet and welcome reminder of the situation at hand.

Increasing her dash to a sprint, Dawn made quick work of the five troopers that hoped to rush Dawn’s now-decimated trench, appearing in full greenish starlight through her nightvision goggles. Diving to her side, railgun fire whizzing by her ear, she held the trigger and cut loose. Blowing holes almost the size of cannonballs through the advancing figures, the troopers’ ruptured lungs had not even the air to produce a scream on their way down.

Unfazed by the necessary killing, Dawn strode to one on the side that was still breathing. She hesitated only a moment as she beheld the young man’s handsome, somehow familiar, pleading face, then plunged her bayonet as far as it would go into his heart.

"Private James Colson," she whispered, her lips barely moving to form the name on the man’s ID strip. His face was familiar, but she did not know him. Familiar, like another man she had known. One she had...

No, she scolded herself, not now, damn it. I made a promise.

As she withdrew her caster’s blade from the Federate corpse, Dawn was greeted by a new sight.

Great pillars of white hot flame erupted and rose into the sky from the east to the northwest about a hundred meters ahead of Dawn. The ground trembled beneath her boots as the wall of fire dimmed to a flickering of flames in the distance.

Before she could even wonder what force was responsible, a wing of TB-35A Wyvern-class starfighters swooped overhead, their atmospheric jet propulsion engines kicking in and delivering even more punishment to Dawn’s eardrums. The good guys.

A second wing swooped behind the first, completing a second strafing run with artistic precision, hitting the garrison base with more napalm. The immense heat from the bonfire of explosions could be felt even from where Dawn stood in awe.

Like birds of prey, she thought to herself, riding the tide of war with its kin into honorable battle.

Dawn took notice of the voice cackling on her headset. Straining her ears, she made out the words of the speaker, "... s is the Confederate dropship Chapel-12 to Lieutenant Buefford or Sergeant Raheem. Please acknowledge."

Dawn swallowed on a dry throat, unable to verbally admit that everyone in her unit was dead and gone. Including the lieutenant and the sergeant, and even the official corporal. Even Jamie.

"Any Marines able to respond, please do so," the voice came again. "This is the Confederate dropship Chapel-12, here for pick-up of any re—"

"Acting Corporal Dawn L. McKenzie here. Bravo Company, 5th Light Drop Infantry Regiment, Confederate Colonial Marine Corps; 854-53-5450," she rattled off automatically into her headset mike.

After confirmation of her identity and position, her gaze wasn’t directed at the bulky-looking, descending dropship, but instead at the sleek Wyvern fighters escaping back into space. Standing before the landing dropship, covered in mud, wounded, tired from three days straight of no sleep, Dawn made a new promise to herself. From within the hollow shell of a person she had become, dying both from the inside and out, a spark of something that hadn’t been there in a long time rekindled.

A decision was made.

"I... I want to fly."

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