The Telic Campaign - chapter 1

"Wake up, you idiot!"

I jolted upright with a small cry. Cat had slammed her fist into my side with enough strength to knock the wind out of my lungs.

"What the...?"

With a tremendous bang drowning the continuous howling of the dropship turbines, a large explosion rocked the dropship from the other side of the nine inch plasteel armour plating that protected my ass from the cold vacuum. Whatever it was, it missed, but came damn close to the ship nevertheless. All of our gear had been tightly latched in place, but a dozen coffers unsnapped and equipment came flying from all directions. I found myself crawling on the floor and my mouth was bleeding when our petulant ship came back on course and pandemonium subsided a couple seconds later. An unsettlingly big dent had formed in the starboard hull.

"HELMETS ON AND HOLD TIGHT!" Wildcat yelled into my ear and whacked me over the head, "We're under attack!"

Oh, Really? I lightly covered the injury with my hand and looked to my right.

"Don't even bloody say it, Murphy" Bastille snarled and shoved a rag in my face. "Crybaby" he added under his breath.

The cramped crew deck had no monitors, but a brief glimpse into the cockpit revealed the boringly brown surface of Rhea. Seemingly endless sandy desert plains covered almost the entire surface of that rathole planet, and our small, metal pot was screaming full juice directly towards it.

"Who the fuck is shooting at us?!" I demanded to know from no one in particular while desperately trying to find my helmet, that had obviously decided to go flying with the rest of the junk during the first attack.

"Slept through the briefing again, eh Murphy?" Bastille shot me another look. I'm so going to beat this French bastard senseless one day...

"Orbital droneships. Opened fire without warning..." Jaeger answered me nervously without turning his head. His bulky frame was crammed into the cockpit doorway to provide some footing when yet another salvo of angry energy caused the dropship to quake and tremble frighteningly, it's solid titanium sustainers squeaking like rusty old door locks. "Bastards!... Conrad! How much longer?"

"Still twenty clicks away" replied the bellowing voice of the sarge "prepare for a rough ride folks!"

"Didn't anybody tell'em we were coming?" I muttered, fastening the broad seatbelts around my body armor. At least I had found the damn helmet by now and hastily put it on my head. With all parts in place, the powersuit activated and ran a diagnosis, filling the inside of my visor with cascades of text and pictures.

"So they could roll out the planetary defense cannons? Bright boy..." Jaeger retorted through gritted teeth and I quickly shut up. Linking my suit into the dataport I began loading all the mission related files from the ship's main computer instead, skipping through heaploads of environmental and meteorological data, coordinates, blueprints and floorplans directly to the classified stuff. Who needs the required Angel Delta clearance when you're the one with the hacktool onboard?

Interesting read indeed.

Rhea, inhabitable type five border world, part of a cluster of satellites orbiting the spiral galaxy N715... arse end of the sector, great... environment hostile, vast deserts, atmosphere rich in Nitrogen, lack of natural water reservoirs... This is boring me to death, tell me something I don't already know... "Encrypted Intelligence Briefing #64175, Attn: Joseph Conrad, Status: Classified". I whistled, and it echoed in my helmet. Bingo.

"Don't do that," Bastille mumbled absent mindedly, "Or everyone not blind and deaf will see you're snooping around in restricted stuff again."

"Shut up," I snapped back and scrolled down. If I end a cloud of lukewarm carbon dioxide molecules in the orbit of some unknown shithole, I want to know why.

Telic coporation was running a medium sized trading and research outpost on Rhea, first stage of terraforming had been completed almost a year ago. Just recently they had begun moving in the bigger part of their weapons research department. Since it was the most remote place they owned, obviously they had figured no one would care even if they accidentally blew that rock to pieces. Well, I wouldn't. Oxygen and water processors had been established underneath the planet's surface, activities on the planet had been expanded to biological and archeological research, the planet's strategic position in the galaxy was now used to establish a base of operations for trade with outlying worlds. Investing a small fortune of good money, Telic had even managed to develop a number of stable settlements here. Where they always find enough colonists with a martyrdom complex is still a mystery to me.

"Whoa whoa whoa... CRAP!"

That was Jaeger again. A split second later another detonation violently shook the dropship. A couple of bolts and rivets came loose this time, ricocheting off the cabin walls with a series of loud twangs and everyone pulled his head down. I took a deep breath, slowly let two thirds out and continued reading.

Now came the fun part.

With transmissions taking a week to the next relay station, Rhea was perfectly shielded from public scrutiny. Coincidentally, Telic had managed to establish itself as one of the major players within the defense industries in the meantime, after a few successful ventures with newly discovered materials that reportedly boosted the income of the Corporation tremendously. After a hostile takeover, Telic had surprisingly quickly replaced Matsumoto as SynTek's arch-rival, and might now actually manage to beat them to the release of a portable, and affordable, energy based weapon system. If this was true, chances are the IAF might actually consider terminating their exclusive contract with SynTek systems in Telic's favor.

And now everything went down the drain...

Shortly after the disaster at the SynTek facilities at Sigma 612, the tightening of Interstellar Law regulating bio-armament research lead to several council resolutions forcing Telic to disclose vital information about the weapons programme developed on Rhea. The documents provided by the Corporation, although vague, were detailed enough to warrant a further enquiry from the Alliance. A team of prominent scientists was assembled and sent to Rhea in order to inspect the colony and deliver a detailed report on Telic activities. They came, they saw, the colony dispatched a mayday signal.

Another full blown swarm outbreak. Will people never learn? As if the past two had not been bad enough, I shuddered, and scrolled to the thermal scans the Actaeon had shot from high orbit. Admittedly, authentic information was sparse, but in the recent past Telic had applied for an exemption from paragraph eight of the Swarm Contraband Act twice, regarding ownership and transport of living tissue of xenomorph specimen. Both times it had been rejected. And now the whole outpost was swarming with heat signatures. Ninety-three times the number of confirmed bio readings we had expected to find, counting in laboratory rats.

It's hard to concentrate on a read with a constant barrage of artillery ringing in your ears, to put it mildly, quite frankly it felt rather like I was crammed into an empty soup can while someone with a twisted sense of sportsmanship violently kicked it around. I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to shut out the unnerving, hissing sounds of our precious oxygen disappearing through dozens of microfractures in the hull, accompanied by the loudspeakers cheerfully shouting "DECOMPRESSION ALARM! PLUG YOUR ASSES AIRTIGHT YOU SISSIES!"

The upside of the visor snapping shut was that I could now replay the last recorded distress call from the colony without fear of anybody listening, the downside on the other hand was having to endure the acetous stench coming out of the activated-charcoal air filters and a peeving claustrophobia. The sound file was partially corrupted and heavily defaced by static, but left little doubt about the mess awaiting us. Given we didn't end a mess of twisted titanium ourselves. The droneships attacking us were unmanned vessels, piloted by autonomous computers that probably received encrypted commands from the colony's mainframe. Unfortunately the Bloodhound didn't feature a comm-tracker, or I'd have loved to reprogram those pests and watch them blast each other to pieces.

Through the reddish blur of the dataport menu displaying on the inside of my helmet I suddenly noticed the outline of a huge figure stumbling towards my seat.

"Murphy! Pilot wants a tech in the cockpit, get moving," Jaeger's voice roared through the helmet's intercom, barely identifiable as human with all the interferences but at least amplified to a deafening sound level. I aknowledged with a husky yessir and unbuckled the belts, then hurried to the front of the ship as fast as possible, mostly on all fours clinging to the floor grating, until halfway I finaly remembered that I could magnetize the boots with the press of a button...

"What took you so long?!"