Chapter 2

Seconds after the first rocket propelled grenade had hit the convoy, a barrage of missiles started to rain down on the military vehicles. The first weapon launched by the Jerrassian Liberation Front had hit a tank, and while the resulting explosion had been substantial, it had failed to make much of an impact on the heavy vehicle. But the second wave had targeted the armored personnel carriers following it, and now, two of the lighter armored cars stood burning in the street. Several Sunguard soldiers rushed out from the back of the vehicles, eager to escape them before being roasted alive.

The burning vehicles effectively blocked the street, turning it into a death trap for the cars following them. The personnel carriers further down the convoy started to turn around, but in the chaos of the attack, their movements were difficult to coordinate and the vehicles in the middle became stuck there, waiting for those further back to start moving in the other direction first. Turning around the entire convoy, more than a kilometer long, in the middle of an attack, would take time.

The back doors of the fifth vehicle began to open a second before it, too, was hit by a rocket. The resulting explosion threw the car into the air and flipped it on its side. As it landed, the soldiers inside were flung out on the street through the open doors, their bodies bloodied and broken as they landed on the hard asphalt.

Well, not all of them were dead, Nyasi realized, as she rose from her protective cover to assess the situation. One of the men that had been thrown out of the personnel carrier immediately rose from the ground and grabbed a heavy pulse rifle one of his fellow soldiers had dropped.

A man in his early thirties, clad in a gray jumpsuit with red stripes running down its sides.

Special Agent Nyasi rushed forward, into the chaos of the burning convoy. Waving her hands, she directed the soldiers fleeing the first vehicles to safer routes, away from the incoming fire from the JLF guerillas who now surrounded them, shooting at the trapped Sunguard soldiers from windows, balconies and rooftops.

She saw the other Special Agent scanning the crowd for threats. In another world, he could have been mistaken for a farmer or a field worker, his olive-brown skin dark from years of exposure to the sun, his short black hair and neatly trimmed goatee making him look almost Mediterranean. But now his hair was in disarray and covered in dust from the explosions, his eyes glistening with tears from the smoke of the burning vehicles, and his smooth skin covered in specks of red blood from his deceased colleagues.

Without warning, the other Special Agent opened fire. With the precision only a biot had, he swept his rifle over the crowd without even using the sight for aiming, firing a single shot each time its barrel passed in front of an enemy soldier. As she watched, the terrorists hiding in the buildings along the street fell to his assault, one by one.

Had the scene not been obscured by smoke and fire, she would have realized much earlier that something was, indeed, very wrong.

She switched her multispectral vision to infrared mode, allowing her gaze to penetrate the haze obscuring the battlefield and revealing the exact positions of the JLF insurgents on the far side of the street.

But as she readied her own hand gaser to assist the other Special Agent in taking them down, the clarity of vision her infrared mode afforded her made her gasp in horror.

Some of the Jerrassians on the other side of the street were unarmed.

They hadn’t been terrorists from the Liberation Front. They had been innocent bystanders, women, men, and children who had lived in the decrepit buildings in the district, and who now had been caught up in a situation they had had no part in.

And the other Special Agent had killed them indiscriminately.

Instinctively, Nyasi activated her communications cortex, setting it to use the encryption key that was hard coded into all Special Agents, and broadcasted her plea.

“Unidentified Sunguard Special Agent, stand down!” she shouted into the ether. “Be advised, you are firing on unarmed civilians. Please comply!”

Not having the authority to give orders to another Special Agent, she nonetheless put as much emphasis as she could into the recommendation she sent to him.

Though she faulted him for his actions, she found nothing to complain about in his response to her request. The second he received her message, he lowered his rifle, turned around, and started to sprint towards her.

A gaser shot rang out from one of the terrorists who had been hiding in the same building where the civilians had been standing. As Nyasi watched, it penetrated the Special Agent’s shoulder from behind, causing skin and blood to explode out in front of him in a fountain of boiled tissues.

The man stumbled, but quickly caught his feet again, and continued to run towards her. Meanwhile, Nyasi raised her own gun and eliminated the JLF member by crippling his right arm. He would live, but he would no longer be a threat to the Sunguard soldiers on the street.

When the other Special Agent finally reached her, she had taken cover behind the first armored tank of the convoy. He sat down beside her as she peeked out from behind it in an attempt to locate the remaining terrorists.

“My apologies if I misinterpreted your intentions, ma’am,” he said, panting from the sprint.

Why would he pant, Nyasi thought? He’s a Special Agent. He doesn’t even need oxygen.

“Who are you?” she asked, demanding to know the identity of the man who had butchered their own citizens.

“Myan Lami, ma’am,” he replied immediately. “Sunguard Special Agent, serial number NL-27. Assigned to Reagan Base by order of the Solar Command to quell the Jerrassian unrest.”

Myan Lami—that was a Sunguard given name, derived from his serial number. It wasn’t a real name like most biotic Special Agents tended to select for themselves, eventually. And he kept calling her ma’am, as if he didn’t realize neither of them held a regular rank. She had her suspicions…

NL-27. Accessing the Sunguard’s registry of active Special Agents was a simple matter for her. Within milliseconds, her suspicion was confirmed.

The bloodied soldier sitting next to her on the burning battlefield was only five days old.

Nyasi didn’t have time to consider the implications of that revelation before she saw, out of the corner of her eye, a flash of lightning strike a city block further down the street, causing it to explode in a blinding display of destruction. From the impact site, a burning cloud of fire and smoke mushroomed into the air, boiling and churning as it rose. Within moments, another streak of light from space, as bright as the sun, struck the block next to it, followed by yet another powerful detonation. Seconds later, the thundering clash of the lightning and the rumble from the explosions shook her ears.

Orbital bombardment had commenced. The Sunguard War Cruisers hovering in pseudogeostationary orbit over Kerrma-non had begun to fire their GDAPCs against targets on the surface, their high-energy gaser beams superheating columns of air—stretching from orbit to ground—to temperatures that drove the molecules in them away, effectively creating temporary tubes of vacuum all the way to the surface. And into the air-free tunnels now created by the gamma-ray lasers, the War Cruisers then fired antiproton cannons, their particle beams now free to travel at near the speed of light without interfering with anything on the way—until they reached the ground, where the antimatter immediately annihilated, releasing their immense energies in explosions resembling those of small tactical nukes.

The indiscriminate slaughter almost made her vomit.

“Sunguard War Cruisers, you are hereby ordered to cease orbital bombardment immediately. Authentication NA-14, Special Agent in charge of Jerr,” she commanded, as she shielded her eyes from the intense lights of the attack. “Stand down, now!”

The human commanders of the War Cruisers would have taken seconds—perhaps minutes—to authenticate her command and respond to it. But fortunately, the precision required to properly execute orbital bombardment excluded any humans from the process. The gamma driven antiproton cannons onboard the vessels were entirely under the control of their intelligent computers, which responded to her order within milliseconds.

In the silence that followed the battle, Rehema Nyasi saw in the distance Mr. Nielsen sitting on his stairs, cradling the broken body of a small Jerrassian child clad in a blood stained blue bodysuit.

She cursed at the Special Agent squatting in the dirt beside her.

“What did you do?”

Author's Note

The story you're reading is one of many set in the Lords of the Stars universe I've been creating over the past 30 years, where familiar characters and places reappear, and new favorites await discovery. Check out my profile to explore more stories from this universe.

While Soldiers of Heart and Steel is entirely standalone, I think you’ll particularly enjoy Twilight Duty, which serves as something of a prequel to this story, and Choices of Steel, which is a sequel.

Visit the official Lords of the Stars blog for more information about this hard sci-fi universe: https://lordsofthestars.wordpress.com

If you enjoyed this chapter, please consider giving it a like.