Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ankh-Morpork Guard" data-source="post: 3511949" data-attributes="member: 10079">Chapter 456: Ground Assault“Is anyone else offended that its just ignoring us?!” one of the troopers with Rulae yelled as he jammed a new power pack into his blaster rifle.    “Not at all,” another of them responded. It was the grey skinned Twi’lek and he had also been the first to stop firing his rifle at the huge, walking, firebreathing...thing that was going right past them. They’d been firing since it was a block away, having made it up on the roof of one of the smaller houses that populated this edge of the city on Gyndine.    Its bulbous form on spindly legs that didn’t seem capable of holding it up simply went past them, a mouth-like protrusion tilting to one side and sending a jet of liquid flame to consume another series of buildings in front of it. This one fire breather was causing enough problems for them, but to make matters worse, once he’d gotten onto the roof, Rulae had spotted at least three others in different parts of the city.    On the bright side, the coralskippers had been pushed back into orbit with the rest of that end of the fight.    Rulae lowered his own rifle, realizing, too, that their blaster bolts weren’t doing any damage to the creature. Instead, he reached into his jacket pocket and retrieved his comlink. Quickly switching it to one of the encrypted frequencies being used by the ground forces, he ignored the other voices coming through it already and hit the activation switch, “Has anyone figured out a way to take down these damned fire breathers?!”    So it wasn’t a usual military-style communication. But, at this point, Rulae didn’t care. These creatures were burning the entire city without anything in their way and they needed to be stopped immediately. So, though the blaster fire, general sounds of chaos, and the roars of the giant creature that was moving past away from them now, he tried to listen through the comm chatter.    From the sounds of things, it was bad all over. The north side of the city had two of the creatures working together and the fires had consumed all but a few buildings near the edge of the city, itself. The number of dead was unknown, but considering that many civilians had been evacuated to that end of the city...well...it was probably something that was best not to think about.    And then a voice cut off the others. It was hard to hear thanks to interference, but the speaker’s Corellian accent was still easy to catch, “This is Mobile Artillery Platform 325R. We’ve taken down two of the fire breathers that were burning the forests not far from your position and we’re moving as fast as we can.”    Once it cut off, another voice came through on the channel. The voice sounded gruff but thankful at the same time, “Is there anything we can do to help you out?”    “Contain the creatures if you can,” the Corellian spoke again, and now, off in the distance, Rulae could spot the large, round-shaped object that had to be the artillery, “If you can’t do anything about them just do what you can to get the civilians to the east. There are several transports on the ground waiting to get as many off as they can.”    And then the chatter returned to the comm channel. Rulae pocketed the comlink again and then called out, “Shoulder the weapons, boys, we’re heading east.”    “But, sir—“    One of the troopers started to protest, but was cut off by a loud, powerful sound that they all knew very well. Turbolaser blasts had a very distinct sound in any atmosphere, and their heads all spun to see a pair of green bolts arc from the distant, flying platform until they slammed into the large, fire breathing creature. There was an alien screech and pieces of the creature flew in all directions as its huge body fell to the ground, taking out a series of structures with it.    In the silence that followed, Rulae spoke up again, “They’re under control. Now, lets get moving. The transports that brought our new friend down here are waiting to on civilians. Its our job to get as many as we can there.”    As the artillery platform began to move to its next target, Rulae and the troopers he’d ended up commanding made their way through the mostly-ransacked residential building and back out to the street. Pockets of fires were abound through the street, but as bad as it was on the other end of the street where the fire breather had seemed to concentrate most of its efforts. The people on the streets were in the same state as before, panicked, and so it took a great deal of yelling from all of the troopers to calm them down enough to hear that there were ships ready to take them off-planet. With this information, the civilians started listening, and seemed perfectly fine to follow the relatively small group of soldiers.    It wasn’t long before they had a good forty or so civilians of various species following them. Despite a few injured within the group, they managed to keep a fast pace heading out of the city. What worried Rulae, though, was the lack of any Vong on the way. He had seen the transports, and they’d only encountered that first one. For an invasion, it was far too light.    Of course, as things normally seemed to go in the galaxy, Rulae was quickly shown that he probably should have just kept his thoughts on anything else.    “Sir!” the Twi’lek trooper called out at the same time they all heard the distinctive buzzing sound of a Yuuzhan Vong’s thrown thud bug. A half second later, there was a yelp of pain from another of the troopers as it hit him square in the neck, sending him to the ground with a disturbing and gruesome end.    “Everyone get cover now!” Rulae called to the group behind, pushing nearby civilians to small alleys and other areas out of the way of the open street. Coming around the corner, he could see a group of Vong. A very large group. Scarred, angry looking, and charging right for them. They weren’t going to keep this fight at range, and with the civilians taking cover, it left the New Republic soldiers out in the open...    All of them realized what this meant, and so took advantage of the very small amount of time they had to use their blaster rifles before the Vong and their deadly amphistaves came into reach.</blockquote>

Verification