Lieutenant Sara 'Meteor' Roche
GADF Marines, 222nd Nova Corps, 121st (Augmented) Battalion, 3rd Company, 3rd Platoon
Location: Southern sector, New Aldera, New Alderaan
Objective: Halt the Imperial offensive
ALLIES: Shorurra Groznik
Bayaz
Ibra Sest
ENEMIES: FN-999
DECEASED Aron Gowrie
Melvain Braxis
Sara shook herself awake, feeling the force feedback padding of her armour squeeze her back into consciousness.
The first thing she saw was the dark red glow over her HUD, before the heat washed over her and she realised:
that's fire.
Jolting herself to full attention, Lieutenant Roche pried her seat harness open and stumbled to her feet, her armoured head hitting the vehicle's roof.
Damn, now she remembered. The patrol. The alert over the comms. And the ambush.
Sara readjusted her helmet sensors, cutting through the smoke in the vehicle's troop compartment. The
TT-48 Armoured Troop Carrier they were on had been converted for heavy combat, with an enclosed troop compartment, but was still ultimately armoured as an APC, as Sara found out minutes ago. She stumbled through the compartment, finding the exit hatch. She tugged on it. Stuck.
She looked around through the smoke and flames, feeling the heat worming its way into her armour. Thankfully, there were few other soldiers in the transport with her, as the carrier had disgorged most of its riders before the ambush. Nonetheless, Sara still felt pain watching the slumped corpses of the others in the transport.
Sara checked her comms. Noise, but she had to try. As she sent out a signal, she made her way back to the front of the compartment, to the welded door separating it from the pilot compartment, dragging her Chainblaster along, tied as it was to her belt but with no room for her to hold it up. This was not stuck, and the Marine kicked it open. She stumbled over the uneven gap between the transport compartment and the cockpit, and she immediately felt the heat recede. While the pilot lay dead, his head sizzling from a high-powered bolt that had come in through the window, this section was not on fire. Either way, Sara knew she had to get out before the vehicle's power cells exploded under the intense heat from behind.
The trooper ducked under the pilot console, observing the outside. They were on the outskirts of New Aldera. Far from the rest of the 222nd. While the 94th Assault Company under
Bayaz
had been suited for the vanguard deployment, the newly attached 121st Battalion (which was to be disbanded after this op) was sent soon after to assist in urban defense, just in time to smash into Imperial reinforcements. Sara cursed her luck. The routine run from the city to the Final Stand on her route had been relatively safe with, at best, indirect desultory shelling, but her convoy just had to be the first one to be hit by a full ambush. The Imps were really pushing it.
She peeked over the console again. Forest and empty, leafy suburbia. Empty...
They must have cleared the residents out before we rolled through.
This was serious, then. The Imps had taken over a district connecting the main front to the Final Stand. Command had to know. Sara checked the compartment for comms equipment, spotting a working transmitter. She moved over, careful not to expose herself to the window. Whoever fired the shot that took out the driver might still be prowling. She hooked for armour comms into the vehicle's transmitter, and immediately she picked up clean signals. About a dozen Marine life signs in the destroyed convoy, and a working transmission beacon. She hesitated to send out the SOS. Even now she knew the constant skirmishing in the city was ongoing, and if she activated it, the Imps would know there were survivors here.
Whatever the case, I'm not hoofing it back to Last Stand in the open.
Sara hit a few buttons on her armour comms and sent the signal. Preparing to move out, she caught sight of a
REC-CBS/01 "Doombringer" Combat Scattergun that lay on the ground of the pilot compartment, tossed from its rack on the wall. She stowed her Chainblaster away as best she could, 'holstering' it by the magnetic clamps in the back of her armour, before picking up the scattergun. In the half-forested, half-urban environment here, the Lieutenant did not want to be spraying bolts blindly unless she had a proper fireteam.
Vaulting over the cockpit console and through the shattered window, Lieutenant Roche slid off the nose of the transport and hit the ground. No sniper fire. That was good news. She moved over to the other ambushed vehicles, looking to find the soldiers whose biosensors had pinged off the console. Within a few minutes, she'd managed to pry open (or, in the case of one particularly stubborn door, blast open with the Chainblaster) the transport doors and pull out those still alive. The survivors, stunned but relieved, helped Sara in rescuing the others. The wounded were kept in one of the vehicles that were not at risk of going up in flames, and before long Sara had a proper platoon to command.
"So Leftenant, what the hell is going on?" Corporal Haskin asked after he'd been rescued from his vehicle, giving voice to what the others thought.
"
The convoy got hit, as you can see. But worse than that, we got hit at this location. Right at the midpoint between the Front and the Stand. I think you can all appreciate the gravity of the situation." Those still standing nodded grimly. Few among them were greenhorns, and they were ready to take action instead of wait around.
"
I've sent out an SOS signal. I hope the signal is able to reach the 94th under Captain
Bayaz
, but even they will take some time to arrive. In the meantime, we clear the neighbourhood of any remaining ambushers. The Imps will have been able to detect the signal, so expect anything."