Blood of our Fathers [Makura Rising, Endwar E1]

[Jiang Winters]

Blood of our Fathers
ENDWAR
Forest-Moon of Ulbar, Qas'el'ok System
Bral, Mandalorian Refugee Colony
1135 Local Time

"A Mandalorian, a Stormtrooper, and a housecat walk into a bar..."

Keller groaned in pain. "Not this again, Tol. I'd sooner save my balls with a rusty razor than listen to another of your karkin' jokes."

The Kushari Captain pulled his helmet on and sealed it tight to his neck. He wore bog standard beskar'gam - no fancy upgrades, no newfangled alloys. Just the heaviest duraplast money could buy, a halfway decent jetpack, and a few wrist weapons. The armor's plates were flat olive drab, while the visor was bordered by crimson trim. The suit was battlescarred; it was the same armor he'd worn when he was with Bralor, and it'd seen its share of scraps. The most damaged part of it by far, though, was the iron heart at the center of the chest. That component, the Kar'ta Beskar, had been his son's. Echoylir Bralor had made sure he received it after Vikaar died. It was blackened and the center partially slagged from a railgun strike - a reminder not of his son's death, but of the raw courage that inspired Vikaar to fight against incredible odds.

The same courage Keller desperately needed.

The situation at hand wasn't pretty in the slightest. In the last months, the conflict between the Commonwealth and the Federation had flashed over and ignited a full-fledged war in the Kushari home system of Qas'el'ok. Dreadnoughts exchanged barrages of railgun slugs and furious salvos of missiles in the dense asteroid belts of the home system. Dropships and starfighters dueled in the skies, columns of tanks clashed on the ground. It was all-out war, one the Commonwealth wasn't winning. The Federation had finally stopped playing around and was pulling no punches - they threw all they had at the Commonwealth and then some. On Ulbar, that meant they also went for the group most likely to align with the Commonwealth: the Mandalorian refugee colony-city of Bral, presently locked in the middle of a harsh winter.

The hilltop colony was built like a fort; duracrete walls and low, reinforced buildings dominated the city. Its ten thousand inhabitants either lived within Bral itself or in a home on its outskirts. At present, the entire populace was inside, taking refugee in one of the half-buried, bunker-like civic structures that made up the city center. Guards, clad in beskar'gam that hadn't been touched for fighting purposes in a decade or more, manned repeating blaster emplacements and anti-vehicle laser cannons all along the walls. The forest had been cleared back for a full kilometer and a half in all directions around the fort, leaving naught but open, snowy fields to watch. A few burning wrecks dotted the treeline north of Bral: the remnants of a Federation armored recce unit that had been spotted and pasted by Bral's defenses.

The problem wasn't the patrols. It was that they were the tip of an armored spear descending en masse from the North. An entire army group was coming down on the colony. The artillery'd been falling since midnight. Federation rockets and gauss howitzers rained hell on Bral and its surrounding fields, leaving more than a few craters and blasted, burning structures. The only thing the Mandalorians had going for them was the flak; the heart of the colony was a Mandalorian destroyer that'd been de-orbited and used as a central fallback location. Its turbolasers and laser cannons spat long lines of gold energy into the sky, smashing to pieces any Federation starfighter bold enough to get close. But if its guns fell silent, Kushari close air would tear the colony apart in a matter of minutes - a single Brightlance bomber had enough ordinance to flatten the city twice over, and the Federation had hundreds waiting in the wings.

Hence the armored column. The destroyer's guns couldn't target ground forces, and the Mandalorian's anti-vehicle laser cannons weren't much good against proper tanks. The Federation was winding up to release unholy hell on the colony, and if Keller had to venture a guess, it'd end with every single Mandalorian dead. He couldn't let that happen. While the Commonwealth slugged it out with Federation forces on Damaros, the world which Ulbar orbited, Keller collared a small group of volunteers and beelined to the colony. He didn't know if he could save it - not with an entire army coming down its throat - but he was going to try.

He had good allies with him. Tollin Vencu, a tall and square-jawed man with heavy features, stubble, and a shaved head; he was a Mandalorian native to Concord Dawn, who had relocated to the Kushari home system with his daughter during the Evacuation of Mandalore so many years ago. He was particularly fond of his new home, though, and was very keen to see it and his farm preserved. The other was Sev, an Imperial Stormtrooper.. Sev was taller than himself or Tollin, and wore battlescarred Centurion-pattern Stormtrooper armor and carried a DC-11S blaster rifle... Along with a lightsaber. He was a very slow to anger, very cordial fellow. Nothing at all like the Stormtroopers Keller'd met before.

They'd slipped in with orbital pods during around 2100 the night before, and had spent most of the morning pitching in wherever they could. Most of their attention was focused on the defenses; it took the better part of the wee hours before dawn to get the AV lasers out of storage and running. It was clear the colony hadn't been expecting a brawl; even the repeaters were caked in layers of dust and rust-preventing gel. They'd made it happen, though, but the defenses simply weren't good enough. A dozen repeaters and less than six anti-vehicle cannons per facing, on a hectagonal fort with six facings? Not good. Not good at all.

It wasn't entirely hopeless, though; he'd put the word out for reinforcements and a tank squadron was being shipped in. Supposedly, the coordinates of the Kushari home system had also found their way into the hands of a great many Mandalorians in the 'verse. That, he realized, would draw some serious aid. Assuming any showed up, of course! Keller's tail twitched in its sheath, just barely restrained around his waist, and he issued a low growl of frustration.

"Wish the bastards'd hurry the hell up, I'm sick of this waitin' business," he grumbled, as he swept over the Northern treeline again with his macrobinoculars. He, along with Sev and Tol, stood on the Northern wall; there was nothing productive to do except sit up there with their rifles and wait. He hated it. He'd always hated the waiting game.

Sev clapped his shoulder. "They'll get on with it when they're ready, Keller. No sense tearing your fur out over it."

Keller took a deep breath. The Stormie was right, wasn't he? He knew better to be so antsy, so why wasn't he at ease? There was nothing he could do about the wait, so why worry about it? He couldn't help it, though. Something was gnawing at him. He had a bad feeling about things, and it wasn't the usual sort of bad either. There was something just a little off in the Force, something creeping a little closer to Bral every passing minute. Sev felt it too - a sliver of darkness flitting in the shadows of the forests outside Bral. And behind it, a massive wave of life: the Federation's attack force.

Tollin rapped his fingers against his bucket, perched atop his knee, and took a sip off a bottle of ale. "Ya might as well get a bit tight, Sadiir," he remarked, "Way I see it, we're kriffed, so I ain't gonna die completely sober." His voice was cheerful. Tol had already accepted that the odds they were against were impossible.

Keller chuckled faintly and set his macrobinoculars down. The snow was coming down thick again, and the wind howled. A storm was moving in. He peeled his helmet off and grabbed one of Tol's bottles of ale - they were from Tol's brewery, half an hour's walk south of Bral. "They're gonna come when the storm hits full force," he decided. He took a deep breath, then released it in a sigh and let his shoulders sag as he shook his head. "This is gonna suck." ​

 

[Chask274]

Coming in from the south, Aaron's ARC-360 Starfighter skimmed above the treetops as it approached the fortress city. Through various means(namely a very eager Calico), Aaron had caught wind that things had gone from bad to worse with the Kushari. Chief among several things, a Mandalorian refugee colony was in severe danger of being wiped off the face of the planet by Federation forces. 'As if what the Imperium did to us wasn't bad enough, now the damn Feds ar-' Aaron was torn from his thoughts when several alarms went off in the cockpit. Looking down at his displays, Aaron realized the grounded destroyer in the city's center was locking onto him and preparing fire. Flicking a series of switches to bring his comms online, he hailed the ship.

"Hold your fire, ya fekking di'kuts! I'm a friendly! Or are you in the habit of shooting down fellow vode?" Aaron transmitted his credentials to the ship, and after a few terrifying moments of silence, the locks disengaged and he was given clearance to land at a pad near the destroyer. After setting down, Aaron disembarked and walked to the access hatch for the fighter's cargo bay. Grabbing his jetpack, he clamped it into place on his back, before slinging his rocket launcher over one shoulder and grabbing his recently acquired Verpine shatter rifle. After ensuring he had spare ammo for everything, he sealed up his ship and began walking towards the northern wall. Between the gear he'd just grabbed, and his usual loadout of a E-75 rifle and anti-armor pistol, Aaron was carrying around almost every piece of kit he had. He got the feeling that even this wouldn't be enough for the imminent battle.

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Reaching the top of the wall, Aaron heard a familiar voice. Walking over, he recognized Keller, a Kushari whom he'd worked with when he had previously run into the Federation on Greyman's Planet. "Hey, Keller! I was wondering if I'd find you out here. Heh, I shoulda-" It was at this point that Aaron noticed Sev.

"Somebody mind explaining why the hell a Stormtrooper is here?!?"

 

[Tristar]

"Jenkins, get your shit unpacked and settle 'em at that rooftop there." Corric directed another blank face of the Imperium with a short wave of two fingers. The fellow trooper gave an okay sign before rounding up three extra soldiers from his unit, one of them lugging the cylindrical shape of a mortar. Corric had to stop and run his fingers through his hair, his helmet clipped to his belt- yet another assignment where his sorry ass was dragged by a higher up, and what made it poetic justice was that it had been General Sev once again, that old freezing bastard of an officer. This time however, he wasn't going to go in unprepared without backup.

The soldier had a few strings he managed to yank, and with it came 16 not-so-fresh troopers, each with their own story to mumble drunkenly. A squad of misfits was a squad nonetheless, and their gifts of superior firepower- in the form of two M61 mortars. With Private Jenkins and Gunther manning their indirect support with 3 men each, that left them with a good half of the squad left for whatever duty their leader saw fit to do. Given that Corric was the defacto head, it was up to him to see to the defenses.

Did he regret being pulled out from his leave? Some parts of him said no- civilian life was getting far too boring to consider making it a lifelong occupation. He'd invested too much of himself learning how to live by the military boots so much that fitting into the slippers of a normal person felt alien. He'd much preferred smelling the air of war, hearing the crunch of gravel under his boots and feel the air of command around him as befit of his rank. He wasn't a general like Sev, but a corporal in a sea of privates is still a beacon of authority, one who had begun to order the remaining eight into positions where their lines of fire made artificial choke points for any trespassing....Federation troopers? Corric wasn't too great with the details, only that his orders was to follow Sev, shut up, and kill anyone who shot back at them. Given that their allies were talking about them and the Federation, it wasn't too hard to piece two and two together.

Lugging a DC-15A rifle in a sling, Corric made sure that the squad knew their orders- spotters were to call in positions ahead of any approaching hostiles. When the enemy cleared the killzone, rifles were to harass the enemy infantry and play the guerrilla game. Numbers were not on their side, and if what he heard was true, they'd be facing less of infantry and more of armour hell. 's why he had most of them lacing the major roads with AT mines they pilfered from the armoury with an IOU note in place of 20-30 pressure-plated explosives. Corric didn't want to think of the repercussions.

Satisfied that the squad knew the game plan, the Corporal clipped his helmet back on and jogged back to his superior officer, skidding to a stop and snapping a well practiced salute to the ageing commander. "Soldiers in position, awaiting orders sir."

 

[T.J]

" Damned snow... "

Delmon had always hated the unending mounds of white crap ever since he was first introduced to it in his youth. It was cold, it was wet, and it stuck to every conceivable thing possible. Having grown up on a jungle planet it was nearly as opposite from his comfort zone one could get other than the cold vacuum of space itself. Never the less he had done his time in that white hell, having learned the finer points of survival in a tundra like environment during his exploratory years.

Even with his severe aversion to the elements, Delmon still found himself knee deep in snow forcing one of many mobile anti vehicle cannons into position aided by several other beskar'gam wearing soldiers along a line of shelled out homesteads. They had arrived in the early hours. Having touched down planetside in what Delmon could only describe as an expidited touch and go, the maneuver involving being dropped in at low altitude and at a relatively high speed in less than desirable conditions. When Delmon had caught wind that not only was a Mandalorian settlement in dire need of assistance but also that the Kushari were involved he wasted no time mustering a force. He had crossed paths with their kind on multiple occasions, more specifically with Keller and his squad. His own code of ethics would not let him abandon them to an unknown fate.

The Mandalorian commander had been accompanied by two platoons of mixed Rebellion and Confederacy troops, along with five anti vehicle cannons and the speeders required to transport them with haste. Every fifth man was equipped with hand held anti vehicle launchers, packing enough punch to make short work of most types of armored vehicles provided they were in close enough range to ensure accuracy. Each squad of seven was each equipped with either an E-Web repeating blaster or a standard MG 270 heavy machine gun, each of which would be mounted on the walls of the city to provide additional firepower.

With a soft hum and a loud thud the final cannon fell into place, it's four legs burying themselves in the deep snow and its shields activating. Linking with the other four, the large weapons would rain fire down upon the enemy from within the walls of the city as soon as they came within range. Seeing that his job was done, Delmon retrieved his helmet from atop a piece of fallen debris and made his way to the cities wall. Keller and anyone else of importance was sure to be there, they would need to discuss the coming battle before the enemy actually arrived.

Delmon reached the others with haste, double timing it through the destoryed portions of the city and up to the ramparts. Coming to a stop he took note of those present. Imperials specifically. Though he held a good deal of animosity towards their masters, he held no such hatred for the actual soldiers of the Empire. They were doing their job, just as he was. The fact they had yet to fire on each other meant the city was some type of neutral ground. The threat of a larger foe always seemed to bring unlikely allies together. Giving the commanding stormtrooper a curt nod, his attention turned to the large feline in beskar'gam. " Su'cuy Keller. I see you're still biting off more than you can chew. " Pausing briefly before breaking decorum and letting a laugh slip past hid lips. Closing the gap between himself and the Kushari he gave Keller and firm slap on his shoulder, the metal of his gauntlet clanking off the felines shoulder plate. " It is good to see you ner'vod. Thought I must say you choose the strangest company. "