TitoVillar
patreon
SCL Chapter 68: Home for Christmas, If We Survive
🕑 Added 2025-05-13 04:27:55 +0000 UTCThe Iron Justice was a behemoth-class battlecruiser of the Terran Federation. This steel giant, stretching 460 metres in length, boasted over twenty magnetic-coil-accelerated cannons and laser pulse turrets, as well as laser grid defense batteries. A massive Colossus-class reactor powered the ship’s life-support and weapons systems.
Clad in heavy steel armor and equipped with heavy artillery, these ships were like mobile fortresses forged in iron. In wartime, they served as the command centers of the Terran Federation’s fleet commanders; in times of peace, they were a projection of the Federation government's military might.
Augustus, clad in black-gray power armor, walked down one of the Iron Justice’s corridors connecting the crew quarters to the launch bay. Following behind him was First Squad of the Heaven’s Devils. The clunking of their powered boots echoed along the corridor’s cold, utilitarian walls.
“Once we take Meinhoff, Kel-Morian surrender won’t be far off. It’s October now—if all goes well, we’ll be home for Christmas.”
Jim Raynor spoke over the First Squad’s comms channel, bringing up something entirely unrelated to the current landing mission. “I really want to see my parents again… Hopefully our family’s little heifer isn’t pregnant yet. That old bull from the Billy farm is always up to no good.”
“Jim, don’t you know things never go the way you want?” Tychus grumbled.
“We all know Lady Luck’s a bitch—she only opens her fly for the enemy.”
“I reviewed the mission brief thoroughly. Meinhoff isn’t exactly undefended,” said Lundstein over the channel. “Our commander is clearly basing our force deployment on outdated intel from some spy. The battlefield changes in an instant—who knows, we might land right between tens of thousands of fully armed Kel-Morian Rippers.”
“Generals are used to launching wars strictly by the book. I just hope their plans were well thought out and revised multiple times. If it were up to me—”
“You’re just a grunt, Aland. Talk when you make general,” Josephine cut in. “Even I can tell command doesn’t give a damn about this ‘broken rock in space.’ They want the resources. We’re thieves—grab what we can and run.”
“Has anyone seen my peanut butter? Little Amy?” Harnack whispered into the channel.
“You’re always losing your stuff. Last I saw it, it was buried in your pile of smelly socks,” complained Amy Brandon. “I’m not your mom. Sometimes I seriously wonder if you’d even survive without me.”
“I really might not… not without my peanut butter,” Harnack replied, sounding like a man on the verge of death.
Amid the squad’s grumbling and banter, Augustus turned into a wider corridor and stepped into the launch bay, thick with the smell of ozone and engine oil. Ground crew in bright orange uniforms darted between parked transport ships and landing craft, while engineers surrounded a damaged Avenger fighter, welding torches sparking in flashes of white-blue light.
A full battalion of marines was boarding four rounded-belly landing craft. Deck crew in orange nylon caps scrambled to unhook the mooring cables securing the vessels.
The Heaven’s Devils had their own dedicated transport—a brand-new APOD-46 drop ship built at the Bennett Shipyards on Tarsonis. Augustus and his squad had spent over a week repainting it, adorning the black-gray hull with their signature hooded skull and a deep crimson cross.
All forty-plus Heaven’s Devils had wanted to give the ship a unique name, but after a weekend of arguing without reaching an agreement, Augustus made the call to name it Little Devil. Harnack’s suggestion of Red Demon was ruthlessly shot down. He couldn’t help but wonder: if the Heaven’s Devils ever got a larger warship, would Augustus name it Big Devil?
Augustus’s unit didn’t have to wait long before boarding their designated transport. The pilot, a man named Jack, had previously flown supply barges between ground stations and orbital platforms for a private aerospace company. The Heaven’s Devils’ armor technician, Feek, did not accompany them on the mission. Instead, he remained on the battleship’s central spine deck, working with other crew members to repair damaged power conduits.
Little Devil was swiftly launched into deep space via the launch bay’s electromagnetic catapult. Compared to older models, this ship—built during the final phase of the Kel-Morian War—boasted significantly enhanced capabilities. Each seat was equipped with a data cable that could be plugged directly into the Marines’ powered armor, allowing their HUD visors to synchronize with the ship’s onboard sensor suite.
Augustus’s HUD displayed six different visual feeds. He could see from the pilot’s viewpoint as well as the orange afterburn glow trailing behind the ship. Hundreds of transports and dropcraft plunged toward Meinhoff’s thin atmosphere, under the cover of Avenger and Banshee fighters.
As Little Devil sliced through the upper atmosphere, flames licked across its hull, while its thrusters roared with brilliant plasma fire. From Augustus’s perspective, the ship resembled an immortal phoenix wrapped in fire, diving toward the earth.
And it wasn’t alone—more and more of these fiery phoenixes were descending behind him from Meinhoff’s dark blue sky.
When Little Devil descended to an altitude of 2 400 metres, Augustus could see swarms of Kel-Morian Hellhound fighters rushing toward them like angry wasps. At first there were only a few dozen, but the number quickly multiplied.
Both sides opened fire simultaneously.
Out of the corner of his eye, Augustus saw a laser beam graze Little Devil’s tail fin and strike an APOD-33 transport behind them. The ship erupted into a ball of fire. Another large troop carrier, packed with a full company of soldiers, collided head-on with a Hellhound. There was no chance of survival for anyone aboard.
As the ships inched ever closer to the surface, Augustus counted more than twenty dropcraft obliterated by autocannons, missiles, or even suicide attacks by Kel-Morian fighters. Yet Little Devil remained fortunate—so far, the enemy hadn’t locked onto them.
In moments like these, Augustus often felt that his life and death were entirely out of his hands, dictated solely by whether a stray bullet or shell would randomly land on his head.
Right now, there was absolutely nothing he could do—and he longed deeply for the simple, solid feeling of having his feet firmly planted on the ground.
By the time Augustus could clearly see Meinhoff’s dark brown mountain ranges and the distant Kel-Morian towns crowned with black spires, one Hellhound had managed to tail them. Its missiles had long been spent, but it now fired relentlessly at Little Devil with two sets of nose-mounted air-to-air laser cannons.
In an effort to shake off the pursuer, pilot Jack veered off the planned approach path, steering toward the mountains instead of the Kel-Morian city. On Augustus’s HUD, a string of flashing numbers showed that they were rapidly drifting farther from the original landing zone at the New Apollon Mining Facility.
The dual-engine jet fighter from the Kel-Morian Combine tailed closely behind the deep-black APOD-46 transport ship Little Devil. Orange laser beams streaked past its side hull, and Jack, at the helm, narrowly evaded each shot through a series of high-risk maneuvers.
The dark gray ship skimmed over Meinhoff’s equally dark terrain, gliding over jagged rock fields and dried-out canyon beds. Above and behind, a Hellhound fighter with crimson-gold trim trailed like a hawk circling its prey.
"This is transport AP-404, calling escort squadron—requesting immediate support!" Augustus could hear the pilot's voice over the comm channel.
Jack’s distress call was quickly answered. A CF/17 Banshee swooped down from high altitude and locked onto the Hellhound pursuing the Little Devil. Two twin-star air-to-air missiles launched from the missile bays beneath its wings, trailing long plumes of plasma flame and white vapor as they surged toward their target.
To the cheers of the Heaven's Devils, the Hellhound—like a reaper clinging to their backs—erupted in a fiery explosion.
The Little Devil banked once more, heading toward its designated landing zone. It flew over an arid brown wasteland devoid of greenery, dotted with mounds of coal slag and mining debris, resembling termite hills spread across Africa’s continent back on Earth.
From this altitude, cranes and trucks below looked like toy models parked beside the mounds. The workers had long since abandoned their tools and fled. A lone signal tower, used to guide vehicles during incoming storms, stood desolately between the hills.
Beyond the cluster of hills, Augustus’s HUD display revealed a faint outline of deep-black buildings—clusters of spires and arched windows shimmering in the sunlight like seashells on a beach.
Unlike the grid-pattern towns and domed cubic buildings of the Terran Federation colonies, Kel-Morian architecture bore a distinct identity. Their family estates, castle-like in structure, were built from precisely cut marble and minimalist yet aesthetically elegant cuboid stone columns.
Buildings stood tightly packed with towering domes and multi-faced small windows. Brick courtyards divided major clans, while kilometer-long walls shielded the entire New Apollon community from sandstorms and beasts beyond. Two black satellite towers jutted from the horizon like antennae, and several Kel-Morian ships could be seen either taking off or landing—mere specks rising and falling in the distance.
![MF [MALE FOCUS] from patreon](https://leaqio.com/kistorage/8544.jpg)
