The first rockets impacted the colony at Seshi VII at 17:45 NEST.
Commander Crevitch had been using modified Digiscape memory training processes to run the simulated attack for a week straight. He knew every nook and every cranny of every building from the drop zone to the target building, and then back to the evac shuttle. All of the soldiers under his command for this operation knew that there were backups in place but ultimately, they were expendable. No baseliner that landed on Seshii VII with the Chiranjivi expected to return.
The strike force was a mix of clone soldiers and baseliner soldiers, with very limited orbital support. A couple frigates, a cruiser, and a blockade runner delivered them to the target. And almost all of them would return except for the Zombies, what those who hadn’t been chipped called the Sansha slaves that they fought alongside. They were to fight and die, stay behind to cause confusion and delay for their foes.
The first gunfire came at 17:46 NEST from Colony defense batteries.
The targeted colonies today were all on high alert for various reasons. False drop pods and sensor ghosts from projected electronic countermeasures drew most of the heavy turret fire. Some of the drop pods that contained actual troops were incinerated before reaching the ground. Others were caught by atmospheric fighters, what few such remote colonies were afforded by their controllers. But various factors, including the thankfully poor timing of the Imperial Navy restructuring in to Military Circuits, led to weakening these far flung colonies into fending for themselves. And thus were they penetrated.
The landings were accompanied by standard Sansha’s Nation broadcasts. “Lay down your arms. Salvation awaits. Shed your worries and embrace Utopia. Join Us and you will no longer know fear, pain, or death.” This led to a usual and predictable reaction. Civilian centers were reinforced, great care was taken to rally around the residential districts. Hundreds of apparently mindless soldier drones began to appear on the streets and were mowed down by the local security forces who were still trying to assess the invasion.
The Colony secure mainframe was accessed at 17:48 NEST
Commander Crevitch led his squad of trained clone soldiers into one of the data vaults on Seshi VII, the way flanked by the executed technicians and security forces. The clone soldier armor was thick and heavily shielded, nothing the baseliner forces had was much of a threat. And one of the soldiers that was killed upon the initial breeching by defense turrets before they were shut down rejoined them in less than a minute from the temporary clone reanimation unit. It only had enough to restore all of the troopers once over, but that was deemed enough for the mission at hand.
Crevitch processed from his networked implants the status of the attack. Though surprise was on their side, predictably in many areas they were being forced back. But they had already got what they came for. Any and all documents they could lift from the Colony database on the Vimoksha Chorus attack of last month. Corpses left behind, weapons used, infiltration methods, details on abductions if there were any. Or at least this is what he hoped he had, as they had little choice but to brute force rip much of the encoded data as they could before extracting. Decoding would be done off site.
Extraction of Seshi VII by Clone Soldiers under heavy fire completed at 17:51 NEST
The clone reanimation unit was a pile of molten slag and bubbling biomass within ten minutes of landing on the colony. The majority of baseliner soldiers that had landed that had not extracted but were captured began to show signs of convulsions and seizures. Signs of nerve toxin use in each and every one, as well as massive cerebral damage. Most of the recovered equipment that was too small or inconsequential to be set to self immolate seemed to be fairly run-of-the-mill mercenary equipment. In fact, many of the soldiers were armed with equipment coming from all four empires if not some extra from Null entities like Sansha’s Nation.
And there were, of course, the ‘Sansha Drones’ that attacked. On examination of the bodies after the fighting while it can be determined they were likely linked and most certainly disposable shock troops, their implants do not match those of True Slaves and as such are not to be positively identified as belonging to Sansha’s Nation. Instead what insignia can be found matches the recently formed Capsuleer organization Chiranjivi, which up until this point had claimed to be an organization for the purpose of enticing Clone Soldiers out and away from empire space.
Within the hour, similar attacks were reported on Marmeha IV and Soure IV…
