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Around him, the recruit's making up Naruto's squad passed out almost immediately after the grease bucket's maglev paddles engaged the number-two strand. Over the course of four seconds, the bucket had tripled the rate of its ascent. The resulting gee-forces were extreme—nothing the recruits were prepared to handle. Naruto managed to stay conscious by utilizing training he'd undergone for HEV orbital drops at Corublo. He squeezed his knees together and regulated his breathing to keep blood from pooling in his legs.

The bucket was a squat cylinder comprised of two C-shaped halves. Curved, clear windows in its inner wall provided a three hundred-sixty-degree view of the strand, currently a golden blur. The bucket's cramped interior was only rated for a crew of four, but the JOTUN all-in-ones had removed the controls and monitors for the bucket's crablike maintenance arms and managed to make room for twelve seats, each one stripped from abandoned sedans in Utgard.

The seats were arranged side by side, facing away from the cable so Naruto and his team could make their way to the bucket's single hatch as quickly as possible once they docked with the Tiara.

"Commander? You still with me?" Naruto asked into his throat-mic after.

"Barely," Jilan radioed from her bucket. "Healy's hanging tough. Dass too. Yours?"

"All out cold."

When Captain Ponder had tasked Naruto with retaking the Tiara, he'd asked for volunteers.

The mission was extremely dangerous, and Naruto knew there would be casualties. But he ended up getting more volunteers than he had seats, a mix of recruits from 1st platoon's three squads. Every one of them (Forsell, Jenkins, Andersen, Wick—even a married man like Dass) was willing to risk his life to give their families, friends, and neighbors a chance to escape the alien onslaught.

As Naruto's bucket passed through Harvest's stratosphere and air friction fell to zero, it increased its speed again.

"Uzumaki?"

"Ma'am?"

"I'm going to pass out now."

"Understood. Alarm set for fifteen and five."

Naruto knew the Lt. Commander could use the rest. Like the marines and most of the militiamen, she hadn't slept at all in the forty-eight hours since the aliens' attack on Gladsheim. And Naruto suspected she hadn't gotten more than a few hours of sleep a night since they'd ambushed the aliens on the freighter almost a month ago. Avery was trained to think tactically.

Of the seven grease buckets hurtling toward the Tiara, only the ones on the number two and six strands (Naruto's and Jilan's, respectively) carried militia strike teams. The other five were empty. Decoys rigged with claymores linked to motion-tracking sensors. On Naruto's recommendation, those five buckets would arrive at the Tiara early. Once they stopped inside the orbital's coupling stations, gantries would automatically extend. Any aliens curious enough to cycle the gantries' airlocks and inspect the buckets would get a nasty surprise: a narrow cone of round metal balls, exploding outward with lethal force.

The claymores' projectiles would also shred the gantries' thin, flexible walls. But after stations one, three, four, five, and seven were cleared of hostiles, the gantries were no longer necessary.

Naruto felt his COM-pad buzz inside his assault vest, alerting him that the decoy buckets were beginning their deceleration into the Tiara. Fifteen minutes to go. Naruto thought, patting and pulling at his vest's pouches to make sure his weapons' magazines were properly stowed. He had his battle rifle barrel-up between his knees, but he'd exchanged his usual M6 pistol for an M7 submachine gun from Jilan's cache. With its high rate of fire and compact size, the M7 would be perfect for close-quarters combat on the Tiara.

The pouch that held the submachine gun's sixty-round magazines was backed with hook-and-loop material. Naruto ripped it from his vest and adjusted its angle, so the magazines were an easy, cross-chest pull. As he pressed the pouch firmly into position, he felt something dry and brittle crunch against his chest. Gingerly, he pulled one of Captain Ponder's Sweet William cigars from an interior pocket. He had forgotten it was there.

In a final briefing on the parliament ballroom's balcony, the Captain had given one cigar, each from his dwindling supply to Naruto, Avery, and Byrne.

"You men light them when they're safe." Ponder had said, nodding toward the elevator anchors and the civilians gathering in the surrounding sheds. Naruto knew the Captain had purposefully not included himself in their celebratory smoke. Ponder had known he wasn't going to make it. The Captain was a suicide bomber. The explosives in the mall would kill him, and if they were lucky, whatever aliens were sent down to meet him. The truth was, Naruto didn't think the rest of the Militia's odds were much better.

Avery and Byrne, with a group of twenty volunteers from the 2nd platoon squads, were currently holed up at Utgard's reactor-complex, guarding Loki's data center. JOTUNs had carefully unearthed the driver's magnetic-acceleration coils while the alien warship was busy burning Gladsheim, and Loki had adjusted the driver's gimble, so it was aimed at Utgard's skyline. Once the mass driver fired, the Naruto assumed the aliens would identify its power source and launch a retaliatory strike. It was up to Avery and Byrne to make sure they didn't succeed—to keep Loki's data center safe while the cut into the enemy's numbers.

At the five-minute mark, Naruto's grease bucket jerked as its maglev pads pulled from the strand and its brake wheels engaged, slowing the bucket's progress. The transition was enough to rouse the recruits around him. One by one, the recruits revived, retrieved their MA5s where they had fallen to the rubberized floor and checked their ammunition.

"Alright, everyone listen up," Naruto called out. "Check your corners. Watch your teammates. The targets will have had time to dig in."

Naruto had run the militiamen through the assault plan multiple times: both teams would clear their coupling stations, then press out and secure the far ends of the Tiara. Once that was done, they would drive any surviving aliens back toward the center, trap them around the number-four station, and wipe them out.

"We'll meet you in the middle," Jilan said. "And Uzumaki?"

"Ma'am?"

"This better work."

Naruto unclipped his seat belt and rose to his feet. Through the interior windows, he could see the rate of the cable's passage slow, revealing a herringbone pattern in the strands' carbon nano-fiber construction. The bucket came to such a smooth stop—so unlike the jarring, airborne insertions, Naruto had experienced time and time again on training missions—that he worried his groggy recruits might not get the adrenaline surge they needed.

"First platoon!" he shouted. "Ready weapons and stand to!"

The recruits pulled their MA5s' charging handles and thumbed the rifles' fire-selection switches to full automatic. As they stood, the sons of Harvest met their squad leader's steely gaze with equal resolution, and Naruto realized he had underestimated his recruits' preparedness. They're ready. He thought. They weren't perfect, but they were ready.

The bucket swayed against the cable as the gantry sealed over its hatch. The recruits stacked close together to Naruto's left and right. For the first time, he looked at them and saw them for what they were: heroes in the making.

The gantry's semitransparent walls let in more light than had been in the bucket. Naruto squinted as he rushed forward, scanning for targets. As the militiamen surged forward behind him, the tube began to bounce, throwing off Naruto's aim. Luckily, he didn't see any contacts until he reached the end of the gantry, and the four masked creatures running past the airlock weren't in any mood to fight. Their tough, gray skin bled blue from a claymore's deadly hail.

Naruto let them pass—waited to see if they had a rear guard. A moment later, a fifth alien appeared, caught sight of Naruto, and raised its explosive cutlass.

He fired a three-round burst that caught the creature in its shoulder and spun it around.

Before its cutlass clattered to the floor, Naruto was inside the Tiara proper. He drilled a second burst into the alien's chest, and the creature crumpled.

Naruto scanned right toward the number-one strand and didn't see any stragglers. He scanned left and fired at the closest of the four aliens just now retreating around the corner of the coupling station, and the alien's head disappeared in a bright blue spray.

"Andersen, Wick, Fasoldt: clean up any wounded at the first station!" Naruto pulled his battle rifle's half-spent magazine and slotted a fresh one into place, sprinting after his retreating foes.

Rust-colored oversized insects skittered along the walls. Their wings creating a buzzing sound that filled the hallways. Yet none of them moved to attack him or his team.

What are they after? He thought following the creatures. If they weren't supposed to repel a counterattack, then why were they on the Tiara? He got his answer as he rounded a corner.

Half a dozen of the insects had the floating alien surrounded. Pressed against the wall as they attacked. They weren't showing their captured comrade any mercy, peeling strips of its skin away with their hooked forelimbs.

Naruto raised his M7 and let them have it.

The closest insect's head exploded before any noticed him. Naruto killed a second as it attempted to take flight, and a third trying to buzz for cover.

"Don't' shoot the big one." He ordered the recruits behind him.

The insects scattered, and the floating alien came towards the humans. That's a good sign. Naruto thought, moving forward to meet it.

He stumbled as the Tiara's large support beams groaned, and the walkway bucked beneath him.

"Number seven strand," Jilan replied, still breathless from the fight. "It's gone."

Naruto fired his M7 at one of the insects as it leaped from a nearby support cable. The creature lost a wing and half its limbs and crashed to the walkway behind a group of barrels to Naruto's right that Forsell shared with Jenkins.

"What do you mean, gone?" Naruto shouted as Forsell finished the insect with a burst from his MA5.

"Snapped. A few thousand kilometers above its anchor." The Lt. Commander was crouched behind a barrel to Naruto's left. She frowned and pressed her helmet's integrated speaker closer to her ear. "Say again, Loki? You're breaking up!"

"Two! Coming high!" Healy interrupted, firing a wild burst from Dass' rifle. The older squad leader was down and groaning with a serious plasma burn in his back. He would live, but there were many dead—a recruit named Wick and two others from Naruto's bucket and five militiamen from Jilan's. Most of the others bore a grim assortment of wounds they had gained as they herded the enemy to the center of the Tiara. Fragments from the gray-skinned alien's cutlasses and lacerations from the insects' razor-sharp limbs.

Naruto emptied his BR55's last clip halfway back to the barricade, and the bug had jumped him before he could bring up his M7. Luckily Jenkins was on the ball. The recruit took the thing out with a well-placed battle rifle burst—killed it with the same stoic accuracy he'd exhibited ever since the mission began.

"Loki's been hit. His data center's damaged." Jilan reloaded her M7.

"Petty Officer!" Andersen yelled, firing from a barrel past Jilan's. "Hammer!"

Naruto snapped his focus back to the alien's barricade. Both sets of barrels had shifted when the Tiara bucked. Some of the foam-filled canisters had tipped and rolled down the walkway, confounding the gold-armored alien's first charge. A steady stream of fire from the recruits had kept it pinned near the control center. But now it was coming—hammer in both paws, low across its waist—flanked by four of the gray-skinned aliens, each wielding an explosive shard.

Naruto knew the armored alien would be too difficult to take one-on-one. And even if they concentrated their fire, he doubted they could stop it. Which was why right after the alien made its initial charge, h4 had come up with another plan.

"Forsell!" he shouted. "Now!"

While Naruto lay down covering fire, the recruit hefted one of the aliens' glowing energy cores over his barrel—a two-handed sideways fling, just like he was back on his family farm and hurling bags of soybeans into his father's hauler. The core landed ten meters in front of the gold-armored alien, and the vortex of blue energy inside its clear walls flared as it rolled forward. But it didn't explode on impact as Naruto had hoped. It took a burst from his M7 to set it off, but by then, the gold-armored alien had already leaped over the core, and the explosion missed it completely.

But Forsell's effort wasn't a total loss. The explosion hit the four gray-skinned aliens full force, blowing them off the walkway. Spiny forearms flailing, they plummeted to the bottom of the Tiara. None survived the fall.

"Move!" Naruto shouted as the armored alien landed, hammer high above its head.

He emptied his M7's into the alien's left side, but the high-velocity rounds simply sparked off its energy shield. The alien dropped its hammer and glared at Naruto, teeth bared. But as it hefted its hammer a second time, Naruto leaped headfirst over his barrel toward the control center, away from Jilan and his recruits. The alien's hammer smashed down where he had stood a moment before, buckling one of the walkway's diamond-grid metal panels.

As Naruto rolled to his feet and pulled a fresh M7 magazine from his vest, a massive fur-covered arm clipped him sending him head over heels.

"Move back!" Jilan ordered.

Naruto lost his M7 as he landed on his hands. Looking up, he saw the hammer-wielding alien bring its weapon down, scattering the recruits. The hammer's head dug down into the walkway.

Naruto didn't waste any time. He raised his M7 and did his best to get its attention. This was his mission. He had brought the recruits to the Tiara. Pitted them against this black-haired giant.

His bullets bounced off the aliens' armor as it advanced on him, dragging its hammer behind it, into an unexpected melee between human and alien. Naruto dropped his spent M7, pulling the combat knife from his chest harness. He rushed forward.

He and the creatures were now at each others' throats—claws and knife flashing.

The alien grunted as the blade cut deep into its gut. With a roar, it lifted his hammer high. Naruto dropped to the ground, jamming his knife into the side of its knees. The alien faltered, took a heavy step back, and brought his hammer down.

Naruto rolled between its two trunk-like legs. He rose up, ducking back down, letting the aliens heavy back swing pass harmlessly over his head. He sidestepped a slow, uncoordinated hammer swing. The cudgel stuck into the wall of the Tiara, and Naruto acted.

Using the neck of the hammer as a springboard, he sailed upwards, wrapping his arms around the alien's throat. He kicked his legs over its massive shoulders and jammed his knife through the gaps in the golden helmet.

The alien howled in agony. It dropped its hammer and reached up. Naruto felt kitchen knife sized claws dig into his sides before he was yanked from the aliens' shoulders and thrown back towards the recruits.

He hit the ground hard, bouncing from the impact. He slid for a distance before he hit something that didn't budge. A wall? How far had he been thrown?

Above him, bullets flew past as the recruits opened fire.

The newest chapter of A New War!

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