93: Chapter 93 Frontline Mutiny: Refusing to Be Cannon Fodder

Stratton put down his laser pointer and strode out of the operations room door.

Holloway followed closely behind, and Castro shoved aside the chair blocking the door, knocking it over, before catching up.

The three of them walked up the concrete steps leading from the command center to the ground observation platform, their boot soles striking the steps with a rhythmic, hurried clatter.

The observation platform was located at the top of an old flight control tower on the west side of the base runway, offering a wide field of vision facing southeast.

Stratton was the first to push open the iron door at the top of the tower.

The moment the cold wind rushed in, he looked up at the skyline in the direction of the Hoover Dam and froze in place, stunned.

Holloway walked up behind him and followed his gaze for a moment; his lips parted, but not a single word came out.

Castro was the last to stand still, and when he saw that part of the sky, his breathing visibly hitched.

In the distance, the entire firmament above the Hoover Dam had been completely covered by two terrifyingly large space fleets.

Massive motherships with a gray-blue luster surged out from spatial rifts on the left and right.

The silver-gray hull surfaces had no rivets or welds, only a seamless alloy shell so smooth it was almost liquid, shimmering with a cold, alien, and desolate light under the dark red clouds remaining at the zenith.

Battleships were arranged in geometric arrays, frigates formed a protective perimeter around the motherships, and dense swarms of attack craft, like flying ants pouring from an anthill, lined up in front of the motherships in several layered, trapezoidal wave formations.

The energy weapons were unlike any land-based or sea-based air defense system they were familiar with.

They were thousands of pulse beams lighting up simultaneously, colliding at the speed of light and exploding against shields into irregular bursts of plasma fire.

In the brief intervals between beam penetrations, the mothership hulls released massive beams of light, striking the shields of the opposing battleship groups and exploding into a sea of blazing white fire that blanketed the edge of their vision with shockwaves.

The entire sky was illuminated, flickering between light and dark by the beams and explosions.

A low, muffled rumble, shattered and traveling across dozens of miles of wilderness, could still be faintly felt in the air.

Debris began to fall from the engagement altitude.

Silver-gray fragments of ships and aircraft, trailing black smoke, drifted erratically through the low altitude before crashing into the desert floor in the distance, kicking up sporadic sparks and irregular yellow-white dust pillars.

The scale, speed, and intensity of the firefight involving non-human technology in the sky were several technical generations ahead of the "air defense penetration" and "tactical ground fire suppression" they had trained for over the past few decades.

Major General Stratton's back stiffened.

He would bet that every Army field manual he had ever read contained no record of enemy activity on this scale.

Their plan to sit in the base and wait to reap the benefits had completely crumbled into worthless paper within these few seconds.

"This matter... must be reported to the White House immediately! Report it to the President!"

Stratton's voice was as dry as sandpaper.

Just as he finished the last word, another messenger stumbled up the stairs.

The messenger's face was even paler than Winters' had been, and his tone was so urgent it almost cracked:

"Major General! There's a mutiny on the front lines!!"

"The soldiers of the 3rd Cavalry Regiment and the 75th Ranger Regiment are all refusing to advance into the target area!!"

"They said... no, they are shouting... that they want the President to give them an explanation!!"

Holloway and Castro withdrew their gazes from the distant sky almost simultaneously.

In that same instant, their expressions shifted from shock to extreme coldness and gravity.

Holloway tried his best to keep his tone steady when he spoke, but he bit out each word tightly:

"This isn't a question of mutiny."

"If that fleet on the horizon is truly an enemy fleet that our intelligence system completely failed to detect, then no conventional means at our disposal can suppress this."

"Castro, you and I are going to the front lines immediately!"

"If we can't stabilize the troops' morale, all three of our names will appear on the military tribunal's execution order by tomorrow!"

Castro didn't speak, just nodded heavily, turned around, and followed Holloway quickly down the stairs.

...

Southeast of the Hoover Dam, in the staging area.

The soldiers of the 3rd Cavalry Regiment and the 75th Ranger Regiment were no longer staying in their respective armored vehicles.

They were all standing outside their convoys, everyone looking up, everyone staring at the skyline to the southwest.

There, the battle of two hundred thousand silver-gray space fleet ships was unfolding in a way that crushed their understanding.

Fighter craft weaved through barrages at speeds of over a dozen Mach, beams struck invisible shields, exploding into thermal rings with shockwaves spanning miles, and the fire exchanged between motherships covered half the sky.

Every flash of intense light, every beam of light that drilled out from a ship's belly and pierced the atmosphere, shattered all their common sense as ground combat soldiers before they could receive any official notification from the alarm signal towers.

A young corporal crouching behind the scope on top of a vehicle, staring at the sky, was the first to break down.

He threw his binoculars onto the roof, stood up abruptly, and pointed at the continuously expanding cloud of plasma light in the distant sky, shouting at the top of his lungs:

"Those politicians in the White House sent us here to die!"

"This isn't some terrorist group! And it's not an anti-terrorism exercise! That's an Aliens fleet! An Aliens fleet!!"

"They want us to act as human shields for them, to die for those fat cats stomping their dress shoes on the carpets of the White House!!"

His voice carried very far in the desolate desert air.

The squad next to him was silent for several seconds, then, like an ignited powder keg, they exploded one after another.

Someone ripped off their helmet and slammed it onto the hood of a jeep, roaring that they hadn't signed their service contract to fight Aliens; someone threw their rifle next to the tire of an armored vehicle, crouched on the ground with trembling fists, repeating over and over that they had been lied to all along.

Others leaned against the wheels, staring blankly, muttering to those around them that their daughter was only three years old, that they had been called up for assembly this morning before they could celebrate her birthday, and now they might never return to Indiana.

Those mid-level officers—battalion commanders, company commanders, platoon leaders—not a single one stepped forward to stop them.

They stood in place, looking up at the same sky, their faces, like those of the ordinary soldiers, left only with utter pallor.

Someone clutched a tactical tablet in their hand, their thumb sliding across a photo of their wife and child on the screensaver; as they wiped their lips, they swallowed the second half of their order.

Someone quietly removed the rank insignia from their collar—the one they had never been willing to take off on any occasion—and placed it into their breast pocket.

At this moment, an avalanche... no, not an avalanche.

This was a crushing at the level of fundamental rules, the intensity of which exceeded the scope of any disaster on Earth, rewritten by the two hundred thousand space fleet ships.

One can escape an avalanche, one can act against an avalanche.

But every beam of light interwoven in that sky before them was something no human could escape.

When every individual in a biological community realizes that all their training, all their equipment, and all their combat rules are rendered invalid in the current scenario, and that the only position assigned to them is to serve as the first layer of target practice for the enemy's destructive firepower, the brain will not issue the command to "obey orders."

The brain will issue the command: "Flee this place, or die."

And at this moment, this command flashed simultaneously across the nerve endings of nearly fifteen thousand armed soldiers!