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The boys of the Unsub podcast give Tony his day in front of the mic, after helping him sign pages for the upcoming “Ballistic Edition” of Rooftop Korean: Memoir of the 1992 LA Riots.

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Mongol Moon front man Mark Sibley sits down and talks about what led to the creation of the series and why it hits so much with vets.

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BY PETER NEALEN

Part Two: Counterattack

Back on Gesarron, Kasallas found himself placed in command of a newly-raised phalanx, one almost entirely made up of raw recruits. Stories of his fury are still told today; he wanted nothing more than to take the fight to the Cenites’ den, yet here he was saddled with command of a unit that had almost no experience or institutional knowledge at all.

The tales of the brutal training he promptly embarked upon have survived better than even some of his exploits in battle. Determined to beat this amorphous mass of humanity into a tempered weapon to aim at the enemies of the Empire, he set goals that none of his appointed officers thought realistic. When they objected, he had them demoted to trooper or, in at least two known cases, shot.

Nearly a hundred recruits, it is said, died in the course of training. Yet what came out the other side was a machine that could nearly perform to the same level as the Six Hundred, albeit one that almost universally hated its commander. As they boarded the troopships for parts unknown, the men of the 2^nd Gesarron Phalanx were determined to achieve victory in spite of Kasallas.

That would change.

The troopships rendezvoused with those of the 33^rd Mortasan Phalanx, the 97^th and 45^th Weringen Phalanxes, the 7^th Ionia Shockweavers, the 88^th Utreid Chromium Brigade, and a dozen ships of the Varyagus Clan. Only then were they given their orders. They were bound for Vulmanar VII, a world thought lost a century prior. The circumstances of that loss were uncertain even then, but with the revelation of the Cenites’ presence in the Urunian Drift, the truth seemed somewhat more evident.

What they found there, as the phalanxes were brought out of cryo following the hyperspace transit, was horror.

The cities were ancient ruins, overgrown and uninhabited except by furtive bands of feral humans. Other bands roved the hinterlands, often fighting amongst themselves. Yet this was not a human world. Not any longer.

The Cenite garrison in orbit was quickly slaughtered, but the fortress on the planet’s surface would not be so easily handled. Extensive defenses were set around that fortress, extensive and powerful enough to deny the skies within line of sight all the way to low orbit. As the troopships began to descend on the wilderness outside of the fortress’s line of fire, the ships in high orbit continued to observe.

What they saw changed the commanders’ perception of what was happening on Vulmanar VII. Whereas it had initially seemed that tenacious humans had held out and survived the Cenites’ hunt, it soon became apparent that these survivors were, in fact, being kept in what amounted to a Cenite game park. The survivors were culled periodically by Cenite hunters, the Devourers always careful not to completely wipe out the population.

Kasallas did not witness this intelligence, instead riding his troopship to the surface with his phalanx. Some say he was simply determined to take the fight to the Cenites himself, while others speculate that his iron discipline was so hated by his troops that he felt that he needed to lead them personally lest they rebel once they were out from under his baleful glare.

The destruction of the orbital clawship had alerted the Cenites on the ground to the Imperial attack, and while the bombardment to soften up the fortress began, the Devourers were already moving. It is not their way to sit behind fortifications and defenses, even though they might use them temporarily for an advantage or to buy time for an attack of their own. They were spreading out, scattering like disturbed insects, before sweeping down on the landing zones at high speed.

Despite the relatively small number of Cenites on the planet, they still outnumbered the Imperial forces by a considerable margin, and Cenites do not seem to know the concept of non-combatants. They are hunters as a species, and all of their number capable of running and holding a weapon live to kill.

They moved fast enough that the first clash came before even the first few troopships were completely offloaded. Yet if there was one man who knew how to fight the Cenites, it was Kasallas. He had expected to come under attack as soon as the Devourers had any idea where they were, and there was no hiding the fiery entry path of the troopships. He knew they had to be ready to fight, so he pushed his most elite troopers out with their fast attack vehicles to scout, forcing his second-line troops to leave most of their equipment aboard the ships and dig in.

Even with that preparation, though, the raw recruits of the 2^nd Gesarron Phalanx weren’t ready for the sheer ferocity of the aliens. The scouts were decimated, and the snarling packs descended on the hasty defenses, carving through the thin lines where the inexperienced phalanx troopers had failed to take their commander’s dire warnings seriously enough. Blood painted the gray dust as the Cenites tore into their prey, soon threatening the troopships themselves.

Through sheer force of personality—and some say some violence—Kasallas rallied a response, counterattacking with such concentrated firepower that the most eager Cenite hunters were simply blown apart, their remains scattered over the cooling corpses of their victims. In an hour, Kasallas had the perimeter secured, allowing for the offloading of the combat vehicles and heavy weapons, as well as pushing the perimeter out to allow more of the troopships to land.

The first attacks had sobered the survivors, making many of them realize just why Kasallas had been the brutal taskmaster he had been during training. Some still grumbled, but those who looked on the mangled remains of phalanx troopers they had complained with only hours before felt a chill and set to preparing their defenses all the more eagerly.

Those who had lived through the carnage of the first battle also remembered one key detail, one thing that stood out through the miasma of blood and horror that had enveloped the perimeter during those desperate hours.

It was Colonel James Strakken Rodriguez Kasallas who had always been at the thickest of the fighting, pushing his way to the front, firing on the Cenites with an accuracy and a stark hatred that rivaled even the snarls of the aliens, all while cursing and encouraging his men in equal measure to stand and fight.

It was in those desperate, bloody hours that the men of the 2^nd Gesarron Phalanx began to realize why the Six Hundred had followed this man, and a new sort of mettle was forged, heated to a white heat of hatred that would see the Cenites wiped from the face of Vulmanar VII.

To be continued.

When the lights go out in a casino town, a soul could drown in the darkness that creeps in behind it.

Reno, Nevada, has long been the place where the fortunes of man—both good and evil—collide. Stretching across the Truckee Meadows from the Pah Rah to the Sierras, this high desert city stands guardian over the fastest route for men and material to travel from the San Francisco Bay, East, towards the Rockies. Chinese soldiers disguised as circus performers have successfully caried out Operation Wŭjù, a smaller element of the larger Christmas Eve attack known as Mongol Moon. They have seized the Biggest Little City, forcing Renoites into an impossible decision: raise the stakes, or fold entirely.

The only question is who will Lady Luck smile upon: the invaders now headquartered in the Ormsby Casino, or the home-grown insurgents calling themselves the Sons of Carson?

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Tony Moon joins the Sam Tripoli podcast to talk about how civil unrest flares, and what we as citizens can do about it. He goes on to link his time during the LA Riots to the unrest we see today, and talks on his upcoming book… Rooftop Korean: Memoir of the LA Riots coming from WarGate Books.

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Part One: Baptism of Blood

The origins of the Imperial hero known to posterity as Colonel James Strakken Rodriguez Kasallas are lost to time. That he was born on Lesser Gesar is all we can be certain of, as he served in the phalanxes of that world and its parent for all that we know of his life.

Lesser Gesar is a colony of Gesarron, extending that ancient foundry world’s influence into the wilds of the Urunian Drift, a pocket of space where stars and planets are far less dense than anywhere within a thousand light years. It would be an area of space utterly unnoticed were it not for two things: the Drift was where the ancient warship Gorgon was purported to have vanished. None know who built the Gorgon, but its infamy and legendary power led many to search for it after the reign of terror it had wrought across ten thousand light years. Yet there was something worse than the Gorgon in the Urunian Drift.

The Cenites had a den there.

They might not have realized that there were Imperial worlds nearby, not at first. But as soon as the adventurers hove into the Drift, they became aware of new prey.

Lesser Gesar was the first attacked, and that was where Kasallas first made his name.

There was little warning. Gesarron had little in the way of Imperial presence, and Lesser Gesar even less. The 1^st Gesarron Phalanx was also the only such formation, and was an understrength 300,000 men in total. Only a fifty-thousand-man detachment was assigned to Lesser Gesar, supported by only two Imperial cruisers, the Hussar and the Reins of Sleipnir.

Both cruisers, based on limited recordings, gave good account of themselves as the claw-shaped Cenite ships closed in on them, but they were vastly outnumbered, and soon were boarded. It is perhaps fortunate for all that no recordings of the carnage aboard made it off either ship before they were floating abattoirs in orbit.

The bombardment that followed targeted the primary spaceports and the major cities, most of which still stood on the eastern continent. These Cenites used plasma bombs, possibly having looted them from other prey some time before. The core of Uessa Spaceport was vaporized in a flash, immolating nearly ten thousand people outright in an eyeblink.

In the aftermath, the Cenites waited nearly two days before descending in their landers. By then, the survivors had dispersed, expecting the Devourers to concentrate on the wreckage of the cities. Unfortunately for them, such was not the Cenite way. They came down in great circles around the ruins, spreading out in hunting packs to pursue the refugees first.

Headquarters for the 1^st Gesarron Phalanx detachment had been at Uessa spaceport, along with the majority of their personnel and equipment. Only small patrols, about thirty men apiece, mostly concerned with the pirates and slavers that frequented the wastes between the populated urban sprawls, survived the bombardment. One of these patrols was led by Sergeant James Strakken Rodriguez Kasallas.

While there is no record of previous experience, he had seen the flashes as the spaceport came under attack, and correctly surmised that his command was gone, and that a follow on attack was imminent. Leading his patrol into the harshest, rockiest terrain in the wastes, braving the savage local predators that, much like the aliens soon to descend from the sky, hid within the jagged spires to range out after their prey when least suspected. There, the Imperial troopers waited and watched, even as their water and food got low, observing the landers descending on fiery trails from the sky above.

The Cenites spread out, picking off those that had fled first, slowly tightening the noose around the spaceport and what remained of the planet’s primary settlements, all of which lay within two hundred miles, the colony only being a century old. Still, for a few days, Kasallas waited and watched, until he saw the time was right.

Striking out from the redoubt in the wastes, they ambushed a pack of Cenites that were hounding a desperate band of refugees. With the Devourers so focused on their prey, Kasallas and his troopers slaughtered them quickly, before disappearing back into the wastes.

For the next month, they continued to hunt the Cenites, occasionally joining other patrols of Phalanx troopers, but generally trying to stay small, fast, and agile. They attacked only when they had the element of surprise, and they showed the predatory aliens no mercy.

Finally, the Cenites began to hunt Kasallas and his men more seriously. While the Devourers prefer to hunt on foot, chasing their prey like their ancestors did before they reached the stars, Kasallas had killed enough of them that they brought their fast attack vehicles into play, hunting through the badlands under a sky turned dark by lowering clouds of smoke and dust that still had not settled from the bombardment.

It took a clash with a fast-attack claw of speeders that left half his men dead for Kasallas to rethink his position. Small and elusive they had been, but they were still men on foot, no match for Cenites on speeders and sickle-winged attack planes. Driving deeper into the badlands, he began to circle around toward where his scouts had determined some of the other surviving phalanx forces had been hiding.

One by one, staying just ahead of the Cenite hunter packs, Kasallas gathered the ragtag bands of local militia and surviving phalanx troopers, working his way toward the ruins of Uessa. By the time they reached the scorched and gutted remains of the poor quarter habitation blocks, Kasallas had gathered nearly a battalion. Even with the Cenites hot on their heels, they were able to keep them back with ambushes and delaying actions, enough for The Six Hundred to begin to dig in.

The Cenites were closing in, packs gathering from all around Uessa and coming out of the ruins where they had been hunting those civilians and deserters that had sought shelter in the debris. Kasallas and his troops had killed hundreds of them already, and whatever pack leader was directing the slaughter saw him as the threat that he was.

The first attack on the Six Hundred came before the defenses were completed, and nearly shattered one flank before Kasallas himself led a spoiling attack, exposing himself and his attack force far out from the defenses in order to strike the assaulting Cenites from the rear. If his hope was to stop the assault altogether, he failed, but he still bought time, though the spoiling force lost nearly thirty percent casualties before getting back within the burgeoning fortifications.

There, they prepared for the next attack, as night fell and the Cenites regrouped.

It came in the dead of night, the Devourers’ alien senses attuned far more than those of mere humans. Even so, Kasallas was ready for it.

The first attack came with sound and fury, striking almost directly up the cratered road that was the primary avenue of approach to the Six Hundred’s positions. They came on speeders and loping on foot from crater to crater, sending up hunting howls as they came, bringing devastating fire down on the Imperial fighting positions.

Kasallas sensed that this was a feint, however. Over the previous several months, as he’d hunted the hunters through the badlands, he’d learned their ways, come to understand them perhaps better than they understood themselves. For all their savagery, the Cenites were not fools or heedless, frenzied beasts. The noise and the high volume of fire was not their way. He sent two squads to reinforce the road, then waited for the real attack.

It came on two axes, the Cenites bounding through the rubble on foot, sometimes going down onto all fours as they clambered over the ruins, silent and dark. They used blades and talons on the listening posts, but one got a warning out.

Still Kasallas held his primary force in reserve, even as the first lines spotted the shadowy shapes slipping through the night and opened fire. He watched and waited, knowing instinctively that the Devourers still had not fully committed.

Only when the two flanks were fully engaged, the frontal assault on the highway stalled, did he move, striking toward the Six Hundred’s rear area.

There he encountered the main Cenite force, about to launch itself deep into the Six Hundred’s position, and the battle was joined.

The fighting raged the rest of the night, with Kasallas always seemingly in the thick of it. Some of the Six Hundred, already low from the last month or more of fighting, ran out of ammunition and resorted to bayonets, knives, bare hands, rocks, even the Cenite hand weapons they could seize. They finally threw the Devourers back, gaining a few hours to rest and see to their wounded.

Their trial was not over. While it was whispered that perhaps Kasallas had himself slain the pack leader that had gathered the force that sought to overwhelm this bastion of resistance—as far as they knew, possibly the last such bastion on the planet—the word had seemingly gone out to the rest of the Cenites on Lesser Gesar’s smaller continent, and the hordes closed in on the Six Hundred.

It is said that Kasallas had his remaining wavecast operators call for help, if there were any forces left in the system that might hear, but told his troopers and militia that he himself would stay and fight, at least until all of them were taken off. At the time, none had much hope for deliverance, as the Cenites circled, occasionally getting close enough to take shots at the defenders with their dart weapons, almost never exposing themselves long enough for one of the Imperials to get a shot off.

Finally, the next wave of diversionary attacks began, more ferocious than before. The Cenites prefer to eschew artillery, preferring their prey wounded but alive when captured, so they used the rubble to their advantage to get close before attacking, some having seemingly burrowed to get even closer. One flank nearly collapsed as the pack closed in, and only Kasallas’s personal intervention got the Imperials to hold, even as the main attack appeared out of the dark along the highway that had been the diversionary path of attack before.

Leaving the beleaguered flank, Kasallas and his chosen few attacked the Cenites on their main axis of attack, falling on them with a ferocity that rivaled even the fanged predators of the sky. Once again, they took terrible losses, but they threw the Devourers back, leaving hundreds of them lying broken on the shattered flagstones of the ruined city.

There was no possibility that the Cenites would retreat. More of their flyers and fast vehicles were coming, gathering yet more packs to assault the Six Hundred, now closer to three or four hundred after the last few days’ fighting. The Cenites were enraged that their prey was fighting back so effectively, and they would see the Six Hundred eviscerated for their temerity.

Some have reported inspiring speeches that Kasallas gave to his surviving troopers. No two recorded speeches are alike, however. It is more likely that his reputation for grim, quiet determination, seen so much in the wars that followed, dominated the still hours before the next attack. The survivors of the Six Hundred, now nearly completely out of ammunition, sharpened their blades and prepared for the end, determined to take as many of the Cenites with them as they could.

Strangely, however, the attack did not come. The Cenites scattered, coming quickly under fire from heavily armored Orn-pattern gunships, as the vanguard of the Varyagus Paladin Clan descended in blood and fire to turn the Cenite hunters to hunted.

None record the words between Kasallas and the Paladin commander, in that blood-soaked pile of shattered rockcrete that had once been a city. Nor are the words exchanged with the commandant of the 1^st Gesarron Phalanx to be found, this long after the events. All that is known is that Kasallas was taken to Gesarron directly, leaving behind the rest of the Six Hundred, to become the new commander of the 2^nd Gesarron Phalanx.

TO BE CONTINUED

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When the government goes into overreach mode, Braxton Knox responds with violence!

When woke-minded political officials take a man’s pet fox and raccoon and kill them, it’s too much for Braxton Knox and his allies. What they find in the Adirondacks is a rogue state police unit, a politician who used the death of the animals to advance his career, and an eco-terrorist group that feels that the government didn’t go far enough.

When cops go bad, Braxton Knox becomes the only justice that matters.

From the minds of Mike Baron (The Punisher, The Flash, and Nexus) and political thriller author Blaine Pardoe is a story of vigilante justice against the backdrop of modern events. Knox and his team find themselves facing multiple forces bent on stopping them from bringing vengeance for Sheffield the fox and Fritz the raccoon. It is a story of corruption, cover-up, and good old-fashioned retribution.

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As the crime world of Red Eye slips into chaos, legendary bounty hunter Tyrus Rechs finds himself trapped in a nightmare of his own making. With his ship seized and his crew likely dead, Rechs must navigate a world where Lizzaar death squads patrol the streets, zhee war parties prowl the jungles, the only law is survival… and the only hope is escape.

Getting off the distant planet won’t be easy. Those with functioning starships are long gone, and Rechs’s only chance lies in the Beast Games—a gladiatorial bloodsport where slaves and desperate men fight for the promise of freedom. But the Games are rigged, the owners treacherous, and every victory only paints a larger target on his back.

As Rechs fights through deadly matches and deadlier ambushes, he’s unaware that something more than the jungle’s predators stalk him. Surviving bounty hunters sent by the crime lord Zauro will stop at nothing to claim their credits, even if it means following Rechs into the depths of hell itself.

From arena death matches to desperate raids on slaver vessels, Rechs must use every trick learned in centuries of war to stay alive. But when predator becomes prey, and the hunter finds himself hunted, even a legend can bleed.

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BY PETER NEALEN

Pick Up Your Weapon, Trooper Part V

The support beamers were raking the oncoming mobs of battle thralls with crackling bursts of energy, cutting fanatical reptilians and humans down in great swathes, piling bodies and parts of bodies on the ravaged ground before the trench line. The rest of the troopers threw themselves up on the firing steps, adding the crackling thump of their pulse rifles to the support beamers.

Ulgar started to join them, but Jerigan pulled him back and shouldered in front of him. “You’re in command now!” The other man seemed to have calmed down, getting his fear under control, as he mounted the firing step and laid his pulse rifle on the shredded sandbags. “This is your plan! These men are listening to you, like it or not, and somebody has to do it!”

With a gulp, Ulgar realized that Jerigan was right. If there was no one in command, no one to coordinate what they were doing, the Charul would box them in and overrun them. He felt a shudder go through him at the thought, despite the immediacy of the physical danger as the oncoming battle thralls’ beam fire crackled overhead.

He still couldn’t stay where he was and just watch, as the assault wave came closer. They had too few weapons to afford that kind of leadership. He pushed to another firing step, where he hoped he could at least get a better view of the battlefield.

Not that he knew exactly what he was going to do. He was a regular phalanx trooper. He wasn’t a corporal like Aubrian. This was his first battle.

Laying his own pulse rifle down, he put a burst into one of the reptilian thralls that was getting closer, sending it sprawling with a splash of orange blood. They were close enough to see and smell the gore now. He shifted to another, just as it dropped to the dirt.

That was when he realized that something had changed. The first assault had been an overwhelming wave, thousands of screaming fanatics charging across the last hundred yards toward the Torremadan positions while they fired from the hip. It had worked, too, since as far as Ulgar knew, this little cluster of phalanx troopers were the only ones still holding their ground. Yet now, the thralls were taking cover.

He could just barely hear a faint buzz over the crackle and thunder of weapons fire, and looked toward the Charul in the armored palanquin, where it was gesturing and seemed to be the center of the buzzing sound.

Just as he shifted his pulse rifle to try an almost certainly futile shot at the thing, the thralls rose up again under a withering blizzard of beam fire, charging forward again, the sheer volume of their fire forcing the Torremadan survivors to duck down below the parapet. The wiry man who had found the second support weapon was still firing, his head down but his hands on the controls, raking the oncoming wave with blind pulses of beam fire.

Shielded from the torrent of destruction, Ulgar knew they were doomed. He knew they had to fight, or the thralls would be on them in moments. But he couldn’t bring himself to stick his head up over the parapet, and none of his comrades, from his unit or others, could either.

They were going to die.

He forced his eyes up, though he still couldn’t manage to make his head rise, flinching down again as the beam fire raked the parapet above him, showering him with superheated grit as more of the sandbags exploded under the onslaught. That movement of his eyes might have saved them all.

In the brief moment that he’d managed to shoot back and had seen the Charul master, he hadn’t realized that he had lost track of the lesser, armored Charul. But now that he looked up, squinting against the continuing battering he was taking as the parapet continued to be chewed away, he saw the bigger, hulking shapes moving through the trench line on their flank, coming up against the piles of bodies they had used to barricade their position.

“On the flank!” He dropped down from the firing step, leveling his pulse rifle, knowing it was probably not going to be enough. He fired the remaining rounds in his magazine at the chitinous thing that was pushing up over the stack of corpses. His pulse rounds smashed into its armor, battering it but failing to penetrate.

It lifted a limb, surmounted by a sleek, blade-shaped weapon, as Ulgar threw himself into the bloody mud at the bottom of the trench, ripping a new magazine out of his webbing to reload. A weird, ripping sound was nearly drowned out by the crash of weapons fire between the Imperial troopers and the Charul thralls, but the wiry man behind the support beamer exploded in the middle, his upper body and his legs falling in mangled segments to the bottom of the trench. One hand was still locked in a death grip on the support beamer’s control, dragging the emitter toward the smoke-laden sky before it slid entirely off the parapet and into the trench itself.

Ulgar fought his own weapon and himself, the magazine clashing against the well as his hand shook, his eyes still fixed on the inhuman, many-limbed shape pushing the dead out of the way, its black lenses turning toward him.

By some miracle, he got the magazine into the weapon, as two more of his new comrades realized the threat on their flank and started shooting wildly at the trench junction. Still shaking, his knees feeling like they were about to give way, he blazed away at the oncoming Charul, battering it with about half the rounds in the magazine, the others blasting into the bodies or the dirt walls of the trench.

Stumbling, he lunged toward the fallen support beamer, reaching it as his pulse rifle locked open empty. That strange ripping sound reverberated through the trench once more, and what was left of the two closest troopers that had been shooting at the armored Charul fell to the bottom of the trench in a slither of gore.

The beamer was heavy and unwieldy, and Ulgar could feel the shaking getting worse, as the thing turned those baleful black dots of its eyes on him. It seemed to stare through him as it fired its weapon again, turning the burly man who had first come from the adjacent trench into a tottering slab of meat that slumped against the wall of the trench, blood pouring in a great pool from severed blood vessels.

It was toying with him, confident that his pulse rifle couldn’t get through its protection before it killed him. The scars and pits in its armor—suddenly painfully clear as he watched death come closer to him—told him that eventually he would have gotten through, but there was no time.

Wrenching the beamer over, cranking the power higher, he thought that maybe he saw surprise in the Charul’s movement just before he raked it with the beam, catching it just below the mandibles and carving through the thinner armor near its neck. Tissue and armor plating exploded, blowing the insectoid slaver’s head off. It tottered like the recently killed trooper for a second before it fell atop the pile of bodies, adding its own mass to the Torremadans’ barricade.

To be continued…