This is a 5 year old one shot I posted on SB back in the day. These days I don't do much writing anymore (maybe that should change), but here's my humble contribution to this budding subforum. @The Original Sixth you should enjoy this 
There were three of them, gliding over the broken terrain under the reddish light of the setting local star. Their silvery forms - presumably due to a reflective ablative layer meant to protect themselves against laser-based attacks - were very vaguely humanoid. A bipedal platform with two arms and a rounded torso, their mechanical legs carried them gracefully over the hills and pits of the wasteland, their motions reminding me mostly of a ballerina, with a touch of jerking insectoid motions. Their movements were shockingly liquid for a bunch of... cog buckets.
They have yet to spot me for some reason. Maybe the improvised camo pattern I've painted over my green power armor was more effective than I figured (I *was* hiding in a tangle of bushes after all). Power Rangers are not usually issued with camouflage systems, not even Green Ranger scout/infiltrators like myself. The Rangers serve more as a police force than a military one. There's a reason our armor comes in bright colors, we're supposed to keep the peace on the constantly expanding frontier of the Galactic Network of Mankind, not pile up corpses. And high visibility serves that role much better than being sneaky.
Unfortunately, I was now pitted against a situation where sneakiness was my only chance of survival. With our patrol ship shot down from orbit by the invading forces (at least that's what I surmised from the frantic reports of the Alpha-5 class ship's AI. Its last transmission was cut off abruptly, and the ship was undergoing urgent evasive maneuvers and deploying countermeasures at the time), I couldn't just beam myself up and escape to warn the rest of the Network. The fact that the planetary communication array was destroyed in the first orbital volley wasn't helping things. And the fact that my comrades, the rest of Team Zeo, were dead, didn't help things either.
Focus, Adam, I told myself. You'll have time to mourn them later. Right now I had to focus on the mission. The three drones were patrolling right between me and the spaceport, part of which was still intact - and containing my only hope of escaping this hellhole.
I drew my sidearm, took careful aim using only the passive sensors of my helmet, and fired off a shot at the middle drone.
A packet of highly excited hydrogen molecules streaked in a red flash from the compact pistol's muzzle and hit its target square in its bulging torso.
The return fire - apparently, the enemy was using ultraviolet-range lasers, or at least that's what DeSantos believed (back when he was alive) - started a fire that will scorch the vegetation in a minute. But I was no longer there.
The training kicked in. I was running at a full sprint toward the enemy, the servomotors of my armor doing most of the work, carrying me like a bullet train straight at the aggressors. Closing in with the enemy will put me at a distinct advantage, where they would have diminished lines of sight and would find it harder to hit me from fear of hitting their comrades. I was firing on the run, but naturally, my accuracy went to shit. Dust and fragments of rock exploded all around the drones, and they returned fire immediately. But now I could see the beams of their weapons reflecting from the dust all around them, and could dodge accordingly - Ranger armor is designed to be highly maneuverable, not too bulky. When we need heavy armor we call in the Zords for an orbital drop. Of course, right now they were probably nothing more than a bunch of mono-atomic dust mixed up in this planet's atmosphere along with the patrol ship. Even if they were still intact, strapping myself into a combat mech would simply make me a bigger target.
As I ran I took a grazing shot to the side. A shower of sparks flew out in a geyser of molten metal and I cried out, but fortunately, my HUD showed me no critical system was hit, although the spot was radiating heat like crazy. Fortunately I was so close to these "cogs" that detection and targeting via infrared was irrelevant.
I reached melee range, and was greeted by a thrust of one of the drone's arms, seething with blue electrical lights which I knew could irreparably damage my suit, possibly kill me. Grabbing the arms, I punched the drone, denting its outer armor with my servomotor-augmented fist. I ducked at the counter-attack, and kicked, enjoying the satisfying crunching sound the joint of he machine's feet made as it fell "face" down to the ground.
The one I shot earlier appeared to be still active, although somewhat damaged. I drew my extendable blade, a standard issue weapon used mostly for pacification rather than serious combat, and thrust it right through the hole my earlier hit had made. Redundant systems or not, this finished the bastard right off. The blade heats up to a few hundred degrees Celsius via the power source integrated into the handle, it can be quite painful to exposed flesh - or delicate circuitry.
As I struggled to finish off the third drone, I wondered what went wrong, and whether we could have done anything differently. The situation we were in - we, as in mankind as well as myself personally - was unique, and frightening. We were team Zeo, not a green (pardon the pun) or naive team. We were operating for quite some years now.
Of course, we weren't as good as the legendary Team Mighty. Oh, no sir. Those guys got their fame by pretty much single handedly pacifying planet Regda, led by the terrorist-turned-dictator Rita "Repulsive" Bandora and equipped with illegal genetically modified soldiers with ultimate loyalty to their despotic state. I heard that interstellar piracy Network-wide dropped, like, by half after their victory. All the handiwork of six guys, who toppled the government of a medium-sized planet thanks to some guerrilla techniques, smart political maneuvering, and a LOT of balls. That's what I call "policing the frontier", indeed.
But I doubted even they were prepared to face a full on invasion by an alien empire. At least, that's what the alien described them as. You see, we were the closest Power Ranger patrol to the planet when the local government of this dinky colony world has sent us a word of a crashed alien vessel near their capital city. The poor blokes were hardly equipped for the situation, this called for some expert work, not a bunch of farmers. So we jumped into orbit and beamed down as quickly as we possibly could.
It took Officers Sloan, Hillard and DeSantos days until they managed to nurse the single alien we found back to health, and translate what it said.
By the way, those are... were, our yellow, pink and blue rangers respectively. When you volunteer for the Ranger service you first undergo a world-class selection process at various training camps around the world. The lucky few are assigned a color-coded section, and receive a one way ticket to California, where they'll sweat for 4 long years at Fort Angel Grove, the premier Power Ranger training and command center, trying to earn their badges. Yellows were diplomats and political experts, pink or white were medics (pink for females, white for males. I was told it was inherited from some obscure tradition of some long forgotten organization. Personally, I think it makes no sense. Whatever), and blues were science experts. Oh, and blacks were assault and combat support experts (although Team Zeo hasn't had one assigned in ages now), the big bruisers if you will, greens like me were scouts and infiltrators, and the reds, of course, were the team commanders, CIC, what have you. Ranger patrols usually operated in great isolation from higher command authorities yet with very restrictive rules of engagement, so the word of our Red Ranger was the word of God to us. But I digress.
The alien was hideous. Huge, chitinous, insectoid body, most resembling a beetle, although naturally it was far from a perfect fit. After our guys managed to nurse it to health and crack its language, it identified its race as Kamen, and its name as Dex (the sounds are not precise, his species communicates by rubbing its vestigial wings together to produce sound, but they sound fairly close to that). And immediately screeched about a vast "Machine Empire", a race of powerful renegade AIs that destroyed and occupied Dex' native world, and apparently making a move towards the human sphere.
We gathered what information we could from the injured but friendly creature in the little time we had before the machine's mothership jumped into orbit and started wrecking havoc on the human colony below.
Most of my comrades were killed in the ensuing mess. And now I was here, trying to break through to the intact sections of the spaceport, hoping against hope that some small ship survived to lift me out of here and call for reinforcements. The military is going to have their hands full when they find out. The huge Fleet was unwieldy and slow to deploy, which was why small teams of Rangers and not Navy or Marine elements were tasked with patrolling the frontier in the first place (that and the fact that the said frontier was expanding very quickly, forcing the government in Geneva to spend increasingly more resources as the surface of the human sphere ballooned outwards).
I just hoped I could survive long enough to get a warning off planet.
Wish me luck.
---------------------------
So yeah, the ranger is Adam rather than Tommy. The 'ole bait and switch. Sorry, Sixth!
There were three of them, gliding over the broken terrain under the reddish light of the setting local star. Their silvery forms - presumably due to a reflective ablative layer meant to protect themselves against laser-based attacks - were very vaguely humanoid. A bipedal platform with two arms and a rounded torso, their mechanical legs carried them gracefully over the hills and pits of the wasteland, their motions reminding me mostly of a ballerina, with a touch of jerking insectoid motions. Their movements were shockingly liquid for a bunch of... cog buckets.
They have yet to spot me for some reason. Maybe the improvised camo pattern I've painted over my green power armor was more effective than I figured (I *was* hiding in a tangle of bushes after all). Power Rangers are not usually issued with camouflage systems, not even Green Ranger scout/infiltrators like myself. The Rangers serve more as a police force than a military one. There's a reason our armor comes in bright colors, we're supposed to keep the peace on the constantly expanding frontier of the Galactic Network of Mankind, not pile up corpses. And high visibility serves that role much better than being sneaky.
Unfortunately, I was now pitted against a situation where sneakiness was my only chance of survival. With our patrol ship shot down from orbit by the invading forces (at least that's what I surmised from the frantic reports of the Alpha-5 class ship's AI. Its last transmission was cut off abruptly, and the ship was undergoing urgent evasive maneuvers and deploying countermeasures at the time), I couldn't just beam myself up and escape to warn the rest of the Network. The fact that the planetary communication array was destroyed in the first orbital volley wasn't helping things. And the fact that my comrades, the rest of Team Zeo, were dead, didn't help things either.
Focus, Adam, I told myself. You'll have time to mourn them later. Right now I had to focus on the mission. The three drones were patrolling right between me and the spaceport, part of which was still intact - and containing my only hope of escaping this hellhole.
I drew my sidearm, took careful aim using only the passive sensors of my helmet, and fired off a shot at the middle drone.
A packet of highly excited hydrogen molecules streaked in a red flash from the compact pistol's muzzle and hit its target square in its bulging torso.
The return fire - apparently, the enemy was using ultraviolet-range lasers, or at least that's what DeSantos believed (back when he was alive) - started a fire that will scorch the vegetation in a minute. But I was no longer there.
The training kicked in. I was running at a full sprint toward the enemy, the servomotors of my armor doing most of the work, carrying me like a bullet train straight at the aggressors. Closing in with the enemy will put me at a distinct advantage, where they would have diminished lines of sight and would find it harder to hit me from fear of hitting their comrades. I was firing on the run, but naturally, my accuracy went to shit. Dust and fragments of rock exploded all around the drones, and they returned fire immediately. But now I could see the beams of their weapons reflecting from the dust all around them, and could dodge accordingly - Ranger armor is designed to be highly maneuverable, not too bulky. When we need heavy armor we call in the Zords for an orbital drop. Of course, right now they were probably nothing more than a bunch of mono-atomic dust mixed up in this planet's atmosphere along with the patrol ship. Even if they were still intact, strapping myself into a combat mech would simply make me a bigger target.
As I ran I took a grazing shot to the side. A shower of sparks flew out in a geyser of molten metal and I cried out, but fortunately, my HUD showed me no critical system was hit, although the spot was radiating heat like crazy. Fortunately I was so close to these "cogs" that detection and targeting via infrared was irrelevant.
I reached melee range, and was greeted by a thrust of one of the drone's arms, seething with blue electrical lights which I knew could irreparably damage my suit, possibly kill me. Grabbing the arms, I punched the drone, denting its outer armor with my servomotor-augmented fist. I ducked at the counter-attack, and kicked, enjoying the satisfying crunching sound the joint of he machine's feet made as it fell "face" down to the ground.
The one I shot earlier appeared to be still active, although somewhat damaged. I drew my extendable blade, a standard issue weapon used mostly for pacification rather than serious combat, and thrust it right through the hole my earlier hit had made. Redundant systems or not, this finished the bastard right off. The blade heats up to a few hundred degrees Celsius via the power source integrated into the handle, it can be quite painful to exposed flesh - or delicate circuitry.
As I struggled to finish off the third drone, I wondered what went wrong, and whether we could have done anything differently. The situation we were in - we, as in mankind as well as myself personally - was unique, and frightening. We were team Zeo, not a green (pardon the pun) or naive team. We were operating for quite some years now.
Of course, we weren't as good as the legendary Team Mighty. Oh, no sir. Those guys got their fame by pretty much single handedly pacifying planet Regda, led by the terrorist-turned-dictator Rita "Repulsive" Bandora and equipped with illegal genetically modified soldiers with ultimate loyalty to their despotic state. I heard that interstellar piracy Network-wide dropped, like, by half after their victory. All the handiwork of six guys, who toppled the government of a medium-sized planet thanks to some guerrilla techniques, smart political maneuvering, and a LOT of balls. That's what I call "policing the frontier", indeed.
But I doubted even they were prepared to face a full on invasion by an alien empire. At least, that's what the alien described them as. You see, we were the closest Power Ranger patrol to the planet when the local government of this dinky colony world has sent us a word of a crashed alien vessel near their capital city. The poor blokes were hardly equipped for the situation, this called for some expert work, not a bunch of farmers. So we jumped into orbit and beamed down as quickly as we possibly could.
It took Officers Sloan, Hillard and DeSantos days until they managed to nurse the single alien we found back to health, and translate what it said.
By the way, those are... were, our yellow, pink and blue rangers respectively. When you volunteer for the Ranger service you first undergo a world-class selection process at various training camps around the world. The lucky few are assigned a color-coded section, and receive a one way ticket to California, where they'll sweat for 4 long years at Fort Angel Grove, the premier Power Ranger training and command center, trying to earn their badges. Yellows were diplomats and political experts, pink or white were medics (pink for females, white for males. I was told it was inherited from some obscure tradition of some long forgotten organization. Personally, I think it makes no sense. Whatever), and blues were science experts. Oh, and blacks were assault and combat support experts (although Team Zeo hasn't had one assigned in ages now), the big bruisers if you will, greens like me were scouts and infiltrators, and the reds, of course, were the team commanders, CIC, what have you. Ranger patrols usually operated in great isolation from higher command authorities yet with very restrictive rules of engagement, so the word of our Red Ranger was the word of God to us. But I digress.
The alien was hideous. Huge, chitinous, insectoid body, most resembling a beetle, although naturally it was far from a perfect fit. After our guys managed to nurse it to health and crack its language, it identified its race as Kamen, and its name as Dex (the sounds are not precise, his species communicates by rubbing its vestigial wings together to produce sound, but they sound fairly close to that). And immediately screeched about a vast "Machine Empire", a race of powerful renegade AIs that destroyed and occupied Dex' native world, and apparently making a move towards the human sphere.
We gathered what information we could from the injured but friendly creature in the little time we had before the machine's mothership jumped into orbit and started wrecking havoc on the human colony below.
Most of my comrades were killed in the ensuing mess. And now I was here, trying to break through to the intact sections of the spaceport, hoping against hope that some small ship survived to lift me out of here and call for reinforcements. The military is going to have their hands full when they find out. The huge Fleet was unwieldy and slow to deploy, which was why small teams of Rangers and not Navy or Marine elements were tasked with patrolling the frontier in the first place (that and the fact that the said frontier was expanding very quickly, forcing the government in Geneva to spend increasingly more resources as the surface of the human sphere ballooned outwards).
I just hoped I could survive long enough to get a warning off planet.
Wish me luck.
---------------------------
So yeah, the ranger is Adam rather than Tommy. The 'ole bait and switch. Sorry, Sixth!
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