Burning Mountain

By Mike Adams

Now that Winter Haven has been lost, the Rangers know the aliens will be coming soon for some of the Western settlements.
Commander Rick Cassidy and Gunnery Sergeant Molly Pickford and their Jacks Company is on the move at last after a planetary year trapped in the mountain valley where they crashed after their transport was attacked by the aliens invading the New Hope Colony.
When they begin their long journey across alien occupied countryside, they find that not every physical obstacle in their way shows up on the maps they’re using.
The aliens have set their sights on Castillo and Novo Napoli, two of the last settlements still in human hands, but the ‘Hot Tub Brain Trust’ has come up with plans to make them pay dearly for those prizes.
Rick Cassidy’s sister Lieutenant Bridget O’Brien has been initiated into the Hot Tub Brain Trust and has been called on to help lay the trap being set for the aliens in Castillo.
In the meantime, Captain Olga Kasparova has her own war to wage against the aliens that nearly wiped out her platoon in Southport.
While the Rangers and civilians captured by the aliens at Winter Haven await their fate, the Australian Rangers who crashed when the aliens took Winter Haven are doing all they can to avoid being captured and eaten themselves.
If you liked the first books of the Fierce Girls At War series you will love Burning Mountain, the 16th installment of the saga of the ‘fierce girls’ war against the aliens. Click the BUY NOW button at the top and continue your journey now.

“After being chosen for Colonial Ranger duty, going through three months of specialized training, then a six-month long voyage to the New Hope Colony, my detachment lost nearly a third of our people just a week after we got there. Now I am looking forward to them attacking Novo Napoli where we will tear them to pieces when they least expect it!”
-Lydia Kowalski, platoon leader, 2nd Polish detachment, New Hope Colony

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mike Adams
• Release date: Jan 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463967072

Mike Adams

Born in Brooklyn and raised in Staten Island, NY. Mike has a BS in Business Admin from Wagner College and an MBA from SDSU. A retired US Navy Lieutenant Commander, Supply Corps (Logistics), a former small business owner, and part-time substitute teacher. he's visited 6 continents and 36 countries, speak Spanish, some German, a little Italian and a little less French. He currently lives in Chula Vista, CA with his wife Chris.

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Prologue

Relief Force

March 15, 2127

Day 171

CSS Antarctica

Major Colonial Security officer Major Kelly Cassidy was one of the senior officers among the 500 Colonial Rangers, US Marines and Russian aviators aboard the cargo supply ship Antarctica headed for the New Hope Colony on Tau Ceti 4 where an army of aliens had invaded six months earlier. Earth had learned of the invasion just three weeks earlier when the cargo supply ship Asia had jumped back into Earth’s solar system carrying 1,000 passengers including 400 wounded Rangers along with the news of the invasion. The Antarctica departed with an initial contingent of reinforcements just a week later with a mixed force of Americans, Russians, Chinese and Koreans bringing heavy weapons, vehicles and aircraft to fight the aliens who were trying to rid the planet of the human colonists.

Four and a half years earlier, Kelly Cassidy, then a retired police captain and weapons specialist, had been home with her daughter 20-year-old Nicole O’Brien and her granddaughter, 9-year-old Ciara McCord O’Brien. She and Ciara had been in the kitchen making cookies when a news report played the astonishing recording of a courageous young female Marine staff sergeant who had risked her life to save a group of hostages during a firefight in Nigeria. Little Ciara had been overwhelmingly impressed by the young Marine and hoped to meet her one day, especially when she learned that her unit was due to embark on her father’s ship a few weeks later. Among those hostages was a young female Canadian officer about to be beheaded by a group of terrorists. It wouldn’t be known to that Marine until much later that the Canadian captain’s name was Naomi MacCaffrey.

Fate was to bring the Marine Force Recon squad leader Staff Sergeant Susan "Molly’ Bennett and Kelly’s Navy logistics officer son, Lieutenant Paul O’Brien (known as ‘Rick’ to his family and closest friends), together in a way that neither Kelly nor any of her family could have imagined. At a diplomatic reception in Cameroon, the head of the terrorist Gul family, Hassan Gul, along with two of his sons and about fifty of their followers attacked the US Consulate seeking revenge on the Marines who had killed his youngest and oldest sons. In a desperate gamble, Staff Sergeant Bennett and Lieutenant O’Brien had walked out of the besieged building with their hands in the air apparently willing to sacrifice their lives in return for the lives of the three young daughters of the American consul. Incredibly, just seconds later, Hassan Gul and his sons were dead, the girls rescued, and Bennett and O’Brien were safely back inside the building.

Molly Bennett had been flown back to the States a few weeks before Rick, who was still with his ship. Through contacts that Kelly had made as a high-ranking police officer, she arranged for her family to meet the young Marine who she and her three daughters truly admired and who little Ciara was in absolute awe of. The family minus Ciara’s mom, Melanie McCord who joined them a few days later, went down to Quantico, Virginia to meet Ciara’s hero. Then-Colonel Robert Black, the Commander of the Quantico Marine Base, had arranged for them to take Bennett on a weeklong vacation to a private resort in the Caribbean. Very quickly the women bonded closely and within days they had inducted Molly into their family, ‘adopting’ her when they learned that she had no family of her own. Raised by her now-deceased former Marine grandmother after her parents had died during the viral pandemic of 2103 when she was just 5 years old, ‘Molly’ had no siblings or other relatives she was close to. Major General Robert Black was now the senior officer at Ranger Command in Geneva. He and Kelly were married a few months after he returned from the New Hope Colony where he had been the Commander of the Colonial Ranger Regiment.

Unfortunately, the entire sequence of events in Cameroon had been carried live worldwide thanks to a news reporter there to cover the reception but not actually expecting anything of interest to happen. He’d already recorded brief interviews with a number of the Americans including Bennett who was there as part of the security detail, and O’Brien, who was responsible for setting up the reception, before the trouble began and suddenly their names and faces were known everywhere. This resulted in two major developments. First, Rick and Molly had become instant international heroes, and second, the two remaining sons of Hassan Gul also knew who they were.

After Rick returned from his deployment the assassins sent by the Guls came after them. Ciara had been with her father during the first attack and went into hiding with him. They were eventually joined by Molly but their time was running out. With no good options left to them, the precocious now-10-year-old had told her father that everyone had to think they were dead or the bad guys would never stop coming for them. She suggested that they go off-world to Earth’s first extra-solar colony, New Hope, on Tau Ceti 4. What had sparked this idea was Ciara’s meeting Colonel Black at Quantico; he had told them that he would be leaving for the New Hope Colony soon. Black provided pivotal assistance in getting them off-world under their new identities as Lieutenant Commander Rick Cassidy and Gunnery Sergeant Molly Pickford. It was a close call all around and Rick was wounded during an attack that was used as cover to fake their deaths and showed the world a grieving 10-year-old screaming over her father’s ‘lifeless’ body.

The ploy worked and the two boarded the cargo supply ship North America in August 2122 for the six-month journey to the New Hope Colony leaving Ciara and the rest of the family behind. The 10-year-old vowed to join her father when she was old enough and now four years later, she was there, having arrived at the colony safely on the cargo supply ship Asia.

Two months after the Asia left Earth, Kelly and the rest of her family back on Earth learned from Robert that Ciara had had her own brush with death during the voyage to the colony. What’s more, although she was only 14, Ciara had earned a remarkable reputation as a phenomenal marksman and weapons instructor. It was a skill that she, like her father and her aunts, had learned from her grandmother Kelly, the retired police senior weapons instructor.

The incident aboard Asia had been the deciding factor in Kelly’s decision to accept Robert’s offer to join Colonial Security, the security and investigation arm of Ranger Command. With her experience and background, she was commissioned as a major and sent to attend a three-week course for Colonial Security officers that emphasized the legal and political issues they would face at the colony and the security issues the colony program faced on Earth. Virtually all Colonial Security officers recruited on Earth were current or former police officers from nations that sponsored the colony program.

Kelly had completed her specialty course and moved in with her husband at Ranger Command HQ in Geneva. As a major and therefore a somewhat senior officer in Colonial Security, Kelly was expected to spend a few months attached to the Ranger Command Staff to learn as much as she could about the organization while going through a staff course for majors and above. At the time, she’d hoped for an assignment to the investigative branch that dealt with terrorist attacks against the colony program. Ranger Command was in need of trained investigators and other experienced law enforcement officers to man the growing division.

The colony and starship programs were tremendously expensive. They were so costly that no one country could have afforded to pay for it. It had required the combined contributions of resources from some fifty countries, with more applying to join, and a large number of corporate sponsors to support the massive expenditures of resources required to build the starships, provide the material, and recruit and pay the colonists developing the basic infrastructure that would support the millions of people who would one day live at the New Hope Colony.

In return, these sponsors expected to recoup their investment over the coming decades as the natural resources of the planet were developed. The sponsoring nations and companies all knew that the colony program would take a long time to show a return but felt strongly that the future of a resource-stretched, overpopulated Earth might well depend upon its success and they were all in it for the long run.

There were many who opposed the program, believing that the resources used for it could be put to better use. Some were willing to use violence to slow it down or stop it altogether. In the previous six months, there had been a number of bombings of colony program-related offices and facilities in Sweden, Argentina, Germany, France, and India. Two months before they were due to depart for the colony the prospective commander of the cargo supply ship Australia had been assassinated outside his home. Australia’s First Officer Commander Nadya Kashani had been promoted to the Commanding Officer’s chair. Before that was the attempted sabotage of the Asia and the malware virus inserted into the North America’s command and control computer system.

News of the alien invasion had changed everything. Kelly’s oldest daughter Bridget O’Brien was a former police officer and was now a lieutenant in Colonial Security. She had arrived at the colony on the colony transport ship Marco Polo along with 2,200 other Rangers just before the Asia had jumped out of the Tau Ceti system. Kelly’s middle daughter Nicole had joined the Marines after college and was now a platoon leader on her way to the colony aboard the Australia with her detachment of American Rangers. Her youngest girl, Chloe, was also traveling on the Australia. She was heading to New Hope to manage the family business Stellar Enterprises’ ventures at the colony. Those ventures included eateries, clothing boutiques, a water bottling plant, sporting goods stores, a nascent winery and a growing brewery business, among others.

With all of her children and her only grandchild now at or soon to arrive at the New Hope Colony, Kelly had asked Robert Black to allow her to go with the Advanced Relief Expeditionary Force (AREF). He’d expected her to ask and had supported her request. Kelly was now in charge of weapons training for the Chinese and Korean Rangers, the American Marines and the Russian aviators on the Antarctica to fight both aliens and demon wolves, the planet’s most dangerous predators.

British Brigadier General Eden Sheraton was in command of the AREF. She had previously served at the colony twice before as a detachment commander and three years later as the commander of First Battalion. She was well acquainted with the colony and the effort it had taken to build it up to the 10 settlements and 45,000 colonists and 4,500 Colonial Rangers that had been there before the invasion. The Chinese and Koreans detachments had been through Ranger training and were better acquainted with the colony’s history than the American Marines and the Russians who had been brought into the expeditionary force on very short notice. It had taken twenty years to build the colony to that point and Sheraton hoped to instill in all her officers the need to try to avoid destroying the colony in order to save it.

Chapter 1

Lieutenant Aria Giffords

March 15, 2127

Day 171

40 miles southwest of Winter Haven

On the same day the aliens took Winter Haven by surprise, a shuttle filled with Australian Rangers from Hammer Company was shot down 40 miles southeast of the settlement. The Australians had arrived on the colony transport ship Marco Polo six weeks earlier and they had been sent to Winter Haven just a week before the attack. The three field platoons were posted south of the range of hills that separated the northern settlement from the open country to the south and west with orders to keep an eye out for alien scouts moving into the area while the Ranger scouts and APCs from the vehicle platoon kept watch on the now evacuated agro-complexes a few miles further south. When the alien ships appeared out of the fog on the lake that bordered Winter Haven on its north side it was already too late for the three field platoons to make it to their primary evacuation site. The cargo transport lander London picked up most of the civilians and half of the Rangers who had been defending the hills to the south in expectation of attack coming from that direction as they aliens had tried twice before. The APCs and the ATVs were closer to the road that led through the hills and were ordered to join up with other Ranger companies headed east to McKinley Station where they would be retrieved by another transport as soon as one could get to them.

The detachment commander, Captain Rollie Montgomery, was ordered to gather his platoons at an alternate evacuation site to be picked up by two Ranger shuttles and taken to McKinley Station. The Australians made it to their evacuation site and waited for their rides to come to them. When the shuttles arrived, Lieutenant Aaron Harper and his platoon along with half of Lieutenant Aria Giffords’ platoon loaded up in the shuttle flown by Swedish Lieutenant Ole Lamberg and his Russian flight engineer Master Sergeant Ekaterina Federenko.

A few minutes into their flight to the east the two shuttles came under attack from Jammie plasma rifle fire. Advance elements of the alien ground force coming up from the south had been secretly landed in the dead of night unseen by the Rangers and were closing in to cut off anyone fleeing south. Lamberg’s shuttle was hit and came down in a large lake and flipped over. The other shuttle witnessed the tragedy and reported that all hands were likely lost but couldn’t verify that as they fled east out of range of the Jammie gunners.

In fact, just two of the forty-five Rangers aboard the shuttle had died in the crash and two others were injured but not seriously. Some of the other Rangers suffered bruises, split lips or bloody noses but they were otherwise fully functional. With a lot of effort, they were able to right the aircraft and tow it to shore using the one Ranger ATV that had survived intact enough to be driven ashore.

It took four days to get there but the 41 Australians and the two aircrewmen had made it to an agricultural complex 40 miles southwest of Winter Haven that had been evacuated two days before the attack. It had already been searched by the aliens who had moved on before the Rangers arrived. They’d been there for a full day without seeing any signs of the aliens.

Fortunately, they’d found some food left behind when the agricultural workers had hurriedly abandoned the place. The aliens had taken all of the frozen meat but had left the frozen fish to defrost. There were also cases of canned goods and bags of rice the aliens either didn't want or didn't recognize as edible. The Aussies went through the nearby all-weather indoor farm houses where some fruits and vegetables ready for harvest or almost so. Everything had been loaded onto one of the vehicles they found in the vehicle barn in case a quick getaway was needed but the aliens had not come back, at least not yet.

###

Aria Giffords was quite happy that Aaron Harper was the senior platoon commander and therefore shouldered the greater responsibility for command of the little group. She'd never tell him that though. The Australian lieutenant was concerned about their chances of surviving their predicament but it was her and Harper's job to be positive and encouraging to the 39 Australian troopers in their platoons. We will get out of this mess! It won't be easy but we will survive!

The native of Sydney, Australia was the 26-year-old daughter of a nurse and a teacher and she was the oldest of three sisters. Her sisters Stella, 25, and Bella, 24, had also graduated from the University of Melbourne where Aria had earned a degree in engineering; Stella was trauma nurse and Bella was an elementary school teacher.

After obtaining her degree in 2122, Aria joined the Royal Australian Army with the dream of being assigned to a Colonial Ranger detachment and serving at the colony. When she joined the Army against the wishes of her longtime college boyfriend Steven Coffey, he angrily broke up with her which saved her the problem of how to manage a relationship that probably wouldn’t have lasted very much longer anyway. Steven didn't approve of the choice she’d made nor had any interest in her dream of going to another planet.

On the other hand, her parents were both excited and worried for her and her sisters wanted to know if they could go too. In fact, the whole family was hoping to go, but they would have to pass all the rigorous screening qualification exams required of everyone going to the colony first and then wait for Aria’s report. She hoped to sponsor them all if they passed the stringent medical, intelligence and psychological exams.

The Giffords family had once lived on the outskirts of Sydney but they’d had lost their family home to a wildfire when the girls were in elementary school after which they had moved into a nice neighborhood closer to the shore, not far from the famous Bondi Beach. Before that, the girls’ maternal grandparents had died in the viral pandemic of 2103 while working in Africa as UN aid workers assisting with food distribution in a refugee camp. Fortunately, everyone in the Giffords family was healthy and well-educated. Now Aria’s family wanted to leave Australia for good, it was too hot and dry and the economy was not great. They all had skills useful at the New Hope Colony and they’d all read extensively on the prospects for future development there and could imagine the opportunities there would be for people who got in early. Even so, Aria warned them not to get their hopes up just yet, they hadn’t passed all of the tests yet and what if one of them didn't?

There was a lot of competition for platoon leader slots, so after she completed her officer training course, she volunteered for a Rapid Response Force unit that would likely be sent into a combat area during her 30-month tour of duty. She had some other factors working in her favor as well – she was an expert marksman, or she thought she was until she met her cabin-mate Bridget O'Brien on the Marco Polo, she had top grades at the university and she was highly competent at her job. She had also indicated on her initial contract that Colonial Ranger duty was at the top of her list of preferred assignments. There was one other advantage that she had that she hadn’t realized at that point; she was quite physically attractive. This was something the military had on their list of desired traits for their female officers and senior enlisted but didn’t make public. There was a practical reason for this – many returning Ranger officers, especially female officers, were often used as the face of the Colonial Rangers in public service announcements, news interviews and recruiting programs. An attractive female in uniform just returned from the colony tended to help increase public support for the immensely expensive colony development and starship programs. This was not confined to Australia; it was common among most of the sponsoring countries that sent Ranger detachments to the colony.

The Rapid Response Force unit she was assigned to was deployed three times, twice to respond to natural disasters, a devastating earthquake in Indonesia that killed thousands, a disastrous series of tropical storms that led to a civil war in Timor, and a six-month tour of duty in Northern Pakistan that saw her unit under fire by insurgents several times. With excellent officer evaluations and her preference for Colonial Ranger duty on record plus some good timing, she got the posting she'd hoped for as a platoon leader with a new detachment of Australian Rangers in early 2125.

The detachment commanded by Rollie Montgomery was composed of six officers, Montgomery and his five lieutenants, and 104 enlisted troopers, all of them veteran soldiers and 80% of them with some combat or peacekeeping experience. They all had at least two years of service, a requirement that applied to all prospective Colonial Rangers regardless of which country they were from. Like all Ranger detachments, the Australians were divided into four platoons of about 25 enlisted troops, three field platoons and one vehicle platoon, each led by an officer and a platoon sergeant who was either a Master Sergeant or senior Staff Sergeant. The detachment’s extra lieutenant was a weapons training officer and would be assigned to the Ranger bases in New Hope Town or New Cancun. That officer would fill in if one of the platoon leaders was unavailable for some reason. The vehicle platoon leader was responsible for the drivers of the seven cargo and personnel trucks, the maintenance techs, the four-man crews for the three light armored personnel carriers, this group included two comm techs and two medics, and the scouts who manned three 4-seat ATV scout cars that each detachment brought with them to the colony.

Giffords was assigned as the leader of Third Platoon and she led them through their three-month Ranger training course that included cold weather training in Scotland and warm weather training at the Ranger facility in Thailand. After a month's leave to spend time with her family, the detachment assembled at the Royal Australian Air Force Base outside Brisbane for the flight to Paris, France where they did their last-minute medical checks and pre-departure orientation before boarding the cargo transport lander Johannesburg for the trip up to the Marco Polo in low orbit above the Earth for the voyage across the stars to Tau Ceti 4 and the New Hope Colony.

Aria was assigned to a four-person cabin with three other female lieutenants, Norwegian shuttle pilot Anna Kane, and Colonial Security officers Anita Stefansson from Iceland and Bridget O'Brien, an American. They would all become close friends during the long voyage and Giffords was the first to realize just who Bridget O'Brien was and the secret that she had been keeping for the past four years. Bridget was from ‘that’ O'Brien family, the family of Lieutenant Paul O'Brien, one of the two supposedly murdered heroes who had killed Hassan Gul and two of his sons during a deadly encounter in Africa in 2122. The last two of Hassan Gul’s sons had been killed just before the Marco Polo departed for the colony and story was all over the news.

Bridget had just told her friends that she had a brother and an adopted sister at the colony when a shocked Aria made the connection. Bridget had told them earlier that she’d been trained by her mom, a retired police captain who had been the senior weapons training officer at the New York Police Academy. Just like the late Paul O'Brien! Aria thought Oh my goodness! The secret that Paul O'Brien and Marine Staff Sergeant Susan Bennett had gone to the New Hope Colony as Lieutenant Commander Rick Cassidy and Gunnery Sergeant Molly Pickford had surprised everyone in their tight circle of friends. Although the danger seemed to have passed now that the last of the Guls had been eliminated, the group all agreed to keep Bridget’s secret.

O'Brien was an amazingly superb marksman who had spent 18 months as a sniper on a police SWAT team before becoming a Colonial Security officer. Bridget O'Brien quickly became the all-time highest scorer in the starship’s Virtual Reality trainer where the Rangers practiced their tactics for defending the exploration and survey groups searching for resources for later development from the very dangerous demon wolves and other predators native to the colony planet.

O'Brien took Aria and the others under her wing and helped them raise their own marksmanship scores significantly. When the Marco Polo learned from the outbound Asia that the colony was under attack from aliens, O'Brien and weapons training officer Captain Ellen Spraeker had been put in charge training the 16 national detachments on Marco Polo to fight the aliens using the virtual reality program received from Asia that had been developed by the Ranger technicians at the colony.

A few days after arriving at the colony, the Australian detachment had been matched up with a new detachment of Bulgarians to form Hammer Company then sent to Winter Haven. Winter Haven was the last settlement in the East that hadn't fallen to the aliens during the past local planetary year, or six Earth months. The alien invasion had begun with attacks on Southport and New Cancun and since then they’d taken New St. Louis, Rocky Point and the Oceanographic Research Facility at Monterey. Winter Haven and McKinley Pass had been attacked twice the previous summer with heavy casualties on both sides but the Rangers had stopped them, barely. Castillo had also been attacked at the same time but that episode had ended with the small alien force being annihilated within minutes of landing their airships in the town.

Now Aria and her group were on their own and they had to hide for two to three weeks while they waited for the spring floods to subside and the land to dry out. They planned to head for the ferry terminal on the Clearwater River 400 miles to the west, cross the Clearwater then head north to Winter Cove, a small satellite facility where they hoped to find shelter for the coming winter. With some luck they would be found or at least find a way back to the western settlements which were thousands of miles away. The Australians couldn’t stay where they were, not with thousands of aliens in the area who would return to the agro-complex sooner or later.

Chapter 2

The Hot Tub Brain Trust

March 15, 2127

Day 171

New Hope Town

The ten-seat hot tub was full but the women in it were not in a good mood. It had been barely a week since the debacle at Winter Haven. Some of their closest friends were missing and most of them were almost certainly in the hands of the aliens, if they were even still alive, and there was nothing they could do about it. The residence had lost people before, especially during the Second Battle of Winter Haven but those had died or been wounded fighting, not taken alive to be eaten by the aliens. Their likely fate was too horrible to contemplate.

Some of the missing, like Japanese communications officer Captain Yui Watanabe, French lead nurse Captain Catherine Nay, Brazilian Colonial Security officer Lieutenant Sandalee Silva, Irish shuttle pilot Lieutenant Moira Sullivan and British shuttle pilot Master Sergeant Tamara Halliday, were members of the ‘Hot Tub Brain Trust’. The group usually came up with their ideas sitting naked in the hot tub drinking cold beer or chilled wine. The ad hoc operational planning group was comprised of a number of women living in the sprawling building that had started out as Commander Rick Cassidy’s personal residence. The residence had been expanded several times since the invasion, adding new wings on either side of the original structure, and now it housed virtually every female officer, and some of the senior female enlisted, currently in New Hope Town. With all of the companies brought back from Winter Haven there were well over 150 women living there but at least each had their own bed with a mattress and pillow, clean blankets and linen, and there was plenty of hot water which was more than they’d had in Winter Haven.

The Brain Trust had planned the raids on the alien-occupied towns of New Cancun, Rocky Point and Southport, the recovery of bridge sections and construction equipment from the coast road east of Southport, and contributed to the record-breaking offload of both of Marco Polo’s cargo barges. They were also behind the current plans for when the aliens finally came at Castillo and Novo Napoli.

Besides those who were missing in Winter Haven, there were several key members of the group now posted at one of the other remaining settlements. Major Zoey Bryant, Delta Company’s former commander and now the Operations officer for