Let It Rain

By Mike Adams

Going all 8th Air force on the aliens
Bombs away or should it be Rocks away, if that’s all you have!

Jacks Company is headed for Winter Cove but the weather is bad and getting worse by the day
Commander Rick Cassidy and Gunnery Sergeant Molly Pickford and their Jacks Company has rescued over 100 Rangers and civilians from becoming part of an alien feast and they're nearly at Winter Cove but the last few miles will be their toughest yet. They need shelter from the coming winter and they hope to spend it there unnoticed

More alien reinforcements
A huge alien starship has arrived and thousands of their troops are being brought down from orbit as they prepare for an all-assault on New Hope Town. The Rangers plan to bomb the various alien camps hoping to do enough damage to delay the attack. While they prepare to do that a separate operation is planned for alien-occupied Ryan’s Island.

An automated signal, a few bars of music, was detected 400 miles south of Winter Haven. Now the Rangers have a puzzle to solve. Where is it coming from and from who?

“One of the Aussie Rangers we saved from the cookpot called two of the girls in my squad ‘kids’. I wasn’t going to ‘talk’ to him about it; I just gave him a knee and put him on the ground. He won’t be saying that again around us!”
- Luka Teranova, leader of squad Seven, age 17, Ukraine

If you liked the first books of the Fierce Girls At War series you will love Let It Rain! the 20th 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mike Adams
• Release date: Dec 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463921883

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

Privacy at Last

June 2, 2127

Day 244

CTL Cairo

Diana Alexander stood outside on the 850-foot-long cargo transport lander Cairo's main deck with a pair of field glasses surveying the mountain valley from 60 feet above its granite floor and pulled up the collar on her jacket, the wind had picked up and she shivered in the cold of early morning. The clouds were gray and thick clouds portending rain later that day; possibly even snow. I guess we won't be eating lunch outside today, she said to the Indian botanist Ravi Chandrabustra.

Ravi leaned on his cane and grinned wryly, I doubt there will be many times in the coming days when we would want to. Perhaps a walk up here with a hot cup of cocoa will be the best to hope for.

Could be. The Australian nurse shrugged, Well, there's nothing much to see out here. Mannfred's got breakfast ready, let's go in and eat it while it's hot. He's making pancakes.

Ah! Excellent! Indeed, let's go inside then. His pancakes are always very good!

###

The Cairo’s Valley, 700 miles south of Winter Haven

It had been two weeks since Master Sergeant Guy Gilbert and nine other members of Jacks Company had departed the Cairo after saying goodbye to Diana Alexander, Mannfred Loesser and Ravi Chandrabustra. Since then, things had been very peaceful for the three New Hope Academy staff members who had all suffered injuries either during the crash in the valley or afterward. They'd all volunteered to remain behind when the group left in the last of the six shuttles the company had assembled in the cargo bay; they had not wanted the group to be endangered by their presence.

Six Ranger shuttles in their shipping containers, had been on their way to the Ranger Base in New Cancun. Guy Gilbert, Cairo's senior engineering tech, and Captain Gabriella Tomei, the ship's assistant engineer, had supervised their assembly and they’d used four of them to shuttle the company and their supplies out of the mountains to their initial staging area 300 miles north of the valley. After returning to the ship the final time, Tomei had been flown the fifth shuttle and her cargo of supplies to the staging area where the long trek across the northeastern tier of the Alpha continent hundreds of miles west to the ferry terminal across the Clearwater River began. Six weeks later Guy Gilbert, Corporals Gert Hammer and Damian Carter, and the seven girls of squad Six led by former New Hope Academy intern, 19-year-old Venus Bennett, departed the valley for the rendezvous with Jacks Company.

They could only hope now that all had gone well and that the two groups had met up by now but there was no way the three could know if any of them had even made it to the rendezvous. They would just have to trust and have faith that Commander Cassidy and Gunnery Sergeant Pickford would get them there safely and that Master Sergeant Gilbert hadn't run into trouble during his 600-mile flight over enemy-held territory.

The fall rains had begun and it had gotten significantly colder in the mountains. Mannfred, a science teacher at the Academy, told the others that they should expect the first snows to come soon; it might happen any day. The valley they had crashed in was about 6,200 feet above sea level and snow would come early there. The previous fall it had snowed quite a bit and there had been at least 6 feet of it on the ground before winter officially started.

Whenever the weather was nice the three had taken to having their lunch outside on the main deck. From there they could see all the way to the lake two miles to the south, and beyond that to the waterfall on the other side of the mile-long lake if they walked past or through the line of containers that had been placed there to form a walkway beneath the heavy accumulation of the previous winter's snow and all the way back to the stern of the ship 200 feet further aft. Fewer and fewer days however were nice enough to sit outside to take their meal as they had during much of the summer. Now, more often than not, they simply sat together in the passenger lounge on the second deck just below the crew's kitchen. In the absence of any contact with the outside they had to find ways to entertain themselves and they often played cards and watched movies together on the big display in the lounge.

Diana continued to work with Ravi on his physical rehabilitation, helping him get his strength up now that he was walking again. Venus and her squad had brought up some exercise equipment from the weight training area down in the cargo bay before they'd departed so that Ravi wouldn't have to go down there too often. There was still a lot of physical training equipment in the cargo bay however and Diana and Mannfred had made a point of going down there every day. They continued their own physical training regimen and practiced on the target range, and sometimes in the virtual reality trainer that had been set up down there from equipment that had been in one of the cargo containers meant for the Ranger Base in New Cancun.

All three had cabins on the main deck. All the way forward was the flight cabin where three of the four flight officers had been killed, of them only Captain Tomei had survived the crash. Right behind the flight cabin was the communications pod where Sergeant Miruku Nakamura had had her station and the engineering support pod where Master Sergeant Gilbert had had his station. Both of them had survived uninjured; Nakamura had departed with the main group three months before.

Directly behind the comm pod was the commanding officer's cabin that had been taken over by Commander Cassidy and across from it was the copilot's cabin that had been taken over by Captain Tomei who Cassidy had named his second-in-command of the group of survivors. The next two flight officers' cabins had been occupied by Gunnery Sergeant Pickford, the company's tactical officer and training master, and Major Scott, a medical officer who had been on her way to New Cancun with two medics, Staff Sergeant Ferguson and Sergeant Kampf, to join Second Battalion. Every member of the transport's 27-man crew had had their own individual cabin on the main deck. Tragically, in addition to the three flight officers who had died up forward, 13 of the 14 members of the cargo crew had also been killed during the crash, only Corporal Carter had survived although he'd been badly injured. Four of the 7 members of the ship's security detachment of Colonial Security officers had died in the forward passenger compartment, unable to reach safety before the ship smashed into the granite wall at the end of its mile-long skid across the valley floor. Four of the Academy teachers had also died at that moment.

Everyone in a crash couch had survived although some had already been injured; some badly like Diana and Ravi. Diana had been the school's senior nurse and she'd suffered a fractured skull and still suffered bouts of dizziness nine Earth months later. Ravi had suffered a broken back and had spent several months recovering in a medical pod in the ship's sick bay under the care of Doctor Scott and the medics.

Mannfred had not been injured during the crash, but he was the oldest of all the survivors and he'd had a difficult time keeping up with the younger people and their intense training regimen. He'd done his best to keep up during the first two weeks of training; he was actually in pretty good shape all things considered; it was a requisite for all personnel at the colony to stay in the best physical condition. Unfortunately, a bout with hypothermia when the training group had been trapped outside in the freezing rain for over an hour dressed in just T-shirts and shorts had resulted in Mannfred suffering a cardiac arrest in the makeshift casualty station just inside the cargo bay doors. Fortunately, a quick thinking 15-year-old named Montana Garcia had been there and following the instructions from Doctor Scott she'd been able to save the German who was then brought up to the sick bay on the main deck. Within a day or two everyone else had fully recovered but Loesser had been on limited duty ever since.

Aside from any concerns that he would be able to make the journey, Mannfred wasn't going to leave while Diana stayed at the ship to care for Ravi who was definitely not recovered enough for the arduous physical challenges that were anticipated. The science teacher and the school's nurse had become very close over the months since the crash. They'd been friends before the internship group had left the Academy but that friendship had grown into something much more since their arrival in the valley.

While the weather had been warm, they had taken walks along the river that split the valley in two, careful to avoid the pieces of wreckage strewn around the area. In the aftermath of the Battle of the Valley the previous summer, and the explosion of the Orange alien airship that summer, there were shards of alien airships, destroyed cargo containers and wrecked vehicles everywhere.

A few times they’d ridden scooters liberated from cargo by Guy Gilbert all the way to the lake. The scooters had been in a container too far forward to reach until the big containers with the last pieces of the shuttles had been dragged forward during the previous fall; by then they hadn't been worth the effort to get them out while the company, now called Jacks Company for 'Jacks the Giant Killers', moved their training inside as they prepared to depart as soon as the weather permitted during the spring.

Wherever any of the three went they were connected to the ship's comm system through the personal comm badges that Miruku Nakamura had given them. If any signals came in from the outside they would be alerted immediately, and the three could always talk to each other if they needed to. In the meantime, it was nice to have some privacy at last even though it could get a bit lonely at times. They all sorely missed the young people they'd spent so many months with and they couldn't help but wonder how they were faring. If they only knew!

Chapter 1

Major Maya Scott

January 2124

UN Field Hospital Northern Pakistan

The medics brought the wounded private into the surgical tent at the field hospital in Northern Pakistan and Captain Maya Scott prepared to perform surgery on the Dane who had been shot in the chest by a sniper ten minutes earlier. She had a second surgeon, two nurses, an anesthesiologist and a medical tech on her team cutting away the young soldier's uniform, cleaning the wound area and getting him hooked up to the various monitors. Her priority was to stop the internal bleeding before he lost too much blood. If she could do that, they would put him in a medical pod and get him to a real hospital on the next flight out. She finished scrubbing up and waited for the team to finish their preparations before she could begin.

We're ready, doc, said trauma nurse Lieutenant Kayla Johnson.

Alright, the scanner says he's bleeding from a nick on his heart. A few millimeters to the left and he'd be dead now. He won't last ten more minutes unless we can stop the bleeding even with all the plasma we're pumping into him. It'll be delicate work but it shouldn't be too hard to seal it. We've got to get to it first though and that will take time we don't have. We have to open him up fast without making things worse. Kayla, keep the scanner on his heart at all times. I'm going to use the laser cutter to separate a section of his chest plate above the heart that we can lift up and then see what we're doing without putting any pressure on the heart but it's all too easy for the laser to cut too deep so watch it carefully.

Yes, doctor.

"Okay, let's do this

The procedure had been going smoothly, the Dane's chest cavity and heart were exposed and Maya Scott had located the tear in the right ventricle when the sounds of incoming artillery fire were heard. Militants fighting UN peacekeeping were peppering the base with rocket and artillery fire. Explosions were going off nearby and her team looked at her anxiously; there were bunkers to take shelter in but they couldn't leave right now. Scott was standing on the right side of the patient next to surgical nurse Lieutenant Annie Rice who was handling the surgical instruments for her. Layla Johnson and the other surgeon, Lieutenant Griffin Hoskins, were on the other side of the table while the anesthesiologist was at his station monitoring the patient's vitals and the medical tech was making sure the blood plasma continued to flow into the patient. A rocket aimed at the surgical tent fell short and hit the ground outside barely thirty feet from where Maya Scott and Annie Rice were standing.

The force of the blast tore through the thick tent fabric and sent shards of hot shrapnel flying towards the surgical team. Everyone but Scott was knocked to the floor. Hearing the whiz of the incoming rocket Maya had thrown herself over the open wound area and kept the patient from being blown off the table but she'd paid a price for doing that. She had bits of jagged metal sticking out of the backs of both of her legs, her buttocks and on the right side of her back. She was bleeding profusely from her wounds when medics rushed into the room. Most of her team was down although all were less seriously wounded than she was. His face bleeding from a bad cut on his forehead Hoskins was quickly helped out of the room as were the gas jockey and the medical tech. Annie Rice was sitting up holding her head and the medics pulled her up and took her away then tried to pull Scott away from the soldier.

Captain, you're bleeding badly. We've got to get you out of here! said the medic who put his hand on her arm to lead her away.

She pulled her arm away from him, No! If I leave now this man will die! Explosions continued to rattle the ground around her, some almost as close as the one that had wounded her.

Captain, you'll bleed out yourself if we don't stop the bleeding from your leg! I think you may have a ruptured an artery!

A bit frazzled and with a cut on her cheek but otherwise none the worse for wear, Layla Johnson returned to the table and asked the surgeon, What do you want to do, Doc?

Blood was pooling around her feet as Maya answered painfully, We're going to finish this. He can't wait for another surgeon to get here. Once we seal the tear somebody else can close him up. I can do this if you help me.

Whatever you need, I'm here.

Thanks. Aah! Shit, that hurts! Maya looked down and saw Annie cutting away her trousers, a bandage wrapped around her head. She pulled a tourniquet tightly around Scott's upper right thigh. Maya said wryly, Oh, great! My ass needed some fresh air anyway!

Annie admonished her, You do what you have to do and I'll do what I have to do, Maya. If you're going to finish it then finish it before you pass out!

Okay. Thanks. The burning pains in her legs and side were growing more and more intense. Feeling increasingly light-headed Maya was able to finish sealing the tear in the soldier's heart just before she passed out and fell into the arms of Annie Rice and the medic helping her.

###

Maya Victoria Scott had joined the US Air Force after finishing medical school in 2119. Born in December 2095, the tall, attractive native of Portland, Oregon had read everything she could find on the effort to develop Earth's first extra-solar colony on Tau Ceti 4 called New Hope ever since she was a teenager. A brilliant student, Maya graduated with a degree in Anatomy and Physiology from the University of San Francisco in 2115 at the age of 20. She had competing dreams of becoming a doctor and of going to the New Hope Colony but she wasn't sure how to make them both happen until she was contacted by an Air Force recruiter who was looking for the right candidates to represent the United Sates in the Colonial Ranger organization. By agreeing to accept a commission in the Air Force they would put her through medical school and then put her on the list of potential candidates for Ranger service.

Following med school Maya did an 18-month residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital outside Washington DC then two years at a USAF hospital in Texas then most of a year in a trauma unit at a field hospital in North Pakistan. It was near the end her tour of duty in southwest Asia working at the field hospital when then-Captain Scott was wounded in action. She was airlifted out of the area, first to a hospital in New Delhi, India then back to the States for more surgery. Maya received a Purple Heart and a Silver Star for bravery under fire and the Defense Medal of Bravery from the Danish Government.

While she was recovering, she was asked if she still wanted to go to the New Hope Colony and Maya quickly affirmed that she did indeed still want to go. She would have to wait until February of 2126 before she could board the Amundsen for the six-month voyage to the colony. In the meantime, she returned to Johns Hopkins for advanced surgical training and a course in field medicine specific to the New Hope Colony. She was promoted to Major in September 2125 just before her transfer to the Colonial Rangers. After taking some leave to visit her family she was sent to Brussels, Belgium to attend a three-week specialty course for medical personnel going to the colony then after another three-week leave period she reported to Earth Control Terminal Number Two outside Denver, Colorado for the flight up to the Amundsen on the CTL Warsaw. The huge colony transport ships like the Amundsen were not designed to land on a planet's surface and all passengers and cargo had to be brought up to the ship in Earth orbit.

Jacks Company's future Medical Officer had arrived at the New Hope Colony just a month before the alien invasion began with orders to be Second Battalion's senior Medical Officer. The battalion's new prospective commander, Colonel Colin Fox, and four new detachments of Colonial Rangers, two full companies, had also come in on the starship and he had taken them to New Cancun early. Scott and two medics, Staff Sergeant Ian Ferguson and Sergeant Heidi Kampf, had remained in New Hope Town to finish up an updated course on planetary medical issues at the Ranger Base in New Hope Town. A day later they boarded the Cairo in the early morning but didn't meet Commander Rick Cassidy and Gunnery Sergeant Molly Pickford for the first time until they arrived in Southport. Cassidy and Pickford had also boarded in New Hope Town but having barely slept the previous two days overseeing the rearrangement of cargo and personnel to get Fox and his people on their way ahead of schedule they'd both climbed into their crash couches and went to sleep before she had a chance to talk to them.

The following evening Scott and the two medics were having dinner with Cassidy and Pickford at Sonji's, the best eatery in Southport, when they'd been alerted by the transport's navigator Captain Tomei that the Cairo had been ordered to depart early, before dawn, for New Cancun. Colonel Fox wanted the equipment for the two companies delivered as soon as possible. Fox and his Rangers had originally been scheduled to leave on the Cairo but concerned with a situation developing around some islands a few hundred miles south of Southport and having a bad feeling that something was about to happen he'd decided to take the two companies to New Cancun earlier than planned.

Rick Cassidy had been the Director of Logistics for the Ranger Regiment, and for the colony as a whole, and he'd been able to reschedule the passengers who had expected to travel on the transport Beijing to make room for Fox and the more than 400 Rangers with him. The companies' equipment however was already on the Cairo and there was no time to unload it and then load it on the Beijing. Also in Cairo's cargo was a large shipment of ammunition for the Ranger armories in Southport, New Cancun, Winter Haven and New St Louis as well as six brand new but unassembled 36-foot-long Ranger anti-grav personnel/cargo shuttles. Unfortunately, they only had the smaller maintenance cells used for flight and systems testing after initial assembly at the colony, and that meant they had a limited range, flight ceiling and load-carrying ability.

After returning to the Cairo with Cassidy and the others Maya had met the New Hope Academy's Assistant Director of Student Travel and Transportation Veronika Tchachenko when she led a group of 50 female students and interns and 11 staff members aboard for the early morning flight to New Cancun. The students were on an internship tour of the New Hope Colony's eastern settlements during which the students spent time getting a behind-the-scenes look in company and government offices at how the colony operated. The next morning the Cairo inadvertently flew over a fleet of alien sea-going ships headed for the coast east of Southport and they were hit by blasts from alien plasma cannon on the ships below. Trying to escape to the north the Cairo crashed in a mountain valley 500 miles