The hot Askaran sun beat down on the men and women of 467th Valkian Penal Battalion. Dressed in irregular uniforms and armed with stun rifles and grenades, the battalion was manning a hill on the forward defense line before the city of Valkevaal. It was the objective and duty of this expendable unit to blunt the Thuunian offensive before it could strike the city in force.
Overhead, a pitched battle raged among the aircraft of both sides. In the distance, the mechanized schwerepunkt of the Thuunian column drove hard to the city.
Suddenly, the whine of turbines filled the air around Hill 656. Three Thuunian platoon carriers dropped from the violent sky and landed among the defenders. Immediately, 2nd Platoon, A Company began its desperate defense by trying to attack one of the troop carriers. The initial assault let by Platoon Leader K’Thaal was repulsed with heavy losses. With the immediate area secure, the carrier opened its bay doors and its passengers debarked in a violent fury.
The penal soldiers in their fixed positions were no match for the airmobile infantry and they began to retreat from their place in the line.
Private Mathieu Fontaine, an outworlder, had been knocked unconscious in the first assault on the troop carrier. While he had tasted organized war before on his home world of Nova Terra, here he had been rendered hors de combat in its opening minutes. It was an ignoble way to end a life and, when he regained consciousness in the opening moments of the battalion’s retreat, he was filled with an uncontrollable, spiteful rage.
Throwing his stun rifle away, Mathieu ransacked the stunned body of a nearby Thuunian soldier. Now armed with a killing weapon, he proceeded to attack the Thuunian airmobile infantry from behind creating a swath of destruction as he went. With enemy soldiers being killed by the score, the 467th reversed their retreat and counterattacked. Taking a page from their comrade, they also looted the bodies of their fallen enemy for killing weapons and proceeded to destroy two of the three troop carriers before the survivors escaped.
Just as the 467th reoccupied the hill, Thuunian mechanized infantry arrived and unleashed a hailstorm of blaster fire, missiles and other explosives upon the battered unit. In the hellish confrontation, the 467th ceased to exist as a cohesive organization, however Hill 656 never fell to the enemy that day, in spite of attacks by two full divisions. The Thuunian forces retreated the following morning amidst reports of violent firefights behind their lines in the vicinity of Hill 656.
When the Alliance officers toured the battleground around Hill 656 later that morning, they were shocked by the numbers of destroyed fighting vehicles and troop transports and the scores of dead littering the fields. No one was alive, friend nor foe. As they looked toward the retreating Thuunian forces in the distance, they saw one bedraggled being walking back toward Hill 656. It was a bloody, wild-eyed, red-haired outworlder, dressed in a torn, irregular uniform and carrying a Thuunian assault rifle. Recognizing from the remains of his uniform that this survivor was a penal soldier, he was immobilized and stunned into senselessness for carrying a killing weapon, a mercy given that the usual penalty for such a transgression was death. As the only survivor of his unit, a battlefield commission followed a day later.
It was a pattern that was to continue throughout the war.