Chapter 3

Sepia star system, inner system.

Sepia Prime, Silvis Province capital of Foris.

Sarah sighed as she stepped down the ramp and onto the landing pad. Fortunately, the Dominion's standard heavy shuttles for it's interstellar freighters were about the size and weight class of her ship, which meant that she could land pretty much anywhere there was industry on a planet in this stars forsaken backwater of a galaxy. Or well, any form of commerce whatsoever, since a disturbing numbers of worlds here were so underdeveloped they weren't even capable of producing their own in system crafts. Unfortunately, it also meant that where her ship went, she went, and in this case that meant gallivanting off to the middle of the enemy's old lair to provide support for her marines.

"So, sergeant, what did you find?" She calmly subvocalized on her com as she looked at her marine's detachment commander image. It wasn't technically a hologram, since it was being directly projected onto her vision by her implants, but it wasn't quite as real looking as Elteria's avatar was. If only because the sergeant's avatar was hovering at least a solid centimeter over the ground.

"Something promising. This one is registering as definitely lying on our scans, but she's refusing to talk. We'd like to bring her in for questioning."

Sarah nodded. Modern technology made torturing information out of people wasteful, useless, and outright counter productive in most cases. A lot of people did it, out of vengeance or outright sadism, but it was....unprofessional. And professionals have standards. One of which was that if one of their....ahem, 'suspects' was detected as lying about their lack of association with the SLF, they'd simply inject them with modern truth serum and have them spill the beans rather than slowly cut them to pieces with a plasma torch. If nothing else it was considerably cleaner and easier on everyone's minds. Besides, even the best lie detector occasionally pulled out false positives.

"Very well. That's what we're here for. Just make it quick. I was given to understand the locals also wanted some extra help?"

"Yes ma'am. There was an SLF attack 3 hours ago, as you probably know. We were on site and managed to push them back, but we're low on ammo, and quite frankly the locals seem to think the Seeker is some form of magical fix-everything ship."

Sarah snorted.

"I think our....intervention in last week's attack had that effect."

To be fair to the locals, few gunships could have been up in the air minutes after receiving words about the attack, but not every gunship was captained by a hunted, highly paranoid veteran mercenary who thought that keeping the ship ready to depart, guns blazing in a hurry at any time was a fundamental. It also meant that it could be up in the air and kicking ass within minutes. Usually the problem in those cases was the crew, but in atmosphere fights like this, especially when the biggest guns the enemies had were anti-tank weapons, Elteria could handle it just fine. And she had. The SLF had thus brutally understood the difference between a planetary security force composed of people that barely knew which end of the laser rifle to point forward and a crack group of mercenaries with a heavily armed gunship and a pissed off AI. The only problem was that they'd have trouble to parse the wreckage, it's gauss turrets were the least powerful weapons the Seeker boasted, but even firing at reduced power they still completely shredded the stealth grav vehicles the SLF had used to try and retreat.

And shredded the forest where the high velocity tungsten rounds finished their course, but she doubted the forestry service or whatever the local equivalent was would try to sue a government hired mercenary company that had just obliterated a group of terrorist that were running from their latest mass murder spree.

"Indeed. In any case, we'll be there in 5."

"Roger that." Sarah cut the connection and sighed as she looked up at the sky. It was....nice. Blue, terran standard. That usually wasn't exceptional, but a lot of planets around here were barely terraformed. Hell, even here the atmosphere wasn't fully stable, and they had to run the old terraforming stations to keep the air quality from degrading. Part of why the government had been starting to seriously panic about the SLF attacking the colony's vital infrastructure.

"Feeling nostalgic?" Asked Elteria. The AI at least had the politeness to ping her implants before invading them. Not that not pinging them would have been a good idea, Sarah had been a Directorate Navy officer, and her implant's defensive protocols were nothing to sneeze at, even for an AI of Elteria's caliber.

Sarah snorted, and shook her head, before stopping herself.

"Maybe a little." She admitted. "I miss home, but...."

"Everyone does." Softly said the AI. "It has been 60 years, but....we still all miss home." The holographic projection looked to the sky. "I think every spacer does. But at least most of them have the option of coming back."

"We don't." Said Sarah firmly. She didn't regret what she'd done to deserve that exile, but she wasn't stupid enough to try and brave it either. The navy let her and her co-conspirators go, but they'd been quite clear that any attempt to return to Directorate space would only end in their deaths.

The silence stretched for several seconds -they knew each other too well, and had that conversation too many times in the past for it to be awkward- before Elteria looked up.

"What's wrong?" Asked the captain.

"Bogeys inbound. Several grav cars, just left their high altitude lanes, and-MISSILE LAUNCH!" The AI's avatar vanished, and Sarah heared a distinct whirr fill the air.

She was down and covering her ears before her brain had even fully processed the information, her instincts and combat implants sending her to the ground as the Seeker's gauss point defence guns opened fire.

It was over in a fraction of a second. But Sarah still took a few solid seconds to make sure no one was going to fire weapons that could damage starships in her immediate vicinity before coming back up.

"Let me guess, retrofitted civy vehicles with missiles slapped onto them?"

The AI avatar's appeared once more in her field of vision.

"Nope." Elteria shook her head, her face grim. "Specialized vehicles. I'd say force recon assault APCs."

Sarah whistled softly. Normally she'd have dived back to cover into the ship after such an attack, but she was still at the foot of the ramp, well under the ship's shield. Nothing short of a detonation in the hundreds of megatons would get through it, not without a sustained barrage anyway, and she didn't think the SLF was quite fanatical enough to wipe out their homeland to get to her, even if they had that kind of firepower to begin with.

"Didn't know they had that kind of gear."

"They did have stealthed grav cars."

"Yeah, and even I know enough to slap some radar absorption panels and cover them in broad spectrum cameleon coating. Any civvy fabricator can make both if you get the schematics and a lot of spare time. Military grade systems are a bit of a step up from that. Tech level?"

"Good enough to fool traffic control, but their approach radar is crap. I doubt they even realized they were basically tracking tanks instead of boxy vehicles. My passive sensors didn't get anything until they went active on their scanners though. Good emission control if nothing else, but..."

"Your passives are very good."

"Yeah. I'd say Dominion level. Not their top grade stuff, but...good. Civil war level, maybe?"

Sarah nodded. Despite having happened nearly 50 years ago, the civil war that had led to the formation of the Dominion Protectorate of the Thaumor Galaxy and Colonies had produced a crap ton of equipment that was still in service throughout the Protectorate, and even the Dominion's core worlds. Most of it was obsolete now, mainly thanks to the war giving the Dominion a very good reason to invest in military R&D and upgrading it's various armed forces, but obsolete didn't mean harmless.

"That...changes our threat assessment significantly. Local, chemical weapons like firearms and missiles are fine, but I don't want our marines to encounter fusion or grav missiles in the kind of gear they're using right now." She shivered. "Especially if these maniacs know how to rig up gravitational containment fusion reactors."

Elteria nodded grimly. There were many, almost countless ways to draw energy from the nuclear fusion process that fueled the stars, but there were 4 major ones: the first one was magnetic confinement, it was cheap, cost effective as hell, but took a lot of space and mass for it's energy production, thus making it less than ideal for starships, especially given the voracious appetite of hyperdrives for energy. Gravitational confinement was the next step. It more or less involved keeping a star bottled up by sheer artificial gravity, and it was much, much more compact for a given energy output that magnetic reactors, and could use a wider range of fuels. The problems were that they were much more expensive relative to the energy they produced, and if containment failed you suddenly had several tons of highly concentrated fusing star stuff on your hands instead of the few grams magnetic reactors had, which was a polite way to say you were at ground zero for the detonation of a thermonuclear bomb. Of course the reactors were made to shut down safely in case of emergencies...but that could be overridden. And a good engineer could even find a strong enough pressure container to put ultra pressurized fusion fuel around the failing reactor, turning the reactor into an effective, if highly sensitive and finicky, variable size fusion bomb, which could be scaled well into the hundreds of gigatons with even a small power core as the detonator.

At least the Seeker didn't have to worry about that. Their power core relied on the third method, called 'thermo-fusion', for....whatever reason. The technology was so old no one knew who'd named it, except perhaps the Infinite Systems Federation. This one was effectively a gravitational fusion core taken to the next level, with the plasma immediately extracted from the chamber and run through...converters. Sarah had seen the design documents but her brain had just shut down at the 6th pages of equations. There was around, oh, half a million such pages for just those converters alone. The converters took ionized plasma, did something, got a lot of electricity and cooler ionized plasma, and then did something else, and somehow you got even more electricity and less ionized plasma. Rinse and repeat and you could squeeze a ridiculous amount of energy out of a single power core. And as bonus it didn't even go boom if you shot it!

The last method...The last method was exclusive to the Infinite Systems Federation and their export tech. Basically they turned the entire confinement chamber into a giant array of mirrors -probably energy shields given the quite frankly stupid power output of those reactors, but Sarah wasn't going to bet against them having some super mirror material as well- redirecting all of the energy output of a mini star at a single patch of a material they called 'etherium'. Then that etherium just took that energy and turned it into electricity. All of it, heat, gamma radiation, everything. Perfect electromagnetic radiation to electron conversion. No kidding they were the most advanced polity in the universe, even the Seeker's thermo-fusion core required a cooling rig 3 times the size of the rest of the reactor, not counting the radiators on the ship's hull.

"I doubt they're at that point yet." If only because gravitational fusion cores were usually produced in small numbers, and only for starships or large scale industrial platforms. And even then the latter user solar power collectors, if only because they were cheaper in the long run, even if you had to drag it halfway across the Protectorate to get it there. "But their resources are greater than they expected. That or they threw their best at us right away, but..."

"Unlikely, however flattering it may be. Could the APCs have threatened us?"

Elteria huffed.

"Hardly. They had some halfway decent missiles...for this backwater. Railguns as well, although those were much better for some reason."

"They used the missiles that came with the APCs already. They certainly nailed enough of the planet's security armed response teams for that. Or their benefactor really didn't want to give them missiles modern enough to actually start launching a full scale assault of the capital."

There wasn't really a question at this point of if the SLF had offworld benefactors or not. Someone was clearly supplying them with weapons, and with their sources of funding in Sylvis itself gone, the money had to come from somewhere. Which almost certainly meant some large scale interstellar agenda. There wasn't anything in Sepia to justify a targeted effort, no matter how valuable the biochemicals extracted and refined in Sylvis.

"Possible. I guess we'll know when they check the wreckage."

"Collateral?"

"More trees are going to end up in tiny itty bitty pieces, and I'm going to get some more angry emails from some pissed off ecologists, but otherwise no. The APCs were barely over the horizon when they adjusted course, and they were in one of the high altitude lanes, probably to avoid someone coming into visual range or spotting them from the ground. What's left of them is going to hit far from any inhabited area. Some of it might even end up in the sea for that matter."

"Fair enough. The locals?"

"Still running around like headless chickens. Traffic controls is shitting themselves thinking there was a catastrophic accident and the planetary security forces are still trying to figure out what all the pretty lights on their sensor consoles are about. Only customs' ships are on top of their game, but they can't really do much from up there. They are forwarding all of their sensor data and have calibrated some of their laser turrets for high altitude point defence, but that's it."

"That I expected. The guys they send on their ships are probably the best they've got. But seriously, we just fired, what, a few hundred gauss rounds in the air, and the system security can't figure it out?"

"A few dozen, please, my aim is not so bad that I need to spray and pray."

"Right. Still, that's not exactly stealthy." Technically their gauss point defence guns fired projectiles at a small, but still significant fraction of what people on Earth would have called 'the speed of light'. The concept didn't matter in most dimensions colonized by humanity now, including this one, but it still served as a decent metric. Still, it meant that at those velocity the projectiles basically drew a line of plasma along their entire course as they hammered through the atmosphere, making them look like bad holovid's depictions of lasers.

"Yeah, but these guys are glorified cops, not career military. Ah! Finally, they've pinged me. Forwarded them a sanitized report. Aaaaand they're running off to call their superiors. And waving their arms wildly."

Sarah snorted. Then froze.

"Wait, how do you know that?" When the AI failed to respond and refused to meet her gaze, the captain sighed. "You hacked their systems didn't you?"

"....Maybe?"

"They're our allies Elteria."

"They're so slow! And so bad at their job!"

"Still our allies."

"Should I stop then?"

"...No. Just....make sure to cover our tracks once you're done."

"Aye aye captain. Oh, and here comes the marines."

A grav car appeared in the sky, hugging the roofs of the nearby buildings at a distance that was far too close to be safe, and skiddled to a halt in front of Sarah. The captain shook her head as she looked at the livery of a high end car rental service. When Elteria had talked about a backwater, she'd expected a lowly, barely industrialized planet in back end of nowhere, but still with the basics of interstellar technologies. Here they'd had to hunt a rental service that provided grav cars. Some of the vehicles on this world even used chemical combustion engines! Chemical! She didn't even know those existed outside of museums or recently contacted planets on the explored rim of known space!

"Ma'am!" Said sergeant Hector as he exited the car. The marine looked so much like a mercenary it sometimes hurt. A cybernetic right eye gleamed as it's sensors scanned her for injuries, and the man looked like the tough, weathered sergeant he was, with scars dotting his face that he had refused to have regenerated, and a jaw so square it looked like a block of granite. "We punched it as soon as we saw the PDGs firing. Is everything alright?"

"We're fine sergeant. Our enemies...less so. Do you still have the prisoner?"

"Ah, yes ma'am! She's in the car."

"Good, bring her aboard then. We have questions to ask her."

"Yes ma'am!"