Chapter 5

Sepia star system, inner system.

Sepia Prime, SLF Sylvis action camp Sygma.

"Come on people, pack it up!" Said the commander as he clapped his hands together. "We don't have all night!"

Seria grumbled under her breath, but shouldered the crate nevertheless. She'd rather have used it to smash her leader's head in, but that would have been...unwise.

She was in the rather uncomfortable situation of having a skill set the SLF found extremely important, enough for her to get away with a lot....but also enough that their recruitment had been done at gunpoint, with some of the guns pointed at her parents and little sister.

Oceane chuckled, and Seria shook her head. She got along quite well with her handler all things considered, far better than her predecessors at least, but then again that was a low bar to clear. At least as much as the SLF were a bunch of murderous, self righteous maniacs, they frowned upon turning on their own, including trying to rape one of their nominal allies. Her previous handler had been patched up after she was done defending herself, hauled in front of a revolutionary tribunal, shot, and then his body disappeared down a biomass reclaimer.

Of course Oceane was still her guard dog -there was a reason they'd selected someone at least capable of restraining the 2 meters tall, quite fit weapon tech after all-, but at least she was being polite about it, and kept her eyes where they should be...most of the time.

"Don't worry, I'm still going to push the damned crates."

"I never doubted it. You always bitch about everything, but unlike some people." The pointed glance got some of the terrorists half heartedly lugging gear around scrambling into something approaching efficiency. "You actually get shit done. I can work with that."

"Right, and-"

Seria almost dropped her crate in surprise as a wave of something passed over her. It felt like her skin had just been dropped in front of an oven, although the sensation was fading. Had she been more focused towards actually using the weapons she built rather than just tinkering with them, she might have recognized the phenomenon for what it was: an extremely powerful active sensor pulse from a scanner array. A very, very close scanner array.

Not that it would have mattered.

Seria was halfway through her first insult when all hell broke loose.

*****

"Defence emplacement suppressed." Simply said Elteria. "Captain?"

"Tell Hector he's cleared to land." Sarah shook her head. Suppressed was....an interesting understatement on her AI's part. Annihilated might have been closer. A few seconds ago there had been a dozen single shot surface to air and surface to surface missile turrets strewn around the terrorist encampment. They weren't good weapons, they just provided for the capability in a pinch, and against the crap Sepia's system security usually used it would have stopped an air raid or an armored column quite admirably. But whoever had programmed them hadn't exactly expected them to fight a starship.

The automated perimeter defenses maybe had the time to ping their owners about what to do with the big energy signature that had just materialized over the horizon....just in time for Elteria to finish acquiring a hard target lock with her active sensors and blast them into oblivion with the gauss PDGs, firing at reduced power of course. Technically they wouldn't even have needed to give the terrorist that window of opportunity, however tiny, but they wanted prisoners, so precision was paramount, and as precise their ground support missiles were, they were still...messy compared to the precision of the gauss turrets.

"Aye aye ma'am. Airlocks opened. Marines dropping in." The AI's hologram tilted her head. "Most of the targets appear to the be disoriented. Stunning everyone for now, and- perdition rifles detected!"

Sarah winced. There were a few ways to bridge the gap in military technology between the different cultures and worlds throughout the myriad of galaxies mankind had colonized. Especially since there existed many draconian bans on technology transfers from advanced to more primitive polities. Although to be fair, given how horrifyingly most of those uplift attempts had ended, she could definitely see why. As such, a lot of weapons producers had to put thoughts into using what they had on hand and making something capable of harming a much, much higher tech enemy.

In the case of starships it was usually a simple case of out massing your enemy by several orders of magnitude and firing everything you had at them until their shields and armor just failed under the amount of energy. In ground combat that was usually less viable, especially if you weren't willing to just carpet bomb the entire area with nukes. So, the answer had been extremely high energy, usually low rate of fire weapons.

In the Dominion's case, those were high-energy lasers, in the form of a massive laser gun whose output rivaled that of tripod mounted anti-tank laser canons. Of course all of that power came at a price, forcing it to be atrociously slow firing, cumbersome, easily detectable once turned on and extremely expensive. But it was the only way to make a man portable weapon could actually pose a decent threat against any heavy combat armor short of Near Verge or Infinite Systems technology, and thus the Dominion, as well as virtually every world under it's Protectorate that had the necessary technology to fabricate them, continued to produce them. Interestingly enough, the weapon became far more widespread than originally predicted, as it was, all in all, a relatively polyvalent and portable anti-armor weapon, and thus a popular choice for security forces and guerilla fighters the galaxy over, and even beyond. The name was a joke on the fact that if they were necessary for their original, intended purpose, you were probably completely fucked to begin with.

"Hector knows his orders. Anyone attempting to run?"

"That he does. Marines switching to lethal. Yep, tracking 5....make that 6 individuals trying to run for it. They won't get far."

Sarah nodded. Even the if the terrorists somehow managed to outrun her marines, Elteria would simply fire a single PDG round at them before they crossed the horizon. That would cut into their prisoner bonuses, but it was better than having some escaped mass murdering maniacs running around.

"Excellent. Tell the tech team to get ready. Once the marines have cleared the site I want them to get on every computer they have. I doubt our friends had the time or foresight to wipe everything, but we can't take the risk of some deadman switch starting to hash everything."

"Aye aye ma'am. Chief Engineer Tural is reporting ready. And we-Uh, that's funny."

Sarah visibly twitched. Contrary to popular belief, most scientific breakthroughs or military disasters didn't start with 'Eureka!' or 'It's a trap!', they usually began with those innocuous seeming words.

"Elteria?"

"Something for the marine's AAR ma'am, but....I think there's someone down there you might want to meet with in person."

Sarah raised an eyebrow, but shrugged as the marines finished mopping up the last of the resistance in the camp. The fact that the terrorists had been clearly packing up had helped a ton -having a concentrated target was always nice-, but there was also a fair amount of them that had just been scythed down by the shrapnel when their automated defenses had been obliterated. Oh well, she had a good med bay, and worst came to worst she could live without some of those bonuses.

*****

Seria opened her eyes, and got up. She felt...weird. Kind of like everything wasn't quite real. There were people....shouting, screaming, and crying. Some were whrithing on the ground, holding shattered limbs or trying to keep their blood from flowing out, and others were stumbling around like her, looking completely lost. And something felt oddly....wrong about the clearing the SLF had used as a training camp and then base of operation.

Then it hit her. The trees surrounding them were just half destroyed trunks now, or even barely more than stumps in some places, like if some angry giant had just sliced them down in a single sweeping strike. At least it explained why people where looking like they'd been hit with splinters the size of her arm, a corner of her mind noted.

Then the flickering light of the stars overhead vanished, and she looked up at...something. It was a matte, perfect black, the kind that just seemed to drag in the light....until she realized that it was. Her brain, still more used to making weapons and armors rather than being at ground zero for having them unleashed at her, quickly ran through the options. Stealth coating probably. Or the paint for warships. The difference was minimal in many ways anyway, and-

Her train of thought was interrupted as a rectangle of light appeared in the hull of the ship above her, and black figures jumped through, landing with the unmistakable grace and thump of power armor. Then began firing. She didn't even see muzzle flashes, which puzzled her, until she realized that there wouldn't be ones, as those were gauss rifles.

She watched them as they methodically began shooting everyone around her, the bodies of her 'comrads' spasming after each hit, and then dropping to the ground, immobilized.

Taser darts, her still shocked brain noted, then one of the power armored soldier leveled his rifle on her...and stumbled back in a shower of sparks as the armor plating took enough concentrated energy to make the extremely tough composite laminated material explode.

Seria winced and stumbled backwards at the sound of the perdition rifle , the air ringing with the sharp crack of the massive energy discharge heating the air into plasma, looking to her side to discover Oceane, grimly shouldering the gun as she tracked her target. Miraculously the powered armor soldier appeared to be still alive and moving, either his armor significantly better than anything Seria had ever seen, or the trooper inside of it was lucky beyond belief.

From the corner of her eyes she saw the rest of the power armor squad retargetting, with at least two different soldiers preparing to take out her ertswhile handler. But even she could see that they were just too slow, and she saw the green light signaling that the weapon was ready to fire once more flash on Oceane's face...

Without thinking, she simply lunged at the terrorist. It wasn't exactly what you could call a calculated move, her shocked brain barely capable of telling her body to go in the rough direction of her handler, but it was enough. She collided with the terrorist, and the perdition rifle fired a fraction of a second too late. The shot went wide, and both women went down in a heap. Seria just had the time to see the bottomless hatred in her handler's eyes before her head disappeared in an explosion of gore.

Seria just stood there, horror somehow percolating through her brain as she slowly tried to wipe off her face what had once been her handler's head, before she felt a sharp prick, a spasm, and then nothing.

*****

"So, Tural, what have you got for me?" Asked Sarah as she carefully stepped around what had once been an SLF member, and was now a very messy floor hazard. In tiny pieces.

"Unfortunately, not much." The engineer shook her head as she looked at her holo tablet. She didn't technically need it with her implants, but an impressive number of people still needed physical data mediums to interact with to focus properly. One of the quirks of the human mind even millions of years of intensive bio engineering had never been able to remove. "These bastards were exceptionally paranoid, they didn't fucking wiped the drives, they burned them. And for the computer cores they had intended for transfer they put thermite dead man charges linked to their commander's vitals inside them. And since that idiot decided to try to pull out a rocket launcher out of those damned crates...."

There hadn't been much left of him. The first perdition hits had gotten her marines firmly into 'shoot anything that looks remotely threatening' mode, which had quickly eliminated any effective resistance. Then it had been a matter of mopping up the runners and getting everyone into some clean handcuffs and stashed away somewhere safe.

"Well, do what you can. Personal computers, phones, hell personal implants if you need to. But you need to give me a next target up the ladder. Now that they know we've started hitting back..."

"They'll get desperate. Yeah, I know, I was at Stygia 6 remember?"

Sarah winced. Tural had been with her since the beginning actually, although she'd sometimes opted to take a few years as a civilian to take a break from the mercenary trade. But she'd always come back to the ship eventually. And Stygia 6 had been a fine mess. When the insurgency there had realized they were closing in on their leadership, they'd tried to run with everything they had...including their families and dependents.

The system government had been determined to not let that happen, and intercepted the convoy with an armored column with air support, grav gunships and fighter aircraft. It had been a bloodbath. Thousands of civilian casualties and literal piles of bodies, not counting the catastrophic losses the government's forces had suffered as well. It had taken over a week for the doctors to even get an accurate head count of who had survived and who was definitely dead, with a fair amount of just 'missing' people. Missing as in 'probably in that pile of pulverized human bits in cold storage we can't positively identify'. It hadn't been one of her greatest memory, although thank the stars the government had insisted to do the last operation on their own, to show their people that they were capable to fight on their own.

Needless to say, it didn't have the desired effect.

"Hopefully it won't get that bad."

Tural looked over her datapad at her captain, and Sarah could almost feel the chief engineer's incredulity.

"Right. Well, Hector has someone for you apparently. Something about one of the terrorists helping one of his boys or something."

"Right." Sarah nodded firmly at Tural, who saluted, and departed towards her knot of technical experts, who had been waiting while vaguely poking around at a bunch of burnt out husks that had to have been the booby trapped computer cores.

The captain looked around, and gestured at the hulking form of her marine sergeant in power armor. The figure gestured back, before walking with the long, almost leaping gait of someone with the enhanced artificial muscles of recon power armor, which instead of sacrificing it's systems to be able to lug around weapons meant to go on tanks, with the armor plating to withstand them, was able to move at literally superhuman speeds.

"Ma'am." Said the sergeant as he saluted. Her crew's attention to protocol varied, especially outside of her bridge crew, but they tended to follow it when there were people watching. And someone most definitely was. Whoever the young woman two of his marines were escorting was, she looked like she'd been on the wrong end of an artillery barrage -mud and blood sprays included-. In fact it was so bad Sarah couldn't even tell what she looked like under all that grime. "This here is Seria Elka. She has a fascinating story about her presence here, and for once I'm actually inclined to believe her." The marine sergeant shrugged, and gestured at one of the marines, whose armor had a clearly blown hole through the chest plate, with the stark white of a standard medical patch underneath it. "Without her intervention Ultos would have taken another perdition hit to the face, and while I believe he'd have survived that, I don't like to plan on maybe."

"I see..." Said Sarah noncomitally as she looked the woman over. The terrorist met her gaze and kept staring back. There was anxiousness in those eyes....but also determination. Oh well, even if this turned out to be a waste of her time, they'd at least have someone to interrogate first. "Very well then, get onboard sergeant, then we'll have a more civilized discussion around hot beverages, after our friend here has taken a shower."

"Yes ma'am!"