Chapter 9

Sepia star system, inner system.

High orbit over Sepia.

"So....where is it from?" Said Sarah as she weighed the personal shield generator. There was no doubt it was from the Near Verge, no one made them small enough to fit into a large, heavy belt. High Verge tech could build personal shield generators, but they were backpack mounted things, usually integrated into some serious power armor. Hell, if they'd had a bit more money on hand when they'd met that smuggler, she'd have bought that instead of the heavy assault armor her marines used. Sure, their armor had more endurance, but it couldn't take a plasma gun hit and keep moving.

"It's Atlantean." Answered Elteria absentmindedly as she tried to break into the communicator.

Sarah frowned, before relaxing and chuckling.

"What is it?" Asked AI, raising an eyebrow.

"Nothing, just....old habits." She snickered. "Back in the day I might have thrown this out the window."

Elteria chuckled, but didn't comment. She didn't need to, after all they'd all been there.

The Atlantean Republic was, to put it mildly, the Alterian Directorate's archnemesis. Both nations had been at each other's throat to some degree or another for almost 50 thousand years now. The only reason they hadn't reduced each other to cinder was because 30 millenia ago their latest war had degenerated into a genocidal campaign, both sides unleashing saturation bombardment munitions on the other's border worlds, sterilizing thousands upon thousands of planets in less than a week. The body count had been...incalculable.

Then the Imperial Frontier Fleet had intervened, backed up with a detachment from the Hyperdimensional Republic Navy. 50 million Infinite Systems Federation warships had stopped the various military leaders on both sides instantly, and the fact that two of the 3 power blocs that basically ran the Federation, the Empire of Mara and the Hyperdimensional Republic, had actually agreed on something this fast had prompted the politicians to sit down and actually talk. The imperial Frontier Fleet immediately arresting the presidents on either side for war crimes and throwing them before the interstellar atrocity tribunal also helped to focus their minds Say what you will about the Federation's lethargy and peculiar brand of isolationism, once they actually started moving they didn't go for half measures.

A series of peace talks had followed, and the Federation was asked in as mediators. Ever since there was a gigantic wall of automated Imperial Frontier Fleet fortresses lining the frontier between both powers. It wasn't fool proof -they could just go around them through intergalactic space-, but it was a pointed reminder for everyone to play nice with each other. There had still been wars, but everyone had tried to keep their hands as clean as possible.

"Well, at least this will do nicely." Sarah grabbed the belt, and put it around her waist, smiling as it automatically adjusted to her contour. Then, she pressed a small button, and shivered as the light around her wavered as the shield formed. "Very nicely. Rated resistance?"

"5 Gigajoules at full charge. "

Sarah whistled softly. That meant the shield could suffer a direct hit from, what, a 1 ton TNT bomb? And just....absorb it. That was actually on the low end for a portable shield generator of that tech level, but it was probably optimized for fast recharging rather than absorbing a single attack, allowing it to stay in combat longer at the cost of not being able to stop more powerful weapons. Since Sarah wasn't planning on dueling a grav tank, it was perfect for her needs.

"Well, I'll add it as part of my personal armory then." Sarah winced. "I don't suppose it's accepted as formal wear on some planets? And am I wrong in assuming we can't hide the fact that it's a shield generator?"

Elteria burst out laughing.

"Captain, this thing has a bigger energy signature on stand by than most suits of power armor. The only thing that could conceal it is a freaking cloaking field, and, well..."

"Only the Infinite have ones that can fit on something smaller than a frigate, I know. A girl can hope though..." Sarah unclipped the belt with a sigh, and set it down in her locker. The thing was nice, but it was freaking heavy! "Alright, I'll get off of your hair and let you focus on this."

"Actually, if I don't do something else in parallel, I think I'll start going nuts. I hate the people that programmed this thing. Couldn't the army have botched their jobs for once?"

Sarah frowned.

"Is it that problematic? Do we risk losing the device?"

Elteria shook her head.

"Nah. Whoever stole this took out the self destruct. Probably first thing they did actually, I know I would have. And I went in hard enough that I managed to prevent it from hashing the vector lists for transmissions. One good thing about these things, it's that the army was more concerned with people figuring out what was said rather than the direction of who it was said to, so I managed to slip in while the system was destroying the actual logs." She shrugged. "I know, it's not perfect, but as old as it is it was once Alterian military. Right now I'm just mopping up the security system and decrypting the secure data, it's just...annoying."

"Right. Well, I'm going to go visit Hector. I'm fairly sure he was salivating when I brought him the fusion gun."

*****

"Starius. The time has come."

"At long last. What do you need from me Razor?"

"We are executing couperet 1. Our other contacts will open the gates and access points to the governor's palace. We need you to disable the palace's sensor network so that we may approach undetected. Surprise is key, it must not be wasted. A virus package will be delivered, as well as detailed instructions for implementing it into the palace's systems."

"Very well. It will be done Razor. Sepia must be freed."

"And stars forbid, it will be. Good luck starius."

"Good luck Razor."

The communicator froze, and then began to smoke as the small incendiary charge within consumed it's circuitry, and Helena Martak, delegate to the system parliament of Sepia, took a deep breath. It was time to finally free her system from tyranny.

*****

Sarah had expected to find Hector and his marines all over their new toy, inspecting the fusion gun and the manual that came with it. However she'd forgotten one thing: she'd sent Seria to deliver the weapon to them.

She stepped into the marine's ready room and looked around at the mess of parts, bits and pieces of a weapon that could vaporize tanks with a single shot hapazardly spread accross the room. She returned the marines' salutes as they snapped to attention, and gestured at the room.

"People, remember, we have an engineering workshop for this." She said as she carefully avoided bumping into the benches, lined with....bits. She was fairly sure a lot of it was just cooling systems, but some of it were definitely electromagnets, made to precisely guide the flow of plasma as the weapon fired.

"We're fine, we've tagged all the pieces. Besides, Elteria requisitioned the workshop." Said Seria as she sprang back up from what little was left of the main gun itself. "And I got permission from chief, uh..."

She looked to the side to Hector.

"Turral." He helpfully provided.

"Yeah. The chief engineer. She gave us permission. And the tags."

"Right. So, I see you've dug pretty deep into the thing already. Your assessment?"

"Well, it's definitely not Dominion. There are Dominion engineers that would kill to get the schematics for those plasma containment fields." Answered Seria as she pulled out a datapad. "Apart from that? Not much. Whoever cleaned this thing of serial numbers was very thorough. They erased everything. And I mean everything, even the isotopes in the internal reactor were sanitized."

Sarah nodded. The big difference between a fusion gun and a plasma gun was that the former actually had a full on fusion reactor in it, not just a plasma exciter. That's why it was so lethal, it didn't fire hyperheated gas, it fired still fusing hydrogen at people, making it fire literal, if extremely low yield, nukes. Nothing outside of mono-molecular armor or energy shields could even hope to survive that kind of punishment. And it was standard practice to mark fusion reactors with a isotope tag, a particular set of radioactive elements that helped identify the reactor model and it's age in case of emergencies.

Which also let you track said reactor. Not well, but it could be done. After all with a manufacturer, model and an age, you could narrow it down considerably.

"That is indeed pretty thorough. Professionals?"

"Almost certainly. This has 'interstellar arms smuggler' written all over it. We checked some of the local guns the SLF had in their armory, they didn't bother erasing everything from their weapons. They hit the most obvious spots, but not all of them."

Sarah tilted her head.

"Wouldn't they had asked you to take care of that? Back when they were holding you hostage I mean."

Seria snorted.

"Nope. They were too busy getting me to keep their precious heavy weapons running. Perdition rifles, the APC's railguns, that kind of stuff. Never saw or heard of the high tech stuff though. I don't even know how they were planning to use it, they had no one to maintain them."

Sarah shrugged.

"The Near Verge build things tough. Very tough. And they came with the manuals, as you saw."

"Fair. They're surprisingly complete actually. Most of the ones I've seen for Dominion are crap compared to this."

"That's mainly because our- Near Verge maintenance systems are highly automated. You slot in your gun at the armory, and the machines take care of the rest. When someone has to do it themselves, it's assumed they won't have much experience, thus, complete and thorough manuals. And a lot of tutorials."

"Right." Seria's eyes had lit up at Sarah's slip up, but she chose to let it go without any comment. Not that it was hard to figure out that her hosts weren't from Thaumor, at least some of them, and she was fairly sure she could just look up the image she'd seen in the commissioning seal, but they'd saved her and her family, the least she could do was avoid prying into their past if they did not wish to share it. "Well, that's about all we can tell you right now. We're going to go over the software next. I don't expect it to be booby trapped, but....well, I knew the SLF."

"Right." Sarah blinked as Elteria pinged her.

I need you in your office right now. Full privacy mode. Read the message.

Sarah mentally frowned. Full privacy mode? That was highly unusual.

"Alright, duty calls. Just don't blow up the ship."

"Yes ma'am!" Chorused the marines, and Sarah shook her head, before exiting the room, and making her way to her office.

She'd barely stepped in when the door closed behind her....and a heavily armored blast door, made of the same armor that surrounded the vessel, made to deflect point blank nuclear detonations, slammed closed behind her, accompanied by the hum of a privacy field, a low power shield that would block anything short of an active scan from getting any data from inside it's protective bubble.

"Alright, what's gotten you so scared?" Said Sarah as she took her seat, before her smile died at the AI's expression when her avatar appeared on the chair in front of her.

"Not scared captain, just....concerned. I'm still digging through the communicator, but while I was doing that I decided to do a thorough scan of the star system. I passed it off as a sensor test, and it was mostly just pure paranoia but..." She sighed, which was useless as an AI, but human body language was about as universal as it got. Besides, AIs were usually based on human thought processes, to some level or another. "I got a read on...something. And I focused the passives on it."

She gestured, and a hologram appeared above Sarah's desk. It looked like someone had taken a flattened disk and covered it in gantries.

"That's..."

"A Dominion Navy refueling and repair station. It's currently on low power, hiding in the upper layers of one of the outer system's gas giants."

"Why the hell would the Dominion- nevermind. I saw the map. We're right between Condor and Alientia, correct?"

"Indeed."

Sarah sighed. During the Dominion's little civil war, and the ensuing rebellion of most of it's extragalactic territories, the Condor and Alientia sectors had been instrumental into leading the revolution. Both had been highly industrialized, capable of producing their own cruisers and supplying worlds with all the tools necessary to throw out the Dominion. Together with the Sortor sector, they'd lead the rebellion's forces, and then more or less ran the peace conference following the war, as well as managed to strongarm the Dominion into relinquishing their claim on all but the core worlds in Thaumor, establishing a 'Protectorate' over the ex Dominion colonies in the galaxy. A Protectorate that, for example, allowed Condor, Alientia and Sortor to build their fleets as they pleased, and integrate more systems into their own government.

It wasn't exactly a secret that they were actively gearing up for a new war. And apparently, so was the Dominion.

"They want to drive a wedge between the sectors."

"That or have remote logistics bases for raiding."

Sarah let out a short bark of laughter.

"Bullshit. If you want to support raiding ships, you just need a supply cache and an on site fabricator, a few containers anchored to any old asteroid would do the trick. This is enough to refuel and maintain what, an entire battlegroup?"

"At a time, yes. Probably 6 or so in total if they don't try to come in at once, and assuming they're all doing combat operations. Won't be able to fix a lot of battle damage though, it has industrial fabricators but it's no shipyard."

Sarah winced. A Dominion battlegroup consisted of a single battlecruiser, with 10 heavy cruisers, and a somewhat random assortment of escort ships (essentially whatever was on hand nearby when the battlegroup was assembled). The battlecruiser alone outmassed Eternal Seeker ten thousand times over. The 10 heavy cruisers would be half of the battlecruiser's tonnage, depending on their class, and over a thousand time more massive than the Seeker individually, and then you had the light cruisers or frigates they would bring with them as escorts. She was reasonably sure Eternal Seeker could take on one of the Dominion's heavy cruisers, thanks to it's advanced technology. They'd get hurt very, very badly doing so, but they could win. Against a battlecruiser? She wasn't even sure they'd survive long enough to close to laser range, even with their bag of technological tricks. Dominion missiles were pitiful compared to their missile defenses, but a battlecruiser would literally fire tens of thousands of them per volley. At some point quantity had a quality all of it's own.

"So a fleet, basically."

"That's hardly-"

"By our standards their fleets are barely wings, I know." The Alterian Directorate, as virtually all Near Verge powers, used the nomenclature of the Empire of Mara for their formations. A hundred thousand ships, only counting ships of the wall, thus heavy cruisers and above, was a fleet. A million was an armada. A billion was a theater force. Those numbers seemed insane, but that was exactly the sort of firepower a Near Verge power with 8 galaxies -12 if you counted various aligned minor nations and protectorates- worth of industrial power at it's fingertips could bring to bear. The Dominion had to operate on a smaller scale however. They were an intergalactic power, but only by the thinnest of margins. "Still, by their standards, that's a fleet. Not a full strength one, but a fleet."

Elteria nodded, and Sarah leaned back into her seat. Well, that explained why Sepia was the target of such an heavily armed rebel group. Someone wanted to take out that base. Since just popping in and bombing it from high orbit would be a simpler solution, they were probably funding the rebellion to legitimize their presence and their demands for the Dominion to withdraw from the system.

If, of course, they could pass up the chance to 'accidentally' destroy a massive enemy space station that had probably costed tens of billions of credits to build and get there in the first place, and would present such an asset in the conflict everyone was busy pretending wasn't coming while they prepared to slit each other's throats.

"Well. If the Dominion's here, I guess it answers where the governor's payment is coming from. Always thought that was a lot of money to pay to mercenaries rather than ask for help from a nearby system, but the last thing they'd want would be for someone else to be looking to closely at what they've got hidden here."

"I doubt most ships would have seen it. I only investigated because we were looking for a relay satellite, otherwise I'd have dismissed it as a sensor ghost." Answered the AI. "And you know how thorough I am."

"Fair, but they can't afford to take those kind of chances. They probably figured we were safe enough to have as contractors." She chuckled. Few knew the capabilities of her ship, and most of those who found out either ended up her allies...or dead. "Well, this doesn't change our contract....but it does change the assessment. If we find their HQ, it's probably going to be fortified to hell and back, and might have some 'advisors'. The 'ex-military' kind."

Elteria grimly nodded. They'd faced enough of these 'recently retired' military advisors to know that they were neither. They were just troops sent over to help rebels and terrorists by giving them a solid cadre of professional, veteran soldiers to build their own organization upon.

"Alright. Well, continue digging into that computer. I'll go tell Hector to get in contact with whatever passes for special forces on this planet. If we find their HQ -and I highly doubt the com satellite won't have a direct link to them, if nothing else- we're going to need their help."

"Aye aye ma'am. Should I contact the governor?"

Sarah paused, before shaking her head.

"Let's try to keep our cards close to the chest for now. If nothing else, we do know her own government is riddled with spies. Oh, and get me all your scan data on that station on a chip. We might be able to get our dear governor to pay a bit more to keep it under wraps."

She was, after all, a mercenary. She wouldn't betray secrets she was hired to keep or told as part of her contract...but her employer had hidden this from her, which made it fair game. And Sarah hated being lied to, even if only by omission. That was the kind of stupid stunts that got mercenary like her killed after all.