Chapter 38

Stuggart star system, inner system.

Stuggart Prime, Secure Berth Delta-31.

"He's dead ma'am! You're in command now!"

The officer looked up at the her communication specialist, and shook her head as she looked at the mess around her. They'd managed to push through the automated defenses that had been blocking their way to the hangar proper, but they'd taken many casualties doing so. Especially when explosive charges that had been drilled into the damned walls detonated, taking her entire point squad with them.

"Alpha is dead?"

"So is Delta! You're the only commander left ma'am!"

"Fuck! Alright, what's the status of the other teams?"

"Alpha team is FUBAR! Only a few of their wounded are still responding, and they say everyone else is dead. Something tore them apart. Delta is more or less in the same shape we are, but our warning at least got them to avoid the mines in the walls. Epsilon is still without a single casualties, but they're reporting strange activity all around us."

"Fuck. Alright, coordinate with Delta, we need to do a simultaneous push, rush them before-"

"INCOMING!"

Beta leader had just the time to turn her head, and catch a glimpse of a miniature star rushing down the hallway, before vanishing a ball of nuclear hellfire.

*****

"One down! Recharging!" Yelled out Seria as the superheated air from the literal nuclear detonation rushed past her, and the bits and pieces of corpses from the first assault team, the one that literally came through the floor, caught on fire.

"Roger that. Marines, flush them out!" Said Hector, before firing a burst from his pulser, shredding one of the survivors from the second assault team, the one they'd just fired the fusion gun at. They were simply too close to the enemy, and in too much of an enclosed environment to simply fire the pocket nuclear weapon at full power, so they had to tune it down a bit. That meant that, ironically, the point team had actually survived the death of their comrades.

Well, for a few seconds at least, as a volley of grenades flew over their cover, and the soldier, too shocked to do anything else, automatically scrambled out.

Except that this time their comrades in the back weren't there to cover them, and Hector's marines reduced them to ribbons.

"Alright, one team down!" Yelled out the sergeant. "Reorient the gun!"

"Yes sir!" Yelled out Seria, and the armorer began turning around the cumbersome gun. It could technically move on it's own, but it was for precision fire, and it's speed sucked. "Set! 15 seconds to recharge!"

"Right! Larry!"

"Sir?" Answered the corporal, his armor definitely looking the worse for wear.

"I'm sure our captain would like some prisoners. They probably have some form of rear echellon somewhere. Once we're done with them, we'll rush out and try to get what we can-"

The sergeant stopped as the command channel on their implants activated, and Sarah's voice resounded through it.

"Hector, the enemy is pulling back! They're rushing to several shuttles and getting the hell out of dodge!"

The sergeant smiled as he checked his sensor feeds. Indeed they were, their perimeter team scrambling aboard a shuttle that had just touched down, while the last assault team remaining hopped from cover to cover towards their own craft.

"Excellent! Should we pursue ma'am?"

"No. Tend to our wounded, and hold the perimeter. It's probably not a trick, but I won't take the risk. Besides, I have it on good authority someone else will take care of them."

"Aye aye ma'am." Said Hector, before turning towards his men. "Alright, Seria you cover their entrance. Larry you're on nurse duty, anyone who has yellow or worse biomonitor status, get to the medbay. The rest hold here."

His marines nodded, and a handful began hobbling towards the ship, with the corporal watching over them like a hawk.

Either Sarah had forgotten that the command channel was still live, or she felt that the marines should be kept in the loop, as she continue talking.

"Elteria, can you take a shot at them with the PDG?"

"I could. But I don't think we should bother."

"Why-"

Sarah's voice trailed off, and Hector and Seria both swallowed, hard. Even the armorer had kept the sensor data of their retreating enemies in a corner of her mind.

The shuttles had clearly been made for a fast and clean getaway. Sleek, with high acceleration, and covered in Dominion navy grade stealth composites.

On even Dominion military sensors, it might have worked.

Against an orbital defence grid it was pitiful.

Aura let the shuttles get out of the starport, and arrive over the no man's land separating it from the capital.

Then dozens of lasers, each meant to rip apart capital ships, spoke as one. The shuttles, and anything within half a kilometer of them, were simply reduced to atoms.

"Targets destroyed." Simply said Elteria. "And Stuggart defense force marine assault shuttles inbound."

"I...see. Very well then. Stand down sergeant. It seems that our friends from up high took care of it."

Hector and the rest of the marines were very careful not to hear the muttered 'trigger happy AIs' their captain let out on the command channel before closing it.

*****

"Thank you for the assistance. Still, some more prisoners would have been appreciated." Said Sarah as she sat down in her chair behind her desk, carefully setting down her mug of hot chocolate as to not spill it.

"It's my pleasure." Said Aura, before taking a seat on one of the chairs set up in front of the desk, and looking reprovingly at her girlfriend, as her avatar simply sat down on the desk itself. "And believe me, had it been possible, I would have tried. Unfortunately it wasn't that simple."

"How so?" Asked Sarah as she grabbed her mug of hot chocolate and took a sip.

Aura winced.

"First and foremost, our orbital weapons aren't exactly precision instruments. They're made to shoot down heavily armored landing barges and interdict a planetary landing, not neutralize shuttles. We have airborne fighters for that."

"Which you didn't have the time to deploy."

"Precisely. I have to admit, these bastards were good. The only reason we caught them at all was because the orbital defence grid came up, and they clearly weren't expecting that. The air defense radars, the spaceports sensor arrays...all of them had been hacked in some way. It wasn't anything major, just not reporting the sensor ghosts from their stealth shuttles, but still." Aura shrugged. "We could have still caught them of course, tracked their ships, but...I'm sworn to defend the people of this world, and their shuttles were making a beeline towards an inhabited area, after having deployed nuclear weapons."

Sarah nodded.

"Fair enough." The captain sighed. "My...apologies if I seemed a bit accusatory there."

"No need, I heard you...lost some people."

"Not...yet."

Aura's eyebrow rose.

"I thought one of your men was almost completely disintegrated!"

"Yes...but not her head. And her head contained her implants. They prepared everything for an emergency digitalization, and we managed to get her out and into the ship's computers, albeit with only a few seconds to spare." One day she was going to find the person who designed the Alterian Directorate Marine Corps' implants, and kiss them. Without them laying the groundwork they'd have never managed to pull Sally out in time. "It was messy, but she's alive...more or less."

Aura whistled softly.

"And how is she doing?"

Sarah winced, and nodded towards Elteria, who sighed.

"Badly. Human psyches already have a hard time adjusting to transition at the best of times. While on the verge of death? It's a testament to her mental resilience that she hasn't gone completely insane already." Elteria shrugged and her girlfriend winced. One of the key problems of digitalizing humans was that they sometimes failed to hold themselves together after the transition, and simply...fractured into a thousand pieces and destroyed their own selves in the process. That got better with technology, but even Near Verge systems and software had their limits. "The implant download process also wasn't...perfect. Some pieces of her ended up where they shouldn't. I'm running a full reconstruction program, but it's going to take a while."

This time Aura's wince was even more pronounced. Fragmenting was the bane of all AIs. The fact that they were, at their core, pure data meant that even simple errors in their internal architecture could make them lose entire chunks of their memories, or warp their personalities and very selves beyond recognition.

"If there's anything I can do to help..."

"We'll manage. We've already contacted one of the planetside hospitals who specializes in that sort of things. The cyberneticists aren't necessarily that useful, they can't even understand the software they're working with, but the counselors help a lot."

The problem with personality reconstruction was that you simply couldn't shut down the AI while doing it, which meant that Sally was very much awake...and aware of what was happening to her.

Sarah hid a shiver. She didn't know if she would have the force of character or sheer stubbornness to withstand that. There was a reason she had included sealed instructions to give her the choice to terminate herself if it ever happened to her.

"That's good." Said Aura. "I take it she won't be coming back into service any time soon?"

"We'll keep her onboard, our systems are better than yours for this, but no. It's going to take months at least before she's anything I'd consider stable. And that's if she doesn't decide to get imprinted back into a biological body."

"Right. Well, at least now that you have been attacked, it has enabled me to ask for additional security for you."

"You mean more than the marines around us?" Said Sarah as she gestured at the table, and a hologram showing the overhead view of the ten thousand or so soldiers dispersed around the secure berth.

"Oh, they are only there because they rarely get to be deployed onworld, and the garrison commander thought that it would be good training for them." Which at least handily explained the level of force. Sarah wasn't going to complain, but it still felt weird being surrounded by over three hundred times their number in heavily armed soldiers, especially as they seemed to be getting dug in around the berth. "No, you're going to take off, and dock at Defense One."

Sarah and Elteria stared at Aura in sheer incredulity, before exchanging a glance. Defense One was the spaceborne command center for the entire orbital defence grid, the nerve center of the Stuggart Defence Force, and the single largest fortress in Stuggart's orbit. Rumor was it could fight a Dominion battleship on even terms, although given that the station's exact specifications were a well kept secret, it was impossible to know for sure.

For one, Sarah wouldn't bet against it being even deadlier than the battleship.

"Are you...sure that's fine honey?" Tentatively said Elteria, and Aura firmly nodded.

"Of course! It is the safest place you could be, and it would prevent civilian collateral damage from another attack. Besides, it will allow me to have you close to hand for statements, and prevent some of my colleagues from advocating for your arrest." She said piously, and Sarah bit back a comment about how it would so handily put her girlfriend within hand's reach at her workplace, and put the largest military installation in the entire system between her and whoever wanted her harm. After all the AI was right...even if she was being overprotective as hell.

"It will be our pleasure to accept your hospitality and protection." Said Sarah, diplomatically, as she started furiously thinking as to how she was going to load all of the weapons and hardware of questionable provenance she was still trying to acquire on the planet below onto her ship while quite literally docked to the central command station of the very people supposed to stop this kind of contraband. "Still, we do need to get an idea of who hired those mercenaries to attack us. We've caught some of them, but..." Sarah shrugged. "They were small fry, and didn't knew much."

A few of the wounded from the first and second assault teams had tried to make a run for it after their shuttles had arrived, but some of them simply hadn't made it. Which, ironically had saved their lives. Impressively enough, they had still tried to run, using the maintenance tunnels underneath the berths. That hadn't been enough, as the defense force had simply ordered the entire area locked down, and combed the entire network of tunnels with a level of precision and thoroughness that would have made Hector proud.

"That was to be expected." Aura smiled. "Fortunately, they were in our databases...including the mercenary outfits they belonged to. Some of them had already moved all of their other assets out of the system, but a few clearly weren't expecting everything to go so wrong so fast, and we managed to intercept their transports in the outer system. I also got the required warrants to raid their offices. They were abandoned of course, but still."

Sarah nodded. The mercenary administrative offices on Stuggart were considered sacro-sanct, as were the civilian dependents that lived there. As bitter as her enemies could be, none of them would dare attack them. It also meant that the system government was very careful to justify their presence whenever they descended upon them.

"They might have left something behind. Although quite frankly I doubt it."

"It's worth a shot. I've also sent specialists to track if they had received a payment for the job already, and if we could trace it back to it's source. Chances are it will be through a shell corporation, but we have gotten a good idea of who is a front for who."

"You think it's the Silver Syndicate?"

Aura laughed out loud.

"So do you! They're the only ones that have the resources to pull that off. But as long as I don't have proof, I can't act. When I do however...well, let's just say that their headquarters are far less well hidden than they think."

Aura laughed, and Sarah nodded. For once, she was in full agreement with the AI. These bastards had almost killed several members of her crew in their attack. It was time for some payback. And at least she could trust that Aura would do the job...thoroughly. And cleanly.

She'd learned not to trust herself when things came to avenging her crew members. Messy wasn't the right word for the way she exacted vengeance. Indiscriminate bloodbath was more appropriate.