Lights flashed in steady pulses outside the many glassplate panels as flames erupted behind them. Screams of panic and rallying cries of instruction intermingled within the hull of the marathon class command vessel.

The fleet was falling, and the First Commander knew the weight of it fell entirely on his shoulders.

The moral code he had held above all else was punishing him, and in turn it was punishing his troops. Of all things that would have lead to be their downfall, honor had never been considered the likely threat.

He fired his field cannon down the long stretch of hall, effectively blocking it with a steady sphere of contained plasma radiation, landing thirty units from their position. Flares of smoke puffed and sizzled as the consumption attempted to reach through. To respect and know his enemy was important in battle, but this was not an enemy, this was an act of the void itself. This wasn't a battle anymore, either: this was a rigged game of survival.

Slowly, certainly, the Consumption would bring them into its clutches, just as it had done to all the rest.

Another shot flew down the hall, replacing the previous just as it had begun to waver, sputtering the last breathes of resistance. Behind him stood a few surviving soldiers: several shock troopers, and two heavy class Rullah in fully shielded personal armor. Still, he knew it wouldn't be enough. Not against this threat. Their survival had only been possible through avoiding contact entirely.

Obviously that was plasma under the command bridge now, though, so they would need to work with what they had.

Raising one of his Armored limbs, he signaled the team of shock troopers to replace him, as he dropped back to reload his field cannon. Barely twenty personnel, and only half a dozen were properly armed. The rest simply wore their traditional military edgers and light-pistols, which were next to useless in this scenario. None of them stood no chance unless the mechanized 27th squadron had reacted in time and was on their way to the bridge. Their only option was to hold, and that option wasn't a very good one.

Pausing to glance at the rest of his fleet, Rukkali Bolsorg, First commander of the 33rd line, leader of the Outer shell, and Enforcer of the Code felt something he had never experienced in his existence before. The first commander felt shame.

This was all his fault.

All his fault...

He stared through the glass, watching the proof being scattered over the sky for all to see. Honor had cost him everything. His thoughts drifted as he waited for his shift on the ever shortening border between them and death, and he contemplated his mistakes.

The Union had a strict code when it came to ships hit by the consumption. It had been known as the “Mercy protocol”

To Rukkali Bolsorg, that had never been seen as anything but a lie. There was no mercy in it, just cowardice. He remembered that cowardice all to clearly, for his first cycle on the lines, he had witnessed fifteen of their ships shot down by their own weapons. He had seen the sadness in his comrade's eyes as they had issued the commands, and beheld the guilt that came with it.

To fire upon his fellow soldiers sickened him. As he had climbed the long ladder to obtain rank, he swore to himself upon his honor to change things. It had taken him over thirty cycles, but he pressed forward, and that oath became motivation.

His first rotation as Commander, within moments of being presented rank, Rukkali Bolsorg had finally made that oath into reality. Personally leading a shock squad, he had set out to rescue survivors from a damaged vessel on the front lines. Ship 782, a forward interceptor class vessel, crewed by a total of one thousand, two hundred, and seventy three brave souls. He had waited until every one last one of them still alive made it out before before boarding the escape carrier. First one in, last one out. The code of a First Commander.

His statement was clear, and his beliefs stood in the open for all to see: The Mercy Protocol could be damned, they were his soldiers now.

The very moment he had landed back at his ship, a whole fleet of Union Marshals had been deployed to have him arrested, and he had expected it. He had expected it and been ready. He had saved the lives of his troops as he had planned, and that had been enough. They were alive, and would live on. None had to bear to guilt of killing their own flesh and blood. He had let himself be taken into custody without a word of protest.

What had not been expected, were the fifteen million Rullah ships that came to his defense, surrounding the marshal fleet and his command ship. Only a single warning was issued during the stand off, and it had been a simple one:

“We would gladly watch the entirety of the inner-systems burn, than watch someone of such honor be punished.”

This statement had been by promptly vaporizing the first Marshal ship to attempt to move away from formation.

It was said that, defying physics, a sound echoed across the void soon after: as Political representatives throughout the Union collectively shit themselves.

The trust from his troops had never been in question since. Rukkali respected them, and they respected him. Twenty seven cycles later, and they still stood by him as truly as they had all that time ago, all while the Union had begrudgingly stayed the frack away from the 33rd line. If he could keep the quarantine of that system held while engaging in such methods, they had little grounds to judge him for it, and even less means of punishing him. Not without opening up an entire containment system.

Of course, now he realized now that they had been right to attempt to punish him for such actions. He had unfairly placed the lives of the few before the lives of the many, and he was finally paying for his beliefs. After all, itnly took one mistake to lose everything in the game of war.

As far as the eye could see, his ships were burning.

His troops, those loyal and brave soldiers... His gut clenched in heaves as his sadness overtook him. His honor had been their ruin.

A heavy shockwave rocked him from his sorrow, and back to awareness. Another, and then another. Intense impacts seemed to be growing in their intensity as he felt the very hull beneath his limbs shake under the pressure.

It couldn't be...

Heat washed over Commander Rukkali Bolsorg and his squad like the radiation of a pure burning engine. Far worse washed over their enemy. At the end of the hall, nothing remained but the bare metal of the ship, wiped clean by intense flames. Clean metal, and three towering figures wearing fully mechanized battle units.

Their sleek forms had six limbs, four of which were predominantly focused on motion, and the other two heavily armed with plasma torches. Their energy shields flickered as the fields came closer to one another, and their visors glowed with the red phasing provided by the HUD screen contained within their thick helmets. Upon approach, the farther two fell into rank and raised weapons to firing position down the hall while the third continued forward, before kneeling in a form of respect only Rullah seemed to be capable of.

“Commander, we loyally await your instructions.”

Perhaps, in this bloody game of war, all had not been lost quite yet.

...

[Yitale]

Yitale sang out orders in a rapid fire tempo of stress and anxiety and rage as her ship spiraled out of FTL travel. Mostly, it was rage, and the crew reacted accordingly.

What in all the fracking hell had been floating in the middle of the void that was capable of knocking out their Engine synchronicity? Scanners were supposed to pick things up millions of units before hand, not let out a panicked burp right before impact. Her scars seemed to flush dark blue as her six fingered hands clutched into six fingered fists. When she got back to port, she was going to pay that station-side engineering crew back with interest.

No- Void with that, she was going to set the human on them.

A hum began to ring out as their minor FTL focused it's output to stabilize before reacceleration. It could probably do the job on it's own, but Yitale wasn't quite certain at the moment. There was still the matter of damage assessment. Somewhere on the ship, they probably had a hull breach sapping power from the shields. She killed the motion and let them drift, technically they were still moving relative to their destination, and that was good enough until she had a clue on what was going happening.

The worst part was that the freighter had finally been starting to look good. Now it probably had another hole in it. Sonat and Syzah would probably sneak out and patch that one with another steak of red metal to go with the first one if she didn't watch them. Void help her, they would look like a decorated mercenary vessel soon.

Rapid thumping could be heard as a dense body flew through the halls, and the ship-beast arrived on the bridge with a tremendous entrance. Kicking itself off of a wall it dived straight into the middle of the room, curling up into rolling motion as it did so. As so as it was clear of the floor, it bounced onto it's feet with upper limbs raised in a combat ready stance.

Yitale tried to hide her amusement as one of the newer crew members threw themselves to the floor in terror. In times like these she could understand why the human found it comical to keep up it's deception.

As the human scanned the room, it's eyes darted quickly in search of a threat. Slowly, it lowered it's arms and relaxed, before gliding over to stand at her side. Yitale figured that it had been watching over Syzah from the direction it had come from, though how it had gotten to the bridge so quickly made her wonder if it had some type of miniature thrust-packs bolted to it's feet. Yitale gave him a poor mimic of the gesture he often repeated, curling her lips and showing her teeth slightly, and he returned it with a nod, obviously relieved there were no blood-thirsty raiders this time.

She sat back in her seat and waited as the crew pulled up a damage report. There had been some hull tearing over in the lower starboard of the freighter, but somehow it had already been patched. Engineers must have been right near the impact, she would need to get eyes on the outer hull to confirm before they set themselves back into FTL travel.

Strange things could happen once you got moving that quickly...

...

The outwalk had started out normally enough, as Di'her caught the young Syzah smuggling a small panel of red hull metal out of the airlock. That had been expected, and she had left some of the engineers with him to keep the event from repeating until they had confirmed everything was safe. All that, though, was in the back of her mind as she checked the upper level.

Di'her wasn't quite sure what she should report back to the shipmaster first.

The good news? Or the weird?

The upper level was simply a huge flat surface. On planetside ports, the crew had often taken to relaxing on it, or organizing some simple sports depending on the native gravity. Planet side, the upper level was warm and inviting, but during an outwalk in the dead of the void, the upper level was creepy.

Really creepy.

The lighting of the ship was essentially nonexistent, and Di'her had to walk slowly and carefully not to accidentally loose her suit's magnetic grip along the travel grid that lined outer edge of the hull's alloy surface. Her exosuit only provided enough light to illuminate the first few units before her, and not much else. If she hadn't done it dozens of times during her career, she would have been thoroughly spooked.

To add to ominous feeling already present during a solo walk in pitch black conditions, not only was their hull completely sealed, the metal was fused in such a way that would have required a port-side crew two or three rotation's of work to fix. It was strange enough to make Di'her actually turn around and do a full 360 of her surroundings before going back to investigate further.

The ion detector on her suit scanned the surface with intense detail as she continued the survey. All it found brought her more questions. Maybe this was simply the rare average between the two categories, and could be classified as good-weird news.

Magnetic resonance rang off the charts when she had approached the shining patchwork, and secondary check repeated much of the same. She had begun to suspect her suit was malfunctioning and that she was reading too deeply into it. When things made no sense- it was usually for a reason, and that was the best one Di'her could come up with.

As her outwalk survey was completed, she headed back toward the airlock entrance in the center of the level, but stopped short as she stared at the sky above. The remainder of her rotation was spent staring out at the ever approaching quarantine.

Flashes of light streaked out, of blue and red fire, crossing one another over and over in a spectacular display of power and security. Those reaching her eyes now had probably been fired thousands of cycles before. Out there in the distance was the front line. That thin membrane which held the threat at bay, and slowly pushed it back.

In a few hundred thousand more years, they might actually win the never-ending war, and the light show would continue on for long after.

A tiny ping echoed off of the thin defensive shield which was covering the ship and interrupted the moment. That had probably been the size of a small pebble, and she didn't want to think about what could happen if something larger came hauling through from the unknown. Glancing back at the fused hull Di'her put her attention back on the job. There was some good-weird news to report.

…

[Xios]

When the space elevator began to collapse from the first shockwaves, Xios decided to take the initiative and be the first one out. He had gone the most direct route available to him under the circumstances, and settled for a straight free-fall out the loading port's gate. Despite this he still might not have been fast enough.

He wasn't quite certain why everything along the front lines of the 33rd was being embraced by the unmistakable light of uncontrolled nuclear fusion, but he wasn't going to wait on some planet orbiting coffin to find out. Above and behind him, the first creaks of tension had begun to vibrate through the structure as it strained to accommodate the waves of energy buffering through the outer atmosphere.

Rotating, he turned his body to watch as the coils began to snap with resounding cracks, one after the other. Several whipped past at speeds that would surely have left him nothing but a tiny scattered smear, and the air currents that followed tossed him into a corkscrew down through the layers of clouded atmosphere below.

Slowly, he began to free himself from the confinement of his armor, locking it into a balanced free fall with it's limbs spread in a wide fashion to hold the center of mass steady as he cautiously pulled back his nerve linkages. Pooled into a dense ball, Xios waited, leaving only the imitated nerves for the visual output of his suit.

There was no true way of telling how far he had fallen, or how far he still had to go. This was going to be a risky gambit.

If Gemynd were capable of sweat, Xios would have been drenched by now, as the cloud cover never seemed to end. He felt the temperature fluctuate as his shell flew through the different atmospheric zones, and knew trying to leave at the incorrect time would lead to either becoming a frozen block of flesh, or a melted puddle of goop- more so than he already was.

It came abruptly.

With a burst of clarity, below was nothing but thick green foliage, as far as his sensory organs could perceive. It was a true primal world.

A rapidly approaching one.

Xios quickly began to spread himself out, oozing through the hole in the back of his unit's skull plate, and then along it's back. He tried his best to ignore the elements whipping at him. It was time to take the plunge, and though 400 years of warp-jumping should have prepared him for pretty much anything, Xios felt himself shiver in terror has he flayed himself out and left his artificial skeleton behind.

His retirement was off to a wonderful start.