Even before the Proxy War began, there were those who smelled opportunity on the wind. They were people who, for the right amount of credits, would be anything from hired thugs to bounty hunters. They were mercenaries; a job that was intermittently high and low risk, given the task and payout. All legitimate mercenaries were subject to something called ‘The Mercenary Review Board’, which was an authority that was supposed to make sure the employer did not stab the employee in the back, while putting the same standards on the mercenaries themselves.

The key words in that sentence were ‘was supposed to’, and they did, for the most part. However, the one employer that could get away with betraying the mercs that it hired was the UGN itself. Being a massive coalition of different nations and being backed and oftentimes controlled by corporate interests, the UGN had enough money and influence to get the MRB to turn the other way from time to time. When the UGN payed, it payed big time, but when it screwed you over, it screwed you over hard.

This made the contracts offered by the UGN a high-risk/ high reward employer. Working even a single contract could make or break a Mercenary Company, a fact that the Mercenary Company formerly known as ‘Nullzone Solutions’ would learn firsthand.

Nullzone Solutions was a mercenary company designed for in atmosphere and ground operations. It was not equipped for space-based operations, but when the UGN offered them a metric fuckton of credits to clean up a pirate problem in a different system, complete with an upfront payment, the leaders of the company decided they might as well try their hand out in a new environment.

They first got about to procuring a few dozen civilian freighters and single-sitter civilian spacecraft. A couple dozen purchases, bit of ingenuity, a lot of aftermarket add-ons and a couple weeks of engineering later, the company had managed to turn a bunch of unarmed and unarmored freighters into decently armed and armored speed demons with carrier capability. The single-sitter spaceships were also given a makeover and turned into improvised fighter/ bombers that were fast enough to make people question how it was even possible to move something that fast.

Unfortunately, after all the modifications had been completed, the trouble began. The very day they were to set out and deal with the pirates, they got a call from the UGN. Expecting nothing bad, they were shocked to hear that they, the mercenaries being employed to deal with heavily armed pirates, were being fined for every month that they had ‘unlawfully militarized civilian vessels’. Their response was ‘What were we supposed to do, fly unarmed craft into them like suicide pilots?’ They received no response other than that they were being fined, and that they should scrap the ships they had created.

‘Fuck that noise!’ was the general consensus. How the hell were they supposed to complete their mission otherwise? Setting aside all the funds they figured they would need to pay the fines, the improvised fleet of militarized civilian ships jumped and landed straight in the middle of a fully prepared pirate ambush. Only after their ships were disabled by the oddly well-equipped pirates and the entire merc company was either dead or captured did they learn the truth.

The system government was in bed with the pirates. They occasionally would request mercenary aid through the UGN to the MRB, who would send unprepared mercenary companies to their doom. The pirates got the loot and would then exchange it for credits at the government sanctioned scrap vendors, and then when flushed with cash they would waste it all on hookers and blow. If the pirates ever got the idea to attack the ships that were not targets, another merc company would be thrown to the wolves and the cycle would repeat.

What made things worse was that Nullzone Solutions still existed on paper, despite having been taken as prisoners. This meant that they were still being fined for having unlawfully augmented civilian ships, which in turn meant that they soon ran out of money in their bank account, which in turn meant that they were debtors. There was no hope for anyone who owed debt in the UGN; the banks, the UGN and the other companies would ALWAYS collect, one way or another. There was no such thing as bankruptcy for the masses, and all they could hope to look forward to was the terrible fate of slaving away in debtor’s prison.

This was a blessing in disguise for the Nullzone Solutions survivors, as it meant that they were not enslaved, nor were they killed. Although the pirates certainly wanted to do that, it was far more profitable to get the cash bounty from turning debtors over to the UGN. So, the mercs found themselves locked in individual cells on a prison ship on its way to god knows where. Four months into the 80 system wide extension to the Proxy War, the Nullzone Solutions mercenaries were up shit creek without a paddle.

It seemed divine luck and mercy was on their side, however. When the Prison Ship suffered an accidental overload in one of its reactors, the vessel dropped out of hyperspace for repairs and ended up right next to not only a massive electromagnetic anomaly, but also an Arcadian battle group. Rather than taking the diplomatic option, the Prison Ship’s captain made the absolutely idiotic decision to open fire on the Arcadian fleet while trying to buy time for the repairs to finish.

Why he thought that provoking a full military fleet while trying to make repairs was a good idea, no one shall ever know, because due to his decision the Arcadian fleet sent out enough Mobile Suit Golems to not only overwhelm the prison ship’s defenses and weapons, but also overrun any meaningful defense inside the ship.

However, such a thing was not needed. The electromagnetic disturbance in the area had done more than merely disable the shields of all the ships in the immediate effective radius, it also tended to mess with the magnetic locks that kept the prison cells closed. This led to an all-out prison riot, where the guards were quickly overwhelmed by both the prisoners and the MSGs as they boarded

There was one group of convicts that did not do the stupid thing and try and fight the guards AND the MSGs at the same time. That group was the remnants of the Nullzone Solutions mercenary company. They took advantage of the confusion and snuck into the armory and then proceeded to barricade themselves in with all of the weapons, armor and supplies that were stored there. If they really wanted, they could hold out for weeks, but they knew they would not be able to do so if the Arcadians tore the ship to bits with their main weapons.

Thus, when the fighting died down, they did the smart thing and surrendered to the Arcadians as soon as the MSGs arrived. They figured that they would either be killed or imprisoned, just like before, but they were in for a surprise. They were the only cons to yield and were in fact the only people on the ship to give up at all. They were agreeable, and as they told the interrogators how they had ended up on that ship, the mercs slowly realized that they now had a chance to pay back their backstabbing employers in a way that no other merc company could ever dream of doing.

A few months later, in the very system that the mercenary company known as Nullzone Solutions had been destroyed in, the pirates and system government partied like it was 1999, completely oblivious to the menace that was preparing to take revenge.