Date Point: January 8, 2437, Three days before Greater Terran Union announcement.

Gyosincrance orbit over Terra

Unity Station

“We can not allow this attack to go unconfronted, they killed billions on Arcadia. Not to mention the hundreds of thousands that are going to die in the coming weeks as they leave warp space.” President Reyes said, the other six representatives shifted uncomfortably in their seats.

“Arthur,” Sani Mugabe, Marshal of the African Commonwealth asked, “what do you expect us to do? We can not take on the entire galaxy, we would be drowned beneath a sea of blood.”

“We do not need to fight the entire galaxy, we wouldn’t even need to fight the entire Senate, just the Rokorans and Stigarians.”

“President Reyes, I do not mean to insult but do you know what the political landscape looks like in the Senate?” President Zhang Fei asked in a slightly condescending tone, “The Rokorans dominate the intergalactic stage as the sole Class 17 space-faring species.”

Prime Minister Svetlana Volkova cleared her throat, “President Zhang is correct in that matter, the other races fear the Rokorans far more than they fear us and would have no qualms committing genocide against Terrans if it meant satisfying the Deathworlders.”

“President Zhang, what would you have us do then? Do you believe they will stop at just one planet?”

“The assault of Arcadia, while tragic, is no major concern of the Pan Asian Coalition. Until a PAC system is directly attacked, we will not join in any major military action,” he said in a tone of finality.

“That’s odd, seeing as there appears to be a disproportionately high number of ships arriving at Long Kou for repairs.” the Indian prime minister said.

“How might that be odd, Minister Abhishek? Long Kou is home to one of the largest shipyards outside of the Iron Belt. It is quite common for ships to conduct repairs in that system is it not?

“However large the shipyards are, I do doubt they are capable of repairing the entire 2nd Fleet in any reasonable amount of time,” Abishek said flatly and Zhang stiffened. He was about to reply when the mediator cut in.

“Let us bring the discussion back to the topic at hand.”

Arthur nodded to the mediator, “As I was saying if we do not retaliate against this attack they will only become more common. Most of the senate holds no major grudge against humanity and would have no reason to attack other than to keep the Rokorans at bay. However, if we do not act, then they may see us as weak and attempt to seize our land on their own self-interest.”

Over the course of the next two days, the members of the GTU hashed out a plan. Naval production was to be doubled within three months, reserves were to be activated, and the three remaining wormholes that led into Terran space were to be fortified as were the systems surrounding Arcadia. Ships would be pulled off the frontier with the Empire and sent to the wormholes.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

“Navigation, where's the nearest Terran outpost,” Michael ordered.

“Closest station is the Outlook on Forever in the Ganymede system, that is a three-day cruise through warp.”

“How long’s going to have passed on the other side?”

“Three days to two weeks.”

“That’s quite a bit of variation, you might want to get your drive coils checked out.” Oscar noted and the engineering chief glared at him.

“It’s not like ET’s got shipyards that fix them, stupid fuckers can’t even get warp drives to work when they buy the ships off of us.”

“Alright, get those guys squared away, for all intents and purposes their part of the crew as well now. Give them the rundown on the contract and figure out what they can do.” Michael said, two of the armored men saluted and started shuffling the survivors out of the bridge. They were taken out of the bridge and down three decks to their new quarters.

“Eight to a room, don’t get too cozy, you’ll be hot bunking tell we reach Ganymede.” one of the men said. Oscar shrugged and walked into one of the rooms, it was depressingly small. Each ‘bunk’ was really just a tub with a blanket in it with no space between them.

“This is unacceptable! I had a room to myself on the Lily.” a woman shouted at the marine, “I demand to speak to your superior officer!”

“Just choose a fucking room and quit complaining, it’ll only be for a couple nights,” he said shoving the woman away. Oscar sighed and tapped his watch, a holoscreen blazes to life in his hands. He swiped past apps and messages before opening his bank account to see it was still the same as it had been yesterday, 83,876 Terran Credits.

“Fuck!” he shouted, kicking the bulkhead, he was supposed to have been paid this morning. That was the entire reason he had left the ship in the first place, six months of pay lost. The captain had either assumed him dead and decided that he didn’t need to pay dead people or the ship was lost with all hands still on board. Therefore there was no one else to give him the money.

Oscar felt a hand on his shoulder, he turned around to find one of the marines, “Hey the captain wants to speak with you.”

“What is it this time?”

“I don’t know, maybe he’s going to pay you for saving his life, maybe he’s going to kill you, or maybe he’s gonna fuck you in the ass. The point is don’t ask questions and go to his office,” she said and gestured towards the lift with her thumb before walking past him.

“Hey,” Oscar said and the woman turned around.

“What?”

“Fuck you too,” he said and entered the lift.

Oscar walked into Michael’s office, a small room barely larger than a closet. Michael had his feet up on a desk, playing some sort of game when he entered. “Ah, just the man I wanted to see.”

“What’s up?”

Michael took his legs off the desk and gestured for him to sit, “so Oscar, I had Intel do some digging on you.”

Oscar shot out of his seat hand on his pistol but Michael just waved him back down, “relax man I’m not a cop.”

“So what do you know?” he said, sitting back warily in his chair.

“Let’s give it a run down shall we?” Michael grinned pulling a holoscreen up, “born on Atlas Station, orphaned at the age of two, raised in one of the military wards. Got booted out at fourteen due to budget constraints, disappeared for four years before magically reappearing and signing on to a cargo ship headed towards ET space.”

“Sounds about right,” Oscar looked up nonchalantly, “let me guess, you want to know where I was for four years right?”

Michael waggled his eyebrows, “Eyup.”

He shook his head, “I didn’t disappear anywhere, I took a job as a miner in the belt. Long story short, turned out the company was a front for some gangs and when the IRS caught on, they took down all our records to be audited and they lost them or some shit. You can look it up on the database when we get to Outlook.”

“Mhm,” he said, pulling up another screen, it showed a picture of Oscar with a short girl with pink hair on one side and brown on the other. Slung across her shoulder was a massive red sword almost as tall as she was. “So then who’s that?”

“Jesus Michael! Where the fuck did you find that?” Oscar shouted.

Michael gave him a sly smile, “what can I say, my guys are good. Now answer the question.”

Oscar sighed, there was no lying his way out of this one, “That would be Stephanie Slater.”

“Slater huh? Now, what would you be doing with the daughter of one of the most dangerous men in Terran space?”

“That’s none of your business.” he snapped.

“Seeing as you’re on my ship, it is my business and unless you want to be on the outside of it while we are still in warp I suggest you tell me.”

“Fine.”

“Oh, also I know you’re lying about being a miner.”

“Fuck.”

“Anytime’s good.”

He took a deep breath, “we’re going to be here for a while.”

Oscar watched the plaza nursing his black eye, he was lucky to have gotten away without any real damage. His other three companions had been beaten and dragged off to the station police.

“Well, at least they’re going to be sleeping on a real bed tonight,” he thought as his stomach grumbled. It had been three weeks since he had been kicked out of the ward. Three weeks of fighting, stealing and hiding. Fighting the other homeless bums, stealing from the well off, and hiding from the cops. Oscar lived off of the meager 1200 thousand calories a day that came out of a box of Basic Nutrition Allowance rations. The only thing he could buy with the little money he could get. Already, his body was starting to thin and the muscle mass he had maintained throughout his time in the ward was deteriorating.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a girl. She was short, barely five feet tall, slim of build, and multicolored hair. She walked aimlessly through the crowd reading a book. Oscar noted the expensive shoes and necklace. Normally he would have been appalled by the thought of stealing from such a person but these were not normal times.

“It’s not like I’m going to hurt her or anything. I’ll just bump into her, nick her holodeck and buy myself some rations or a jacket, or a knife.”

Oscar weaved between the mass of human bodies and got close enough to see her face clearly. Her eyes were also mismatched and they sparkled with mischief as they flicked up to meet his before returning to her book. He gulped and steeled his nerves.

Walking into the girl, he flicked on hand down grabbing her holodeck out of her pocket while pressing his leg against hers. Oscar pulled it out, pretended to stumble and tossed it to his other hand, and melted back into the crowd. Or he would have if he hadn’t felt a hand latch onto his neck and lift him into the air.

“Now what do we have here?” A deep cockney accent asked, “Tryna steal from my daughter are ya?”

“No sir!” Oscar yelped as the man gave him a good shake. He reached back and put both his hands on the man’s wrist trying to get free.

With his other hand, the man fished the stolen holodeck out of his pocket.

“Fuck, this isn’t good.”

“So not only did you steal from me, you're also lying to my face as well now are we?” the man said in a disapproving tone. “What’s ta stop me from reporting you to the police?”

Oscar’s eyes widened with panic. If the cops found him, they’d send him straight off to some hell hole planet in the Iron Belt where he’d never be seen again. He dropped one hand to his belt where a small make-shift shank was fastened, pulled it out, and stabbed the man through the wrist. Severing the tendon and forcing the man to drop him, “You little shit!”

Landing on his feet, Oscar scrambled away from the hulking man.

“Burn in hell asshole!” he laughed, looking back towards the man. He turned back around just in time for a fist to meet his face.

“Oooh, that’s going to leave a mark.” The heterochromatic girl said gleefully in a voice not dissimilar to Mary Poppins. Oscar rolled over groaning, and the girl leaned down and picked her holodeck out off the ground.

“Fucking wanker,” the man muttered wrapping his tie around the bleeding hand, “I’ll have you strung up by your bollocks for that!”

“Now father, there is no need for that.” she hummed, “I believe his attempt was quite skillful, you could use a boy like him.”

The man huffed, “We’ll see about that, get the bastard up and find him something to eat.”

“Wait let me get this straight,” Michael asked, “you unknowingly tried to rob the daughter of Dylan Slater, the kingpin of the inner belt?”

“Yeah, not my smartest move.”

“How are you still alive, I’ve heard he kills people for looking at him the wrong way and you got away with stabbing the man?”

“I guess I got lucky that Steph was there, she’s the one who kept me from getting curb stomped or being sent to some industrial cesspit.”

“Well in that case, it seems I’ve got nothing to worry about from you. So as long as you do as you're told during a firefight, then I really don’t give a shit what you do and my offer to join my crew still stands.”

“About that,” Oscar said scratching the back of his head, “I think I might take you up on it.”

“Oh? What’s with the change of heart.”

“I am officially unemployed now and I never got paid for my last job, think my employer kicked the bucket.”

“I see,” Michael said, pulling up a contract sheet, “Holodeck please.”

Oscar presented his watch and opened a screen, a page of thick official-looking text appeared. “So give me the rundown on what’s going on here.”

“You know how most pirate crews work right?” At Oscar's head shake, he explained, “so profit is measured in shares. Each crewmember gets one share, then another half share for each job they specialize in such as navigation, engineering, that sort of thing. The captain gets another two shares, and the medics also each get another full share.”

“And how much might each share be?”

“That really depends on how well the job goes, if we end up doing a cake run then each share could be well over 50,000 TC’s. But if we end up in a fight and the ship gets damaged or we take casualties, there is a chance that none of us end up getting paid.”

“Right, give me a moment to read all this,” Oscar said and scanned the text, after more than half a decade contracting he had learned to read the fine print before signing anything. At the end, he signed his name to the bottom and sent the page back to Michael.

“Terrific,” Michael rubbed his hands together before offering it to him, “welcome to the crew. We’ll get you set up in your own quarters by the end of third station.”

Oscar wondered what he had just gotten himself into as he entered his new quarters. It was less than half the size of the one he would have been sharing but since he was the only person using it, it was rather spacious. A standard tube bed was pressed against one of the bulkheads with a tiny closet and a nightstand in the other. There was a communal bathroom down the corridor that the entirety of deck two would share. A thought hit him and Oscar paled visibly. “Why would you decide now’s the time to join a mercenary crew, you idiot? The Union’s at war!”

Someone thumped on the door and Oscar opened it, a squat man with a very impressive red beard stood on the other side.

“You Oscar Irons?” he asked with a thick belter accent.

“That’s right, what’s going on?”

“I’m the quartermaster of the Mistral, Captain wants me to find out what you can do so get your lazy ass out here and don’t even think about taking stims beforehand.”

“Stims?” Oscar blinked, “why on earth would I ever want to take stims?”

The quartermaster scowled at him, “Are you stupid or something? Were you dropped as a baby? What a dumb-ass question, stims’ll give you a substantial boost almost every way you absolute ‘tard.”

“Good lord, who pissed in your coffee?” Oscar muttered under his breath.

“What was that?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Oscar said before walking out into the corridor, the quartermaster grumbled something before following. “So quartermaster, do you have a name?”

“Yes.” there was an awkward silence until they reached the elevator, “deck five.”

Oscar frowned, “That’s a really weird name.”

The man glared at him and he shrugged, the ride down was completely silent save for the hideous elevator music. Deck five was the largest of the nine, a track ran down the length of it, right above the MARS cannon. The cafeteria, gym, and shooting range were also housed there.

“So, I’ve taken a look at your file.” the quartermaster said, “looks like you're already EVA licensed so that’s less work for me. You worked in space traffic control and from what Michael tells me, you can handle yourself in a fight.”

“I’ve been in my fair share.”

“Sure, so can you fix shit?”

“That’s a rather broad range of things,” Oscar said dryly.

“Ship’s parts,” the quartermaster said, listing off a bunch of fancy technical names.

“That would be a hard no.”

“I knew you were absolutely useless.” he muttered before pointing towards the range, “I want to see how good of a shot you are.”

The shooting range was really just a virtual reality playground at the tip of the ship. The quartermaster handed him a fancy-looking rifle, “This is a GS3-T, the t stands for training meaning it won’t fire actual rounds. This is the weapon of choice on this ship, it ain’t cheap but it’ll put most things down in a few rounds.”

Oscar inspected the gun, turning it in his hands and noting its substantial weight, “this thing’s like twelve kilos, how the hell am I supposed to carry it?”

“You have got to be one of the stupidest motherfuckers I have ever met.” he said shaking his head, “Marines wear power armor so weight isn’t going to be an issue.”

“Right so am I going to be running some scenarios or how’s this going to work?”

“I’m going, to be honest with you bud, you’re probably going to end up as the marine combat controller. So that means most of the time you’ll be holding choke points against pirates on cargo ships. Which means most of your training will be defense simulators.”

He nodded, “I can get behind that, so what’s a combat controller do?”

“We can get into that after I assess your shooting.”

Oscar nodded and the lights flickered for a moment before the scenery changed. He found himself in a hallway with three entrances on the other side about a hundred feet away. “Goal, hold out for as long as possible.” a computerized voice said before a countdown appeared in the middle of the hallway.

Hefting the rifle up with an audible grunt, Oscar turned the fire selector to semi and found a concealed space behind one of the bulkheads. It probably wouldn’t stop any of the rounds but it was the thought that counts. A boom erupted from the other side and the lights went red as smoke billowed into the hallway, “Hull breach detected, sealing bulkheads.”

A tall, lanky, blue alien burst out of the smoke, kinetic energy weapons spraying the hallway. Oscar scrunched as close together before leaning his head out and lining up the sights. He pulled the trigger and a red tracer illuminated the corridor before sinking inside the ET. A few moments later there was a wet splat as blue-green chunks made a modern art masterpiece across the walls. Squeaks of alarm sounded from the other side as other aliens witnessed the fate of their buddy. Realizing that there were more, Oscar flipped the selector to full auto and braced the gun against the wall. He fired a long burst of tracers that disappeared into the smoke.

“HAHAHA GET SOME YOU FUCKS!” he laughed and sent another burst. The squeaks stopped for a heartbeat before Oscar heard something hit the ground in front of him. He looked down and saw a weird triangular pyramid. “Oh shit.”

The world went white and he felt like icepicks had been rammed into his ears, he screamed, hitting the deck pounding his head into the ground to try and get the ringing to stop. The simulation stopped and slowly Oscar’s vision returned.

“Well, I’m not going to lie, that was absolute garbage.” the quartermaster said disappointedly.

“You never told me they were going to have flashbangs!” Oscar shouted. “I would’ve been perfectly fine if I had a suit of armor or hell, even an EVA helmet.”

“Whatever, I’ve seen enough.” he said typing a message on his holo, “go report to Gunnery Sergeant Graves and try to stay alive for longer than a month, or not I’m ok with getting extra pay.”