Date Point: 14y2d AV
Three Valleys, Amanyuy Territory, Planet Gao.
Second Lieutenant (brevet) Martina Kovač
“…Do us proud, lieutenant. Stainless out.”
Marty sat back from the radio and let out a long, stress-filled breath. Powell’s orders had been no different than she’d expected and dreaded, but actually receiving them was a different matter.
Still. Seniority wasn’t a matter for debate. Not a single able-bodied officer had checked in so far from among *Caledonia*’s command staff. Maybe one would show up in the future, but here and now the job of making something functional out of this mess fell to the senior Enlisted. They had a Royal Marines corporal in the form of Ian Wilde, NATO code OR-4. They had Reactor Technician Saci Patel, also OR-4. And they had Technical Sergeant Martina Kovač, OR-6.
…Make that Second Lieutenant Martina Kovač. She was now, temporarily at least, an officer.
A voice spoke up from behind her. “Well. That puts me in my place.”
Marty turned away from the radio. Wilde gave her a nod. “…Ma’am,” he added.
“You heard him,” Marty stood up.
“Oh aye. You’re in charge. Better you than me…ma’am.”
“Any good news?”
“Well, we’re still just about on the right side of completely fucked. I was about to suggest we should send Williams and Hayes out to reccy the area.”
Only a Brit could turn ‘just about on the right side of completely fucked’ into an optimistic sentiment. They ought to be dead, given that one of the Hunters had been latched onto the hull only meters away when they started self-destructing. Wilde and his Marines had kicked a legendary degree of ass in their assault on the swarmship though, helped by how badly the Hunters had been burned by the SOR techs.
Marty was kinda proud of that. She’d had a hand in forging their own survival. It had made all the difference, and the swarmship latched to the hull meters away from her hadn’t, in fact, exploded.
If it had…well, she probably wouldn’t have felt anything.
A lot of *Caledonia*’s hundreds of crew hadn’t been remotely as fortunate. The efficient scramble to the lifeboats had been a testament to that—they’d had to force Patel to leave behind the dead colleague she was dragging, even though she kept insisting he was alive. She hadn’t taken that well, and was huddled under a thermal blanket by the lifeboat, staring at something far away.
Their supplies, meanwhile, consisted of a crate of rations, a water purification filter plus some pouches of drinking water, a half-dozen ammo cans, and the makings of a tent village. Standard lifeboat equipment and nothing more. There hadn’t even been time to grab the Crue-D, and that was a source of major regret.
And theirs was probably the best-placed lifeboat. It had landed safely and correctly in open terrain among farmland, in contact with command, and everybody on board was able-bodied. The other lifeboats were strung out to the east like beads on a macramé necklace, and most of them had wounded.
One of them carried the XO, Commander McDaniel, who’d be able to count it as a God-given miracle if she made it out the other end of this alive. From the sounds of things, her head injury was life-threatening.
“Do it,” Marty agreed. “We can’t stay here…the map says there’s what might be a small farming town about seven klicks south-west.”
“Yep. Around about where all that smoke’s coming from.” Wilde indicated a faint gray columnar stain on the horizon with a nod of his head. “Worth takin’ a shufty at that even if it just tells us where not to go, frankly.”
“Would it make more sense to send out two teams to gather more information, or keep them here for defense?” Marty asked him. Wilde gave it some thought.
“…What you don’t know will kill you,” he decided, after a moment. “If we see hostiles comin’, we can do something about them. Right now, we’re probably better off avoiding a fight if we can. I say scouts are more important than base defense.”
“Right.” Marty grabbed her tablet and scoured the regional map again. “Okay. One team to check out the smoke and that town, one team in the other direction…here.” Wilde leaned forward as she indicated her choice. “Looks like a farm.”
“Got it. Anything else?”
“Vehicles, if we can get them. Especially ones that can go cross-country. For carrying the wounded, the supplies, or hooking up with the other lifeboats…Preferably without antagonizing the locals.”
Wilde grinned at that and nodded, clearly approving.
“Okay. Alpha team to scout the town south-west, bravo team to scout east toward the farm. Avoid contact, report enemy movement, look for opportunities to boost vehicles if we can do it without pissin’ off the Gaoians,” he repeated. “Can do.”
“Go. I’ll work on getting our stuff ready to go,” Marty promised.
“Aye aye, ma’am.” Wilde gave her an encouraging grin, and bustled to work.
Marty rubbed her hands together for a moment, partly because they were threatening to shake but mostly because they were cold. She’d known Gao was a cold planet, but allegedly it was late spring locally. She doubted it was even fifty degrees.
She closed her tablet’s cover and hooked it back onto her gear, among everything else she was carrying. She wished some of that load could be armor, right now she felt exposed and vulnerable. But there just hadn’t been time.
At least her techs were mostly handling it fine. Like a well-oiled machine they’d rolled the pill-shaped escape vehicle back into its “upright” position and formed a human chain to empty out its small but efficiently packed lockers and cargo spaces. They’d all taken some bruises and knocks—Marty herself had a scab crusting in her eyebrow and no idea how she’d earned it—but considering that they’d bailed out of a tumbling, burning, disintegrating wreck of a two hundred meter warship, they were in fine condition.
Too bad they’d landed on the wrong continent, among endless square miles of farmland. They were in glacial terrain, if she was any judge, and the wide, shallow basin that those ancient ice fields had carved out obviously translated to fertile growing land…which for Gaoians largely meant animal feed. They were primary carnivores, after all.
The survivors were surrounded by green hay, in other words, and only the slight roll and elevation of the terrain let them see further than the nearest field.
Deacon saw her coming and stood up straighter, arching her back to work out the labor. Suit techs were toughened from the hard work of forcing HEAT operators into their suits anyway, but moving packs of survival gear around in a muddy field wasn’t quite the same thing. “Kovač,” she said. “Any luck?”
“I got through to Stainless,” Marty told her. “I’m a second lieutenant now, until we find somebody to take over from me.”
Doyle poked his head out of the lifeboat. “I heard that right? You’re an officer now?”
“Yup. Fall in, guys.”
They all dropped what they were doing and gathered round looking dirty, nervous and stressed, but alert and ready.
“The Marines are scouting the area,” Kovač told them. “There’s a town south-west, but judging from the smoke it could have a biodrone problem. If that’s the case, they won’t have missed our descent, and there could be hostiles en route as we speak. So we’re going to relocate. I want everything bagged up and ready to move ASAP. Corporal Wilde is my second.”
She saw them nod, and nodded herself. “We’re a team. Have been for years. We know how to work together and how to achieve results. We just keep doing what we’re good at, okay? Any questions?”
There was silence, and she nodded. “Okay. Go.”
She had a good team. The techs as one leapt into action, barely needing to confer to assign their responsibilities. A “you—” here, an “I’ll—” there, and they had a working structure figured out almost instinctively.
That just left Patel.
The diminutive British sailor still had blood in her clothes and hair, and it wasn’t hers. She’d obviously been listening despite her faraway expression though, because when Marty got close enough she looked up and made to stand.
“M-ma’am.”
That was a good sign. She might be trembling, shellshocked and grieving, but she was still functional. Marty let her stand up.
“If I remember correctly, the lifeboat’s batteries and field emitters can be scavenged for field use, right?” she asked.
Patel nodded. “Um… yes. Ma’am. They were designed for it.”
“You’re the reactor tech and electrician. Sounds like a job for you.”
It was amazing just how healing it was to have something constructive to do. A little life seemed to come back into Patel’s face. Her face lost some of that slack, shocked expression and she nodded solemnly. “Yes ma’am. I’ll dismount and pack them for transport right away.”
“Get Matthews to help if you need it. He’s a field emitter specialist.”
“I’ll do that,” Patel nodded again.
“Carry on.”
“Yes ma’am.”
God, being called ‘ma’am’ again felt weird. Marty wasn’t unused to authority, she was the NCO in charge of suit technicians and had worked in Space Command before the SOR after all, but there was a whole extra layer of deference in there now and it didn’t sit comfortably. She left Patel to get to work and surveyed around herself.
The Marines—Williams, Hayes, Hodder and Rees—were already gone, and Wilde had gone with alpha team, pausing now and then to check things out through his scope. The suit techs were efficiently dividing their survival resources for transport, and Patel had just popped a carbon-smeared ablative panel from the lifeboat to get at the electronics underneath.
Hopefully, Marty wasn’t doing too badly. But the real test, she knew, was still to come.
She took a deep breath and returned to her radio. It was time to start getting in touch with the other boats.
Date Point: 14y2d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm
Technical Sergeant Timothy “Tiny” Walsh
Walsh hated farewells—he’d said enough of them over the years. This one was probably the worst he’d ever done though, because Walsh wasn’t stupid and it was obvious to him exactly what Daar was about to wade into. Their time together as simple grunts on clear, easy-to-understand missions was over. Daar was leaving the team, probably never to return, and Walsh knew there was a very good chance they’d never see each other again.
Tigger had just died. In his place stood the Champion of Stoneback: warrior, protector, and a prince of the Gao, leader of its most ancient Clan. Walsh could scarcely comprehend the weight of all that resting on Daar’s broad back. Of course that had always been there in the back of everything, but friendship aside, Daar wasn’t on the team just because he wanted it. He was there to further the interests of his Clan and his people first and foremost. Against that, feelings and friendship took second place.
Duty called, and with it, Daar had changed entirely. He’d begged a full double dose of Crude off of Walsh, eaten like Warhorse, quietly slipped off to his tent and slept for nearly an entire day while encased in that incredible suit of his. He slept so long and deeply that Walsh checked in on him several times to make sure he still had a pulse.
At some point during the next evening he’d slipped out of camp when nobody was paying attention, stalked down toward the river and cleaned himself up. Right about when the camp had noticed his absence he’d returned with what remained of his possessions in a much lighter pack strapped onto his back, his eye-bending suit safely stored away for the moment. He padded back between the huts and tents as quietly as a panther and said nothing, just waited the long moment for everyone to notice.
The difference was…impressive.
Between the megadose of Crude, the damn near half a Werne he’d eaten, and whatever exertion that incredible suit of his demanded, Daar had recovered entirely and clawed himself not just back into fighting trim, but possibly into the finest fighting trim Walsh had ever seen in…well, practically anyone. Every line of his body—hell, his very being—radiated strength and crackled with the will and ability to fight.
He had reappeared at a standoffish distance and nobody said a word as they took in the depth of the change. Champion Daar had reinvented himself in mold of an avatar of retribution; strong, fierce, recharged and rejuvenated, his claws sharpened into razors and his fur cleaned up and shorn almost down to the skin.
And he was angry.
Walsh had only ever briefly glimpsed that darker side of the big furry dude, generally when he was fighting a Doom Noodle or maybe when he was especially annoyed at something. Those weren’t really serious moments, though; brief, white-hot flashes of a rage that Walsh could scarcely comprehend but they passed quickly, and were forgotten easily…
Not this one. Daar had gone right the way through rage and out into a calm place on the far side that would have given even Firth pause. His entire body was brittle with the kind of stillness that only the truly angered ever achieved. And he was absolutely, chillingly quiet and polite as he made the rounds and said his goodbyes.
It was the kind of rage that transcended species and everyone felt it in their guts. Julian shook hands carefully, Master Sergeant Coombes offered a polite nod and a salute. Vemik and the Singer both shied away and only approached when he patiently sat on his haunches and nodded respectfully towards Yan. Even Yan was being deferential, and discreetly kept himself between Daar and the villagers while they shared parting words.
Hoeff, though, he didn’t have time for that; he leapt up onto the big guy and offered him a hug. Daar returned it, gratefully, and that seemed to melt much of the tension out of the moment. Coombes shook his head and joined in, then Julian did too, then Yan and eventually Vemik…soon the entire village had mobbed him, pressed small trinkets and talismans into his paws, offered small prayers and their careful gratitude.
He handled it with grace and decorum, and offered his own words of thanks. But the rage in his soul had never lifted and everyone could see it.
Though of course, Daar wouldn’t have been Daar if he hadn’t found time to worry about his friends. He eventually broke away from the mob and padded over to Walsh on all fours, who had stayed aloof from the crowd to let them have their moment.
“You’ll be okay?” Daar asked. Everyone cleared away and gave them plenty of space.
“Bruh,” Tiny shook his head disbelievingly at the contrast of an enraged, caring friend. It was amazing, it really was. “We won this one. I just wish I was comin’ with ya.”
Daar didn’t react for a moment—he was clearly trying to control himself. At length he sighed, stood up on his legs and said, “I know. I couldn’t let you do that anyway.”
“Wishes ain’t there for the things we can do, bruh,” Walsh told him, quoting his grandmother. He put a hand on Daar’s shoulder, then hauled him into a huge rock-crusher of a hug. Daar returned it and nipped him gently on the ear; for Gaoians, that was a profound display of affection.
They were interrupted by the jump array’s alarm, letting them know that charging was complete and the window was opening in two minutes. The exchange from Cimbrean was going to bring a whole airdrop-worth of supplies their way, enough to comfortably set them and the natives up for months if that was how long it took before the situation chilled out and a more permanent solution became viable.
To Walsh, it may as well have been a death knell.
Daar did manage to force a little levity into the moment. “I wish I was helping you unload all that stuff you’re getting. You’re gonna be sore, Brother!”
Walsh scoffed. “Please, like your fuzzy butt wouldn’t be hurting too.”
Daar shrugged, “Never said it wouldn’t. You…you take care of them, okay?” He growled low, just for Walsh. “Especially Julian. He looks up to you.”
Walsh just nodded, and pulled apart from the hug. The rage settled on Daar again almost instantly. Honestly, it was terrifying. He stalked back a few steps to stand in the middle of the array, took one last look at them, and raised a paw to his chest in the Stoneback equivalent of a salute.
There was a thump, the unnatural light-sucking blackness of a stasis field flickered into and out of being for just a moment, and a stack of drab crates settled into the higher gravity with a creak. The first of many to come throughout the day.
Walsh sighed, looked at Julian and Yan, and looked back at the stack.
“Well,” he said. “I guess we better get to work.”
Date Point: 14y2d AV
Mayuy City, Planet Gao
Champion Genshi of Whitecrest
Mayuy was—had been—a wealthy city. It was Clan Goldpaw’s jewel after all, their hub, their throne. Any city that had been at the crossroads of so many different avenues for trade over the centuries couldn’t be anything less.
Three rivers and their associated canals flowed through it, into a bay that was just the most perfect natural harbor. To the north-west and south, the land was high enough above sea level to avoid even the fiercest weather, and firm enough for straight, wide roads that had stood there since before the great reformation.
Those rivers, flowing from the mountains to the north-east, brought copper, coal, iron and silver in ancient times, and in the modern age were still a rich source of rare earths and platinum-group metals. The highland slopes were perfect Naxas summer grazing, the warmer lowlands provided ample room for the flocks in the winter months, and the shallow seas had provided fishing for food and the stringy, fibrous sea plants that ancient Gaoians had used to make fabric and ropes.
By fortune, the flat terrain around the city itself had been perfect for later developments like airports, and the city was close enough to the equator to facilitate rocket-powered launches to orbit.
It was, in short, the perfect trading city. Other cities such as Lavmuy and Wi Kao may have had more cultural significance, others had been industrial powerhouses and centers of learning… but Mayuy had always been a city of stockhouses, the warehouse for Gao’s wealth.
Unsurprisingly, it had a lot of banks. And those banks, as all genuinely mercenary institutions should, provided discretion as part of their service.
Whitecrest did a lot of business with the Goldpaws.
Genshi’s private lockbox was one such item of business. He’d always intended it as a stop-gap measure, on the grounds that relying on the security provided by others wasn’t the Whitecrest way, in the long term. But in the short term, another Clan’s discretion and competence were a useful smokescreen.
He was quite certain that the Goldpaws had never found out what was in his lockbox. If they had, and if the information had filtered through to one of their augmented high-level account managers, the Mayuy Bank of Gao would already be a crater.
That didn’t mean it wasn’t enemy territory, however. The Hierarchy’s forces were ransacking the vaults in search of sensitive secrets to delete, and simply slipping their cordon had been a tall order to tax even Whitecrest’s best and bravest.
If not for some of the technology they had developed for the cross-species military program with the human SOR, it might have been impossible. Genshi wasn’t wearing a full suit like Regaari and his claw, but he had adopted something like a cloak. Hooded, swathed in light-bending fabric, shapeless so that from a distance in the urban landscape he’d look like just a chunk of rubble, or an item of furniture.
It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it was a solution. Perfection was a luxury, and a half-decent idea that worked, worked. Results were the important part.
For example: his lockbox. Which, yes, was in enemy territory rather than in Genshi’s paws right now which was less than ideal, but it was intact. It was safe.
In all the madness of the last two days, for something so vital to be definitively and definitely safe was a victory all its own, one which made the task of actually retrieving it feel like a formality rather than the whole battle.
But what a formality.
Genshi was using one of Whitecrest’s adaptations of Human weaponry. Acquiring the designs had been trivially easy—a lot of them were freely available on the Internet—and from there the Clan’s own smiths and engineers, plus their trusted Clanless associates, had keenly sought any opportunity to apply Gaoian technology to improving their performance.
It was the little things, really. The weapons themselves were already excellent, and all that the Clan’s efforts had achieved had been applying a few…tricks. Harder metal, lighter composites, an improved buttstock to fit Gaoian anatomy more comfortably. Advanced coatings on the interior surfaces that never needed cleaning or lubrication. Propellants that didn’t foul the weapon in the first place.
An automatic mode that never jammed.
The Hierarchy had suppressed these weapons. They took a species’ first bruising, dangerous forays into black powder technology then quietly nudged them into abandoning the whole idea as a fool’s enterprise. It was just another avenue of control, just another way of dumbing down the life forms under their thumbs…but it worked. The weapon in a warrior’s hand dictated how he fought. If he held a dumb weapon, he fought in dumb ways. If he held a precision weapon…
“Cubs play hunt. Mother’s asleep.”
Eight Brothers spread out around the bank all took their shot, including Genshi. His target stiffened from nerve trauma before slumping to the ground, utterly dead.
“New game.”
“Cubs play run.”
Out the window, anchoring a rope on the concrete as he went. Walk down the wall as though it was just a vertical floor with the reel on his belt whining softly while it held him against gravity. Reach the bottom, jump the last arm’s length to the ground, detach the rope. The moment it was detached, a chemical reaction aggressively ate the rope and reduced it to fine black flakes which blew away on the breeze, leaving no sign that it had ever been there.
Stick the rifle to his chest, four-paws, dash like a blur—and thank Regaari for finally convincing the Clan that being able to run efficiently trumped dignity when it came to getting the job done—across the street, against the wall, weapon back to ready.
Brother Fergiil was up against the far side of the door an instant behind him. The younger male’s eyes were shining with the thrill of a real operation—Nobody liked to admit there was a reason Whitecrest’s combat-cant played on childish themes, but the simple truth was that life-or-death firefights for the highest stakes were fun.
Killing was fun. Not a civilized thought…but the truth.
Fergiil slap-stuck a sensor bug to the bank’s doors, and looked through its eyes into the building’s shadowy interior.
“…Kitchen’s empty,” he reported.
Genshi duck-nodded sharply. “Cubs steal food.”
Mere hardened security glass was no impediment whatsoever to a Whitecrest with the correct tools, and within moments of the order being given the eight of them were ghosting across the bank’s stone tile floor, checking every shadow or potential hiding spot.
They cleared the room without incident.
“Suspicious,” Fergiil commented immediately. Genshi duck-nodded. The young Brother had good instincts.
“Sticks,” he ordered. They all drew a shieldstick from their harnesses and held them in their left paws, ready for immediate use.
Champions were leaders, not dictators. They held their position through being unafraid to do the same dirty work as the Clan’s most junior members, which was why Genshi took point between the glass consultation rooms at the back of the lobby, where the potential danger was at its closest.
The fact that he had the skills, experience and reflexes to survive if there was an ambush may have had something to do with it too. All of the brothers in his Claw were unaugmented and relatively young. They were well-trained and intelligent as a Whitecrest ought to be, but he was the only true veteran among them.
Which was why his shieldstick hit the ground and flared into life the instant he sensed movement where there shouldn’t be any. It was why the pulse shots splashed harmlessly against his freshly-deployed cover rather than pulverizing his bones and pulping his flesh. It was why the three biodrones that tried to kill him all went sprawling dead in the space of two seconds, each dropped by an efficient double-tap to center mass that sneered at their mere military-grade combat shield harnesses.
Fergiil and Yagu shot the last two, and a deadly ambush was over before it had even really begun. The biodrones were going to have to do much better than that to best a Champion.
“Playtime’s over. Cubs—kill.”
The power had failed and the lights were down, so with their cloaks the Claw were a ghostly wave among the shadows, crashing through, over and around anything that got in their way. Every Gaoian body in the bank that wasn’t a Brother died the instant there was a straight line between it and a Whitecrest.
Genshi could only see his Brothers by their infrared lasers in his goggles. Even when they fired their weapons, the flash was negligible.
In seconds, they were standing outside the vault. The Biodrones had been attempting fruitlessly to penetrate it with explosives and fusion cutters. The door was twice as thick as a Gaoian was tall, with subsurface forcefield reinforcement, sophisticated armor materials and the kind of metallurgy in its construction that had been impossible to Gaoian science even twenty years ago. Their efforts so far had ruined the Goldpaw livery painted on its surface and torn up the tiled floor in front of it, but achieved exactly nothing in regards to actually penetrating the vault.
Genshi simply entered the access code.
This was not entirely as straightforward a process as he might have liked, because one thing the drones had achieved was to completely demolish the control panel. In fact, it took nearly ten nervous minutes while Yagu excavated the shattered unit and replaced it with a portable unit that hopefully was up-to-date with Goldpaw’s security systems and wouldn’t inspire the vault to totally lock itself down.
Once that was installed, however, Genshi entered the access code, and the door opened outwards, toward them. No amount of explosives were ever going to smash it inwards thanks to its slight conical shape, but once opened correctly the door pushed itself outwards and rolled aside with little fanfare or difficulty. Fractured tiles crushed and splintered under its weight with a noise like an expensive accident in a plate factory.
They ignored the stacks of silver, the assorted land deeds, artworks and cultural artefacts. Perfectly unscathed historical treasures were snubbed, priceless artworks were disregarded entirely. Their goal was a black composite crate resting ignominiously in a corner. Not shoved there—Goldpaw bankers were far too proud to treat the treasures in their vaults with anything but reverence—but certainly not exactly in pride of place. If the vault was a private museum or art gallery, then Genshi’s crate was not in favor with the curator.
And that was exactly how Whitecrest liked it.
Its contents were three smaller boxes, with carrying handles and straps. Handing them out to the strongest Brothers was the work of seconds.
Genshi checked his timepiece. Four minutes ahead of schedule.
“Mother’s coming,” he said.
Seconds later, the vault was closing behind them, and once the small fusion charge they left behind went off the Hierarchy would never be able to find out what they had stolen.