AN: Wow. Almost 130 followers, and the story clocked 3.000 views in about a week. I have had longer stories up for over a year who don't get that kind of coverage and readership. Huh. Anyway, this kind of support is really, really appreciated. Thank you all, from the silent reader to the most active reviewer. Keep it up.
Oh, by the way. Any mention of time in the "Council" sections refers to the galactic timetable. So, one minute = 100 seconds. If someone knows of some handy software for the conversion between our time and theirs, I'd really appreciate a link, thanks.
The Lily Bowen's superstructure shook even as its shields absorbed and deflected the kinetic impactors. Still, the overhead lights turned the blaring red of emergency life-support for a moment due to energy loss, then switched back to white a moment later as the systems and operators compensated. Contrary to all of his expectations, Oleg Petrovsky found himself still alive.
"Status report!" he bellowed.
"Energy shields at thirty-eight percent power, sir," Kyle reported earnestly, anticipating the recovering Sensors' officer. "The enemy ships tried to gut our engines with mass-accelerated fire. Port-side, destroyer Twin Mothers is adrift venting atmosphere, three more corvettes destroyed or dead in the water. Starboard, fleet's two corvettes down, one's venting atmosphere but operational. Our point defenses were overwhelmed by volume, but they cut down eighty-nine percent of their missiles. I'm picking up localized fields of irregular gravitational distortions upon the sites of impact. The damage is extensive but superficial, the gravity rifts just ripped off our armor so far. ED-E swarm-bots and MBFs are taking off now, no enemy fighter inbound. Main cannon is ready to fire, firing solutions locked."
Petrovsky nodded, somewhat bewildered. The losses were heavy, but he'd expected to hear of total, crippling annihilation, or rather, hear nothing at all.
It was clear these xenos were no zetans. Their MAC fire was effective, more so than any brief attempt made by R&D that he knew of, but they didn't hold a candle to Motherships and prism cannons. The zetans wouldn't have left anything capable of flight, much less returning fire.
"All ships, CASABA out, cold launch! Main guns, fire at will!"
The carrier-cruiser shuddered as its hull flared and its plasma thrusters engaged, re-aligning the ship towards its target. Then a tight beam of deep purple light, focused by magnetic lensing running the near-entire length of the carrier, erupted from the ship's spinal gun. It covered the thousands of miles between the SCDF's flagship and the port-flanking ships almost instantly, and hit one of the avian-like cruisers on the prow.
To Petrovsky's diminishing surprise and growing sense of vindication, no energy shield lit up to interpose between the beam and the ship's hull. The laser lance impacted the cruiser with tens of kilotons of energy in an area not two meters in diameter. Exposed to several times the maximal heat transfer indicated by the manufacturers' specifics, the xenos cruiser's low-conductivity ablative armor exploded into a cloud of plasma within nanoseconds, and so did the first few million atomic layers of the hull proper.
The plasma, several times hotter than a star's surface, melted the delicate circuitry regulating the cruiser's systems, from heat-managing to point-defense, as well as its fuel lines. It pressed inwards, and as the hull's layers were blasted off, some of the photons' heat converted into kinetic energy, warping and pushing on the underlying structures.
Despite the entire cruiser's length there to disperse the impossible heat, the plasma melted through the bridges in a matter of seconds, until it reached the ship's drive core, piercing its shielding. With the Eezo driven up to critical as the cruiser still tried to charge another MAC shot, the failure of the magnetic containment caused it to detonate violently.
The back of the cruiser was shredded open in a deflagration that further destabilized the ship's antiprotonic engines, triggering the final step of a chain reaction that annihilated the ship into warped space debris and bursts of gamma rays. Eight thousand kilometers away, the after-image of the cruiser's explosion was immortalized by the Lily Bowen's sensors, and from there burned into Petrovsky's eyes.
Assuming the xenos even possessed eyes like normal human beings, that explosion would have blinded anyone near a window.
The three remaining SCDF destroyers hit and killed two enemy counterparts between them, neatly bisecting one in two halves before its failing core shredded it into space dust. The corvettes' plasma engines flared and the fast, lightweight, heavily automated ships closed the distance. Their Tesla cannons powered up just outside of CASABA-range, gutting engines and raking the enemy crafts with deep gauges, venting aliens and atmosphere alike.
Then the CASABA torpedoes' engines engaged, and the missiles silently screamed forward both lines of the xenos fleet, enveloped in protecting swarms of ED-E decoy swarm-bots.
The xenos' armaments might be subpar to the zetans, but there was no denying they knew how to use them for effect. The destroyer-class charged forward in wolf-packs and fired another volley into the still maneuvering human-vessels, exploiting their superior numbers to overwhelm the energy shields by concentrated volume of fire.
The Lily Bowen shook violently and Petrovsky wasn't thrown off his feet only on grounds of his artificial arm clasping on the holomap. Many hurrying crewmembers on the deck and more throughout the ship weren't so lucky, and the flurry of communications ground to a brief halt as the cruiser's hull screeched.
With Kyle busy with managing the fighters and what ECM/ECCM he could through laser pointers and infrared, it was a human voice who rattled the tally.
"Shields down! Breach in sector eight, venting atmosphere! Starboard point defense turrets from six to nineteen damaged! Blast doors sealing the area off! The port-side formation is collapsing, only destroyer Ouroboros still operational!"
As he spoke, the CASABA torpedoes and the decoys entered the xenos' point-defense range. Over the holomap and the sensors' energy readings, Petrovsky watched apprehensively as the signatures of the swarm-bots were scythed down by the dozens by the enemy's red laser grid, inefficient by human standards but still highly effective, especially with overlapping coverage from the wolf-packs. Several torpedoes stopped dead or careened off target as well, their targeting systems or engines damaged despite the reinforced shells.
Then the first torpedo struck one of the destroyers' kinetic barriers in the main enemy fleet, and the map blazed alight with the sudden energy spike from the detonating thermonuclear shaped charge.
Petrovsky smiled grimly.
The latest iteration of the oldest weapon in the Alliance's space arsenal proved to be utterly devastating once more. The missile itself not substantially bigger than the swarm-bots on decoy duty, the CASABAs' on board computer registered the impact with the ships' kinetic barriers, and triggered the primary implosion fission bomb, which in turn set off a subsequent fusion reaction.
The cascade of reactions happened in a matter of nanoseconds, generating several hundred kilotons of pure energy and radiation The CASABA's inner beryllium oxide channel filler converted most of the x-rays into heat and channeled that energy to the fore, where a large fraction the thermal energy was transferred to a propellant of deuterium.
The result was a narrow cone of particles just over sixty-thousand degree Celsius that lanced like the fury of the Founders towards the xenos' ships at well over ten thousand kilometers per second. Devised to break through zetan energy shields and damage Mothership hulls, the particle shot overloaded the kinetic like they weren't there and continued on to obliterate the targeted ships. The triggered drive core containment failures and engines instability finished the work, swatting more than a dozen ships out of existence in mere moments.
"CASABA hitting for effect all over the enemy's formations! Port-side flankers annihilated to a ship, main enemy formation in disarray!"
"Press the advantage! Kyle, focus the MBFs on the enemy's flagship! Restrict the firing solutions, I want that ship intact!"
The remains of the Shanx-Xi Colonial Defense Fleet endured more losses by another full torpedo salvo from the fish-like heavy cruiser. They answered with laser and Tesla shots against its remaining escorts or precision shots at the nacelle points, while Kyle altered the course of the Modular Bird Fighters through their Integrated Synth Piloting Systems.
Unhindered by the inherent frailty of a biological pilot, the MBFs dived through the point-defense fire of the cruiser with high-g turns and a coordination unmatched even by the best fighter squadrons in pre-Alliance days. At Kyle's command, the twin LAER Pulse-Laser Gatling Batteries on every fighter's underbelly opened up on the heavy cruiser. Hundreds of purple streaks impacted the outer plating, leaving only shallow gauges.
"The flagship's hull composition is different, sir," Kyle reported through his interface back on the Lily Bowen's deck. "Some form of layered carbon nanotubes sheets, highly resistant to heat. Damage's minimal. I'm passing for another strafing run, but the corvettes' Tesla lances might prove more effective."
"Focus on crippling its engines," Petrovsky reiterated as the last few enemy escort elements were mopped up by the remains of his fleet,"I'll prepare a boarding party. Captain Taylor, bring your wing around to the Relay's exit zone. If the flagship tries to run for it, gut it before it links up with the Relay."
As he'd expected, less than a minute later, after another ineffective fighters' sweep and a smaller third torpedo salvo, which was blown apart by the focused fire and point defense of his fleet, the Sensors officer alerted him of a building Dark Energy signature from the heavy cruiser.
Oleg felt a spark of envy: Engineering told him it was still another nine minutes before the Lily Bowen could jump to FTL again. The xenos' cruiser, a ship of superior tonnage, had a drive core at least twice as effective as one of the Alliance's line vessels, if not more.
With such speed and tactical elasticity at their disposal during the Wars, the Alliance's heinous losses in every major engagement against the zetans would have been reduced exponentially. The numbers of lives spared in the centuries of conflict, both in terms of ship crews and glassed colonies, was beyond Petrovsky's mathematical talents to quantify.
Suddenly, securing prisoners through the boarding action became a more pressing priority. Besides the cruiser's armor, the xenos' ships were inferior to their Alliance-equivalents in weapons, armor and energy efficiency, but even with those disadvantages, their superior FTL speed and maneuverability almost ended the battle before it started.
'Intelligence better break the prisoners and translate their language fast.' Oleg brought up his Pip-Boy and commed the marine detachment leader, ordering her to assemble boarding parties in the cargo bay. He waited for the acknowledgment ping, then brought up Governor Marcus' contact just as the enemy cruiser jumped.
Then the Sensors officer, her voice starting to grow rough, shouted in horror, "Sir! Relay's powering up again! Incoming signatures number in the -"
"Founders…"
Hundreds of enemy ships jumped into the system with minimal drift in formation, their weapons hot. Only Petrovsky's considerable experience and training allowed him to keep his composure as the preliminary sensor sweeps flowed in, together with the delayed report of every ship in Captain Taylor's wing being utterly destroyed by the enemy's opening salvo.
There were hundreds of destroyer-equivalents and sixty-six cruiser-equivalents, as well as almost a hundred minor crafts whose superstructure hinted at being troop transports, enough to field a planetary invasion. Then thirty-two heavy cruiser equivalents, all of them sharing in the avian-raptor-like design, and sixteen larger ships with twin spinal cannons and of comparable tonnage to a Mothership, though they had over a hundred meters in length to it.
What made Petrovsky's blood turn to ice were the six even larger ships, their tonnage only comparable to the theorized but never implemented dreadnought-class of Alliance Ships. Such large, lumbering beasts would have only made for prime targets for the zetans, against whom the age-old wisdom of high-mobility warfare held true: the best defense was not to be hit.
Right now, however, that didn't look like a feasible option. Nor was good ol' fashioned ramming, not with the FTL drive still recharging.
As Kyle reported his fighters shot down by such a fire volume not even his superior automated coordination could compensate for more than a few seconds, Marcus' green face winked on one of the screens, tight but unperturbed. He didn't even ask: the planet's ARCHIMEDES defense grid had enough sensor suites to pick up just what had jumped into the system.
"I've sent one last comm-burst to Alliance Command. Relay-01's shut down now. It ought to stop them for a while," Marcus informed him matter-of-factly.
The Lily Bowen shuddered as its spinal cannon sent a solitary deep purple beam towards the battle line of the alien fleet. A twinge of hope and satisfaction lightened his heavy heart as one of the dreadnought-equivalents took the hit and started venting atmosphere from a nasty breach, yet kept on moving regardlessly.
Whoever the Alliance sent to relieve the system could take them, if they had enough ships. If the enemy didn't send more reinforcements. If.
It took three shots from a heavy cruiser equivalent to strip the Lily Bowen of its recharged energy shields. To Petrovsky briefly-lived surprise, the next shot didn't kill the ship, but only its engines, leaving it dead in the water and drifting as the artificial gravity failed and the emergency life-support engaged. The next few shots from lighter ships opened a few other breaches and compromised structural integrity, but also shut down the last point-defense systems
It wasn't really a surprise when Kyle reported incoming enemy smaller crafts. A boarding action. Of course.
"All hands, arm up for xenos' boarding action," Petrovsky ordered to his crew and the Ouroboros', the last remaining destroyer, in a very similar situation to the Lily Bowen. "Kyle, wipe all comms and navigational logs, every mention of Earth and the inner colonies, then prepare to enact the Poseidon Contingency on all ships. The Lily Bowen and the Ouroboros will act as field tests against the alien boarding forces. Once they overwhelm us, send all information to Shan-Xi Command, overload the cores, and jettison out."
"Sir, there could be survivors. The Four Laws -"
"- bind you to protect humanity, as a whole. If these xenos share even half a mind with the zetans, those people are better off dead, and they know it."
Kyle hesitated, then gave a very human nod of capitulation and winked out.
Petrovsky turned to Marcus. "Bleed them dry, old boy. Petrovsky, out."
As the Ninth Council Defense Fleet rearranged around Relay 314's exit zone and deployed comm-buoys for the Turian military leadership to coordinate back to the Citadel and the Hierarchy about the new developments, a single shuttle slipped out of the salarian Stealth Frigate SSF Mauvai, a ship that, by all official accounts, neither existed nor was attached to the Ninth, unlike its more overt corvette counterpart.
The shuttle, its presence concealed by the same bleeding-edge lithium heat-sink technology and mimetic painting as the Mauvai, drifted the few kilometers to the wrecked alien ship on its secondary thrusters. Bringing the transport's port side up to the rather massive hole left by a turian cruiser on the ship's starboard, the pilot expertly matched the wreck's rotation, double-checked all systems to remain nominal, and flipped a switch.
In the passenger area, a blue light switched on.
Jormol Tuvai rose a digit to his omni-tool and opened a secured comm channel with the Muvai.
"Squad Leader Jormol to Overseer Anoleis. Shuttle's in position, squad's ready for boarding and artifact recovery. Permission to proceed?"
"Permission granted," came the clipped answer.
Jormol's helmet HUD flashed with the confirmation pings from the dozen salarians in the form-fitting gel seats all around him. On the top left corner, above the basic readings from their suits, a small timer ticked down the seconds.
Get in, bag everything, and get out without leaving a trace. All in forty-two minutes, by Overseer Anoleis' estimates and orders. It'd be a tight op, but crucial for the Union. More personally, Jormol knew his and everyone's breeding contract back home likely depended on it. No Dalatrass would accept a failure to father even a single egg, much less a proper hatch or a fertilized female.
The atmosphere was vented out and the side hatch slid open without a sound. One by one, the STG team engaged their zero-g thrusters. They drifted out of the shuttle and into the alien vessel, eyes twitching and blinking in every direction to take in as much detail as possible for their enhanced senses, heat and EM scanners out to pick up any trace of alien survivors the Muvai's sensors may have missed.
They found none.
The wreck Overseer Anoleis selected had bordered on the lower limit of the frigate classification, but that hardly mattered when it packed energy weapons decades, even centuries ahead of even the most advanced STG prototypes. Any information, data, or samples of that technology ranked first in Jormol's list of priorities, and despite the rather annoying complication of a different tech base, the salarian Squad Leader had no intention of coming back empty-handed.
The team's entrance point led them into an utilitarian middle deck, as far as scans could tell. The area seemed to serve as a mess hall once, considering the over abundance of cutlery floating listlessly and the blasted bolted half of a table. The kinetic slug had punched through the ship midsection from bulwark to bulwark, nearly breaking it in two and leaving rather typical kinetic damage in its wake. The crippling hit, however, had left the core and engine sections largely intact, if unable to operate due to lack of a working crew and superstructural damage: subjecting the hull to the push of the thrusters would probably finish ripping it in half, Jormol considered quickly, alien alloy and design or not.
Several unsealed side doors led into bunk rooms, toilets, storage spaces, and even what looked like a common room for the crew. Further down the main aisle spanning most of the broken deck, a row of escape pods lined one side, none of them activated or used. The Ninth Fleet's attack had been too sudden and overwhelming.
They found the first bodies almost immediately. Jormol got a good look on one of the most intact specimen, finding the general anatomical structure rather similar to the asari, though the extensive decompression and kinetic damage made further field examination only a pointless waste of time. Curiously, however, they did present gender dichotomy.
More importantly, the dead carried weapons. Intact weapons. Jormol took in the compact structure of a sidearm, a mix of light polymers and metals, the surface sleek even as the structure remained somewhat bulky. He removed some form of battery or feeder from a slot in the side of the gun and ran a scan with his omni-tool on the small device. He almost dropped it - or rather, let it drift - when the readings a rather absurd amount of energy contained and shielded in a cylinder half as long as his shortest digit.
He was thankful for the darkened plate of his helmet: his excited, almost giddy expression at the moment would have been rather unprofessional by any STG standard. Salarians ought to be better than the lustful asari and the turians, with their melodramatic intensity and shallow facade of emotional control, but...
This! This kind of weapon and shielding technology, in the span of a few years of intense reverse-engineering even by salarian standards - maybe even within his own lifetime! - was bound turn the galactic balance over its head like even the geth or the krogan hadn't. And this time, it'd turn into the Union and the Council's favor.
The best part was, he'd yet to move past the crew deck, or get onto the alien's planet. Jormol felt sincere admiration for these aliens: their practical sense and ingenuity was almost salarian, never mind the horrfying results of throwing WMDs around like a batarian at an auction for asari maidens. It was almost too bad they'd either be exterminated for the multiple violations of Council law, or vassalized by either the turian or the asari, both of whom would proceed to smother this new race out of envy, fear, or simple interest.
The ticking digits of the timer ended that little lapse of focus. Jormol had his team bag everything - weapons, ammo, corpses, armor, the alien's wrist computers, a rather curious electronic appliance that could well be a food bioprinter from its placement, drifting fragments of the unknown outer hull material, even food samples and random entertainment articles for the newts down at biotechnologies and xeno-sociomanipulation.
He left the three youngest Operatives to cart everything back into the shuttle and was about to split his squad, one team to the command deck to gather sensitive data and one below, to the weapon systems, engineering, and possibly an armory, when Operative Fess spoke over the squad-comms.
"Squad Leader, I'm picking up heat signatures from two decks below. Intensity and concentration match GARDIAN point-defense more than fuel flares."
Jormol's blinking rate increased as he thought. The ship wasn't under attack. No heat signatures corresponding to life. Automated defense system in halls? What, or who, had triggered them? Council scavenger teams were still safe margin of time out. Maybe the aliens were cold-blooded? Hard to say at first glance. Vacuum cooled the bodies considerably. Blood was red, high hemoglobin concentrations from omni-tool scans, but that meant little. No, wasteful thought, scans picked up any heat signature above space backdrop. Advanced insulation systems, like STG's hardsuits? Possible. Weapons suggested advanced but cheap heat management tech, could diversify in applications. Had heat signatures another origin then... a trap, perhaps?
Jormol put those lines of thought on hold for the moment. Too many variables, not enough information.
"Overseer, Squad Leader here. Possible alien contact scenario in the ship, lower deck."
"Scans' accuracy is disturbed by hull material," Anoleis answered immediately. "Proceed. If contact's made, attempt to subdue, otherwise eliminate. Fourth Squad's on standby for hot insertion."
Jormol lids twitched in annoyance. He wouldn't allow someone else to steal his accomplishments. "I read. Second Squad's proceeding. Jormol, out."
Jormol and the rest of his squad assumed a fast-sweeping formation and ignited their jet thrusters, angling down through the damaged section of the floor leading down to the deck below. From there, they briefly navigated the area until they found the elevator shaft, cut through the doors with a plasma blowtorch, descended another level, and repeated the process.
Turian boarding teams would have moved in slow, thundering units, checking every room along a single vector and maintaining a massive volume of fire and bodies to overwhelm any oppositions. An avalanche, sweeping the ship from one end to the other.
STG doctrine was different in these scenarios, especially time-sensitive ones. Salarian physiology and mentality just didn't mesh well with stationary fighting and damage-absorption, something that their bleeding-edge shield and omni-armor tech only partially circumvented. Moreover, time was of the , Jormol picked a fast and aggressive approach, splitting into two teams for converging fire lanes, trusting their heightened reflexes and sensor suites to give them just the second needed to react concertedly to any emerging threat.
The heat detectors guided them unerringly and they converged into the main hallway leading into the largely intact engineering bay housing the eezo core. The ascertained minimal risk of containment failure, together with the wreck's position, had been Overseer Anoleis' main reason for ignoring one of the larger frigate-equivalents and boarding this wreck instead.
As it turned out, the core bay was indeed intact, but not accessible. Whatever mechanism operated the reinforced blast door wasn't working, but a swarm of little robots and larger ones was hard at work cutting through it with dozens of lasers and making great progress on it by all means.
"Contact. Unknown drones. Energy weapons and armor plating. They're attempting to access the drive core."
The line remained silent for a long moment, giving Jormol time to observe the drones better. A round chassis with minute, directional thrusters, they came in two varieties. The smaller models, half the size of a biotiball sphere, had a lightly armored chassis with minute pronged appendages attached around a non-functional grill-shaped front. They were the ones doing most of the cutting, a deep purple laser firing in a thin, steady beam from the underside of their chassis. A repair and maintenance model, Jormol deduced: the tech might be different, but the design philosophy didn't look too different from many a flash-forged omni-drone.
The larger ones, three times the size of the repair drones, were another matter altogether. The exposed, rounded grid and the thrusters' muzzles were the only points not covered in thick, curved plates of armor. A series of antennas protruded from the front, top and underbelly of the chassis, making it resembles a floating, metallic cousin of the Mannovai's native bellspiner.
Bellspiners didn't have a large axial gun stuck on their chassis, however, nor did they hover in a precise, defensive formation of eight around the working drones.
"Disable them and gather samples, then return to shuttle. Team Four's securing the command deck and CIC for information."
"Affirmative," Jormol nearly spat, annoyance and bitterness cracking his professionalism. There went his recognition. No, no, he could still salvage it. Bringing back some unique samples, possibly intact, would still bolster his pedigree. "Form up, two lines. Snapflacks on drones and concentrate fire on defenders. If hardened, switch to grenade packets. Watch out, might be AI directed. On my mark." Jormol levelled his rifle at one of the larger robots, who suddenly twitched. All eight defenders turned at him. "Mark!"
Snapflak grenades went flying from underbarrels and throwing arms, the lack of gravity only speeding them up. Jormol and three more operatives engaged their magnetic boots for stability and started laying down precise suppressive fire even as the grenades flew. The rest of the squad broke from cover, speeding down the corridor on their thrusters for the cover of the archways further on.
It all happened dazzlingly fast, even for a salarian's mind. Two of the defenders went down to the sudden bursts of salarian precision fire, shuddering and bobbing before more accelerated fire tore through their thick armor. In response, the six remaining robots opened fire on the snapflak grenades, purple beams of energy burning up the EMP components and triggering the secondary explosion that blanketed the corridor with shrapnel.
Having timed reaching their new cover two seconds and a half before the grenades set off, most of Jormol's team was caught in the open. The shields of the two operatives in the lead flared with the accelerated shrapnel and would have held, if several grenades hadn't been detonated at the same time. A heartbeat later, the blue flare of kinetic barriers died and the searing hot bits of metal tore into the light hardsuits of the two STG salarians where the omni-armor didn't protect them.
Their vitals glowed black into Jormol's HUD, plunging vertiginously to unsustainable levels. He was too slow to react, however. They all were. Realization and the ensuing order hadn't yet burned through his synapses when the defenders adjusted their aim and more beams of lasers lanced through his operatives, still caught in the open.
One, then two more literally melted into their suits, and the lasers ignited the jetpacks' fuel into small explosions that were immediately choked by the void. The last operative, his heartbeat going haywire on the HUD, managed to slam into cover and shoot a tight packet of micro-grenades from his rifle's underbarrel.
"Squad Leader, fall back," Anoleis ordered flatly, undoubtedly following the action through Team Two's helmet cams and a projected map of the alien wreck. Jormol pushed his heavy-rifle into overheating, taking down another of the defenders and one of the drones by combining his fire with another operative's, then switched to his heavy pistol. "I repeat, fall back and regroup with Team Four at the elevator."
"Negative, Overseer! They're almost through the blast doors!"
For the life of his, he couldn't pinpoint why that was important, but it was. His hardsuit's medical suite injected combat stims into him, and artificial combat clarity returned, yet bringing no definite answer.
The packet of micro-grenades was intercepted by a laser beam two-thirds of the way there and exploded, sending two of the defenders reeling as their thrusters flared to compensate. The bold vanguard operative took advantage of that, even as the head of one of Jormol's rear-teamers neatly evaporated, light helmet and all. Another two packets, shot in the wake of the first, slammed into the defenders, tearing through their grill-visors and sending the dying husks spinning. The triumph was short lived, as another of the robots swiftly flanked the lone salarian and executed him before he could react, only have one of its thrusters punched through by an explosive sniper round that tore part of its underbelly open.
"Very well. Team Four's retreating to the shuttle, ETA two minutes. Stall them for three. Overseer, out."
So this was it, Jormol thought bitterly as he retreated into cover, the bulwark's corner briefly glowing hot with dissipating heat. The HUD flared yellow and then black as one of his operatives thrashed silently, his arm removed at the elbow joint. For all his dreams of a future Dalatrass calling him father, he'd die in the belly of an alien wreck, killed by robots, and another would take the merit and reap the benefits. Anoleis himself, maybe.
Zero-g combat in the void had the noticeable benefit of hurrying up the cooling of weapons. Jormol unfolded his rifle again, then signaled at the last remaining operative and the two of them sent twin cryo-blasts from their omni-tools down the corridor. The two remaining defenders were caught in the snap-freezing snare. Jormol engaged his hardsuit's thrusters and flew forward, hounded closely by the other operative.
Heavy mass-accelerated fire pummelled the two frozen robots, sending chunks of ice and metal flying. Jormol glanced up at the new timer on his HUD, noting that only seventy-two seconds had passed, as twin packets of grenades destroyed the cryo-trap and the robots inside.
Seventy-three. Seventy-four. They could still do it, all that was left was taking down the drones. Then a breach charge would make their way out.
Jormol registered the tiny hole in the blast door first, barely large enough to squeeze a biotiball sphere through it. Then he noticed the nine repair drones arrayed against him, they laser guns glowing. Even with his enhanced reflexes, he barely managed to bring the rifle halfway up before the drones' guns discharged and several purple beams sliced and melted their way through his armor and flash.
His brain, overcharged with combat stims, held out for another two seconds, long enough to see the last name on his HUD become black as well.
Nineteen seconds later, Jormol Tuvai was already long dead when the lone ED-E drone, a simple, mass-produced maintenance model remotely piloted by Kyle, initiated the Poseidon Protocol on the corvette Dog Town. The drive core destabilized moments later, just as the stealth shuttle was loading the last of the bagged human tech and data drives from the command deck.
In the operation control room of the SSF Muvai, Overseer Bel Anoleis took in the death of two of his five teams, as well as the near simultaneous self-destruction of all drifting-alien vessels with their drive cores or engines still intact, and ordered the helmsman to make for the gas giant and conceal the ship on one of its many, cratered moons. Then he sat down to formulate another plan.
Access: Shan-Xi ATAJ Library, Training Programs and Courses.
ID: JANA_SHEPARD_SXC002966 - RECOGNIZED
Authorization: CADET.
Opening Files…
Introduction to Combat Engineering Training Program
Subsection: Field Support Units - ED-E
Of all the Companions, dead or still thankfully among us, none is more intertwined with the image and day-to-day life of the Alliance than ED-E. The first Duraframe Eye-bot, a staunch ally and loyal friend of the Courier, even after His destruction in the pacification of the Divide ED-E's legacy lives on in the trillions of units produced since before the start of the Zetan Wars by the Alliance war machine, for public and private use both. While they may not have supplanted the Mr. Handy butler model in regards to sociability and popularity as a domestic unit, the Alliance military, from the Navy to garrison forces and colonial police, have made an extensive and pervasive use of hundreds of designs across the centuries. The official designations are as many and varied as the developers and the units' intended role: from maintenance to collapsible combat-graded infantry support, from flying radio station to stealthy infiltrator and everything in between, sooner or later all the units are unofficially dubbed ED-E by their handlers and companions.
The ED-E is the best friend of the combat engineer, and in this course…
Closing Files…
Opening ATAJ Intranet Mailing System.
From: Balalaika_Shep
To: SammyRookT
Re: Come to the Techie Side! We have awesome bots!
Yes, my little personal ED-E would be cute and all kinds of awesome… but that's one big string of nope for me. Nope. Nopenopenopenopenopenopenope.
Seriously, Sam. That's waaay more up your alley. Of crazy. Besides, someone'll have to be there to patch you up when you inevitably blow up your first tinkering home-project. And every other odd one after that.
Love,
Shep
AN: Yep, I said trillions. The Alliance adapted a rather efficient way, so to speak, to continuously replace their hardware against the heinous losses ratios inflicted by the zetans during the Wars, especially in the first century(-ies), where the population wasn't just that impressive.
As for the CASABA torpedoes, I researched the RL Casaba Howitzer project, fused it with a modern thermonuclear device and tried to keep the mix at least resembling some bastardized cousin of hard science. The numbers are probably a bit wonky, but then again, Fallout isn't Fallout without some SCIENCE! A bit of handwaving is allowed.
Anyway, biggest update yet. Shower me with feedback, reviews, and critiques!... Please. Thank you for reading.