Muninn began up its own contribution to the battlespace with ripple fire from its uneven-faces missile banks, dual VLS rows cold-launching Anti-Ship Missiles into space in between the still-burning fusion candles, black spears oriented with puffs of RCS before shooting away on blue plasma drives.

Then the Muninn opened up with its main driver, and began long-range bracketing fire, exploiting the remaining c-fractional velocity it was bleeding to help the rounds pass into the target area quicker, continuing to fire as it decelerated.

In response to the new threats, the Oliver turned, bow-forward, into the fire and went to full burn, GARDIAN tasked forward and launchers spitting 12 interceptor drones into space. Then, still presenting the smallest aspect, it began evasive action, ECM at full power as it lured the incoming fire with false positives and dazzled their sensors, particle cannons swinging aft to engage Huginn, invisible lances streaking out to slam themselves into the barriers in flashes of blue and white.

Relativistic travel speeds meant that their sensors were degraded - and with limited ability to make effective course corrections, the missile barrage from Muninn missed entirely. None of the missiles made it into the main GARDIAN envelope, and the Huginn was forced to abort a new gun-run on the Oliver to skew-flip and burn about, evading a swarm of missiles as they streaked away and out of the battlespace before detonating in flares of blue, a drive's star extinguished in a nova.

Having evaded the first salvo of guided missiles, the Oliver turned out of the path of the next barrage from the Muninn that followed close behind, letting the streaking rounds flash overhead and into the depths of space at some 0.22 cee. The Oliver then evaded the next salvo, AI-controlled weaves sending the ship through the incoming fire, turning at the outer ranges of the ship's safety envelope and constantly swinging the nose around to apply new vectors with its main engines.

The Huginn followed close behind in a circling arc, using predefined holes in the bracketing fire coordinated between the two Warmind congruences to minimize its own evasive actions,then throttled up its cee-eem and engines in synch, "jolting" to c-fractional speeds and blitzing across the battlespace. The Huginn skew-flipped, killings its velocity and coming about to herd the Oliver into a killzone between itself and the Muninn.

The Oliver twisted out of the first envelope attempt using its RCS, flipping in a complex maneuver only made possible by AI-coordination of the thrusters to keep adding "upwards" velocity while flipping end-over-end; entering a c-fractional cruise of its own, angling down and underneath a barrage from Muninn, the Oliver spun and burned to evade the next barrage from the Huginn, its own GARDIAN firing as it came about to throw 20- and 30-kilo slugs off their paths. Then, it spit another barrage of missiles, light Anti-AKV Hunter-Killers mounted on first stage delivery buses.

The AKV envelope went evasive, burning hard and fast to overcome the missiles and deplete their Delta-V reserve.

And then it "slipped", the heat systems of the AKVs overtaxed, and the last five remaining AKVs, four of Harpy Flight and one of Raider Flight, fell behind, unable to maintain their acceleration for the immediate danger of catastrophic overheating of core systems.

The Muninn responded immediately.

❰ Launching Wyvern Flight. Separation underway. ❱

RCS spun the ship; then it switched from the main retros to smaller, bow-mounted secondaries, clearing the launch bays of the indiscient hot plasma streams above them. Twelve more AKVs launched in waves of three, and raced towards their target.

The Oliver's reaction was an aggressive, equally brilliant and desperate maneuver. With the Muninn deploying its AKVs from 60,000 kilometers stand-off range, they were not angling out immediately to reform the jamming sphere, nor had they launched as one coherent group, spacing them out by effective one-thousand kilometers. It was an opportunity the Oliver exploited.

Spiking its cee-eem bubble, the craft accelerated hard and fast at the edge of what the engines could provide, redlining them as the MEFGs provided their best field gradient. From the Huginn's perspective, the enemy spacecraft seemed to shoot towards the incoming AKVs, weapon blisters tracking, lashing out.

Wyvern 1, 2 and 3 were all blown apart by a mixture of main co-ax, particle beam turret and laser fire, the Oliver flashing past the plasma clouds they left behind in the wake of their detonation seconds later.

Wyvern 4, 5 and 6 initiated immediate evasive action, skew-flipping around to bleed fatal velocity - an action which only increased the engagement options to the missiles SCAS Oliver carried, forcing them into evasive action. 4 managed to complete a daredevil maneuver and blew its pursuing missiles to heat death with its own co-axial, Wyvern 5 zorched away at cee-fractional speeds and simply outran its pursuing munitions, 6 managed to slip its own in a similarly daredevil move to Wyvern 4, though it lost one maneuvering pylon and immediately shut down systems, overheating under the thermal load of hyper-velocity maneuvering.

Forced to hold its fire as the Oliver positioned itself before Cedatis Station, the Muninn was forced to hold the fire of its most lethal weapons, discharging its forward torpedo accelerators as the only armament it could viably use.

Wyvern 7, 8 and 9 flashed past the Oliver, forced to jink as Particle Beams were shunted into their vectors. They overshot completely, only able to begin turnaround burns after they had completed their high-thrust evasive action.

By the time Wyvern 10, 11 and 12 approached, the Oliver was reaching over 0.15 cee in velocity, and all AKVs made the same unanimous decision.

Wyvern 10 missed, blasted onto a new vector at the last second as the full ventral GARDIAN network converged on the drone, managing to breach the fusion reactor despite heat-induced coherence loss.

Wyvern 11 was shredded by the kinetic point defenses before its debris slammed into the Oliver's barriers at an oblong angle. 120 effective kilotons of kinetic energy transferring themselves into the fields.

The barriers of SCAS Oliver broke in a massive photon field flash of decoherent field collapse; The Oliver flipped and turned, making last-microsecond maneuvers to dodge the last viable threat.

Wyvern 12 ripped one of the radiator wings off in a white impact flash and caused the Oliver to spin, though it did not knock the craft off its escape vector. RCS flared hard as the craft began to stabilize, fighting the imparted force, damage alarms wailing in the CIC of the OFIF ship. Countermissile launchers flashed, and blew the torpedo barrage diving in behind the last AKVs completely out of the black.

The corvian Warminds coordinated. Their jamming screen was gone. At the closing ranges, missiles would be unviable - the Huginn's missiles were unable to pick up enough speed to intercept the still-accelerating Oliver and the bad angle of the head-on engagement by the Muninn would result in direct destruction of Bandit-01 from the impact of the missiles alone. The same applied to full-powered barrage shots which had a low RPM, for which the target had too much speed and a too small interception window.

That left one last chance to disable Bandit-01 before it could disengage into FTL.

The warminds took it.

Diverting all cooling power to its GARDIAN lasers, the Muninn narrowed down its head-on intercept with the Oliver, whose own radiators were glowing bright-hot, close to overloading under the heat of combat systems and its main drives.

SSV Muninn's main co-ax cut loose, a massive burst of light breaking out from the nose, slow rounds with only one kiloton of power that overrode all safeties and brought the accelerator rails into ablative temperatures, each fast shot after the next chipping material of the rails, degrading their use. Four shells connected with Bandit-01, blowing craters into the armoring and leaving long, white-glowing grooves.

The Muninn turned to present its broadside, lasers slashing at close-range, as the white flashes of their impact points turned into volcanoes of vaporized foam and plating; deep glowing scars etched themselves into the hulls.

Bad luck had it that the laser turreted intended to destroy the Oliver's main fusion reactor's ventral side and abort its escape was hit by a laser from the Oliver 256 milliseconds before it could lock and fire, a megawatt beam intended for far longer-ranged engagements burning through the di-electric reflectors and collimators before cutting and melting the turret mechanism. Safety interlocks cut in, and Muginn's laser emitter fell silent, the Oliver's main fusion reactor untarnished.

Just as quickly as the intercept had begun, it had passed.

Free of jamming, the Huginn racing after it at the outer edge of its acceleration envelope while flinging shells and missiles in a last desparate fire mission, the Oliver's navigational sensors kicked in.

Two seconds later, it accelerated to cee-fractional speeds in a blur of blue and a flash of engines, mass effect fields approaching the Capachelly point, gaining in distance. 10,000 kilometers. 50,000 kilometers. 100,000 kilometers. 0.8 cee. 0.99 cee.

Transition.

SCAS Oliver was gone, its light trail slowly creeping away, a last mocking goodbye to its pursuers as the source of the light raced away at increasing FTL speeds, heading for deep space.

The Huginn and the Muninn both kicked in their retros, cycling down from combat mode. Hatches opened, and emergency heat radiator sails unfolded from storage mode, beginning to glow with heat from onboard systems.

In the distance, a few clusters of undetonated munitions flared as they self-destructed, pinpricks among pinpricks, visible only for an instant.

Drone craft launched from both combat starships as they deployed their Search and Clean robots, sending them out after major vectors of their co-axial and point defense fire. In a few hours, the craft would nudge the projectiles onto harmless intercepts with planetary bodies and the local star using low-yield lasers; by the time the spacecraft could expect to head back home, the robots would have redirected every single piece of kinetic ammunition. A public debris warning for the local SysCon and its traffic buoys would complete the clean-up, keeping other craft clear of the marked trajectories.

Then both turned around, slowly, and burned, heading back for the white dot of Cedatis Station, and the Mission teams. Now there was no cause to run the engines hot, no reason to be somewhere fast; they let field generators and containment coils cool down, and withdrew weapons and closed hardpoints.

Inside the CIC of the Huginn, Captain Stewards turned to his XO, then made visual eye contact with his crew, as they came out of the congruence. Their thoughts were etched into their faces and body expressions, Shells restrained inside the thick acceleration webbing pressing them down on their interfaces couches.

Once again, FTL had been the trump card.

They had failed. The enemy had escaped.

The space around Cedatis Station was still in uproar when both spacecraft returned, now flashing their System Alliance transponder codes in the open and running blue-on-white livery on their hulls for everyone to see.

The open channels filled with curses and insults rather quickly, Captains Stewards and Xiolen listening to them all passively, the crews taking the backlash with detached professionalism.

One small freighter got cocky and kept going on a dangerous trajectory, before the SSV Muninn simply presented its broadside and made a stern, low-power laser-assisted warning to back off. The craft complied, still spitting half-hearted insults in the open net.

Captain Xiolen leaned back in his interfacer/acceleration couch, digesting what had just gone down in barely 4 minutes of space combat action. Bandit-01, SCAS Oliver, had been far too tough for a simple refitted freighter. Its kinetic barriers had been heavy, top-of-the-line models, its lasers had not been cutting-edge but still very effective, and whomever had stood at the helm and commanded it knew how to stand his ground against two other spacecraft trying to interdict him.

The entire affair smelled of ex-military personnel and overall, fishy in the extreme.

He turned around to his XO, Jane Dacosta: "Any word from the Ground teams?"

"Nothing for us, so far. They're talking with the Huginn and preparing the inspections and forensics teams for transfer, but nothing in the line for us."

"Then let's just keep next to the Huginn and keep an eye on the salvage and clean-up ops in the meantime." His throat suddenly felt dry.

"Aye Sir." She opened a private channel: [ ...Sir, if I may suggest you get some rest? I know the congruence and the consequences got to you, maybe you should clear your mind now.]

He smiled, suddenly tired but thankful for the care of his XO. [Thanks.]

"XO, you have the conn."

"I have the conn, aye sir."

He unbelted himself and headed aft, for his personal quarters and his terminal, where his Vidlog and a cup of good tea would already be waiting for him.

"What do you mean, Cedatis Approach blocked your parking orbit and denied permission for the teams to come a-station?"

Motoko Kusanagi was picking up her pace, now out of her Shell suit and wearing only her light undersuit one-piece. Her left trouser had been removed so a gunmetal black, bionic replacement leg could be anchored to her Shell, replacing the damaged one she had lost to a Mech only minutes ago.

At this point, she was about ready to start shooting people.

First her assault operation had nearly fallen apart.

Then she'd lost a pursuit to a lance of war robots.

THEN the escape craft had slipped through the grasp of two military spacecraft - not fitted with the latest tech, sure, but still cutting edge!

And now Traffic control was throwing a tantrum too. Some part of her was expecting a headache right about now.

At the moment, she was heading back to the OFIF hideout, two bioroid escorts at her side, to debrief.

"It's exactly what I'm telling you," XO Dacosta's voice said in her ear, clearly exasperated herself by the turn of events. "Some of the traffic controllers are locking up, citing our 'wild-west behavior' as a reason to deny us a parking orbit or the permission to transfer shuttles."

"You told them this is a Section 9 Op?" She reached the lower parking bay, and the mission teams of Alpha-01 and Alpha-02, gathered in circles around the Tachikomas, doing post-mission patch-ups, tending to wounds and damage and doing small-talk.

"Yes, Ma'am, I did. Didn't sway them."

"Fine by me. Stand-by." She turned to the room at large: "Hey! Get moving, we got more work!" The Mission team members looked up, then got on their feet and picked up weapons and helmets.

She turned around, and drew her service pistol.

If you want to cover them - Fine. By. Me. Now suffer the consequences.

10 minutes later, 2 traffic controllers leaned, ghost-locked and handcuffed, against a wall inside Cedatis Traffic control. Severa more had been subdued non-lethally and then herded into a corner, under watch by Williams and Antoine from Alpha-02. The room was open and airy, its walls completely lined with massive holographic screens, and similar massively sized screens for the traffic operators.

"You can't do this!", a young kid at his station shouted, flipping his mike up to mute it. Batou opened his visor and turned to face the young man.

"Supporting a terrorist group, impeding a System Alliance law enforcement operation, resisting arrest.", he listed. "Yes, we can."

"Law enforcement?!" another Operator complained, voice cracking with anger: "You fucking shoot up a starship out there, cause massive havoc by lighting up antimatter-catalyzed fusion candles within 10,000 kliks off the station and near traffic and call that Law enforcement?!" His fist landed on a railing with a bang.

Batou turned to face him, tone hostile: "Last I noticed we were arresting a dangerous terrorist cell which has several dozen counts of real death and property damage in the billions on their chest, or rather, we were trying to arrest them, before they slipped us because of those two a... men."

Raven placed a hand on his shoulder: [Batou, let it rest. We harshed the local color enough as is. Last we need is you burning the ashes.]

Two bioroids moved go pick up the two arrested traffic controllers.

"Get them moving to the docks. They're getting shipped over to the Muninn together with the OFIF prisoners on the next available shuttle", Major Kusanagi ordered, then turned around, a forced cheerfulness in the voice: "Which, by the way, I would really appreciate being granted clearance right about now."

The senior Supervisor, clearly older and more experienced and himself disgusted at what had happened under this nose, agreed: "Yes, Ma'am. We'll get it done immediately."

"Thank you." Kusanagi turned to leave.

"Bitch", someone mumbled under his breath.

He punched himself in the face a second later.

Batou and Paz managed to contain their snickering long enough for the doors to close.

The OFIF cell's former hideout had turned into an almost literal hornet's nest.

Mirroring drones were everywhere, scanning every micrometer of the rooms with lasers, light field cameras, sonar, MRI, and T-ray scanners. Everything was photographed from every available angle by "Hummingbird" drones, before Molly drones turned to scanning every inch for molecular and atomic residue of any kind.

Behind them, the humanoid forensic teams moved in to bag everything once it had been thoroughly documented; corpses were tagged, their stacks and other cybernetics extracted on the spot where possible and locked away separately in armored cases, before body bags were rolled out and the shells transferred over and sealed inside.

Meanwhile, evidence was being bagged from tables; computers were located, dug out of walls and furniture, and secured for more thorough data analysis back at HQ. Personal belongings were bagged and indexed alongside working equipment, half-finished project, and finished devices. A group of weapon and explosives specialists moved about removing all of the weaponry, sealing it up separately and shipping it out as soon as possible.

Above it all, more monitoring drones held vigil, documenting every activity for archiving and legal use.

The Mission Teams stood aside from the commotion, slowly storing their own equipment and locking it inside the passenger pods of the Tachikomas. By now, the post-battle stress was etched into nearly everybody's face, brains and bodies recovering from the stress of combat augmentation.

In many ways, Paz had noticed once, getting off battle augmentations was similar to after a drug trip. Between hormones, combat drugs, and neuronal augmentations, the return to normal cognitive operations caused all sorts of grinding gears, especially for those not used to the Battle trance. Himself included, as he had sardonically remarked, massaging his scalp.

[Miss Kusanagi, you have an incoming communication from Director Aramaki. Encrypted, full-body ARvatar conference]

[I'll take it here.]

She turned around and faced an open space of the garage floor.

Inside her ARO, Aramaki materialized in full body render, as if he stood two meters in front of her. His arms were folded at this side, and he has his usual stratified body posture.

[Sir.]

[Major. What is the situation at Cedatis Station? The Opfeed intercepts I've been feed paint a mixed picture.]

[I'm afraid that's true, Sir. The assault on the OFIF hideout was largely a success - but four people managed to slip our perimeter via a prepared escape route that involved using an unstable 'field to burrow through solid rock, then slipped our pursuit on foot by using a war robot squad as cover. The spacecraft they used to escape with managed to slip the Huginn and Muninn after a prolonged space engagement with medium damage but full interstellar flight capability.]

[Hmmm.] Aramaki telegraphed his unhappiness with the situation minute, but clearly to her augmented perception. [Alright. We will deal with the larger fallout of this later. Do you have any information on what they were doing yet?]

[No sir. The first files were just transferred over and Athena is doing a mirror analysis on the recovered data to get as a preliminary assessment, but it hasn't come in yet.]

[Okay. I'll be offline, working the political gears. I suspect the real shitstorm's just about to cut loose.]

[Could be, Sir. There's indication of… extensive support of the OFIF cell by the local population and authorities. Don't know how deep this one goes.]

[...Chikushou. I will take care of this, and get the AIS on board. Clean the situation up, authorities will be on site to take over in a few hours. Get your team ready to ship out by then.]

[Yes Sir, I will see to it. And sorry Sir.]

[Major, bad luck is the trade of every commander and director. I will deal with this, as I have dealt with everything else. Good evening.]

[Evening Sir. I'll drop anything important into your contacts.]

[Do that, Major. Aramaki, out.]

The connection closed.

"Everything alright Major?", Togusa asked behind her. She turned around and took his armor in; scorched gray, white and black by plasma, and the armor plating thoroughly roughened up by shrapnel.

"I will manage just fine, thank you." She produced a confident, friendly smile with just a touch of authority: "Everything alright with yourself?" She prodded his armor experimentally.

"I'll live. Shock's still sitting pretty deep now though that everything's over. This was the closest call I ever had." He closed his eyes for a second. "I… had another flashback to my wife and children, during the greyout." His eyes didn't reconnect with hers.

She patted him on the back reassuringly and nodded Batou, silently signaling him that Togusa needed some more support. "But you lived. Your shell is intact, your wife and children are fine and you will see them again in this life. Everything is okay."

"Yeah, yeah… thank god it is."

She handed Togusa over to Batou and Raven, who had joined her Second-in-Command in taking care of Togusa, and keyed a voice communication with Huginn: "Athena-Actual, what is the preliminary on the data we recovered?"

The Ops AI connected after a second: "Looks like your Intel from SILVER THROAT was spot-on. I indeed recovered a large data file of suspicious content, which included lots of executable files.

"Based on preliminary analysis, the data package you recovered is a Ghosthack weapon. A new one. Custom-written language, extremely sophisticated code."

"A good knock-off?", she asked.

"Negative. My analysis has revealed few carry-overs from known old attack software. By indication, this is a completely new development."

"...Continue." So it was even worse than Ken indicated.

"Based on finished analysis, the weapon is definitely a sophisticated Ghosthack - To be precise, the vector tool. I have identified several file formats and interfaces for loading a payload file into the weapon program. None of your recovered files fit the payload format itself.

"Far more worrying is the vector tool itself. While I have identified DNI subversion software, it is modular."

Kusanagi stopped her pacing, listening intently: "Modular? There is more than one delivery vector?"

"Yes. A system only known to me to be in System Alliance Armed Forces possession - A basilisk hack system, seems to form the other major, or indeed the major, delivery vector of the Ghosthack. I have identified visual and auditorial vectors in the basilisk attack package, based on output analysis and comparison as well as comments on the code.

"Thirdly, the software is coded for several neurological architectures. So far I have identified two separate sets of configurations and separate individual software subtools that are loaded depending on the target parameters and seem to govern fundamental vector executive processes. Whatever this new Ghosthack weapon is intended for, it can subvert more than just transhuman egos - and it does not require a DNI to do so."

Silence.

"Major Kusanagi?"

"Shit!"

A/N(Sevoris): ...I guess that's bad.

Upcoming after all the action and revelations is a larger personal interlude chapter as the team heads home and relaxes from their last OP, digesting what has just happened. At the same time, other things are set into motion...