Doan stared blankly at the cable soup in front of her for a few seconds, until she decided she'd spotted a wire that looked important if she tilted her head and squinted at it long enough. Choice made, she reached in, snapped the wire, and hid it back amongst the others.
Doan stepped back, job done, and closed the hatch of the mining drill before looking around the base. Though not on the surface, it was earthlit by a grand hole in three levels of the Lua infrastructure. It was also much too close to the Tenno borders, something the Grineer would have realized very soon if their drill didn't begin mysteriously malfunctioning within the next week or so.
Which I can confirm it did. One of its teeth stopped spinning reliably and slowed work until they figured out what was wrong, by which time the Tenno border had pulled back.
Strange. Lucky.
Doan, being finished with helping the Grineer war machine not get itself senselessly slaughtered within the next little while, hurried to the front of the base where a platoon was mustering, just as she'd planned a couple of days ago.
The army moved out not long after, with Doan and her squad at the front, because somebody had miraculously noticed her competence and put her properly in charge of a few things. In this case, planning and commanding a small assault on a major Corpus outpost.
A disrespectful Corpus outpost.
-They were! They were ripping Orokin tech out of the walls! At least the Grineer don't pretend to care about the Orokin. They just break it all and move on. The Corpus have to have half a dozen cult sects devoted to the Orokin, all of them for a different method of exploiting them!-
-I'm calm. They're dead. Thousands of cubic kilometers of Lua completely ruined for historical record-keeping, and they're dead. Fair trade.-
-Maybe, but I'm not wrong.-
Well, I think we can tell from that that I'm not going to have much sympathy for the Corpus in this record. Want a less biased account, find another former Archimedean Cephalon historian.
This outpost was an ambitious project, one of those high-risk, high-reward ventures that makes or breaks a Corpus leader. Doan's plan was to break this one. The fact that I'm not bothering to name the Corpus in question should give you an idea how that went.
It was a risk on Doan's part, as well. The outpost was near the Tenno "border", the front line they'd established that nobody was getting past no matter what they threw at it. The drills earlier were planned to be one of the ways around it. Worse, this particular Corpus base had been attacked twice already by the Tenno.
Doan was banking on them attacking again.
-Well, she couldn't be sure they were watching the base.-
-Do you have any idea how terrifying that sounds to those of us without magic genocide suits?-
Skipping over the trip to the Corpus base and, blessedly, Ind's marching song, let's describe the base itself. It was roughly circular, with a radius of two hundred meters. That's a diameter of four hundred meters and an area of one hundred twenty-five thousand meters squared, for you-
-What?-
-That won't be interesting. I'm giving a sense of scale here.-
-I do too let you take part. Remember when we described that… thing, a while back? ...alright, fine.-
The first and most obvious obstacle in infiltrating the base was a massive nullifier field surrounding it. Without our powers, we relied on a more traditional method of sneaking into the base. Some scaled the surrounding walls and dropped down from above, while others burrowed through Lua to come up beneath the base. Both routes failed. Bursas and Techs waited at the belowground entrances. Above, the soldiers had been given Lankas enough to hold us off. It was frustrating.
Two attacks revealed that there were three layers to the base itself, the first visible from the outside, the second accessible by the tunnels. It was only the central layer that was valuable to the Corpus. They spent hundreds of lives and machines to defend it and the Orokin technology within.
That, I suppose, sums things up. I should add that there was more than the soldiers preventing the Tenno from successfully taking the base. The Corpus had been reverse-engineering the Orokin technology available, and it was the work of dozens of Cephalons and Tenno teams to intercept the transmissions they were trying to send out.
Therefore, Doan stood overlooking the base with her squads of Grineer soldiers, unaffected by the Orokin technology within, and called out to her soldiers.
"Shields!"
The front line of Shield Lancers placed shields side by side and started to advance. Behind them, a line of Gunners with their own shields held those up as well.
"Rifles!"
Two full lines of Gunners opened fire. Several died as the defending Corpus took note and returned fire, but Grineer shields are nothing to scoff at. The cavalcade of Gorgons spooled up the base's shields slowly shrank, overwhelmed. As soon as the first Corpus were revealed, Doan gave her next command.
"Combat Formation Bravo!"
There were Bombards, Napalms, Lancers, and Ballistas behind the Gunners, and every one of them opened fire at those words. Aiming high, like Doan had instructed, they forced the Corpus to take cover to keep their shields up.
And the Grineer advanced, inexorably.
-Like unstoppable, but it sounds more impressive. Roll with it, it's Doan.-
Corpus reinforcements came, of course, swarming out of the inner layer of the base.
Doan gave her next command.
"Charge!"
Swarming around from behind the siege line came the Troopers and Scorches, Butchers and Scorpions. The Corpus snipers kept their heads down, leaving the Grineer and Corpus front lines to crash into each other.
The Moas and Bursas were expected. Troopers surrounded them, though they died in droves. The Techs weren't a problem, dragged off their feet by Scorpions to lie at the mercy of the Butchers. Ospreys were left to the Scorches, darting uselessly from flame to inferno until they fell, wires melted. Everything was going to plan.
Then the Zanuka units came, and the Hyenas. They leapt over the outer wall and scrambled along the sides of the cavern. Ice and fire and electricity flashed into being, taking dozens of Grineer with them.
"Back!" Doan tried to yell, "front line, back! Bombards, take the Hyenas! Scorpions-"
But there was nobody listening. The original strategy had been hard enough to get into their heads, and that had taken a week just making sure the right people listened to the right orders.
Worse, more Corpus were spilling out of the base. So what was a clever Grineer to do, in the middle of the usual run of her kind?
Doan shoved her way through the Shield Lancers in front of her and fired her Sonicor. A Hyena stumbled just long enough for Doan to aim and latch onto it with her grapple. Then she hauled on it. The Hyena resisted, almost pulled her off her feet, and then Ind grabbed onto Doan and added her weight. The grapple and Doan's suit whined, and then the Hyena was pulled off its feet and scraped across the floor towards them.
Doan and Ind aimed their guns, all three of them, and unloaded. The Hyena didn't reach its feet again.
That got the Grineer's attention.
"Doan squad!" Ind yelled, louder than Doan could manage. "Here!"
From everywhere within the formation and skirmishing, Grineer came, Doan's squad forming up around the two gunners even amidst the chaos.
"Repeat," Doan called out to them, "fire and fall back."
"Fire and fall back!" They all echoed her.
Ind led the way, with the squad repeating the order and Doan taking up the back with a Bombard named Tegg Boda. Slowly, the other Grineer started to follow, falling back with them. They left behind a lot of their front lines, but the Scorpions and Butchers merged into the shield line well enough, and soon the Grineer were falling back.\
Doan Tana, of course, was busy trying to come up with a new strategy. The attack had barely lasted more than twenty minutes before being forced back. If this attack failed, they needed something that could work with even fewer troops.
That was when the Corpus base's shields went down completely. They'd been starting to grow back while the Grineer retreated, but in that moment they simply winked out.
Twenty minutes is a very long time for a group of Tenno on a sabotage mission.
That would have been the moment to counterattack, but Doan has this thing about using up Grineer lives. As Corpus flooded out of the base, fleeing the newly-empowered Tenno, she kept pulling her troops back. They were outnumbered two to one. If the Tenno hadn't used the distraction for what it was, the Grineer could never have taken the base. Doan just happened to be the only Grineer who knew how to count on Tenno.
Like a signal, a Corpus sniper was launched from the base's wall upwards to slam against the side of Lua's cave network, pinned and dangling by an arrow through its chest.
Doan claims that's what gave her the idea, but I don't see the connection. Whatever the reasoning was, she started pulling her people back, away from the Corpus base, but also away from the Grineer lines.
Have you ever seen a Grineer gamble? It generally doesn't go well. As the saying goes, you can't count cards on your fingers. Doan had just broken even with one gamble and decided to go for another.
I've had talks with her about it. She hasn't promised not to do it again.
What she decided to do was to lead her forces towards the Tenno front lines. You know, the ones guaranteed to make the Tenno angry. Those ones.
Repeating this now for the ones who haven't gotten the message: don't make the Tenno angry. They will… well, there'll be a brief description later in this recording.
I won't go into too much detail about the retreat. Boring military stuff with people dying left and right, orders to form up the shields and suppressing fire. Really, the issue was the pacing. Doan was trying to keep her people just close enough to Corpus to pressure them with the Tenno at their backs, but far enough away to not get her people killed. The Corpus were trying to stay far away from both sides and make a break for it now that they'd been forced out of their base.. The Tenno needed to have just the right combination of hit-and-run and pressuring assault. I'm told it was very nerve-wracking.
Then there were the soldiers Doan had to keep leaving behind to keep the Corpus from breaking off and escaping. Grineer squads would get into skirmishes just long enough that the Corpus couldn't keep fighting without being overrun by Tenno, then the Grineer would have to retreat and find their way back to base. It would have taken some of them weeks, without help.
This is why I don't do war. Well, the lack of a physical body, and this.
Doan and Ind never actually saw a Tenno on their way to the border. Doan did something a little more clever than that. As her soldiers backpedaled further and further into Lua, she had one of her squadmates pull out a map.
"Ind." she beckoned her friend over so she could point out where to go. "This way. You go this way."
Ind nodded, of course, then looked at Doan curiously. "You?"
Doan smiled and her faceplate's expression shifted slightly. "I need to trick them."
Ind probably had no idea what that meant, exactly, but she cheered anyway. A few meters away, still shooting back at the Corpus, their squad joined in the cheering. They definitely had no idea what was going on.
It didn't take long for Doan to gather up a group of about ten Scorpions and bring them off to the side of the path. At a certain offshoot, she took them with her. Eleven, to defend an unstable tunnel against more than a hundred.
About two minutes later, that defense went worse than you'd think.
The setup was fine. A group of Grineer women with borrowed weapons formed something like a line along a tunnel offshoot, one of those walkways above broken and abandoned underground city. It would have been scenic if it weren't for everyone shooting at each other.
Then the Corpus came, and at first most of them ran by, trying just as much not to be trampled by their own as to keep ahead of the Tenno.
"Grapple!"
Every one of them shot out a line, snagged a Corpus each, and dragged them in. That got the attention of the rest of them. The Corpus opened fire but hit nothing but their own soldiers, used as shields by Doan and her Scorpions. Others noticed the side passage, though, and within moments the bulk of the Corpus forces were flooding into the passage, forcing the Grineer back across the walkway.
As soon as the shields of the first Corpus, um, hostage-shield went down, Doan stomped her foot as hard as she could.
The section of walkway Doan and her troops were standing on collapsed. With them on it.
It was a very stupid move, demonstrating all the survival instincts of taking a walk out the airlock for a suntan.
Of course, she'd thought of that, as she reminds me every time.
-No, the fact that it worked doesn't make it any less stupid. Do you have any idea how unstable and unreliable the Lua ruins are? No, you don't. Do you know who did? The too-clever clone woman who had the knowledge passed down to her on nearly a genetic level!-
Well, whatever the case, it worked out for her. To hear Doan Tana tell it, her little commando squad all launched their grapples and latched perfectly onto stable sections of the ruins while the Corpus stampeded across what was left of the walkway. There was a chain reaction as all the Corpus finally escaped down the path they thought they had broken through.
The Tenno followed immediately after, picking off the stragglers.
Doan barely waited for the Tenno to pass before climbing back up.
"Doan Doan!"
Ind sprinted across the walkway and, with a clanging of metal that almost took Doan right back off the ledge, collided with her friend in something approximating a hug.
Once that was over and they separated - something that took long enough for the Corpus and Tenno to get well out of earshot - Doan gave the order for the Grineer to return to base. Her own squad, she split up to lead parties that would find the rear guard and lead them home. You remember, the ones in the tunnels who would probably have gotten lost without help. At this point, Doan had pretty reliably found the most intelligent Grineer around, mostly by virtue of Darwinistic selection. They could mostly follow maps, so that was the job they got assigned.
We're off track. Doan didn't go. Because she hadn't risked enough that day.
I'm still not over this.
Doan, after sending off her squad, turned to follow the Tenno and Corpus.
"Doan?"
She paused.
Ind hadn't left. She walked up beside Doan and tilted her head towards where the Tenno had left. "Coming."
So they both went, hurrying along the walkway and through a handful of tunnels until they heard the sounds of…
-Do you think fighting is the right word?-
-No, neither do I.-
Slaughter, then.
-It was. Nice word or not, it's accurate.-
Secret has a better idea of this part of the story. The Corpus were running, panicked, from the three cells of Tenno following them. Up until that point, Secret and the others had been picking off the Corpus in the back, playing cautiously to avoid losing time reviving anyone. When the Corpus approached the border, though, the situation changed.
As a side note, up to this point there'd been an ongoing argument amongst the pursuing Tenno over exactly what was going on and why the Grineer had been doing everything they'd been doing. Secret argued it had to be Doan ordering the Grineer, and since he was able to give pretty conclusive evidence of Doan's abilities via Sending, many of the others were inclined to believe him. On the other hand, Anaya maintained that it had to be coincidence, since no Grineer was smart enough to make such an attack and take advantage of a fight on two fronts. There were even a few who assumed it must be the doing of some Cephalon.
Up to that point. When the Corpus reached the border and the pursuers were forced to Send out a call for reinforcements, it settled things pretty conclusively.
According to Anaya, luring an enemy into springing a trap on another enemy was too good a move for mere luck. In her words, "it's something I would do."
Considering what we know about Anaya, I don't know if I like the comparison.
Anaya, if you're listening, I meant that in a good way, I swear.
-Secret, you'll keep an eye on me for the next week or so, right?-
Where was I?
-Thanks.-
The reinforcements.
They came. Quickly. More than twenty Tenno in less than a minute surrounded the Corpus, picking off any who strayed from the main mass of soldiers and machines. Once they'd all gathered, all at once, they struck.
Doan showed up twenty seconds later.
She missed most of the fight.
First, two Mesas destroyed the nullifier emitters protecting the army. Three Lokis, including Secret, landed in the center of the army and deactivated their weapons before switching out with Embers. Rhinos and Mags held down the most mobile machines, while another Mag and a Volt joined their powers together to EMP them all. One Nova served up an antimatter drop for Anaya's Zephyr, who threw it into the mass.
Doan watched the army disintegrate from around a corner. Half the remaining army turned on itself, fired single shots into sundered armour, and died. Thirty dead in a second because of a Nyx working with a Banshee, but Doan couldn't know that. She'd never seen most Tenno's powers.
I think that's what she realized in that moment: just how little she really knew about the things she'd followed. So she finally did the smart thing. She ran, pulling Ind along with her.
They made it as far as the walkway. It wasn't empty.
As Doan described them, flying bones came up from the city below, death as obvious as what they'd just left behind.
She and Ind both started shooting, and for a moment it looked like the Sentients were slowing down.
Of course, we all know how that goes. A few pieces broke off before the boneflesh rippled and hardened, and the next bullets simply bounced off. Ind tried her Dera and Doan used her Sonicor, but at that point they were already backing up, trying to get away and find a way around that wouldn't lead them back to the Tenno.
They turned a left they hadn't gone before, Doan shoving Ind ahead of her. The lead Sentient fired a laser that burned a gash in Doan's side. It wasn't much, she says. It wasn't lethal, at least. But it slowed her down. With Ind pulling Doan along after that, Doan struggling to get enough air, they barely stayed ahead of the Sentients.
Then there was a scream, a war cry that echoed through Lua's halls. A fury of energy shot down from a side corridor and landed on the lead Sentient, tearing it apart in a frantic blur of claws. Doan tried to run, but she couldn't take her eyes off the Tenno, and she fell, dragging Ind with her. The Tenno moved onto the next Sentient, and the next, and the next, until every one lay in pieces scattered across the ground.
Valkyr, the Valkyr, turned to the last two living things it could see.
Doan raised her Sonicor.
Another roar sounded, deeper, and Laestrihg's Rhino slammed into Valkyr, cutting her off mid-leap. Valkyr clawed at him, but Laestrihg's Iron Skin held, and in a moment she realized who had caught her and started to calm down. Mostly. She was still snarling at Doan and Ind.
Have I mentioned they're lucky to be alive?
The two Grineer started to stand, and Secret arrived seconds later. He and Laestrihg exchanged a few quick Sendings, and Laestrihg led Valkyr away.
That's how this little adventure ended. Secret led the two of them back to their base, fighting off another Sentient on the way, and Doan told the story of what had happened. I'll add that she glossed over the fact that she nearly died at least four times, and that's not counting the usual hazards of warfare.
-No. No, you tell Doan I still remember this. You let her know she's not off the hook. An apology isn't enough; I have nightmares about her cornered by Sentients, do you understand? Nightmares! I don't even sleep! So you tell her it doesn't matter one split nanite how smart she is, she doesn't get away with toying with Tenno and wandering off alone and no Ind doesn't count and when I get my metaphorical hands on her this time I swear by the old Empire itself…-
[Record ended for the sake of brevity]
Author's Note:
I'm very easily manipulated by review ideas, since Doan Tana is rather disconnected in nature. Given that, thanks to StormCrowley for the inspiration for this chapter.
I'm happy to announce that my friend Icario has made himself a Ko-fi account. That's the only place you can go to find his art of Doan Tana. For those of you that aren't aware, it's nearly impossible to post a link to anything on ffnet, so I recommend going to Ko-Fi, then adding /icario to the end. You'll find a larger version of Doan Tana's thumbnail, art of Doan with her scarf, and the glorious image of Vay Hek as a reindeer for Tennobaum, amongst other things for various other stories. He's even working on an animatic gif for another story of mine, Legacy.