Chapter 3: Contra Omnia Mala

August 12, 225

Augustus, Asimov System

Kerensky watched the proceedings play out on the screen before him; a platoon of some of the finest soldiers the Confederacy had to offer were moving through a live-fire exercise, their movements tracked and recorded by an array of drones hovering far overhead. It had taken well over a year to plan and organize the training regimen for the Confederacy's first federal special forces unit. Officially, they were the Confederate Army Special Warfare Division, but they had started calling themselves the 'Black Berets'. Kerensky didn't mind, it certainly rolled off the tongue better.

The platoon of twelve light infantry were moving across the rough, crater-strewn ground of Nova Roma's sole moon, equipped in the finest combat hardsuits available. Even in such a hostile environment, these soldiers were moving as one. Every field of fire was covered and their movements were methodical and smooth. When they first made contact with a target, an unarmed drone that would trigger an alarm if not dispatched quickly enough, the drone hardly lasted a second before a hypervelocity slug planted itself straight through its optical system.

This platoon had already proved itself in the harsh deserts of Abbadiyah, the bone-chilling snows of Valhalla, the jungles of Nueva Aztlan, and the dense forests of Atreus; all that was left for them was their evaluation in minimal to no atmosphere. So far, they didn't disappoint. Upon arriving at their objective, a small abandoned mining compound that had been erected on Augustus several decades prior, that's when the show really started.

The aerial footage almost looked unreal, with the thin wisps of hypervelocity slugs whipping across the bleached dust of the moon. The security bots that had been placed throughout the compound were reduced to scrap by the twelve elite operatives as they methodically cleared every nook and cranny of the outer perimeter. This part of the evaluation had been left open-ended, and Kerensky was silently proud to see the platoon split into three smaller fireteams to breach through all three of the compound's airlocks. They evidently didn't have any concern for stealth, opting instead to blast the airlock doors open with a plastic explosive breaching charge.

The feeds switched to the cameras concealed all throughout the small station, showing the twelve black berets effortlessly push through the automated defenses that had been set up inside. Even the rather dirty traps that Kerensky had insisted on including, like the fall-away floor panels and ceiling-mounted riot foam dispensers, were little match for these men and women. When the last of the security bots had a hypervelocity slug slotted through its CPU, Kerensky gave an approving smile, swiping his hand across the interface to disable any remaining defenses and sent the mission complete burst to the team. "Excellent work. Pickup is on the way, hang tight."

"All with nearly twenty minutes of O2 left... " Carlsen nodded in approval, watching the technical readout spit out a flurry of diagnostic information on the operatives' hardsuits. "Definitely impressive, Kerensky."

The hours leading up to the platoon's return were mostly spent celebrating. When the platoon had finally reached their home for the past year, the Leviathan-class Light Carrier CSV Audie Murphy, Kerensky greeted each of the armor-clad soldiers with a firm handshake and a warm smile. "Congratulations… all of you." He offered, handing each and every one of them a pair of patches to aid to their berets and armor. The symbol was simple: a Terran Eagle with a broken link of chain in one claw and a sword in the other, flanked on either side by olive branches. Stitched into the small banner across the top of the circular patches were the simple Latin words: "Contra Omnia Mala". Kerensky had also been given the surprisingly difficult task of giving this unit its motto. He didn't have a history to look to, so he looked to what he hoped they would stand for. Sooner or later, these men and women would be called upon to meet the promise of their new motto. All he could hope was that they'd rise to the challenge.

February 1, 226

Erebus System, Atreus (Tessera)

Kerensky tapped his fingers on the table, staring at the talet in his hands as he considered what the report from the border was implying. Apparently, just two days prior, a veritable armada of ships had arrived in the Leto system. When he read that nearly two dozen vessels had come through the relay, he almost couldn't believe it… until he saw images from the defense fleet to confirm the claims. Thankfully, they were peaceful.

He knew far too little about the Quarians for his liking, never having the chance to meet one of the few refugees personally, but he was hopeful at the very least. Even for a fleet of mostly civilian vessels, they packed enough firepower to overwhelm the local fleet by a slim margin. According to the report, a member of the Quarian Admiralty had contacted the colony to request safe harbor for the nearly two thousand souls aboard, and a meeting with the Confederate leadership. Sure enough, First Minister Bailey had accepted the request and a pair of the Quarian ships were allowed to pass to Erebus under military escort. Given Kerensky's unofficial role as her advisor on xeno-affairs, he was expected to attend the meeting later today.

With a sigh, Kerensky took a sip of his coffee and put the datapad down. "You alright?" Katerina asked, walking over and placing a gentle hand on her husband's shoulder.

"Duty calls." Kerensky chuckled, tapping the datapad's deactivated screen.

Kat offered a small smirk and a gentle squeeze of Kerensky's shoulder. "Not surprised… you're one of the big-shots now. Just remember that you made your daughters a promise."

"How could I forget?" He smiled, finishing his coffee and standing up, giving his slightly shorter wife a quick kiss on the forehead. "Hopefully I won't be long, but… well, Parliament."

By the time Kerensky left the house, both Liara and Meredith had made sure to remind him of the promise he had made. When he finally made his way to the Parliament Hall, he was very thankful that he had decided to leave early, as the entire part of the building that had been set aside for the proceedings was already abuzz with activity. He did what he could to help prepare the conference room for the impending meeting, but he was woefully out of his element. Before he knew it, a member of the Quarian Admiralty and a trio of Migrant Fleet Marines walked into the conference room. All three of the Quarian marines had been relieved of their weapons.

Each of the suit-clad aliens looked around the room in what Kerensky could only guess was amazement. Parliament Hall was definitely an impressive building, even to the General that had spent most of his life in Tessera. It was a building built along the architectural styles of Roman antiquity and the late European Renaissance, complete with vaulted domes and a central rotunda. The clash with the hyper-modern and metropolitan capital of the Confederacy could be a bit jarring, but it grew on you after a time.

"Admiral Ixia'Lerah vas Neema, welcome to Tessera." First Minister Bailey greeted the Admiral with a respectful nod, gesturing to the open seat just across from her. "The message from your ship was… brief. I don't suppose you could bring this committee up to speed on what's happening in the Pylos Nebula?"

The Quarian seemed pensive for a moment, glancing over to the very obvious military officers sitting at the table. Her eyes settled on Kerensky for a moment, and she almost seemed to give the General a nod. "A… A small detachment of the Migrant Fleet's civilian and heavy fleets are being effectively held hostage in the Kriseroi system by a Batarian fleet." That very quickly piqued Kerensky's interest. "One of the vessels of the Civilian Fleet, the Iktomi, was… impounded by the local government for passing too close to a patrol fleet after an engine failure. They're demanding the surrender of the detachment, and are using the crew of the Iktomi as collateral, claiming that they'll be shipped to Khar'shan if their demands aren't met."

"Correct me if I'm wrong, Admiral." Bailey began, leaning forward a bit. "But the Kriseroi system lies outside recognized Batarian space in the Traverse, no?" As the Admiral nodded, Bailey glanced over to Kerensky. "Where might the crew of the Iktomi be?"

"They're in a prison facility on the sparsely-inhabited planet of Neidus." Ixia explained, fiddling with her omni-tool for a moment to bring up a projection of the star system in question. The planet that the Admiral highlighted was a small world orbiting the native red giant star, likely a bone-chillingly cold place if Kerensky had to guess. Why the Batarians were interested in establishing a colonial presence in such a place was a mystery to him, but he had bigger issues to worry about at the moment.

"Respectfully, ma'am… how did you escape the blockade?" Admiral Carlsen spoke up.

"We took the fastest ships we had and ran the blockade." Ixia explained, showing the course they had taken by drawing a dotted red line on the system map. "We… we nearly lost two ships in the stunt, but we made it. I'm here to ask for your help in getting my people back to the Migrant Fleet. We're carrying much-needed dextro food to compensate for a lackluster harvest aboard the liveships." She looked right into the First Minister's eyes as she pleaded. "Please… you already helped my people; thousands might die without this food, and we can't afford to fight our way through a Batarian fleet. Most of our ships are barely even armed."

The First Minister was silent for nearly a minute, staring down at her hands as she considered what course they should take. After a long sigh, she nodded. "Officially, the Confederacy neither has nor makes claims on any systems in the Pylos Nebula, and our fleets are stretched thin defending what space we already possess." Right as the Admiral began to take a resigned posture, Bailey continued. "Unofficially, however… we can get your people off that planet, and we just might have a way for you to get past the blockade." The Admiral immediately perked up, seeing the truth in the First Minister's eyes. "General Kerensky… I'm placing you in command of the operation to free these people. It's time for your 'black berets' to get their trial by fire."

"Consider it done." Kerensky nodded.

February 5, 226

Pylos Nebula, Kriseroi System (CSV Cydonia)

Captain Amilee Harper's stomach lurched as the Cydonia slid out of FTL, followed by the call of silent running over the ship's PA system. She wasn't sure what strings Kerensky had to pull to get a whole class of ship designed for the Black Berets, but she wasn't complaining. The Independence-Class Frigate was officially still in the experimental phase, and was still considered highly classified due in no small part to just how revolutionary the rest of the galaxy would consider it.

The vessel was a stealth craft in every sense of the word, having barely more than a defensive armament. The closest thing it had to offensive weapons were the missile racks mounted in its center. Every available inch of space was crammed full of advanced electronic countermeasures, ablative stealth coating, heat sinks, and sensor equipment. Its primary role was inserting strike teams without being detected, and it seemed to be working rather well so far.

"Ground team, five minutes to insertion!" The captain called over the PA, causing Amilee to stand up from the small bench in the armory after attaching the breastplate of her hardsuit. She pulled the helmet over her head, and grabbed her rifle and ten spare magazines of ammunition. It was strange to be issued a combustion rifle, but when she saw what it was capable of, she couldn't help but love it. The XM-33 rifle was a deceptively simple solution to the problem of kinetic barriers. Outwardly, it looked similar to the M-31 used by the Donegal Armed Forces, but it lacked any electronics or mass effect fields. Instead, it made use of subsonic 9.3x55mm ammunition and an integral suppressor. When she fired the thing for the first time, the report was so minimal that she probably wouldn't be able to pick it out over background noise if she was more than a few dozen meters away. She was even more impressed when she saw the small sabot dart that it fired punch clean through a suit of captured Eclipse armor after passing through its kinetic barriers without even activating them.

When Amilee finally reached the drop bay, she saw the rest of her platoon already securing their equipment. A few moments after she walked in, she felt the frigate's structure shudder as it made contact with the relatively thin atmosphere of Neidus. She did her utmost to filter out the background chatter on her helmet's radio, simply watching the indicator on her HUD and waiting for the signal. A mere moment after a ramp at the rear of the frigate opened up, the indicator on her display flashed green, and the entire fourteen-man platoon ran and leapt from the rear of their vessel, immediately hitting a frigid wall of air and beginning to fall towards the surface.

This was far from Amilee's first time jumping from near-orbit, but this one was a bit strange. The planet below had a slightly lighter gravitational pull than she was used to. The white planet below was much smaller than any densely-populated world in Confederate space, easily less than 5,000 kilometers in radius. She watched as the altimeter in her armor's systems began counting down the meters to the surface. Here she was breaking another personal record in such a short time. She just jumped from a spacecraft at nearly fifty kilometers above a planet's surface.

When she finally touched solid ground, it was a bit of a rough landing at first. The icy ground caused her to slip after her drogue chute deployed and slowed her enough for her armor's jump pack to soften her fall to the point where it felt like falling from only a few feet. Despite all of the advanced technology packed into their hardsuits, slipping on ice was still something that couldn't be engineered around.

Amilee didn't even need to direct the second fireteam, they were already heading for the small prison complex that was a five kilometer hike to the north-west. With a nod, she motioned for the six remaining operatives to fall in with her as she set off towards the south-west to disable some sensor equipment. After the hike, a small outpost came into view, built into the side of a decently-sized mountain. At the mountain's peak was an array of sensors; looking like a mixture of radar and lidar equipment. The mountainside complex was small, only a few buildings and a pair of light vehicles with no real armament.

Scaling the three-meter wall was trivial for the troopers, who simply activated their jump packs and found themselves standing atop the snow-covered defensive structure. The whistling wind evidently drowned out enough noise that the pair of Batarians standing beside a space heater didn't hear them land. Their conversation was equally drowned-out, so Amilee simply motioned for the nearest operative to take the left while she took the right. The soft clack of the rifle's action was barely audible even to the wielders as the sabot darts sailed through the rear of the alien helmets, sending their bodies to the snow.

"Whiskey 1-1, negative on thermal signatures outside the buildings. Whiskey 1-2 is waiting for you to disable their air defenses and comms. Out."

Amilee motioned for a quartet of her fireteam's troopers to clear the obvious barracks building, while she took the remaining three to clear the command center. Since this part of the planet was in near-perpetual twilight thanks to its proximity to its north pole, none of the buildings had any windows to speak of. When they finally found the door, indicated by the orange hologram at the center of one of the walls, Amilee motioned to one of her three troopers to start lining the center seam with compound-6b explosive foam and took up position on the left side of the door. When everyone was in position, both teams keyed their detonators at the same time, blasting the doors inwards and sending a spray of red-hot shrapnel into the buildings.

As Amilee's team rounded into the command center, all but two of the Batarians inside had been turned to paste by the detonation, the remaining two lacking any armor and reeling from likely having their eardrum-equivalents ruptured. Both of them were put down with little fanfare, the clacking of the rifles a bit more audible now that the wind was muffled somewhat.

"Clear." Amilee called over the comms.

"Clear." Her lieutenant called out in turn. "Moving to the third structure."

Confident in her team's ability to clear what she could only assume was a commons building without her, Amilee set to work sabotaging the local comms and air defense systems. All it took was powering down the local fusion generator and inserting a small storage drive that immediately set to work extracting every byte of data from the local net before purging the system. "Whiskey 1-2, systems disabled. You're clear to move. Godfather, you're clear to insert the Quarians."

"Solid copy, 1-1. Head for extraction."

Less than an hour later, Amilee was sat on the side of one of the light vehicles they had commandeered from the outpost, watching the small column of commandeered transports rolling towards their location deep in the tundra. With the entire planetary comms grid in chaos and all detection systems disabled, much of the prison complex's guard detachment had to be dispatched to the nearby colony to help maintain order, making it all the easier for the second team to get in and extract the Quarians. All that the dispatched guards would find upon their return would be empty cells and the bodies of their comrades.

Despite all their best efforts, not everyone made it out unscathed. As the second team finally arrived and started to disembark, she watched as a pair of them started off-loading a body that was wrapped in a tarp. When she only saw six of her comrades actually climb off the transport, a pit formed in Amilee's gut.

There was a solemn silence when the frigate finally descended into the valley that they had taken refuge in. Amilee did what she could to direct the people that they had rescued onto the ramp, and helped those who couldn't walk. Color her surprised to see several Batarians among the Quarians. Apparently, they were political prisoners of some kind. She'd let intelligence sort them out, all she wanted right now was to get what remained of her platoon home.

When they finally reached orbit, Amilee made her way to the upper deck to pass along the news to the captain. Sure enough, she saw several of the blockade's warships beginning to head for the planet to try and reestablish the comms system. A few moments after the blockade's formation began to shift, Amilee was stunned to see a Confederate battlegroup jump into the system, fangs already bared as they dropped out of FTL practically on top of the Batarian blockade. She stood there slack-jawed, not even really registering the smirk on the captain's face.

This was a detachment of the Confederate Home Fleet, the Liberty-Class Supercarrier CSV John Paul Jones serving as the flagship and bearing Republic of Chulainn livery on its aft. It was joined by six cruisers, eight destroyers, and eight frigates. A moment after their arrival, a wideband message was broadcast across the system from the John Paul Jones. "Attention Batarian Fleet assets, you are currently performing an illegal blockade of an unclaimed system and impeding a humanitarian effort. You will disengage and allow the Quarian vessels passage from this system, or we will be forced to engage."

The heaviest vessel in the blockading fleet was a cruiser, and an old one at that. Even the Batarians, who had been nothing but hostile to the Confederacy's attempts at diplomacy over the past year, had to know when to back down. Rather than commit to a fight they couldn't win, the Batarian cruiser returned a single word over the comms: "Acknowledged…"

February 10, 226

Erebus System, Atreus (Tessera)

"I'm glad to see the gamble paid off, Minister Bailey." Councilor Tevos began, her hologram flickering at the far end of the First Minister's office. Kerensky shared the sentiment. Getting the Council involved was risky with first contact still being so recent, but he was happy to see that backroom deals worked in the wider galactic community just as well as they did in the Confederacy. Getting the Asari's support was easy enough, but it took a good bit of convincing to get the Turians to agree to ignore the fleet deployment beyond the Confederacy's accepted borders. The promise of sharing any recovered intelligence from the Batarian communications network seemed to get things moving in the right direction quickly enough, however.

"As am I, Councilor. I have to wonder…" Bailey began, pushing herself off the front of her desk and standing upright. "Why didn't the Quarians contact the Council in the first place?"

A look of… sadness seemed to pass over the Asari councilor's face for a moment. "Relations between the Quarians and the rest of the galaxy have been… cool at best over the past two centuries since their exodus from Rannoch. Their research into A.I. technology was in direct violation of Council edicts, and most of the galaxy still has yet to forgive them for unleashing the Geth, even if it was an accident."

Bailey gave a nod. Truth be told, she thought that effectively excommunicating an entire species from the civilized galaxy to be a harsh treatment, especially when said species was now confined to a roving flotilla of ramshackle ships. "Well, I'm glad we were able to come to an understanding. You can tell the Turian Councilor that we'll have the… agreement sent to Palaven over the coming days."

"Thank you, Minister Bailey." Tevos gave a short bow, followed closely by her hologram fizzling out. As it did, Bailey let out a long sigh.

"Closer than I'd have liked…" She began.

"You're telling me." Kerensky chuckled. "Still, felt good doing right by those people… even if it cost us potential co-existence with the Batarians."

"You know as well as I do just how unlikely peaceful, let alone cordial relations would be between us and the Hegemony." Bailey shrugged. "Parliament was hung, so I went with my gut and trusted my advisor." She sent Kerensky a small smirk.

"Here's hoping my gut's right, then." Kerensky nodded, giving his best attempt at a consoling smile. By all accounts, the operation in the Traverse was a resounding success, and a perfect demonstration of what the Black Berets were capable of. Even still… the fact that one of his troopers didn't get to return home weighed heavy on him… even if it was for a good cause.

"So far, it hasn't disappointed." Bailey smirked. "Now… What's this about you requesting two-weeks leave?"

"Ah, well… I erm… made a promise to my daughters." Kerensky shrugged, smirking. "Liara's apparently at the age where getting her biotic implant… things is common. Since we're still trying to get the gist of how they work ourselves, I figured that there's no better place to go than the Asari themselves, so…"

Bailey chuckled, watching the normally-stoic general fumble his way through an explanation. "Consider the request granted, Aleksandr."

"Thank you, ma'am." Kerensky smiled, giving a respectful nod in return.

A/N:

Jeez, thanks for all the love on this new one, everyone. I appreciate the patience with my wack-ass update schedule.

Lemme just get one question out of the way: "How did a combustion gun manage to pass through a kinetic barrier?"

The way I interpret kinetic barriers to work is that they only kick on when an object travelling above a certain velocity, which is true to the setting's lore as I understand it. Since every weapon in common use in the galaxy is effectively a hypervelocity gauss rifle, you'd only want said shields to kick on at speeds exceeding that of sound, or at least relatively close to that, since there's no real advantage to having them kick on at lower speeds, since I assume that they're powered by an internal battery or a small power plant in the armor itself. Since we don't ever see barriers and shields kick on in high winds or against large debris, I think it's a fair estimate to say that they'd kick on at roughly the speed of sound. It's effectively just the Confederacy exploiting a design oversight to help their special forces punch above their weight.

With that off my chest, godspeed.