As the alarm rang, Max sighed and looked up from her omni-tool. Single repeating blast. There was no rush. She was writing the last page of her thesis and the alarm was came at very inconvenient time. She had two weeks till the deadline, but Max didn't want to delay it until the last moment. Her power couldn't help her like it did for exams.
Two years ago, she had enrolled at the Technical University Munich for distance learning, which was pretty common in the 22nd century. She had chosen physics and computer science. Max couldn't say that she had ever been good at math or physics, and she wasn't a computer geek, but she had good reasons to succeed. As the time went by, Max realized that neither math nor physics was as insanely difficult as she had used to believe. Well... her powers were helpful too and she was almost finished after two instead of three years.
Max wasn't giving up on learning more about her powers and specialized herself with that in mind. As for computer science, she took courses which could help her in her military career. Omni-tool was very useful in combat. Right after the ITS, she, Reyes and Fokin had gone through the reconnaissance marine training. Both of them had proven to be good enough, unlike Wang who had failed and had chosen a garrison on Elisium. The three of them had accepted an assignment to the recon frigate SSV Magnesia.
She pulled on her uniform and went to the cargo bay. She liked the ship. Unlike the majority of the Alliance Marines on spaceships, who were mostly doing the hurry up and wait thing, Marines on Magnesia didn't have time to get bored. Among other things they were installing long-range scanners, visiting recon stations, shooting smugglers and other criminal scum on unregistered vessels, doing deep reconnaissance in the Terminus Systems. The best way to protect a colony was to neutralize an enemy long before the attack. Not that they always were successful.
The rest of the squad except the LT was already in the cargo bay. Six Marines. A small two-teams squad, but enough for most recon missions. Besides, there was no space for more on the SSV Magnesia. The vessel was cramped to fill all the necessary equipment and personnel, which left little space for anything else.
"Hey, Caulfield," Fokin said, "did you eat a lemon?"
"Not sure what you mean, but fuck you, Nikita," replied Max. "It would be nice to have a lemon though."
"Yeah, I hope we'll get a shore leave on Arcturus or Earth soon."
"Dream on..." Reyes said.
"Cut the chatter!"
The Marines lined up as Lieutenant Lucas Roja entered the bay.
"At easy. We've got suspicious activity in the Moolung System. Two vessels about parsec away. Our objective is to investigate and to make sure they're no threat to our colonies."
"What's suspicious about the ships, LT?" Fokin asked.
Nikita had been promoted to a NCO two months later than Max and was a Service Chief like her. Much to her displeasure. Not that she wasn't happy for him, but his promotion forced him out of her team and she had to train a FNG replacement. PFC Jack Germansson wasn't a bad Marine, but he wasn't Fokin. On a happy note, Nikita had to deal with two FNGs of his own.
"The largest vessel signature matches the ship of a known batarian slaver Char Amak," the LT explained. "He's a suspect of multiple raids on our colonies. It's highly likely that he works for the Hegemony."
"You think they plan a raid?" Reyes asked.
"Are there any colonies in Moolung?" Germansson asked.
"There's a mass relay leading to Pelasgian Cluster," replied LT Roja.
"Which is a single jump away from Elysium," Max said.
"Exactly."
"But Elysium is a very tough nut to crack," Fokin said. "Not sure what they can achieve with two vessels."
"Yes, and we'll make sure that they won't have the vessels to raid our colonies," Roja said.
When Magnesia dropped out of FTL, the squad was ready for boarding, but first they had to endure a few long minutes of space battle. The enemy vessels were orbiting the third planet of the system. They were simply drifting with their engines off to avoid detection. If there hadn't been an Alliance scanner array hidden on one of the moons, the ships would be nigh invisible. A small corvette and an old batarian frigate.
Max didn't know what was happening. They were under the protocol to hail the suspicious vessels before shooting, but she felt growing vibrations of the charging main gun, which meant the captain didn't believe in successful negotiations. Or they failed. The cargo bay shook as the mass accelerator threw the first slug at an enemy vessel. A moment later she heard a familiar firing sound of secondary weapons.
It wasn't Max's first space battle, but she couldn't get used to the feeling of total powerlessness. She could only trust in the helmsman`s skills and rely on the element of surprise. They had mostly been lucky until now. The one time they had been caught with their trousers down, a chance meeting with a pirate cruiser accompanied by two frigates had almost been fatal for Magnesia. They had lost their shields after the first salvo and insane helmsman's skills had gotten them out alive.
"All targets disabled," the flight lieutenant reported.
"Boarding party prepare for the fun part," the captain commanded.
Max sighed with relief. She loved space flights, but hated space fights. The only real downside of serving in the Navy. Those who served groundside had their skills and weapons to thank for survival. In space though... Some freak hundred-pounds-heavy slug could break through the shields and kill everyone before they knew it. Luckily for them, Flight Lieutenant Carlo Pisano was one of the best in the Alliance.
Soon she felt the ship touching the enemy vessels. The airlock indicator blinked and turned green.
"Take up your positions!" Roja ordered.
Max unfastened herself and floated towards the airlock. As per regulation there was neither air nor gravity on the Magnesia while they were in combat. Gravitational mass effect fields were in inertia negation mode. They took their positions around the airlock on the floor. Normally she wouldn't call it floor, but in a zero-G environment floor could be any chosen surface.
"Begin," Roja said as they took positions around the airlock.
"Flash grenade," Max commanded and opened the door.
A grenade flew through the hole. The name had somehow survived through the time, but it was an EMP grenade that temporarily disabled electronics rather than a simple flashbang. Omni-tools, weapons, shield generators... Everything failed within a radius of the blast. As long as an enemy didn't have N-grade equipment.
Not a single living soul met them on the other side. No life signs on the scanner. Only dead bodies floating in the darkness.
"Clear," Fokin reported.
"Let's move," the lieutenant said.
They didn't go through the elevator, instead they flew through maintenance shafts. Sometimes they would notice some movement, but every single time it was just another dead batarian.
"Creepy as fuck," Reyes muttered.
"Pisano hit too hard," Max said. "I doubt we'll find anyone to interrogate."
"Everyone's dead due to an impact," Fokin said as he examined another corpse. "Seems like one of our slugs damaged the drive core which caused a short-term spike in hypergravity."
Max really hated space battles.
"There's a life sign in the bow section," Roja said. "Stay focused."
The squad was combing through every single room of the ship, moving slowly to the bow. They found a broken body of a naked asari in one of the rooms.
"Chipped," Nikita said as he scanned the body. "Meila T'Ranu. Reported missing more than two hundred years ago after a slave raid on an asari colony."
"Fucking animals," Taylor hissed.
Max tightened her grip on the rifle as she boiled with anger. She knew that it wouldn't be right to say that every single batarian was a slaver scum. The majority of them were slaves themselves, but every single batarian she met didn't make it easy for her to believe that.
"We'll get her on the way back," Roja instructed.
The squad found the only survivor on the bridge, but he was more dead than alive. Medi-gel was a wonder salve, but it wouldn't help the batarian. He looked like meat turned through a grinder. The only reason he was still alive was high-end armor with quality shields and inertia compensators. Max looked up to the LT, but he shook his head. Max wanted to shoot the batarian, but the lieutenant clearly thought that the batarian didn't deserve mercy.
"Char Amak," Fokin said as he scanned the dying batarian.
"Fuck!" Roja exclaimed. "I hoped to interrogate him. We have to know what they were doing here. Comb through the ship for anything useful."
A sudden alarm shook Max out of sleep.
It took them two hours to get through every system on the ship. SSV Magnesia was hidden in the debris left from the battle as they waited for decryption of the data from Amak's omni-tool. There had to be a reason he was hiding in the middle of nowhere on the orbit of planet next to a mass relay. The perfect position to watch the relay. There had to be something.
This time she was the last to get to the cargo bay.
"We've decrypted Amak's message log," Roja said. "They had a plan to attack Elysium. Amak was tasked with watching this-"
"The board is green," the helmsman reported. "Approaching the relay."
"-route."
"Then why the fuck are we leaving, LT?" Reyes asked.
"We're too late," Roja explained. "Moolung was a fallback route. We've received a distress signal from Elysium."