Chapter 40

"Beyond a certain point, no return is possible. That is the point that is to be reached."

—Franz Kafka

August 2220

Day Two

Did Warp Travel always leave one with the feeling like they were dropping at fast speeds? The feeling of acceleration, like an elevator was moving too quickly beneath him, it settled into his stomach and made him feel uncomfortable. In a feat of engineering worthy of the Protheans themselves, in just three weeks, the shattered remains of the Batarian navy, some six thousand ships, were dry-docked, and had Citadel Space's first working Warp Engines wired into them and settled down. The Humans had very nearly destroyed any chances of successful Batarian Warp during their operations on Siler, but in their scramble to destroy the Warp Gate and their panic to find their missing SIGMA, they overlooked several small details, like a survivor desperate enough to gain favor with his government, to download all of the relevant information onto his omni-tool and then swallow it after taking a pill that slowed down his stomach's processes.

The result was, after the end of the war, their prototype was lost, but the research was not. This, added to what could amount to the greatest possible addition to their war machine, and High Command had made the admittedly controversial decision for an uplifting enslavement - a scenario that had been considered hypothetical for centuries, and never once truly carried out, though some argues whether or not that was by accident, or design. Their goal was to breech into the heart of Human territory, within which lay one single solar system, given by birth to a species of lizard people who, by all accounts, were as ferocious as Krogan. All they had to do was conquer a primitive species, uplift them, and set them loose on the Humans. It would take time, a great amount of time, at least two generations, for them to forget their previous lives and societies and become unflinchingly loyal to the Batarians, but the Hegemony wasn't unskilled in the long game, else their slave economy would have collapsed centuries ago. The maddening part, however, was that a great many veterans of the last war had deserted then and there once they'd gotten their new orders, for fear of another war against the Humans. So precious few actually wanted to voluntarily start another war with the Alliance, that they were even committing treason, trying to sow the seeds of rebellion and revolution; not that they got far, unlike the Humans, the Hegemony never let possible rebellions grow past their infancies.

So now here they were, travelling many exponents above relativistic speeds. When all the math had been done, Warp Speed had been calculated at over seventeen hundred light years per standard day; a person could travel from one end of the galaxy to the other in less than two months, at that speed. To get from Hegemony Space, to the Saltorian solar system took less than forty eight hours. The Captain of the HSS Vengeance disliked the feeling of acceleration that settled in his gut upon entering Warp, it felt as if he were falling very far, very fast, but he could tolerate it, especially when work kept him busy, and not dwelling upon it.

For instance, while communication of any kind - save for face-to-face - was impossible in the Warp, he could access archived messages and orders, and now, five minutes before they were scheduled to leave Warp and arrive in the Saltorian system, he was going over his orders and the general plan of attack. From what they'd learned during their communications with the Saltorian leader, their 'Praetorian', whose word was law and whose law changed as frequently as the man who held office, the true threat was from their homeworld, the unimaginatively named 'Saltor'. The world had many multiple moons, all of which were populated with numbers ranging from the hundreds of thousands to millions, and the population of Saltor itself rounded out at nine billion individuals. The Saltorians' only extra-planetary colony, 'Hoomanisire', wasn't that much of a threat, given the fact that it hadn't seen war in over two thousand years, and these misinformed creatures died daily to make sure that trend continued. Thus, the plan was to surround Saltor and launch surgical, orbital strikes against military installations and cities, before they blockaded these cities. An army moved on its stomach, so all they had to do was cut those cities off from their supplies and keep them pinned and immobile inside the shattered ruins of their precious cities. After they were starved, wounded, and exhausted for enough time, then the Batarian Military would roll in and kill anyone who fought, slap slave collars on anyone who didn't, and all survivors who did.

They could likely win out in an extended military conflict, but the problem was that if they won the fight against them, they wouldn't win the fight against the Alliance, primarily due to all of the unknowns. High Command had no idea what kinds of environments they were running into, they didn't know what the gravity looked like on either of the planets, they barely knew that Saltorians breathed oxygen, which meant that they had had to equip everyone, the slave corps included, with exo-frames to counter potential gravity wells. The frames weren't anything like human power armor, they were simply meant to allow soldiers to fight effectively in gravitic environments reaching upwards eight standard G's, twice that of the heaviest known planet, the Elcoor homeworld, Dekuuna, which came in at four G's. They were playing the long game by starting this second war, a game they would win as long as everything went perfectly. Even War-Plan Aralakh largely relied on pinning the Krogan down in their villages and removing their food sources and restricting their supply chains; at the time, it had been considered revolutionary, but then Humans came along, and showed that they'd been practicing warfare similar to that for longer than they'd even recorded their history. The point was that the Batarians needed a quick, and relatively painless victory here, if they wanted to win what would no-doubt become a dragged out campaign later on. They needed the numbers of both the Hegemony Military and the Saltorians to remain as undisturbed as possible, so if that meant breaking a few galactic conventions and stealing enemy tactics, then so be it. The reward was worth the risk.

"Captain, we are exiting the warp." Reported a helmsman.

The Captain nodded; he might not have an Admiral's rank, but there were only two Admirals who had survived the Human war, and they both were on Khar'Shan, so he'd been brought in to captain the Vengeance, the de-facto flagship of the assembled Batarian Navy. Just a few seconds later, he felt the acceleration in his gut vanish on the spot, and the small hum he hadn't even noticed was in the background vanished as well. His people quickly started getting updates from the other ships, all ships were accounted for, save for sixty whose Warp Engines either failed or their ships couldn't handle the stress of Warp-Travel, and they simply vanished in the immaterial. For a moment, the Captain pondered the Warp, starting to understand that the reason Humans built all of their ships with thick armor plating wasn't just to survive attack, but what he wanted to know was something that no being alive could comprehend: What the Warp was itself. It was a dimension outside, in-between, or even beneath their own, but separated regardless, but what happened to ships that were lost in it? Were they disintegrated? Shot out into space at random? Catapulted to the future? So many questions existed, and the only way to answer them was to undergo the experience himself, and he certainly didn't want that.

Still… Sixty three out of six thousand. Not bad, I guess. He nodded, and gave the order to begin the assault; scant seconds later the massive battlefleet made brief eezo-assisted FTL jumps to Saltor's orbit, and after they bled of their momentum, they began angling so their noses faced the planet.

"When ready: fire." The Captain hadn't been given orders to try one last negotiation, the Saltorians knew what they were doing, so they didn't get a second chance. They hadn't been entirely too forthcoming about where they put their military bases, but from their conversations the Navy had been able to glean that, over the course of several tens of thousands of years, they'd dug underneath nearly every single mountain in their world, and set up a base there. Massive underground complexes, invisible from orbit, but with deep-scanning probes, they were as obvious as a virgin Asari in a bar.

Obviously, the Navy couldn't very well blast apart and destroy every mountain on the planet, they had neither the time nor the numbers, but they could choose the next best thing: Find the largest ones and have the more powerful ships focus their fire, while the smaller ships orbited above and shelled their cities for a few hours. Some would call it cowardly, but those same people weren't planning tactics and strategies for two wars against three species and tens of billions of people.

The ship shuddered as its main cannon fired once, twice, three times and then a fourth. The Vengeance being a Pratr ship, a mock-up fusion of Alliance and Citadel technology, could fire more shots in rapid succession than most other non-dreadnought ships in a Citadel fleet, and given that more energy could be dedicated to the main cannon, it was able to hit harder, too. The end result was six shots, one right after the other, before they had to stop firing and let the ship cool down. All around the planet, similar stories were reported around - a few shots placed strategically, several mountain ranges fell under the multiple kilotons of explosive yield each cannon contained. They let a few minutes pass as they moved their ships and reoriented not for mountain strikes, but city-strikes.

Hours passed as the Batarian Navy struck Saltor without end. In a grand total, a petaton of accumulative damage had been wrought upon the planet. Mountains were flattened, cities were shattered, and tens of millions were killed. When the Admiral got word that the cities were soft enough, he sent the order for the ground troops to deploy.

If there was one thing in war that Jorban Sal'Naa absolutely detested above all else, it was a coward's strike. Completely separate from a stealth attack, a coward's strike was defined as any situation in which an enemy force bombarded a civilian population center from a position which they could not be touched, lest it be by a manned assault. It was, in theory, a perfect battle strategy - maximum enemy casualties with zero risk of allied deaths - but in practice, it was simply horrible. Peace was not for the soldiers fighting for it, but for the civilians who lived in it, and having that peace be shattered by a sudden, surprise attack by a coward's army was unthinkable. In the twenty hours the Batarians had shot Saltor from their cowardly, nigh unreachable position in orbit, the BattleVectors had gotten countless pleas for help, distress calls, and disheartening updates from fallen cities. The weakest cities, who only warranted small token Tyyrahn defense forces, were being taken by the Batarians outright, with the largest conflicts being those that came after the fact, when the surviving Tyyrahn regrouped and coordinated guerrilla larger cities had different stories, as they were assaulted from orbit for a few hours and then blockaded on the ground, so any supplies or help simply cannot reach them. The only city that hadn't been utterly ruined by combination air, ground, and space strikes was Innsua, the half-continent spanning city-state that housed the BattleVector's Temple of the Hoomanisire, and the only reason for that was because that many dozens of the capitol city's buildings had HellFire cannons wired onto them to act as massive anti-aircraft, anti-missile, and anti-anything batteries. When the Batarians had attempted to shell Innsua from orbit, the ancient, but well-maintained, cannons awoke and protected the city, turning the projected tens of millions casualties to a mere few thousand.

The Batarian strategy was a textbook representation of a flash-fire war: Strike fast and hard, and steal everything possible in the opening salvo. The Batarian victories in this first day, while small in scale, were numerous enough to keep the BattleVector and Tyyrahn defense forces off balance, and the Praetorian unable to coordinate any counter-attacks until he reached the temple and assessed the situation, and to ensure he made it to the temple safely, there were six shuttles, filled with BattleVectors, each one told that they held the Praetorian and were to protect him at all costs, while he rode in a seventh shuttle that had ceased burning its engines so as to facilitate avoiding radar contact. Including those seven were forty space shuttles, hurtling through the deep, black void, each of these vehicles were holding their absolute maximum carrying capacity, one million BattleVectors. There were thousands of other shuttles, but they were all years older, outdated by the forty shuttles that had made the sixty million kilometer trip in the forty eight hours they had. Such a venture would have been essentially impossible not even a decade ago, but the Batarians were nothing if not short-sighted. In the hopes of gaining potential allies, they had equipped their latest enemies by spoon feeding them conventional spaceflight technology that was centuries beyond anything the Saltorians could produce. All the Saltorians had needed was the inspiration, a simple analogy, all they needed to know was that it could work, and they could have figured out how on their own. The Batarians had said that the key to their Faster Than Light was the ability to generate extreme amounts of thrust from small amounts of fuel, preferably through annihilation, so if the Saltorians wanted FTL, they first had to reach the point where it would be feasible. The Saltorians, however, given their large lack of feasible antimatter creation, came up with a different solution - fusion based propulsion. Instead of instant massive acceleration, they preferred to build up their speed over time, sacrificing acceleration for control. The result was forty ships in four years, capable of crossing the distance between Saltor and Hoomanisire in just under two days.

Jorban, along with the million other BattleVectors, sat in his space shuttle, energy lance cradled in his arms, pressurized suit ready to seal itself against the void. It had been sheer coincidence that they'd already been on their way to Saltor to shore up the ground defenses, so now the Batarians would have to wait a lot less longer to feel the full might of the empire they chose to engage. Like many, Jorban was engaged in a deep, pre-battle meditation; he simply focused on his breathing, feeling the air go into his lungs, and then flow out. In, deep, out, slow. It calmed his mind and helped him think of the warmth of home, of his mates, it kept away the thoughts of his past, of the gangs he had once fought with, of the near-rebel groups he had once called family, of the people he had killed and homes he had robbed.

"BattleVectors, arm yourselves. Relevant to your orientation, your target will be right above you as the upper bay doors open. You are to breach the ship and take it for our own, before returning to the shuttle and making for Chairon City, where we are mounting our first counter attack." Came the words from their Praetorian. "Many of us will die today, and in the coming days. It is our duty to make certain that more of them die to show for it. Amen."

"AMEN!" Roared out the Saltorians, as the shuttle lurched to a halt by flaring its engines. Just a second later, the massive, curved bay-doors above them opened up, the atmosphere vanishing on the spot and turning the once noise-filled environment into a silent one, almost as if they had placed a pillow upon the mouth of the universe; all of the BattleVectors' suits sealed their wearers against the oxygen-lacking void, compressing inward and tightening against their bodies, before feeding them the metallic tasting oxygen. 'Above' them, relative to the floor of their shuttle, poured the naked light of the planet that birthed the Saltorian race. Its multiple massive continents and connecting landmasses, mixing green, red, and brown, with the blue of the oceans, reflected the light of the twin suns, before being covered up by the comparatively enormous object they had snuck up behind like a hunter predator. It was a massive, white, gray, and red ship, nearly two kilometers long, with building-sized thrusters on its tail end and alien characters adorning its surface. The space shuttle, and more importantly its million BattleVectors, knew its duty, and it unleashed the most trained, experienced warriors that Saltor had ever birthed, pouring them out like water from an urn.

Jorban leapt from the shuttle and flew several meters through the void. His arms were outstretched, with them and his head pointed directly at the ship. Brief bursts of air from dozens of small nozzles all over his body controlled his orientation, his velocity, and his direction as he soared towards the ship. Micro-computers in his suit kept track of everything from his heart-rate, to his oxygen levels, to his orientation relative to Saltor's gravity well and his velocity. For a brief moment, he felt like a giant, as his outstretched hands filled his vision and blocked out the alien war vessel, but as he grew closer, the enormity dawned on him: he was but an insect, trying to bite its way into a tank. Fortunately for him, even Dregs spit acid.

When he impacted the ship, small magnets in his gloves locked him to the hull, so when his momentum made him crumple against the hull and would have had him shoot out and away, all that truly happened was that he hit the ship and halted almost wholesale, his muscles straining as his momentum was absorbed by the superstructure of the ship. For a moment, relative to the ship he had locked himself to, he almost looked like he was doing a hand-stand, but soon, when he felt it safe to right himself, he lowered himself down to the ship and stood up tall, the magnets in his paper-white boots keeping him locked to the ship. Several thousand other BattleVectors performed similar landings, and they all called out over the radio that they had landed. Jorban leaned down and strapped his rifle to his back, making doubly sure the straps and connections were secure so they didn't fly out into the void the moment he let go. The laws of the conservation of momentum were every space-fighter's worst enemy, even moreso for pilots, like the one who worked the shuttle above them, they had to learn how to maneuver in three dimensions, whilst building up as little momentum as possible; hundreds of Saltorians died every year simply because they couldn't figure out how to decelerate in space. The scowling Lanceman knelt down and he pulled out a plasma torch from his backpack. Standard equipment for every BattleVector had to include some kind of high-power cutting tool, after all, they had to be equipped for any possible situation, to the point where they even had emergency re-breathers for brief underwater operations; after all, one never knew when they would need a specific tool.

"Lancemen Sal'Naa, Cutting Hull." Jorban announced, as he lit the torch and brought it to the hull. It was thick and hardy, but it relented astonishingly quickly under the almost solar heat of the torch.

"Lancemen Mun'Sha, breached hull." Jorban looked up as he cut the hull, and saw the distortion in the void as the ship decompressed, the oxygen inside blasting outside and vanishing into space. Several BattleVectors streamed through this entrance, but Jorban focused on his own - the death of ten thousand cuts would work just as well, and even if they planned on taking the ship for later, for now, it was an enemy ship, so to hell with it.

When Jorban breached the hull by carving a two meter, square hole, more air escaped from within. He called out his hull-breach and then swung inside, several men following him. Inside the ship, Jorban nearly crashed onto the ground as he was reintroduced to gravity, but it was a gravity lighter than he was used to on Saltor, so his landing, while rough, wasn't bad by any definition.

This gravity… It is lighter even than that of Hoomanisire. Thought Jorban, as he got to his feet, but before he could go any further, he heard a voice in his radio call out directly to him.

"Sal'Naa, kogger on your left! Jump now!" Jorban didn't hesitate at the words of his gun-brother and he leapt forward, dodging several muted shots from a Batarian who wielded a handgun. When Jorban landed on the ground, his energy-lance, and the lances of six other Saltorians, were trained on the Batarian and firing. Six lances trained on any target would fry that person in seconds, but this creature had no scales, no natural defenses against heat, and its armor was only marginally more effective at blocking out said heat. The result was, before the Batarian could even blink, six beams of searing hot light burned a tree-trunk-sized hole in the creature's chest, even going so far as to slagging the metal wall behind him and showering him in sparks as the sensitive electronics and wires overloaded and exploded.

"What is the armor even for if it does not protect against energy lances?" A BattleVector asked, as Jorban got to his feet.

Around him were dozens of floating Batarian bodies, and the bodies of other species that the Batarians had likely tried, and succeeded in, enslaving. Blue-skinned alien creatures with flesh sacks on their chest, odd, leather, avian creatures with spikes on their heads, reptilian people with enormous eyes, they all were united in that none of them had armor, or anything to protect them from vacuum exposure, they were merely garbed in scraps, signifying that they were far below the Batarians on their social ladder. Jorban sighed as he wondered where his people would stand on this, Holy War meant that they would not stop until their enemy was gone, but Praetorian Sid had not taken into account the other species the Batarians had enslaved during their reign. If the Saltorians won their defensive war, and subsequently won their offensive war, what would they do with the other species? Even more worrying, what would they do if the other species fought back? If they had been so thoroughly broken by living under Batarian rule that they knew no other life, and would fight to keep their status quo? Would the Holy War then extend to these other poor creatures? How would He Above All judge that?

"Perhaps they never created them in the first place." Said Jorban, as he watched several squads of BattleVectors streaming into the ship, thundering through the tight corridors, and into the closed off rooms, making sure this small area was clear before they moved on. Jorban turned around and looked at the wall behind him, several dents signifying where it had been shot, yet he saw no shrapnel from the bullets, and after looking back at the shooter, he saw no shell casings. "Their weapons fire caseless rounds."

"Our hellfire cannons do the same. Do they prefer quantity over quality, or is there something we are missing?" A BattleVector spoke up.

"We only have five seconds of combat exposure, just let the questions build for now, and if we get answers, make sure to pass them to your Lanceman." Jorban decided with a firm nod, as he turned back to face the flow of the BattleVectors, "now move forward, to the bow!" He called out. "BattleVectors, the enemy armor does not protect against our energy lances." He added over the short-wave, so all could hear. "We do not know their genetic composition, so if possible focus fire on their heads."

Jorban and his fellow BattleVectors cautiously made their way through the ship, their knees bent, their tails curled around their stomachs, and their rifles raised. Though their section of the ship was exposed to the void, the floors and walls vibrated periodically as the battle for the ship raged. Jorban's eyes were wide behind his thick glass visor, the alien ship was spartan in nature, with few decorations and fewer finishings. It was clearly a warship, and as such it was meant to look like it, no considerations for comfort in the harsh blue and gray colorings of the metal walls, ceilings, and floors, everything built with function foremost in their minds.

The Lanceman quickly came upon a set of thick blast-doors that had long since slammed shut in response to this section's exposure to the void, but Jorban's plasma torch was still hot, and it only took a spark to get it going again. The moment he began cutting, the air inside blasted out, nearly setting Jorban on fire as its fuel fed the plasma, but Jorban leaned out of the way of his torch, locked his feet to the ground and was like a boulder in a stream: unmoving. In ten seconds, he had carved a three square meter hole in the door, and when he was finished, he hopped up, grabbed ahold of the ceiling, and swung forward, kicking the door inwards with both feet, his strength in the low-gravity environment sending it flying inwards. The BattleVectors streamed inside before Jorban even landed on the ground; this area had more soldiers in it, but they seemed unaccustomed to fighting in space, whereas Jorban and his gun-brothers had trained for years on micro-gravity maneuvers alone, adjusting to the new environment was as easy to them as reloading a handcannon.

It was hard to take cover in the cramped, close-quarters environment of the alien spaceship, and as such whenever the BattleVectors breached new corridors and entered new sections of the ship, they were met with walls and storms of alien gunfire, but the alien weapons technology found it nearly impossible to puncture the BattleVectors' armored space-suits, which were rated to take several seconds of sustained laser fire, and were able to take handcannon rounds as close as two meters and still be vacuum-rated, the comparatively microscopic slugs of the alien shooters did little but hit the BattleVectors and bounce off of their suits, leaving them with the feeling like they had been kicked by an angry animal. The BattleVectors found their momentum and kept with it, almost literally burning their way through the ship, never slowing down for more than a few seconds at a time, and thoroughly clearing each room they came across.

The ship, big as it was, was clearly not meant to hold more than a few thousand crew and slaves, which meant that even had the Saltorians not had the weapons or armor advantage, their sheer mass of numbers would have won them the day. The Batarians were vastly underprepared for how wild BattleVectors fought, and they were even less prepared for having to fight on their own ships, where they thought they had been safe from the noisy primitives.

The biggest and only surprise Jorban got from the fight came when, instead of having to cut their way through another blast door, it was instead opened by the aliens, and they used the sudden, rapid decompression in conjunction with the shutdown of the artificial gravity to fly right towards the Saltorians at high speeds, their guns bucking and barking wildly, their sound blasting out in all directions and quickly vanishing as the air vanished in the void, the whole display sounding as if someone was slowly applying a massive pillow to the whole area to muffle and silence the noise of war. The alien fighters hurtled towards the Saltorians, some of them hitting their targets with enough force to jar them from the ground, giving them enough time to spray the stunned BattleVector with gunfire, with some even being lucky enough to try and aim for the visors and not the suits, which had the effect of shattering the helmets and exposing the BattleVector inside to the vacuum.

Jorban, instead of retreating from the advancing aliens, stood his ground and threw his arm out, clotheslining his opponent and flipping the man around one hundred and eighty degrees. Before the creature could even croak, Jorban knelt down and slammed him onto the ground, the impact snapped his neck. The sound barely reached his ears as the vibrations traveled through the metal floor and into his suit. Jorban's head snapped up and he saw more Batarians advancing, so the kneeling BattleVector whipped up his energy lance and pressed the trigger, immediately lighting up the soaring aliens and burning through their armor and bodies with barely any resistance. Without the knowledge of where these creatures' hearts or vital organs were, Jorban was targeting their heads, and his efforts bore fruit as the incinerated brains ceased function and the Batarians died before they even felt the heat from the energy beams. As the ash from the incinerated portions of the Batarian bodies began clouding the air, more Batarians stormed outwards, some jumping, some sprinting, some stupidly letting both feet leave the ground at the same time and aimlessly floating out into the void, their arms flailing and waving around as they panicked. Jorban shot the ones he had a clearest line of sight towards as the ash continued filling the air, lending everyone present the ability to actually see the bright white lances shoot out in tight cones of light whenever a BattleVector fired his weapon, as the light hit the ash and reflected off of it.

Jorban straightened up into a crouching position and crab-walked to the side, intending to find cover so no stray shots hit his visor. Just a second later, another Batarian landed next to him and threw a wild punch at Jorban's face. The scales on the back of Jorban's neck flared and he dodged on instinct, bending over backwards just before the fist flew over his head. The white-suited Saltorian then dug his feet into the ground and leapt to the side, smashing his shoulder into the torso of the alien, his mass and the speed of the attack catching the alien off guard and knocking the wind out of his lungs. Not waiting for the Batarian to begin his counter, Jorban twisted around so as to face the alien like a warrior, and slammed his thick fist into the creature's stomach, following it up by drawing his hand cannon and blasting him twice in the chest. Now with blood mixing in with the ash floating about, Jorban grabbed the creature by its armor and flung it back towards the enemy defensive line, where it took a great amount of fire in the null-gravity and was sent spiraling out of the way.

After dispatching his opponent, Jorban calmly crouched low and shouldered his lance, firing short bursts of searing hot light at the Batarians who hadn't tried the suicidal advance. The brief lances of light lit up the ash-filled, corpse-saturated vacuum, as the BattleVectors pressed forward and the Batarians tried not to fall back. Walls of gunfire flew out from behind the blast door, and either harmlessly hit the BattleVectors, or were melted outright when they passed the cones of light shot from the Saltorian weapons. As they advanced Jorban knew that several of his gun-brothers had either died or been injured in the Batarians' attack, but one brief glance around told him that they hadn't taken anywhere near the casualties the Batarians had, that there was still a raging sea of BattleVectors, and the Batarians were like a pebble trying to block a stream.

"These people are pitiful!" He heard a BattleVector cry out as they advanced, frying anyone and anything that moved and wasn't one of their own; their space-suits proved vital in that regard, as their stark white suits bore a great contrast against the dark colored armors of the Batarian soldiers. "Dreg outbreaks provide more of a challenge."

"They weren't expecting us to attack them on their own ship." Said Jorban, before the door they crossed shut with a silent metallic clang, soon the ship was filled with atmosphere again, and the gravity came back to life. "They're trying to separate us from our numbers." He called out, as he took stock of the few dozen that had made it through the door before it shut. He switched on the radio and contacted the BattleVectors who had been separated, "find a way through. We'll continue onwards." He raised his hand and spun it around in a circle, gathering his men and sending them onwards, as he heard multiple affirmations from the radio. The BattleVectors thundered forward, their footsteps now completely audible as thunderous bangs on the metal floor.

They practically flew through the rest of the ship, cutting open the doors that remained sealed and blasting into dust anyone who stood in their way. As they got closer and closer to the bridge, they found themselves facing more and more heavily armed and armored enemies, who used larger guns more meant for blasting people into little bits than taking prisoners or killing. The result of the heavier weaponry was that Jorban started taking hits, which was unavoidable given the tight corridors of the ship, and the large caliber weapons the enemies were beginning to use.

After two hours of nonstop combat in the tight corridors of the ship, briefly broken up by the recreational areas used by the crew - such as the mess hall and the barracks - the BattleVectors finally arrived at the bridge, joining a few hundred of their allies in a battle already in progress. Jorban slammed into cover heavily, jarring his shoulder on impact, but he ignored the pain as other BattleVectors stacked up on the two sides of the blast-door that led to the bridge.

"On my mark, we enter! Do not stop moving for more than fifteen seconds, we must overtake and surround them! We are on level ground, all we need to do is surround them and we shall win!" Jorban yelled out, to the nods and the battle-cries of his gun brothers. "One… Two… THREE!" He screamed, his deep voice accompanying a deafeningly loud battle-cry from his gun brothers, as all Saltorians raised their rifles and dashed inside, chaos greeting their eyes.

The bridge was massive and expansive, with the captain's chair raised above all of the crew in a central dais. There was a circular wall surrounding the captain's chair, behind which the Captain and several of his soldiers were fighting, fending off Saltorians as they found cover or, in the absence of such things, ripped plates and chairs off of the walls and ground and used them as cover - the alien slugs, for all their had in raw force, seriously lacked in penetrating power. Past the nervous center of the bridge was a narrow corridor, barely three-Saltorians wide, in which the majority of the Batarian resistance was hiding behind raised plates and firing blindly.

Before Jorban could think of an idea, however, one of the Batarians bodily hauled a blue-skinned slave creature with heavy-looking flesh sacks on its chest to the front of their defensive line. The creature, with fear causing its entire body to tremble, was wreathed in flame just a second before it threw its arms forward. In the blink of an eye, a violet bubble expanded outwards from the fleshy creature, and immediately the Batarians stopped firing. The BattleVectors attempted to continue firing, but none of their energy weapons penetrated the barrier. In less than ten seconds, the sounds of intense battle were replaced by dead silence, as each side took a moment to recover.

Jorban squinted his eyes, he stood up from behind his cover and retrieved his hand cannon. All eyes watched him as he aimed the handgun and fired it at the violet barrier, whereupon it shattered and violently rebounded on impact. Jorban frowned, but it took his predatory mind not even a minute to come up with a new idea.

There are thousands of these ships in orbit, and countless have been stormed just like this one. We can afford to lose one, so long as the rest of it remains in orbit so we can scavenge their technology. Thought the Lanceman, as he rallied his BattleVectors and lined them up in front of the barrier, one meter between the aliens and the Saltorians.

He quickly formed three lines of one dozen BattleVectors. "You." He indicated the first line, "concentrate fire below." He pointed at the ground that separated the barrier from the BattleVectors. "You." He indicated the second line, "the ceiling." He pointed upwards. "You half." He pointed a gloved hand at half of the third line, "the left wall. And you half, the right." He retrieved his lance, "make sure your suits are patched up and sealed." He suppressed a feral grin, as it failed to dawn on the invading aliens just what the Saltorians were doing. "And lock your legs to the floor." He said, just as he activated the magnets in his boots. "Ready…" He pointed his energy lance at the ground, and adjusted the safety so he could get ten seconds of sustained fire, as opposed to three. "Fire." On his word, the BattleVectors fired their weapons, the silent, searing hot energy beams needing not even a second to turn the floor, walls, and ceiling to slag.

Some of the Batarians behind the barrier figured out what they were doing, but they were ignored by their fellows, who refused to believe the BattleVectors were so suicidal. The BattleVectors continued to burn through the ship's interior with their laser weapons, quickly slagging the first layers of metal and burning through the sensitive electronics. It took them three seconds to burn through the ship's outer hull and its armor, but when the first hole was made, the entire bridge decompressed and the section that was sealed off by the barrier groaned loudly as the metals were stretched and torn, it was kept on by a thread, but it only got worse as more holes were burned in the ship and the air inside began escaping faster. Soon, when the shooters were certain their beams had made it outside, they slowly dragged their weapons to their left and right, widening their holes and slagging more metal.

Some Batarians were screaming now to put the barrier down, but others, far more panicked, argued that doing so would ensure their deaths. It took three minutes, but finally the Saltorians' improvised laser cutters managed to completely bisect the bridge and separate it from the rest of the ship. Jorban turned his gaze upward, ignoring the shower of sparks and heat radiating from the slag that covered the floor, walls, and ceiling. He made eye contact with the first Batarian he saw, and noted with glee that the Batarian had realized what he was about to do.

With no warning or hesitation, Jorban lifted his foot and placed it on the alien portion of the ship, still protected and still sealed by the blue barrier. "Push!" Jorban called out into the radio, as he saw some Batarians begin to float into the air, artificial gravity clearly having been destroyed or deactivated. He was joined by the other BattleVectors, who all placed their hands, feet, or even tails, on the now bisected bridge, and pushed with all of their might.

They didn't hear the Batarians or their slaves begging or screaming for their lives, though the alien portion of the ship still had air because of the slave's barrier, Jorban and his portion of the ship did not, they only had dead silence as their physical exertions bore fruit and they slowly began to push the nose of the ship away from the bridge. Jorban and the BattleVectors kicked the nose of the ship and sent it slowly tumbling through the void. They had nowhere near the collective strength to actually send the bisected ship hurtling through the void, but they had the required strength to push it, and they all watched as the ship slowly floated away, now fully influenced by Saltor's powerful gravity well. It began the long, sedate journey upwards to the planet's surface, ever so slowly picking up speed as it kept floating outwards, now revealing to the Saltorians that they were oriented to where their planet was 'up'.

After a few seconds, the nose of the ship built enough space between it and the rest of the ship for the BattleVectors to see the planet above them. The planet was steadily revealed to them, almost as if it were a surprise gift to be unwrapped. They were greeted by the sight of a planet on fire. Enormous orange patches on the formerly green land signified flames, and large, thick smoke trails crisscrossed through the air, signifying non-nuclear ballistic missiles being launched at the cities confirmed lost. The Saltorian War Machine was a well-oiled one, the only true change from this war to any other one in their past was that they were fighting sentient aliens instead of Dregs or Insurrectionists. The standard operating procedure for a lost city was first a non-nuclear missile strike, and should they then fail to capture the city in the counter attack, then they fusion-bombed it and the surrounding area.

More of the planet was revealed to them as the bisected nose began sinking as well as floating away. Surrounding the planet were hundreds, if not thousands of space ships, both Saltorian and Batarian. Dozens of these ships were smoking, exploding, or otherwise damaged from the inside, and several of them were uncontrollably falling to the planet below, fire-trails enveloping them as they hit the atmosphere and their friction built as they continued to pick up speed. Jorban could see several BattleVector shuttles beginning their descent operations, having gutted the alien ships and left them to float in their orbital graveyard.

Jorban stared up at his planet, fury settling deep in his lungs and fire boiling his blood. "Sweep the ship and make sure it is clear, then get back to the shuttle."

The arduous process of clearing the ship took an hour longer than intended due to a dastardly slave-creature wearing some kind of hazard suit. It had been scared out of its mind by the BattleVector assault, and had tried sabotaging them with hit-and-run tactics. Unfortunately for it, the BattleVectors had had enough after the third attack and had found it after an hour of tracking, and they promptly disemboweled it and left it to die. It had tried to get to the ship's bowels and retrieve a metal, skeletal frame of some sorts, which it donned and then presented in such a way that it made Jorban wonder if it wasn't some sort of device meant to augment its strength, or, more realistically, allow it to walk in high-gravity environment, which would achieve the same effect. Unfortunately for the creature, no Saltorian, even BattleVectors, truly believed in an honest, honorable fight, if they could avoid it. The poor, pitiful slave creature hadn't made it more than two steps before its head had been blasted off by a handcannon, and it itself was pried from the metal frame, which had been taken by the BattleVectors for potential study.

After ensuring the ship was clear, the army of BattleVectors all leapt up and ambled back into their shuttle, and within fifteen minutes, were rocketing towards a planet on fire. Jorban got a good look at the bright side of the planet as he launched himself out of the alien ship and floated upwards, towards the space-shuttle. A lot of cities were on fire, a lot of cities had been bombed, and if he had to guess, streets and plains were running red with the blood of the Saltorians fighting savagely for their home. No one took their planet, their home, from them, and walked away unscathed; such was why the Hoomanisire grew to admire his creation - how hard they fought for what was theirs, by rights, by birth, and by victory. They earned everything they had, and their entire race would go extinct before they gave it up.

"Has everyone boarded the vessel?" The captain called from his pressurized cabin, he got an affirmative that all who had survived the assault were in, and the canopy doors shut tight, and the ship pressurized. "Hang on, we are going in for a loud landing!" Not a second after he had made his announcement, everyone was pressed into their seats as the ship's engines flared brightly, and they went from zero to ninety kilometers per hour in half of a second, and thanks to the vacuum of space, they only kept accelerating.

As they hurtled towards the planet, Jorban checked his rifle. His energy cell was only half empty, which meant it wasn't anywhere near time to change it out, and the rifle was otherwise in fine condition, with no partially melted barrel, and no heat damage. The energy lance was doing just as fine as its wielder. Jorban set the rifle down between his legs and clenched his fist tight, anxious, antsy, and amped up, adrenaline still flooding his system as he impatiently waited to get home and spill alien blood.

These Batarians may think that we are pitiful, primitive, and weak… But we will show them the truth. Holy War. Thought Jorban with an ironclad conviction.

A/N:

A couple things happened since the last update, the most important of which being I quit my job.
The long and short of that story is that aaaaaaaaaaall the BS I've been dealing with there came to a head. I confronted one of my coworkers about not doing his job, and he threatened to knock me out, before proceeding to physically push me out of the store. Brought it up with the boss man and he ended up saying he thought the best idea would be for us to essentially kiss and make up.
Not gonna happen. I all but told him that if the guy wasn't fired, I'd leave, and he thought I was bluffing, so I left.

I also started up a blog, over on WordPress. Not many entries yet, but I've been getting a feel for the layout and how the thing works. I plan on using it to tell stories of the non-fiction variety, those primarily being news about IRL and tales of what's happened/happening to me. Movie, Video Game, TV reviews, discussions, the whole shebang. I plan on having it be the 'hub' people can flock to should any of my various profiles get shut down or removed for whatever reason.

'Till next time!

-PFB