Grineer Galleon number 8905, fly by Neptune
The empty darkness of space shimmered occasionally at the presence of a Grineer Galleon, which seemed to be patrolling Neptune. It kept at considerable distance, only to record ship entrances and exits.
Inside, a butcher by the name of Travis fiddled with his cleaver while sitting spread eagle on the ground.
"Uuuh" he moaned, as he inspected the handle.
As he carefully slid his fingers across the blade, he met the fizzling edge of it, and had cut himself as a result.
Travis screamed in agony as he decided to punch the cleaver, which resulted on providing him with a much deeper wound. Travis then squirmed in pain as a result, alerting nearby Grineer towards him.
As the massing Grineer, steady with their weapons slowly realized what the situation was, they collectively sighed and steadily returned to their posts. One of them even remarked:
"The retard again. We got the short end of the stick here."
"Not… retard…" Travis murmured, almost to himself.
The Lancer scoffed him off and walked back to his post. Once the door closed, Travis clumsily rose to support himself on the wall right behind him. He held his hand closely to his chest and lumbered towards the thin hallway leading into a much larger room, the area where they kept the galleon's cannons fed with ammunition and power.
As he amazed himself with the machinery's inherent symphony, he leaned onto a ledge that enabled him to see the machinery work fluidly, as best as Grineer engineering can do anyway. Upon this, he sat down, back against the ledge and unfurled a small, a bit tattered, picture. It was of Earth. He had found it in one of the veteran's lockers and since then fawned over it. In the back, it was written, albeit very sloppily, "Earth". The picture depicted a waterfall, next to some green trees. He slipped his non-cut fingers across the faded corners of the picture and fantasized about living in such place, but as soon as the violent machinery snapped into life, so did he snap back into reality. The cold, metal, ugly reality he lived in.
He grasped the paper as if to hide it, startled by the sudden machinery noise. He scanned the room only to find himself alone there. He rose once more and hid the paper amidst his chest appendages, which allowed the paper to remain hidden. He looked towards the window showing the outer space. He walked towards it, reminding himself of the gaping wound, to discover a small trail leaving Neptune in the ever dark background. Upon the trail heading off in the ever shrinking distance, the intercom snapped to life:
"All Grineer are to enter the boarding shuttles. I repeat, all Grineer are to enter the boarding shuttles."
Travis looped his eyes around the circular window to find the vanguard of a vast Grineer ship fleet, preparing to assault Neptune. A vast mass of soldiers, a mix between Troopers, Lancers and Gunners flooded the hallways and urged Travis onto the boarding shuttles, preparing to invade Neptunian soil. His face started to show a more worrying expression as he was frightened about the ordeal. He followed the mass soldiers onto one of the boarding vessels, and the ever shrinking standing space only furthered his worry.
"Where… to?" Travis let out, to a trooper right next to him.
"Didn't you hear? The Queens want Neptune taken." The trooper answered with a dull tone of voice vented through the thick mask.
As the Grineer commander ordered various Grineer inside and then stepped inside, only to lock the loading bay doors, Travis began to succumb to his worrisome feelings, dulling out the constant grineer chatter and surrounding ambient noise.
Back at Neptune, John sat under a Heat Generator, audibly sipping through a straw on H2-Cry-O¸ 99% Cryotic Water as he stared into the nothingness of the Neptunian sky.
"Something's wrong." Said John, upon succumbing to a feeling inside his mind.
"John?! John where are you?!" said a Flux Crewman in recent despair, who stopped at the sight of John sitting next to the heat generator.
"John, god damn it! What the hell are you doing?"
"Something's wrong, Norbert." John exhaled after an audible sip.
"Of course something's wrong you nitwit, you left the radar home all alone! You missed a goddamned Grineer invasion!"
"So that's why it was beeping."
"Enough, John." Said the Flux Crewman, as he seemingly pressed random buttons. "Get to a XT, now."
The base flourished into an alert status. Crewman flushed from all possible doors and convoys of machinery and soldiers poured into the scattered anti-ship weaponry, in the hopes to catch some of the most crewed ships off guard.
Even though late response, the initial breakthrough was a massacre. With the anti-air weapons active, many of the Grineer ships did not manage to reach the ground intact, as the brilliantly placed precision beams by the XT cannons pierced through even the toughest Fomorian hull, cleverly tracking and offing transport ships first.
The Galleons that weren't smashed upon entering the atmosphere managed to relentlessly bombard areas in the hopes to scatter Corpus troops. The violent clash of crude Grineer metal and polished Corpus fire shifted the teal Neptunian sky into a violent dark red typhoon of smoke and fire. Nevertheless, Grineer ships pressed onto the atmosphere, trying to get a foothold on the surface.
Some fallen ships sheltered occasional Grineer groups that had survived the fall. However, they only managed to survive for a while until the sub-zero temperatures froze their mechanical augmentations, slowly dying out in the cold.
Although even with the destruction reigning onto the Grineer fleet, several boarding vessels managed to crash land onto Neptune, pouring several Grineer troops on random, seldom useful places. Many of those raced to a defined rendezvous points, occasionally picking off the rare Corpus tracker. Not that it'd matter anyway, the Corpus were entrenched deep into the power facilities and anti-air facilities. The least fortunate, scattered and isolated groups of Grineer were easily ripped apart by Neptune's security system.
Travis jumped as the boarding vessel impacted on the thick Neptunian ice. Upon the opening of the back, Travis discovered he had hit ground gained by the Grineer. As the icy air filled Travis' lungs, he met the red skies smothered by the dark smoke. He saw the mighty, arguably unrivaled Grineer ships torn asunder by the Guns of Neptune. He could not do anything other than succumb at the bittersweet sensation of watching the titan ships being destroyed so quickly.
"Quick." Shouted an Elite Lancer to Travis, drawing him back to reality. "We need to take the Power Station, south of the XT cannon. Those were our orders from HQ."
"What… HQ?" Travis exhaled as he looked up once more, watching the golden fireworks. The Lancer followed his gaze.
"You may be right. Let's not waste time here, though."
Travis landed on the lukewarm molten ice right below the boarding vessel and looked at the small number of Grineer stationed nearby. He looked worryingly at first, only to be put at ease by the sole Commander with them, who had consulted his GPS tracker.
"We were put off target by around seven hundred kilometers, we have to walk there. We're a week away from where we're supposed to be."
Travis looked onto the vast icy desert and the Lancer corrected his gaze south towards the objective. The skies still bled with the fuming debris when the group unanimously decided to venture towards the power station. Travis noticed a string of heat generators on the base of an icy mountain, right behind them. Upon this, he remarked:
"Follow… them?"
The group noticed the generators that extended to both sides of the mountain away from their crash site. One of the Lancers scoffed Travis' plan to follow the generators, given they headed west as opposed to south. He immediately resumed his march, where the Commander had pointed beforehand. The Commander was stuck trying to perceive the situation, but once the Lancer had left the warming radius of the nearest heat generator, he began to stutter his paces.
The remaining Grineer stared in awe as the Lancer tried to fight for one more step, only to have to fight harder on his next one. Upon his immense strength on his fifth or so step, his right leg metal augment gives in and snaps, causing the Lancer to fall and toss his weapon altogether. With this, he starts to squirm in agony as he fights for one more step forward, causing him to freeze in his pose altogether, unable to move, shout or even think.
The Commander, after the gruesome scene, gives into Travis' plans to follow the generator lines, eventually picking up the pace accordingly. The decision went on quietly, as they only registered the violent echoes of the still ongoing combat.
They all walked across the generators, hopping from one to another, never leaving its warming radius, and with this monotonous routine they pushed minutes into hours, where the skies no longer emitted the shattering sounds of the skirmish, but still kept the scars of the battle. That either meant the Grineer managed to land or the Corpus fought it off. However, the towering heaps of smoke in the ever growing distance just made Travis sure that the Grineer were beaten back. Nevertheless, they pressed on. They had an objective and, deep down, they all knew they weren't going to make it out Neptune.
Later on, hours turned to days, and in the midst of what they thought it to be the fifth or sixth day of skipping generator to generator, one of the lancers caught wind. They looked all around, and the, once again teal, Neptunian skies bore clouds as sizeable as ships themselves, carrying forth with them a blizzard.
"Crap!" Exclaimed the Commander upon this sight.
"Run, you idiots!" The Heavy Gunner unnecessarily bashed on the group.
The group sprinted from generator into generator, trying to flee from the icy blizzard right behind them. Although, even with their best efforts to keep away, the whistling wind caught up to them and fogged their vision immediately. In spite of this, they charged in one after the other, having a rough sketch of what was ahead before the storm had hit them.
In a bee line, one after another, they all ran almost blind. The piercing cold was finally getting to them in spite of the heat generator's best efforts to balance the temperature around them. Suddenly, Travis hit metal and fell. Metal stairs. This was a Corpus made structure! He looked around, confused, tired and cold to see if he could see anyone. He worked himself up in spite of all of the wind pushing him sideways and called out with his deep voice:
"Anyone?!"
But only the wind replied with its whistling passage. In the meantime, Travis' breathing was getting harder. He decided to press on the Corpus structure with a second wind, as it was the most likely safe location. To his surprise, he fell flat once more onto ice.
"Was it… a bridge?"
Travis lingered on the floor, letting the wind slide past his face. His second wind had worn out as he crawled away from the bridge. With his vision fading, he was unable to measure how fast he was reaching and how far he was going. Finally giving into the blizzard's hands, Travis stopped. Seeing that he had nowhere to go, he had finally accepted his fate. He tried to reach for his tattered picture, and took a gander at it. With his frostbitten lips, he drew a small smile of having the place of his dreams be his last image.
As his head dropped down and he prepared to close his eyes due to fatigue, he captured a figure rushing from the horizon only to reach for him. He could not keep awake any further, and this stranger's hand was the last thing he saw before collapsing unconscious.
Travis bolted awake, now inside a corpus building, laid upon a bench next to the wall. He figured that he wasn't dead and even better, not cold! Travis recalled the picture and inspected both hands as well as his chest appendages as he rose from the bench. From right beside him, John sat on a perpendicular bench with his Dera laid out on the floor.
"Looking for this?" John said, shifting Travis' attention to the paper he was holding. It was the picture Travis held most dear.
"No!" Travis shouted as he tried to reach for it, only to be stopped by John's hand.
"Relax. Not going to do anything." John said, as he handed out the picture back to Travis, who, in return, steadily stuffed it inside his appendages.
"That's Earth. You know Earth?" John broke the silence.
Travis had another thing set in his mind, and thus, he frowned as a response.
"Why… are you… not shooting?" He said after a brief pause.
"I figured no one would be around at this time, especially under a blizzard like that. You'd have to be stupid lucky to survive that. Plus you aren't really carrying any weapon, so, one could figure you were harmless. Also, you drool in your sleep." John replied, sounding a bit condescending near the end.
After a bit of silence, John says:
"Tell you what, warm yourself by the plasma core."
With this, John smashes the nearest terminal's keyboard with his fingertips and, from the ground, emerges a boxy machine glowing bright blue.
"Corpus don't exactly like exposing the power stations' cores, but it gets cold around here."
Silence dawns in again, as both watch the bright core in the middle.
"The name's John Rhodes. Nice to meet you." Says John, as he extends his right hand towards Travis.