Chapter 1: Andromeda
Elevator door opening with a hiss, Regonas stepped out into a blank corridor that had scorch marks and bullet holes on the walls; bloodstains and debris on the floor, and several of his men in bodybags, but otherwise free of trouble. Gritting his teeth, Regonas pushed the thought of the newly widowed and orphaned families out of his mind. He would notify them in the after-battle report, at least the one that would be availible to the civilians. Right now, he needed to see what was holding up the securing of the ship.
Following black arrows his men had painted on the walls, as per procedure when in an unfamiliar area, to the command center for the battle taking place on decks forty-seven and fifty, Regonas passed by guards in heavy black armor, whom had their weapons ready, scanning the corridor for any trouble. Entering the command center, (a repurposed engineering room for the decks thirty through fifty,) Regonas waved the staff officers down as they saluted, standing from their chairs.
In the center of the room was a large circular metal table, which had ten seats around it, eight of which were taken. A hologram, similar to the one shown in the damage report on the bridge, floated above the center of the table, with one marked difference from the other hologram. Little blue dots marked every living soldier under Regonas' command, while there were red ones holding a line against the blue, flickering in and out as they ducked in and out of the troops' vision. There weren't too many casualties in the battle on his side, but twelve men and women had still fallen in their fight against the incredibly resilient crew of the Andromeda.
The fighting was restricted to the 47th and 50th decks, and the original crew was in control of the 48th and 49th decks in their entirety. Neither the force from the decks below the 50th nor the one from the decks above the 47th were making any progress, which was somewhat disconcerting. Regonas sat at the table, listening to the soldiers advise their comrades, tactical, rapid-fire chatter washing over his ears. What could he do to change the course of this battle... of course. Regonas looked at the officers sitting around the table, and spoke. "Tell Taneer she's good to go. Send her into the Primary AO." The tacticians at the table barely paused to process this information, before they advised their fireteams and squads to pull back and provide suppressing fire. Taneer was about to move in.
The original crew of the Andromeda began to cheer. Was their stalwart defense finally paying off? They continued to exchange fire, shooting at the retreating boarders, who were moving from cover to cover; wrecked fighter craft, transports, and various metal crates providing them opportunity to do so.
The hangar of Deck 47 was a warzone, cut off from all outside communication, yet neither the boarders nor the crew had suffered major losses. With the black-clad invaders retreating, the crew, mostly pilots led by a few marines, took it as a sign, and galvanized by the seeming rout, began a counterattack, pushing forward. However, when the enemy had fallen back into a corridoor, they stopped retreating, and took cover behind metal emplacements the size of riot shields, sandbags, and plain old metal crates.
Several of the original crew slowed down as they came to the middle of the hangar, gunfire and lasblasts from both sides dying out, as the charging force of pilots and marines found themselves running towards a serene, untouched circle of hull, which was the eye of a storm of wreckage and corpses, at which a woman, dressed in black, form-fitting armor, with glowing red accents, and long red hair, which was down to her shoulders in length, stood.
With a maniacal grin, she unsheathed a sword, which was a glowing, red-bladed broadsword, a black, supertough composite metal where it was not energy, pulling it from a black scabbard at her side. After a second of staring blankly, a marine dressed in heavily damaged white armor opened fire, but the woman in black deflected each bullet with her sword, insanely quick reflexes allowing her to smack each projectile away with the flat of the blade. Gunfire and lasblasts erupted from both sides, yet the woman remained untouched, walking forward, towards the last few crewmen of the Andromeda.
She started to run towards them about ten yards away.
Then she crashed into the ragged crowd of soldiers, and the screams started.
Cleaving a man in two from head to groin, Taneer kept that crazy grin on her face, even as the two halves of the body began to fall apart, blood and gore spraying everywhere. Kicking a man in the chest, she sliced her sword across his neck, and he was thrown into the bulkhead behind him, breaking his neck.
While this happened, she continued to block, deflect, and slice all of the bullets fired at her, a frenzy of speed and blood. Dancing among that crew that left behind a fine red mist after they exploded, Tanner was soon drenched, red from head to toe. Pupils dilating, she kept killing, slashing over and over.
Finishing off the last combatant in the hangar, she walked into the hallway opposite where her fellow soldiers had taken refuge, her dance of death spraying blood everywhere. The other soldiers followed her carefully, about 20 meters back. They didn't want to get caught up in the melee and rightfully so. They saw what it had done to the enemy. Following Tanner deeper and deeper into the ship, they encountered little resistance, passing by the corpses of the former crew, mangled in extremely gory ways. Blood was everywhere,. The walls and the ceilings were covered in it. But most disturbingly, their boots sloshed through a pool of gore about an inch deep, that ran all along the corridor.
Reaching the elevator, and prying it open with her bare hands, Tanner stopped dancing, and waited for the soldiers to pile in the elevator behind her. Once they had set up inside the elevator in an assault formation, she pressed the button for the deck below, and they descended, headed to the 48th deck.
Regonas watched the descending blue dots with a grin. That certainly was quick. His grin faded, however, as he thought about the massive amount of death involved in that exchange. He would've preferred to have captured the crew, and given them a chance to defect, but twelve of his soldiers dead was the tipping point. Maybe three or four deaths on his side would've justified the capture of forty hostile combatants, but twelve? That was unacceptable.
Watching the blue dot that represented the twenty soldiers on that deck led by Tanner descend, Regonas spoke to the eight men and women in the makeshift command room with him. "Advise them to be on their guard. We haven't spotted any signs of life down on the 48th deck, which means one of two things. One, they have a scanning shield. Two, there really isn't anything alive down there. I'm not sure which is better, so tell them to stay frosty."
Pausing a moment to take in their ruler's orders, they began speaking quietly to the soldiers under their command, relaying what was said.
Colonel Sarvix Del-Talo of the Andromeda Confederation was pissed. Out of all of the ships in the galaxy, out of all the ships they could've taken, these mysterious terrorists had to assault the Andromeda? This dilomatic mission was a complete and utter failure. The four-armed humanoid rubbed his temples, frowning, two of his handguns still pointed at the end of the hallway. And to think, his people were so proud when the Republic had accepted the Spiral Arm and Andromeda as gifts to cement their alliance. Now, twelve years of hard work and labor on the part of his entire people had been ripped away, and Sarvix didn't understand why.
Growling, Sarvix froze when he heard the elevator at the end of the corridoor open with a metallic whirr. The Andromedans were not only extremely strong, four-armed humanoids with a penchant towards genius, but had a special ability almost no one outside their race knew of. Without so much as a heartbeat passing, the Colonel faded away, his body and clothes matching the pattern and color of the bulkhead behind him, and fell off the sensors, making him almost completely undetectable.
As the door opened, he waited until the invaders had entered the hallway fully, and as soon as their leader, a small redhead, was a few yards away, he opened fire, gunshots ripping through the silence and darkness like thunderbolts.
Tanner, at the first shot, was unprepared, for such a furious assault to come out of nowhere, and was caught flatfooted. The second and third shots came too quickly after that for her to react, and two soldiers fell to the floor, crying out in pain.
The fourth shot, however, was deflected into the deck above her, after she batted it out of the way, swinging up with the flat of her blade. She then crouched, and then leapt into a dash, sprinting forwards towards where the gunshots came from. Another flash, another thunderclap, and a bullet was flying at her again. She couldn't split the bullet, in this tight corridoor, for it could hit her men. So, instead, she held the sword out so the bullet impacted the flat of the blade, which caused it to fly down into the floor.
Growling, Tanner dashed down the hall, slashing wildly, while not neglecting to deflect bullets, hoping to score a lucky hit on the mystery shooter. After several tense seconds of flying bullets, slashing, and screaming, Tanner felt her sword impact something. Smiling, she followed through with her swing, causing the alien to appear, as his bottom right hand was seperated from his arm. Grinning madly as the alien roared in pain, Tanner stabbed him in the gut, and driving the sword up to the hilt, kicked him back, making him fly backwards into the bulkhead about two meters behind him. Impacting with force great enough to dent the thick metal, the four – (well, three -handed, now,) alien dropped to the floor, dazed. Tanner's grin grew even wider as she saw where he had kicked him. The airlock door was but two feet away from the dent that the alien had made.
Grabbing the alien roughly by his military uniform's collar, Tanner quickly dragged him to the airlock. Shoving him inside, Tanner waited for the alien to look back up at her, and then pressed a button labeled 'VENT AIRLOCK'. With a soundless cry of impotent rage and fear, the alien was ripped from the ship by the inexorable void of space.
Satisfied, Tanner turned back to her men, who were justifiably unsettled by what had just happened, and smiled. Soaked in blood, and holding a sword that had edges that glowed a malovelent crimson was not the most reassuring look, the soldiers quickly decided amongst themselves. Moving on, they followed the crazy little redhead that their superiors assured them was safe, at least to them.
They thought they would reserve their judgement, however.