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Lissandra Maxson's hands gripped tightly to the armrests of her commander's chair as the ship violently shuddered from the explosions. It was making a steep plunge forward, and it was picking up speed. All over the bridge, sparks were flying from shorted out consoles and panels started bursting out of the walls. Electrical fires filled the room, and lancers scrambled to put out the flames before they damaged anything vital. "Damage report!"
"Ma'am, we've lost power!" A lancer operator announced while trying to bring a computer back online.
"Where?"
"Everywhere!"
Another blast of energy reignited the electrical fires and killed the emergency backup generators. Without power, the Liberator was just a flightless hunk of metal on its way back to the ground. Lissandra tried contacting the Engineering section, but realized that communications would have been among the first to get knocked out. She wasn't content with sitting around and waiting for someone else to do something, so the Lancer-Commander summoned three lancer operators to accompany her on a mission to destroy the EMP device keeping them grounded.
"With me! This ship's not making landfall unless I say so!"
Lissandra smashed the thin glass covering the fireaxe case, then yanked out the weapon before proceeding down the walkway towards the origin of the blasts. Lancers and scribes alike were running back and forth in the hallways when she ventured towards the main hangar, where she was certain she would find the missile. The blasts were getting stronger the closer she got there, and so she took this as a sign that she was on the right track.
Several red fusion beams burst through the hull of the Liberator as the Dominion Warhounds strafed the Brotherhood airship again and again. Lissandra watched in horror as an entire section of the walkway melted off along with the outer hull, sending dozens of lancer pilots to their deaths when the bulkheads gave way. She could see the ground rushing up to meet them, prompting the Lancer-Commander to hurry.
She clenched her jaw and jumped the gap, landing safely on the other side of the walkway. Quickly, she entered the main hangar and immediately stepped back out when a stray vertibird slid dangerously across the floor. It slammed into another vertibird transporter carrying ammunition boxes and fuel tanks, both blowing out another hole in the airship's hull when the fuel ignited. Lissandra shielded herself with her hands and patted away at the little tongues of fire lighting up on her uniform. The Lancer-Commander spotted the EMP-javelin, nestled snugly into the floor. It emitted another EMP blast, which sent her hairs to stand on end. Not one to waste time, Lissandra hefted her fireaxe and proceeded to hack away at the javelin until its emitter was completely destroyed.
Three minutes later, she felt the Liberator's engines roar back to life. The airship fought desperately to keep itself off the ground, and just about seemed to gain altitude when a cry of alarm alerted the Lancer-Commander to the sudden looming of the Malevolence's shadow over its sister-ship. The other airships couldn't recover in time, and they were seconds away from crashing into one another. Despite Lissandra's best efforts she knew that the vessels were lost.
"Lancer-Commander, over here!" Lancer-Captain Reginald Kaczynski, her second-in-command, yelled at her to board the last intact vertibird before the three airships finished their collision course. Onboard with him was a small squad of knights and Head Scribe Harper himself. "Hurry! Get in, before we go down with the ship too!"
Reluctantly, Lissandra dropped the fireaxe and jumped aboard the transporter. As soon as she was inside, the lancer pilot primed the engines and lifted them off the burning derelict airship. Moments later, some unlucky initiates burst into the hangar, only to find that their only hope of escape had already made its exit. Their frantic and helpless cries tugged at the Knight-Commander's heart, and she looked away just as the Liberator erupted in flames. The Malevolence fractured the flagship in two, scattering burning debris all over Riverside and showering the Benevolence the molten jagged pieces of steel and titanium.
The lancers escaped the battle with their lives and headed straight back to the Basin.
The weight of the two airships was too much, and the Benevolence followed the others to the ground. It came to its final resting place atop the twin rivers, carving up a great chasm when it made landfall. Stunned, the onlookers from below couldn't believe it at first. All three giants were brought down by the Dominion, heralding the attack that was soon to follow. The Dominion army returned to retake their citadel and drive the Brotherhood of Steel back into the desert.
First, they bombarded the walls with long-range artillery. Then, the main assault began. The legendary Painbox spearheaded an entire tank company into Riverside, taking advantage of the chaos before the Brotherhood could rally its forces to reinforce the walls. Centaur Mk. II's carrying squads of fresh troops rolled in behind the Black Bears, waiting only after they'd blown holes through the walls of the citadel before letting their rooks off to swarm the enemy positions.
The entrenched Brotherhood defenders gave it their all, locking down the dismounting infantry with hail after hail of high-caliber gunfire. Dominion flamers cured them of this delusional tactic, torching clean the slit-trenches until nothing but burning corpses remained.
Knight-Commander McKenzie led the defense against the Dominion's onslaught, side by side with Paladin Danik Brand. They lost their strongest weapons, but the Brotherhood's arsenal was vast and they weren't about to concede defeat just yet. The Equalizer tank-destroyers trained their powerful guns at the breaches in the walls and crippled the tanks rumbling through them. The lumbering Shieldbearer mechs took positions atop the shops and houses, setting up killzones to arrest the tide pouring through the gaps.
And the brave knights, with all their brave initiates, rallied together to fight the Dominion head-on.
"To me, brothers and sisters of the Order of Steel!" The paladin roared, "Drive the enemy back, Ad Victoriam!"
"Ad Victoriam!" They cried out in unison.
But this time such a rallying cry held little sway over the fate of the defense.
The ground shook from a hundred different explosions. Knights and rooks wrestled for control of the streets, trading shot for shot and each filling the narrow corridors of the citadel with their dead as the fighting grew more intense with each passing minute. Dominion tanks rolled right over the Brotherhood tank-destroyers, relieving pressure for the infantry to make progress. The rooks shelled the Shieldbearers with their artillery and grenade-launchers until their barrier generators shorted out from the non-stop bombardment. Entire squads of these powerful mechs were wiped out over the course of an hour following the main assault. Eventually, the defenders were pushed back into the buildings and alleyways- a perfect setup for flamethrowers.
There was one, a shot-up mini-mart with its windows and doors barricaded with steel beams. A small mixed squad of knights and scribes retreated inside and remained holed up while the rest of the district was retaken. Flushing them out didn't seem to work, and the rooks were getting angrier with each man downed.
"Flamers up!" A rook bellowed, and his squad parted to let the flame-troopers through.
The moment one of the scribes spied the flamer nozzles poking through the shattered wooden door, knowing that their ammunition was running low coupled with the fear of getting cooked alive in that dump of a mini-mart, he immediately gave in and offered their surrender. "Wait! Wait! We give up!"
The rooks ignored them, and torched the whole building to the ground. They waited for the knights to come running out of the burning mini-mart, then gunned them down. They repeated this over and over, showing little to no mercy. Seeing them literally scorch the earth just to drive them out of Riverside, the Knight-Commander ordered everyone to fall back and regroup at their rocky stronghold in the mountains. They holed up for a few minutes at the ruined headquarters where the original Dominion garrison was stationed. There, they were able to mount a better defense and kept their enemies at bay. It gave them all the time they needed to prepare for the long trek across the desert.
Brand, however, would not give up their hard-won ground so easily. Not after spending so much time and effort getting this far.
"We have to regroup at the stronghold!" Kenzie said, "We have no control over the skies here!"
"Leave, if you must." The paladin replied coldly, "I'm not going."
"Look around you, the citadel is lost!" The Knight-Commander argued, "If you stay here, you sacrifice a chance for the Brotherhood to counterattack!"
"Maybe so." Brand, stubborn as ever, glanced at silhouette of the distant mountains. The long stretch of flat, hot and sandy desert discouraged him from any thought of retreating. "But someone's got to stay behind to cover your escape. Let it be me."
Kenzie stared into his eyes and realized that he meant it. She immediately understood that nothing she could say would ever dissuade him, so she decided to save what she could. She saluted him and motioned for all those choosing to fall back with her to join the others at the transport trucks. "We will remember you when we stand at the gates of their capital city!"
Brand nodded and put on his helmet. He was ready to die for the Brotherhood, and there was no better time to do that than the now
Outside, laser-fire crisscrossed the narrow passages leading into the headquarters, followed by tracer-fire and large caliber 20mm shells as a Dominion Centaur drove right through a Brotherhood barricade. Debris and shattered pieces of wood flew in all directions. The armored car swiveled its massive gun and fired at a knight attempting to bring a rocket-launcher to bear. The powerful 76mm cannon punched a football sized hole through his armor and knocked him into the ground. He was dead before he even got the chance to shoot.
A zealous initiate picked up the fallen launcher and destroyed the Centaur with a well-placed shot to the side. He was subsequently gunned down by the armored rooks that were following close behind the car. The barrels on their miniguns were still red and smoking from all the fights earlier, but there was still plenty of ammunition left to spend. With the path open for them to converge on the last remaining holdout, the rooks surrounded the building and prepared to finish off the survivors.
A Dominion vertibird swooped down from the smoky skies and landed on top of the headquarters. A squad of eight rooks deployed several breach-charges to open up a path downward. Once the vertibird was off and the charges were set, the sergeant leading them detonated the explosives. The shower of dust, brick and ash blinded the entrenched Brotherhood defenders inside.
Brand was waiting for them to drop in and stood his ground when the Dominion came rushing forward. He hefted his gatling-laser and fired at the rappelling soldiers, cutting them into pieces with a deadly hail of laser-fire. The men screamed as they fell apart and dropped all over the floor, still burning from the lasers cut through their skin. The paladin was, however, unprepared for a second attack from the ground. By the time he lowered his weapon to reload, two rooks in power-armor burst through the doors and shoved him to the ground with a powerful shoulder tackle.
One stepped on the paladin's weapon, the other stomped on his hand, effectively crushing it beneath the weight of his armored boot.
Brand cried out in agony, but was silenced when the boot came down full-force on his face. Stunned, the paladin fell slack against his harness. He didn't even realize that the rooks had already plucked him out of his armor and were now dragging him back out to face the crowd of victorious Dominion soldiers. When he came to, some two hours later, he was already outside and lying on the dusty road. Brand saw the rooks hoist up the former knight-commander Marko.
The man kicked and screamed, bit and spat as a noose was put over his neck.
A short woman dressed in the gray uniform and armor of a Dominion judge presided over the sentence and subsequent judgement. After the Dominion freed the POW's, the first thing they did was deal with the captured knights. The liberated prisoners pointed out the murderer, and a hangman's noose was set up not long after. The initiates and scribes who surrendered were all lined up against the walls and instructed to lean forward with their heads against the bricks, and their hands on their necks.
The judge condemned Marko for his treatment of their POW's and he was sentenced to death. The disgraced knight hurled insult and curse until his breath caught in his throat when the rope tightened around his neck.
Further back at the gathering stood the Painbox. Its crew was sitting casually over the tank's hull, watching Marko swing from the balcony. The tank commander was smoking a cigar, and he glanced down at the paladin when he noticed Brand staring. His face was blasted by the sun for too long that the wrinkles looked like scars, and several animal teeth hung from his tribal necklace.
He was a hunter, and he was good at his job.
With the last of the condemned dealt with, the judge turned her attention to Brand. She had him brought before her and ordered two combat engineers to begin prepping the skull-jack for intel extraction. Brand, not knowing what the device was for, declared that he would not be broken no matter the amount of pain they were going to inflict on him.
"Shut the fuck up, you filthy spy." The judge sneered with a disapproving scowl. "Yes, we know who you are. Did you really think you could keep what you take from us?"
"You bleed, you die. Same as anyone." Brand replied, "The Dominion will fall. The Brotherhood will be victorious. Ad Victoriam."
As the engineers prepared to administer the potentially lethal device, the judge motioned for them to pause while she had a quick word with the prisoner. She echoed his words, as if to taste the pretentious tang of it all. "Ad Victoriam, Ad Victoriam... tell me, Brand, are you a student of history?"
Brand didn't answer, so the judge continued. "Long long ago, in the Old World, an ambitious little man led his people to conquer the world. They thought they could have it all, they had the technology and the unity to seize their glory. Just like you, their rallying cry was 'hail victory'. And just like you, they picked a fight with the new world order- and they lost."
"No empire will stand forever." Brand retorted.
"True, empires rise and empires fall." The judge nodded, allowing the engineers to resume their work. "But the Dominion isn't an empire, it's an idea."
Suddenly, Brand felt the most intense pain he'd ever felt in his life. He started to go blind in one eye, then the other. He felt as though his head was about to explode, and just as he was about to black out, he heard the judge's haunting words echo from within whatever served as his consciousness.
"You can't kill an idea."
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