Preamble:

Greetings readers, and welcome to a story in which there are no real "good guys"; where the main protagonist is likely to engage in actions you may deem morally dubious, wherein the violence is more akin to an 80s action movie and the occasional explicit love scene may catch you off-guard. I wrote this partly to entertain myself, and I can only hope it entertains you in a similar fashion. All original characters in this one.

Undeclared War

Slavery will NOT be reinstated on Anhur. The negotiations have made this much clear: those who believe in freedom and liberty for all have emerged victorious, and those who would attempt to stamp out the most fundamental of all freedoms have been defeated. Now, we must turn our attention to the rebuilding effort, because like it or not, out here on Anhur we are very much on our own.

- Johan Van Rensburg, President of the Anhur Liberation Front, from his colony-wide broadcast speech on 21st November 2176, one day after the official end of hostilities

This is our world, always has been. And this is one war that can never end as long as there are humans here on Anhur.

- Salak Vok, batarian warlord and former government representative of the Na'hesit political movement

The only good batarian is a dead batarian.

Unknown

1: After the Raid

The stink of burning fuel and the heat of the flames was the first thing she became aware of, followed by the waving yellow light of the fires burning nearby. As she opened her eyes, she became aware of a burning pain at her left leg, potent enough to make her wince as she tried to move, for what had to be the first time since had been knocked out. She blinked her eyes a few times, struggling to compensate for the contrast of the gloom of the night and the brilliance of the burning vehicle.

She was sore all over, mostly from the blast that had knocked her onto her backside. Her ears were still ringing, and she inwardly cursed her captors for having removed her helmet. They had bound her wrists behind her back, yet by sheer chance the cuffs had broken, allowing her the free use of her arms. A relief to be sure, and she sat up slowly then, massaging her aching wrists. As she moved, the burning pain only amplified. Gritting her teeth, she looked down at her legs, her eyes narrowing when she saw the slim, jagged piece of metal that had embedded itself in the calf muscle of her left leg. It was as if looking at it and becoming aware of the injury was enough to increase the pain.

Her armour had done little to stop it, which spoke to just how fast the fragment had been travelling when the fuel tank in the armoured vehicle had gone up. Blood oozed from about the shrapnel, a piece that was little more than half an inch wide, with at least three inches of length jutting from her leg. In a way, it looked almost obscene. She could hear the internal alarm of the armour beeping at her, but without her helmet to offer her a heads-up display, nor her omni-tool for that matter, it told her little other than the fact that something was wrong with her. Looking at the shrapnel stuck in her leg, she hardly needed a virtual intelligence to tell her that.

Her first order of business, then: do-it-yourself first aid. She gritted her teeth, tasting blood in her mouth, before she put one hand to the base of the shard in her leg. As she pressed, the pain only increased, and this time her usual attempts to simply push through it were not enough. A groan escaped her throat and blood oozed freely from about the jagged intruder. With no medi-gel in sight, not even a bandage, she would have to take care of this right here, right now. Sure, every instinct and even her basic first aid training was telling her to leave it be, but the sight of it was enough to make her feel ill. She wanted it out, she simply had to do so without fainting.

Her armour was stained with dirt and soot and blood, some of which was red, whereas there was more than one splotch present upon the mix of white, yellow and black that was dark blue. She looked about at the wreck, the flaming six-wheeled armoured hulk that had been her impromptu prison up until recently. There was little more than a flaming, blackened hulk left in its place, and the stink of burning eezo fuel was thick in the air about her. There was a body nearby, only a few paces to her right-hand side; the turian's armour was blackened, the figure almost unrecognizable. The corpse still smouldered, smoke wafting off of it.

Pulling herself along, she slowly and somewhat painfully crawled towards the body. The turian's head was burnt to a blackened crisp, leaving a distorted, faceless thing in its place. The pour bastard had been caught in the initial blast, likely thrown from the wreck whilst on fire at the same time. It was a small miracle that she herself had made it out of there, since from the look of the place she was the only one still alive. Served these spiky bastards right, she reckoned; they had had no business being here in the first place, and they had certainly had no business taking her prisoner. In what world did she answer to Hierarchy authorities, anyway? They did not have the right.

She slowly pulled herself towards the corpse, whereupon she rolled it over. She was still able to feel some of the heat trapped within the scorched armour, even through her own gloves. Around her, the road was quiet, the surrounding hills and grassland seemingly empty. Above, this world's two moons gleamed as partial discs, silver against the black of the night sky and the many stars scattered across it. Her first thought as to the eerie quiet was to those who had attacked them: they would still be around here, surely? Unless they had died in the firefight. Both sides killing one another suited her just fine, and in her current state she did not fancy getting caught in a fight herself. She could hardly walk, not yet anyway, and she hoped that something medical could be scavenged from either the wreck or the dead soldiers who littered the ground around it. This even included the bullet-ridden bodies of the batarians who had attacked them; little more than insurgent types, she figured, typical for this wretched planet.

This burnt-out turian corpse offered nothing helpful. Huffing with annoyance, she tried to push herself onto her feet. Her wounded leg practically screamed at her as she tried putting weight upon it, and she stifled a cry as she stood up. She wavered where she stood, stumbling slightly but otherwise catching herself before she could tumble. Now she could see the battlefield better. As she had suspected, most of those who had taken her captive were dead. Their bodies were strewn about the place, whereas dead batarians littered the side of the road. They were in better shape, for unlike the turians and their vehicles, these guys had simply been gunned down. No one had fired any rockets at them, unlike the hulking, burning remains of the armoured truck behind her.

Her armour was light, slim-fitting and splashed with blood that was not her own. It was comfortable and less cumbersome than the sort of thing the rank and file of her organization had been required to wear. She thought back to the attack then, trying to piece together what had happened: she could see it replaying itself in her mind, the ambush and her subsequent attempt to make a run for it. Gunfire all round, grenades and rockets going off; things ended abruptly there, for some form of anti-armour missile had struck the main vehicle in just the right spot to ignite its fuel supply. And through some miracle, she had survived. Her old instructor had once told her she was luckier than most. For once, it appeared the old man had been right.

She needed medi-gel and she needed a weapon. Both problems she could sort out from the bodies strewn about the dirt road. She found one of the turian corpses in decent enough condition. This one was a female, from the look of it. The sole survivor pondered the female's appearance for a moment, finding it oddly amusing that turian females somehow looked even more severe than their male counterparts. Blue blood was thick and sticky across the female's armour, and several holes had been shot through the plating at her chest and stomach. The poor girl had been hit by multiple guns, shot to ribbons by an overzealous enemy. The black armour this one wore was adorned with the emblem of an organization the sole survivor was familiar with, if only by reputation and intelligence briefings: the Blackwatch.

It hardly mattered now who these birds worked for. Rolling the corpse over, she sifted through the supply compartments in the armour, finding the medi-gel she had hoped for. Sitting down with her back against the remains of the low fence that ran along this side of the road, the sole survivor plucked a small, dirtied twig from amongst the long grass and put it to her mouth. She bit down upon it hard, trapping it between her upper and lower rows of teeth. And then, with her attention set wholly upon the shrapnel in her leg, she grabbed the piece with one hand and pulled, hard.

She did not even realise she was screaming until after it came free, blood gushing in its wake. The stick had fallen from her mouth as soon as the object had been pulled, and for an instant there she thought she may have bitten her lip. No, she realised, that was something that had happened in the explosion. She could still taste blood in her mouth.

Eyes suddenly watering, her heart pounding, she lathered the medi-gel onto the wound, the relief it brought coming on quickly. Nonetheless, the wound still stung, and she wondered just how much actual damage had been done to the muscle internally. As it stood, she needed to get moving, as staying out here in the open where a recent battle had taken place was hardly a wise course of action. Soon enough, more of the locals would come to check out the scene, and the fires burning about what was left of the convoy served as a giant beacon for miles around.

The dead turian had a pistol on her, a sleek and heavy model that the survivor did not recognize. It had to be something new, she figured, and she clipped it to her armour courtesy of its magnetic fitting. There were some clips to be found on the dead turian, all of which the survivor stashed into the pouches at her own waist. She caught her reflection on the turian's visor, a simple model that situated itself forward of one eye. In it, she was surprised to see how much of a mess she was, her dark blonde hair messy and dirtied, her face smeared with soot and blood and sweat. Once she got out of here, she would be sure to have a shower at the first opportunity. She may have been only thirty years, but the mess made her look older.

Slowly, with significantly less pain than before, the woman stood upright again. The relative quiet of this countryside road made it all the easier for her to detect the crunch of booted feet upon the dirt road, the shuffle of movement of someone in armour, and even the heavy breathing of one wounded and weary. She turned around, raising the pistol at the figure who had been approaching from her right-hand flank.

A turian. And one she recognized from the team who had taken her prisoner. This one had a pistol in hand as well, and he fired a shot that flew wide as the woman threw herself into a roll. Her leg still ached terribly, but the medi-gel had done its job and numbed the wound, as well as having stemmed the bleeding. Her somersault was clumsy nonetheless, but it closed the distance between her and the turian quickly. He fired another round as she came up, this one missing her by less than an inch. And then she was only a few feet in front of him, gun raised. She fired, and the bark of the heavy pistol made the sound of his seem like a popgun in comparison.

The turian's kinetic barriers were still online. She saw the blue flare of the protective shield in response to the shot, but they were diminished almost immediately by the high calibre round. Stumbling slightly, the turian lunged at her, so close they were now as to make the guns they wielded a little awkward. He punched her in the jaw and her head snapped back sharply, blood once again filling her mouth. She backhanded him in turn, and the pair fell to the ground together in a tangle of limbs. This turian was a young male, his dark grey face adorned with a few simple streaks of white under the eyes and across his nose. He looked as dirtied and beat up as she was, complete with blue blood dribbling down his chin and more than one hole shot into his armour.

The woman swatted aside the gun he held just as he fired it, the bullet whizzing off into the night. She pressed her own gun to his face, barrel hard against the middle of his forehead. There, she saw in his green eyes a flash of unmistakable fear. He froze, and for an extended moment there they simply looked into each other's eyes and stared.

The whine and rumble of multiple engines sounded through the night then, and the woman looked up, eyes going down the highway and into the gloom beyond. Headlights cut through the dark, and from the shapes of the squat, armoured cars headed their way, she realised that these were not friendly forces. More of the hostile locals, no doubt coming to check in on their friends who now lay dead about the convoy. She looked down to the turian again, seeing a tired, wounded young male trying and failing to put up a tough exterior. He was hurt, just as she was. And he was an outsider here, just as she was.

The rattle of automatic weapons fire cut through the quiet night. Bullets zipped by the startled pair. The woman found herself stumbling backwards, with more bullets striking the dirt around her. The turian was slowly rising to his feet, yet it was apparent that he was hurt and weary. She could have killed him then and there, yet there was still so much she did not understand when it came to his presence here, that and his team as a whole.

She did not shoot him, not then. Instead, she realised very quickly that she was going to need some serious help to get off of this planet. And this turian, a Lieutenant if she was not mistaken, could very well have offered that assistance. Perhaps a brief alliance was a possibility here, no matter how determined he may have been to kill her. Something told her that he did not much care whether she lived or died, and so with some reluctance she grabbed him by the arm and pulled him to his feet. Turian or not, she was hardly going to leave him for the batarians, especially those of the insurgent variety who were known for brutally torturing any non-batarian they got hold of. Huamn, turian, asari; it did not matter who you were here on this planet, if some of the more unsavoury batarians got hold of you then you could look forward to a world of torment.

The turian followed her with some awkwardness, his gait a hobbling one, his breathing heavy and laboured. As soon as the turian was moving, she released her grasp on him and simply started to run. She did not even look back at the vehicles barrelling into the midst of the burning convoy, callously driving over some of the dead as they did so. More rifles fired, the thunder of their rapid shots echoing across the surrounding plains.

Her kinetic barriers had long since failed altogether, leaving her vulnerable. There was only so much her armour would do for her and given the lightweight padding in her officer's uniform it was hardly enough to stop a high-powered rifle round.

She tore up the grassy knoll by the road, much of that grass long enough to come up to her waist. She thought that maybe the turian was following her, she did not bother to look back to find out. Regardless, she pushed on, running up the slope and over the knoll's other side. The grassy plain ahead was uneven, broken by rocky outcrops and stout hills and clusters of trees. She could make out such shapes against the low illumination of the stars above, but for all intents and purposes she was running blind. The pain in her leg was starting up again. She winced, grunting as an especially bad stab of that pain shot up the limb. She must have covered a good fifty metres before she became aware of the batarians pursuing her, their voices low and guttural, words exchanged in their common tongue that her translator did not pick up.

Her heart was pounding again. She was out in the open, and it was with this in mind she directed herself for the nearest thicket. She stumbled through the bushes and shrubs and bramble-like plants, feeling more than a few of the rough, irritable leaves scratch at her face. And then, without seeing it before her, she fell off a sheer edge wherein part of a gully had simply fallen in sharply.

Here, the drop was surprisingly steep, and before she knew it she was falling. Her foot slipped out from beneath her and her stomach seemingly went with it, the sheer disorientation of the sudden change in height enough to make her feel queasy. She tumbled, hands scrabbling for purchase on the grass, in the dirt, on the rocks all about her; anything she could get her fingers on, really. And nothing seemed to slow her, and before she knew it she had landed in the mud below.

It was a foul, thick and almost black mud, not uncommon on this part of the planet. Something to do with the microbes in the soil, or so her induction course at the facility had informed her. Nothing harmful to human health, especially following the routine round of inoculations. Yet the smell was bad enough to make her gag, and now she was lying in it, with the black muck on her face and in her mouth.

The world about her was dark. The light from the burning fires was no longer close enough to provide any illumination. Only the silvery glow of the crescent moons and the stars above offered some small measure of light, barely enough to get her bearings. The mud stunk, sure, but there was something else. It was not the stink of some algae or rotting native flora that caught her attention, rather it was the stink of death and decay. She had been around plenty of dead bodies in her time, it came with her profession. She knew the stench of death all too well, and she had become quite adept at determining just what species had died, since each one seemed to have its own unique stink when it came to their rotting flesh. What she detected was the all-too familiar stench of humans, albeit ones that had been rotting in this ditch for some time. She felt the first of the bodies then, as she crawled through the mud. Her hand, thankfully still contained within its gauntlet, came upon the stomach of one such corpse, the flesh having decayed to the point that her hand simply pushed a hole right through it.

She gagged on the stench as her hand came away slick from the rotting guts within. Now, as her eyes better adjusted to the night around her, she saw the extent of the death surrounding: humans, dozens of them, dumped into the muddy ditch and left to decay. Men and women of all ages, or at least from what she could tell of what was left of them. Eye sockets were empty, faces sallow and sunken, skin a pale grey (at least where it had not been blackened by the Anhur mud). She was right in the middle of them now, and for a moment there she felt the sudden urge to puke.

She heard the enemy above now, their voices clearer, flashlight beams cutting through the dark. Taking a deep breath, she rolled onto her belly and pulled one of the dead bodies over the top of her, doing her best not to retch at the stench. Mass graves on this planet were not so common anymore, not since the war had ended. Nonetheless, atrocities did occur every so often, and it seemed she had stumbled onto the site of the latest one.

Above her, the batarian soldiers appeared, kitted out in a mishmash of armour and equipment, some of it of their people's own devising, other parts scavenged from Alliance or mercenary forces. The woman could not see them, she dared not move, she simply listened as they stood on the edge of the ditch and looked down at the muddy, rotting corpses their comrades had left behind after their latest outrage. A few audibly gagged, some choice words were shared between the group and then they slowly but surely began to turn and leave. Not even a bloodthirsty band of batarian insurgents were going to climb down here and crawl through the muck as part of their search. The human had to have gone somewhere else, and so one at a time they began to depart, heading elsewhere to hopefully find their quarry.

The woman waited several minutes before she chanced to move. She crawled out from beneath the eyeless, decaying corpse, the pallid face of what had to have been a middle-aged man staring lifelessly at her. She shoved it aside, rolling onto her back in order to best catch her breath. At some point during her tumble, her pistol had fallen from her grasp. Where it was now, she had no idea.

She need not have waited long to find out. A few squelchy footsteps in the mud sounded from behind her, and she turned around slowly expecting to see one of the batarians had actually mustered the courage to come down here. Instead, she found herself looking at a turian again, and even in the darkness she could see it was the same one she had stumbled on earlier. He was as filthy as she was. In one hand he clutched the pistol she had picked up from the dead officer. He had it pointed squarely at her.

'You're kidding me right now,' she stated, her voice low enough so that only this turian could hear. 'After everything, you're still going to shoot me?'

The turian did not reply right away. His blue eyes narrowed, brow plates furrowing, before he tried to straighten himself up. He winced as he did so, wracked with pain from multiple injuries.

'I'm recapturing you,' he told her, his voice carrying with it an oddly refined accent. It was coupled with the deeper dual-tone trait of all turians, the so-called "flanging" effect that operated on a lower wavelength. His limp arm moved slightly, and he visibly clenched his jaw as it did so. No doubt there was a fracture in there, yet to his credit he pushed through the pain and pulled a set of handcuffs from his armour. He threw them into the mud in front of the woman.

'Cuff yourself,' he told her. She saw him waver on his feet then, as if he was having trouble with his balance.

'Fuck off.'

The turian looked about to respond. Instead, he simply doubled over so suddenly that the woman had to take a step back. Here was one very determined spiky bastard, except no amount of determination was going to help him with what she assumed was a combination of blood loss, head trauma and simple fatigue. Smiling, she knelt down and pulled the handcuffs from the mud. She eyed the unconscious turian Lieutenant, her mind suddenly alight with all manner of ideas.

'I sure hope you've got the answers I want,' she said quietly. Given his current state, he was in no mood to heed her words. At least now she could take a chance to relax properly, with the night about her having returned to its previous quiet. Of course, any relief she felt was quickly undermined by the simple fact that she was here on this wretched world with more than one band of aliens out to kill her.

'And I sure as hell hope you've got a ship,' she muttered, before she went to work on cuffing the turian's hands behind his back.