Novel The Impact and the Invocation

Hello, I'm writing a story called "The Impact and the Invocation", you can also read this story at https://senjiqcreations.wordpress.com, I will be posting this story on RoyalRoadl.com


Synopsis: A small team of soldiers are sent to quell a rebellion in a colony a little under 250 light years from Earth, when they discovered that their ship has been sabotaged and one of their team is dead. On arrival, they also find that something has happened to the planet that they couldn't expect. Finding a way home or just surviving, regardless of which they choose there is still a killer among them.

Genre: Action, Adventure, Fantasy, Mystery, Sci-fi


Table of Contents

• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4

 

Chapter 1

Spoiler: Chapter 1

Curiosity was what he felt more than anything when he looked over the weapon that awaited his awakening after the several hundred year sleep ended. As clouded and fuzzy as his mind was, he was still able to recognise the pointlessness of the weapon that hung vertically on the clean white wall opposite him; a piece of common sense that seemed oblivious to the politicians of the commonwealth that ordered the mission in the first place. Even with the weapon's shoulder-rest touching the plastic-metal floor, the barrel was still close to touching the softly illuminate ceiling, two and a half meters high. It was a weapon designed with the destruction of small ships or Arc Suits, and was entirely not cost effective against anything less than that. However, his team were more or less a cleaning service and if their destination was intact enough to still have ships and Arcs, then they wouldn't ever get close enough to breath the air, let alone take a single shot.

But those kinds of concerns didn't matter to the politicians that sent them. They were a political decision during an election year; one meant to show that the Commonwealth would not allow separatist planets to go unpunished. As such, they had been given the very best in every possible way, the best drop-ship, the best cryogenics, the best armour and, of course, the best weapons. That was why he was stuck with a rifle so large and heavy that he could never actually use it without the motors and strengthening that the armour suits provided; it was technically the very best sniper rifle ever made. That was, according to the New Commonwealth Combined Armed Forces (NCCAF) categorisation of weapons, the B&G Tiger-Lilly was the most expensive weapon with a classification greater than standard use but less than fixture mounted. With its price and highly photogenic appearance, he imagined he was assigned it by someone that did little more than a quick search. The name alone was incredibly inappropriate for such a deadly weapon, but he had heard the story behind its name and like most other soldiers that used it, affectionately called the black weapon Lilly.

The short version of how it was named was that it was named after its creator's favourite flower. The longer version was that the creator's of the modular weapon system that all NCCAF weapons were based off, a loving couple that lived and worked together, made the weapon as the final project they worked on before one of them died. There hadn't been a single NCCAF soldier in the previous half century that hadn't used a B&G weapon and they had repeatedly used personal wealth to support soldiers that were deemed to be not cost-effective to save. When the surviving designer wanted to name the weapon after their wife's favourite flower, the soldiers held to that name with a strange kind of pride. Whether it was deliberate, or just a trick of the mind, when the weapon was fired, the flash and exhaust did seem to spread out like a blooming tiger lilly.

Just thinking about that stirred him inside enough to fully shake off the lethargy that the half millennium preserved in ice had caused. With his senses returned, he started to stretch and loosen his body, making sure nothing hurt or jarred. While he was confident that the medical readout next to his pod was accurate, he was also confident that he wasn't qualified to understand it any more than the 'green is good, red is bad' colour coding let him. Besides, checking his body didn't cost anything and if he did find something wrong then something was wrong with the machine and they were in for a lot of work. After all, the ship had been left to maintain itself while everyone slept and if something went wrong than they could be anywhere within three hundred light years of Earth. Even with the age extending gene sequencing he had received prior to his birth, the return trip was not something he could live through without being put back on ice.

With his stretches finished and no obvious injuries found, he made his way to the recreation room. While it was called that, it didn't really have anything in it that would be conducive towards that end. It was a simple room with six doors to the six cryogenics rooms and a ladder leading to the rest of the ship. The central pillar that the ladder was attached to might have been the most interesting part of the room, a grey coloured surface filled with storage space in a section of ship that was otherwise white. Aside from the practicality of the white colour, both in reducing the energy that needed to be consumed in lighting and in revealing any spills or drops that might snowball into more serious issues in the event of emergency, the colour was an unavoidable result of the material used. A part of what made the ship state of the art was its use of a metal-plastic hybrid material that normally acted firm, but when it was exposed to certain frequencies of light, such as the emergency or combat lights, it turned into an absorptive surface that could reduce impacts with it by nearly half, perfect for sudden acceleration or impact. In the short time since its development, however, ways of colouring it without reducing its effectiveness hadn't been found. Its inclusion in the area was evidence that the section was different to the rest of the ship. Not only were the supplies and cryogenics in that section, but the whole section could be separated from the ship to function as an escape pod. Which wasn't to say it should be used as one, only that it could; the section was only rated for atmospheric re-entry on planers with gas layers thicker than Mars or a only a little bit thicker than Earth. It also wouldn't last long outside of the habitable zone of any given star system, with only a limited capacity to withstand the extreme heat melting the hull at one end and extreme cold consuming additional power at the other.

Power was one thing that the ship as a whole had an abundance of, relative to the usual scarcity that ships were prone to suffer. That was yet another result of the piece-meal way that the best parts available were thrown together. The power supply and storage that the ship ran on was designed for a ship three times as large, or one that used true faster than light drive, and without the hunger that those usually fed they had spare power for luxuries like gravity. The ship was originally going to have an FTL drive, but considering how few of them the fleet had they were all already being fitted to more practical warship and carriers. Instead they used a sub-space drive with a very high dive depth. A strange trait of the sub-space drive was that the further it was capable of 'diving' the further it separated itself from normal space, and the normal flow of time that it implied. As a result, a ship in sub-space might travel for a hundred years, but upon re-entering normal space they would find only a handful of days had passed. In that respect, it was something of the opposite of the relativistic effects of near light speeds. From the perspective of someone on Earth, his ship had departed two days ago, yet his ship had consumed several hundred years worth of power. Thoughts like that made him worry about the return journey, but he knew that the reserves had been checked and triple checked before they left.

As he took a packet of nutrient jell, a food substitute that broke down slowly in the stomach in order to provide energy and water throughout the day at a rate that meant he would only feel hungry again when it was next time to eat. Through some unknowable science, each team member had their own supply that was made exactly for their needs, with specialised packs for consumption in curtain conditions. Amongst his own supply was a packet would would keep his heart-rate perfectly constant and not feel any detrimental effects of sleep loss for up to three days. It was meant to allow sniping for unnaturally long periods of time, though it was also came with a syringe that needed to be taken immediately once the effects ended, and it contained a warning that said not to engage in vigorous movements while it was active. From stories he had heard, it also contained something that brought about a compulsive obsession or concentration, but that wasn't listed amongst its effects.

As he ate, the other members of the team started to enter as well. The first was a found faced woman with sunken eyes and a sloppy way of walking that implied that any kind of movement was a kind of effort that took all of her being to muster; the kind of woman who would prefer zero-g simply since that meant she wouldn't have to walk. She wore her uniform reluctantly, as if draping it loosely on her body more than actually wearing it. There wasn't a single part of her that inspired confidence, yet he knew that she was more than qualified to be the teams chief, and only, engineer. He also knew that those half closed eyes hid a sharp green gaze that would cause blood to freeze if anyone had the misfortune of earning her scorn. Having gone through the basic military education together with her, Isabel Mitchell, he had felt why she had been nicknamed Medusa first hand. Her frizzy hair had been cut short and dyed a silver-white colour that somehow his mind interpreted as a mess of snakes. Whether he would make that interpretation without knowing her was another point entirely, but that she had insisted that she had cut it like that to avoid that kind of thing, albeit unsuccessfully. Despite her preference towards the sedentary, she was actually underweight relative to her appearance, evidence of the high quality genes her parents could afford. Another way that was expressed was through the explosive force that her small frame could somehow bring to bare.

When he had first heard that ship tended to only have one engineer on board, he was a little shocked and a lot worried. When he learnt why, however, he had to admit that it made some sense. For the price of training one engineer, 10 robots could be made; 10 robots that didn't require air while fixing damage to the hull and didn't need food, water or downtime. The engineer was mostly their for novel situations, improvisation and fixing the robots. If the ship was damaged to the extent that the robots didn't operate, then it was beyond what any number of engineers could fix without a dock and the civilisation to supply it.

As he and Isabel nodded silent greetings to each other, both out of discomfort in unused vocal cords and also from a passive understanding that neither was fond of conversation so soon after waking up, another person jumped down from the ceiling entrance; the entrance that lead to the rest of the ship. The tall, well built, and heavy man with light olive skin and black tribal tattoos across his face, body and arms called out with a voice that carried a think bass that gave each word an almost physical impact.

“Medi, good that your awake. When I got up something seemed off about the stars so I want you to check out the ship. Make sure this production line nightmare got us to the right place.”

As it turned out, he had been wrong in assuming he was the first person to come out. Instead Ashton V. Romano, what amounted to the ship's pilot, had woken up first and went to check on the ship instead of doing his stretches. Ashton was a fairly unneeded feature most of the time on a space ship, taking off, navigating and landing could all be done by a computer far more quickly and safely than by any human. As such his bachelor level education in astrology only served as a manual way of double checking the ship's computer. Not that anyone would pick him as a scholar from his looks, by far his body was the most soldier looking out of all the crew. His back was always as straight as a ruler and his every movement was both graceful and powerful. He was every bit the warrior-poet that the latest round of recruitment posters loved to promote. He didn't really take much credit for himself though; his parents had worked hard and saved up for fifteen years just to afford all of the gene corrections they wanted, having planned out his life for a lifetime before he was born. Although that kind of all encompassing control would likely cause most children to rebel, Ashton's gene's made him less likely to feel the need to do so; they had truly thought of everything.

Everything aside from the collapse of the mining corporation they had heavily invested in, and then the unfortunate suicide of the worker whose job it was to maintain the facility despite knowing that they wouldn't have a job much longer. When the Romano couple inspected the site, a micro fracture in a corridor that was meant to be fixed, but was forgotten with the death of the caretaker, split completely, taking them out into the vacuum. Afterwards, the company folded and Ashton joint the military as a part of their scholarship program.

In that moment there was something strange about what he was asking Isabel to do, yet what was strange hadn't processed yet, though he thought that it would doubtlessly hit him when he was trying to think of something else. Instead he waited until Isabel had topped the ladder before throwing one of her food packets up to her. She nodded her thanks and shut the hatch as she went about her work.

Without much else to do before they arrived at their destination he went to check on the others, the remaining three that hadn't come out. Opening the first door, the door to Dr Leslie Hall's pod, he was greeted by the smell of rotting meat, so strong and putrid that it felt like he had been punched in the face. In his career as a soldier he had smelt death before, the blood and emptied bowels, but he had never experienced a body in such a state of decay. For reasons of decency and health, bodies were always disposed of well before they reached that state.

While the crew were in their pods, there was no need for heat and air in the ship, and such things could actually impede the automatic functions of the repair robots, and as a result the ship was at near absolute zero temperatures for the vast majority of the journey. It was only around the time when they were soon going to wake up that the ship started to gradually warm up. That meant the the body he saw had only really experienced the equivalent of about two weeks worth of decomposition. The defrosting possess had also added something to the mix, making the cells of the body lose their structure and fall apart, an effect made more dramatic when the body, floating in zero gravity, was left behind by the accelerating ship, to collide into that back wall. What he saw was almost nothing like the good Dr Hall who had run their pre-flight check ups. With the body in that condition, there would be almost no way to work out the cause, especially as Dr Hall had been the last person to enter their pod. It could have even been an accident, a stroke or heart attack just before she entered the pod. That didn't seem particularly likely, considering those things had been reduced to the extent that most people had called them cured and the doctor had been in good health. Nevertheless, the point was; he couldn't rule them out. It would hardly be the first suspicious coincidence to have happened.

Turning around he rushed back out to the main room, wanting to check on the remaining two crew. Waiting in the centre room, however, was Isabel and Ashton, both with grave looks clearly showing a troublesome situation was about to be revealed. Seeing him also distressed, they too guessed that there was yet more problems. Without knowing who to speak first, their training kicked in and Isabel, as the highest ranking soldier amongst them, was given the obligation to speak first. Her usually hypnotically mellow voice was tainted with a jarring worry as she voiced her concerns; a virus that threatened to take compete control of more than just her tone.

“I don't know when or how, but someone disconnected the depth-finder. I know it was connected before I went into cryo, I went and checked it three times. Ending up like the Brisbane's every mechanics nightmare. Something also went wrong with the repair bots; none of them went into their self-repair cycles. From what I can tell, we did the last two dozen years without any bots functioning. It's a miracle we survived long enough to wake up.”

She gave a shudder as she thought about that. It was a pause that lasted long enough for what she said to sink in. The depth-finder hadn't been plugged in. That was one of the key components to a sub-space drive, a component that let the ship know when it reached the target depth. They functioned like a drum that was sensitive to spacial pressures and once the drum ruptured the ship knew that it was at the right depth. That also meant that they were one use items and had to be replaced each time a dive was made. If one wasn't connected then the ship would dive to the most shallow depth and then assume that the depth had been reached. At such a depth, the passage of time was almost perfectly in sync with real space. In other words, although they were meant to have been gone for as long as one week, including mission time, they had already been gone for several centuries. It had happened once before, the carrier ship Brisbane. It disappeared once to deliver support to a colony, and was assumed to have been destroyed, only to arrive at its destination two hundred and fifty years too late. It was one of the ghost stories that young pilots and engineers told each other to remember to do their pre-flight checks.

But that wasn't the only this she had said; the robots hadn't run their self-repair functions. Each robot was programmed with a system that monitored the actions of the robots around them, and if any problems or damage was discovered, then they would fix it. That was the self-repair function, despite being more accurate to call it co-repair. It was something that was built into the firmware and it was very hard to over-write it, as it was also something that the robots would fix. To make any change to it, the majority of the robots, though preferably all of them, would have to have the change made at the same time. As such, it was almost impossible that it occurred accidentally.

Seeing that Isabel didn't continue speaking, Ashton took over. The steady drum of his words was reassuring from the way he spoke, though the words were grim.

“I did not know it was possible to do, but the main ship had artificial gravity running for the whole trip. We did not notice as we got into our pods because it was shut off in this section. As a result there was a thirty percent increase in power consumption during the journey. As things stand, if we turn the ship around we well run out of power roughly fifty years from earth. We could save power by making the trip in real space but without repair robots it is unlikely that we would survive. Once the captain wakes up, I will recommend heading for our original destination. Even assuming the bombardment ship arrived without difficulty, the rebelling colony would have had five hundred years to rebuild.”

Ashton paused for a moment to let him and Isabel take in what he had said. Ashton was probably right in his analysis. While their team had been a media show-pony, an automated missile platform, the interstellar equivalent of a predator drone, had been sent ahead of them to cause as much damage to the planet's surface as possible. Since bombardment ships didn't have any crew, they could dive to even deeper sub-space depths, into areas where the spacial pressure wouldn't be survivable even in a cryogenics tank. As such, their deployment was as close to instantaneous as was possible and it was scheduled to arrive there well before them. After five centuries, however, any damage it caused would have long since healed.

“What I find strange, however,” Ashton continued, “is that the communications system is not receiving any messages. That is, not just messages that are directed at this ship but instead there are no signals at all. Either there are no sub-space transmitters within fifty light years or the technology has change too drastically for our equipment to even detect them.”

Seeing that Ashton had said all that he was going to say, it was time for him to speak. Taking a deep breath, he told them that had happened as succinctly and professionally as they had. They were holding themselves together in a clearly awful situation and he couldn't let himself be the one who succumbed to panic first.

“Doctor Hall is dead. She wasn't in her pod when the ship accelerated. I can't determine the cause of death, though it may have been accidental or deliberate. We should check on the others before we do anything else.”

After a moment of surprised silence, Isabel ran through the door behind him. That was only natural, Dr Hall was something like her closest friend. They had gotten along well, despite the difference in age, with the good doctor being almost twice as old a Medusa. He and Ashton shared eye contact for a moment and wordlessly said what each was going to do. Ashton would check on the captain, Benjamin Harroway, and Specialist Lee while he would make sure that Isabel didn't brake down. While neither man thought that it was particularly likely, they still didn't want to take the risk. It wouldn't be the first time a soldier killed themselves in grief, especially since everyone they knew would have died at least three centuries ago.

He entered that room to find her hunched over Dr Hall's body with some equipment in hand. He recognised it as the portable medical bay that had been strapped against the wall adjacent to the cryogenics pod, much like his own rifle was. The med-bay was a large backpack sized device that contained an assortment of scanners, depressors and diagnostic tool that were necessarily for almost any procedure they were likely to need. As the top of the line version, it even included a small computer function for automatic diagnosis. While it was an incredibly useful tool, it was heavy, had a very limited battery life, and basically pointless for anyone without medical training to attempt to use. Thankfully it seemed that Isabel's engineering training was enough to operate that automated mode. A side of the long edge had opened out to show a thin transparent plastic material, whose display seemed to indicate that it should be placed over the body.

After a few moments, the display started to list the possible causes of death. Most of them were obviously due to the the cold and impact. One of the causes, however, stood out. Deed tissue puncture and laceration, consistent with NCCAF standard issue knife. In other words, getting stabbed with a type of knife that everyone on the team had. Considering that the doctor's own knife wasn't too far from the body, it wasn't impossible for that wound to have been caused by the acceleration also, with the blood on the weapon a result of the collision and not from use. After placing the body inside the pod, for preservation and tidiness, and cleaning the blood off themselves, they went to check on Ashton.

In the main room Ashton was siting, eating a food pack with a worried expression. After they told him about what they found, he reciprocated.

“Something just is not right about all of this.” He said with a subtle click of his tongue, “Someone turned off the captain and specialist's revive sequence. I have set the sequence to start waking them up but that will not be finished for a little over three days. Until then, Medi will have to be the acting commander and Nix and I will follow your lead.” He then looked Isabel directly in the eyes before continuing. “If you want to investigate before the others wake up, then we can do that, but if you want to just lock everything down until the captain wakes up we can do that too.”

The implication of the choice was simple, did she think that either Nix or Ashton was involved or were Ben or Lee. There were too many things gone wrong for it to be coincidental. They had a traitor amongst them and unless she were the traitor then there was no way to know who was. She had to make a choice about who she trusted most and who she trusted least. From his perspective, Nix couldn't see the captain sabotaging his own ship, his own team, and he wouldn't put it past Lee. As far as he was concerned, Lee was a genuine mental patient, as rare as those were these days. Her rank 'specialist' was granted due to her expertise with all manor of explosives. She loved fire so much that she had done a doctorate just to know how to best make it. He had watched he in battle before, too, and her pail skin seemed to flush with lust as she deployed a rocket that took down an enemy drop ship. From what he had seen of her, she might very well be willing to blow up the ship with herself inside just to have the best view of the blast.

As Isabel opened her mouth to tell them her choice, the room shook and thunderous straining sounds could be heard. It was at that point when He realised what he forgot to ask.

“Where are we?”

With wide eyes, Isabel started to yell. “Strap in! The we were supposed to be in a stable orbit but I guess something else went wrong.”

Not even ten seconds after he strapped himself into one of the nearby seats, the sound of metal tearing could be heard from the upper portion of the ship. There were very few ways that the ship could survive entering a planet and hurdling in uncontrolled after flying without repairs was not one of them. After a few more moments and the crippling fear that one of the stripped away parts would impact the room, the automatic disengage finally triggered and the lower section propelled itself away from the ship.

The section vibrated and shuddered. It creaked and strained. It heated and they started to cook in their own sweat.

Then suddenly, the sections own power kicked in and the internal artificial gravity neutralised the impact that the fall was having on their body. The system worked so well that if not for the deafening sound, they might not have noticed the impact at all. With ground-fall made, the ceiling hatch opened to show the outside sky. That hadn't been a feature it was designed with, and on another world that might have killed them. That world however was once a colony, however, and its air was fit for human life. The light orange colour of the local star seemed strange and uneasy, like the star was always casting light through thick smog. The alien nature of that world was only exaggerated by the purple-red coloured plants, despite a sky that was a familiar blue. With everything happening is quick succession so soon after waking up, Nix felt drained and worn out, like it would be an effort to just unbuckle and stand back up.

He could see their landing had set the surrounding area on fire as smoke was starting to fill the air. He could already smell the smoke, and was not eager for it to make its way inside. Isabel and Ashton, however were faster to react, and they had already gotten up to close the hatch. As he stood up, the world began to shake. Blackness and bright light alternated in his eyes. He felt like his legs hurt, then his head, then... nothing.

 

It felt so wrong to say tl;dr
I don't have the mood to read recently, so don't get the wrong idea.

I just want to say that you should put the chapters in the spoiler, so that peoples could scroll down easily

 

There you go, all nice and easily scroll past-able

 

The chapter was super descriptive and I like that a lot. The story seems promising(if you have a general idea of what your plot would be like) (and its Sci-fi ) The subspace explanation could have been done better tho. For a first chapter the mystery feel felt rather lacking due to super Sci-fish part of the chapter but that's alright I guess. I am watching this thread.

 

Thanks for the feedback

 

Spoiler: Chapter 2

Chapter 2

He dreamed of home. He dreamed of his parents, his brothers, his sisters, his house and his pets. His parents' sandy blond hair, that made them look more like surfers than scientists, turned grey, turned white, and fell out. Like himself, his siblings inherited the same hair, the same sun-tanned skin, and like his parents he watched them age, year after year until they were bones, then dust. The house that was filled with his childhood memories and the house that he had worked for were impossibly next to each other, despite being built on different planets. First the roofs crumbled, then the walls came down. Plants grew and died in an endless cycle, bringing the dirt fractions of a measurement higher with each cycle until each house was buried and forgotten. He dreamt that while that all happened he stood there beside it, unable to move or even age along with them. Then he awoke.

He had been lain flat on the soft floor surface on the recreation room with the med-bay next to him. From the stiffness of his back, he had guessed that he had been there for a while. Looking up, it seemed that the rest of the team had placed a tarp over the hatch. He could feel the surface beneath him start to go firm, evidently the emergency power had failed and the changing texture of the floor was what shook him awake. As his mind started to clear he took in his surroundings more and noticed a figure sitting near him that wasn't there when he fell unconscious. Specialist Jae Eun Lee, was watching over him with an unmoving face that made even dolls look animate. That was as much a signature of who she was as her love of explosives and her near crimson red skin. Not red in a derogatory sense, or in a flushed sense, but rather a trait of her unusual heritage. Several centuries prior to their ill-fated voyage, a group of radical environmentalists defied laws on the limits of human gene editing and their community created three thousand experimental children. Each child's skin cells were filled with potent photosynthetic features similar to that of plants, but with a much higher efficiency, and giving them a distinct blood red colour. The energy that it produced was then routed to ridges along their backs that converted the chemical energy into electrical. They had hopped to show the Commonwealth that they could be less dependant on technology and live with nature while still having the tools that humans depend on. Instead they were arrested and their research destroyed. Three thousand children, however, was a viable population and they started to spread out and mix into society as their numbers grew. While the changes that had been made to them had been made into dominant genes, there was always a chance that a child with a non-red would be born without the electrical production ridges and develop a lethal aversion to the light.

Gene's didn't explain her obsessions, nor her stone-like face, however; that was all her. Considering Lee was awake, that meant he had been asleep for at least three days. Seeing that he had woken up, she moved to sit next to him, her long black hair brushing against him as she reached over him to pull the automatic diagnostic section of the med-bay into place. She then took off her shirt and attacked some cables to her back and the pack. Evidently the battery had died while he was out and she needed to power the thing herself. Looking at her he recalled a time, when he was younger, that the sight of her tone naked body would have made him aroused, but military training being what it was, what he instead felt was that she showed signs of dehydration and rushed defrosting that would impede her performance in an emergency. He took a drink from a water filled bottle that had been left beside him and, after taking a drink, passed it to her. Even if he was thirsty, he still knew that it would be better for him to just eat a food jell and leave the water for her. After all, when she was generating power she needed to drink as much as four people combined. Unfortunate for her, that much water couldn't be put in a food jell and still have it function, so she had to keep track of things the old fashion way.



As Lee drank she activated the machine without any confidence to her actions, as if she were merely following steps she had memorised, without any understanding behind the motions. As she did so she started to talk to him, her voice as it always was, so monotone and devoid of inflection that you would think she were a computer reading out numbers rather than a woman striking up a conversation. Though oddly, the way that she sounded and the way that she spoke were completely disconnected.

“So, like, the Cap and Ashie are out scouting, and Medidi is setting up some PV cells to get this thing back to, like, basic functionality.”

If he had to describe how he thought of how Lee spoke, he would probably say, 'if a military robot was taught to speak by a teenage girl.' When they had first met he had found it grating and dreaded having to talk with her. Like all things, it had slowly grown on him and he just thought of it as one of her many quirks. He did know, however, that his initial response was a common one, and he had heard rumours circulate the barracks that it was the reason for most of her brake ups. He didn't give that much credit, however, since it was far more likely that her partners just didn't like her military lifestyle, her lack of visible emotions, or her obsessions with making things go through a combustion reaction. As far as he knew, she might even enjoy watching bridges burn.

“while they all do that,” she continued, “we, like, have to watch Medidi and make sure none of the local anything gets her, you know? But like some weird shit popped up when the scan thing happened and they want me to run it again now that your awake.”

With that she stopped talking and let the machine do its work. Although he felt a tingling sensation, he knew that was in his head and the scanner didn't operate with anything the body could actually feel. Whatever 'some weird shit' was, he hopped it was just the result of novices using a machine, rather than something actually wrong. After a couple minutes of quiet, the device made a low hum and it began to display its findings. Although most of it meant nothing to him, chemicals, fractions and other such things that meant nothing without context, there was one part that he could understand. 'Unidentifiable radioactive substance found in bloodstream, insufficient information to recommend actions.'

“Hee, same as before, huh?” said Lee, who like him paid the rest of the display no attention, “When we scanned everyone else we didn't get that, so looks like its just you. Feel bad?”

Folding the scanner away and handing the power cords back to her, he looked over his body and tried to feel for anything out of the ordinary. After a few stretches he concluded that he was fine. Had Dr Hall survived he might have been more concerned, but without her around think about it would just be worrying over something he couldn't change. As such, he got up and grabbed something to eat as he made his way towards his cryogenics pod. On the remaining wall, the one not taken up by the behemoth weapon, the pod or the door, was a cupboard. Inside was a small box that contained the personal affects he was allowed to bring and, more importantly, his armour.

The NCCAF standard issue armour was already an impressive piece of equipment, but the top of the line gear that they were given for the media to drool over made that stuff look like the old Kevlar vests that he had seen in museums, or were worn by reenactment societies. Synthetic muscles and micro-motors wove throughout it and were fixed at the joints to more than triple the wearer's natural strength. The impact absorptive fibres of the underlay reduced any hits and used some of the force to power its battery. The outer fibres were made to have a programmable chameleon effect, while still being photovoltaic enough to charge a third of its power requirement at Earth level lighting. The middle fibres were amongst the most impressive, though, with a mixture damage resistant, resin sealing and explosive reactive fibres, it was the layer that prevented damage and plugged it up afterwards. If it was hit by weapons above what it could take, small outward facing explosives would detonate in that exact location to disperse the force away from the armour, then resin would fill the gap and harden, preventing exposure and vulnerabilities. Because it was made without any plate sections, aside from over the heart, it was able to freely move with the body without limiting the motions. They did take some getting used to, moving with the armour, letting it push with you and not fighting it, but there was no doubt that there was no better protection, aside from an Arc Suit or a ship's hull. Additionally, when the boots and helmet were worn, the armour could even be used in space combat, though its thrust was from the same supply as the air, so the external tanks were rather needed in that situation.

He also felt far more comfortable once in the armour, as the synth-muscles supported his body and even aided blood flow. He hadn't really noticed it at first, since he attributed the sensation to the grogginess of just waking up, but the planet's gravity was about a fifth higher than earth's. Flicking his mind back to the mission briefing, he recalled hearing that it was actually light for its size, with a surprisingly low concentration of core metals. Because of that, the colonists had started with a automatic mining facility in the system's nearby asteroid belt. That was pretty much that only place in the system that made ship fuel, or so said the data they had been given. He also remembered some other basic information; eighteen hour days, nine hundred and eighty nine day long years and four moons that meant no lunar calendar had been made at the time they launched. The planet's most interesting natural feature was its plant life. The plants' closest Earth analogy would be that of certain types of sea-weed, where the whole plant was just a connection of single celled organisms. With each cell being a whole creature the reproduction process was fast but energy intensive, meaning the plant life grew rapidly but needed a lot of power to do so. The cells did, however, act almost symbiotically, with organisms with ground access trading their excess resources for the stellar energy gathered by those with a lot of sky access. The plants between the two just survived by taking a cut from every trade. That meant that all of the tree like plants were hollow at the core, with the most effective transmitters sticking to the edge and the inner cells starving to death. There was probably a metaphor for something there, but he couldn't think of what that might be. Unlike Ashton, he was no poet.

The upside of the plants for the colonists was that the planet's ecosystem was mostly intact. The drone's attack would have made most planets a lifeless ball of dirt for several centuries afterwards, but after only five hundred years the entire place was covered with the red-purple coloured plants. The native plants could also be made into good soil for more familiar plants, which was one of the reasons it was chosen to be a home.

The conditions that the plants liked, however, were some of the reasons why he hated the planet. Firstly, the star was bright. While the surface temperature was lower than good old Sol, the local star was twice as massive and put out a lot more light. While their relative position, water percentage and a lot of other things he didn't understand meant that the temperature range was actually very similar to Earth, the brightness was like someone had switched out a light-bulb without telling him. That similarly was added to by the difference in colour. The light orange hue just felt ill. Then there was the soil that the plants loved. The plants had to have been masochistic to him, as a large part of the soil was acidic. While there wasn't any real danger from it, pale skin would feel like it was burning or itching on contact with it. The plants loved that, with them clustering around where the acid was strongest.

With the armours checks complete, he hefted the heavy rifle off the wall beside him, letting it resting it rest on his shoulder like a plank of long wood or steel beam. He slotted the box filled with bullets longer than his full hand into place and left the ship. Standing on the roof of the escape pod, under the shade provided by the tarp, he remembered how much he hated the star light. Adjusting a dial on his helmet caused the transparency to darken and he became better able to see. He could see that Lee and Isabel were nearby, and both were in their armour also. They were easily told apart in their armours, as each suit was made specifically for its user. Isabel's was filled with slots and catches that could hold tools as she worked, and its basic colour, when not chameleon-ed, was a reflective, hi-vis orange. Lee's on the other hand barely looked functional. In order to let more light hit her skin, her armour's muscles contracted in several sections to leave large holes that could be closed in less than a second. Her armour also had plates along her back ridges that allowed better conductivity and protection. From what he had heard, ridges didn't grow back. Cords attached between her suit and Isabel's seemed to indicate that the engineer had been working for a while. While the armour wasn't entirely self-sufficient while it was in use, just wearing it to make repairs wouldn't drain its power particularly fast. Looking at the soft blue coloured display inside his own helmet, he hopelessly tried to guess at how long it would take her to drain the suit while working in such strong daylight. It was then that he noticed the local time on the display, nightfall was only a couple hours away. They were probably making sure she had enough power to make it through the night if need be.

Looking about, he could see that the ship's impact had scraped along the ground for what looked like several kilometres, forming a near straight trench that ended with the ship being half buried in soft soil. The pervasive plants were already starting to grow back down the trench walls, and he imagined that after a couple weeks the gap would seem like a natural part of the landscape. The fires that their collision caused had cleared away a field around the ship that gave them room to work with and it seemed that the plants avoided the scorched soil. It seemed that where he was standing was the tallest place around, and as such he followed his training and set his rifle down, prepared it so that it could be shot at a moments notice, and activated his helmets scouting systems.

As he was expected to have to hit targets from as much as two kilometres away, his armour was customised to include several features that assisted that. His helmet included a wind approximation module, that used used a camera that measured differences in pictures too small for a human to register to extrapolate the wind as far way as he could see, then displayed that information as a colour coded chart. Next it had a radar system with multiple settings, either focused forward to aid in aiming the shot, or as a warning against anything approaching. Similarly there was a laser sonar, that was sensitive enough that he could direct it at a leaf in the distance and hear everything as though it was his ear there instead. That same system could also be directed to a general circle around him to simply augment his hearing, and that was the more often used setting. Also amongst the display tint settings were night vision and infrared; classics that had been a part of soldiers' gear since before even his grand-father served. With his display covered with the details the various sensors provided, he wouldn't be very effective at scouting while moving, but as a stationary guard, he was the best. If he cared enough, he could probably even start counting the bugs on the trees.

As he kept watch, Isabel started to talk over their short ranged communications, despite her being close enough that she could have just yelled.

“While you were out the captain finished defrosting and we worked out what needs to be done. While there aren't any recognisable com signals anywhere in range of our receivers, in other words, probably not on the planet, there was some strange radioactive interference registering without a pattern. The captain figured that's just what the kids are using these days and took Ashton to scout out the closest source.” She took a pause, though he couldn't really see a reason why; possibly to think or possibly she just got tired. Her voice then drifted into his ears, as suddenly as it had stopped. “There's a no one goes anywhere alone rule in place, and a sleeper, that's the specialist or the captain, and a wake-er, that's you, me or Ashton, have to be in the group. That way the saboteur doesn't have a chance to screw things up without someone finding out.”

After that she filled him in about the broader plan. While their main ship was destroyed and spread across the planet's many oceans, the bombardment drone was still in space and likely had a working sub-space drive. That meant, if they wanted to get back to Earth, they had to either get their pod to the drone or the drone to the pod. Which way they tried that was dependent on its condition, and that was what Isabel had spent the previous few day working on. Their ship had no power and was damaged by pieces of the main ship breaking off, so she patched broken parts and connected stellar power cells to its grid. That task would normally have only taken a couple hours, but all of her robots were broken and the compartment that the cells were stored in had been buried in the landing. Once they had power and a working array, she would sent a signal to the drone and hope that it was still functional enough to be able to send her a diagnostic. If it still had some fuel and was mostly intact, they would then get it to land near them. If it was a broken mess or out of fuel, they would have to go up to it, somehow. The drone hadn't been given much fuel, since it was expected that their ship would pick it up and carry it back with them and therefore didn't need an excess. They had hopped that no one had cut corners and it had been given the standard secondary supply that would be enough to get to the automated mining station.

If there were still people alive on the planet, they would at least be able to purchase some fuel to get their pod back up their, if they weren't able to get a ride back to Earth. They also had to hope that any locals didn't view the drone as a war memorial and try to stop them from taking it. Since it was around the planet for so long without ever being shot down, that was a possibility.

A while after Isabel finished explaining, and just as the star was starting to set, he picked up human shaped movement on his sensors. The radar dispersal pattern and sound profile was consistent with the two other team members, but he none the less lined up his rifle's scope, just to be sure. In a previous mission, a battle in a abandoned station over the last of the fuel, needed by both them and the separatist terror cell's ship, the enemies had forged profiles in order to get the drop on them. Ever since then, he had never trusted the display with the confidence he used to. Sure enough, he had been paranoid and the captain arrived back at the ship about half an hour after dark.

Benjamin Harroway was their captain, and a good one at that. He had joined their team not long before their previous captain retired and at the time members of other teams had called it a diversity hire. It had fit almost perfectly with the prevalent joke that one in six soldiers in the commonwealth needed to be Venusian, or from one of the Venus stations. The fact that nearly ninety percent of all Venusians served at some point in their life compared with the commonwealth average of two percent, it was an unjust rumour to say the least. There was something about living in a lifeless hellscape that just made them into good soldiers and a soldier's life was a good way to bring in the money for the supplies their colonies always needed. With charcoal black skin and a towering height that was nearly eight foot tall, and a broad, muscular body that made that height seem in proportion, Harroway was everything the Venusian stereotype said. He also had an understanding about machines, and how to keep them running, forged from a childhood on a station that would be destroyed in seconds if something broke down. He was a top scorer on the officer training exam. He even lost his legs pushing a fellow soldier out of the way of incoming fire. His new legs, made with the same synthetic muscles as their armour, was a constant reminder that their captain always had their back. As he entered the clearing he signalled for them to all go inside. As the captain passed him, headed inside, he was given the access codes for the network of sentry probes they had set up while they scouted, effectively giving him extra eyes throughout the forest. While that would normally be too must information for him to process, the probes had enough processing power to communicate with each other and priorities what he saw. Anything they deemed to be non-urgent simply appeared as a dot on the map, that his display had constructed using the scanners, and he could access the recordings when he had time.

Once everyone was inside and the captain started talking, he remembered the one thing that he wished he could change about the captain. While the commonwealth had a universal standard language, a kind of piecemeal language that somehow naturally formed out of the four most commonly spoken languages before leaving Earth was an option, colonies tended to form their own dialects over time. Travelling through space was an inherently expensive process and that left the general population without the need to adhere to a strict formal language, and variations sprouted rapidly from there. That was particularly the case for Venus, whose dialect was often argued to be an entirely different language. Speaking Venusian was a habit that Benjamin Harroway never seemed to kick.

“About five batotha at twelve arbshi there was a smodwa. Strange place. They used encon and clay in equal measure; not sure if they want to make things last or waibu.”

His mind dredged through his memory as fast as to could to piece together the phrases to work out what was said before the huge man started to talk again. 'Batotha'; a shortening of battalion approximate two-thirds away, or roughly the distance a large group of soldiers could cover, moving at two thirds of their maximum running speed in the given time of 5 hours. It said a lot about the Venusean people that a common unit of distance they used was based on military movements. Next there was 'arbshi', or an arbitrary north as chosen based on the direction the ship landed facing. That was used when north wasn't know, knowable, or helpful. Finally, 'smodwa'. That essentially just meant village. More accurately it was any place that fewer than 20 humans lived, including small space ships like their own. So his first sentence was, roughly 90 kilometres away along a heading 12 degrees to the left of the ship, there was a small group of people living there. The next sentence was far more easily understood. 'Encon' was just enzyme bonded concrete or cement, made to absorb water over time so that it didn't break like traditional stuff yet could be sprayed in place to make quick and cheap buildings or surfaces. 'Waibu' was a Venusian term that was derived from 'watch it burn' and meant to make something badly, incorrectly or without wanting it to last. It could also be used insultingly, though saying it about another person was a sure way to start violence.

“The locals seemed genpien and didn't look like they've mastered electricity, let alone something like the weishi we detected.” Their leader continued speaking, just after he decoded the previous sentences, saying something that started to concern him. “A couple signs on the buildings used symbols, or maybe just drawings, instead or words. Romano informs me that in ancient cultures that was a common practice in illiterate communities. If that's the case for the whole planet then we're yubulled. No way a people that can't even read have rockets.”

He knew that 'genpien' was the Venusian derogatory term from people that chose not to use technology, such as colonists that never advanced their planet beyond an agrarian society. He also knew that a 'weishi' was an unknown radiation signature. What didn't know was 'yubull', though he could guess at it from the context. Before the captain could continue, he saw something in his display and signed to the group.

“Hold up,” he started to say, before selecting an option that allowed him to share the video with the group by sending it to their displays, “it seems like there are some people approaching from the village. They're following your steps too neatly, it looks like you were tracked.”

There was a group of four people approaching, three young men and an old woman, dressed in clothing that seemed to be made of some kind of animal hide. Two men had solid looking spears, the tips of which the probes said had the same components as a shuttle's hull, one man had a bow, that was almost as tall as he was, and an animal skin quiver of equally impressive arrows, and the lady walked with steps braced against a tall staff. He had never seen any who looked so old; even the cheapest genetic alterations ensured that body ageing wouldn't happen for at least a century, and that amount of time was almost certainly enough time to buy a regeneration cycle. Almost everyone that reached the two hundred body year limit did so with a youthful appearance. If he hadn't watched a horror movie about a failed cryogenics pod, he might not have understood what had happened to her. The group walked at her pace, and were making bad time because of it. They would have to walk for roughly 36 hours, two local days, to make it to the ship. As it seemed unlikely that they had any travel stims or the likes, it would likely take them three or four days instead. Each person carried a large backpack with what seemed to be a bed rolled up and attached to it, aside from the woman whose own bag was considerably smaller, though still with a bedroll.

With continued analysis, all of their metal, their knives, arrowheads, armour beneath the pelts and tools, seemed to be recycled from ship components. That hopefully meant that there was a fuel tank somewhere on the planet. It also seemed that their language, though they didn't speak much as they walked, was based on the common tongue but more dialect-ed than even Venusian. That at least meant they were at least capable of communicating, though he had secretly wanted to see the captain trying to signal and gesture and grow steadily more frustrated. Amongst the officers' training that Harroway had done was a course on theoretical first contact that contained advice for how to establish communication without a common language. He also noticed that moved surprisingly easily, despite the darkness. There was some light from a full moon, the yellow-most of the local satellites that was the smallest and fastest amongst them, but that light was blocked by the canopy of trees in their endless battle for resources. He could hear Isabel analysing how threatening their weapons were beside him, having connected herself to his suit directly to get the data in its raw format. She calculated that the bow had a draw strength of at least one hundred and eighty pounds. Without any force dispersal, muscle enhancements or compound functions, it was impressive that the local was able to use a bow that strong. It was not, however, enough force to damage their armour. It could scratch the chameleon fibres and cut some of the synth-muscles, but the hardening and dispersing would take care of the arrowhead without even needing to trigger an explosive dispersal. There were one or two tiny spots that the arrow could hurt them, such as in a particular joint at the neck where suit and helmet met; a flaw that was simply unavoidable if the ability to look up was to be retained.

She also calculated the strangers' potential ability to resist their weapons. Minimal. Their armours had some ship hull sown in under the hide that would provide good protection against swords, bows and spears, but were not must use against their weapons. Their pistols wouldn't work particularly well, but their normal rifles would break through in only a couple of shots and his and Lee's weapons wouldn't even notice a difference. If the extra shots was a problem for the others they could always swap their rounds out for the spare larger rounds, that was the beauty of the adaptive modular weapons program; just inserting a different box of bullets made the weapon resize to fit. It had limits but meant that if a soldier ran out of rounds they could just use whatever they had, be it their pistol bullets or enemy supplies. After all, an under-powered weapon in better than no weapon.

They still had plenty of time to think about how they were going to deal with the group when they eventually arrived, so they instead returned to what they were doing. He and Isabel continued to watch the approaching strangers as they listened to the captain speak. They were going to have to take things as they come and adapt, if the drone plan worked then they would go with that, otherwise they would have to trade for some, if there was none to trade for, then they would have to make their own. As the captain finished speaking and asked if there were any questions, specialist Lee asked one that, he had to admit, had crossed him mind for a brief moment.

“So, like, these peeps are all, like, stone age-ey... Why don't we just, like, rule over them. Its not like they have anything that could, like, harm us and our guns could blow the shit out of anything they've got. Besides, with how backwards they are, us ruling them would, like, push them forward a few centuries.”

The room went silent as her monotone voice sunk in. Was it better to be rulers of a backwards society or soldiers for a progressive one? He knew that the answer would be different for each of them. He knew Isabel well enough to know a planet without machines was her idea of hell, and the brightness gave him the same impression. The planet was almost perfect for Lee, and would only be topped with an explosives laboratory of her own. The captain was Venusian down to the smallest cell in his body and failing to return to his post, to return supplies to his people, went against something fundamental. As for Ashton V. Romano, Nix didn't have the slightest clue where he stood.

 

https://royalroadl.com/fiction/14394/the-impact-and-the-invocation @SenjiQ

 

yes

 

Spoiler: Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Two days had passed since that first night when they all gathered, since the question of their power was raised, since a uneasy tension started to fill the air in that small ship. After the first day, Isabel had finished connecting the PV cells and they once again had a ready supply of power, one that wasn't connected to Lee's back. Harroway and Ashton hadn't gone out scouting again and instead spent their time working alone in their rooms. They had all agreed that while they wouldn't go anywhere alone, they could still have privacy within their own rooms. By the second day, Isabel had fixed together a communications system and they slowly waited for the right moment to turn it on. The drone was in range that night and they gathered in the central room once again to watch Isabel make the connection.

Things seemed like they were going well. Signal burst one was a start up sequence that told the drone to divert power towards starting the main reactor. The drifting machine actually succeeded in sending an automated 'signal received' confirmation message back at them. A minute later, it told them that its reactor had started without issues. That was when Isabel triggered the diagnostic and the full readout was set down to them. Some higher power had to be looking down on them, was what he though when looking at the results. No only did it no one cut corners when fuelling it, but it had survived for so long without fractures to the tank leaking it or natural processes degrading it to an unusable sludge. Furthermore, it had enough hull integrity to survive a controlled landing.

As Isabel signalled for the drone to land, the sentries closest to them filled his displays with warnings, bringing up what they saw and tagging it as urgent. Outside their ship, one of the sealed panels retracted. Out of the resulting hole came a black, four metre tall, spear like pillar; one of their ships ground to air missiles. While their ship didn't have many weapons, with the majority being fitted to the main craft, it did have what the NCCAF considered to be the minimum for self-defence. That meant two, ship to ship, two ship to ground and two ground to ship missiles, as well as an anti-ship laser. None of those weapons could self arm and for the missile to prepare itself like that meant that someone had ordered it to. He immediately cried out.

“Bel, stop!”

But he had reacted to slowly. As she finished the landing order, and before she could send a cessation, the power inside the ship cut out. In the sudden blackness, with only the virtual light of their displays in front of them, a powerful shaking filled the cabin. Roaring quickly followed and light flashed through the open entrance, the tart flapping in sudden strong wind, threatening to come clear from where it was tied. Through his display he could see the missile climbing, higher, higher, higher; like a lance of fire trying to cut through the sky. Unable to do anything else, they all watched on his shared footage as their newly found hope, filled with fuel and under the strain of passing though the atmosphere, was blasted in pieces of metal, shards that would rain over a distant forest of ocean.

He fell to his knees. He looked up at the sky. Through a crushing scene of loss he couldn't help but think that purple and green colour of the explosion looked like a flower, decorating a lonely, unfamiliar sky.

Even without power, the ship was still warm with its insulation, yet he felt a chill go through him. The traitor was still on the ship with them and they somehow managed to orchestrate further damage, even with the pairing. He didn't really know for curtain, but he was reasonably confident that the missile launch could have been set up in advance by anyone with weapons clearance. That could have even been prepared before leaving Earth. That meant that it could have been the captain, specialist Lee or Ashton. Though Isabel would have likely known how to over-write the commands, that would have required physical access to the missiles and he hadn't seen that. Once again Lee amongst the possibilities, which built his suspicions. She might have though that if the ship was working, they would force her back with them. Hell, she might have just wanted to watch the drone explode. She had both motive and means. While he thought about that, he started to stand back up and look throughout the cabin.

Isabel was curled over in a fetal position and muttering to herself. Lee was starting up at the explosion in the sky; having taken her helmet off to see with her own eyes an enraptured expression could be seen on her normally stiff and unmoving face; even in the dim moon light the pink of blush could be seen on her blood red skin. The fanaticism of that sent a shudder down his spine, like a wave made of revulsion. The captain seemed to turn inwards, focusing on his display and his thoughts, as if searching through everything he had and looking for an alternative. He couldn't see where Ashton was.

Both concerned and worried, he started looking for him. He wasn't in his room, he wasn't in the clearing, the probes didn't have any recordings of his either. Their group started to look about, the captain seemingly taking his absence as an admission of guilt. None of his sensors could pick him up, but if Ashton had activated the armour's stealth systems and had gotten a sufficient head start, it was possible for him to avoid detection. Half of the probes were deployed by Ashton, and as such he would be able to exclude himself from them without alerting him. It was only after they had searched for a couple hours that they realised that they were breaking the rule about splitting up. That wouldn't be a problem if Ashton was the saboteur, but if he wasn't then they were making a mistake. They returned back to the ship at dawn, still unable to find any sign of their fleeing team member. Entering the central room they realised another mistake they made; only Nix, Harroway and Lee had gone searching.

Still in her fetal position, curled up on a soft seat lay Isabel 'Medusa' Mitchell, blood poring out of her severed neck as the smell of burnt flesh filled the room. On the floor beside her was a repair robot, seemingly entirely undamaged, with its spherical body split in two to show off its many tools and devices. As it stood there, somehow seeming as if it were proud of its work, despite having no features which might be displaying such emotions, the severing/welding laser in its supplies still gave off heat. It clearly hadn't happened that long ago and had doctor Hall still been there, they might have been able to do something. Instead, Nix wordlessly pulled his side-arm off of his leg and shot the robot. He immediately regretted that. Not only had he given up the chance of finding out who programmed it, but shooting the gun in the enclosed space of the cabin sent a lance of pain though his ears before the helmet filtered it out.

They had been friends for such a long time, fought beside each other. When she needed someone beside her, he wasn't there, and then she was dead. He had seen companions die before, close ones even, but none had hit him quite as hard. Letting his gun drop to the ground, he went and lifted her body. Taking her body to her room, Lee opened the door for him and they set her into her cryogenics pod. Although without power the body wouldn't be frozen, it was still a bacteria free environment, without access to outside, so the decomposition would be very slow.

When he eventually left her room, he found Lee and Harroway loading supplies onto bobs. Bobs, or beasts of burdens, were robots with treads, carry space, PV cells and nothing else. They followed their remote and recharge in the light, as simple as that. The ship had one for each person, or two for each remaining person. The pair were loading everything from the shelves onto the bobs, medicine, food, bullets, batteries, tents and bedding. Harroway even remembered to load in Hall's med bay and Isabel's tool kit.

“There's, like, no point in staying here,” Lee told him, “so were grabbing anything not nailed down and, like, doing our own thing.”

“Lee will make contact with the genpien at that smodwa, work her way up the social food-chain and if this planet has a way off, she'll let us know. I'm going continue the hunt for Ashton. If I see that waibu bastard that crashed my ship, I'll show him the Venusian justice system. After that I'll start wandering from place to place, looking for any sign of a working ship.”

The captain left it up in the air what he wanted Nix to do, almost as if he was acknowledging that his command didn't mean much in their position. He had to admit that he wanted to join the hunt, but somewhere deep inside he just couldn't bring himself to. He had already seem a third of his team die, and didn't want to be apart of bring that up to a half, just on a guess. Instead he told them that he'd go with Lee. After hearing that, Harroway nodded in agreement and Lee seemed to smile, though with her posture and not her face.

An hour later, they stood outside the ship with all of the supplies loaded. The treads on the bobs had been designed to be able to adjust themselves to use NCCAF ladders, and their suspension system ensured that the load was always kept parallel to the ground. With everyone and everything outside, they manually shut the heavy roof of the ship and used Isabel's tools to weld the ship shut. With any luck, they would be the only ones who could unseal it. Before they left, going their separate ways, Nix triggered a recall signal that caused the probes to detach from wherever they were and start moving towards him. Two hours later, Harroway having left long ago, the last of the probes arrived and they were able to set off. Without any reason not to, the decided that their first destination would be the nearby village. With their armour supporting them, they could easily run at a pace of twenty to thirty kilometres per hour without getting worn out, and the bobs could also match that pace. As such, they could reach the village in just three to four hours fairly comfortably.

He left the tiger-lilly on one of the bobs as they ran, instead equipping the Isabel's rifle. Likewise Jae Eun Lee was using Dr. Hall's rifle, with her own grotesquely disproportionate weapon on a bob. The standard infantry rifle, the B&G neapolitan, was the weapon of choice for NCCAF soldiers who didn't need something more specialised. The weapon featured three rotating barrels with independent force collecting and dispersing systems that allowed rapid shooting while still ensuring that the user effectively only feels a fraction of the recoil. The various system in the barrels converted force into heat, and slowed the rate at which the recoil enters the body, allowing for it to be gradually felt over the course of roughly a second, instead of in an instant. The impact was then further lightened by the armour's ability to spread the force throughout the body to make sure that no once place is overly strained. Those systems and more were the only way it was even possible to shoot the tiger-lilly. With the adjustment systems, power supply and internal computing, on top of all of that, the rifle was a fairly bulky weapon, though when moving it around it never felt impractical. The neapolitan name was another B&G horror story. The way he had heard it was that one of the creators was pregnant, going through actual natural child bearing instead of renting a tank, and she started to have cravings while she worked. Thus she named the weapon of death and destruction after what the three barrels made her feel like eating at the time. Worse still the pregnancy was causing some violent mood swings and the rest of the design team wasn't willing to stand up to her. He didn't know if that was true, he hadn't heard of a natural childbirth in a long time, but if any couple was eccentric enough to do it then they would have been it.

Not long into their trip, they realised that they, or more rather he, had forgotten something. Ahead of them was a group of four people, the group that they had first spotted with the probes three nights earlier. With everything that happened, their existence had slipped from his mind and after he pulled back the probes he didn't have any way to remind himself. They had continued to follow Harroway and Ashton's tracks back to the ship, stopping to sleep and eat along the way. As they walked they occasionally stopped to forage or hunt, supplementing the dried meats and fruits that they brought with them. What they hunted were rabbits and birds, both of which were brought with the original colonists to breed as livestock or pets but somehow thrived in the alien environment. That was how it came that they were standing about two hundred metres from each other, both sides aware of the other. As the local trees took up more sky then they did ground, even from that distance they were completely free of obstacles between them. Using the enhanced hearing, he could hear them talk amongst themselves and even understand most of what they were saying in their local dialect.

“The legends were true,” said the man with a bow, his large upper body and long arms shaking as his hands tightened on the bow, “the rain of fire did bring forth a demons' nest.”

“Hooo, lookie here,” the old lady said, “they seem to live without skin or faces. Not even monsters controlled by a high magi could pull that off.”

“We've confined them, now lets head back!” Said one of the spear-men, “the inquisition can deal with this sort of thing and I'm not letting Laura grow up without me there.”

“Grow a pair, will ya Collin,” chided the other spear-man, “if we bring back a demon's head then we can join the inquisition. How much better would Laura's life be having a parent working for the holy order?”

Apparently the locals followed some kind of theocracy, or some similar superstition based society. They also seemed to believe that he and Lee were their local spooks and were planing on attacking because of it. As he relayed what he knew to Lee, the spear-men took up a fighting stance, one suited for both sprinting or throwing, and the bow user knocked one of the long arrows. What surprised him was that the strange radiation signature appeared again, centred on the old lady. He hadn't seen any trace of technology when they travelled, yet she was apparently concealing something that was giving off at least as much radiation as a military grade energy weapon. What concerned him about that was none of his heat sensors were detecting anything, yet there was clearly something there. He wondered if she was a descendent of the original colonists, and if they hid amongst the local population using the technology to perform miracles, taking important positions like that high magi or whatever she said. Ready to dodge out of the way, but knowing that if it was a laser weapon he could not, he noticed that Lee was doing the same. While her armour had nowhere near as many sensors as his, she at least had the radiation sensors. With both sides having their weapons raised, the still, tense silence continued.

When a strong breeze blew through there, sending a storm a leaves that blocked there sight, they heard a powerful crack as they ducked to the side. It hadn't been the mystery weapon, however, and had only been the loosing of the bow. The arrow had been launched at a high angle and landed nearly vertically in the ground where they had been. In the moment when they looked at the arrow, the radiation moved from the woman's centre and travelled out of the staff in the form of bright violet lightning. They hadn't expected a charged particle weapon at that distance and was even more surprised when the lightning hit the arrow between them and split to arc into both of them. Their suits had good electrical resistance but some of the charge still made it through, not going through their earthing systems at all. While he had no idea how that was possible, in that moment he didn't care. The shock wasn't a lethal charge, but it was very painful. Painful enough that he stopped caring about any kind of peaceful resolution. He braced his rifle in a firing position up against a nearby tree and shot.

Just before he the trigger was pulled he could hear one of them say, “As expected of the 'Storm Sage', even demons are hurt by your power.”

Then, crack. Crack. Crack. Crack. The high speed bullets flew clearly through the four travellers, through them, through the trees behind them and burred themselves in distant soil. In their moment of satisfaction and triumph, their entire party had been killed, without ever realising the danger they were in. Nix went over the bodies, remembering to kick and step on the arrow as he walked, and checked to see if they were dead. His aiming assistance programs seemed to function correctly as all four had been shot in the heart, or near enough to it that the pressure did the rest. As they had predicted, the ship hull armour was nothing like enough to stop the bullets, especially at a thickness that it could still be sown under hide. He could hear Lee talking behind him, not really to him but not really not to him.

“Nix, you're, like, worse than me when hurt, right? Like, Ashie used to say you're the type of dog that looks after those close to it but will still bite if kicked. Don't know if he's, like, talking out his ass, I've, like, never seen a dog.”

His anger started to flair again at that comment, at the mention of Ashton, but he soon calmed down after looking at her. She seemed to have trouble breathing and was sweating. That was when he remembered who she was, what she was. Just because he body produced electricity didn't mean she was better at dealing with it. No, her body was far worse at dealing with electrical shocks, with the extra charge straining pathways that didn't exist in a natural human body. He quickly followed the first aid treatments that he pulled up on his display. First an foremost, move her to some place dark. Grabbing a tent canister from a bob, he twisted the activation and tossed it nearby. Moments latter there was a tent set up with room for three adults to lie down inside. He then rolled in a self inflating bed and told her to lie down. Seeing it was still bright inside, he grabbed a couple more things from the bob then went inside the tent. Zipping the door shut he interfaced with the tent's controls and caused the inside to darken, to let nearly no light inside. Operating with his helmet's night vision he began the next step, removing the excess power. He couldn't deal with the introduced energy, but he could drain her natural energy and let her natural processes slowly treat the excess, just like an infection. He opened one of the things he brought in with him, a type of battery that was developed specifically for that situation. He plugged it directly onto the larges of the back ridges and watched as it clamped itself in place and a coloured bar appeared along its side to indicate how full it was. He the did whatever he could while they waited. He passed her water and some nutrient bars. When the first battery was full, he swapped it for another. By about midday, she seemed to be in much better condition, though she had fallen asleep. Taking the opportunity, he left the tent to go check on the bodies, being careful to close the door behind him.

The movements of the bobs set to patrol, seemed to have kept any wildlife away for the bodies, allowing him to see to them undisturbed. He started with the old lady, the storm sage, and her bag. He had hoped to find the source of the charged particle weapon, but he couldn't find any trace of the power-source on her body, and the staff felt like it was made of ordinary wood, though for all he knew the staff could have been for the benefit of the deception more than for a practical reason. He reasoned that there was two possibilities, either the weapon knew when its user died and self-destructed, or the weapon was something akin to cybernetics or nanotechnology and was hidden within the body. Either way he would gain nothing. If it was something in her body, he doubted it would be so easily used as to be plugged into his own without issue, so there was no reason to go digging through her body blindly. Next was her bag, a simple thing made from coarsely sown together thick hides. Inside he found some loose sticks and bones, as well as a loose flowing robe that seemed to be made from a kind of silk. It looked like it would fit Lee, though expose her legs more than it was made to, but they at least knew it was what the local considered women's clothing. Since there didn't seem to be a difference between men and women's boots, she would be able to wear one of the men's boots over the top of her armour. Of more interest to him was the book within the bag. It seemed to be made from plant fibre paper, with the contents handwritten in some kind of water based ink. The language that was used seemed only vaguely similar to the commonwealth symbols, like someone tried to learn the by having the described to them without ever seeing how they were supposed to look. He thought that if he spent a while at it, and thought about it like he was looking at particularly bad handwriting, he might make some progress at discerning it. For the time being, he set it and the cloak on a bob and looked at the other bodies.

The archer was a large enough person that Nix was able to wear his clothes, a shirt and pants made of some kind of cotton or hemp, over the top of the armour. Since none of the men had robes, it seemed to him that they were either for women to wear, or a symbol of rank. Just judging by the difference in the quality between the silk and the hemp, he was more inclined to believe it was rank. Taking their spare clothes, as well as their knives and spears, he put the spoils onto the bobs before looking at what he took to be currency. The coins were small coloured crystal disks with writing carved around the edges and a runic looking symbol in the centre. He had to admit that he had know idea how much each would be worth, though he believed that the green ones were more valuable than the red ones, simply because the old lady had more of them. Regardless of their actual value, some money was better than no money and he really only felt relieved that they weren't a barter based society. He had been to a planet that tied to go back to that system, in an attempt to foster a kind of inherent socialism, but it was just confusing and frustrating for outsiders. Although he considered breaking both the bow and the staff, he decided to keep them; if they had currency then he could always sell them and the staff could help with Lee's disguise.

While he was at it, he tried some of their food. The taste of the dried meat was bad, just smoke and salt and tough boot meat. The fruit wasn't much better, it seemed like it came from something like an apple, but it was bitter and sour where it ought to have been sweat. While he reasoned that cheaper travelling food was probably not a good judge of their normal diet, he still dreaded the day that their own supplies ran out. Picking up some hard bread, he thought, 'at least they have some kind of wheat'. Aside from the food, he had hoped to see what kinds of medicines they brought with them, but aside from some bandage cloth and a needle and thread which could reasonably stitch together a gash, they didn't seem to bring anything. He did consider that the old lady might have had some more hidden technology to treat wounds, but if that were the case, she would likely be too valuable to risk leaving the village with.

After taking anything he considered useful or valuable, he fetched a laser rifle from a bob. With the number of problems they had as a weapon, it was no wonder that the group of six was only given two of them, but as an emergency tool or a weapon of last resort they worked fine. Considering how weakly armoured the locals were, the weapon might actually be more practical than he was giving it credit for, especially considering Lee was there to charge it. He adjusted the lens till it was configured to be wide and hot, then used it at near point blank to disintegrate the bodies in an instant cremation. The only thing left of them were the pieces of hull metal. Just disposing of those four bodies had already nearly drained the battery. He couldn't imagine relying on it during a drawn out battle. Additionally, the more water in the air, the less energy reached the target so using it at long distances on a planet such as that one would be a wasted effort. He also didn't like how little it weighted; having use the tiger-lilly and the sniper rifle he used before that, the laser rifle was simply too light and made him feel like he would snap its plastic body if he wasn't careful. Still, it was handy to have around, for starting fires if nothing else.

With that taken care of he threw a couple probes into nearby trees and returned to the tent. They wouldn't be going anywhere to she woke up, so he might as well take a nap also. He hadn't realised just how long he had been awake for, the shorter days messing with his rhythm, and the moment he lay down, after dropping a probe in the tent and instructing the probes to wake him up if they saw anything dangerous or if Lee woke up, he fell deeply asleep.

 

Spoiler: Chapter 4

Chapter 4

When Lee started to stir, the probes triggered his alarm and he came awake immediately. That was a habit that the NCCAF drilled into every single person, no matter how deep the sleep when you here an alarm you wake up. The previous jell pack he ate had worn off and he was starting to feel hungry again, so he left the tent to grab a new packet. By that point it was dark out, 1523 hours local time as displayed, and the late spring air was only slightly above zero degrees Celsius. He could only imagine what winters would be like, and hoped that he wouldn't there to find out. After a few minutes admiring the whether, even going so far as removing his helmet to feel it for himself, Lee got up and joined him outside the tent. Just judging by eye, she seemed fully recovered. The air about her that had said she was going to rule over the planet with ease seemed to have faded considerably. If there were still people around with the kind of tech that could harm or kill her, then it was never going to work. That worked out better for him, though, as that implied there was a slightly better chance that there would be someone around with a ship. With Lee able to travel again, he removed everything from the tent and triggered its retraction, closing itself back down into a can.

Showing her the book and clothes he asked her, “We can try to enter the town like normal travellers if you want, get some answers with words before trying a more aggressive approach. What'll we do?”

Without a hint of hesitation she replied, “I'm, like, super pissed at them. Like, say hello before shooting that lightning shit or something.”

Although her tone was as monotonous as ever, he could clearly tell that she was filled with an anger that he hadn't seen in her for a long time. After the quickest flip through the book, she threw it into the bob without any care and filled her hand with an ominously coloured red and green canister. She placed her thumb on the top of the case and it gave a happy beep, somewhat inappropriate for what he knew it could do. She slotted into place on her specialised weapon, which looked like a large tube rectangular tube that sat on one shoulder but wrapped around to rest on the other also. With both hands grabbing the paired grips, it connected itself to her helmet via a cord and sent him a request to transmit his map and sensor data. There was no way he was going to do that, and instead sent a shut down command. Even without his data she still had enough of her own, and her own authority was equal to his and she simply overruled his command. She knelt down on one knee, bracing forward as both she and the weapon made the slightest of adjustments to the various angles, some to fine to see without enhanced vision. Then it started, a heavy bass sound like a drum. One, twice, three times, slowly speeding up like a straining engine or something rolling down a steep hill, four, five, six times, as the beat continued to get faster as an electrical whistling sound started out quiet and was starting to get louder. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen, then nothing. The cacophony of sound died away in an instant, but as quickly as it stopped sound raced back in, hitting against his body like a hammer of wind. He knew that the cylinder, weighing just under a kilogram, had been shot out into the distance and that he had been hit by the resulting shock-wave. The charge carried more force than an antique navel cannon, and the payload was far more deadly.

Above a town seventy six kilometres from where they were, a small object burst open and spread a gas across an elliptical area with a shortest radius of around two hundred metres. As the gas sank in the air it seemed harmless, like water, but as it contacted the ground, buildings, plants or even people, it burst into a fire that burnt at temperatures measured in the thousands of degrees. Buildings melted as the town and its immediate surroundings vanished, leaving only a black liquid behind. Their team had been given those charges as a means of demolishing any military facilities that survived the drone's bombardment, but instead it had been turned on a civilian town. What was worse, if they had made it to the planet on time, as per the mission, she still would have been considered following orders in doing that. The planet was a separatist home-world, the kind of place that built the ships that bombed their stations. The zealous way that Lee was able to follow her orders was something he wished he could replicate.

A few hours of easy travelling later, the ran past the pool of black, barely giving it a glimpse. Instead the moved towards a group of two people who were crying at the edge. The fire had burned itself out so quickly that the nearby forest hadn't had a chance to catch, and the figures, a pair of women who seemed to be mother and child, sat on their knees in utter disrepair when looking at the scene of what had been their whole lives. The woman seemed to have a body age that was old enough to be due for renewal, an age which would be equivalent to a natural body age around thirty Earth years, while the daughter seemed to have an age in the single digits. They each had the same dark brown hear and eyes, with skin that was sun scorched into hard leather but exuded a stange kind of health that seemed defiant to its actual condition. From the way they were dressed it was apparent that the clothes from the earlier woman, that lightning sage, were not the kind of thing that were worn casually, as both the mother and child were dressed in loose fitting shirts and pants that were entirely suited for field work and movements. If anything, the clothes he had taken from the men were more closely related to the clothes that the pair in front of them wore. He wondered what, if any, their connection to the men he had shot was. Without the slightest hint of guilt, hesitation or concern, Lee went up to them and started speaking.

“This noble being is the great Dokkaebi; look upon my works!” She illustrated her words with a flourishing hand gesture that swept across the field. While the shear drama of her words were oppressive, the lack of tone in her voice as she said it gave the performance more of a confused air. That was apparently her attempt at using their superstitions as an interrogation technique, but it somehow fell short. That was bad, as if they didn't tell her what she wanted to know, she would kill them as enemy combatants. She also didn't seem to register that in the dark they were hardly able to see her, as unlike her they didn't have night vision equipped. She drew her pistol before continuing. “Tell me where the nearest city is or your soul will by this noble being's dinner.”

As Lee levelled the gun to the child's head the mother cried out, “The spirit of Ren protect us!” apparently in reference to a religious concept, “The inquisition fort is near demons, you will not escape from them. You will not burn the land again!”

He couldn't understand why she was provoking Lee like that with the gun pointed at her child. Was it some kind of religious courage? Did she not know what a gun is? He pulled a spear from the bob and walked over to her, using a light in the wrist of his armour to shine fire red light on the tip of the spear. With a weapon she understood visible, the woman was clearly more anxious.

“Tell Dokkaebi what she wants to know,” he urged, “tell her so that she lets you and your child live.”

Lee saw that the spear was a better threat, and took the weapon from him, copying the trick with the light as she did. With the gun sheathed and the spear pointed, she repeated her question.

“Tell me how to get to the nearest city and you can keep your worthless lives.”

With reluctance rich on her face, the woman started to speak. “Go east. Go east for six or seven days until you reach the Atwa-Kawa river. From there you can follow it south for eleven or twelve days and you'll reach Atwa-Kawa docks. You can take a boat from there to reach Atwaun on the same day.”

Both he and Lee froze on hearing that. Fifteen to seventeen days to reach the nearest city. They couldn't imagine land travel that was that slow. It would take a terrestrial month just to make a round trip.

Without thinking about it, he asked, “Are there at least towns between here and there?”

To which he received the welcome reply, “of course, there is a village every two days down the river, and if the spirits bless you there is the chance to catch a river boat stopping there for the night.”

With their questions answered, they started to leave. Before they did, however, Nix passed the woman a bag filled with some of the supplies that the four travellers had. With that she might be at least able to make it to another village, or eat for a couple days at least. As they walked away her could hear her pick up the bag and child and start sprinting thought the forest. He was letting Lee walk in front of him with his body between her and the natives on the off chance that she changed her mind and chose not to let them get away. After all, if she saw them as enemy combatants then letting them leave would be against her training.

An hour later they were once again met by natives. Though the natives they met were unaware of them at the time. They hid camouflaged in a tree when they saw a distant group of people approaching, an army of sixty figures approaching with a carriage towed behind them, pulled by a strange animal that he could only assume was a native creature. The large and hulking mass was about four metres tall, and just as wide, and moved like a caterpillar by compressing and stretching its body. The speed it managed in keeping up with the soldiers was a feat granted almost solely by virtue of its size. Its skin looked close to that of a slug or a toad, though at the same time it seemed dry in the humidity. His night vision showed the skin to be a deep plant green, the kind that would be at home on an Earth plant, but stood out in sharp contrast against the native flora. The carriage was a very large thing also, wider than the slug by a metre on each side and taller by three. It seemed to be made of a kind of dark wood and the wheels were wooden spokes clad in steel. There were elaborate carvings all across the surface; images that seemed in his mind to be religious, though not matching any cult he was familiar with. The wheels seemed to be attached to a kind of complicated suspension system, similar to what he had once seen in a museum attached to a car. Those inside would definitely still feel every bump in the road, but he imagined they would at least feel reasonably comfortable, especially if they had some kind of soft surfacing.

He imagined that the soldiers must have seen the flash caused by Lee's attack to be moving so quickly at night. One in every ten soldiers carried a souse of light, either a kind of brightly glowing stone or an oil soaked cloth attached to a stick. That seemed to provide enough light for them to move at a reasonable pace, they would even make it to the village in another three hours. Each man had a chest plate made from either ship-hull or a steel alloy that would provide more than enough protection against arrows and swords. Their uniforms also included kilts without the associated patterns, just a single tone of black with an emblem of some kind over the right leg. There didn't seem to be a standard in regard to head-wear, and some had helmets, others hats and others still wore nothing. Boots were equally disparate, with some being animal hide with rubber soles, others having wooden soles, while the most common seemed to be sandals made from weaving thick but flexible plants. Equipment at least seemed to be divided by rolls, with spear-men leading the way, swordsmen behind them and archers near the carriage. Riding next the carriage driver were two soldiers who had firearms of some kind, a kind of rifle that was out of service even before he was born but was still a favourite amongst colonists. One or two shots from the black coloured weapons wouldn't be enough to get thought their armour, but he had seen what happened when enough shots hit close enough together. He wondered if the bullets they were using were preserved or if they had somewhere to manufacture them; the sealed boxes that the bullets came in would mean that they would still work fine if they were preserved, but they would likely be more liberal in their use if they had a way to replenish their stock. One thing that was clear about the army was that none of their equipment was new. There was scratches along their weapons and armour that showed that it had been handed down generation after generation, possibly since the planet was first hit. Considering ship-hull had to survive centuries in sub-space, time alone was unlikely to degrade it.

When they first noticed the approaching army, Lee seemed to want to destroy them with her cannon but he managed to coax her into letting him gather information first. She was going to ignore him and do as she wanted again, but went along with his plan when he reminded her that the natives seemed to have some kind of energy weapons. As such when the carriage passed by them, he tossed one of the probes onto its roof. That turned out to have been a bad idea, as when he activated its terahertz camera scan of inside the structure, effectively letting it see through the wood, the people inside reacted as if they detected it. That should have been impossible, as terahertz waves were not in a range that a human body could feel and the probe had been designed so that detecting it would be as hard as possible, The four figures within, wearing silk robes of varying colours, left through the doors and started looking about. The anomalous radiation signature sprouted in or around each of their bodies as one of them, wearing a light blue robe that reminded him of the sky on Earth, floated onto the roof, as if gravity wasn't something that bound him.

The previous five centuries had apparently made leaps and bounds from what they knew if anti-gravity tech had become small enough to be implanted into a human body. He had seen the first generation drives being fitted to fleet's carrier class ships once, and even on those monolithic vehicles the drives seemed disproportionate. Yet that same tech had been shrunk to the point that it could be implanted, and was cheap enough that an individual on a backward and broken planet possessed one. He couldn't understand why someone with that tech would be there. He could only wonder if their ship had also crashed there, and they thought along the same lines as Lee.

Specialist Lee was clearly uneasy seeing that display. While it didn't show on her face, her trigger finger shook against the guard and her spikes were indicating an increase in energy production; her body's natural fight or flight reaction was in full swing. He hadn't seen her so uncomfortable even when they were pinned down behind a wall of floating debris under fire from a dozen separatists. Apparently she also understood the difference between their tech and the robe wearing people was as great a gap between themselves and the natives.

“But if that's the case,” he mumbled to himself, “how did I kill that lightning lady?”

Lee's body tensed when she head his words then her shaking hand stilled. Although he hadn't intended it, it seemed that he had given her the confidence she needed; he reminded her that they could die. As the man that had floated to the roof picked up the probe, which should have been invisible, his display showed a processing request from Lee. Sending a confirmation he grabbed a cord and connected his suit to hers, allowing the armours to share energy and data in an equal exchange. With an external power supply, his suit's computer activated to its full potential, not just providing him with the raw data for his and her shots but also approximate flight paths were drawn in his display, showing not only where the bullets would land but how they would get there. As they could each see where the other was aiming, their coordination was perfect. As the probe was broken by invisible blades which cut the metal to pieces, thunderous shots rang out in such perfect harmony they they sounded like a single shot. The one in the light blue's chest burst with a fountain of blood as he shot backwards. One of the ones that remained on the ground, one with a royal purple robe, was pinned against the carriage as a bullet tried to pull him through a hole it made through the thick wood.

The remaining two reacted before the next two shots landed, with their strange radiation forming into a burred wall in front of them that the bullets impacted with. The wall was transparent but blurred, allowing the grassy green and cool dark blue robed figures to be seen through it. Without needed to consult, they contraindicated their fire on a single point in the shield. Six shots a piece later the barrier broke with the sound of breaking glass broken with a megaphone and the blue cloaked person was torn by two bullets entering their body at slightly different angles.

However, the barrier stalled enough time that the blue person's body seemed to overflow with the radiation. They dove from the tree and rolled away, the cord that had connected them coming free and retracting, as a thousand shards of ice, as sharp as any knife, shredded where they had been. The ice moved so quickly that it was very likely that they would be able to cut through their armour. As the radiation started to build for another shot, neither he nor Lee wasted their chance and shot towards the remaining barrier with all they had. Without their co-ordination, the icy barrage came before they could break through. Nix dove towards the soldiers, taking refuge amongst them as their attacks either failed to connect or bounced harmlessly off. Lee on the other hand protected herself by tossing a hot bomb. The soldiers around him were shredded as readily as the tree had been, with the robe wearer showing no regard for their lives. Their unwilling sacrifice was not in vain, however, as their bodies slowed the projectiles enough that his armour could disperse the remaining danger. Lee's strategy also succeeded in saving her life. The hot bomb was a small fusion reaction that happened in an instant and burnt itself out just as fast, giving of a wave of heat. They were mostly used as a means of incapacitating soldiers in armour like theirs by melting some of the fragile systems and causing it to lock up. She timed the activation well, though not perfectly, and melted the projectiles. The resulting steam wave hit her, knocking her back and rolling her. While laying there she once again started shooting, taking her revenge with a bullet to the head after breaking the shield. While she did that Nix finished off any of the soldiers that survived, leaving one left to interrogate.

The one he left alive seemed to be the leader amongst the soldiers, as his amour included a spaulder that was made from the golden metal that was used in the heat resistant sections of ship hull that deployed during reentry. He was an old man with a grey beard and a face with as many scars as wrinkles. His light brown skin and eyes seemed to carry his years, creating an atmosphere that commanded respect. Despite everything around him, the man simply glared, not letting anything show. Nix lead the man into the carriage, finding the inside decorated like a hotel suite with a small bar and comfortable couches, the colours were soft cremes with dark woods. He got the man to sit on a couch, across from him and and Lee, and removed his helmet in the hopes of removing religious fears from preventing answers.

“Well then, I'm rank 6 MC Nix and this is rank 6 specialist Lee,” he started to say, speaking in the calmest and least threatening voice he could muster, though he admitted that doing so probably made him sound blasé about the violence, “could you start by telling us who you are and who we just killed?”

The man seemed surprised, as if he hadn't expected anyone to not know who they were. He gave a hearty and mocking chuckle before responding.

“You may be powerful, but you're clearly idiots. How the skyfire have you never seen an inquisition army before. If I was as superstitious as the idiot farmers we recruit from, I'd say you were demons. You're clearly humans, and sounds like soldiers too, but you don't know shit about the area. Since we're only nine days from the ocean, I'd guess your from some nearby island.” He gave another laugh, though seemingly towards himself before continuing, “You probably saw the skyfire and the burning lance and thought our mages had something worth leaning. Joke's on you; the mages in this caravan were headed there to investigate. We don't know shit, either.”

The soldier seemed to believe that they were local also, and Nix had no reason to correct him. It seemed that even ranking soldiers that didn't consider themselves superstitious believed that the tech the robed people were using was magic. 'Maybe because there was tangible results?' was how Nix justified the two seemingly conflicting beliefs. Deciding to go along with the mistake, he decided to ask some general knowledge.

“I found these on some soldiers earlier,” he said while pulling out the red and blue coins, “what kind of value do they have, what's the exchange rate?”

“Ha! Knew you weren't from the Magbullia continent. If suits and weapons like that were found, the temple of Ren would have burnt them as a tribute to the pillar. Fucking waste that would have been. It's hard enough dealing with bandits, monsters and heretics as is, then the cultists come along and say out bullets are 'impure'. If they were the ones selling them then I bet they would suddenly be a whole lot more pure.” He let the scorn sit on his face for a while longer then spat into a nearby pot, the purpose of which seemed to be collecting spit, then continued. “The reds aren't worth much, you'd get a handful of rice for that and a dozen of them go into one blue. A blue is about what you'd want to spend on a lunch, maybe a bit more than that these days, and two dozen go into one green. One green is an apprentice's weekly wage. All the sizes above that go in groups of sixty, After green there's purple, mixed, silver then gold. Those last two are supposedly made for the real metals, but I've never even seen one so I don't know if that's true.”

He wasn't sure what he had been expecting, but the coins he had taken were worth far less then he had thought but somehow also more than he though. Twenty-two red and five green, it would probably be enough money to live in a reasonable motel for a few weeks. Plus they still had to see what the bodies had.

He then confirmed that the woman had been truthful about how to get to the nearest city, which she had, though she had apparently either left out or forgotten that the inquisition had a fort near that river. When she heard that, Lee had quietly said “I'll kill her next time I see her” to herself. After asking how many soldiers remained at the fort, and finding out that it would be mostly empty, they figured it would be just as easy to avoid it than to head for it. After all, they weren't likely to find anything in it worth taking, especially since the mages that were assigned there were lying dead on the ground. When he asked the man who assigned them there he old soldier replied with a gruff laugh.

“Now that's a question without a simple answer. The short answer would be that as mages they were following the orders of the temple of Ren, but the temple was given those orders by the governance guild in Bisha. Officially, however, the temple cannot be ordered by any guild, so they would say that they reached the judgement independently. Considering that our lot is the group most likely to burn their lot, them coming to help us for no other reason but duty seems a little far fetched.”

After interrogating the man for a while longer, first light started to shine through the carriage window. With their questions answered, they left to see what supplies were worth taking. In the various coin pouches of the dead were a total of one hundred and forty-nine red, thirty-six blue and seventeen green coins. There were plenty of weapons and armours that would probably sell for a lot, but they wouldn't have been able to carry them all without also taking the carriage, and that would have slowed them down considerably. Instead they just took some clothes and gear that fit them well and left the rest to whatever native creatures ate bodies. A couple of the robed figures decorated themselves with jewellery, something they hadn't seen before amongst the bodies they had encountered. When they asked about it, it didn't have any kind of importance aside from flaunting their ridiculous wealth. They were apparently related to some wealthy merchants in the capital and had so little sense that they even showed off to farmers and hunters in the villages they passed through. One thing that they made sure to grab was every gun and any bullets there were to take. Eventually their own would run out and they would have to secure a local supply, so it would be for the best if they used local bullets on any target that didn't actually need the firepower.

By the time they were completely done and had loaded everything into the bobs, it was about six o'clock and the light was starting to break out its full brunt. Despite the chilly night, it was already more that twenty-three degrees, and would break thirty-five by noon. Taking into account the humidity, he couldn't imagine taking off his armour and being steamed to death by the air. They left the captive, who never did give his name, in the carriage and started to continue towards the river. Since they had walked through the night, they made plans to set up camp during the middle of the day.