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02-27-2022, 04:51 AM
Smoke laden with ash filled the air with a weak but sickening odor of burning plastics. Thermocrete walls buckled, still vaporizing silica into the wet and artificial night; this is what they warned would happen if the city didn’t pay.
A warped sense of pride always left bodies when the Terran empire called.
Putting up no fight enraged combat thirsty imperials even more; the scant survivors were lucky to still have an atmosphere to breathe. One by one, the lights of a weak and inadequate defense winked out of the burning amber of the lingering firefight until all that remained was smoke.
Each falling husk of a ship left nothing to build a resistance, nothing to form an underground, the planet was finished, and the people would be enslaved, or worse.
Apart from the fighting was the ruin below; it would take decades for the Terrans to suck the planet dry, even with the collector’s technology. It would take time to decide what to do with the spoils, both organic and not.
Tears wouldn’t provide respite or respect for station, reputation and ego meant nothing… survive, or be chattel, there was no in-between. Terrans were efficient in their cruelty, but there were gaps; there were always holes in their armor; survive… then fight.
Looking up from behind a stage prop that had fallen in the initial assault of a stage meant to entertain a grand event at what was only a few hours ago the ‘Gruimkar’ of ‘House of Gruim.’ In the trading capital of Almiga. D’ena My’ren, a dancing girl, was bathed in the guard's blood who collapsed on top of her. It appeared she was the only one left of her troupe still breathing.
They were there to entertain the Terran delegation, and drinks were being toasted all around. Before the fine singing of Tholian crystal stopped resonating, the Terrans were gone.
The lances of plasma and death began to fall on the home in the last summer rain it would ever witness.
The Orion syndicate had some pull in the regime, but it didn’t come soon enough, and green skin smelled like rotting meat in the collecting rain.
She pushed the body of a guard off her. He had absorbed most of the initial impact absorbing the shards of crystal and silicon glass that had peppered his body and left hers largely unscathed. D’ena’s right arm had been exposed, however. Blue-violet blood collected up and down her once innocent arms, inspired a sense of urgency creeping over her usually calm expression, she had to leave. Ground forces would be coming to finish the job.
The Orion species were much stronger than Terrans could ever hope to be; even young girls could forcibly move Terran contemporaries quickly. Evidence of such strength was intensely private among the Orion people.
Though not a trait held by all Kolari or Orion subspecies, their power was unmatched by the space-faring species of the empire. Even Andorians winced at the unmastered grip of a child. The mystique and control over their emotions made them formidable in more than just words and lingering pheromones. Control was mastered even before speaking; an opportunity to show your true abilities was always a last resort or the last thing a victim saw.
She lifted the broken man and discarded him like another piece of debris. She was pulling his tunic from his body when she noticed Na’ema, her ‘lobdubyal ot’ or executive and head of the troupe. She was a shrewd but fair woman who wore expensive, functional clothing.
She wouldn’t need it anymore as her head was occupying the same space as a fallen column. D’ena stripped the woman who was once her mentor bare and dressed for the potential fight that was coming. She stood affixing executive’s tunic with just enough skin showing to keep her enemies off-center.
The sound of disruptor fire was coming closer; D’ena needed to get to her transport, her tech was her only real shot of surviving the next few hours. She passed the school that gave her special instruction in robotics and holography; it was a burning husk of metal and thermocrete with bodies, resources, and dreams strewn across the campus.
Each city block was a new dimension of the invasion, a largely uncontested one, but cruelty invents reasons for suffering. Firefights broke out within the ruins, students were rebelling as they were so likely to do, but orbital precision strikes quickly convinced even the most dedicated rebel of how pointless resistance was.
She passed her family’s home; she hadn’t spoken to her mother in eleven years, ever since she chose to join the dancer’s guild. They were a house of administrators and trainers.
Performance was for commoners and naïve children, not the nobles of a proud house. It still stood largely intact, but two charred bodies and some burning to the arbor gave D’ena a sense of regret that her mother's disappointment was something that would never be resolved.
The transport was parked outside the central government complex, a sturdy repulsorwave skiff large enough to transport up to 15 comfortably, leaving more than enough room for gear and environmental protection.
The keys were underneath the rubble and probably under boots of Terran foot soldiers, but that wasn’t the last option for a dancer.
Dancers (regionally known as Lodubyaln) were information collectors first. Certain houses concentrated on manipulation, others focused on camouflage, but D’ena had been trained in survival and unconventional warfare. Her talents were a messy combination of the two and mastery of neither, but in that was its unique benefit. Information was worth vastly more than the pleasures of the evening, and the Orion were masters of more than just people.
The skiff was a standard design, used avidly in spaceports and long-haul convoys. They were designed to run in poor conditions, even allowing for short transport through the vacuum of space. D’ena opened the starting computer, a series of micropulse generator arrays that fed the repulsor engine. The sequence was attached to a series of crystalline prisms, called gatewave processing matrix. These kinds of electronics have been around for centuries. They were easy to exploit, but the narrative over these electronics was that they were secure. It couldn’t be tampered with; often, the most effective security is the barriers we think exists, not the obstacles themselves.
Delicate Orion fingers deftly separated the housing on the primary emitter and slid a holograph spanner into the gap. The spanner took a visual rendering of the architecture of a bolt or fastener and articulated its surface to move that type of mechanism. The designers of such a tool did not consider what would happen if it were isolated over the primary emitter outlet, a simple flashlight passing through the articulated lens could mimic the device creating a master key to the entire assembly, and the skiff came to life.
More than a few Terran fighters streaked the skies armed with pulse bombs and kinetic charges during the firefight. They were targeting infrastructure and low flying aircraft, the skiff would have never survived even a temporary assault directly, but D’ena was a student of holography and more than skilled enough to evade blood-thirsty marauders.
The Terran empire may have been the shining jewel in the quadrant, but they were thieves and brigands, exhibiting the same weakness and foibles. She attached a series of holographic emitters to the skin of the skiff as it made passing scans of its surroundings. The skiff itself blended into the background. It would be hard to miss if you were looking for it, but from above or at a distance, it would simply look like a heat mirage or muddied reflection off the water. It couldn’t hold a candle to an actual cloaking device, but its unusual appearance would lend to its success.
D'ena wouldn’t make it far; eventually, her disappearance would be discovered. The only thing she could do was get off-planet, away from the invasion. She made her way into a nearby Fesin. Ignorant Terrans would never assume the hidden jewels right under their noses; it would give her the time to make a plan. She would make her way into the ‘Pounla,’ the now abandoned underground cities for the old mining complexes that made the region prosper before the invention of repulsors and interplanetary travel, ruins wouldn’t be tracked, and sensors from above likely wouldn’t penetrate the crystalline fractures in the rock that made it so valuable once upon a time.
D’ena had experience as a tactical officer for nearly a year in the Orion armada. She almost left the life of the dancers for the appeal of piracy, but even cutthroats and brigands had some allegiances, and Na’ema still held her contract.
With Na’ema no longer able to collect, what would her future be?
***
Maya Deidra was a site team leader a privateer captain in the Terran marine regiment. She oversaw flushing out resistances when the baronies of the sector decided another planet needed to be harvested.
The Terran Empire was bleeding money; baseless claims of ownership and petty wars for control caused loose ownership of everything and anything. The tighter the Terrans tried to hold their shares, the more they lost. It left so much unguarded or overlooked it gave a new boon to space piracy. Strip mining became their answer for the ailing treasury. Raw trade of resources would give them the taxes they needed to satisfy the emperor’s greed, and Maya was in on the scheme. She was a sadist of the first order and a pirate in a uniform. She thought like a rebel, which made her consistently more helpful alive than dead.
Maya was so elusive because of her anonymity among the command crews of most vessels. She was known to her inner circle and two captains in the imperial navy. It gave her the coverage she needed to dig into rebellions and break them apart from the inside. Her name wasn’t the one she was born with either, but it was her identifier in the empire. Her name struck more fear than her face ever did. These jobs gave her the chance to impress the brass, even if they would never see her as an equal. She got paid, and the legend of the name ‘Morakos’: the shadow-killer would grow.
Maya was short and inconspicuous. she was pale with a cream-colored pallor that blended well in the shadows; she had dark green eyes and dark blue and red lips with a broken scar of note from her chin up the left side of her cheek ending just below her temple. Even in an Orion colony, pale skin was not all too uncommon, but attention was close, never more so than today.
“Give me a sitrep on the Almiga resistance!” her voice chirped to life in the science ship ‘Vanguard,’ the command vessel that provided analytical and overwatch support.
Acot’rei was the Officer in Charge (OIC) of the ground deployment communication relay. His office intercepted and relayed communications and logistical information across the planet with its nine linked interceptors patrolling the Low Planetary Orbit (LPO) perimeter.
The holographic image of a tall Amazonian warrior queen appeared on the holographic emitter next to the main Combat Operations Center display. Acot got up from his desk and pinged for a second authentication.
“Call sign and authorization code subject 7741-Beta-3.” He responded professionally, giving no personal acknowledgment of her significance.
“Magren… Shodar, Ganzu-kar of the Korgasanti Vag,” the voice responded in a language the Andorian officer wasn’t familiar with. Small shifts changed in the holograph, altering its physical dimension, indicating a slight disruption in the feed.
The secondary authorization came back: A privateer legion ranking, a mercenary group of ‘Etadubran’ slave hunters, fugitive captors, but this designation had the accent ‘Elt’ added to it, meaning it had been earned in battle and gave them the authority to speak to and for the Terran empire in matters of combat and the right to kill aboard a Terran vessel.
Acot thought there was no reason to be considerate to a mercenary it was safe to have an attitude. “Standard reports are released every six standard hours, meet with the scene commander of your deployment zone, the direct information to those that need it.” He paused. “Stay off this channel! It’s secure and for command use only.” Once those words left his lips, he realized they probably weren't average mercenaries if they could hack his secure channel.
“Acot’rei, an Andorian analyst… I’ll be sure to put those exact words in your mate's forehead as I butcher your two children, Vei and Guani, in front of her.” The voice responded as his mate’s name and current location appeared in the holograph with an overhead scan of his neighborhood.
“Approximately eleven sorties per hour over your current position, tracking twenty-eight targets within fighting age and six with mil-tac (military training). Sending tracking telemetry now….” Acot blurted out and sent the live feed before thinking.
“You’re not actually going to kill them, are you?” he asked pleadingly.
“If there are seven mil-tac, or I find out one of the twenty-two has a club, I’ll transport a box with her head in it to your quarters.” The holograph dematerialized as Acot collapsed into his chair, panic riddling through his conscious mind.
Maya turned off the holo emitter and activated a Heads-Up Display (HUD) to track targets. Her lieutenant was a Gorn named Mekach; he spoke as mouth as they began moving again.
“I’ve seen that happen a hundred times, Mora, but I still don’t have a clue how you do it?” He growled in his rich deep baritone.
Maya smiled without turning to him. “Sometimes a silver tongue gets the information fast, but I find abject terror always gets me there a little bit faster.” A beacon identified one of the mil-tac eighty meters off, trying to ready a shot. She clicked a secondary trigger on her disruptor, and a red tracing beam marked the entire barricade the resistance fighter was hiding behind.
“If you think you’re safe, you tend to play the odds, but when your opponent knows just how vulnerable you really are, then it’s just foreplay, and the fight is over before it began.”
She pressed the trigger again as a glaring ball of light erupted from behind cloud cover as a pulse mortar released a charge six times more than necessary to take down the entire house the fighter was hiding in. A catastrophic ball of heat and pressure turned the structure into an absent cinder; not even enough debris remained to continue smoking.
“And I don’t like waiting….” She smirked as she noticed a shape-changing object at the end of the street; it was a little too out of place to be just debris.
“Hello, I think we found something that makes this planet not entirely boring….” Maya motioned with her as the team of nine took tactical positions, preparing to find an ambush at the end of the street. They closed on the distortion; it appeared as though the environment had been smudged out in just one area of the road. Maya sent out ranging lasers from her HUD and activated infrared sensors from implants next to her eyes. The skiff had no heat signatures, no direct targets, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t rigged; she took a DNA marker from the person who left this gift so she could return the favor.
“Mekach, do we need a skiff?” Her visor switched filters looking for emissions outside of the holography. “With a little work, this could be useful….” She leveled her disruptor at the door and vaporized the hinges so the doors would fall off. Nothing happened… perhaps it may be safe after all.
“I doubt it’s actually in working order; if we’re talking mil-tac, it’s probably trapped or sabotaged, but it’s worth a look.” The Gorn leveled his weapon at the horizon, looking for snipers or opportunists, finding none; he looked back to Maya as she motioned him towards the vehicle.
The Gorn moved closer to the sled and lifted one of the doors to get inside; after a few moments of moving objects around in the vehicle, he looked back at Maya and shrugged. She heard a click, and for the briefest of moments, she looked concerned as the entire vehicle exploded in a blast of red and orange light, silently disintegrating most of the Gorn save a few fingers clinging still to the remains of the door.
“So, this j’hordak has teeth…” she mused with some intrigue in her voice.
Seeing her lieutenant murdered in front of her gave her pause but hardly emotional. He was good at what he did and how he served her cause, but the longer anyone worked with her, the closer they got... This was the Terran empire we were talking about; if someone didn’t make an attempt on your life, you weren’t really respected.
Her visor shifted between x-ray and infrared, looking for pockets in the rock. Even the most advanced civilizations often ignored the benefit of simply paying attention instead of the dogged reliance on the hyper-technical tools available to a space-faring empire; the little things were overlooked, often to their peril.
Fissures in the rockface of the stone outcropping that gave the city its name identified hardly perceptible entrances into something underneath.
She moved to the corpse of her lieutenant and grabbed the blast shielded equipment that survived the explosion. A pulse bomb designed to destabilize the organic compounds in a target, one of the reasons the Terrans used them.
The surviving scanning equipment indicated several holographic emitters were active before the blast. So it was clear they were dealing with someone trained in unconventional warfare, a saboteur, and spy for the ‘Heloskar Fesin’ dancers taught to do far more than entertain.
“Acot, come in,” Maya chirped to the orbiting COC.
“Vanguard reading, chief,” Acot responded moments later.
“Target all known Fesin and fire a mark five ionizing particle lance set to 30 meters below the surface.” She gave orders as though she were his direct superior, and she might as well have been.
“What is a Fesin? Chief.” He responded curiously
“I don’t know what I was thinking, korgasanti; you guys are fine. You don’t need me; it’s not like they might actually know something about spycraft Acot’” she sighed disappointedly.
“Open your trading manifest and identify all known Fesin or dancers’ halls, overlay that on your tactical COC, and fire on those locations.” She rolled her eyes as she gave digital commands for her remaining team to stay clear of any walls that might collapse.
“Thirty-three targets identified chief, commencing an orbital strike.” Acot returned
The deflector dish concentrated a Mark Five particle lance and fired targeting six locations with each charge.
Maya watched as six heavy lightning bolts leveled buildings around the city.
After a few moments, another volley ripped through the clouds decimating beautiful evening houses appropriate for even the most discerning palettes into 30-meter holes, revealing openings to the alcoves typical under most Orion colonies.
Maya rallied her team and found the closest Fesin, and walked casually past hundreds of bodies of slaves and masters strewn like so much chaff before the fire. Her team worked their way through a series of basements and into the expanses of the underground; the real hunt had begun.
***
D’ena finished the barricade in what used to be city hall. It resembled an office of the early 21st century on Terra; their people were not so different once upon a time.
She was treating the silica particulates in her arm and stopping the bleeding. The sensors on her instruments weren’t penetrating the world on the surface, so it was likely they wouldn’t be able to detect her either, or so she hoped.
Several proximity sensors and traps littered the limited access to where she was hiding. She was safe, or at least as safe as she could realistically expect.
It would be ignorant to believe that her identity was still anonymous. The only advantage she had was they had no idea what data they needed to look at to discover her identity. Every inch of the exterior surface of the planet had been mapped. Too much information, however, can be more problematic than too little.
An unearthly roar and shudder of the earth being drilled into from multiple locations simultaneously took D’ena off her feet. The walls struggled to hold as the cave violently resisted the impact of some supernatural force.
Her sisters, just meters above, would slow any advance down to the lower levels. D’ena just had to wait for the Terrans to think they had won.
Hours passed, the sensors she had placed indicated movement and conversation, but no sign where she was hiding. She could tell almost immediately they weren't Terran officers. Her experience on a ship taught D'ena that Terran marines moved as a unit, and they scarcely communicated until the enemy was confirmed dead.
Fear and indoctrination gave an almost instinctive adoption of protocol and apathy to the opponent they were after. Death was often the consequence of failure, and promotions came at the death of a superior, like most "honor" based cultures.
D’ena accessed one of the industrial replicators that had been installed in time past to fabricate a headset granting her a HUD and linking tech to monitor her sensors. She also created a plasma repeater to respond when the unavoidable happened. D’ena was ready, at least in theory; she could now move and prepare in real-time and watch her pursuers simultaneously.
Maya moved through the narrow halls of the caverns, aware she was being watched; her experience with alien tech was limited and often not an issue with overwhelming firepower at her beck and call. So, she moved from room to room under the impression she was fighting an idealist student or a revolutionary who was unaware there was no one to join them in their war.
The remainder of Maya’s tactical team were pirates, without any true allegiance to each other or anything other than money; it made them easy to replace and simple to predict. She directed them to watch the halls to prevent anyone from getting behind them. She, on the other hand, would be hunting.
D’ena was not a leader, but others were hiding in the Pounla, panicking sisters and students, civilians and merchants used the region as cheap housing and optimal storage space, but none of them were combat-ready, and her pursuers wouldn’t know the difference of an organized rebellion or a collection of innocents.
She did the best she could to keep everyone quiet and away from the main thoroughfares, but at some point, they would have to face a well-trained opposition. Her gut told her there would be more coming, and there was no way to save these people, but there was no sense in making their ends any less comfortable.
Night had fallen on the city, and nearly all the combat above the ground was over. Maya was beginning to see gaps in communication with the COC, and her piece in this occupation would soon be over. She lost her lieutenant over this; she wasn’t going to let the person who killed him walk away without a scratch.
Maya left ranging markers in the rooms she passed through and created a map to move from room to room. The map kept her from doubling back, and more importantly, it kept her from getting ambushed by whoever might stupidly be looking for a fight. Her infrared and x-ray visor identified targets through their footprints and stone walls. The few times she detected opponents, her shots rang out before they were even aware of her.
The DNA marker she took earlier was pinging, telling her the owner of the skiff was nearby. Orion had a very telling signature to the pheromones they gave off. It would nearly be impossible for a prepared force to be surprised if they knew who their opponent was and had the insight to prepare.
45m…
20m…
10…
Shots rang out long before Maya expected this time; she took a plasma bolt to the shoulder as her tracker highlighted a target behind cover.
She ducked behind a wall and dodged the rest of the volley.
“You’re not what I was expecting… I’ll give you that princess, but you’re still gonna die like everyone else on this backwater!” Maya responded as she applied a burn salve to the shot.
“We’re all gonna die sometime, pirate. That doesn’t mean I have to leave myself open for an invitation, bright eyes.” D’ena quipped as she moved to more stable cover.
Maya peaked her head around the corner to see who she was aiming at, ducking back just as quickly to avoid a volley of four bolts impacting the wall adjacent to her.
“I’ll admit, you’re pretty good in a fight for a non-com (non-combatant) good thing too. I was afraid this trip was going to be tedious.” Maya smiled as she tapped a comm unit on her wrist, calling her team to her location.
D’ena couldn’t see a simple exit from the room, and Maya would be calling reinforcements any moment; she had to do something to get out of this situation.
“Gunner’s Mate First Kar and Forward Marine Breaching mull. Orion Third Navy, and I will drop any head I see!” she warned.
Maya’s smile grew as she pulled two pulse grenades from a pouch setting them to proximity detonation. D’ena set a holograph trap in the breach and moved to a more direct shot occluded by the same emitters she used on the skiff. While they were talking, she readied two grenades and heard footsteps quickly moving down the hall in her general direction.
“Even better…” she cleared her throat. “Listen, princess, there is no way you’re walking out of here as my enemy, but your sabotage on the surface left a spot open as my lieutenant.” She was pretty serious, composure under pressure, a significant threat even against unassailable odds… these weren’t courses taught in any academy. “I’m putting my gun away and telling my men to stand down. Even if you kill me, there are about six thousand marines on the surface there and no way off the planet.” She nodded to her men as they put their weapons away. “I’m coming out; if you’re open to the idea, don’t shoot me….”
Maya looked around the corner quickly and wasn’t answering a bolt to the head. As soon as she entered the room entirely, D’ena pressed the muzzle of her repeater into the side of Maya’s head. “I didn’t see you, princess… Ingenuity beats tech every time I say…” she put her hands up as D’ena disarmed her.
“How does this work then?” D’ena asked defensively. “What’s the keep you from aerating my skull the first chance you get?” she seemed desperate.
“First we start with names… then we work together….” Maya still had her hands up, shaking her head as her team moved for their weapons. “I know we got off on the wrong foot but doesn’t matter if it’s now, or ten years down the road, we’re gonna wanna kill each other, but we’ll have a good reason at that point, right?” she laughed as she turned to face D’ena. “This is just a job, Princess, I get paid whether you’re part of the pile or not, might as well take competent spoils where I can, right?” Maya put her hands down but left her demeanor open.
“D’ena,” she replied.
“Maya…” she nodded. “Wish it were under better circumstances, but they’re leveling the city in about two standard hours; we don’t wanna be here when that happens.” Maya smiled and offered her a communicator. “My first thought, truth be told, was to kill you the second you board the ship, but something tells me you’re worth more alive than dead, and I’m usually right,” she bragged. “That’s all any of us have going for us, right?” Maya mused as she reached out to her communicator.
“Let’s have some fun, yeah?” she tapped her comm. “Nine to come aboard Kent, open line for one more, no restrictions….” D’ena nodded her head. “okay… ten to board… and make sure Mekach’s stuff is tossed into the hall, he has a replacement.”
A warped sense of pride always left bodies when the Terran empire called.
Putting up no fight enraged combat thirsty imperials even more; the scant survivors were lucky to still have an atmosphere to breathe. One by one, the lights of a weak and inadequate defense winked out of the burning amber of the lingering firefight until all that remained was smoke.
Each falling husk of a ship left nothing to build a resistance, nothing to form an underground, the planet was finished, and the people would be enslaved, or worse.
Apart from the fighting was the ruin below; it would take decades for the Terrans to suck the planet dry, even with the collector’s technology. It would take time to decide what to do with the spoils, both organic and not.
Tears wouldn’t provide respite or respect for station, reputation and ego meant nothing… survive, or be chattel, there was no in-between. Terrans were efficient in their cruelty, but there were gaps; there were always holes in their armor; survive… then fight.
Looking up from behind a stage prop that had fallen in the initial assault of a stage meant to entertain a grand event at what was only a few hours ago the ‘Gruimkar’ of ‘House of Gruim.’ In the trading capital of Almiga. D’ena My’ren, a dancing girl, was bathed in the guard's blood who collapsed on top of her. It appeared she was the only one left of her troupe still breathing.
They were there to entertain the Terran delegation, and drinks were being toasted all around. Before the fine singing of Tholian crystal stopped resonating, the Terrans were gone.
The lances of plasma and death began to fall on the home in the last summer rain it would ever witness.
The Orion syndicate had some pull in the regime, but it didn’t come soon enough, and green skin smelled like rotting meat in the collecting rain.
She pushed the body of a guard off her. He had absorbed most of the initial impact absorbing the shards of crystal and silicon glass that had peppered his body and left hers largely unscathed. D’ena’s right arm had been exposed, however. Blue-violet blood collected up and down her once innocent arms, inspired a sense of urgency creeping over her usually calm expression, she had to leave. Ground forces would be coming to finish the job.
The Orion species were much stronger than Terrans could ever hope to be; even young girls could forcibly move Terran contemporaries quickly. Evidence of such strength was intensely private among the Orion people.
Though not a trait held by all Kolari or Orion subspecies, their power was unmatched by the space-faring species of the empire. Even Andorians winced at the unmastered grip of a child. The mystique and control over their emotions made them formidable in more than just words and lingering pheromones. Control was mastered even before speaking; an opportunity to show your true abilities was always a last resort or the last thing a victim saw.
She lifted the broken man and discarded him like another piece of debris. She was pulling his tunic from his body when she noticed Na’ema, her ‘lobdubyal ot’ or executive and head of the troupe. She was a shrewd but fair woman who wore expensive, functional clothing.
She wouldn’t need it anymore as her head was occupying the same space as a fallen column. D’ena stripped the woman who was once her mentor bare and dressed for the potential fight that was coming. She stood affixing executive’s tunic with just enough skin showing to keep her enemies off-center.
The sound of disruptor fire was coming closer; D’ena needed to get to her transport, her tech was her only real shot of surviving the next few hours. She passed the school that gave her special instruction in robotics and holography; it was a burning husk of metal and thermocrete with bodies, resources, and dreams strewn across the campus.
Each city block was a new dimension of the invasion, a largely uncontested one, but cruelty invents reasons for suffering. Firefights broke out within the ruins, students were rebelling as they were so likely to do, but orbital precision strikes quickly convinced even the most dedicated rebel of how pointless resistance was.
She passed her family’s home; she hadn’t spoken to her mother in eleven years, ever since she chose to join the dancer’s guild. They were a house of administrators and trainers.
Performance was for commoners and naïve children, not the nobles of a proud house. It still stood largely intact, but two charred bodies and some burning to the arbor gave D’ena a sense of regret that her mother's disappointment was something that would never be resolved.
The transport was parked outside the central government complex, a sturdy repulsorwave skiff large enough to transport up to 15 comfortably, leaving more than enough room for gear and environmental protection.
The keys were underneath the rubble and probably under boots of Terran foot soldiers, but that wasn’t the last option for a dancer.
Dancers (regionally known as Lodubyaln) were information collectors first. Certain houses concentrated on manipulation, others focused on camouflage, but D’ena had been trained in survival and unconventional warfare. Her talents were a messy combination of the two and mastery of neither, but in that was its unique benefit. Information was worth vastly more than the pleasures of the evening, and the Orion were masters of more than just people.
The skiff was a standard design, used avidly in spaceports and long-haul convoys. They were designed to run in poor conditions, even allowing for short transport through the vacuum of space. D’ena opened the starting computer, a series of micropulse generator arrays that fed the repulsor engine. The sequence was attached to a series of crystalline prisms, called gatewave processing matrix. These kinds of electronics have been around for centuries. They were easy to exploit, but the narrative over these electronics was that they were secure. It couldn’t be tampered with; often, the most effective security is the barriers we think exists, not the obstacles themselves.
Delicate Orion fingers deftly separated the housing on the primary emitter and slid a holograph spanner into the gap. The spanner took a visual rendering of the architecture of a bolt or fastener and articulated its surface to move that type of mechanism. The designers of such a tool did not consider what would happen if it were isolated over the primary emitter outlet, a simple flashlight passing through the articulated lens could mimic the device creating a master key to the entire assembly, and the skiff came to life.
More than a few Terran fighters streaked the skies armed with pulse bombs and kinetic charges during the firefight. They were targeting infrastructure and low flying aircraft, the skiff would have never survived even a temporary assault directly, but D’ena was a student of holography and more than skilled enough to evade blood-thirsty marauders.
The Terran empire may have been the shining jewel in the quadrant, but they were thieves and brigands, exhibiting the same weakness and foibles. She attached a series of holographic emitters to the skin of the skiff as it made passing scans of its surroundings. The skiff itself blended into the background. It would be hard to miss if you were looking for it, but from above or at a distance, it would simply look like a heat mirage or muddied reflection off the water. It couldn’t hold a candle to an actual cloaking device, but its unusual appearance would lend to its success.
D'ena wouldn’t make it far; eventually, her disappearance would be discovered. The only thing she could do was get off-planet, away from the invasion. She made her way into a nearby Fesin. Ignorant Terrans would never assume the hidden jewels right under their noses; it would give her the time to make a plan. She would make her way into the ‘Pounla,’ the now abandoned underground cities for the old mining complexes that made the region prosper before the invention of repulsors and interplanetary travel, ruins wouldn’t be tracked, and sensors from above likely wouldn’t penetrate the crystalline fractures in the rock that made it so valuable once upon a time.
D’ena had experience as a tactical officer for nearly a year in the Orion armada. She almost left the life of the dancers for the appeal of piracy, but even cutthroats and brigands had some allegiances, and Na’ema still held her contract.
With Na’ema no longer able to collect, what would her future be?
***
Maya Deidra was a site team leader a privateer captain in the Terran marine regiment. She oversaw flushing out resistances when the baronies of the sector decided another planet needed to be harvested.
The Terran Empire was bleeding money; baseless claims of ownership and petty wars for control caused loose ownership of everything and anything. The tighter the Terrans tried to hold their shares, the more they lost. It left so much unguarded or overlooked it gave a new boon to space piracy. Strip mining became their answer for the ailing treasury. Raw trade of resources would give them the taxes they needed to satisfy the emperor’s greed, and Maya was in on the scheme. She was a sadist of the first order and a pirate in a uniform. She thought like a rebel, which made her consistently more helpful alive than dead.
Maya was so elusive because of her anonymity among the command crews of most vessels. She was known to her inner circle and two captains in the imperial navy. It gave her the coverage she needed to dig into rebellions and break them apart from the inside. Her name wasn’t the one she was born with either, but it was her identifier in the empire. Her name struck more fear than her face ever did. These jobs gave her the chance to impress the brass, even if they would never see her as an equal. She got paid, and the legend of the name ‘Morakos’: the shadow-killer would grow.
Maya was short and inconspicuous. she was pale with a cream-colored pallor that blended well in the shadows; she had dark green eyes and dark blue and red lips with a broken scar of note from her chin up the left side of her cheek ending just below her temple. Even in an Orion colony, pale skin was not all too uncommon, but attention was close, never more so than today.
“Give me a sitrep on the Almiga resistance!” her voice chirped to life in the science ship ‘Vanguard,’ the command vessel that provided analytical and overwatch support.
Acot’rei was the Officer in Charge (OIC) of the ground deployment communication relay. His office intercepted and relayed communications and logistical information across the planet with its nine linked interceptors patrolling the Low Planetary Orbit (LPO) perimeter.
The holographic image of a tall Amazonian warrior queen appeared on the holographic emitter next to the main Combat Operations Center display. Acot got up from his desk and pinged for a second authentication.
“Call sign and authorization code subject 7741-Beta-3.” He responded professionally, giving no personal acknowledgment of her significance.
“Magren… Shodar, Ganzu-kar of the Korgasanti Vag,” the voice responded in a language the Andorian officer wasn’t familiar with. Small shifts changed in the holograph, altering its physical dimension, indicating a slight disruption in the feed.
The secondary authorization came back: A privateer legion ranking, a mercenary group of ‘Etadubran’ slave hunters, fugitive captors, but this designation had the accent ‘Elt’ added to it, meaning it had been earned in battle and gave them the authority to speak to and for the Terran empire in matters of combat and the right to kill aboard a Terran vessel.
Acot thought there was no reason to be considerate to a mercenary it was safe to have an attitude. “Standard reports are released every six standard hours, meet with the scene commander of your deployment zone, the direct information to those that need it.” He paused. “Stay off this channel! It’s secure and for command use only.” Once those words left his lips, he realized they probably weren't average mercenaries if they could hack his secure channel.
“Acot’rei, an Andorian analyst… I’ll be sure to put those exact words in your mate's forehead as I butcher your two children, Vei and Guani, in front of her.” The voice responded as his mate’s name and current location appeared in the holograph with an overhead scan of his neighborhood.
“Approximately eleven sorties per hour over your current position, tracking twenty-eight targets within fighting age and six with mil-tac (military training). Sending tracking telemetry now….” Acot blurted out and sent the live feed before thinking.
“You’re not actually going to kill them, are you?” he asked pleadingly.
“If there are seven mil-tac, or I find out one of the twenty-two has a club, I’ll transport a box with her head in it to your quarters.” The holograph dematerialized as Acot collapsed into his chair, panic riddling through his conscious mind.
Maya turned off the holo emitter and activated a Heads-Up Display (HUD) to track targets. Her lieutenant was a Gorn named Mekach; he spoke as mouth as they began moving again.
“I’ve seen that happen a hundred times, Mora, but I still don’t have a clue how you do it?” He growled in his rich deep baritone.
Maya smiled without turning to him. “Sometimes a silver tongue gets the information fast, but I find abject terror always gets me there a little bit faster.” A beacon identified one of the mil-tac eighty meters off, trying to ready a shot. She clicked a secondary trigger on her disruptor, and a red tracing beam marked the entire barricade the resistance fighter was hiding behind.
“If you think you’re safe, you tend to play the odds, but when your opponent knows just how vulnerable you really are, then it’s just foreplay, and the fight is over before it began.”
She pressed the trigger again as a glaring ball of light erupted from behind cloud cover as a pulse mortar released a charge six times more than necessary to take down the entire house the fighter was hiding in. A catastrophic ball of heat and pressure turned the structure into an absent cinder; not even enough debris remained to continue smoking.
“And I don’t like waiting….” She smirked as she noticed a shape-changing object at the end of the street; it was a little too out of place to be just debris.
“Hello, I think we found something that makes this planet not entirely boring….” Maya motioned with her as the team of nine took tactical positions, preparing to find an ambush at the end of the street. They closed on the distortion; it appeared as though the environment had been smudged out in just one area of the road. Maya sent out ranging lasers from her HUD and activated infrared sensors from implants next to her eyes. The skiff had no heat signatures, no direct targets, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t rigged; she took a DNA marker from the person who left this gift so she could return the favor.
“Mekach, do we need a skiff?” Her visor switched filters looking for emissions outside of the holography. “With a little work, this could be useful….” She leveled her disruptor at the door and vaporized the hinges so the doors would fall off. Nothing happened… perhaps it may be safe after all.
“I doubt it’s actually in working order; if we’re talking mil-tac, it’s probably trapped or sabotaged, but it’s worth a look.” The Gorn leveled his weapon at the horizon, looking for snipers or opportunists, finding none; he looked back to Maya as she motioned him towards the vehicle.
The Gorn moved closer to the sled and lifted one of the doors to get inside; after a few moments of moving objects around in the vehicle, he looked back at Maya and shrugged. She heard a click, and for the briefest of moments, she looked concerned as the entire vehicle exploded in a blast of red and orange light, silently disintegrating most of the Gorn save a few fingers clinging still to the remains of the door.
“So, this j’hordak has teeth…” she mused with some intrigue in her voice.
Seeing her lieutenant murdered in front of her gave her pause but hardly emotional. He was good at what he did and how he served her cause, but the longer anyone worked with her, the closer they got... This was the Terran empire we were talking about; if someone didn’t make an attempt on your life, you weren’t really respected.
Her visor shifted between x-ray and infrared, looking for pockets in the rock. Even the most advanced civilizations often ignored the benefit of simply paying attention instead of the dogged reliance on the hyper-technical tools available to a space-faring empire; the little things were overlooked, often to their peril.
Fissures in the rockface of the stone outcropping that gave the city its name identified hardly perceptible entrances into something underneath.
She moved to the corpse of her lieutenant and grabbed the blast shielded equipment that survived the explosion. A pulse bomb designed to destabilize the organic compounds in a target, one of the reasons the Terrans used them.
The surviving scanning equipment indicated several holographic emitters were active before the blast. So it was clear they were dealing with someone trained in unconventional warfare, a saboteur, and spy for the ‘Heloskar Fesin’ dancers taught to do far more than entertain.
“Acot, come in,” Maya chirped to the orbiting COC.
“Vanguard reading, chief,” Acot responded moments later.
“Target all known Fesin and fire a mark five ionizing particle lance set to 30 meters below the surface.” She gave orders as though she were his direct superior, and she might as well have been.
“What is a Fesin? Chief.” He responded curiously
“I don’t know what I was thinking, korgasanti; you guys are fine. You don’t need me; it’s not like they might actually know something about spycraft Acot’” she sighed disappointedly.
“Open your trading manifest and identify all known Fesin or dancers’ halls, overlay that on your tactical COC, and fire on those locations.” She rolled her eyes as she gave digital commands for her remaining team to stay clear of any walls that might collapse.
“Thirty-three targets identified chief, commencing an orbital strike.” Acot returned
The deflector dish concentrated a Mark Five particle lance and fired targeting six locations with each charge.
Maya watched as six heavy lightning bolts leveled buildings around the city.
After a few moments, another volley ripped through the clouds decimating beautiful evening houses appropriate for even the most discerning palettes into 30-meter holes, revealing openings to the alcoves typical under most Orion colonies.
Maya rallied her team and found the closest Fesin, and walked casually past hundreds of bodies of slaves and masters strewn like so much chaff before the fire. Her team worked their way through a series of basements and into the expanses of the underground; the real hunt had begun.
***
D’ena finished the barricade in what used to be city hall. It resembled an office of the early 21st century on Terra; their people were not so different once upon a time.
She was treating the silica particulates in her arm and stopping the bleeding. The sensors on her instruments weren’t penetrating the world on the surface, so it was likely they wouldn’t be able to detect her either, or so she hoped.
Several proximity sensors and traps littered the limited access to where she was hiding. She was safe, or at least as safe as she could realistically expect.
It would be ignorant to believe that her identity was still anonymous. The only advantage she had was they had no idea what data they needed to look at to discover her identity. Every inch of the exterior surface of the planet had been mapped. Too much information, however, can be more problematic than too little.
An unearthly roar and shudder of the earth being drilled into from multiple locations simultaneously took D’ena off her feet. The walls struggled to hold as the cave violently resisted the impact of some supernatural force.
Her sisters, just meters above, would slow any advance down to the lower levels. D’ena just had to wait for the Terrans to think they had won.
Hours passed, the sensors she had placed indicated movement and conversation, but no sign where she was hiding. She could tell almost immediately they weren't Terran officers. Her experience on a ship taught D'ena that Terran marines moved as a unit, and they scarcely communicated until the enemy was confirmed dead.
Fear and indoctrination gave an almost instinctive adoption of protocol and apathy to the opponent they were after. Death was often the consequence of failure, and promotions came at the death of a superior, like most "honor" based cultures.
D’ena accessed one of the industrial replicators that had been installed in time past to fabricate a headset granting her a HUD and linking tech to monitor her sensors. She also created a plasma repeater to respond when the unavoidable happened. D’ena was ready, at least in theory; she could now move and prepare in real-time and watch her pursuers simultaneously.
Maya moved through the narrow halls of the caverns, aware she was being watched; her experience with alien tech was limited and often not an issue with overwhelming firepower at her beck and call. So, she moved from room to room under the impression she was fighting an idealist student or a revolutionary who was unaware there was no one to join them in their war.
The remainder of Maya’s tactical team were pirates, without any true allegiance to each other or anything other than money; it made them easy to replace and simple to predict. She directed them to watch the halls to prevent anyone from getting behind them. She, on the other hand, would be hunting.
D’ena was not a leader, but others were hiding in the Pounla, panicking sisters and students, civilians and merchants used the region as cheap housing and optimal storage space, but none of them were combat-ready, and her pursuers wouldn’t know the difference of an organized rebellion or a collection of innocents.
She did the best she could to keep everyone quiet and away from the main thoroughfares, but at some point, they would have to face a well-trained opposition. Her gut told her there would be more coming, and there was no way to save these people, but there was no sense in making their ends any less comfortable.
Night had fallen on the city, and nearly all the combat above the ground was over. Maya was beginning to see gaps in communication with the COC, and her piece in this occupation would soon be over. She lost her lieutenant over this; she wasn’t going to let the person who killed him walk away without a scratch.
Maya left ranging markers in the rooms she passed through and created a map to move from room to room. The map kept her from doubling back, and more importantly, it kept her from getting ambushed by whoever might stupidly be looking for a fight. Her infrared and x-ray visor identified targets through their footprints and stone walls. The few times she detected opponents, her shots rang out before they were even aware of her.
The DNA marker she took earlier was pinging, telling her the owner of the skiff was nearby. Orion had a very telling signature to the pheromones they gave off. It would nearly be impossible for a prepared force to be surprised if they knew who their opponent was and had the insight to prepare.
45m…
20m…
10…
Shots rang out long before Maya expected this time; she took a plasma bolt to the shoulder as her tracker highlighted a target behind cover.
She ducked behind a wall and dodged the rest of the volley.
“You’re not what I was expecting… I’ll give you that princess, but you’re still gonna die like everyone else on this backwater!” Maya responded as she applied a burn salve to the shot.
“We’re all gonna die sometime, pirate. That doesn’t mean I have to leave myself open for an invitation, bright eyes.” D’ena quipped as she moved to more stable cover.
Maya peaked her head around the corner to see who she was aiming at, ducking back just as quickly to avoid a volley of four bolts impacting the wall adjacent to her.
“I’ll admit, you’re pretty good in a fight for a non-com (non-combatant) good thing too. I was afraid this trip was going to be tedious.” Maya smiled as she tapped a comm unit on her wrist, calling her team to her location.
D’ena couldn’t see a simple exit from the room, and Maya would be calling reinforcements any moment; she had to do something to get out of this situation.
“Gunner’s Mate First Kar and Forward Marine Breaching mull. Orion Third Navy, and I will drop any head I see!” she warned.
Maya’s smile grew as she pulled two pulse grenades from a pouch setting them to proximity detonation. D’ena set a holograph trap in the breach and moved to a more direct shot occluded by the same emitters she used on the skiff. While they were talking, she readied two grenades and heard footsteps quickly moving down the hall in her general direction.
“Even better…” she cleared her throat. “Listen, princess, there is no way you’re walking out of here as my enemy, but your sabotage on the surface left a spot open as my lieutenant.” She was pretty serious, composure under pressure, a significant threat even against unassailable odds… these weren’t courses taught in any academy. “I’m putting my gun away and telling my men to stand down. Even if you kill me, there are about six thousand marines on the surface there and no way off the planet.” She nodded to her men as they put their weapons away. “I’m coming out; if you’re open to the idea, don’t shoot me….”
Maya looked around the corner quickly and wasn’t answering a bolt to the head. As soon as she entered the room entirely, D’ena pressed the muzzle of her repeater into the side of Maya’s head. “I didn’t see you, princess… Ingenuity beats tech every time I say…” she put her hands up as D’ena disarmed her.
“How does this work then?” D’ena asked defensively. “What’s the keep you from aerating my skull the first chance you get?” she seemed desperate.
“First we start with names… then we work together….” Maya still had her hands up, shaking her head as her team moved for their weapons. “I know we got off on the wrong foot but doesn’t matter if it’s now, or ten years down the road, we’re gonna wanna kill each other, but we’ll have a good reason at that point, right?” she laughed as she turned to face D’ena. “This is just a job, Princess, I get paid whether you’re part of the pile or not, might as well take competent spoils where I can, right?” Maya put her hands down but left her demeanor open.
“D’ena,” she replied.
“Maya…” she nodded. “Wish it were under better circumstances, but they’re leveling the city in about two standard hours; we don’t wanna be here when that happens.” Maya smiled and offered her a communicator. “My first thought, truth be told, was to kill you the second you board the ship, but something tells me you’re worth more alive than dead, and I’m usually right,” she bragged. “That’s all any of us have going for us, right?” Maya mused as she reached out to her communicator.
“Let’s have some fun, yeah?” she tapped her comm. “Nine to come aboard Kent, open line for one more, no restrictions….” D’ena nodded her head. “okay… ten to board… and make sure Mekach’s stuff is tossed into the hall, he has a replacement.”
