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Ahmya and Apollo, the best starfighter duo in Fleet.
They've flown together for so long now that they no longer need to think about what their partner requires. It just happens. An automated process controlled by an organic machine spawned within the blood-shine darkness of their subconscious mind.
A creature forged in the fires of war, desperation, and rage fused into a remorseless entity of singular purpose. One whose only concern was their survival.
Whether discussing the latest drive-glow mods or brooding within their own bitter-black thoughts, the dark guardian was there, waiting in the shadows, poised to surge from the smoky darkness.
Its spectral hands gently nudged control sticks while their minds were preoccupied with the mundane, and their ships spiraled and twisted past debris, or slipped strafing disruptor blasts, without ever needing to process what just happened.
Flying and killing and surviving is what it does.
The machine smiles and breathes it all in and spits it back out in dark bolts of death that consume those who would do them harm. An unearthly amalgamation of talent, anger, and will - the will to live. To never give up. To fight to the last man, fight until the last bitter breath wheezes from your dying lungs. To make the costs of triumph so brutally enormous your enemy withers and weeps within the ashes of their own victory.
A guardian machine that will never betray them, will never surrender. It burns through their veins like scarlet forks of lightning coiling down from their spines into wrists that work the controls of a starfighter.
They are the best in Fleet.
"I'm going for it!"
Apollo worked his control stick madly, snapping his ship into a rolling dive that scraped up through a jagged, starfighter-sized hole torn parallel along the tumbling cruisers' hull. Disrupter blasts shattered into nimbus bursts of green all around its edge as he pushed through into the inky blackness beyond.
"Holy shit, that was close!" Apollo blew the air out of his lungs in a loud blast of white noise that contrasted sharply with the darkness pressing in around them from all sides. "It's moments like this that make you question the wisdom of becoming a star pilot instead of something less lethal, like I dunno, maybe a writer or something."
Ahmya shook her head in bemusement at his rambling, yet her eyes gazed at something only she could see.
His remark had jarred a misty memory from the twilight crevasses of Ahmya's subconscious mind. She wove behind him, side to side, her cannons ripping the darkness with crimson blasts of energy that pressured the raptors dogging his heels, but her mind was elsewhere.
She flashed back across the years to a ten-year-old girl who huddled in fear of the dark and what awful creatures might lurk within. A brand of terror she hadn't known in quite some time. One that she vehemently denied now. There was no place for it in Ahmya's heart, so she snarled savagely and drove the memory back into the shadows from whence it came.
"How philosophical of you," Ahmya's words to Apollo were distant, troubled. The long-forgotten memory of a frightened little girl still simmering near the surface, whispering in the ears of her mind. "And this whole time, I was under the impression you did this for all of your adoring fems."
Her holographic display transitioned smoothly into blackout-mode inside the lightless bowels of the drifting hulk, and the various lights and switches on her instrument panels dimmed to a faint glow as all color was struck from the world, leaving a grainy black and white picture in its place.
"Hah!" Apollo laughed, a single, sharp bark, then glanced over his shoulder at the enemy raptors whipping around behind his weaving drive-glows. "You know me better than that, Rain..."
Barrages of coruscating disruptor fire perforated the darkness to his left, then swept to his right, as the enemy struggled to lock their cannons on Apollo's dodging starfighter.
"Impressing fems has always been effortless for me."
Ahmya rolled her eyes.
"Is that so?" She sneered with a smile that a grizzly would recognize. "Why then?"
"For the money!" He cried out exuberantly, smiling so wide she could hear it over the comm. "I do it for the piles of credits they pay us to fly these things. Ain't that why you do it?"
A preposterous notion coming from one born into money, it left Ahmya taken aback. However, she was quickly able to pierce the gray smoke of troubled thoughts swirling in her mind and understood that the true nature of his words was steeped in more of that low-comedy business of his and a snort of derisive laughter issued from her throat.
Apollo was a good friend, the best, actually.
Maybe a little precocious, but anyone else in Fleet, except for maybe Ahmya herself, would have been eaten alive by disruptor blasts a long time ago, so while his arrogance may be misguided, it was definitely well placed.
"You need to focus, Apollo," she snapped, harsher than she'd intended. "Quit fucking around and concentrate on making it out of this scrape in one piece."
A brief moment of silence followed those harsh words, then he spoke, and when he did, his voice was hurt.
"Sorry...I can't help it," he said, quiet and serious. "I think it's a coping mechanism."
Ahmya felt an inch tall.
"I didn't mean..." she stammered, her face flushing hotly, suddenly mortified for speaking to a friend like that. "What I meant to say is...rather...I just...we need to focus on getting out of here alive."
She couldn't tell him what really cast a shadow over her heart - the fear of losing another friend.
A thought that was unbearable despite being a pain with which she was well acquainted. A pain that was like an abusive ex who showed up unexpected and unwelcome, drunk outside your door, waking you from golden dreams on a dark night.
Apollo was quiet for a time while Ahmya's thoughts turned inward, rolling and spinning and dodging through the debris-filled hulk.
"So?" Apollo's deep voice abruptly shattered the silence. It was so unexpected she actually jumped a little in her seat.
"Huh?" She blinked, genuinely confused, and for a brief moment, her mind felt disconnected from reality while her thoughts raced back over the last few minutes, wondering what she'd missed. "What do you mean, so? What are you talking about?"
"You know, how come you became a hotshot pilot?"
Ahmya took a deep breath and let it out slowly through tight lips.
"Apollo," she began, struggling to keep a civil tone. The urge to lecture him again on the danger of their current predicament was almost overwhelming. "I told you before, this isn't the time. Focus on getting through this, and maybe we'll have that conversation later."
Silence filled the airwaves.
"You copy, Apollo?"
"Yeh, that's fair," he answered, his voice regaining a modicum of its usual cheerfulness. "Let's go home."
"We have to find our way out of this hunk of space junk, first," Ahmya's forehead twisted into a slight scowl. "Are your scanners working? Mine are all over the place."
"Same here," he replied. "Just been winging it."
Just winging it, she scoffed. His ability to navigate through a deathtrap while blind with a damaged ship further exemplified his skills as a star pilot.
Ahmya's drives twisted through the dark, her eyes scanning screens feverishly, and her mind flashed back to a moment in time key in the development of her future starfighter pilot self.
She'd known before Titan's probes stumbled upon a series of ancient ruins built by some long-dead civilization, on a distant methane world, that they were not alone in this galaxy.
A kind of icy dread that spread its frozen tendrils through her bones until she knew that something terrible lurked out there in the dark, a destroyer of worlds.
It wasn't long before those tendrils of cold were proven right.
This fear, those faceless alien conquerors, and the resolve to not become a helpless victim are what drove Ahmya to become a starfighter pilot. So that when they came, she could take the fight to them.
She shook off the memory and continued to scan her surroundings.
They were in some kind of storage depot with racks and corridors running on all sides. Apollo's drive-glows wheeled the opposite direction of the rolling world-ship hulk, the enemy raptors on his tail busy dodging around small pieces of debris to worry about him right now.
They shot out of the storage depot into a vast, dome-shaped chamber, not unlike a human city.
Thousands of Nek'var corpses floated in a sea of darkness.
Their hideous features were frozen in rictus masks of terror, bloated gray specters suspended within halos of their own crystallized blood, which caught and refracted the orange glow of Apollo's passing drives, and the sporadic green and red flashes of weapons fire, on their shiny black facets.
The specters thumped off Ahmya's streaking starfighter in a macabre dance of undead marionettes, bouncing and twirling into the darkness to ricochet off bizarre consoles and drifting objects of all shapes and sizes which she couldn't begin to identify.
Disruptor fire flashed in the darkness behind Apollo's starfighter. He pivoted into a defensive slip, and the bolts cut a coruscating path past his drives.
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Ahmya's fingers blurred over her instrument panel, desperately searching for a way out of the Nek'var hulk. Despair was setting in when suddenly, a pinpoint of light drew itself down into a silvery-white line in the distance.
"I found it!" She shouted out with relief, sweat trickling into her eyes. She swiped the nav point over to Apollo's screen and sat back and just breathed for a moment.
"Well, shit!" He called back, some of his playful spirit finding its way back into his voice. "And I was just starting to enjoy myself on this little cruise of ours. Adjusting course."
Ahmya frowned down at a red warning indicator pulsing rapidly on her screen.
Shit.
"Apollo..." her voice was a distant storm. "My nav seems to think we might not be able to fit through that gap."
Silence greeted her, then she could almost hear him shrug with his voice.
"Doesn't matter," was his even-toned response. Ahmya was too numb at this point to be surprised by his shocking lack of emotion. "We don't have a choice now, do we?"
"True," she replied, her voice hard as stone. "Unless you want to fly laps inside this enemy world-ship until we run out fuel or luck, whichever comes first."
"Nah, I'm good," he shot back. "I like pizza and beer too much to stay here."
"Don't I know it."
"Hey, isn't that the way we came in? "Apollo asked after a moment, his voice suddenly going tight with concentration as he navigated a particularly congested part of the world-ship. "Well, isn't it?"
"Yep, that's the way we came in."
"Shit," his voice trailed off for a moment, then picked back up. "So...if we fit coming in... how come we can't fit going back out?"
"I dunno," she shrugged shoulders that ached with tension, a sharp pain that lanced up into her neck. "Since when do you use logic?"
"Very funny."
She laughed through her nose.
"I suppose something must've changed since we came through," she surmised. "Your guess is as good as mine."
"Alright, well..." Apollo's voice suddenly hardened into a sharpened edge. "Fuck it. I'm going for it."
He wove through schools of floating debris, skillfully interposing the obstacles between himself and the pursuing raptors.
"Alright, here we go - you ready?"
Ahmya's chin rose.
"Absolutely," she said and locked her fear behind a wall of will. "Let's do this."
The thin silvery smear that was actually a gaping hole in the side of a capital ship's hull quickly broadened and loomed before them. It beckoned with its maw of jagged teeth, daring them to try.
Apollo's glowing drives hove sharply left as he neared the exit, space around him distorting madly with green disrupter bolts. He waited, waited...almost there...until the last possible second before he made his move.
NOW!
Ahmya's senses constricted into a narrow point directly in front of her fighter. She held her breath and was surprised to discover that she was lathered in sweat. Apollo snapped his starfighter in-line with the hole and scraped through into space, trailing a fountain of sparks behind him.
The bioraptor on his tail twisted to follow, but was a smidge too big for the hole, and blew out into space as a boiling fountain of light and swirling wreckage.
Ahmya instinctively triggered her guns and swept them right, anticipating the last bioraptor's defensive split as it shot straight into the path of her blazing cannons, joining its comrade in a roiling cloud of shrapnel that rattled off her starfighter.
"Shiiiiiiiiit!!" She lifted her chin and screamed at the canopy, eyes straining in their sockets. Her starfighter scraped through the hole, its steel talons carving fissures into her ship's metal skin until she tore free of its serrated grip with a metallic shriek and shot out into space.
She glanced over her shoulder at four successive starburst explosions that rattled out of the hole behind her, drawing a wicked half-grin onto her face - scratch four.
"I can't BELIEVE we pulled that off!" Apollo was shouting wildly into his mic. Ahmya blew out the air she'd been holding and allowed the half-grin to blossom into an exuberant smile of exultation. "And not a minute too soon, Rain. Oxygen levels down to eighteen percent."
Ahmya ran some quick calculations.
"You can make it on that," She surmised. "But there's no time to waste. We gotta move."
"Acknowledged, adjusting course for the Vigilance," He glanced over at his battered starboard wing, frowning at the precious life support hemorrhaging crystals that glittered off into the depths of space. "I know I'll make it, but if I don't..."
"Don't," she cut him off sharply. "Squash that. Don't even think about it."
If Apollo had a response, it was burned to ash by a devastating white light that seared all detail from the world. It was astonishing, blinding even through the automated polarizers built into their canopies.
Ahmya's computer screamed warnings at her.
"What the fu...?" Apollo started to say but was cut off again when the shockwave hit.
It blasted into them like the herald of judgment day.
"Ahmya!"
"Apollo!"
Ahmya lost all sense of direction in her starfighter's violent tumble that slammed her around in its cockpit. Her gut promptly emptied its contents into her helmet, and black motes swam thick across her vision.
"Ahmya..." She heard Apollo say, and the rest was lost in the roaring tsunami of energy raging all around them.
Apollo's voice drifted to her from some distant mountaintop, a world away.
"Go to your own life support, NOW!"
Lights and shapes shot around her canopy so fast the universe blurred into a solid sheet of prismatic refractions.
She was struggling to remember what she had been doing. Something with life support...
Her arm strained against the forces pinning it down on her lap, so close. An inch, that was all she needed. It might as well have been a mile. Ahmya's eyes drooped, so tired. Her head lolled about violently before dropping to her chest.
The last thing she saw before a shroud of darkness stole the light from her eyes, was a brilliant, boiling-white supernova blazing like Armageddon.
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Scores of Nek'var corpses littered the streets around where Erik's squad hunkered behind the blue shimmer of their tactical defense screens.
"Position secured, Gunny," he reported, continuing to sweep his gaze over the area. "No sign of enemy movement."
"Acknowledged, keep a sharp eye out."
Erik activated the holographic controls linked to his forearm and tapped the virtual key for a nutrient stick, which popped from an aperture near his mouth with a soft hiss.
He chewed thoughtfully, sipped from a tube, and squatted down beside Ramirez to stare through the screens electric-blue haze at a trail of scaley corpses leading off into the distance.
So many...
Erik shook his head in disbelief and took another bite.
At first, he'd tried to keep track of the Nek's he dropped, you know, for bragging rights and all that. But that foolish business ended hours ago during a series of pitched battles they fought while driving toward the intel center. It was like the enemy had an infinite supply of soldiers to throw at their meat grinder.
He glanced over his shoulder at Private Cadwell and grimaced. Poor bastard never even saw it coming.
Erik chewed thoughtfully, his eyes distant. Never even had a chance.
Didn't he just get married?
He shook his head again, ate, and sipped.
Had a kid, too...
He'd probably get a ribbon or two for taking out that gunship, but I doubt he cares about that now...
Erik snorted with disgust and kicked at some rubble near his boots. A shiny new ribbon for dying while taking out a gunship is little comfort to the empty bed back on Earth, or was it, Titan? Erik waved this aside.
It didn't matter.
Nothing mattered anymore to the man lying there in that armored coffin. His worries were over. A shitty fucking ribbon... better than nothing, I guess.
Erik looked around at the other members of his squad, and a dark thought suddenly struck him.
We're all dead already and just don't know it.
They were dead the moment their boots touched the surface of this forsaken ball of rock. It was only a matter of time before their luck would run out, perhaps tomorrow? He laughed silently, maybe a year from now, did it really matter?
Erik's face suddenly twisted with revulsion as the nutrient stick turned to ash on his tongue. Fuck ribbons, he snarled silently and spat the repulsive paste into a waste tube.
"I'll carry him," Pfc Bracken's voice sounded constricted, his grief burning behind a thin mask of stoicism. "He'd do it for me."
Erik's eyes followed Bracken over to where he kneeled down beside his fallen friend, and the great armored shoulders shook.
The sounds of war echoed in the distance, and a thick column of black smoke rose toward the sky. They were down one of their own, and the Nek's just kept coming. Before he could descend into that pool of despair, the Gunny's voice broke into his dark thoughts.
"Nek's are crawling all over," the Gunny was saying, a hint of regret twisted into his voice. "I can't risk the unit because you are encumbered with the Private's remains."
"He has a name!" Bracken's whipcrack response lashed out over the comm followed by loud blasts of ragged breathing, then he repeated himself, this time, his voice was barely a whisper. "My friend has a name..."
The moment he uttered the word friend, his voice cracked, and the stoic facade blew away altogether in a bitter blast of sobs.
Erik walked over and placed a comforting hand on Bracken's shoulder, and the distraught helmet swiveled up to look at him.
"He just got married..." he sobbed and rocked his friend.
The bile-black grief contorting Bracken's features was viral. Erik abruptly realized that his own eyes were brimming. What the hell?
He knew that there were no words that could console Bracken, so Erik just stood next to him, hand resting on the armored shoulder and thought about a wife somewhere out there who didn't know she was a widow and a child who would never know their father.
A flood of hatred suddenly rose within his chest. It grew to encompass the war itself, and the bastards who sent them here to die while they sat in the safety of their cush offices back on Earth. His rage boiled nova-hot until it reached an intensity that shocked even himself. A thermonuclear furnace blazing where his heart should be.
He looked down through that red haze of fury and hate at Bracken weeping next to Cadwell's fallen form, and his mind smoked with vengeance. Every Nek'var sonnuvabitch that crossed his path would pay dearly for this. They would pay for all of the horrors their kind wrought on the men, women, and children of Earth. They would pay for ever existing.
"We have to activate the suits self destruct," Gunnery Sergeant Moore went on unperturbed. "That order comes from the top. It's time to move out, we've been ordered to extract the officers at HQ."
"Why can't we hide him somewhere?" Bracken wanted to know. "We could come back for him later when everything is clear."
"Negative," Gunny was shaking his armored head before Bracken had finished. "Brass doesn't want to risk the tech falling into enemy hands. Our orders are clear, destroy the armor."
"What about the guys at the intel center, Gunny?" Ramirez wanted to know.
"And the LT?" Sara Ito added. "Didn't he call for reinforcements?"
"Lt is gone," Gunnery Sergeant Moore stated flatly, holding up a finger and tilting his head like he was listening to something they couldn't hear. "Intel center was overrun, no survivors. Hold one."
Erik stood next to Bracken, watching flashes of light pulse on the eastern skyline, thunder boomed, and his thoughts turned inward.
No survivors...
Humanity faced a threat greater than anything in their history. All of the petty squabbles and ancient blood-feuds, corruption, and political maneuvering and the secret deals all seemed so pointless now. What had any of it done to prepare them for this? All of the shadowy plotting and grand schemes were blown away in the ashes of a world transformed into one giant crematorium. And humanity was the corpse.
The bickering governments of Earth, Mars, Titan, and the smaller provinces, were left with little choice but to unite against an impossibly powerful enemy. They were forced to draft millions into service - millions died far from home.
Thunder crashed in the distance, closer this time, and fountains of light strobed rapidly.
Two years now...it seemed like a lifetime ago.
Even the media stopped reporting the staggering losses coming out of the Zeta system. They deemed it too demoralizing for the common rabble.
Two years and countless lives left moldering in some distant field, their sacrifices long forgotten, and MX-1 was on the brink of defeat.
But now a colossus was rising, bestriding the galaxy. The hopes and dreams of Sol carried into battle on their armored backs. Armored Corpsmen fighting for Humanity's future against a merciless alien empire. Would there be a future, or would the galaxy's history be written in human blood?
"Am I boring you, Corporal Shields?" Gunnery Sergeant Moore asked in a voice reminiscent of distant thunder, peering at Erik through his faceplate. "I can ask the Captain if she wouldn't mind putting the war on hold for a moment while you sort out whatever the fucks on your mind."
Erik's thoughts crashed back in on themselves, and his face flushed hotly.
"That won't be necessary, Gunny."
"Are you sure, Corporal?" Gunnery Sergeant Moore feigned empathy. "I don't want to put you out by, you know, asking you to pay attention while I brief you on the Captain's new orders!"
Erik silently cursed himself for allowing his thoughts to wander off on a morose journey of self-flagellation while Gunny was speaking.
Smooth, Erik, real smooth.
"That's good, Soon-to-be Private Shields," the Gunnery Sergeant's voice hardened dangerously. "Because I don't like repeating myself. Now pay attention."
Erik shoved all other thoughts from his mind and focused on what the Gunny was saying.
"Change of plans, people," Gunnery Sergeant Moore began again, looking around at everyone while he spoke. "Captain Wen has ordered us to the eastern front as soon as we evac the brass at HQ. Nek'var commandos have overrun our defenses there, Bravo company's been all but wiped out."
Erik turned his armored gaze to the east and listened to their orders.
The gloves were off, and the rules of war were left in the ashes of civilized combat. There would be no mercy, no prisoners, no quarter. All targets were now authorized military targets.
The Nek'var came and burned our cities and colonies. Killed millions of our people. They will not stop until the only thing that remains of humanity is a smoldering memory.
So now the Armored Corps marches on the Nek'var. They bring with them a new type of war - a human, kind of war.
And they're bringing hell with them.