Allison tugged on her coat, gloves and hat. She decided the fastest way to Command and Control was actually across the surface instead of through the maze of tunnels, so she braved the frigid wind. When she finally reached the command-and-control tower she was forced to shake snow off of every article of clothing. She didn’t bother taking off her coat. She wasn’t expecting to be here long. Command and Control was packed. All the ops stations were manned and the source of the building shaking noise became obvious when she saw the alert squadron on the boards and launch times for the rest.

“Sir, what’s going on?”

He looked up at her.

“There has been an attack on Yellowstone Colony. Sal’nash hive, we had video feed but then lost wormhole comms and the wormhole beacon has gone dark. You’re the only one who has engaged them in actual combat Lieutenant. I’m ordering you to take your fighter and investigate. Assess the situation and provide safe coordinates for fleet support. You are only to engage if you are actively being targeted. You are cleared for beaconless wormhole jump. Get your fighter here and have it armed with whatever you see fit.”

Allison had already sent the wake command to Bit. She saluted.

“Aye, sir.”

She turned to make her way to the hanger Bit would head to for armaments. Major Ghai called out.

“Be careful, Lieutenant, we don’t need a hero, we need intelligence.”

Allison called out as she continued to walk away.

“Aye, sir.”

Allison used the tunnels to get to the hanger. She used her walk there to set up armaments for the mission. She asked for antimatter, for the wormhole jump and enough for two high yield torpedoes. She wasn’t sure what she would need to take out a hive. Swarm drones and lots of missiles. She had her drone wing filled to the brim with missiles as well. She selected various types, though, heavily leaning towards armor piercing high explosive. She reasoned since the Sal’nash weapons were plasma based, it was likely something they were adept at resisting, so she only equipped ten percent of her missiles as plasma. By the time she arrived the ground crew were already well on their way to completing her loadout request.

While they finished she pulled off everything but her armor and stuffed them in the only free cargo bay since the rest had been switched out for missile packs. The master airman who was the head of the ground crews was overseeing the arming of Bit and her drone wing. He motioned as the last missile pack was inserted.

“Looking for a fight, ma’am?”

Allison shrugged.

“Not planning on starting one, but I wanted to make sure I could finish one.”

He chuckled.

“It is like I always say ma’am, if at first you don’t succeed, find a bigger gun. You’re good to go.”

Allison saluted him.

“Thank you, Master Airman, I appreciate the quick load out. Sorry for the short notice.”

He saluted her back.

“That is what we’re here for, good luck, ma’am.”

Allison climbed into Bit’s cockpit and started an accelerated pre-flight check. Bit seemed rather confused when Allison started downloading pre-calculated wormhole targeting.

“Allison, why are you plotting a beaconless wormhole transit to an Alliance colony world?”

Allison kept her launch prep up.

“The Sal’nash attacked Yellowstone and we have lost all communications. The beacon is down. The Major is impatient for intelligence and doesn’t want to wait forty minutes. I don’t blame him. We’re first in because of our experience with them. Please arm the am torpedoes for maximum yield. I don’t care what our orders are if we see that hive ship we’re taking it out. We can’t track them, and I refuse to let it attack another colony.”

Bit spoke.

“Allison, policy states, no antimatter should be in weapons during wormhole or FTL transit.”

Allison made a face.

“Unless deemed necessary by the mission commander. My mission, I deem it necessary. So, get to it, pretty please.”

Bit grumbled but transferred the antimatter to the torpedoes.

“What exactly are our mission parameters?”

Allison finished off her pre-flight check.

“Get in, establish communications, provide intelligence and safe coordinates for a fleet to wormhole in, only to engage if we’re targeted.”

“So, you intend to violate orders, we have already determined they cannot pierce even your rudimentary holo-web cloaking field.”

Allison frowned.

“No, I intend to put a stop to this once and for all. I missed once, I won’t miss again.”

Allison had already received her launch clearance. She opened comms to C&C and advised them she was launching. She let Bit handle the launch and course away from Eden Prime to a safe distance. While Bit was getting them into position Allison double checked the wormhole coordinates, she’d been provided. She adjusted the wormhole projector setting slightly as her missile load had increased the fighter’s mass substantially. Satisfied she engaged the wormhole projector and they appeared one AU from Yellowstone in open space.

There was no sign of the Hive ship. Space was littered with starfighter and patrol ship debris. As she approached Yellowstone’s orbit her instruments went haywire. None of her human tech was working. She franticly tried to narrow down the source. All comms were dead in the space near Yellowstone, which was the forth planet it its system. She backed off and her instruments returned. She had to reboot all of her systems, save Bit before she could generate a wormhole. Whatever the interference was even threatened the antimatter containment for the fighter.

“Bit do you have any idea what that is?”

“No, but I can posit that it is some sort of jamming device the Sal’nash deploy as part of an invasion. It would seem League technology is insulated against it, human technology is not.”

Allison sighed and once she could, she opened up wormhole communications.

“Andromeda Control, this is Shadow One. We have arrived. The Sal’nash have deployed some sort of high energy jamming technology that is interfering with our systems. It appears that it caused FTL by product containment failures on all fighters and ships in the system. We have no contact with the surface and no eyes on the Hive. I recommend against sending reinforcements until we can find the source of the interference. System should be considered a hazard. All ships should be advised – Avoid this system.”

Major Ghai sounded disappointed.

“Understood. Return to point of origin, Shadow One. We will evaluate.”

Allison looked at Yellowstone. It was a beautiful garden world. Lush green jungles. She tapped her fingers on Bit’s control surface.

“Request permission to stay and gather more data on the jamming. No hostiles are visible, and we can maintain containment through short periods of exposure.”

Major Ghai was quiet for a few moments.

“Does exposure compromise your cloak and your shields?”

“It does sir, but no visible hostiles are present. Sir, we’re close, let us try, please sir, maybe we can do something for the people on the surface.”

Major Ghai looked like he might allow it but then he shook his head.

“No, you’re too valuable an asset to ris-.”

Allison rammed her throttle forward and before she could hear the end of Major Ghai’s order to return, she cut him off with the jammer. It broke the wormhole’s stability and communications failed. She retreated from the field which seemed to have a falloff in effectiveness rather than a hard boundary. Bit sounded somewhat annoyed at her pilot.

“Shall I establish another wormhole comm, Allison? Or are we playing the: ‘I’m sorry my communications went out’ game?”

Allison made a face.

“No, can’t you see our wormhole generator just went out.”

Allison edged Bit closer to the jamming sphere. It reached further than the other covering Yellowstone’s moon and its orbit. Perhaps the other one they’d run into had been losing potency with age. After dipping in and out of the jamming field rapidly she began to build a plot of the outer edge, or at least the effective outer edge of the field. She eyeballed the plot that was starting to look like a geodesic form. She knew since it was a sphere it had to go to a point somewhere. She had enough to draw four lines downwards on a three-dimensional holo of the planet. She pointed at a spot which appeared to be in the middle of a jungle.

“There.”

Allison started looking over her stores. She’d loaded for a space battle not ground assault on a target she couldn’t use active targeting on. She needed dumb fire. Antimatter was out of the question. Even at the lowest yield it would release a high energy exotic radiation burst. The kind of radiation that even three hundred kilometers from the colony would result in a fifty percent casualty rate. She had to assume they were alive.

“How do I destroy something on a planetary surface without having to get close enough to that we end up crash landing in a jungle that could be full of hostiles and not using a dumb fire antimatter torpedo. Oh, and do it before the energy field disrupts the antimatter containment under the base and destroys the colony and irradiates a continent.”

She glanced up at the solar system stellar cartography report that was floating at the corner of her HUD. She reached out and swept it towards the center of her view and zoomed in. She pointed at the asteroid field, the remnants of a planet that likely broke up when it got too close to the sun.

“There. Find me something dense, big enough to survive atmospheric entry and small enough it won’t cause damage to the colony.”

Bit sounded incredulous.

“Allison, you can’t seriously be considering launching an asteroid at a planetary surface, that is highly illegal.”

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“Bit, you’re one of my best friends and I love you to death but for once just do what I tell you, I don’t have time to argue or convince you to do this, that antimatter containment on their base is not getting more stable with age.”

Bit went silent. Quickly she identified an asteroid for Allison. Allison started flying towards it. She brought up its properties. Tungston core. Extremely dense. She did some math on the fly. Roughly ten meters, high density, mass vs escape velocity from the super-giant sun’s gravity well.

She poured every ounce of power her fusion and antimatter reactors were producing to her shields. She used the graviton core to power her forward movement. Her antigravs would normally make escape velocity a moot point but she was using all of their potential to drag the very dense asteroid toward the planet. Bit was pouting so Allison was on her own throughout the process. She was going to need a lot of airframe maintenance after this insanity. Allison could hear the superdense metal that formed the frame for the liquid metal armor creaking under the strain. Finally, she burst out of the star’s hungry grasp.

She lined up the starfighter for a ninety-degree angle asteroid bombing run on her target location. The good news was she was about to cause a surface collision that was on the order of three to four megatons of energy. If the jamming tech was anywhere within six kilometers of her target it would not survive. At least she hoped it wouldn’t. She matched the planet’s orbit and then accelerated towards it. Once she hit the field things started to go haywire again. She pulled up as soon as the antigravs lost all power. She was ecstatic to see her graviton drive was still functioning perfectly. Because if it hadn’t her momentum would have carried her into the planet backwards. It wouldn’t have been pretty.

The impact wasn’t instantaneous, it took a couple of seconds at the velocity had gotten it too. She zoomed into the impact zone. Without the jungle foliage which had been blasted down she was able to see the crater. She swept back around and started towards the jamming field. She gave a small cheer when she saw no distortion on her HUD. She angled for the colony. There were Sal’nash dragging humans through the streets towards a more bipedal version of their drones. She growled. She didn’t have time to worry about that right now, she needed to get the antimatter from the base into containment on Bit. She couldn’t trust that the containment cells were permanently damaged. Even a minor breach would make the colony uninhabitable for centuries. Not to mention would kill them all.

She brought Bit in for a cloaked landing. Allison activated her own cloaking field and jumped out of Bit and rushed to hook up the antimatter drain to her antimatter drain port. She tried to set the base antimatter containment to dump its contents with a computer terminal, but the computer was hopelessly fried. She took a deep breath.

“Bit, I need to do a manual dump. Send power through the port and magnetize the drain we can’t trust the base’s reserve power. You’ll need to route it, take as much as you can. I don’t think I’m going to get anything from the containment system on what it has in storage.”

Allison pulled the manhole cover off of the maintenance shaft for the antimatter containment and slid down the ladder. It was a hundred-foot drop. There were multiple safety’s to prevent a catastrophic antimatter storage leak. Thick lead plates. Armor. Shields. The shields being the primary and probably the only thing that could save the colony from a small leak. The shields were fried. She found the manual release. Normally what she was about to do would be impossible because antimatter was literally the most dangerous substance the Alliance knew of, but with all the numerous security layers completely fried by the jamming field it was as easy as flipping a switch.

“Bit, here it comes tell me when to stop.”

Bit stopped giving Allison the silent treatment to answer.

“Acknowledged. Monitoring and routing.”

Allison tapped her fingers on the durasteel coating that usually formed a secondary electromagnet in event of containment failure. She was getting worried.

“Bit, should I stop?”

“I thought you had. We still have space.”

Allison flipped the switch again and looked at the flickering red and green lights on the antimatter storage.

“Well, here’s to hoping we got it all.”

Bit spoke quietly, almost a whisper.

“Allison, Sal’nash are in the hanger, they’re heading towards the manhole.”

Allison drew her Qual’sa pistols and flipped them to maximum yield. She wasn’t going to play games with the Sal’nash. She re-holstered the pistols and started climbing the ladder. With her vibro knife in her teeth. She had no doubts about the Sal’nash intent now. It was a pair of the black drones. She didn’t really give much pause and shot them both with her Qual’sa pistols. They burst into puffs of turquoise mist. She pulled the knife out of her teeth and slid it into its sheath.

“Bit, any damage?”

“No, they could not penetrate my armor. We should go. I believe your attack did not go unnoticed.”

Allison put her foot and hand on the ladder that would get her into Bit’s cockpit then she stepped back. No, she wasn’t going to just run away. She was going to stand and fight. She’d want someone to do the same for her colony.

“No. Launch. Open wormhole comms and tell command we’ve cleared the jamming field and require reinforcements. I’m going to see what damage I can do in the mean time to slow down whatever the hell they’re doing.”

Bit sounded angry.

“Allison, you are in direct violations of orders! We’re here for intelligence and comm relay only. You are already way outside our mission parameters. I will not leave you down here alone with those monsters running around.”

Allison stepped away from Bit.

“Sorry, Bit, can’t do it. I don’t have it in me to leave when innocent people are in danger. Major Ghai can kiss my… you know… So, go. The sooner you call for reinforcements, the sooner you get me out of here.”

Bit closed the cockpit and Allison could only tell where the fighter was because of the dust it kicked up where it disturbed the air. She formed her helmet and decided it was time to stop by the armory. She realized the black drones must have had an enhanced sense of smell. They dogged her steps towards the armory. None could seem to see through her cloaking field otherwise it would have been a much more difficult journey. She glanced at the time on her HUD. She’d have to hold out on her own for at least thirty minutes. System’s Alliance could rapidly deploy but it took time to get ground troops briefed and in drop ships. To organize a wormhole jump without a beacon and only coordinates. If she was lucky she might get a Special Forces squad in a drop ship through a wormhole from Andromeda-1, if they had anyone on standby. That really didn’t fit Major Ghai’s usual methodical behavior. He would want to assess the situation before sending more troops in. She had four following her. They broke off one by one when they saw fallen colonists. Her scanner said they were unconscious but alive. She hadn’t had a chance to look more closely.

She glanced around before prying the access panel off of the armory door frame. She pulled an e-clip from her belt and hotwired the door to power. It had a manual release but she didn’t want to waste blood or armor energy when she was surrounded by hostile superstrong bugs that could hurt her bad enough it took her days to heal. The door slid open, and she walked inside. The militia hadn’t even gotten a chance to arm themselves. She eyed a high caliber anti-material sniper rifle. She pulled the bolt for the rifle out of the lock up and assembled the sniper rifle. She gathered several clips. Then she looked at the grenades. They were in a separate lock up. This was a physical lock and key set up. She didn’t have time to fiddle with that and she knew explosives would be a force multiplier for her based on her training, so she used some of her precious blood vitality and armor power to rip the door off its hinges. She grabbed an ammo bag and filled it with standard pull a pin release the lever frag grenades, the scalable fusion grenades would be fried. She grabbed a few flash bangs. She grabbed four of the thirtieth century equivalents of claymores, they had physical triggers, and she was confident they would still work. She finished her kit off with a rocket launcher. She slung that from her back, and she made her way out into the base.

She saw obliterator hover tanks lined up in a nice row and wished she could use one of those but like everything else with complicated systems on the base they were likely dead. Everything she’d picked had minimal electronics. The rockets she selected were dumb fire. The sniper rifle had a physical scope and used actual black powder bullets. It was a good thing the System’s Alliance didn’t like to waste anything, or these all would have been replaced with new fangled railgun systems and guided missiles. She wasn’t sure how to go about reducing the number of Sal’nash on the colony. She knew they would swarm a location if some were killed. Something humans had long ago learned not to do. She’d seen a few of the large red destroyer drones. She wasn’t eager to fight one of those.

Eventually she landed on finding out what the hell they were doing with the colonists. She climbed up the colony’s government headquarters. It was identical to the one on Eden Prime. She set her claymores in such a way that she could maximize Sal’nash casualties should she decide to start shooting things and they decided to come find the source. She set up the sniper rifle and trained the scope on the strange looking drone by the colony center.

It was bipedal and only had two arms. Its chitin had a purple sheen on it in the dying light of the day. The head was larger than other Sal’nash. Allison focused on what he was doing with his hands. The warrior drones were dragging unconscious humans up to it. If it saw they were male it motioned to several piles of male colonists and the men would be tossed onto one of them. The women it would grab their heads and roughly inspect their ears. Then they would be added to the piles of women. It seemed the strange big-headed drone was running things. Allison glanced at the time. She had five minutes before she had any hope of reinforcements. She decided that she’d make their landing easier by taking out the head bug.

She aimed down her scope and pulled the trigger. The strange drone’s head exploded in a green mist. It stood there for a moment then collapsed. The other Sal’nash started screeching much like they had on the super-hive. It would have been ear piercing had Allison not been wearing her helmet. The building she was on shook as one of her claymores went off. The rest followed which just increased the screeching from the Sal’nash warrior drones. She took the chance to aim at the head of one of the destroyer drones and when she pulled the trigger it exploded.

By this time the drones had figured out her location, so she dropped the sniper rifle and jumped off the building. She had never had the opportunity to use the energy wings on her armor, she wasn’t even sure how they worked. Thankfully like most other things the armor seemed to read her intentions and what appeared to be a pair of glowing blue angelic wings sprung from its back and slowed her descent. They disrupted her cloaking field, so she was forced to hit the ground running.

She tossed two flash bangs over her shoulders when they went off she skidded to a halt and turned around with the rocket launcher and fired at the group of Sal’nash she’d stunned. The explosion turned the Sal’nash into splashes of Sal’nash blood and chitin shrapnel. The explosion also sent her flying backwards and into a wall. Even with her armor absorbing most of the blow it still dazed her long enough the Sal’nash caught up.

Allison realized the building she hit was the colony’s high school. Once again, the fact that the System’s Alliance was cheap and just built everything the same for colonies was a blessing because she knew the layout just as well as she knew her own home. She narrowly avoided a barrage of Sal’nash chitin spikes by diving around a corner. She ran towards the narrowest hall in the building. It was the hallway to the fusion reactor and building utility closet. It had one entrance and while she was trapped, she could turn the hall into a choke point. The walls were thick, they wouldn’t last forever, but hopefully her reinforcements would arrive.

She formed the energy shield it took the shape of a tall roman shield just like she imagined it would this time, she used it as cover and started firing her Qual’sa pistol down the hall. Drone after drone disintegrated into turquoise mist but without the brain drone, they only seemed to know how to swarm. Her pistol ran out of charge, and she tossed it aside and drew her other pistol just in time to disintegrate a drone that was almost on top of her. She could not have told anyone just how many she’d killed by the time she heard a familiar voice over comms. Not that she’d known him for long. Thomas from the recruitment event had apparently arrived with his squad.

“Shadow One, is that you in the school.”

She answered as she continued firing down the hallway.

“Affirmative. I’m almost out of charge so it would be really nice if you could get in here before I have to start using my knife or the grenades.”

Allison knew she was saved when she saw Sal’nash exploding as giant durasteel spikes burst through their chitin. She crouched behind her shield. While she trusted her fellow soldiers, she really didn’t want to have one of those go through her. Thomas stood at the end of the hall with two gore-covered goliath power armors flanking him.

“Shit, ma’am, you barely left us any bugs to kill.”

Allison stood up and let her energy shield vanish.

“Did you find the destroyer? Red, taller than a goliath?”

Thomas nodded.

“Yeah. He tried to attack us when we landed. Our obliterator’s main gun took care of that real fast. Are you injured ma’am?”

Allison shook her head and reached down to pick up her fully discharged pistol, she slid them into their holsters. Now that the adrenaline was fading she realized she was lying because pain shot through her from her abdomen. She looked down and saw two Sal’nash spikes had torn through her depleted armor. She held the wall and blinked.

“I lied.”

She stumbled and slid down the wall. Whatever toxin they had injected was already starting to affect her. Allison grabbed them both with her left hand and yanked. Thomas rushed forward and jammed two tubes of wound foam into her new holes. He patted her on the shoulder. She was feeling lightheaded. The last dose had been a single, apparently her body was struggling with a double dose. She could feel her energy draining away as her blood and her nanites struggled to overcome the toxin. She grabbed for the high sugar supplement she’d added to her kit when she had realized her nanites needed fuel. She popped it in her mouth. Thomas was already requesting med evac for Allison. She motioned the spikes.

“They have a poison. Toxic for us, deadly to humans.”

He nodded.

“Raven Nest this is Raven One. Shadow One requires med evac from the school. She has been poisoned. I have a sample.”

He scooped her up into his large arms and held her close. He held one of the spikes in his armored hand. Allison wrapped her arms around his neck.

“Hang in their ma’am. We have blood on the ship.”

When the med evac shuttle arrived, he laid her down on the hover gurney and offered the spike to one of the medics. They put it into a stasis container. Thomas stepped back and gave her a thumbs up before retreating out of the med evac shuttle.