July 8th, 2448
Landing Pad 4
Talon Military Base, Tulipalo (planet), Ignis Star System
Captain Heidi Kopfjäger grumbled to herself as she pulled her luggage across the landing pad. “Take a vacation they said, it’ll be good for you they said. HA! 35 years of constant deployments during the war and the brass only realized at the end that Leave was something we didn’t know existed. Not that they would have let us have it anyway. Which they just proved, recalled me back before I even made planetfall. Dunno who’s shit list I’m on, or which shit holes I’ll have to go to but I hope it will be fun.”
She started to smile with a feral look on her face as she thought of the hell she might get to cause, a smile that made a pair of sailors to change course to avoid her. Well it was probably the smile paired with the crimson wolf’s head insignia patch she wore on her uniform signifying her as a member of the Wolf Brigade. The Wolf Brigade was the elite of the Special Operations community and seeing one with a feral grin like that generally meant they were on the hunt and that someone was gonna die.
During the war with the Cetaria Empire, the Wolf Brigade had gained a reputation of being ferocious and relentless in combat. Retreat was only to regroup and reorganize for the next strike. Many of the regular units that worked with a team from the Wolf Brigade, or Wolf Pack as the smaller groups were called, quicking formed the opinion that every Wolf was psychotic to some degree. Some actually were but for the most part it was an act, one intended to encourage the units they worked with and to terrify their enemies. It didn’t always work out the way the brass wanted but that's the way Psy-Ops go.
Unlike other Special Operation brigades, the Wolves didn’t have a specialty. Unlike the Sharks who specialize in amphibious operations or the Hawks that specialize in zero-gee operations, the Wolves simply dealt in combat, causing as much chaos and destruction among enemy forces as possible. One could say their specialty was simply war in all its aspects.
As for Heidi Kopfjäger, she was a special and rare breed of Wolf. She was a former member of the highly classified Werewolf Battalion and current member of Chameleon Company. She lost her place in the Werewolves when she lost both her legs during the Battle of Krusa Major. Well lost doesn’t quite do it justice as she had a squadmate cut them off with a plasma knife after artillery caused most of a building to land on her while they were behind enemy lines. After administering some nerve blocks, a squadmate strapped her to his back and they shot their way out of enemy territory, but not before they triggered some demolition charges destroying any evidence left behind and a communications tower. It caused quite a stir when they made it back to friendly territory. It was something out of an action holo they said; emerging from the forest with a thunder of pulse rifle fire from behind the enemy. They blasted their way through to friendly lines with a wounded Heidi providing covering fire while being carried like a backpack.
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Normally the loss of a limb only takes you out of the fight until a replacement can be flash cloned, reattached, and physical acclimation therapy completed then its right back you go. That turned out to not be the case for Heidi or for any member of the Werewolf Battalion. It was discovered that flash cloned body parts didn’t retain the genetic alterations, gene therapy and augmentations that every Werewolf went through during adolescence in the Einherjar Project. This meant that while Heidi would be physically fit and fully capable of returning to the battlefield, she would never be able to keep up with the rest of her squad. The Werewolves would forever be her family but she would never be able to deploy with them again.
She transferred to Chameleon Company, a covert operations unit that focused on solo operatives conducting infiltration, sabotage, assassination, asset retrieval, and asset denial. Unlike their cousins, the Snakes who were deep cover operatives or spys, Chameleons were expected to get in, do what was needed and sneak out, but were often encouraged to cause as much chaos and destruction as they could without getting caught. Many of them being originally Wolves, Sharks, or Hawks, they wouldn’t pass up a chance to inflict maximum damage to enemy forces. That was 25 years ago, now she’s a captain and second in command of Chameleon Company.
As she walked towards the transport, she thought of a certain general who once belonged to the now collapsed Cetaria Empire who had warranted her immediate recall and scrambling of every Chameleon that wasn’t already deployed or committed to a target. Had he just left well enough alone and not- “DIMENSIONAL SHIFT DETECTED!” A skull splitting female voice screeched as her implant’s alarms went off. Snapping Heidi’s train of thought and driving her to act, she quickly slung her gear bag over her shoulder onto her back while mentally ordering her implant to tap into the spaceport’s sensor net. As the sensor map popped up on the left side of her vision, a new alert sounded; “DIMENSIONAL RIFT DETECTED!” The sensor map showed the location of the rift, which to her horror is right where she was standing. As the ground all around her began to glow, the air distorted, she found that she couldn't move. She triggered her emergency sub-space beacon via her implant and struggled to move while holding tight to her bags. The glow quickly became so bright that she couldn't see and then darkness… Absolute darkness and weightlessness, just like being in space but with air.