Forty-eight hours should be enough time for them to be long gone. Though forty-eight hours was barely enough time for maintenance to repair the damage done to Affinity. I need eyes on the ground to assess this situation and recover any remaining militia. Hopefully Jane Doe has left some survivors.

‘Prepare for a full megalith slip. All personnel are due aboard in two hours. All offsite slips are restricted until further notice,’ I comm out to all personnel. That alone will cause an uproar, there have been very few times that I’ve recalled everyone, much less with such a short lead-time. I’ve never restricted offsite slips, a commonplace protocol on military vessels but not on private megaliths. It’s about time that everyone felt the shifting climate.

‘Jason, start researching where we’re going to acquire three new teams, after we handle the carnage, we need to restock,’ I comm.

‘Will do,’ he replies.

Two long hours have passed. The last slip craft just docked. I am standing on the command deck.

“Slip for Airis,” I say. Sarah, our navigator, nods and begins the process from her seat on the far left of the platform. Moments later Airis is visible on the observation screens.

“Sarah, bring Affinity down, center us on top of where our militia teams were deployed. We are on radio silence here, no communication with any Airis authorities. Jason, scramble interceptors if anyone sends anything our way,” I say. Sarah turns around in her seat.

“Excuse me, you want me to ground Affinity?” she asks. I’m not surprised, grounding a megalith is far from standard procedure. The physics of landing and takeoff for a megalith are difficult, especially on larger planets, so it is much easier to just stay in orbit.

“Yes, you heard me correctly,” I say. She nods again and starts adjusting several different controls.

We start plummeting down towards the surface, all the while Airis gets larger and larger on the observation screens. Moments later we are inside the atmosphere, and the descent slows to a reasonable pace as individual landmarks on the surface become visible. The closer we get, the larger the scar on the earth gets, it stands out like a sore thumb. The entire landscape of Airis is beautiful, lush plains and forests, and right in the middle there is a big black crater.

Touchdown, here I go.

“Jason, have my personal unit deployed on the ground by the time I’m out there,” I say.

“They’re already there for all intents and purposes,” he replies.

I turn around and leave the command deck, stepping into the transport. The transport brings me straight to the loading deck, where the ramp is open to the outside. My personal unit is ready and waiting at the edge of the ramp. I start walking over to them.

“Jack Meridal is the only survivor, we believe. We’ve had no luck getting a response from anyone else, but we haven’t searched the transport ships yet,” says Lilah, head of my unit.

“Good to know we’ve got at least one survivor. Let’s go talk to Jack,” I say.

I start walking down the ramp, the end of the ramp is flush with what looks like the initial impact of the blast, the ground is glassy, crystalized. The mansion is now nothing more than a pile of rubble, and there’s Jack, standing solidly in front of it. I walk to him, my unit in lockstep, surrounding me on all sides.

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“Seems that you’re the only lucky soldier in my company Jack. I’m sorry for putting you in this mess,” I say.

“There’s no way you could’ve known. You can forget searching the transports for anyone, they massacred everyone like dogs, the only reason I’m alive is they wanted to talk to me about you and the company. You’ll be happy to know that I was able to plant a tracker on their ship before they took off, it’s inert until activated, it’s up to you when to ping their location,” he says.

“That’s disheartening to hear about everyone else, we will have to collect whatever is left and notify any relations they had. It is nice to know that this loss of life was not all for naught. Have you seen our people, or even tried to enter our ships to look? It may be that they are simply trapped inside,” I ask.

“I’ve only seen what’s left of our ground units and those in my ship, but everyone in those ships is dead, no question. After the initial show of force, some in their group wanted to watch her kill us, as a demonstration. When they came for me, it was just three of them, and two of them did nothing but watch. What she did was nothing short of a slaughter. It was like being in a simulation with an old age automaton, back before anyone developed countermeasures for them. After they left me here, I attempted to use our ships to return to Affinity, but they’re locked down tight as you can see; most likely we will have to cut our way back in. Under normal circumstances, we wouldn’t be able to easily recover the ships after forcing entry, but seeing as you’ve brought Affinity down, we should be able to take them with us without a lengthy repair job,” he says. I figured that Jane Doe wouldn’t leave the ships for us to easily recover, just doesn’t seem like her style, to make things easy for us.

“Yes, I suspected that we would have trouble with the ships after I saw how Jane Doe crippled them. I will try to use my owner privileges to open them up in a moment, but I’ll go ahead and tell Jason to ready up a crew for the recovery and repairs,” I say.

‘Jason, we’re going to need an engineering team out here to work on the ship’s systems, but before that we have to cut them open. Ready up three leeches, it’ll be quicker that way, just let us know before they start so we can clear the area,’ I comm. Leeches, used for boarding enemy crafts are generally used in space, I haven’t seen them used planet-side before, but I know for a fact that they’ll cut through the reinforced plate on those attack ships faster than any manual cutting equipment.

‘Our maintenance teams have equipment for this kind of thing, but I understand if you don’t want to be grounded for that long. If we use the leeches, it’ll only take five minutes, but no one can be outside Affinity. They’ll be out in a minute,’ he replies.

I reach out to interact with the ships and there’s nothing, they aren’t broadcasting any kind of signal and they aren’t responding to any of my requests. They must have their core systems shut down.

“I just tried reaching out to the ships and nothing’s coming up. Jason is sending out leeches as we speak, everyone needs to load back up into Affinity,” I say to Jack, and as I do, I look to the right and behind me to see hatches opening revealing the leaches inside Affinity.

“Jane Doe, her name is Evelyn, and her abilities were new to the rest of the crew, they were unaware of her nature before our operation. I was able to pick up on quite a few things regarding our targets, I believe my debrief will be helpful.”

‘Everyone on the ground needs to return to Affinity. We are about to force entry to our ships using leeches,’ I comm. Moments later, everyone I see walking out and about turns tail and begins walking back to the main hanger, I follow suit.

“Thank you Jack, I will personally sit in on your debriefing. You will be receiving a bonus equal to your yearly salary in reparation for this disaster of an operation, and I apologize for any trauma this caused you. I will also personally be helping the cleanup teams when they collect the bodies of our fallen militia,” I say, as Jack follows closely behind my detail. It will be extremely helpful to have any insight into the group dynamics of our targets.

‘Look out, incoming. Airis wasn’t keen on our diplomatic stance,’ comms Dalton. Not a second later, two local ships explode above us, soon to rain down as debris. That’s it, I assumed that the Airis local government would not be so bold as to send fighters, but apparently not. We have to move quickly; Affinity is more vulnerable grounded than in any other situation. Luckily, everyone is already on their way inside.

‘Jason, cancel those leeches, open a cargo bay large enough for our three ships and have them lifted in, we have to go, our luck hasn’t been the greatest recently and I don’t want to be a sitting duck any longer than we have to be,’ I comm.

I start jogging to the hanger, the last thing I need is to get impaled by falling debris. Everyone around is reasonably calm, given the situation.