Void Space
Exodus Fleet
Military Station Bastion
Lance Corporal Aiko Sato
Aiko sat in the nondescript interrogation room dreading what was coming. Should would be debriefed on the events at Objective Charlie. It was a nightmare she wanted to forget, but her superiors had been more than patient. Her medical treatment on the Embercrest kept her unconscious for the trip back, preventing a remote debriefing, but the second the Ember docked with Bastion, she was ordered to accompany MPs, those are Military Police, to this very room. Now she was awaiting the officer that would debrief her. She wished her big sister were here with her. The doctor on the Embercrest told her Fumiko hadn’t even been to see her in sickbay. Aiko wondered what her sister was up to.
It was while lost in these thoughts that the door finally opened and a man in a military uniform entered. Aiko recognized the Alliance Navy Lieutenant Commander’s gold oak leaf on his uniform, and a name tape that read “Chen-Lee.” Aiko immediately stood to attention and saluted.
Chen-Lee took a moment to review some information on their e-glass, a portable digital device used for media of all kinds, before they placed it on the table and returned the salute. “Have a seat, Corporal Sato,” Chen-Lee gestured to the chair she had just vacated, “I’m Lieutenant Commander Emir Chen-Lee. I’ll be conducting your debrief.”
Aiko did as instructed, returning to her seat, while Chen-Lee continued to reviewing information on his e-glass. Several minutes passed like this before he finally broke the silence, “You understand that this is a formal debrief following the events on Redion II that resulted in the loss of your entire squad, your Platoon Sergeant, and your Lieutenant?”
“Yes Sir.”
“And you understand that we continue to operate under a wartime footing, maintaining de facto martial law, and therefore many of your rights both as a private citizen and a member of the Alliance Marine Corps are suspended until such time as we are no longer under martial law?”
“Yes Sir.”
“Good,” Chen-lee said, almost cordially compared to his machine gun recitation of the previous information. “Tell me what happened in your own words.
Aiko took a drink from the glass of water sitting on the table before starting. “Well sir, as I’m sure you’re aware we were one of two teams sent to Redion II on an R&T Recon, that’s research and technology recon. We were to enter and recon Objective Charlie for any Pre-Fall information that could help in the war effort.”
Chen-Lee made no outward sign of agreement or disagreement as he tapped at his e-glass while Aiko spoke.
“Everything was SOP until we reached the surface buildings for OBJ Charlie.”
Three Days Prior
Redion II
Lance Corporal Aiko Sato – 1st Squad, 1st Platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Batt., 6th Marine Regiment
Aiko’s head was on a swivel as she broke through the treeline at Objective Charlie and entered the clearing. No signs of life, but the buildings look like they could have been lived in less than twenty-four hours ago. Everything seemed well kept, but at the same time there was something not quite right.
She was nearly startled from her reverie by her Lieutenant, Gao Yu, casually strolling past her towards the nearest building as he maglocked his Bravo to the back of his armour. “Sir,” Aiko reached out, “We haven’t cleared the area. Recommend you remain back while we do so.”
Yu was casual in the way he waved Aiko off, “Blackbird scanned a ten square kilometer area around this facility when we entered atmo, there’s nothing alive down here, Sato.” Aiko turned to look at her Platoon Sergeant, Hilda Andersson, and even through their sealed buckets she knew Andersson read her concern.
Yu tested the control panel on the wall beside what appeared to be a large elevator, but nothing happened. “Team 1, I want this elevator functioning inside three minutes.”
Lance Corporal Xander Johnson said, “Yes sir!” As he waved the rest of Team 1 forward.
It took longer than three minutes to wire up fuel cells to the elevator. Aside from Johnson, Team 1 was a green fire team. FNGs times three. Fuckin’ New Guys. Nine minutes after Yu ordered Team 1 to get the elevator working, they declared it ready. That’s when Lieutenant Yu made mistake number two.
“Mount up.” Yu ordered the squad.
Aiko opened her mouth to say something, but Andersson beat her to it. “Sir, SOP dictates at least one team remain up here, and that you remain with them until we clear the facility.”
Yu’s body language, even through the armour, screamed butterbar with a chip on his shoulder. “Sergeant, I’ll make it an order if that makes you feel better, but we’re going down into this facility.” Yu shifted his gaze to look over the rest of the squad, “And if that’s a problem, we can discuss insubordination when we return to Blackbird.”
Yu was a new additional to the platoon, making this the first mission Aiko’s squad had gone on with him. Calling out the insubordination card so early told Aiko he was perfectly content with heavy-handed tactics. The squad looked around to see if anyone else would speak up, but they came to the same conclusion she had. This wasn’t the battle they wanted to fight.
Aiko’s squad filed onto the elevator, starting a tense fifteen-minute ride down into the bowls of Objective Charlie. When the elevator finally stopped the and the doors opened, every gun except Yu’s came up and pointed at the lone figure standing in the hallway ahead of them.
The figure was clearly male, wearing a generic pair of medical scrubs and a lab coat. If not for the odd smile on his face, and what he said next, Aiko might have been happy to see him.
“Greetings!” The male figure said, “We’ve been expecting you.”
“Stand down,” Yu said, walking out to greet the unknown figure, “Lieutenant Gao Yu, Alliance Marine Corps.” They shook hands, but the unknown man’s movement of his arm and hand slightly off to Aiko.
She could see her fellow Marines warring with the situation in their minds. All except Andersson who stood there stoically staring at the back of Yu’s head. Aiko got the sense her Sergeant had already come to a conclusion about this situation, and she was just waiting for the right time to act.
“Please, follow me.” The unknown man said.
Without a second of hesitation, Yu followed behind the stranger, and her squad fell in behind. The hallway lead directly away from the elevator. Several meters from the lift, Aiko noticed the unlit exit sign hanging above a door with a stairwell sign on it. She couldn’t help but think that was a secondary point of egress, but because they didn’t recon the area they had no idea where the surface exit was.
The strange man lead them through a winding series of corridors. Shortly into the walk Aiko checked her HUD to confirm her suit was recording the path they took, which is the only reason why she noticed the radio desync icon. Flagging down Andersson, she said, “Sarge, is your radio desynced as well?”
Andersson kept her voice low when she responded, “Yeah, it cut out on the elevator. Shouldn’t be possibl to block quantum communications, so I’m guessing they’ve done something to destabilize the radios somehow. Disable the entangled pairs.”
“That’s a bit over my head, Sarge,” Aiko sounded a bit sheepish because she knew her sister, Fumiko, would chastise her for not learning about every device they used. “Do you think it’s impacting Park’s RTO module?”
The RTO, or radio telephone operator module, was the piece of equipment that housed cartridges with entangled pairs for the M.W.A.S.S. Shroudmoor and the dropships that brought them in, as well as the other insertion team’s RTO module. Although the term RTO was millennia old, the term never officially left military lingo.
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“I’m leaning into yes…” Before Andersson could continue her statement, the stranger and Yu stopped in front of a sealed door to what appeared to be a shielded testing room. The hallway they had just left opened up to the space they now stood in. Perhaps six meters by ten, with a table and chairs near the sealed room. A literal and figurative dead end, that’s what it looked like to Aiko.
Yu’s third and final mistake, the proverbial straw the broke the camel’s back, came next. As he removed his bucket, he said, “Get comfortable and remove your buckets. Let the good doctor see our faces.”
Aiko couldn’t imagine the tension could get worse, but those words took the scene up a gear. Aiko’s grip on her Bravo tightened, as the members of Team 1 followed Yu’s instructions. Team 2 and three subtly shifted their positions, preparing for a fight.
Andersson spoke up first, “Negative, Sir. This is an unsecure location. We will not be compromising suit integrity to make some indigs feel warm and fuzzy.”
Without his bucket, Yu couldn’t hide a hint of anger that crossed his face, or the recognition that things were about to escalate. Before anyone could act though, movement from the stranger brought their attention to him. His eyes, nose, mouth, and ears were all leaking a colourful gas that seemed to writhe and twist like it was alive.
Andersson didn’t hesitate to lift her rifle, “It’s a trap!” She punctuated this with a several rounds from her Bravo aimed center mass on the stranger.
This prompted Team 1 to start raising their weapons, but before any of them could get a bead on Andersson she used the significant strides her height afforded her and closed the distance with Yu, tackling him to the ground.
At the same time the colourful gas was pouring out of the stranger and reaching for the uncovered faces of Team 1. Their attention was split between Andersson and Yu wrestling on the ground on one side of the room, and Team 2 and 3 near the opening to the hallway on the other side of the room. Johnson, Ramirez, Khan, and Park didn’t stand a chance. One minute they were debating what to do, the next that gas had entered them and their faces went slack.
Aiko didn’t hesitate, and neither did the remainder of her squad. As Team 1 brought their Bravos up to shoot, a flurry of exotic matter bursts crisscrossed the room. Aiko dropped to a knee, reducing her profile right before a series of bursts flew over her head where she had just been standing. Someone collapsed, falling against her and knocking her forward and pinning her for a second before the body kept rolling.
When she got her feet back under her, Aiko took stock of the situation. Team 1 was down, Andersson was straddling Yu, a klaxon was ringing through the facility, and her suit registered loud footsteps in the hallway before someone in her squad opened fire. Andersson twisted for a second to face her, “Get out of here! Report back to the fleet!”
Turning to face Andersson as she spoke her orders, Aiko saw the last of the gas slipping into Yu. “Sarge! Look out!” She reached for Andersson as a manic grin grew on Yu’s face and he started to hammer at Andersson’s helmet.
“Go! That’s an order!”
Before she could protest again, someone yanked Aiko’s arm toward the hallway. The muted staccato of Bravos firing with the thwip sound of exotic matter beads exiting the barrel. She fell in, Bravo at low ready so as not to hit a friendly.
Team 2, Aiko’s team, still had three including herself with they left the room, while two from Team 3 were mobile with a third injured. Setting a quick pace back to the elevator, the hallways went quiet. No enemies, no ambient noise. When the injured PFC Patel and Lance Corporal Jones who was helping her went missing behind them without a sound, Aiko ordered them to run.
She was faster in a flat-out run than her teammates, so she paced herself to keep with them. It didn’t matter, as her teammates started getting swarmed from side doors and pulled inside. The first time it happened, they got PFC Ali from Team 3. She tried to slow and help her, but that’s when she saw a group of ten pursuing them from the way they had come. The last to go down when they were nearly at the elevator was Ochoa-Park.
Aiko paused slowed for a second, ready to help at least one teammate, until she heard the muffled wump sound of a grenade going off. She bowed her head for a second, then broke into a dead sprint down the last hallway.
As she neared the door with the stairwell sign, she skidded to a halt. Ripping an ExM exotic matter grenade from her suit, she set the grenade for maximum yield, and overrode the minimum five second timer to just three seconds. A warning flashed on her HUD advising the override would be logged. She blinked it away, confirmed the override, and side-lobbed the grenade straight at the elevator.
Switching on suit boost and cycling for strength, she felt the telltale tingle of increased potential as the suit boosted her muscles. Aiko lunged up the first set of twelve stairs with a slight boost from her hand on the railing, reaching the landing and switchback to do it again.
When Aiko finally burst out the door at surface level, she switched off suit boost and checked her HUD compass bearing. The door exited out the back of the building relative to the elevator, meaning she had to circle around to the front to head for her intended destination.
Around the front of the building, she determined her heading, dropped a small spherical sensor drone in passive detection mode, then flipped suit boost on and set it for speed. She cursed at the twinge of pain, having already run suit boost for too long to get up the stairs. She would be lucky if this didn’t induce long-term damage, but she had to get to Fumiko’s squad and warn them.
“Just under ten kilometers. You have to do this, Aiko.” Her words of self encouragement may not work, but saving her big sister was all the motivation she needed.
Aiko took off at a dead sprint into the forest. On flat, solid terrain she could just edge over sixty kilometers per hour. Forests were not flat, solid ground. Inclines and declines, tree roots, branches, loose underbrush, it all slowed her down.
Three minutes into her run, Aiko got the notification from the drone. Multiple heat signatures detected, and then the drone stopped transmitting. That slight shift in her focus almost made her run headlong into a tree before juked to the side. Another distraction in her HUD started flashing, warning her that she was well beyond safe tolerances for use of suit boost. She blinked that message away and refocused on her path.
Just over six minutes later Aiko saw the light shining through where the edge of the forest opened up to the clearing at OBJ Alpha. Bursting through the treeline, a palpable relief came over her to see Alliance Marines, helmets still on, setup in a tactical position. This brief elation, coupled with the distracting thoughts, were the last coherent memories she had of the event though, as her fatigued body failed to fully respond to her commands, catching on an outcropping, and sending her flying forward to concuss her head and slide over three meters across the ground.
Present Day
Military Station Bastion
Lance Corporal Aiko Sato
“And that’s as far as I remember with clarity, Sir.” Aiko shook her head as if doing so would shake loose some of the memories. “There was talking that I couldn’t make out, and I think weapons fire, and then I woke up in the Ember’s sickbay.”
“Thank you, Lance Corporal,” Chen-Lee’s tone did not sound thankful, nor did it sound reproachful, however he paused for a moment in thought. “Are you familiar with a group in the Exodus Fleet we refer to as The Cult?”
“Yes Sir.”
“How familiar would you say you are with them?” His tone wasn’t quite accusatory, but Aiko was growing uncomfortable with this line of questioning.
“Mostly what we hear in official reports, Sir.” Aiko fought to keep her tone neutral so as not to infer anything for Chen-Lee.
“Have you had any interaction with a member of The Cult, or are you aware of anyone with affiliation to The Cult?” Chen-Lee was looking her directly in the eyes now.
Aiko steeled her nerves, believing in the truth to maintain her innocence from this fishing expedition. “No Sir, and if I may be frank, those nutjobs should see my suit footage from Redion II. That would set them straight.”
Chen-Lee held Aiko’s gaze longer than was comfortable before continuing, “What if I told you The Cult was present at Redion II.” He paused briefly, “Not just present, but among the team you inserted with.”
Aiko’s eyes widened involuntarily, the statement overriding her calm outward demeanour, “Sir, that’s…it’s just not…no…no, that sonuva bitch!” Anger replaced shock as Aiko almost spit the next words through gritted teeth, “Lieutenant. Gao. Yu.”
“I’ll permit the loss of decorum under the circumstances, Lance Corporal Sato, but I ask that you contain future outbursts.” His rebuke was fair, but only added to Aiko’s embarrassment at losing her cool in front of an officer. “Not just Gao Yu, who has been officially stripped of his rank, posthumously, but also Xander Johnson, former Lance Corporal of Team 1.”
The shock had returned to Aiko’s face. Xander was in her platoon in boot camp. She wouldn’t have considered him a friend, but he wasn’t an enemy either. Never would she have guessed he was a fanatical member of The Cult.
Chen-Lee’s pause seemed time to allow her to digest some of the information before he stacked more on, “We also have intel that suggests Emilio Ramirez, Ali Khan, and Jin Park, formerly PFCs in your squad were newly recruited. All four have likewise been posthumously and unceremoniously discharged from the Corps. Dishonourably.”
Anger once again replaced shock as she remembered the hesitation from Ramirez, Khan, and Park, and then wondered if they were really traitors, or just too new to know better. “Sir, I’m not certain Ramirez, Khan, and Park were traitors. They seemed…less sure of what Yu was saying and doing.”
“You’re not required to be certain, Lance Corporal,” Chen-Lee took a more commanding tone this time, “We have damning evidence, including Yu’s personal recommendation to allow those three into the Corps, and his request to have them assigned to his platoon.”
Properly cowed, Aiko lowered her gaze slight. “Yes Sir.”
“The good news, Lance Corporal, is that I’m confident you had no part in their plot.”
“And the bad news Sir?” Aiko’s voice was not as steady as she would have liked.
“Final Roll Call for Sergeant Andersson and the members of Teams 2 and 3 will start at 08:00 tomorrow morning.” For the first time Chen-Lee showed more humanity for a fellow soldier, “You should head to the Medical Centre as well. Your sister is still unconscious”
“My…Fumiko?” Aiko’s heart dropped. She knew Fumiko hadn’t visited her in the sick bay of the Embercrest, but since Redion II she had either been unconscious or sequestered. “Sir, permission to be dismissed?”
“Granted, just don’t bowl anyone over on your way there.”