Chapter 29

Sidernis star system, inner system.

Waterside, Capital city of Sidernis Prime.

"You're joking, right? That's....not possible."

"Oh it very much is!" Said Sarah as she gestured at the city around them. "This city is impressive, I'll give them that, but it has nothing on what you can build with the gravity manipulation tools of the Near Verge!"

Seria shook her head, looking slightly incredulously at her captain as they made their way through the streets of Sidernis' planetary capital.

"But...What if the gravity generators fail? I mean, the top of the city would crash on the bottom part!"

"I would take a lot for that to happen. Triple redundancies on every main and backup system, which there are many, and if everything somehow fails the other side's backup generators are capable of holding them both in place if necessary."

"That's..."

"Expensive, but necessary. But hey, it's worth it. Believe me, you haven't lived until you see a street above your head with people looking like they're walking on the ceiling! And it gets better, on Viria-9 there-"

"GET DOWN!"

Sally, one of Hector's marine corporals, was good. Very, very good in fact, her instincts honed by decades of combat no amount of training could truly reproduce. But outside of her power armor she could only rely on her muscles, and even augmented by various cybernetics and genetic upgrades, it was still a pale shadow compared to the speed she could achieve in power armor.

Which meant that she slammed into Sarah's shield a split second after the stun darts pinged off of it. The marine bounced off, dazed but completely unharmed, and the unexpected bounce took their assailant by surprise, causing the next volley of stun darts to ping harmlessly off of the pavement where they were expecting her to tackle Sarah down to.

For a split second, silence reigned, their assailants stupefied, and everyone else too busy diving for cover...Including Sarah, whose implants had just released enough combat drugs into her system to kill an unaugmented human. Fortunately her implants kept the chemical cocktail carefully in check, and calmly scanned her surroundings as they triggered her armored space suit's integrated helmet, causing it to close around her head and pressurize her suit, running on internal air to protect against any potential chemical attack.

The situation was quite chaotic to say the least, however her implants were made exactly for this kind of situation, and quickly a series of positions were highlighted as possible enemy hiding spots. Sarah drew her gauss pistol, bracing her arm on the waist high wall she had taken cover behind, and forcibly stopped herself from flinching as another volley of stun darts pinged off around her, most harmlessly crashing into her cover or the building behind her, but a few ricocheting off of her shield, disturbingly apparently directly aimed at her face. Then she picked her target, and opened fire.

Somehow she managed to engage before Sally, although that was mainly because the marine's first reflex had been to protect her, not return fire. Her first gauss round harmlessly punched through the small metal wall serving as a form of guard rail on the overpass above them, and the assailant behind it made the mistake of flinching and trying to change position, briefly showing the top of their head above the barrier and betraying their position.

Sarah put three rounds in the barrier right below that head, and was rewarded with a scream of pain, and the subsequent gurgle of someone choking on their own blood. Then another volley of stun darts pinged off her shield...accompanied with a small number of laser bolts.

This time Sarah did flinch and took cover, reflexes too deeply ingrained in her by decades of merciless training at the hands of her own marines taking over. Just as she did, the rest of her detachment opened fire.

Sarah closed her eyes as she heard only 3 guns open fire. One was Sally's gauss rifle, and the 2 others were the mid verge laser pistols her crew used as a standard side arms. She'd gone with 6 people, that meant 3 had gone down to the stun darts or laser bolts.

Then the unmistakable hiss of a pulser joined the fray, and she popped her head over the wall to look for targets, and check on her friends.

Two of her crewmembers were laying down in the middle of the street, twitching slightly with the manner of people that had just been stunned, Sally was taking cover in the building opposite Sarah's, carefully taking aim and instantly blasting at anyone who tried to retaliate. So far, judging by the amount of screams and corpses splattered on the ground, she was making a fair dent in their enemies on the overpass.

To her right, Seria and Cindy were hidden behind what looked like a giant ornamental tree, taking turn firing at the building in front of them, before retreating as a hail of shots answered them.

And lastly, grimly taking cover behind a battered looking car, was Turral, a miniaturized pulser pistol in hand. Sarah knew the chief engineer had a personal armory to make some of her marines jealous, but she'd never realized the engineer had a weapon that had they still been in the Alterian Directorate, would have belonged to its special forces.

If the gauss rifle was punching through the cover with contemptuous ease, the pulser was shredding it. The building opposite Turral looked like it had been on the wrong end of an infantry platoon, not a single person, and the blood and liquefied flesh slowly dripping from it's chewed through facade was a testament to the pulser's devastating ability to crush anything without shields or power armor.

Sarah lifted her pistol once again, and started firing on the building Seria and Cindy were taking potshots at. Her first few shots were very tentative, and likely didn't hit anyone, but it caused one of the assailants to start repositioning...just in time for Cindy to blow their head off.

The engineer smiled, looking at Sarah and nodding, before looking faintly surprised as the tree behind her shook...and a tungsten round punched straight through her stomach. Sarah's eyes snapped to the new threat as a figure in power armor began wading through the bloody mess of Turral's handiwork, a gauss rifle in it's hands. Sarah pulled the trigger a split second after Sally...and her eyes widened as the slugs bounced off the of the armor, digging shallow gouges into it but otherwise leaving it unharmed. Their gauss weapons were High Verge tech, bought straight from the stores of an...amenable supply officer of the Heinsich Imperial Marine Corps, and made to at least be able to harm High Verge recon light power armor, and virtually anything lower tech than that. Which could only mean one thing...

"Oh shit." Muttered Sarah to herself. She'd prepared for a lot of contingencies for their excursions, but not that someone would attack them in the middle of the street with mil-spec High Verge heavy power armor!

Fortunately for her, she had very competent, and highly paranoid subordinates. Just as the figure started speaking, a feminine voice summoning them to surrender or be taken down and captured one by one, a grenade sailed through the air towards her.

The figure caught the grenade, and looked at Sally. Despite the slab of metal hiding the wearer's expression, she could feel the smirk the person underneath it was wearing on their face.

Before they could say anything however, the grenade activated...and Sarah recoiled as her eyes were filled with a flash, thankfully kept to a bearable level by the shield, which automatically dampened any emission of light above a certain threshold, and looked at what had once been a building in slack jawed horror and amazement.

She might not necessarily remember all the restrictions the city had put on their equipment, but she was fairly sure 'plasma grenades' weren't on the list of allowed weapons. Notably because, well, there wasn't anything left of the figure in power armor. Or anything within a few meters of where it once stood.

Sarah swallowed, and raised her voice, breaking the stunned silence.

"Unless you want to join your friend there, I highly suggest you gentleman and ladies throw down your weapons and surrender, now."

The inflection of command in her voice was unmistakable, as was the bloodthirsty rage that was starting to percolate through her mind as she saw Seria desperately using her medikit on Cindy, trying to staunch the bleeding.

It clearly got through to their assailants, as a handful of weapons were pitched through windows and over barriers, and a small knot of persons came into view, their hands raised in the air. Sarah was fairly sure she could hear a few legging it as well, but those were a problem for system security, not her.

Unless Cindy died. In which case no deity was going to be able to save these bastards from her wrath. Few managed to kill one of her crew members and live to tell about it.

Fewer still had died quickly.

"Good, I see some of you aren't complete idiots." Sarah stood up, trusting her shield to save her if one of them had taken the opportunity of his comrade's surrenders to play sniper, but no fire came. Sarah activated her internal communicator, and was immediately pinged by Elteria.

"What's going on?" Demanded the AI as soon as she got through, avoiding projecting her image in her captain's view in case she was still fighting. "Your team's emergency beacons activated! I've got Hector gearing up and distributing weapons from the armory, but we don't have a way to get groundside except by dropping in straight up."

Sarah blinked, and then realized that as soon as combat had started, her implants as well as her crew's had activated their respective emergency beacons.

"We've been ambushed. I've got 3 casualties, and one looks bad. I need fire support and a medevac right fucking now."

"Aye aye. Requesting permission to undock...One second." The AI's presence lessened in Sarah's implants as she made her way towards Cindy and Seria, before dropping down next to them and opening her own medikit, making sure to lean over the engineer so that her shield would take any shots directed at her, and began helping Seria. "...Well holy shit. Captain?"

"Yes?"

"The station hasn't authorized me to undock." Sarah's eyes widened, and she was about to give a rather...sharp reply when Elteria continued. "But they're sending their own support. Incoming shuttle from up high!"

Sarah looked up, and saw a trail of fire in the sky as a Dominion assault shuttle ploughed through the atmosphere. Clearly it must have been some sort of quick reaction force, staying in low orbit, ready to deploy anywhere as needed. Given the string of terrorist campaigns throughout the Protectorate, an extremely wise precaution....and a highly welcome one.

Sarah looked back down, catching a glimpse of Sally lining up their surrendered foes against a wall, before going back to Cindy.

"Is-Is she gonna be okay?"

Sarah looked up at Seria idly noting that the newbie's face was lightly splattered with the engineer's blood, and nodded.

"Yes." She quickly checked the diagnostic system in her medikit. "She'll have to go through a few hours of regeneration therapy in the medbay, but she'll be fine afterwards."

Seria sighed in relief, and leaned back.

"Oh thank the stars...What the fuck just happened?"

"Ambush. Like I said, I have a lot of enemies."

Although given the fact that her foes had only used stun darts initially, she had a pretty fair idea who it must have been. She'd have felt bad for using lethal force from the get go...if they hadn't fired their lasers at her so fast after she'd retaliated they had to have begun drawing a bead on her before then. They'd probably only intended to take out her shield, but she didn't truly care at that point.

Sarah looked to the side as Turral joined them, the chief engineer warily keeping her pistol in her hand and scanning their surroundings.

"How are you doing?" Asked the captain.

"I'm fine. Low on ammo, a few scratches, but...fine. Just checked up on Charlotte and Maria by the way, they're stunned, but otherwise okay. They'll just have one hell of a headache when the paralyzing agents wear off."

Sarah sighed in relief.

"That's good. Very good. We-"

Sarah looked up sharply as her voice was drowned out by the hum of a grav drive pushed to its limit. A Dominion assault shuttle slammed to a stop meters above the buildings, fully 50 meters in length and covered in enough ordnance to level a small city.

Suddenly hatches popped open all over the craft, and figures in the Dominion Marine Corps' standardized power armor dropped through, hitting the ground like meteors of metal and death, before deploying all around her battered group.

"Captain Sarah Ciel?" Said one of the marines as he made his way towards her, escorted by half a dozen other, constantly sweeping the buildings around them with their laser rifles. "I am major Skanor Ory, Dominion Marine Corps. We're here to rescue you."

Sarah smiled.

"It's good to see you major." She gestured at Cindy, then at her two crew members in the streets. "We have casualties on our hands however."

"We'll take care of them." Assured the major, making a simple gesture, and disks lowered themselves from the shuttle, carrying a group of white clad and red cross bearing medics, with their accompanying stretchers. They rushed towards the casualties, and Sarah stepped back, letting them do their work. "What the hell happened?"

Sarah looked at the major, and gestured at the mess around them.

"We got ambushed, and returned fire. Things devolved from there."

The major looked around, noticeably stopping at the bodies fallen from the overpass, as well as the chewed through and partially vaporized building.

"I...see. And I also see why you only took 3 casualties. Well, captain, my men will handle the local authorities. If you would care to, I believe it would be for the best if you joined me and your wounded, and went back to orbit with us."

"Of course major, it would be my pleasure." And for once, it wasn't just a figure of speech.