High above the skies of a barren desert planet, a lone destroyer sat in a tight orbit. On the worn and battle-scarred hull in faded paint the name Shitsuyōna was printed in Roman and Japanese characters. It had rolled out of the Mitsubishi starship yards in Earth’s orbit under the flag of Japan sixty-five years ago. Now Mitsubishi, Japan, Earth, and all of human civilization were naught but ash and embers, but the tough little ship soldiered on. Shitsuyōna. Relentless. An appropriate name for such a ship.

However, the crew of the ship, who lived aboard her, loved and hated her, had a different name for the temperamental old bitch: Shitty.

Shitty was a terror in battle, her Mitsubishi-Kawasaki fusion drive-state of the art when she was launched-outperformed even modern (by post-war standards) designs in terms of both power and reliability. It also outperformed them in being a gargantuan pain in the ass to perform maintenance on. Nevertheless, they were unfailingly reliable in combat. All of the ship’s critical systems were. The not-so-critical systems, however, were decidedly less reliable. The air-scrubbers, for example, were unflinchingly dutiful in recycling exhaled carbon dioxide into breathable air. The air fresheners, however, were another story. Suffice to say, there was more than one reason for the name Shitty.

Her crew regarded her the way a juvenile might regard their older sibling. She was a spiteful, annoying bully, but when the chips were down, she took care of her little brothers and sisters. She’d taken a beating that would’ve crippled ships twice her size and then come out swinging. Her scars were numerous, each having their own story. However, they all came together to tell another, larger story:

When humanity calls, Shitsuyōna answers.

Unfortunately, humanity had a tendency to call on Shitsuyōna quite a lot more than her crew would hope. There was, in fact, yet another reason for her nickname: She got all of the shitty jobs. Which was why, when the rest of the fleet had wandered off to forage, the battered little destroyer had been left behind to ferry rangers around to finish up some mercenary work humanity had contracted out.

The Shitsuyōna’s captain, Commander Marku, was considerably more enthusiastic about his current assignment. He had something of a reputation among the Space Force as a man who lived for a fight. He was tall, gray-haired and olive-skinned, his face just as tough and weather-beaten as his ship’s. He was on the wrong side of middle-aged, a decorated officer who’d risen through the ranks over the decades since enlisting as a young man years before the Ivo war. He’d been in the Force so long he was saltier than the brine of Earth’s devastated seas. He was also completely mad. Or, at least, that’s what his crew said. They were convinced he’d had more than a few screws knocked loose during the war.

To Major Albert Newman, commander of the ranger detachment on Shitsuyōna, the pair of brown eyes that scrutinized the recon maps of the bandit compound didn’t look much like the eyes of a mad man. Just an experienced and battle-tested officer. Those eyes turned to him, and their owner spoke.

“Your rangers are gonna be really damned exposed going in like this.” Commander Marku remarked.

Al nodded. “Yeah, tell me about it. Nothing but wide open desert far as the eye can see, flatter than a pancake. Which is exactly why we need to air-drop right on top of them. Approaching on foot is suicide.”

Marku grimaced and shook his head. “I don’t like it. You have even less cover from the air. Those skies are too damn clear.”

“Which is why we’re dropping at night.”

Marku snorted. “Even amateurs like this lot are bound to have at least a few thermal scopes. And night or day, if they’ve got any laser defenses once they reveal themselves they’ll chew through half a dozen of our people before my counter batteries can melt them. You need some kind of concealment.”

“Smoke bombs?”

Marku shook his head. “No, those won’t obstruct the lasers enough.”

Al wracked his brain, and then when it hit him he smiled at the salty old officer. “I’ve got a few ideas.”

Perhaps there was some merit to Marku’s reputation for madness, because when Al told him his plan he didn’t balk at it or list off the dozen or so reasons why they shouldn’t do it.

He just grinned right back.

—

Al walked among his rangers, slapping them on the back or muttering words of encouragement. There was an even mix of people among the rangers. The majority were young bucks (and a few does) looking to prove themselves, eager for a fight, and also quick to get themselves killed. They paced, or chattered among themselves, or fidgeting in their seats. Others were more experienced, sitting quietly and waiting for the drop. A few were like Al, salty old bastards who’d been wearing a ranger’s armor for longer than most of the drop bay’s occupants had been alive. They were all wearing an NCO’s rank insignia, walking among the rangers the way Al was. Al envied them, in a way. He’d liked being an NCO a hell of a lot more than he liked being an officer. He hadn’t the faintest idea how he’d ever been convinced to wear an officer’s rank, but here he was.

The ship began to vibrate, and Al walked to the front of the drop bay. He banged on the bulkhead to get everyone’s attention.

“Alright kiddos, buckets on.” he said, placing his helmet on his head.

His rangers donned their helmets and looked back at him, their faces replaced by the familiar visage of a UN ranger helm, the only indication that there was a human beneath it were the two opaque eye holes that his rangers stared at him through. Even with scraped and battered hand-me-down armor that necessity had given them, they still cut a striking figure.

Al went on. “We’ve got a compound stuffed to the gills with bad guys sitting on a pile of Nodexi civilians. We drop in, kill the bad guys, free the civvies. Clear?”

“Aye sir!” the group shouted.

Al nodded and moved over to his spot. The ship’s vibrations reached a loud peak and then started to peter off. There was quiet anticipation amongst the rangers, and Al decided to break the silence.

“Rangers, how many?” He asked, putting on his graveliest NCO voice.

“Not one!” his rangers chorused back.

“How many?”

“Not one!”

“HOW MANY?”

“NOT ONE!”

Al smiled to himself as the rangers chanted, their spirits raised. He hadn’t lost his touch yet.

A red light shined through the drop bay.

“Seal check!” an NCO shouted.

Each ranger checked his neighbor’s armor seals and shouted “clear!” going down the two lines. Al heard his training come to his mind for the thousandth time. Arms crossed, legs straight, chin tucked. Arms crossed, legs straight, chin tucked.

A voice chimed in Al’s ear. “Icarus, this is Overwatch, are you green, over?”

“Overwatch, Icarus, we are green, over.” Al said back.

“Understood Icarus. Drop in ten, over.”

The light changed, and the drop bay was bathed in green light.

“Drop drop drop!” Al shouted to his rangers.

The two groups of rangers stood in a line facing each other. Trap doors began opening in rapid succession on Al’s line, the rangers standing on them dropping like lead. Al braced himself, hearing nothing but the loud clang of the doors opening, growing louder as it approached him. It still took him by surprise just like it always did, and the gravity of the dusty planet below him seized him in an iron grip and he plummeted through its skies.

—

Al watched Shitsuyōna shrink above him as he plummeted to the ground. He looked down at the vast empty desert below him and smiled. This fall was going to take a good while. He looked around him as his rangers spread their arms and legs and maneuvered into a formation. The atmosphere was on the thin side on this planet (even without the altitude), albeit breathable, surprisingly enough. The nearby Nodexi colony, Yuvintbirfset, had used this so far unnamed rock to host a few research bases looking to survey the planet in detail, until they’d been seized during the recent invasion by a bandit warlord.

Some particularly influential pirate leader had gathered together a small army composed of all lowlifes from the region (who weren’t on the Diln’s payroll) and had invaded the system with a sizeable armada of makeshift warships.This far out into the frontier, the Coalition and the Imperial presence was limited, to say the least. The beleaguered Coalition garrison commander for the district had a destroyer, a handful of elderly frigates, and dozen second-line interceptors to cover the entire region. Even if they had managed to gather them all together, it was far from a sure thing that they’d be able to drive off the warlord.

So, the colonial government in exile had hired the best mercenaries in the Arm: Humans. Which was the reason that Al was currently hurtling towards the ground at alarming speeds. Humanity in exile really only had one resource: it’s relatively large and professional military. While the Fleet was largely self-sufficient, there were some supplies that they simply did not have the capacity to produce themselves. So, from time to time, humanity’s disproportionately powerful military was contracted out to fight alien conflicts. While they had never once taken a contract that would bring them into conflict with one of the two warring superstates, and Admiral Khatri took special care to shy away from the more morally dubious contracts, humanity had still developed something of a reputation for the work among the sorts of people in the Arm who hired mercenaries.

The Yuvintbirfset government had made an offer that Humanity couldn’t refuse: a huge mountain of dirt. Soil, to be specific. Yuvintbirfset was a colony whose primary export was arable soil, and what a treasure it was. The government had offered humanity enough soil to outfit three new agriculture ships, with every gram of it engineered to human botanists’ exacting specifications. Engineered soil was obscenely expensive, so the payment offered was enough to buy the services of a heavy cruiser and its escorts. The small fleet had made short work of the warlord’s orbiting fleet, and the colony was liberated in a lightning fast ground assault. The rest of the task force had gone off for a rendezvous with the main fleet for repairs and rearmament, and poor old Shitty had been left behind to mop up the last few pockets of resistance.

The only significant remaining pocket of that resistance was currently many thousands of meters below Al, and approaching rapidly. The bandits had razed most of the science outposts on the desert planet to the ground, and then holed up in the largest of them, turning it into a base. When the shattered warlord’s fleet had been routed, this little base had been left behind. Rather than surrendering like sensible people, the bandits were using the captured Nodexi researchers as human-er, alien-shields.

By now the small base was close enough to be visible to Al without using his helmet’s zoom function. He looked around himself to the rangers surrounding him.

“Break.” he said into his helmet comlink. The rangers immediately began to break off into units, preparing.

A voice came into Al’s radio. “Icarus, Overwatch, stand by for fire support in thirty, over.”

“Overwatch, Icarus, understood, over.” He grinned beneath his helmet in a mixture of excitement and terror.

“Hold onto your hats people!” he called through the company comm. He gritted his teeth.

Several horrifically loud sonic booms assaulted the ears of the rangers as cannon rounds soared past them at hypervelocity.

And those are the light cannon rounds. Al thought to himself with morbid amusement.

A handful of seconds after passing the rangers the rounds impacted their target. Which, incidentally, was not the raider base. Instead, it was the ground in front of it. A gigantic cloud of dust and debris was kicked up into the air, engulfing most of the compound.

“Now!” Al ordered his rangers, and they all deployed their wingsuits. Al struggled not to lose his lunch as he was lurched around by the sudden change in control as he glided for the front of the compound. Within a few moments, Al’s suit computer calculated that it was time. His parachute deployed, and soon he crashed into the sand, skidding on his ass a few dozen meters from the front of the base. He didn’t stop, instead turning his momentum into a sprint as he ran for the front wall, his chute rapidly winding itself back up behind him. Two platoons of rangers performed the same action, and the entire unit sprinted for the wall. The debris in the air had guarded against anti-personnel lasers, and now the precious concealment it provided was rapidly dissipating.

Without prompting, two teams of rangers began setting breaching charges while their fellows took up positions around them. A handful of deadly accurate shots rang out as bandit gunmen placed on the roofs exposed themselves to the ranger’s thermal vision through the dust cloud and suffered the consequences. Within seconds, the charges were placed and the breaching teams got into position. The carefully placed explosives blew a hole in the wall, and shots rang out as rangers flooded into the building and took up positions within its hallways. In the aftermath of the brief firefight Al saw corpses from many species on the floor, but fortunately none of them were human.

No orders were given, the rangers had the building’s layout memorized and had been rehearsing a breaching strategy for days. Getting here intact was the hard part. Now, it was business as usual.

The rangers poured through the building, one platoon circling left while the other circled right. Resistance was suspiciously sporadic. Or, at least, that’s what Al believed. The rangers moved in breaching teams, blowing down doors and rapidly clearing the rooms. A decent number of bandits were killed, but not a single hostage had been found.

Figures. Al thought with a grimace as he heard the reports. He had a terrible feeling that he knew exactly where the hostages were. His enemies were not blind, and they’d had time to prepare. If they couldn’t defend the compound, they really only had one card to play, and they were well aware of it. Odds were good that they’d retreated to some kind of bastion when their air defenses failed.

It wasn’t long before the entire ground floor was cleared of hostiles. The enemy’s numbers had been substantially lower than estimated. Unfortunately, there was still one last place to check.

Al stood in front of the heavy steel doors of the compound’s basement, his rangers fanning out to find the other entrances to it. An intercom on the door buzzed.

Guessing that’s for me. Al gave a resigned sigh and made his way to the door, tapping the intercom screen. A heavily scarred Tlassiopei appeared on the other end in a video call. His growls and hisses were translated by Al’s helmet.

“Human! You’ve fought honorably, but I’m afraid that the time for honor is over.”

Al was almost amused. “Oh, is that so? What did you have in mind?”

“I have some things I intend to purchase from you, and the lives of these hostages will serve as my funds.”

“I see. Let’s hear it.” As much as it pained Al to negotiate with scum like this, at the end of the day he was not the one in charge here. The Nodexi would want to hear the criminals’ demands. They were not the sort of species that got hung up on matters of “honor”. It was simultaneously their most noble and ignoble quality: for good or ill, the giant centipede-eels were always willing to go to the table, no matter how foul their company would be. And at the end of the day, they were the ones signing Al’s hypothetical paycheck.

The Tlassiopei spoke succinctly, his demands had likely been rehearsed. “We want a Dark Space capable ship, either a tramp freighter or light passenger liner will suffice, and a pair of shuttles capable of ferrying us to this ship. In exchange, all hostages will be released, save for five which will be retained as insurance. These five will be dropped off in a lifepod, and after a timed delay its distress signal will be activated. All of the hostages come out in one piece and my compatriots and I get to keep our heads. Everybody wins.”

Al actually laughed at that. A professional hostage negotiator, he was not. “Everyone wins, but some win more than others, right?”

The Tlassiopei chuffed in amusement. “Just take the demands to your employers, primate.”

“No, wait. I have a counter offer: surrender now and you’ll all walk out of that room alive, I swear it.”

The Tlassiopei chuffed again. “Death now at your hands, or death later at the hands of the executioner. Not much of an offer.”

“The Nodexi don’t practice the death penalty.”

“So I get to spend the rest of my life in prison instead? Tempting, but I’ll have to pass.”

The ranger shrugged. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He killed the intercom and went out to make a phone call.

—

Nodexi didn’t have much in the way of facial expressions, but Al guessed that Yuvintbirfset’s governor was looking annoyed.

“They cannot seriously expect us to just…wilt like this, surely?” the governor asked.

Commander Maru started to shrug, before catching himself. The aliens wouldn’t understand a shrug. “It is difficult to say, governor. This is likely their Hail Mary-er, their last gamble. What happens if we refuse is anyone’s guess. They may very well be prepared to die if their demands are not met, and they’re almost certainly prepared to murder, at the very least.”

“These demands are completely unreasonable. I’d expected bargaining for reduced sentences, perhaps negotiating for internment in a penal colony rather than a prison, but this…the answer is no. I have no interest in negotiating with such unreasonable individuals.”

The big alien swiveled its head and looked at the screen where Al watched the discussion over a video call. It stared at him with the black empty pits it had for eyes.

“Tell these criminals that I am prepared to offer a reduction from life without parole to life with parole, and a deferment from prison to penal colony. This is my only offer. Should they refuse, or harm one of the hostages, you have my permission to storm the basement with lethal force.”

It seemed even Nodexi diplomacy had its limits. Al nodded. “Understood, Governor.”

The Governor nodded and closed the call. Al shook his head. The idea that a criminal could use hostages to bargain down his punishment was completely absurd to his human sense of justice. Yet, his employers were not human. What was a mockery of justice to him was perfectly sensible negotiation in the interest of preserving life to the Nodexi mind. At the end of the day, if all of the hostages walk out of there alive then I suppose it doesn’t really matter, does it?

He made his way back to the basement door and buzzed the intercom. After a moment, the scarred Tlassiopei’s face appeared in front of the camera.

“Well, human, what is your answer?”

“The Yuvintbirfset government will not be submitting to your demands. They offer each of you a reduction of your maximum possible sentences from life without parole to life with parole, and the option to have your sentence deferred to a penal colony if you so choose. In exchange, you will release the hostages and submit to their justice system.” Al suspected he already knew what the answer would be, and he subconsciously unslung his rifle.

“...Is this a joke?”

Al grimaced beneath his helmet. “No, it’s their only offer.”

The Tlassiopei bared its teeth and growled. “So, they choose battle? A shame that such honorable warriors need kill each other for such gutless cowards, isn’t it? I’ll see you in combat, human.”

The big alien made to cut the connection, and Al prepared to order his men in. As he was drawing in his breath to do just that, the Tlassiopei was knocked out of frame by a massive Strit. There was a scuffle, and it ended when the Strit got its pinchers around the Tlassiopei’s throat. It grabbed his torso with the other and twisted until the hairy alien’s neck snapped. The Strit discarded the corpse the way one might dump a lunch tray, and swiveled its body to face the camera.

“Human, ignore previous spokesman. Terms are acceptable; will submit to your custody-”

The big arthropod was cut short by a gaping hole appearing in its chest. It collapsed to the ground. Behind it stood a Krrg holding a mag rifle. It shrieked in rage.

“Traitor!”

Then all hell broke loose as the bandits turned on each other. Al didn’t waste time watching. He shouldered his rifle and joined the rangers stacking up on the entrance. Looks like I’m leading from the front today.

“Breach breach breach!” He roared over the company comms.

—

Rinsvretqaglo sat on the ground, her armored body coiled protectively around her daughters. She’d worked as a contractor for one of the research outposts on this planet, what felt like a lifetime ago. When the raiders had come, she’d been rounded up with all the other denizens of the planet who hadn’t been murdered and stuffed into pens in this compound. She had lived in terror for months at the criminal’s hands, along with hundreds of others. It was sheer dumb luck that she and her daughters hadn’t yet been carted off to be sold into slavery with most of the others. The raiders were disorganized in terms of logistics, and a low-priority task like transporting a few hundred slaves was not high up on the to-do list. So, she had lived in this same compound while the raiders carted away the population piecemeal, waking every day to the terrible fear that she and her daughters would be on the next tramp freighter heading for Diln space.

Then, something had changed. The shipments had stopped going out. Their already meager rations had been cut, and the guards seemed to be on edge. Then, out of nowhere, Rinsvretqaglo and the other captives had been herded down into the basement along with most of the guards. It was not exactly spacious, and Rinsvretqaglo’s bones ached from being crammed into one side of the room with the other captives. While she still had no idea what was going on, she was watching her captors intently.

The de facto leader of the band, a burly, battle-scarred Tlassiopei by the name of Hrigfitettlal, was seemingly having a heated discussion with someone in the intercom. Then, it seemed to abruptly end, and the gargantuan Strit whose name she had never learned seized Hrigfitettlal by his throat and killed him on the spot. A wave of terror washed through Rinsvretqaglo’s body, and she coiled tighter around her young. She watched as the nasty little Krrg standing behind the Strit blew a hole clean through its armored body, and then all the Seventy Hells seemed to break loose. The raiders turned on one another, and the Nodexi captives shrieked in terror. Rinsvretqaglo uttered a prayer to the Thousand Gods that her young die without any suffering, and then steeled herself for the end.

All three doors to the basement were suddenly blown off their hinges, the noise deafening all but the most hardy of auditory organs. Disoriented, Rinsvretqaglo watched as bipedal forms clad in dark armor streamed into the room, their movements deliberate, every action perfectly calculated. A Krrg who had been lingering on the edge of the brawl noticed them first, and opened fire on one of them with a laser carbine. The beam struck the biped (gah, what was the species called again?) and it staggered, its flesh unharmed but its armor charred. One of its fellows fired a single shot from a mag rifle, and the Krrg’s eye burst into a spray of gore as its body spasmed in death.

The other raiders attempted to reorganize as their brawl was interrupted by the attackers, but most were gunned down in short order as they sprawl across the ground in various states of violent disorientation. A handful, mostly Krrg, had the sense to throw down their weapons and lie on the ground, gripping appendages on their heads. Others fought back. A Tlassiopei rallied a trio of Krrg, and they opened fire on the bipeds. One of the creatures fell, writhing on the ground with a wound. Its companions returned fire, their disciplined shots rapidly felling the shooters.

One of the raiders, this one a Nodexi himself, scurried over to the hostages. It had a mag cannon wrapped up in its tentacles, and Rinsvretqaglo felt her blood run cold as she realized he was aiming at the hostages, not the attackers. Rinsvretqaglo joined others in screaming in terror, and then the Nodexi was shot, its mag cannon going off wildly and peppering the walls and ceiling with fire. The big male bellowed in pain, writhing on the ground in an effort to get back up. He managed to level his cannon at an approaching biped, and had his brain splattered on the floor for his trouble.

Just as suddenly as it started, it ended. A pile of corpses littered the room, and what few raiders had surrendered were being put into restraints. The one who had killed the Nodexi criminal, and saved Rinsvretqaglo’s life, turned to face the group. It spoke to them through the synthetic voice of a translator.

“Uh…hi?” It waved its left gripping appendage back and forth in the air, standing still. “Are you folks alright?”

Rinsvretqaglo didn’t know if she’d ever be “alright” again, but she (and more importantly her daughters) would live. She uncoiled herself painfully, and stumbled her way over to the biped on her blood-deprived limbs. As she approached, she wracked her brain. Bah, what are they called? Yunmuh? Tuhnan? No, I remember. A memory from her youth entered her mind. A newscast playing in her family home, her parents watching it in horror. It was the image of a murdered world, sent out for all in the arm to see by the genocidal lunatics who had committed the crime. Even so far out into the frontier, most have at least heard of-

“Human.” Rinsvretqaglo croaked out. She hadn’t spoken louder than a whisper in weeks.

“Woah, easy.” The human held its hands out. “We still need to search you guys, there could be-”

Rinsvretqaglo stopped short. “Thank you, human.”

—

Al sat in Commander Marku’s office, enjoying a bulb of celebratory whiskey with the captain. While he did this, his men were finishing the cleanup on the planet below. Bandit corpses were disposed of, prisoners processed, and hostages given food and medical attention. The rangers also policed up what weapons and equipment the bandits had with them, as part of the contract with the Yuvintbirfset government included salvage rights to any equipment and ships belonging to the enemy (indeed, the fleet had gained several new hulls from salvaging the warlord’s fleet). Al sipped his whiskey, looking at the bulb with amusement.

Being an officer does have its moments.

“That was damn fine work, Newman. Not a single hostage dead, the bad guys are all either corpses or prisoners, and you brought all of your rangers back alive.” Commander Marku raised his bulb and grinned, downing the rest of it.

Al smiled as well. “Not just this operation, the whole campaign has gone damn near perfectly. That better be some premium dirt we’re getting, because humanity has more than earned its pay this time around.”

He shook his head, his smile growing rueful. “I worry about us getting complacent, fighting scum like this instead of real soldiers. Our troops are going to get overconfident if we keep fighting things we can mop the floor with so easily.”

Marku shrugged. “I don’t know, I like these little ‘operations’ Khatri sends us on. Before we started doing these, the only way a new recruit would ever see combat is if they happened to have a run in with pirates when escorting one of our trade convoys, or maybe on a scouting mission. I’d rather our troops see combat in easy fights like these rather than never see combat at all.” He grimaced. “Hell, my first time in combat was against the Ivos. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”

Al didn’t respond, finishing his own whiskey. As usual, any semblance of a good mood he might have had vanished at the mention of the Ivos. I already see them every night in my dreams, so why does everyone feel the need to bring them up in my waking hours too?

He was relieved to hear the captain’s handheld ring, as it absolved of having to talk about the Ivos.

Commander Marku answered his handheld. “Yeah? …Ok, what’s strange about that? …On my way.”

He got up to leave, turning to Al he said. “There’s a ship that just dropped out of Dark Space. It’s hailing us.”

Al’s eyes widened in mild surprise, and he followed the captain to the CIC.

The pair entered the CIC, “Put them on the big screen.” Commander Marku ordered.

Al saw the face that appeared on the screen, and just like that he was back on New Kolkata, looking into the empty eyes of the little girl he’d found amidst a pile of human corpses. When had that dead, broken look turned into the strong, determined gaze he looked into now? And when had that little girl gotten so damned big?

“...Janea?” He asked in shock.

She seemed as startled as him, but then her surprise broke into a smile, and Al felt his heart light up just like it always did when he saw it. That little girl’s smiles had always been few and far between, and every one of them was precious.

“Hi dad.” Janea said.

Her smile faded, and her determined gaze grew tired. “I need your help.”