ZanarkandKido
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Interesting Times - Chapter 68
🕑 Added 2025-04-26 13:07:12 +0000 UTCWell, I am back. After five weeks in school for an internship followed by two weeks of hardcore writing two papers for university, I can finally go back writing this story without looking at my laptop with loathing.
Anyway, here's the chapter. And don't worry, I won't take as long as this time to put the next one up. Promise.
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March 18th, 2175
20:36
Lesh'ka-System
Torfan
"Get 20 men to the west side. I don't like how many humans are assembling in the West. Give them rocket launchers, too. They will need them to deal with the enemy armor," shouted Boshvak Vo'ok, formerly Major Boshvak Vo'ok of the Hegemony Special Forces, toward the other side of the room where one of his attendants stood at attention. "Take them from the slave pens. We won't need many guards there once the humans launch their attack."
Just thinking about those hairless pyjaks raised his temper to a boiling point, and he relieved the tight feeling in his chest by hammering the table with his armored fist, leaving behind a small dent in the metal.
"Any luck getting through the jammers and contacting the Hegemony?" growled Vo'ok.
"No, sir. They are probably doing it from orbit, and after losing all our space assets, we don't have any chance to get through. Yet, we have missed our scheduled check-ins more than once. The Hegemony has to know that something is wrong and is probably currently assembling a relief force."
While Vo'ok would have probably said the same and agreed with the words openly, inside his mind, the situation was different. After all, he had been part of the Hegemony's Special Forces for most of his life before taking on the task of organizing and leading the pirate forces in this part of the galaxy for the benefit of the Hegemony. One could even say that Vo'ok had never left the Hegemony Special Forces. He just changed his field of use.
Yet, as such, he was particularly aware of how the Hegemony acted.
The people in charge could act rashly at the slightest provocation but also very calculating at other times. If they decided Torfan was lost, they wouldn't even send a freighter to look for remains.
If Vo'ok had been in command of the possible relief force, his decision would have been to abandon Torfan. Of course, this decision was made with the knowledge of the facts he had on hand. It was impossible to know how much his fellow Batarians outside the system knew about the situation here on Torfan. A relief force could be coming, and based on the possibility, Vo'ok couldn't stop fighting. They had to hold out long enough to make this possibility a certainty.
Otherwise, everything they could do was have a last stand and drag as many humans as possible with them into the beyond.
"Are the charges planted?" he asked, his eyes never leaving the holographic map that showed the real-time movements of his and the enemy's troops.
"Yes, we have planted enough to destroy all slave pens. There won't be a single survivor if we detonate them. It will be a bloodbath the Alliance will never forget. A shame that the pirates and slavers were more concerned with keeping their pathetic lives than making the humans suffer."
"It can't be helped," grunted Vo'ok. "The scum that followed us has always been loyal to credits and nothing more. They have a low cunning but are ultimately barely above butchers. After hearing what happened to the group on the south side of the planet when they tried to kill their merchandise after trying to use them to get the Alliance to surrender and let them flee, it is no surprise to me. The bigger surprise, in my opinion, is that the Alliance was willing to make an example like this. I believe even our former comrades wouldn't find fault in their methods to instill fear in their enemies."
"If you say so, but our methods still surpass them."
While Vo'ok's attendant had a point, it didn't stop him from appreciating the humans' methods like a connoisseur appreciates a glass of fine wine.
"The humans are assembling more and more forces at that point," Vo'ok said, changing the subject and pointing toward a point on the map northeast of their base. "It seems they are preparing for a strong push toward our position."
"A futile endeavor, in my opinion," replied Vo'ok's attendant. "Our defense stands strong, and we pushed them back multiple times before without taking any significant damage."
"Yet, their numbers are higher than before. And their armor is increasing, too. It will be more difficult than before."
"Conversely, we haven't shown all our cards, too. The Alliance has no idea about the hidden turrets and minefields. Nothing to say about the number of our mortars. Should they try to approach us, they will die in a field of destruction."
"Very well," replied Vo'ok, a smirk appearing on his face at the thought of his enemies' dying screams. "Make sure that enough ammunition is close by. I have the feeling that the humans will attack soon." A thought appeared in his mind, and he asked: "When was our last communication with any of the other four fortresses?"
"It has been more than 20 hours since any actual communication, sir. The Alliance is doing its best to disrupt any attempt at communication with any other group, and for the most part, they are successful. But we managed to send each other rudimentary messages to give each other updates about our situations. We got signals that the humans were attacking them, but they were holding out. The only exception is the fortress on the other side of the moon. The Alliance somehow managed to destroy their air defenses, and they sent in a frigate to destroy their defenses to allow their ground forces to storm it."
"Any possibility that they could do the same here?" asked Vo'ok, keeping any sign of concern out of his voice.
"None, sir. Our air defenses are in the middle of the fortress, and I personally increased the number of guards the moment I heard about it. Furthermore, the only time the doors to the control rooms open is during guard change. And they have to activate the doors from both sides simultaneously to open them."
It may seem overly cautious, but Vo'ok was rather paranoid than being hit where it hurts and leaving them open to the Alliance's attack unopposed.
Furthermore, this much was standard protocol for the HSF and any facility under their control. Usually, he didn't have any need for the protocols from his time with them. Leading a pirate crew, even one sponsored by the Hegemony and mostly made up of "former" military forces, was by far more relaxed, but he did his best to make sure that if the need arose, things were ready to go into lockdown without any problems. His predecessors did it, and Vo'ok's successors would do it, too. He would make sure of it.
If he was being honest, though, he would have made their fortress even more secure than it already was, putting their defenses on the level he was used to, but that would have shredded the veneer of deniability they had to keep. So he had to keep them on the level they were at, or else someone higher up, someone with more political ambition than brain, would have used Vo'ok's desire for more security to advance their position by making Vo'ok into a risk for the Hegemony's reputation and ending his career prematurely with a bullet to the head. Something he did his very best to avoid since he walked into the barracks the first time as a recently joined soldier.
But, right now? He wished he had done it anyway. It would raise their survival chances immensely.
"Good, how far along is the data purge?" asked Vo'ok. Despite hoping that there would be a day after tomorrow and many after that, he had ordered a complete purge of any data they had. It didn't matter what kind. They all got deleted. Anything that connected them to the Hegemony was gone first, of course, but it didn't stop there. Information about other pirate groups, data about resupply posts in mostly abandoned star systems, names of informants, shipping lists, sales, hell, he even ordered to delete their own inventory lists. A mistake, he later conceded to himself, since nobody would have any idea anymore what they had that they could throw at the Alliance. Knowing when to ration their Medi-gel even more than they already did would save lives down the line.
"Everything critical is gone. We did the usual. First, scrubbing the software, then destroying the hardware utterly. Nobody, not even the best Salarian techs, can pull anything from those servers."
"Good, now..." but before Vo'ok could say anything else, an explosion shook the room, and he had to grab the table tightly to keep himself from falling to the ground. His second close-by didn't have that luxury, fell to the ground, and cried: "What is happening?"
Vo'ok's first thought was the Alliance had started to bombard them with artillery, trying to soften their defenses before committing their forces to an attack, but their scanners would have caught the projectiles long before their base got hit and at least sent an alarm so they could prepare for impact. Yet, that didn't happen.
Besides, it had been a single explosion, not the barrage one would expect from artillery fire, and the accompanying shockwave didn't feel like it had come from the outside.
"Inside..." Vo'ok whispered before roaring: "It came from inside!" He had never activated his Omni-tool and made a call this quick before in his entire life. He tried to establish a comm channel with any of the guards he knew were positioned within the control room, but Vo'ok only got back the static noise of a dead channel.
"Fuck!"
"The turrets are down!" came a cry over the general communications channel after his comms changed to it due to the high-priority marker of the message. Dread gripped Vo'ok's throat with an icy hand. The worst-case scenario had happened, and their main defenses were now out of commission.
"What is the Alliance doing?" He closed his side of the general comm channel and changed to a direct link with their scouts.
"They are starting to move. I see vehicles coming in our direction at top speeds. And not just APS! Their tanks are coming, too!"
Dozens of curse words were now coming from Vo'ok's mouth. He was already mowing, grabbing his personalized rifle from another table while he changed back to his previous comms channel and sent a signal for them to be quiet.
He didn't wait for them to be completely quiet. Instead, he used his admin clearance to turn their micros off and his own louder.
"Everyone get ready. The humans are coming. Kill as many as you can before they get to you. For the glory of Kar'shan and the Hegemony!" Vo'ok roared and a cacophony of answering roars sounded over the channel after he returned the settings to their previous position.
His aid was walking beside him as he moved out of the room and toward where he knew he would have a direct view of the place where the Alliance's attack would hit. He could have stayed back in his little control room and directed the battle from there, but Vo'ok wanted to be in the thick of the fighting. After all, it would be the last time in his life that he would have the chance to do so, and he didn't want to go out of this life without killing a few of those despicable humans.
"Go to the slave pens," he said to his aide as they got closer to a corridor that led into another section of the fortress. "I want the Alliance to feel nothing but despair when this is over. This victory of theirs will be nothing but ash in their mouths. Kill all the slaves. Start with the humans and then everyone else. This fortress may be our graveyard, but it won't be ours alone."
His aide nodded, understanding the situation as much as Vo'ok, and growled: "Your will will be done, Commander! Long live the Hegemony!"
The determined look on his aid's face told Vo'ok that the task was in good hands.
He stopped before the door that would lead him out onto the wall and into the fighting. A quick look down at the rifle in his hands to check if everything was alright and a deep breath were the last two things he did as a living person. Once he stepped outside, Vo'ok would be a dead man walking.
His steps didn't hesitate for a moment crossing the frame after the door opened.
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March 18th, 2175
20:57
Lesh'ka-System
Torfan
Marcus' feet raised small clouds of dust whenever they hit the dry ground. And with his pace, it looked like a line of dust was trailing behind him.
Yet, his own trail couldn't compare to those of the tanks. Theirs were absolutely massive and could be compared to a smoke screen. Something the ground troops were using to their advantage and keeping themselves out of sight during their advance.
The order to attack came through a couple of minutes ago, and already they had advanced a third of the way to the Batarian fortress. Shots and explosions hit the ground around them, but without their turrets, the Batarians wouldn't be able to stop them. Even the walls before them wouldn't hold back the tide of Alliance soldiers coming to end the pirate threat of Torfan once and for all. A frigate was coming to their support, and a single shot of its low-power MAC would crack the fortress' wall open like an egg, giving Marcus and his team an entry point into it.
Once inside, they would ignore most of the fighting, and run toward their objective, the slave pens. They had to get there fast to back up the two operatives that had snuck into the fortress to sabotage it and keep the slaves safe until Marcus and his team arrived.
He didn't doubt that the two operatives would accomplish the second part of their mission as they obviously had the first, but they were trained for infiltration and assassination rather than straight-up combat like the members of Ares. After all, while their program was also called after a Greek deity, it was the goddess of hunters, Artemis, instead of the god of war, Ares, who was their patron.
And that should tell one enough about where their specialties lay.
Not to say the Hunters weren't capable of combat. They were rather good at it, too, but Marcus had trained with some of them and knew that Ares was better if they had to hold a position against an enemy for a prolonged time. Yet, on the other hand, if the Hunters could choose their terrain, one would never see them coming and would be killed before ever seeing them. That was an experience Marcus had first-hand knowledge about, too. It had helped with a lot of the arrogance he had accumulated after being in Ares for a year and feeling like he could crush any enemy. Many of his friends and peers within Ares had felt the same way. A risk that could cost them their missions and lives if it wasn't curbed early on.
Thankfully, the people in charge took note of the problem and started to remedy it with training missions like a game of cat-and-mouse with the Hunters. There wasn't a better way to crush arrogance than to put someone against an opponent playing to their specialty.
A mortar hit the ground close by, and Marcus' shields flickered for a moment from the shrapnel before returning to their optimal level. The defensive fire of the Batarians, especially their accuracy, left a lot to desire, but it wasn't outside what Marcus expected for military forces as well. They simply didn't integrate VIs into their equipment as much as the Alliance did and couldn't leave the calculations and adjustments of the mortars to a machine.
Despite that, some tanks were hit nonetheless. Their burnt-out husks were a stark reminder that the Batarians were still dangerous until none took another breath.
His HUD gave him a warning to brace himself, and Marcus didn't waste a second to throw himself to the ground. He knew his team and the other Ares members would do the same while the tanks decelerated. Moments later, he felt the shockwave of the sub-sonic MAC round traveling through the atmosphere and hitting the wall of the Batarian compound. The resulting impact shook the ground, and Marcus knew that if he was standing, even with the additional weight of his armor, he would have lost his footing and planted his ass on the ground. Due to lying on the ground, he could jump up the moment the quakes stopped.
He started running again, and just like the tanks, he accelerated, too. A quick mental command and his armor directed extra energy from the reactor to his legs, accelerating him even further. After all, with the wall gone, every second counted to make sure the slaves survived the assault and weren't killed by the Batarians as a last: "Fuck you!"
It had happened at one of the other larger pirate bases Ares had hit in preparation for an assault by the regular forces. Ares had been on a tight schedule to hit two more bases and didn't consider the possibility of the ground troops being too slow to stop the massacre of the slaves.
Dozens had been killed mercilessly. Their slave collars had been rigged to explode and the result had been so messy that the remains had to be identified either by fingerprint or by DNA. Thankfully, this time, something like that wouldn't be able to happen since the two Hunters had taken a small scrambler with them to stop any signal activating the self-destruct mechanism of the slave collars.
After the soldiers got the compound under control and discovered the atrocity, there had been a huge outcry. And no holding back their darker impulses anymore. It didn't matter if the pirates or slavers had been captured or surrendered themselves willingly to the Alliance forces, none got spared. They had been all summarily executed by revenge-driven men and women. And those around them? They did nothing but stare with empty and emotionless eyes at the execution.
Personally, Marcus couldn't fault them for their actions. And he didn't want to either. He knew that he and the people under his command would have acted the same way, perhaps even a bit more brutally than a bullet to their heads. A side-effect of the Ares project was that when they let their emotions run wild, what could easily happen in extreme situations, they ran wild. Especially with the enhanced strength their armor granted them, it was easy to rip someone's arm off.
Marcus even heard through scuttlebutt that Admiral Hackett when he heard about the situation simply blinked and responded with a single nod to acknowledge the information before proceeding to ignore everything concerning it. That said a lot about how much anyone cared about the fates of the pirates and slavers here on Torfan.
Technically, the execution of prisoners would be categorized, and should be categorized, as a war crime and the people involved put before a war crimes tribunal before being sent to prison, but Marcus doubted that would happen.
While the Alliance would normally adhere to their regulations and any galactic agreements religiously, they weren't saints either and had more than one skeleton in their closet. Hell, most of Marcus' genetic enhancements toed the line of what was and wasn't allowed, and others probably were so illegal that even thinking about doing them would carry a prison sentence.
Thankfully, the people working on the bio-mods knew what they were doing and encrypted them. Even finding Marcus' blood and analyzing his DNA wouldn't help finding out what had been done to him.
Furthermore, he didn't know either, only the guys in the lab knew, so he couldn't even spill his secrets if he wanted to. Of course, with enough time and material, everyone could crack open the code, but that would still be a time-consuming effort.
Anyway, the soldiers who had executed the slaver prisoners would probably only get a mark in their files. "Going against regulations" was the most probable. After all, that remark could mean a thousand things and none. Like any military, current or past, the Alliance military had thousands of regulations, and without specifying them, nobody could ever be sure. Besides, if it ever got out, the Alliance could still prosecute them if it became necessary to save face in front of the galactic community. Until then, it would be overlooked quietly.
Yet, the soldiers would probably see the mark in their files as a badge of honor, or shame depending on the soldier's personality, and brag about it.
Marus' audio sensors captured the sound of howling turbines before a message hit his comms.
"Be advised. Doing a strafing run in Sector C," came the calm voice of the leader, at least Marcus guessed it was the leader, of the three gunships approaching at high speeds toward the pirate fortress. Despite the warning, neither Marcus nor any of his team, or the members of the second team a few meters behind them, slowed down. They were still far enough away that there was no danger of being hit by friendly fire. The gunships raced over their heads, and soon after the familiar sound of miniguns firing echoed through the air. It was impossible to see if any pirates got hit by the strafing run, but the fire coming from their front was lessening until it was a pittance.
Right now, they were a few dozen meters in front of the supporting tanks which had stopped after two-thirds of the way to the compound, having arrived at the most effective range for their cannons to attack, and give support for the troops slowly coming up behind them.
Seeing an opportunity, Marcus opened the team channel and said: "Overclock the speed enhancement. With the counter-fire down, we have an opportunity to hit them hard and get into the base before they regroup. On my mark." Normally, he would have asked his second for an opinion, but the time wasn't on their side. Every second counted when taking advantage of an opportunity.
"MARK!" he ordered and activated the command.
His world appeared to blur, and the hole in the wall got closer much faster than before. The boost only worked for three seconds, a security feature that had been hardwired into the armor to prevent the reactor from overloading or burning out, but it was enough. They had arrived at the entrance.
His HUD informed him of the aftereffects of the sudden energy surge, saying that his systems were only working at 68% effectiveness and activated the countdown until everything was normalized.
While overclocking a specific part of the armor's system, be it the speed, strength, reflex, or even the neural enhancement, would push them to the next level, beyond even the already impressive improvements, it was a double-edged sword. After all, it could take up to two minutes for everything to get back to normal. Perhaps even longer than that if one was in serious combat. Something we would undoubtedly be in in a few moments. Still, getting in quickly was worth it. The mission could not fail.
His team pressed itself to the wall on the right side of the gigantic breach.
"Move fast, move deadly," said Marcus over comms. A phrase he always said whenever they had a mission where speed was essential.
A quick look back toward their approaching allies showed him that it would take time for them to arrive. Nevertheless, they had to move now.
And move they did.
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March 19th, 2175
04:06
Widow-System
Citadel
I was on my nth cup of tea for that night when the message arrived in my personal account. Opening it caused a predatory smile to break out on my face, especially when I got the second email. A different source, a different part, but still pertaining to the same operation.
Rolling my right shoulder to loosen my muscles I said to myself: "Seems like I should get some sleep. The games will begin in a few hours and it's going to be much fun."
Comments
Mark
Hey is anything going to come of the unstable ezzo mentond in chapter 12
Awesomesauce
Quick question is this before or after the skyllian blitz
