by Dark Knight
In the eyes of Omasa, this was an utter and complete failure.
For that single Terran destroyer to be felled, both the pirates and his people had sacrificed an exorbitant amount of resources, counting both starships and lives. It was an unacceptable waste even for an empire as vast as his, whose leaders took pride in the very fact they could throw billions at the enemy and still have billions more who could take their place afterwards. The same thing happened during their ill-fated invasion of Earth, replicated down to most minute detail. Back then the humans were deprived of their clients' help, but still they persevered, wiping out virtually everyone who set foot on Earth. They were hunted down by every Terran able to hold a weapon. Every single clan warrior, their machines, mecha and all those foolhardy taz'arans who volunteered to join them, seduced by the chance of snagging some easy loot. Omasa wasn't even willing to imagine what naive, adventurous plan the Imperial taz'aran army had fantasized to “ensure” the capture of Sirius Prime! How cowardly Nedal had survived that living hell without betraying his squad or running away was a mystery to him. This is why young Omasa had already deduced the future of his people. He understood that, lest they find a way, (and a cheaper way at that) to defeat those bloody Terrans and their clients before the next star decade was over, the whole effing sector would be lost. And not only to them but the clanners too, who so angrily and proudly refused anyone's assistance.
“Terrans can do whatever they want to us now,” Tale murmured quietly while sitting next to her Lord Captain's now repaired command throne. “Who knows where are they lurking or what new devilry is their captain plotting?”
“Worry not my capable adjutant, they couldn't be doing anything that bad! They were heavily damaged, remember?”
As convincing as Omasa tried to sound, he suspected the exact opposite of what he'd told Tale was true. A crew that skilled and expertly led had to be planning something extraordinarily bold. Perhaps even raiding Pion base itself! It felt rather laughable when he thought about it, yet Omasa was not your typical taz'aran and had obviously adopted a tiny bit of his enemy's tactical madness. Hyper-jumping that small starship into Pion system and then committing it into frontal attack run against a base of this size, while simultaneously fending off numerous starfighters, bombers and space mecha was the very image of insanity. And yet, what if this Terran, or his Dzenta'rii counterpart had devised some ingenious plot to play their entire force? To prance around the base like they just did to them? Because from what Vala had told him, and after consulting with his aide, Omasa was adamantly confident that his opponent was a Dzenta'rii. None other could perform in such a way and out-think a great man, and even greater strategist like himself!
Any other taz'aran commander would've been mad with rage, shooting officers and crew dead, trying to line up as many sacrificial lambs as possible to save his own ass. Omasa's plan was different, for he had achieved a victory of sorts. The information he'd recovered from the battle and the experience his crew accumulated were all but priceless. Even if Nedal had failed and his commando team lost, Omasa still had something to barter for his command and life. Operational parameters were successfully followed as far as his brilliant mind was concerned. The prototype was a flying disaster to begin with, and yet he fixed it, managing to not only defeat his enemy but force him to retreat from the battlefield. Therefore Omasa had claimed space superiority, and theoretically could even engage in salvage operations. Not only that, but the Terrans also fled from the planet's surface after the ground engagement, meaning that Carrola – friggin Carrola! – belonged to the Taz'aran Empire! Mere technicalities, like the fact that they had probably deployed a dozen or less against his company strong force of star troopers were insignificant in the grand scheme of things. For Empires such as theirs only the end result was taken into consideration; not the road walked nor the number of soldiers' left rotting in the ground.
He only hoped that his fool of an XO would soon return with everything that was needed to assemble the reactor.
“Tale, I want you to commit more of our personal energy reserves and try cleaning another of the lower decks. We need more of the lower-enlisted crewmen to survive if our vessel is to operate at normal capacity – take care of it personally. And don't forget to mention that this energy comes from my personal reserves. They also need not know that there are no officers among the living except us and a handful of lieutenants.”
“It will be done, Excellency!”
Tale saluted again and slowly moved in the direction of their bridge's elevator. Omasa had ordered it turned off to conserve power. Now anyone who wanted to reach his command deck had to use their feet. Fortunately emergency ladders were installed in all elevator shafts, and at the last possible moment before they'd left Pion base. And somewhere in the base’s gravity field, a headless engineer's corpse floated ungracefully through space after the lazy bitch tried to argue with Omasa that:
“Ladders are a useless feature and a thing of the past.”
________________________________________________________________________________
Somehow Nedal managed to avoid alerting the big roots completely. His mech landed on the other side of that gorge and unleashed a particle-beam burst. It felled yet another of those disgusting trees. He was close now, close to their last hope for escape from this jungle Hell. Instead of flying off into space, the commandos' shuttle crashed near his transport's forced landing site. Why the operators chose to follow Omasa's secret orders so rigidly was beyond him. He’d return in their stead, back to the safety of 'Empress Throne's' hangar bay. Nedal smirked. He planned to pilfer their craft's main drive and power core, maybe lift the DMS data-crystals away from them. Presenting both the reactor and the data they were sent to retrieve would raise his standing in the hierarchy, maybe even to his previous rank or a new command.
His power armor looked like crap, and not only on the outside. He’d removed the leaves that stuck out in all directions, but the damage was done. Its armor plating was all but useless. Instead of just quaking in his boots like before, Nedal leaped inside the small mech and defiantly strode out to face those abominable trees. If he must quake, better to do so from inside the power armor. Even damaged it gave him a far better chance to survive. He burned a lot of fuel in his search, but in the end of his third day marooned on top of that damned gorge, Nedal located the shuttle.
Despite the shuttle’s composition of armored stealth alloys, it was badly damaged and leaking fuel. In fact it was that very fuel that his scanners had finally managed to pick up, thanks to the strong signature of the refined hydrogen. Nedal was vulnerable, too. He could see pinpricks of light shine through the holes in his armored hull. The mech limped along, its leg damaged during the insane melee in that last fight. He’d be easily noticed, heard from afar, and any expert marksman could land a shot through the holes blasting him to pieces. And all commandos were expert marksmen.
But instead of being silently shot dead, Nedal strode unopposed to the shuttle. He picked the plasma torch from his leg's mag-slot and started to slice the main engine away. Wherever those commandos were, they didn't matter right now. Nedal's ass was on line and he'd choose the troopers under his command over the operators in a heartbeat. After the chaos of battle had settled, he acknowledged the fact that those commandos were sent by Omasa to kill him and take command if he had failed. Were he in Omasa's position he'd probably give the team the same order.
His plasma torch sliced the shuttle's drive section cleanly, and controlled by the PA scanner continued cutting the rest. Five minutes in and there was still nobody around. The whole salvage operation wasn’t exactly quiet, and yet none of the operators tried to stop him. He wondered why. Maybe they reached his base camp? Nedal shook his head and abandoned the idea. It would be damn near impossible to get there by simply walking over the mud. The treacherous Mumpa trees could “see” basically any movement over soft ground, and then you'd get quickly rooted to death. Or branched. Perhaps even leafed...
The taz'aran officer found his time spent chatting and mingling with the lower-enlisted quite eye-opening. He learned so many useful things for plotting his eventual return to high command that it wasn't even funny. For most ordinary troopers, the only interaction they wished to have with their officers was to safely shoot or stab them in the back before quickly fleeing the battlefield. He’d done this himself. Multiple times, in fact, since self-preservation was the chief motivation that drove the taz'aran military units. While Terrans bravely fought together and sacrificed for each other to achieve victory, Taz'arans preferred to “escape” their way into conquest, allowing those stupid enough to continue the fight to die in their stead. Sometimes even to the detriment of their entire unit, as it was part of their very nature. Taz'aran High Command were always finding new and “exiting” ways to force troopers and other military personnel to their deaths after each military defeat.
Suddenly the leaves moved again. Nedal grabbed the shuttle's vertical stabilizer, bending the aileron. He intended to use it as a shield but there was no need. From behind the shrubs, out poked the snout of a single hungry wozzie. Fortunately, a short intensive scan showed nothing else hiding in the area. Nedal removed the engine from its casing and placed it on a nearby rock. The data was next, but for him to enter the shuttle and check its mainframe he’d have to exit his PA's cockpit. The risk was high; too high. Reluctantly, he decided to cut his losses and picked up the shuttle's engine, slowly walking away from its crashed hull. Of course, that’s when it happened. Peppered all over with buzzing, exploding needles, pieces of the PA’s unprotected hull were torn away.
He was right! The bastards were hiding nearby, waiting for him to foolishly exit the mech. Then they would’ve killed him and rode the PA back to the transport, effortlessly taking command after he was out of the way.
Nedal set the engines to maximum thrust. They boomed to life and he launched into the sky, the shuttle's engine block settled nicely on his shoulder as he sped away from the ambush. Turning his back to them was a mistake, though. One of the commandos hit his PA’s engine exhaust and he started losing altitude. Smoke billowed from the thrusters and it felt like he was being pulled ever closer to the muddy, open ground below. Those accursed roots were already sticking out, ready to snatch their next meal!
Desperate, Nedal shot his PA's grappler, its large magnetic hook aimed at the closest part of his transport. Working the controls with every bit of skill he had, Nedal managed to land on his ship's dorsal hull, the shuttle’s engine block in hand. Then, leaping down from the upper hull, he walked inside his ship and the hangar door slid shut behind him at last. The grappler, no, the PA as a whole, saved his life and even though the design had turned out to be a scam driven by Pion base engineers to make an easy decat, it actually wasn’t half bad. He had to admit that shoddy as it was, all of its systems, armor, weapons and everything else helped him survive. He considered getting it fixed and upgraded, even found himself taking an odd pride in the fact that his remaining troopers soon named it after him.
But that would have to wait. They still had a jungle to escape.
“Quickly troopers, get the engine up and running. And don't forget to search it throughly for bobby traps or other devices!”
“Yes, Excellency!” The troopers saluted and turned around. Nedal gave the sign to begin by dropping his precious cargo. Then four of the nearby troopers sprayed his still smoking mech with their fire extinguishers. There was some light commotion afterwards, a scuffle with a commando who stowed away on his mech. But he couldn’t do much after being directly hit by a localized stasis bubble. Even though his armor protected his body from the worst of it, such fields made it all but impossible to move until they lost their intensity. By the time he managed to wriggle free of the unexpected trap, he was cut down by a weaponized leaf.
It was Nedal’s own idea to weaponize the Mumpa tree leaves. He had his men drill holes in them with plasma torches and tie them to a branch. It was all perfectly set to look like an unfortunate accident, killed by some Terran colonist who fashioned the primitive weapon themselves, a double bladed axe that they threw in the mud afterwards. After a thorough searching the commando’s body followed suit. Then Nedal had his men copy the data-crystals he had on his person and pick the supplies in his backpack clean.
They’d lost almost all of theirs in the battle. Nedal’s men tried scrounging the battlefield for spare equipment, but it was yet another disaster. Terrans had mined and bobby trapped everything – bodies, wrecked AFV’s, and abandoned supply caches were all turned into death traps. He lost a full section of troopers before he forced them to stand down, as it was not under his order that they went there. In fact, they’d volunteered. Nedal was probably one of the precious few officers in ten light years range who even knew what the word meant, let alone had witnessed such an action. But now his crew was at work fixing the shuttle's engine. As they linked it to the transport’s drive section Nedal finally exited his PA and inspected what his sergeant nicked from that commando.
Data-crystals stored all of the local colony's DMS passive scans that their host array managed to collect. Carefully inspecting the logs Nedal noticed an unusual sensor smudge. At least that’s what it looked like when projected from his sub-par PDA. Watching the holo slides while connected to his PA via nerve-gear, Nedal suddenly understood why High Command wanted to take this part of space. Before his mind's eyes slowly appeared the silhouette of a large, ghost starship!
Surrounded by the powerful energies of hyperspace, a ghost vessel like that was all but impossible to trace with normal sensors. But the Terrans had good optics and the holo-slides they took, while grainy, showed more detail. The strange elliptical shape of its hull featured tall, spire-like attachments protruding from the back end. Engine pods perhaps, or powerful weapons? He wasn't much of a starship buff, but the peculiar design perfectly fit the descriptions. The mysterious starship's entire outer hull was covered with flat, blue armor plating. Small, circular domes protruded from the port, starboard and dorsal sides of the vessel. Nedal figured its armaments were located in those. He couldn't see the ventral section since there were no more holo-slides, but this was more than anyone had seen in recent Galactic history. He quickly made a personal copy and deleted the file from the data-crystal, calculating the price of this info in decats should he sell it to one of the border Counts.
This information changed everything!
Nobody actually knew why that inbred old fart started this reckless invasion in the first place. Carrola was a hellish planet and it seemed that only those blasted Terrans could coexist with its monstrous flora. One couldn't deny the possibility that the fool found about this and haphazardly “planned” the whole operation on his own. Yet Nedal wasn’t convinced that Frontier's Navy High Command didn't know, or at least suspect, something like this existed here. His people told an old story of a taz'aran lord who found one such vessel, boarded it and made it his own. It was a tall-tale told to children that he now believed to be true, and very relevant. One could not deny the evidence; the holo-slides spoke for themselves. Moreover, that Lord became first Emperor of Taz'ara, or so it was written in the old books. In his youth Nedal read in his schoolbooks that their line of Emperors and Empresses were all descended from hyperspace Gods. All taz’aran children were taught this unbelievable story, but after seeing this Nedal was sure that it wasn’t all just glorified propaganda.
What was so special about these mysterious ships? Throughout the millennia many starships vanished while traveling through hyperspace. This was neither a new nor well kept secret. But it was the shape of that vessel which spurred Nedal's interest and rekindled his old memories. Normally, vessels caught in a hyperspace anomaly or suffering a malfunction in their hyperdrive got “stuck” inside. Then, perhaps decades, hundreds, or even thousands of years later, they'd slip out of hyperspace on their own. These derelicts were swiftly plundered, with everything usable salvaged from the bowels of their
ancient hulls.
But those weren't the ghost ships of legend, not at all. What Nedal remembered from his time skulking around the hidden libraries on Taz'ara prime was both vague and yet incredibly interesting. The books spoke of an alien race with a name long lost who, in times immemorial, retreated into hyperspace, hiding there for some wholly unknown reason. They possessed advanced, almost magical knowledge and technologies far ahead of those living here on the Fringe. Some historians even dared assume those aliens' technology superior to the races of the Galactic Assembly itself. As a young and scheming teenager, Nedal often dreamed of finding such a vessel, of using it to become Emperor. They were silly childish dreams, never to be fulfilled... until now.
Demoted and low both in the Command structure and Noble Ladder, Nedal couldn't allow himself to dream about anything else than the mere restoration of his previous status. He’d found his hatred again, as taz'arans often said about those who were too cowardly but bounced back and away from their disgrace. Now his surviving boys and girls watched him without the usual ill concealed despisal most officers got when near their troops. An officer's life depended on the quality and superior numbers of his cannon fodder. He was beginning to see how Omasa's new ways could be greatly beneficial – you only need to pull your weight and not slag random troopers left or right. Most of the time, anyway.
There was a time honored tradition in the taz'aran military. Officer pets had their commanders' backs and were always those who first retreated together with them. Obviously, one couldn't rightly expect the taz'arans to be loyal like that, so he never had such pets. Hell, in most cases they used that status to kill their commanders and usurp their posts for themselves. Even so, Nedal began entertaining a most heretical notion:
What if ALL the troopers under my command were officer's pets?
