It was entirely possible that this was a punishment assault meant to force a trade deal between Basepholon, House Indron, and by extension, Grotto Corporation. Once all the blood had been cleaned and the bullet holes patched, the survivors would simply return to work, perhaps a little wiser as to who was truly in charge.
For the Dire Swords, none of that mattered.
They arrive, they fight, and they leave.
There was a freedom in that, Jada thought to herself; this was indeed a new paradigm for her compared to being a salvage marine, in which the story of a place and its people often defined the salvage in varying degrees.
The path of the mercenary was one intentionally divorced of context, an endless war without narrative and Jada found that she was relieved by that emptiness. Once the mercs left this planet, that would be the end of it.
3. THE TRAIN JOB
“If it wasn’t such a rush, I’d say thievery was beneath us,” laughed Poe through the private battle buddy channel he shared with Jada as the dropship reached a higher speed in order to keep pace with the mission milestones. “Work like this seems more suited to pirates than the Merchants Militant.”
“Marius used words like ‘asset seizure’ and ‘high-value target’ in the briefing, that makes it sound more official,” countered Jada as she toggled through the target finder modes in her HUD while safely harnessed to the deployment rack in the belly of the dropship. “Besides, no way could a gang of pirates pull this kind of op, there are seasoned battle troopers on that train.”
“Fair point. I’ve only gone up against them once, on Gedra Prime, and admittedly I was impressed,” agreed Poe as the dropships sped over the vast and sun-baked shale plains that covered the majority of the unknown planet’s surface. “Strega was Helion before she expatriated about twenty years ago, though she was a tanker, not infantry.”
“I’ve been fighting them sporadically for half my career. Since Grotto crossed the Ellisian Line, it’s become routine,” stated Jada, taking note of the snake-like image of the approaching train being painted on the wall mounted mission screen. “Helion battle troopers are volunteer soldiers with profit shares, not the usual conscripts and convicts fielded by Grotto, or even fixed rate contractors like us. They’re trained, equipped, and invested in their cause.”
“Then we’re in for a proper fight,” said Poe, the harsh light of yet another dying sun glinting off of the skull etching on his face plate as the launch bay of the ship opened for the rapid deployment descent. “That’s why all of us are here anyway. Nobody ever became a Dire Sword for the money.”
They fell silent after that, each lost in their own thoughts as the ship closed the distance between them and their target. Jada could feel the sticky gloom of the Deepspire against her skin, the smell of dark tunnels and industrial waste sharp in her nostrils. The rush of pending violence always brought on the hallucinations more vividly, and she, as did the rest of the mercs, worked to push them to the back of her mind. Deep breaths, one after the other, slowly cut through the smell of decay and ruin.
The Dire Swords mantra, we fight as though dead, was repeated over and over in her mind as well as the others, filling her consciousness with the task at hand and driving out the bitter memories that clamored for her attention. The pain in her muscles was a haven, and she sought a keen awareness of her body, a war machine barely held together within the boundaries of her dusky skin.
There was poetry to it, Jada thought to herself, the temple of the body as a sanctuary from the terrors of her mind. To become the perfect warrior, she had to face daily the very nightmares that had driven her away from her Reaper comrades and onto a more pure path.
Jada knew that Poe was right, that she, like the rest of the Dire Swords, cared little for the vast sums of money she now earned as a member of the Merchants Militant. In a year with the mercs, she had already accumulated more wealth than she’d earned in the first half of her service as a Reaper. Granted, much of that wealth had already gone towards her buy-in fee to the Merchants Militant, the cost of her treatments, equipment, and dues to Sword Base. Yet all of that mattered little when Jada was honest with herself; it truly wasn’t about the money. Out here, kicking up shale as she hurdled towards furious combat against formidable foes, she was free.
The ghosts that clung to the veteran soldier were shaken loose in the melee. The burdens of culture, politics, and economics were cast off as she exchanged their weight for that of the mag-armor. Her yellow eyes burned behind the etched skull of her helmet and that became the face she presented to the universe.
“Overwatch reporting. Raid Alpha, two minutes to contact,” said Marius over the company channel, broadcasting from Sword Base as he and the mission control staff used the ship’s long-range sensory equipment to monitor activity in the target area. “Good hunting.”
Jada’s heart began to beat faster and she flexed her fingers in anticipation before taking a firm grip on the rungs of the deployment rack, knowing that the safety harness would detach without warning once they were in drop range.
Their mission was a daring one, and Poe wasn’t out of bounds to describe it as something closer to an act of piracy than it was a stratagem of war.
Grotto and Helion might not have been slugging it out in epic-scale conflicts the way they were a year ago, and they certainly weren’t attacking each other’s holdings in mapped space as they had been in the past, but there was still much in the way of corporate bloodshed in necrospace.
Well inside the boundaries of Helion territory, there was a small solar system that had yielded evidence of a noticeably stronger presence of organic corporate units. While much of necrospace, on both sides of the Ellisian line, was full of independent contractors and scavenger soldiers engaging in continuous struggles with one another in the name of this corporation or that, the masters of Helion seemed to have something different in mind for this particular system. The clandestine operatives feeding that information to Grotto Corporation had indicated that Helion was committing its own internal military and industrial elements to the system, instead of the various subsidiaries and subcontractors used by both Grotto and Helion now that the trade war had all but ended.
According to the available intelligence, presented to Jada and the others by Marius in the mission briefing aboard Sword Base, major excavations were underway on each of the six planets in the system. While some of the data pointed to a variety of industrial plays, most of the recon seemed to reveal that the excavation had non-industrial purposes, though what exactly that might be remained a mystery.
The usual heavy equipment that would be present in raw material extraction was not present in most of the sites; instead, smaller pieces, more difficult to identify given the limited intelligence available, were being used towards an unknown purpose. While archaeology was certainly suspected, given the data available, it was still thought to be highly unlikely given the lack of profitability of such endeavors.
However, the fact that Helion was expending a tremendous amount of resources towards the, as yet, unknown endeavors, made it necessary for agents of Grotto to disrupt those activities. Two great houses, couldn’t, by their nature, allow the other to gain without offering contest. So it was that the Dire Swords had been pulled back into the fight. House Indron had been paying the mercenary company a modest retainer to remain this side of the Ellisian Line, making low-risk security patrols throughout Grotto’s newly won territory, their notorious presence serving more as a deterrent than anything.