She was raised Grotto and hailed from a habitation sector that was grim even for the likes of Baen 6. Her entire family had called a chamber not much larger than this home for the entirety of Jada’s childhood.
Hama Sek, her father, had insisted that saving on living expenses would enable their family to work against the life-bonds of the three children more effectively. The trick was to pay down the principle rapidly until the scales of interest balanced out. It was a plan common in the hab sectors that surrounded the gigantic sulphurite refinery and throughout the poorer communities of Grotto Corporation as a whole. If one could achieve the ‘debt balance’ then, though they might never pay off the debt and would perpetually remain impoverished by it, the payment would at least be manageable.
Everyone was really just trying to avoid the stiff fines and jail-time in the local enforcer’s spire for non-payment or, worse yet, an off-world prison sentence for full default. It was a serviceable plan, though one that did not leave enough in savings or disposable income for the average citizen to handle health emergencies, habitation tax re-districting, or family members in need. So delicate was the mathematical balancing act that one misstep would usually end with severe consequences. It was no coincidence that the poorest and most desperate of Grotto’s population also had the highest instance of debt crime.
Jada Sek, once a veteran Reaper and now a licensed mercenary in the esteemed ranks of the Merchants Militant, had come a long way from the polluted stacks of Baen 6. However, as she breathed in and out the way Poe had shown her, starting at the base of her spine and letting her lungs fill to their maximum potential, there seemed to be a tinge of sulphurite in the air.
At first, Jada thought it a real scent, and then she recognized it as another one of the minor hallucinations, in this case olfactory, that haunted every Dire Sword. The price for their superhuman bodies was a life spent on the knife’s edge, physically and mentally. Jada felt it was logical that it would be so. Her years traveling the universe had shown her that more often than not, all things had a return and a hard return at that.
She had sent the majority of her marine pay back to her two brothers. Her mother had passed away not long after Jada had become a Reaper and her father, Hama, refused her help. Hama Sek was a proud man, and she supposed he had some reason for that.
When Hama was young, he struggled with his work assignment, and much like the stories of her former comrade, Ben Takeda, before he became a Reaper for life, the young Sek was a malcontent and a brawler. Unlike her former comrade, Hama crossed the enforcers of the spire and was sent to an off-world penal colony.
One elite house or another made arrangements with the colony and Hama was pressed into a penal legion. He served for two years as battle fodder, sent into the jaws of wild combat time after time, and somehow, against all odds, he managed to survive. Of the seven hundred men and women pressed into service, only Hama and forty others survived to fulfill the ‘combat rehabilitation’ terms of their agreement. Most of the others, predictably, some might even argue by Grotto design, were unable to successfully re-integrate into the Baen workforce and so ended up back in prison.
Hama, on the other hand, had kept his record clean, put his head down, and got to work. That work gave him a family, and even if they were perpetually teetering on the edge of financial ruin, for her father, it beat the alternative.
Jada thought of her brothers, and for a brief moment, the stench of the sulphurite once again filled her nose. They had died in a refinery accident along with her father and several hundred others in their habitation sector, one of the largest industrial tragedies in Baen 6 history.
When Jada had gone Downspire with Tango Platoon, her brothers were alive and happily spending her hard-earned marine pay on not nearly enough of their life-bond principles, and when she emerged, her brothers were dead.
She really did lose everything in the darkness of Vorhold, thought Jada, as she allowed the pain of her body and the sting of the memory to wash over her, pass through her, and fade away beyond her.
She suddenly realized that she carried a sort of pride in her yellow eyes. Where once it had been something she felt ashamed of, as it marked her as being from the poorest of the poor, not a single one of her Reaper comrades had ever given voice to the fact. That was her Grotto upbringing combining with the pain and hallucinations to rob her of her focus, to test her resolve, and Jada continued her exercises in order to breathe it away.
Jada breathed in a lungful of air that would have been sharp with the cold had she not been sealed inside her helmet. The merc opened her eyes to take in the full view of the frozen valley below. The surface of this planet was covered in ashes that fell from the sky in a light breeze, vomited up from the volcanoes and cracks of the surface of the troubled world.
Jada recalled from the mission brief that it was believed that the planet’s geo-thermal instability was due to intrusive mining on a mind-numbingly large scale, far beyond the capacity of known human technology. The merc knew it had to have been a truly massive operation for it to dwarf humanity’s capacity for planetary ruination. Where humans stripped what they could from claimed planets, whoever had exploited this world, like countless others on this side of the Ellisian Line, had fundamentally upset the physical equilibrium of everything.
As she stood on the rock outcropping overlooking the ashen valley below, Jada could feel, thanks to her advanced body, the subtle shifts in gravity and spin as the planet careened through its tight orbit.
The cold temperatures on the planet were due to the dying sun that had all but burned to embers. It hung in the sky, vast enough to cover half the horizon with its dirty brown bulk. The other six planets in the system were just as dead as the sun. Most of them were frozen wastelands, as quiet as they were cold.
No signs of current or former civilization had been discovered by long-range scanners and cursory scout recons. To date, at least according to available intelligence, none of the plundered worlds had revealed anything of the sort. If other civilizations had existed on these worlds, their presence there had been wiped away completely, or were so beyond human that signs of their existence were all but invisible. Only the tomb-worlds seemed untouched by whatever weapon of devastation had swept across this part of the universe, leaving maelstrom wracked planets and silent grave cities in its wake.
“Jada,” said Poe as he walked up behind her, so quiet despite his mag-armor that the merc might not have noticed him had her own physical senses not been so enhanced, “It’s time.”
Jade turned to look at Poe. His face, like hers and all the other Dire Swords, was hidden behind the grinning skull engraved onto his faceplate. She had learned quickly to tell each of the warriors apart based on the unique features of the skulls, as they were all acid-etched representations of the individual’s actual skull.
The Dire Swords were a practical lot, sharing weapons, equipment, and armor at will without much notion of ownership, but the helmets were the single item that belonged solely to the individual.
“Okay, battle buddy,” said Jada as she rose up from her crouched position on the ledge and turned to mount her tactical ATV, “Let’s go do some damage.”
Poe laughed quietly behind his skull face, and though Jada couldn’t see him clearly, she had learned after weeks of rigorous one-on-one training how to read his body language. The mag-armor was bulky and did much to render each merc somewhat indistinguishable from the other, but there was a certain bounce in his shoulders that gave him away.