Some things never changed. After a year in the bunkers of Volgograd, she had all but forgotten the smell of a Storm crammed full of soldiers. A combination of sweat, gun oil, and what she could only label as fear. It hadn't taken long in the Coalition for her to recognise that particular odor. The reminder of the stench that Barricade offered was hardly welcome. Akira scowled, the expression strangely out-of-place on her Kusarian features. The Kusari Navy may have been full of hateful old men, but at least they cleaned their gunboats. She hated the Coalition's troop transports, with their cargo of self-righteous would-be soldiers, certain that they would be the Premier's next heroes. It was a delusion. There were no heroes on JiangXi. None that came back. There were only survivors and corpses, and Miyagi Akira fully intended to belong to the first group. Two of the Militsiya Corps pilots next to her shifted nervously in their seats at her expression, quickly striking up conversations with the men around them when she met their gaze. Battered as hers was, the uniform of a Fighter Corps pilot and the Lieutenant's stripes on her shoulders demanded respect.
Akira smiled, a thin predatory expression. She had forgotten.
Across Barricade's crammed bay, a man sat with his eyes pressed closed. Praying, likely. She watched him for a moment, ice in her gaze. Akira had abandoned that practice long ago, as the ancestors had abandoned her. She wondered if the young fool would live long enough to leave those beliefs behind. Unlikely. Religion was frowned upon in the Coalition. It had been one of the few policies she had agreed with on her enlistment. There had been only a handful she truly disagreed with, but few outside His Watchful Eye cared, if you kept your mouth shut and uttered the right lies, and she had grown very proficient at deception since she had fled Kusari's Navy. Not proficient enough to prevent herself from being shuttled down to JiangXi, but that had hardly been her fault.
A twinge of pain crept up her spine as the Storm shuddered. She'd left her straps too loose again. With a few furious tugs, the necessary adjustments were made, and the pain in her back faded to a persistent discomfort. The old injury rarely troubled her in space, save for sporadic bouts of numbness, but she would have to be careful on the ground. It had been a long time since she had been required to run in full gravity. Akira had devised a simple counter to that problem.
The VLR-01 'Seeker' rested between her legs, the big rifle's muzzle to the floor. It was one of the more advanced infantry weapons the Coalition employed, insofar as anything the Coalition's marines used could be called advanced. The Fighter Corps had the lion's share of the budget, and everyone knew it. It was what could modestly be called long range and, with any luck, would stop anything from clawing her face off long before it got close enough to try. The rifle was still a toy compared to the high-end energy weapons she had used in Kusari's Navy, but somewhere in the sea of training sessions she'd undertaken the Seeker had grown on her. Solid projectiles. Recoil. You could feel the kill. Akira liked that.
Her pack sat behind the rifle, tucked between the bench and her knees. It was depressingly small. Eating before she'd climbed on board would have been wise, but there had been precious little time to spare - even a disgraced Coalition Lieutenant knew better then to keep Major Kirov waiting. Now, she was left with a sparse handful of rations, and less ammunition. No tent. No mechanical aid. The pack would still be painful to carry, and she'd loosened the straps off in case she needed to dump it in a hurry.
If only she could figure out a way to do the same to the Militsiya. The junior soldiers were young, untrained. She had no doubt that they would do far more to get her killed then assist her. Her shoulders rose and fell in a gentle shrug. Survivors and corpses. If they died, they died. That was their problem. She had no intention of throwing her neck in a Stalker's fangs to preserve the blood of some idiotic hero.
JiangXi hovered in the Storm's viewports. It couldn't be too far now. Soon, the world would be a simple place, dominated by the need to kill, to survive. It was a simplicity that had been absent from her life for too long. Slowly, almost reverently, she fished a battered green notepad from her pocket, and flicked to a blank page. Pen and paper books were archaic by Kusari's standards, but it was still possible to get hold of them in the far remote regions of space frequented by the Coalition. She liked the old book. There was something calming in recording memories in tangible form. The last line was still smudged from where she had hurriedly stowed the diary the last time the censors had come knocking. It read:
Dublin, 817 A.S - Bretonian Armed Forces
Underneath, her pen scratched out a new line. The shuddering of the ship blurred the characters, and it took a few tries to get the kanji just right.
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