The shattered edge

[arvg]

Alvarez recovered his cap from where it had fallen, banging it out as he set it back atop his head. He looked around the room at the wreckage, checking his now empty SMG, shaking his head as he tossed the useless weapon away across the deck.

"Pistole," he demanded extending his hand. Thankful when Dimitriov slapped a .60 caliber Coalition assualt pistol into his hand. He checked the gigantic pistol, ensuring the powerpack was fully charged and the magazine loaded with Teflon semi-armourpiercers.

Across from them, Pasha was rapidly switching the light machinegun pan from anti-personnel to anti-mech rounds. The Master Chief looking all the worse for wear in his torn great coat and dented helmet. But there was no doubting the look of pure fury in his eyes. It meant bad luck for the next blundering mechanical behemoth that decided to cross his path.

Alvarez tapped his TAC headset, "Kerimov, this is Coyote... come in?" He tapped the TAC and shook his head at the others. "We're being jammed."

"Over here," Brooks called from a small compartment. "We can hold up and shoot anything that comes through this door..."

Alvarez grabbed a fist-full of XiaoBei's coat and nodded to the others to fall back to the compartment. Each taking a moment to catch their breaths and check their weapons.

"Concentrate fire on anything that approaches that door, hermanos," Alvarez stated, as he turned to survey the compartment. It was quite tiny by the standards of the wreck: Octagonal, and very difficult for a mech to get inside.

XiaoBei looked shaken, but still in control, willing his hands to be steady as he took what videos he could of the scene in the outer compartment. He stepped backwards, into the very middle of the chamber, and that was when the floor began to move.

"Hey, who pushed the down button?" Brooks called, as they sank away from the twisted bio-lab.

"Security wheel!" Alvarez bellowed. "Doctor XiaoBei in the center!"

XiaoBei was thrust into the middle of the descending platform as the others put their backs against him, weapons pointed out before them. The walls suddenly opened up, over the gargantuan main chamber of the alien starship. Around them ancient scripts flowed and changed, dancing down the walls.

They stopped, at a new platform, above the main core of the ship. A transparent bowl, high to the stern end of the compartment. It was big, but the flat black crystal octagons around the chamber were at the perfect height for consoles.

"It looks like a nerve center," XiaoBei observed.

"Hold tight," Alvarez commanded. "Brooks, you go first... and don't touch anything, hermano!"

---

[Jayce]

"Well... That was pretty cool." Jayce said. "Hey, boys..." Stacy coughed. "And girl, in here." Jayce motioned for the group to enter a smaller room. Once the group entered the room, the floor started to shudder. Then the walls, and finally the ceiling of the room started to wriggle, before the group felt like they were moving.

"Ey, hermana, it's an elevator, ese. Chill out." Alvarez said to a rather confused looking Winters.

They stopped, at a new platform, above the main core of the ship. There was a transparent bowl, high to the stern end of the compartment. It was big, but the flat black crystal octagons around the chamber were at the perfect height for consoles.

"It looks like a nerve center," XiaoBei observed.

"Hold tight," Alvarez commanded. "Brooks, you go first... and don't touch anything, hermano!"

"O-key, boss!" Jayce retorted, in a rather thick, fake Hispanian accent. He began walking, running his hand along almost every panel and console in the room, before the door behind him closed.

Minutes later, there was a banging noise on the top of the elevator. The hatch opened to reveal a rather confused and bewildered Jayce. "Hey, umm, yeah, so you guys shut the door, and then it didn't open again... So I had to go all through this deck, find a way up, come BACK to this deck, and open the hatch. But look what I found!" Jayce help up a small, opaque, black triangular panel, with a single recessed button at the top. "Watch this!" Jayce placed the small triangle on the floor, and pressed the button. "See, it's a map! And I DIDN'T wreck half the ship to get it." Jayce's smile went from one ear to another, as XiaoBei said:

"Well. Great. Except that map leads us to the room that we're standing right in front of. So... Yeah, you just wasted about... 45 minutes of my time. Let's go." XiaoBei stepped out of the elevator, one of his boots crushing the small triangle. Jayce stayed behind and collected the small shards of the map, a dejected look on his face. Winters shot Jayce a sadly sympathetic glance. He followed behind the group, pondering how much of a jerk-off XiaoBei was.

"I wonder who would miss him if he fell through the flo-" Jayce' train of thought was derailed as the Doctor nearly fell through a hole in the bridge floor, letting out a rather girlish scream. A smile crept back onto Jayce's face, as he hauled XiaoBei back onto the deck. "Don't break my stuff, doctor. You need us. That need doesn't reciprocate." Jayce whispered into the doctor's ear.

XiaoBei simply looked at the deck.

---

[arvg]

Doctor XiaoBei wondered why on Earth he had stepped on an alien device, definitely not at all like him... ahh well. He did have a headache, and was in chronic need of a cigarette.

He shrugged off Brooks' grip and adjusted his coat. "I am fine, now then..."

He looked at the consoles that Jayce had been randomly touching. Thankfully they were dark and unresponsive. The last thing any of them needed was for him to have triggered some kind of auto-defense system, or lock-down protocol.

"Colonel Alvarez," XiaoBei looked sternly at the Commander. "Please restrain your men, I can't do my job if they keep disregarding my advice, and go about randomly shooting bullets into things, pressing strange buttons... and other wise doing the most bone headed things imaginable!"

Alvarez heaved a heavy sigh, "Comradas, you heard the Doctore, stop doing stupid... things. Si, happy Doctore?"

Lang ignored Alvarez's question, looking about himself as if in a dream. Despite the many objects and installations that were impossible to identify, there was a kind of comprehensibility to the place: here a desk, there a screen of some kind.

Alvarez and the others were so fascinated that they didn't notice what XiaoBei was doing till they heard the pop and crisp of static.

Consoles around the bridge lit up with ancient sigils, holographic displays. In the middle of space before the bridge hung an image of the Coalition flotilla. Red halos circling each of them.

"Weapons systems?" Alvarez asked, tersely.

"I don't know," XiaoBei admitted. "The language is... vaguely similar to something I have seen before on ancient relics... but it definitely isn't Dom K'Vosh, nor their progeny, the nomads."

"Can you read it?" Alvarez pressed.

"No," XiaoBei replied. "At least... well... I can pick out one or two words. That's a warning..." he pointed to a series of sigils. "And that," his finger shifted to another console. "Is a distress beacon... I am deadly serious here... touch nothing. Even accidentally... Who knows what weapons systems just switched on... and what is now targeting our comrades out there."

"I do not like this, Doctore," Alvarez admitted. "Winters can you contact the Flotilla? Dimitriov and Steeles, perimeter... Master Chief, keep them covered as you can. Brooks... ese, you so much as twitch I'ma gonna shoot you myself, holmes."

While the others readied themselves for some kind of defense, XiaoBei went back to what looked like the central console.

He had been right, they were in the ship's nerve center, and the console and its peripherals were the nucleus of it all. XiaoBei began a form-function analysis, fearing that he would never get another chance to study it.

Certainly, the ship used no source of power that he could conceive of. Some uncanny alien force coursed through the fallen ship, and through the console. Perhaps if he could get some data on it, or get access to it...

At XiaoBei's cry, they all turned with guns raised, as strobing light threw their shadows tall against the bulkheads. The command center flashed and flowed with power like an unearthly network of electronic blood vessels.

The console was surrounded by a blinding aurora of harsh radiance that pulsed through the spectrum. XiaoBei, body convulsed in agony, holding fast to the console, shone with those same colours as the enigmatic forces flooded into him.

"Don't touch him!" Alvarez dragged Brooks back, the youth had been about to attempt a body check to knock XiaoBei clear. Winters moved to one side, well out of the range of the discharges, to get a line of fire on the console that wouldn't risk hitting XiaoBei. Winters made sure her selector was on full auto and prepared to empty the magazine into the console.

But before she could, the alien lightning died away. XiaoBei slumped slowly to the deck, breathing raggedly.

---

[arvg]

It was dark on Volgograd.

The Kremlin dome, a shining crystalline mound of steel and glass rising from the blasted surface of the desolate world was testament to the perseverance of the Coalition. Long the masters of dome life having pioneered the technology on the Martian colonies, and the inner ring worlds back in Sol.

The art of making habitation where none thought possible had given them an edge in remaining hidden. First converting mining tunnels under the surface of the planet, and then turning to the great feats of construction that had seen the rise of the Arcologies that now housed the majority of the Coalition's population.

Arcology-One, the Mocoba Dome was by far the largest, dominating a significant area and home to a massive population. Connected to the fabrication and construction heartland of Volgograd, which was, for practicalities sake, also constructed beneath the surface. Beside it, almost in its lee, was the Kremlin Dome.

It was as if someone had taken an old Earth trinket, a snow-globe of the old Earth Kremlin, and had gone to such painstaking lengths to recreate it. Red Square, the GYM, and of course the Kremlin itself. Housed here were the government buildings, the state Duma, the Ministry of Truth, the Ministry of Plenty, and the Ministry of Peace. But overshadowing them all was the immense Palace of the Soviets. With the great McIntosh statue towering into the sky in defiance.

Sitting alone, late, in his office, the Premier of the Coalition, Alvin Katz, attended to matters of state that demanded his constant attention.

The recent dismantling of McIntosh's hard-line government, as well as the purge of the Commissariat and the removal of His Watchful Eye from his shadowy position of power, had left a starkly different Coalition behind it. One that was coming to grips with what it had been through under the totalitarian era.

Like waking from a nightmare.

His computer detailed the constant pressures of the JiangXi reconstruction project, the completion of the planetary shields on both worlds that meant that the disaster that befell the world would never happen again. Then, of course, were the reports from the Omega-50 front, and the dark tidings of the ever present war. The situation of L'acadie and the Gaulic refugees. The list seemed endless.

The trilling of the incoming message via Neural Net had him sit back, and stare at the large flat screen that hung on the far wall. He reached out a hand to activate it.

"We're getting a direct report from Commissar Santorini on the situation with the alien derelict." One of his many aides reported from the communications center deep below the dome.

"I will hear it directly," Katz said, turning to the screen as it lit up with the Commissar's face.

"Dobre Deen, Commissar," he greeted, inclining his head a fraction. "Please go ahead."

---

[Shagohad]

Klaxons began to scream and red lights began to revolve in their housings. Men frantically typed at their consoles, pushed buttons, and handled levers.

"Status report!" Angelica barked harshly.

"The alien warship, Comrade! It's targeted us!" A bewildered crewman replied.

"It what?"

"The weapon systems have painted the entire fleet! If it fires, it will saturate our entire formation with weapons fire!"

"Contact all vessels...tell them to target the ship's turrets. If it fires, I want it disabled ASAP."

"Da, Comrade Lieutenant Colonel!"

She then swung about to face a communications officer. "Bring up the boarding party. I need to yell at them. Now!"

---

"THE HULL HAS BEEN BREACHED AND THE SCIENCE IS LEAKING OUT!"

[Yuveraj Khan]

Khan was immediately and deeply aware of the Premier on one of the other comm screens, listening to Santorini's briefing. He cleared his throat.

It was time to act decisively.

"Colonel Broch, your men will board the derelict at once, locate Colonel Alvarez and Doctor XiaoBei, and secure that thing once and for all. You will lead them, personally." Khan smiled wolfishly. "If things went well, he would get the credit. If things went poorly, Broch would take the blame. All in All a perfect plan.

"If it moves, and isn't Coalition, shoot it." Khan crossed his arms. "Make it so!"

---

[Tabris]

As the Storm waited on the Hanger Deck for reinforcements to pick up the corpse for study, it noticed multiple heat-signals closing in on it's position, it's scanners started to actively search for them, the AI was puzzled, the signals were approaching from all directions, when he finally got a visual if it had blood it would run cold, however since it did not it did the only thing it could.

"Oh...Sh-." was all it got out over the Comm before it was swarmed by dozens upon dozens of the large bats like the one he killed earlier, they were simply everywhere, BAAL's defensive turrets could barely keep up, when he killed one two more took it's place it seemed!

It briefly contemplating using it's Razors to drill a hole in the side of the ship near the Forcefield outside the ship but disregarded it since the Commissariat would want the ship relatively intact, so it stuck to it's primary turrets which was barely keeping them at bay.

"Alert, multiple hostile organisms detected, require heavy-fire support." the AI sent out before one of the Bat's managed to slip past it's defensive fire, digging it's talons into the hull and started to rip into the panel, if BAAL did not get aid soon the Chassis would be useless to BAAL...

[Shagohad]

She didn't even respond to Khan. She hated him. So very much. Her gaze fell across the crew of the ship, all looking to her expectantly. "Bring us around. And prepare our special cargo for battle..." She stood up quickly, turning on her heel, and headed off the bridge; her coat flailing behind her.

Her hand dipped into her coat, fishing out the headset and wrapping it around her scalp, setting the earpiece in place. It was rather small and fancy; a gift from the Corsairs. She spoke into the microphone that perched itself on her cheek, "Via, we have work to do. I want a light combat frame sent to the docking bay."

A soft, monotonous tone responded, "Da, Tovarisch. I go where I am needed."

Her pace increased as she approached the docking bay, her hands undoing the buttons to her coat and her dress shirt, hooking a left and advanced upon a row of marines, all dressed in standard combat armor and toting automatic weapons. A man stepped up to her, offering a set of personalized armor in one hand and an odd weapon in the other. With a quick motion, she pulled her dress shirt over her head and handed it to an aid, taking the armored shirt and pulling it over her undershirt. The armored EVA suit was formfitting, but armored in the more vital areas, giving it a rather chunky look.

When she finished adjusting the armor, she turned to the marines, speaking loudly, "All of you have orders to kill what ever isn't bearing the hammer of the Coalition! If you are given the order to kill, you will do so, or I will shoot you myself." With that, she took the weapon from the man and slung it over her shoulder. "You are the best. So I expect the best." Her gaze diverted to a humanoid object that stepped from a cargo elevator, a myriad of weapon systems built into its arms, chest, and shoulders. Without a word it stepped to the main loading door, its stance shifting to that of alertness.

"Maintain radio contact, check your corners, remember your training, and keep your Comrades safe."

The marines replied with an enthusiastic, "Get some!" then fell in rank behind the machine. Angelic grabbed a featureless face mask from a crewman and slid it over her head, the built-in HUD sharpening her view of things. With a loud roar, machines set into motion to open the cargo doors, the black expanse of the alien warship they had docked with filling their view. Without any hesitance, the machine and the men charged inside, weapons raised. Angelica followed closely behind, her eyes on the progress of the men more than they were on the hellhole they had just stepped into.

---

"THE HULL HAS BEEN BREACHED AND THE SCIENCE IS LEAKING OUT!"

[Rodent]

Santorini looked a little worried, reporting to the Premier himself of this.

So...basically, Recon Group Sevastopol was carrying out operations in Omicron 64, when we were beset and attacked by a form of Drone, attacking in wings. At the same time, a severe technical failure happened on our ships. We managed to get critical systems up on all ships, but a massive Drone squadron was assembling above us. Before they attacked, an ultimatum was given to us. Surrender, and eject our crew as a symbol. We did...

But at the same time, Colonel Alvarez managed to find a huge derelict warship, Battleship class, and we have figured out that the Battleship is the central point from which the Drones are being controlled. Alvarez....nearly killed himself destroying the drone array, but that problem was dealt with.

We have now stormed the ship. Comrades Steeles, Brooks, Alvarez, and Winters are on board the ship, along with Doctor Xiaobei. We've found that the ship is inhabited by....strange alien creatures, and most of our marine teams have been taken out....

We're attempting to secure the ship, but it would have been quicker if not for a few faults. Brooks nearly destroyed the warship by first firing Razors inside the derelict, and by trying to pilot the Social Credit inside it. That was a really stupid move...

We're currently attempting to clear the ship of aliens, and to figure out what the ship is all about. That'll be all, Premier.

She bows Tiredly.

[arvg]

Premier Katz scooped up a mug of bitter coffee, stirring the sugar around inside it as he considered what the Commissar had reported.

"So it's been the typical kind of day for the Fighter Corps, then?" He smiled cheerily. "I mean, when they have bad days, yikes, they have really bad days."

Rich, dark, velvety caffeine flooded his senses, the cold espresso instantly smoothing his sore throat as it went down. Katz's mouth watered at the traces of cream lingering on his palate, and something spicy teased at the aftertaste. Hints of cinnamon and cloves tasted like Christmas, sinking straight to the root of his tension headache.

He sighed.

"Do what needs to be done to get control of that ship, Commissar. The eyes of the Coalition are upon you, and Commissar Khan." he set his mug down. His face loosing all trace of good humour. "I needn't remind you of the price of failure in this endeavour."

---