19 - Ground PVE

"Sir, team one reports that the 3rd floor is clear, advancing to the 5th floor while team two is still clearing the fourth floor. Outer cordon reports preliminary contact, strange movement near the dock but no spare personnel to secure the area."

"Shit, tell teams one and two to hurry it up!"

Impatiently tapping a finger on the table, the sunglass-wearing suit started to realise he was starting to lose control of the situation, this operation wasn't meant to be a long stay and he didn't have the resources to keep this large of an area locked down.

(Why do I feel like this is exactly what Mike wanted to happen… This isn't good, I lost the initiative.)

While destroying one staircase, making sure the droids couldn't advance quickly by denying the use of the elevator shafts and hiding inside a massive building perfect for ambushes didn't say much on their own, together they told quite a convincing story.

Mike was stalling, something he could easily do as time was very much on his side.

"Well fuck… Disband the outer cordon and have them join in flushing out our little rats."

"But sir, that-"

"I fucking know that already! Just fucking do it."

Calling back their outer guard would leave them exposed, but it would also free up more resources desperately needed to clear the pilot's guild before things went from bad to worse and other powers started kicking up a fuss.

Sadly things needed to get a lot worse for the sunglass-wearing suit before they got any better.

"Wha- What happened!?"

Out of nowhere, a massive explosion shook the ground as team two's camera feed cut out.

"Team two appears to have triggered some kind of IED, extreme casualties expected!"

Although the droid who had been acting as the team's point man quickly re-established contact, the sensor feed it sent back made it clear that they had suffered heavy casualties.

"Team two wiped out!"

"Yeah, I can fucking see that! Send in everything!"

Furious with anger, the sunglass-wearing suit could almost see Mike's smug grin as he laughed at him.

"Sir, that would leave us exposed!"

"Don't fucking care! Do it! Use all the droids too, secure that fucking building, and kill everything inside! Next time you disrespect me like this I'll kill you myself!"

"S-Sir, yes Sir!"

"Here they come, are you ready River?"

Tapped into the building's security cameras, Mike easily tracked the number of suits now rushing his position as he inserted a fresh magazine into his brand new assault rifle before chambering a round.

"I think so…"

While River looked considerably more nervous than Mike she was still somewhat confident nevertheless, for some reason Mike's plans seemed to work most of the time, and she hoped this time wasn't an exception.

"Then let's hit it!"

Leading the way, Mike jumped down to the ground floor and checked the surveillance feeds as he crept up to the door leading into the reception area that up until a few seconds ago had a droid blocking the exit. Feeling a hand on his right shoulder, Mike opened the door and pied the reception with his rifle before finding the area to be clear like the cameras had told him. Nodding to River the two of them slowly moved up to the blasted open blast door and shared a mutual deep breath, from here, things were going to get loud.

At Mike's signal, River tossed out a special kind of grenade as Mike took point while River took up a shooting position basically over his shoulder. Instead of exploding, the grenade River had tossed high into the air suddenly transformed into a small drone which painted the entirety of the blood-soaked plaza and surrounding buildings with its LIDAR and thermal image sensors while its laser range finder worked overtime to send target solutions to both Mike and River's weapons. Squeezing the trigger on his new impulse purchase in the general direction of the concealed machine gun emplacements, Mike emptied the magazine in about half a second without any form of refined aim, the individual rifle round's inertial navigation system and ion thrusters did the rest. Leaving thin vapour trails in the air, each individual round that came out of Mike's rifle found its own assigned 'grape' due to the wonders of sci-fi technology. Pushing the mag release as he forced the spent magazine out of the mag well with a fresh one, from there, Mike set the rifle to manual targeting and hit another flawless headshot on a lucky survivor, splitting his sunglasses in two as Mike broke into a run. Counting a single heartbeat after Mike had started firing, River squeezed her own trigger as a high-pitched tone sounded out inside her helmet and a series of small red crosses appeared in her field of vision. Being a rank amateur with a rifle as she only had had about an hour of training before this, River's aim was far from steady, even less so when moving, but that hardly mattered.

The second River's aim overlapped one of the red crosses in her sight, River's rifle fired on its own while not caring about the cover. Leaving vapour trails of her own, River's kinetic rifle was the kind that didn't care about cover or concealment as its miniaturised anti-tank rounds tore straight through anything short of titanium plating like a pencil through wet tissue paper. Within 5 seconds of Mike opening fire, more than a dozen clean black suits had been stained in blood and brain matter, this fact alone allowed Mike and River to escape the immediate area, but it also helped that Mike had waited until his opponent had committed most of their troops to search the guild.

"I'll cover you, get in!"

Although it was considerably more awkward to run the lower gravity became, River and Mike nevertheless made record phase as they finally reached the Scorpion, Mike covered for River as she warmed up the reactor and got the ship online.

"Done! Get in!"

As the low purr of the reactor finally started humming, Mike wasted no time as he climbed into his cockpit.

"Don't bite your tongue now, we're getting out of this system as fast as possible!"

Even if the two of them had managed to wipe out the suits in their entirety, Mike wasn't about to wait for Lu biomedical to send reinforcements, this was the chance to escape from their surveillance net.

"Agreed!"

Ignoring the proper preparations for takeoff and traffic control in their entirety, Mike instantly raised the reactor output to pre-jump levels and warmed up the faster-than-light drive before even leaving the station. Lighting the afterburners as soon as he entered the barrel of the station, Mike used the manoeuvring thrusters to swerve past another ship leaving.

"I'm doing a blind jump out of the system, start working on a path that'll throw them off us."

Going balls to the wall, Mike started opening up the distance to put himself out of the gravity well as River spoke up.

"The sensors are going haywire!"

"We'll look at that later!"

Thinking it was just some sort of sensor malfunction, Mike made the mistake of not looking at the data himself, if he did things would have worked out very differently. Finding the station's gravity well unnaturally disruptive, Mike looked down at his sensor panel to find about a hundred ships jumping in, as well as the massive disruption River had mentioned forming about a kilometre in front of the Scorpion's current position.

"Oh fuck!"

Cutting thrusters for a split second as he slammed his foot down on the pedals, Mike barely managed to avoid a truly massive ship entering the system. Equipped with multiple medium calibre railguns in armoured turret mounts, shielded fusion torpedoes which cost the equivalent of the Scorpion able to vaporise an entire mid-sized station and a crew of about 50 this ship wasn't something players of Interstellar online could normally get their hands on, this was a destroyer, the kind of ship which lined the navies of larger, multi-system powers.

[This is the Solar Empire destroyer Endurance, vessel GCV-43, power down immediately or you will be destroyed.]

Judging by the sheer amount of lock-on warnings from not only the destroyer, but also the numerous ships who had arrived along with it, the threat was genuine.

"They must have seen what went on inside the station…"

"Yeah, the timing is too perfect otherwise… Fuck."

Obeying the directives given to him, Mike cut thrust and took the reactor to its lowest output, try as he might Mike would need multiple lives to outrun a destroyer already locked on him at this kind of range and without any cover. Spinning up the Scorpion so he and River could at least have some semblance of gravity while they waited for their captors to come and collect them.

"I'm not going back to a hellhole like that, no way."

Remembering her time in that freakishly cruel, small box she had spent months inside as her mind and body degraded, River was sure in her mind that she would rather die than return to something like that.

"Yeah, I'm on the same page there, if they try to fuck us I'll make sure they regret it."

-

"Ma'am, contact GCV-43 appears to have followed our instructions, they've powered down and entered a permanent spin-holding pattern."

Hearing her subordinates report, navy commander Kate Daniels, who commanded the destroyer Endurance narrowed her eyes as she used her own command panel to order an even closer scan of the highly irregular railgun-equipped fighter.

"... It would appear so, the capacitors look to be empty, but if that monstrosity as much as points in our general direction destroy the craft with extreme prejudice."

"Yes ma'am, at any sign of trouble from the contact, I am cleared to engage and destroy it."

Making sure her weapons officer had the correct orders, Kate turned her attention away from the weapons system officer.

"How does it look inside?"

Contacting the advance team which had triggered her battle group's early response in the first place, Kate saw live pictures of what her advance team had called an unprovoked massacre for the first time.

"Ma'am, it is worse than we first believed, initial estimates that had been in the low 30s were a gross underestimate. It seemed to have been a premeditated attack on the local pilot's guild branch without any consideration for collateral damage using two camouflaged heavy machine gun emplacements."

"Tell me how bad it is."

As her subordinate was continuing to beat around the bush, Kate forced a direct answer out of him with a direct order.

"... We're still working on it along with cooperating eyewitness accounts, but the current death toll stands at 53 and the figure is likely to increase as we conclude our investigation."

Although 53 people was an almost insignificant number of fatalities on a galactic or even imperial scale where crime and conflict were rampant, Kate still shuttered at the fact that such a tragedy had happened under her own watch. Kate had known about the worsening security in the system, but she had still delayed the deployment of her group, this had led to the loss of at least 53 souls and weighed heavily on her conscience.

"After the initial attack at the plaza there also appears to have been a secondary attack on the pilot's guild, we've found traces of cluster charges on its breached blast door in addition to some serious hardware which was either destroyed in combat or intentionally scuttled."

Seeing the pictures in addition to her subordinate's report, Kate quickly put together a plausible theory.

(So the main target escaped into the guild and the perps pursued, the question is if they achieved what they wanted or not… Not that it really matters, with this many forces at my disposal it should be no issue getting to the bottom of things.)

Kate's main objective this time around was securing the Solar empire's newly acquired asset from the now-defunct Lex heavy industries, like any other mission in her budding career she sought to complete it perfectly and had therefore taken time to prepare, as a result, people had died and that mistake must not be repeated under any circumstances.

"Lockdown the station! Not a soul in or out until I saw so, such a scaving crime must not go unpunished!"

"Yes ma'am!"

Having also seen the live feed, Kate's subordinates were as eager as her to get to the bottom of this massacre and punish the ones responsible.

"Have that fighter towed back inside the station and get a shuttle over here, my gut tells me it's the key to everything going on here."