Embers After Flames, Chapter 8.0 (Patreon)

8.0

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In the aftermath of the whole thing, the PCA was, not to put too fine a point on it, mad.

Like, extremely, earth-shatteringly, unreasonably fuck-ass mad.

PCA troops swarmed along Branch’s trail, desperate to attempt to get their hands on them. King and Chartreuse had a number of engagements, but Raven... Hoo boy.

Raven was the priority target, the PCA singling them out as the one who had caused the most problems. Raven racked up a dozen engagements in the first day alone before they finally shook the PCA’s attention and went to ground. Over the course of that single day, Raven had wiped out four digits of Auxilia and other drones, upwards of thirty LCs, twelve HCs, six AH12s, and a pair of Warships.

It was the worst losses that they’d ever faced at the hands of a single entity, even if that was only because the Enforcement System was usually smart enough to remove things from the zone whenever Dolmayan showed up.

It took a day before the System’s mainframe finally began to drop in temperature again. It did not reach its previous baseline, staying a consistent three degrees higher than it had previously been, even with the coolant being pumped through at maximum efficiency.

The knowledge that the Enforcement System was malding so hard was a balm to my soul.

The first interstellar ships arrived only days later.

They were small things, mostly. The opportunity hunters, the first of the vultures, chasing the first scents and first indications of a possible meal. They were the closest ships available, each one from nearby systems. Miners. Cargo ships. Things like that.

The Closure Satellite was still a while aways from functioning, and the Warship fleets had been called to fill in the gap. The PCA vessels were being hastily refitted for their new duties, but that too was nowhere near complete.

Most of the new ships didn’t try to test them. Despite their number, they were independents, not here as a group, merely here as like-minded scavengers. Survival, for them, required caution and opportunity.

Some were willing to take the risk. Rubicon’s surface was soon adorned with dozens of new metal husks.

As time progressed, the number grew. By the end of the week, they were swarming, and those who were willing to test things were swarming the PCA’s fleets. Most died, but not all, and that was enough to embolden many.

I marked every surviving ship for reconnaissance. Chances were, anybody that bold was going to cause problems for us.

It wasn’t until the end of the second week that the corporate fleets started to arrive. Now, those were ships worth writing about, and they came in swarms that were more than large enough to handle the PCA’s interdiction without the Closure Satellite in play. Most of them made it through with only moderate losses, forming a bunch of new groups that would inevitably become new problems, but who would probably fight each other first.

By the end of the third week, the Closure Satellite was nearing reactivation, PCA Industrial MTs swarming over the megastructure and hauling new shit into place. They were limited now by manufacturing, but while Chartreuse had caused significant damage, nothing she’d destroyed had been irreplaceable.

It didn’t quite come quickly enough. Only a day before the final conduits could come out of the manufacturing bays, the big boys arrived.

The fleets of Balam and Arquebus arrived within two hours of each other. Both of them were enormous, with ships of almost every size category. The only one that was missing from the lineup were capital vessels, long restricted by treaties older than interstellar colonization under the threat of destruction of assets and dissolution of corporations.

What they brought with them was still an enormous force, large enough to conquer a less developed planet. The ‘corporate security assets’ that escorted the fleets were more than a match for the PCA’s AS07 Warships, on account of the fact that they were actually designed for space battles rather than bombardment and ground support duties.

If they had more favourable numbers compared to the PCA, they would have had free reign for a lot of the system. Alas, for a force that had been gathered so quickly, for how the corporations reckoned things, they couldn’t pull that much from their prior duties.

Balam had a head start. They violated the PCA’s claimed space. The Warships fired first. Balam broadcasted the instant that they’d fired with proclamations that they were following the law and operating within the bounds of their acquired license, but only seconds into that speech, the corporate security ships had started firing back, so the political theatre was a little obvious.

Concentrated on the threat of the anti-space assets, the PCA Fleet wasn’t able to stop many of Balam’s ships from breaching the defensive line.

They were here in force. Their ships carried an army, and yet more than that, they had also brought a significant supply of manufacturing equipment, ensuring that they would be able to survive for the foreseeable future. 

Evidently, they were a bit too learned to try and bring a Grid back into operation.

Arquebus turned out to be mostly the same as Balam. A similar setup, but the specifics differed. Where Balam had a bunch of blocky ships that truly fit their ‘flying brick’ aesthetic, Arquebus went all in on the neat curves and aerodynamic angles. Balam continued to refine kinetic weaponry, Arquebus sought out more and greater energy weapons.

And yet, just like Balam, Arquebus waited until they were attacked to claim innocence, had the space combat units hold the PCA’s fleet back, and then dropped the rest planetside.

Most corporations really weren’t that different, in the end.

Balam landed near Dafeng’s current holdings. Arquebus landed on top of Schneider. Surrounding them were dozens of smaller corporate, independent, and mercenary groups. In between the both of them were the RLF’s fortresses.

It took four hours for the shit to start flying. It was Arquebus who made the first shots, sending MT squads led by their personal, in-house AC Pilots, the Vespers, out on retrieval missions. They attacked the nearby corporations first, seeking to plunder the data that the smaller corps had acquired over their longer time on Rubicon. There was no doubt in my mind that they were after all the information on Coral that they could acquire, surely thinking that they were different from every other failed group that had to come to the planet.

Five simultaneous assaults, with all but one of them led by a pair of Vespers. 

I had positive identifications on most of them. They weren’t really trying to hide.

The first squad had been ‘led’ by V.I Freud, and to be completely honest, they were utterly superfluous. Freud had walked in excited and walked out bored, leaving the accompanying MTs to do the job that they had been sent to do. I noticed that his AC incorporated a significant amount of BAWS parts, specifically their newer and better gear. It might have been odd to see the supposed head of Arquebus’ Vespers using a machine that was two thirds a completely unaffiliated corporation, but the game had prepared me for that. 

Freud was nuts, man. A Pilot whose performance surpassed that of King, yet he wasn’t augmented at all. All of that was just sheer, terrifying skill, raw determination and a drive to be better every single day.

The second squad had been led by V.III O’Keeffe and V.IV Hawkins. As Rusty had not been utilized as a spy in the Vesper’s ranks, every Vesper above O’Keefe had been bumped up a rank.

O’Keefe was Special Intelligence. I actually knew about him before this entire mess. A Second Generation Augment, and not one of the lucky ones who had escaped without issue. No, he’d been victim to the Coral burn-in, the condition that arose when the brain lost function and the Coral slowly took the place of neurons. I could sense no Coral in him anymore; he’d been upgraded to a later generation as part of his conditions to join the Vespers.

I couldn’t say I knew too much about Hawkins. All I knew of him was what his game profile had said. Generation Seven, lost a lot of colleagues to the prior generations of Five and Six, now feels some peace at their sacrifice having revolutionized the augments and made them safer. I figured out, during my observations, that he was also the leader of their logistics corp, which made the choice to deploy him... rather odd.

The third squad had been led by V.V Maeterlinck, and V.VI Swinburne, who... Well, to be honest, neither were particularly interesting. 

Maeterlinck was the only female member of the Vespers, and was described as ‘risk-adverse’ and ‘particularly loyal’. The former was an odd thing for AC Pilots, who would normally favour overwhelming aggression, but eh. The latter was only bad because of who she happened to be loyal to.

Swinburne, on the other hand... Well. A coward who was both paranoid and overconfident, quick to display cruelty when he thought he had the upper hand and quicker to beg for his life when he was in danger. I’d say that he’s the worst, but there is, in fact, a member of the Vespers even more odious than him.

The fourth squad also had two leaders, but I only recognized V.VII Pater, their mercenary liaison and probable schizophreniac.

The fifth squad also had two leaders, and again, I didn’t recognize them.

It took me a bit to find out their names, but I eventually uncovered them as V.VIII Schweitzer, V.IX Tagore, and V.X Hesse. If they survive, I’ll pay more attention.

V.II Snail was the only member that did not actually take part in the raids. Given how much of a pompous, self-important asshole he was, that didn’t really surprise me. He was probably sitting back at base furiously seething over Freud’s existence while his own arrogance self-justified how he was ‘too important’ to do something so plebeian as his actual job.

Eh.

Well, he’s not my problem at the moment. 

Balam, at least, was polite enough to not cause any problems immediately. They spent most of their first day fortifying their initial location, securing resourcing sectors and getting their local manufacturing up. With the Redguns, Balam’s counterparts to the Vespers, as well as Balam as a whole for that matter, being more militarily minded than Arquebus, that wasn’t really a surprise.

They waited one entire day to start some shit. They did basically the same thing as Arquebus, except they actually bothered to leave more than one of their AC Pilots behind, properly garrisoning the place. They had also evidently bothered to communicate with Dafeng, since they only launched three raids that targeted the three oldest corps in their vicinity, the ones who had done a lot of scouting, gathered a lot of knowledge, and would provide the most use. Much more efficient than Arquebus’ bulldozing, that’s for sure.

Deployed to the field were a mere six of the Redguns. G1 Michigan, deploying alongside G4 Volta. G6 Red, deploying alongside G7 Hakra. Two more unidentified pilots, G10, who I had not been able to identify, as well as the ever famous G13.

I had to say, G13 really lived down to their reputation of ‘The Curse of the Redguns’, because they somehow managed to die on the very first deployment that Balam had on the entire planet. 

It had been sheer dumb luck, I’ll admit. A missile strike that introduced exactly enough angular momentum to spin the AC at exactly the wrong angle for a railgun sabot to collide with the thinner armour of the Core/Head joint. The cockpit had been damaged, and automated ejection systems had tried to activate, only to get stuck in the deformed neck. The AC had slammed into the ground at great speed, and the pilot had been crushed from the fall in a display that really showed that fate just had it out for some people.

It... wasn’t a great showing for the Redguns, that was for sure, but honestly, it had been a comedy of errors. A rube goldberg manslaughter machine, utterly ridiculous and unbelievable until you saw it happen.

And that was only the start of the next five years.