《Tread and Sword [Updates Daily]》 Chapter 1.1 - Ruins of Xandria The first interstellar colonies of man were, generally speaking, successful. Such was the wealth of habitable and resource-rich worlds made available to humanity upon the discovery of the hyperdrive that violent conflicts largely subsided. In their place came conflicts of prestige; any nation worth talking about needed at least one interstellar colony, often established by the cheapest of means. Many of the better-backed colonies did, in fact, become success stories in their own way. With national pride and prestige fueling political will, these quickly became model replicas. Yet success left their backers in the same predicament as those whose colonies had been barely scraping by, as the first order of business of a self-sufficient colony was to cut ties with them and seek better fortunes peddling their products on the open market. There followed a secondary spree of colonization, made cheaper and faster by the first colonies¡¯ experiences. Yet these ¡®second-class¡¯ colonies were not planted with national pride or prestige in mind, for the wonder of colonization had largely worn off for the majority of mankind¡¯s population. Commerce was a far better motivator; the daughter colonies were established as planet-sized mines and farms, freeing their progenitors to pursue higher-value industries. The new colonizers were far wiser than their Terran predecessors and, as such, limited or entirely barred their planet-sized business ventures from growing out of their strict role. Yet they failed to account for their own hubris, for they thought themselves capable of controlling men and women who relieved themselves of the luxuries of properly industrialized worlds for the mere chance at a life free from government control. Some controlled the spaceports, believing that their ventures could not establish independence -as they themselves once had- without control of their exports. Yet a population could only be forced into such subservience if only it was willing to be logical¡­and logic was a rare value indeed in the interstellar frontier. Many a colony rebelled against their masters, violently so. The homeworlds invariably were forced to either abandon the colony or reinforce and reunify it by military means. Yet any kind of military operation ultimately intensified the disruption, and the inevitable collateral damage of a conflict between colonial militaries and rebels against the majority-neutral populace made any kind of reconciliation a herculean task. Even if a military solution was found, the problem of what to do with the troublemakers inevitably arose. Solutions ranged from monstrous to stupid. On Jawhara, a joint farming venture between the egyptian Warada and the pakistani Khajana colonies, three thousand surrendered Sikh fighters were executed. On Solstice, a joint European lithium mining colony, much of the rebel populace succumbed to an enhanced malaria strain because they did not want to accept medical aid from the colonial government. Yet these were outliers. In the vast majority of cases, the defeated ¡®troublemakers¡¯ were sent to cause trouble somewhere else. That required there be other conflicts to fight in, but there was always another problematic world to reassert control over or a backwater colony whose produce could prove profitable if only it could be taken over at a manageable cost. The chaos that followed this second wave of colonization ensured that there would always be somebody willing to hire expendable troops. By the middle of the twenty-second century, the roving bands of armed exiles had transformed into organized mercenary outfits as small as a squad of marksmen or as big as an army, with payments and equipment sales managed by dedicated companies. The chaos never stopped; it merely moved far enough from humanity¡¯s cradle and out of the minds of the billions on Terra, Mars, Proxima Centauri and Trappist. For many within the core worlds, it was a barbaric profession best left to rot in the long and dusty annals of human history. Terra and her closest daughters had long banished war from their backyard, their militaries remaining powerful through their immense industrial and technological superiority. Violence had been exported to the outer worlds rather successfully, and to great profit. A brave -or crazy, depending on your viewpoint- few thought it more honorable than most. The practice held an undisputed allure to millions of farmers, miners and factory workers in the Heartland or the Outer Worlds; the average footsoldier earned about as much as a middling corporate shill but needed no qualifications greater than youth and vigor, and he had the ¡®luxury¡¯ to see the galaxy¡¯s beautiful, exotic and lethal sights. To Colonel Steele, it was the only life he''d ever known. ¡ª ¡°What the fuck do you mean, don¡¯t harm the statues?!¡± BOOMThis story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings. The radio headset crackled around his ears. Indeed, the contract stipulated that no harm could come to ¡®objects of archeoxenological interest¡¯¡­unless his soldiers¡¯ survival demanded it. He glanced at the large screen at the wall in front of him, watching through the remote rig dialed to one of his panzers as cloth-clad extremists hurled Molotov cocktails and fired mortars at his troops from inside the statue-decorated outer walls of the city. Two of his tanks were already cooking off amidst the grassy plains, and soon the religious nutters would be bringing in more rockets. ¡°You want me to retreat now, you moron? A little late for that! I¡¯ve got tanks a hundred meters from the walls, and they¡¯re getting closer by the second!¡± ¡°No, you hear me, Director. If we retreat right now, I¡¯ll lose half a battalion of men and equipment to their artillery without two kills and a penny to show for it! You try to get a contract after that, because I sure as hell won''t!.¡± At a gesture across his neck, the comms specialist sitting on his right cut the crazy scientist out of the regimental comnet. The Bondsmen sure wouldn¡¯t like being dragged out to the edge of nowhere to settle a dispute, but they would award the money to him. Enough outfits had been fucked over by indecisive colonial governments that even the most boilerplate contract had ¡®heat of battle¡¯ clauses protecting him from bullshit orders. Switching to the kampfgruppe¡¯s network, he heard the local commander keeping his troops as calm as one could in these conditions. ¡°¡ªsmoke mortars. Keep tossing them out, men.¡± Within another try at the frequency dial, he turned the connection private between the pair. ¡°Ocelot Actual, this is Overlord Actual, you copy?¡± ¡°You do, Ocelot Actual. Clearance granted, dig em out!¡± Whether the following sounds were static or laughter, Victor didn''t know. Even without returning fire, most of the armored column had remained untouched; the jessomites had frightfully weak anti-armor weapons, powerful as their long-ranged artillery might be. With heavy munitions back in play, the tides turned in moments. BOOM The tank broadcasting through the remote rig fired its main armament, the fourteen centimeter smoothbore gun utterly obliterating a heavy stubber emplacement atop the gatehouse. Though Victor often dreamed of commanding entire divisions of panzers, it was sights like these that reminded him what as a single beast could accomplish¡­especially with a trained and bloodthirsty crew. Torrents of autocannon fire came from the personnel carriers, sheltering behind the tanks in neat rows of two. The twenty-mil guns seemed tiny compared to tank armament, but they fired ten times faster with the same computer-aided accuracy. Ocelot moved as one, twenty-four vehicles and nearly two hundred soldiers advancing deep into the city to find their targets. They crushed their way through the paths of most resistance, searching for that which the jessomites¡¯ mercenaries valued the most. The extremists themselves were bona fide religious nutheads, searching for meaning in forgotten relics of an ancient civilization that had gone extinct a dozen millennia prior. Yet even they understood they were outclassed when Steele¡¯s troopers landed on the planet with tanks, artillery and combat aviation supporting a core of battle-hardened mechanized infantry. So they had hired the Iron Mountain Legion, an outfit made up of veterans from the civil war on the russian-speaking world of Zamoroz. Not the best outfit, but respectable none the less and just barely cheap enough to be bought with the foreign exchange the jessomites earned selling pixie dust to off-world smugglers. The Legion was smaller than Victor¡¯s Regiment, three or four thousand men with no heavy armor to speak of. But they were not supposed to fight the same fight his soldiers did. Their job was to sit tight and defend against the opposing outfit until the enemy party ¡ªgovernment or rebels¡ª ran out of will, patience or money, and signed over whatever land or resources their clients demanded in return for peace. Their primary tool was none other than a battalion of heavy artillery, currently hiding amidst the irreplaceable relics Victor¡¯s own clients were crying about. Unfortunately for the Legion and their clients, he had a reputation to maintain¡­and the New Geneva Conventions said nothing about alien heritage sites. Static came from his headset¡¯s speakers, then a familiar voice. There was no response from his own bunker, but Victor was certain the command bunker housing Fire Control Central, nice and safe several hundred klicks away, was scrambling to respond. He and his staff officers merely listened, nice and tight inside their forward command post. The tactical table in front of Victor flickered, local counter-battery radars as well as orbiting fire control satellites picking up on the salvo of 15cm shells. On the remote rig, the panzer fired at the supporting column of what looked like a temple; gray-clothed legionnaires ran out with their hands in the air, only to be buried a moment later under tons of crumbling stone, carved before man had learned to farm. As the dust cleared, a series of explosions came from the camera¡¯s left. Going by the sounds of secondary explosions and bright flashes, they¡¯d hit the legionnaires exactly where it hurt. The kampfgruppe commander¡¯s voice came on the commnet not a second later. Central¡¯s sterile response was followed by eighteen more rounds; the entire artillery battalion was firing as one. Before the first eighteen landed, the fourth barrage shot into the sky, and it didn¡¯t stop until the tenth. By that time, the entire central district of the city had been levelled, statues and temples reduced to rubble, filled with broken howitzers and shattered bodies. Chapter 1.2 - Shipping Out The newest of my colleagues always make the mistake of equating an army that fights for coin to one that fights for a nation. They deify the weapons they are given; panzers capable of winning a fight outmatched two-to-one, rocket artillery that can fire everything from cluster to orbital denial munitions, aircraft whose technology makes all but the most advanced detection systems more obsolete than a rock sling. Those that survive their first few years commanding an outfit learn to specialize in their use or dispose of such fancy equipment, for they were designed for a military that had to fight, bleed and still make a profit at the end of the day. Let¡¯s compare, for example, the ¡®Astreus¡¯ MBT, the most advanced tank ever deployed outside of the Core Worlds, and the humble ¡®Rhino¡¯ panzer. The former¡¯s active and passive defenses make it virtually impervious to rocket and guided missile attacks, while its frontal armor can take a direct hit from most sabot or shaped-charge rounds in use. Yet its protections require skilled technicians, expensive spare parts and regular maintenance to remain in top condition, while giving it a factory-fresh weight of eighty tons. It¡¯s fast for its size, thanks to a martian engine design and its four tracks. Alas, the former requires a specialized fuel to run with any kind of efficiency, which is both expensive and difficult to source because of the small number of refineries that can make it, while the latter further decreases the ratio of frontline units to rear maintenance personnel by being double the normal size and double the work to keep in good condition. The Rhino, on the other hand, is a far leaner machine. It mounts the exact same 14cm gun but carries only thirty-five instead of sixty-two rounds of ammunition and has both thinner and weaker armor and a comparatively lacking active protection system. Yet its turbine engine can run on liquefied charcoal in a pinch, and can be virtually rebuilt in the field with a truck-mounted machine shop and a couple skilled mechanics. At just fifty-two tons in full combat kit it can cross most bridges, and the ubiquitous M1088 heavy truck can carry two Rhinos instead of just one Astreus on basic asphalt or dirt roads. The Astreus might win you the battle, but its logistical requirements will lose you the war. It costs two times as much to maintain and needs two to three times as much logistics and maintenance personnel to keep in combat conditions, though it¡¯s by far the best the Heartland Worlds have to offer. It¡¯s the best tank for a modern, capable, state military, which can afford the extra logistical challenges in return for lower casualties and better chances at victory against a peer enemy. Yet to one of our own it¡¯s more of a white elephant, amazing to parade around but absolutely terrible to budget for. Now, of course, your outfit might be special. I¡¯ve seen my fair share of ¡®elites¡¯ hired as a force multiplier by weak but willing colonial security forces. Yet if you, like most of us, are hired with the job of winning a war with minimal support, your secret weapon is no supertank. It¡¯s logistics. ¡ªColonel Victor Steele, Decennial Security Providers¡¯ Conference, 2344 ¡ª Steele and his regiment had fought on many worlds, from the exotic to the ugly and most often the boring. Each world was slightly different, though the reason they were colonized was mostly the same; resources. Whether it was massive herds of cattle, endless seas of wheat or deep crust mines, colonies were planet-sized resources extracted for the good of whichever government or corporation invested the money to develop them. Though the resource and method of extraction differed from planet to planet, every colony invariably started from a single location; its spaceport. For advanced worlds, this was a massive city-sized logistics zone where planet-sized land, sea and air corridors combined to load and unload hundreds if not thousands of metrics tons of cargo on huge dropships. Anything more advanced was done in orbit, where microgravity and vacuum allowed the construction of massive spaceports, shipyards and refueling stations. Yet this was the exception. Rural worlds, like Xandria, had far less illustrious facilities¡­and significantly more uniform. Entire megacorporations had formed around the industry of colonization, fine tuning the architecture and logistics of establishing a spaceport until all the necessary tools, heavy equipment and buildings could be packed into two dozen standard shipping containers and sent dozens if not hundreds of light years across space to their new forever home. The main terminal also functioned as the colonial headquarters for the first years of development, though on Xandria the government had long moved out and dedicated the building to traffic control and logistics agencies. Bright red-colored bunkers sat over underground fuel depots for the dropships; the local system had little in the way of orbital infrastructure, and the small merchants that bought its few goods used ships that landed on planets instead of sending ferries down from geostatic orbit. Last but not least, rows of metal warehouses and grain silos surrounded the tarmac, a large oval several kilometers long and almost a klick big at its widest.The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement. It was there, on that hot tarmac, that the barely aerodynamic brick that was the Victoria sat in all its splendor. Once a military dropship employed by Victor¡¯s homeworld, it had been sold to him along with a whole lot of goodies for a job whose details were best left under lock with the key forgotten. The only thing that mattered was that it was his, in the best sense of the word, completely reliable in even the worst of scenarios unlike the boats-for-hire most mercenary outfits had to rely on to take them off-world. As Victor watched through the glass wall of the restaurant nestled at the top of the terminal, a row of trucks and armored personnel carriers had formed in front of the lowered rear ramp, with navy ratings wearing high-vis vests and holding colored batons guiding them inside the massive vehicle hold of the dropship. ¡°Colonel?¡± A male voice called to him from the other side of the dining table. Victor turned towards Xandria¡¯s governor, a gray-haired man of Japanese descent who went by Hiroshi Susuki. ¡°Yes, Governor?¡± ¡°I think you will be pleased to know¡­¡± Governor Hiroshi said, sliding a tablet across the table. ¡°That your payment has gone through.¡± The simplistic interface of Banque Credit Insterstellaire, the premier intra-system bank this side of the galaxy, showed Victor¡¯s favorite words. [Transfer Approved] ¡°Two hundred and fifty million solariis for services rendered, as well as another seventy-three million and change for damages incurred.¡± ¡°Excellent.¡± Victor replied, digging into his steak. ¡°¡­plus an additional seven million, four hundred and fifty to thousand, nine hundred and nineteen solariis, and thirteen cents.¡± The Governor added, grimacing. ¡°I hope you¡¯re not planning on keeping some of my men on retainer with that offer.¡± Victor replied, cutting off another piece of perfectly seared steak. Beneath his mask, a cold smile took form. Hiroshi shook his head, taking a swig of the rich red wine that Xandria had begun exporting half a t-decade prior to great success. ¡°That is the remainder of Director Misaki¡¯s research fund. An apology, on our behalf, for the¡­confusion she caused. I hope the Consortium will be able to request your services and discretion once more if the need arises.¡± Victor nodded slowly, grimacing. In truth, he was never going to blacklist the Sakura Consortium; greedy fuckers they might be, like every other trillion-solarii megacorp, but they paid very well in return for his discreteness. Case in point, this ¡®apology¡¯. A bribe in all but name, but one any bank would eagerly process nonetheless. Finance in the outer worlds was less regulated than xenoarcheology, and every solarii billionaire worth their fortune had an alien artifact in the lobby of his villa on Mars. ¡°A most unfortunate incident indeed; the Veisgolt Regiment accepts your apology in full.¡± He replied. A less experienced merc would¡¯ve asked about the Director¡¯s fate; Victor knew better. Best-case scenario, she would be teaching her craft at some middling university for the rest of her miserable life. Worst case¡­well, Xandria¡¯s farms could always use more fertilizer. ¡­ The plains of the Xandrian Highlands were much like the Central Plains of Lieutenant Pavlo Stepanovych Borysenko¡¯s homeworld, Zorya. Both were dedicated in their entirety to growing grains, though Zorya had specialized in a protein-rich strain of corn instead of the drought-resistant wheat Xandrians cultivated for a living. Yet there were stark differences that he couldn¡¯t get used to. Xandria was cold, windy, and so dry that pure-strain crops couldn¡¯t make it to harvest. The terrain was also full of short hills, which turned the experience of riding a fifty-ton main battle tank into being through in a running washing machine. ¡°Think you¡¯re going to miss the place, Emanuel?¡± He asked the brown-skinned man enjoying a cup of caf from his own hatch on the turret. Sergeant Emanuel Garcia, the Nutcracker¡¯s loader, had served under Colonel Steele for nearly three t-years. The man was supposed to be twenty-three according to personnel records, but looked closer to thirty-two. Nobody could blame him; even Borysenko was starting to see gray hairs in the mirror after the Xandria Campaign¡­which was thankfully coming to an end. With the Legion¡¯s heavy artillery and SAM emplacements destroyed in a siege two Xandrian Months ago -two and a half standard- the Regiment had been free to advance its own shorter-ranged artillery and aviation assets towards the jessomite strongholds on the eastern deserts. The Nutcracker had been part of that very siege, barely managing to take down an entire building with a siege round before the legionnaires inside reloaded their rockets. A peace treaty had been signed just last week after a flurry of negotiations between the Xandrian Colonial Government and the Jessomite Council, allowing the latter autonomous control over much of the barren desert that was so holy to them in exchange for funneling their profitable production of pixie dust through the former¡¯s spaceport and paying taxes. A shuttle full of justicars from the Bonding Authority oversaw the entire thing; non-compliance by either party would mean a slow and painful death by ironclad sanctions. ¡°Well¡­¡± the latino muttered, taking a sip of caf. ¡°Not really. The weather¡¯s pretty nice, but the coingirls¡­they are a bit too conservative for my taste.¡± ¡°And expensive!¡± Hans, their driver, shouted from the sun-baked tarmac beside the left track as he inspected the wheels for cracks. ¡°They charge the same rate as the bordello dancers on Haven, but they can¡¯t move half as well!¡± Borysenko shook his head with a smile; only a standard year ago he¡¯d been a captain of tanks in the Zoryan Guard, a ¡®prestigious¡¯ position whose salary barely equaled that of a sergeant in the Regiment¡¯s mechanized infantry, and with a significantly shittier quality of life to boot. Now a lieutenant with a single platoon of four tanks ¡ªpanzers, he reminded himself, as they were called in the regiment¡ª, he made one and a half times his previous salary plus combat pay¡­ Say what you will about the Colonel¡¯s attitude during combat operations; the man was worse than a slave driver without a doubt. Yet he knew how to take care of his men, with regular pay in credit or coin, food that didn¡¯t make them shit rocks, and even bonuses so that even the lowest-ranking men could enjoy a night a week with the local¡ª Borysenko keyed his headset, sending back a short ping of confirmation to the captain¡¯s tank. Soon the rest of Dagger Company replied, and the captain spoke again. Chapter 1.3 - Stop and smell the rainbows Many soldiers become mercenaries seeking freedom¡­only to have their dreams shattered the first time they go into town for supplies. The days of independent sell-swords exploring the world while earning their pay died with the era of swords and shields on Terra, when weapons could be scavenged from dead enemies and the day¡¯s food could be secured by hunting and foraging in the wild. Nowadays, even the worst-equipped bandit needs bullets for his rifle which must be made in a workshop out of gunpowder, casings and cores¡­which all require a supply chain from saltpeter mines or chemical laboratories and copper or tungsten mines to refineries and metal presses. Any proper soldier needs medical equipment to remain healthy in the field, packaged food to remain energetic during combat operations, and a shovel to dig himself a foxhole for cover. The greater the force multiplier, the longer the supply chain and the greater the price or barrier to purchase it. Therein lies the high cost of mercenaries, for they run on a military budget while still needing to make a profit. The main reason the use of mercenaries remains financially possible ¡ªif ill advised¡ª is that it is cheaper to hire an army for six or twelve t-months than maintain an active army for years or decades on end. Of course, there is also the issue of loyalty. A state army with proper hierarchy is loyal to its senior-most officer and civilian government¡­yet the former allows for the possibility of coups. An all-too-likely possibility; over half of all colonies in the Outer Worlds with a state military have suffered from coup d¡¯¨¦tat. Mercenaries, on the other hand, fight solely for coin; a colonial government can be sure that its hired help will fight only as hard as the contract stipulates, and only so long as the money keeps flowing. So long as the political and economic price of sustaining an army is greater than hiring mercenaries, the industry will remain a staple of Outer Worlds culture. ¡ªUnknown ¡ª Much of Xandria¡¯s population had stopped for a moment to look up at the sky as the IDS Victoria blazed forth towards orbit on a pair of fusion powered engines. The last time it had taken off empty, while thousands of troopers and hundreds of vehicles from the Veisgolt Regiment moved east to counter the jessomite advance. Now the threat of oppressed, impoverished and radicalized desert farmers was gone, buried under a mountain of paperwork that secured the colonial government¡¯s stranglehold over trade while keeping Jessom¡¯s followers inside their mountainous deserts farming arid fields by day and praying for death to their oppressors by night. Victor looked at the gathered crowds from a screen mounted on his seat in the bridge, while the experienced crew handled the pesky work of orbital and trans-atmospheric maneuvers. Fifteen or twenty years ago, the knowledge that he¡¯d likely ensured a few hundred thousand people remained oppressed would¡¯ve made him bitter if not sick; nowadays he grabbed the money, fed his troops and chucked all the rest in to the depths of his mind. On most planets, the alternative ¡ªrebel, religious extremists, separatists or ideological idealists, the branding hardly mattered¡ª were just as power-hungry as the incumbent government. The Outer Worlds, save for a precious handful of independent colonies which fed, housed, armed and entertained the hordes of mercenaries floating around, were rentier states. Furthermore, unless their homeworlds in the Heartlands decided to lose out on the income and cut them loose, they would remain so until their fertile fields turned to sand and their mines ran dry. The reign of fleeting violent solutions had persisted too long; humanity¡¯s hallmark, ironically, was impermanence. Everybody just kept kicking the can down the road, lest it explode in their faces. Victor did much the same, in a sense. For all his achievements as Colonel Steele, commander of one of the best armies to ever fight for a dollar, he was but a particularly well-oiled cog in the shit-eating and shit-producing machine that was the mercenary industry. ¡­ As the Victoria made its way to the closest hyper-transition bubble, the Regiment licked its wounds. The job had been rather easy, but easy didn¡¯t mean painless. Men and women had died from both enemy and environment, vehicles had been destroyed and consumables used up. Recruitment would begin the moment they jumped to the nearest R&R world, by sending out individual teams to select able-bodied farm boys, miners and factory workers from around the Outer Worlds. While some of the more specialized outfits had contracts with military academies to fill their ranks with well-trained tankers, pilots and technicians, the Regiment trained everybody in-house. The practice kept everybody running on the same frequency, as veterans too old, injured or experienced to be wasted on a frontline battalion trained the newer generation. It was also slightly cheaper; while the rest of the regiment rested for three or four months, the training companies borrowed vehicles, aircraft, artillery and production capacity to train their recruits.You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story. A greenblood was also almost never ¡®cut loose¡¯, as the Regiment could find a place for everyone. The ¡®recycling¡¯ clause meant that those who joined to become tankers or airmen were first trained as infantry, and contractually obligated to serve as such for the next two jobs or two t-years if they didn¡¯t make the cut while training for more elite roles. And in the unlikely case that the infantry companies couldn¡¯t use more manpower¡­logistics always wanted more. For every soldier meant to fight the enemy, there was another one-and-a-half whose primary role was support; driving supply trucks, providing medical aid, building fortifications or managing the dropship¡¯s autofacs. The latter was what kept the Regiment supplied, capable of making the mechanical components, electronics and chemical substances necessary to build everything from bullets to panzers. Much of the Victoria¡¯s crew was dedicated solely to keeping them working and maintaining the regiment¡¯s stockpiles of ammunition, consumables and replacements, whether during combat operations or downtime. It was the Quartermaster¡¯s job ¡ªoften known as the R4¡ª to ensure all those went where they needed to go¡­and Major George Flemming was exceedingly capable at it. Victor had poached the slightly chubby, glass-wearing man out of a managerial position on an industrialized world¡¯s spaceport. In return for replacing his suit and tie for an olive drab uniform and looking through catalogues of rifles and bullets instead of concrete and rebar, he earned four times his previous salary¡­and worked like a dog. The man didn¡¯t seem to mind too much; George was a workaholic through and through, often found working through catalogues of requisition forms in the corners of bordellos while oiled-up coingirls full of glitter drove the grunts¡¯ libidos to new heights. ¡°¡ªbattalion needs them for training the recruits, so we should prioritize the new Rhino chassis over increasing ammunition surpluses.¡± Victor nodded along as the pair walked through the Victoria¡¯s corridors towards the fore of the ship. Well and truly done with combat for the next four to six months, the regiment had gone into hibernation. Medical personnel, both army and navy, could combine their skills to treat those heavily injured during the Xandria Campaign under the clean and controlled ship environment, while maintenance crews, swell with numbers from idling frontline personnel, dived into damaged vehicles whose issues had been deemed too complex or cosmetic to solve during combat operations. Today, they were visiting the latter in the ¡®Stable¡¯. As they crossed one final bulkhead, the pair arrived at floor zero of the massive garage that housed the regiment¡¯s vehicles. From the most humble utility jeep to self-propelled air defence guns and panzers, everything was nestled side by side. Many of the vehicles were being tended to by soldiers surrounded by tools, spare parts and faulty pieces, crouched between wheels, crawling under chassis or hanging upside-down inside turrets. Rock music played from speakers, maintenance chiefs shouted at their crews, and power tools buzzed with life, combining into a never-ending symphony. Victor and George moved towards a particular corner of the Nest, where the gutted chassis of six panzers sat in individual cradles while mechanics crawled over them. Before they realized it, a ginger wearing the two-bar insignia of a captain was standing in front of them, performing a salute. ¡°Welcome, sirs.¡± The maintenance captain, one Iskander Traub according to the personnel records, said. ¡°I suppose you¡¯re here about the dirty dozen?¡± Victor saluted back. ¡°Is that what you¡¯ve taken to calling them, captain?¡± He gestured to the stripped-down panzers, half of which were missing a turret. Only one had tracks, and two didn¡¯t even have wheels. Traub shrugged. ¡°Somebody did, and the name stuck around. If you would follow me, sirs?¡± ¡°Lead the way, captain.¡± The trio walked through piles of fresh and discarded parts, puddles of lubricant and discarded power tools. Victor had seen war zones better organized than this, despite the fact it must¡¯ve felt organized to the gaggle of mechanics looking over his panzers. ¡°These six are on life support until manufacturing can sift through its previous orders. Engines, sprockets, turret rings¡­one of them even had its barrel sheared in half by an anti-armor missile. It¡¯s a miracle any of them are worth keeping, in my opinion.¡± George smiled, showing Traub the screen of his tablet. ¡°Actually, they were on life support. They¡¯ll be needed to train the newest batch up to standard, so we¡¯re moving up the order for replacement parts you submitted a few hours. Most of the replacement parts ought to be ready in seventy-two hours, maybe a little more for a new engine block.¡± ¡°That¡¯s¡­good.¡± The mechanic nodded with a smile. ¡°Good thing we have spare electronics¡­¡± He paused, looking at Victor with a worried look. He stared right back with a grimace. ¡°I feel the same way you do, captain; electronics replacements are a bane on the entire regiment. A replacement for our lithography printers is in the works, but I can¡¯t promise too much.¡± Traub nodded awkwardly before making up an excuse to go back to work. Victor couldn¡¯t blame the officer; talking with your boss¡¯s boss was weird any way you put it. As he and George walked back to the officers¡¯ quarters, he berated himself for getting soft...then dismissed the entire thing with a shake of his head. ¡®All I need is some good R&R¡­and a good blowj¡ª¡¯ The shrill tone of a klaxon reverberated through the corridor, followed by the panicked words of the Victoria¡¯s captain. He and George looked at each other for a split second before dashing for the nearest oxygen mask cabinet, smashing the glass with an elbow strike before putting them on. They were on a timer, and it was not going to be pretty. ¡®2¡¯ ¡°Where do we¡ª¡± ¡°Nest!¡± Victor replied before the man even finished, pushing him along as they ran for the garage. Blast doors slammed shut behind them as they entered, sealing off the ship¡¯s most vulnerable area¡­and their best hope. ¡®5¡¯ Mechanics scrambled all over the place, some running around like headless chickens, while most jumped towards the closest good-looking armored vehicle. Victor did as much, rushing to open ramp a nearby infantry fighting vehicle. ¡°Get in, come on!¡± he shouted, pushing George inside while a pair of mechanics barreled towards them. ¡°Seal in three!¡± ¡®7¡¯ ¡°Come on, lads!¡± He shouted, grabbing the pair by the shoulders and bringing them inside. One of the pair barreled to the floor with a whimper, but Victor barely registered the noise as he slammed the emergency seal button on the side of the ramp. The entire IFV sealed with a hiss and everyone secured themselves using the seats¡¯ harnesses. ¡®10¡­huh, was it a faul¡ª¡¯ Suddenly, he could smell rainbows and taste purple¡­and then everything went black.