Chevy was fast asleep when the emergency call came through on her comm implant. Normally she was a light sleeper, but a day that had started with meetings, then proceeded to training, followed by surfing, and then dinner, drinks at a private club, and finally a couple of hours of decent quality sex, had wiped her out, and full consciousness was slow in coming.
All that changed the instant she recognized the emergency code.
She sat bolt upright so fast (and for someone operating in two thirds of their normal gravity, that was very fast indeed), that she nearly dragged her surfing instructor out of bed with her. There was no time to apologize, and she started grabbing her clothing from the floor where it had ended up earlier, and dressed herself with indecent haste as he came to and asked her the most obvious question.
"Where're you going, hái'ér?" He asked, sleepily, using a word that she now understood as a term of endearment, which translated literally as 'babe'.
"Emergency call, I have to go. Fast." She paused as a person to person call came in, and she scrambled to get her personal headset jacked into place behind her ear. The jack wasn't really needed, but it encrypted her communications, making them indecipherable to anyone not on her unit's network. Once she had it connected, she opened the connection, and spoke quickly.
"Turlington. IG identification number 211768. Give me a SitRep." She said tersely; identifying herself, and demanding information in the same breath, without any wasted effort.
Kenjirō answered in a similarly clipped tone.
"Commander, about two-point-six minutes ago, our monitoring station here at the embassy began receiving a Class Five emergency code from a broken Medalert beacon. I had the signal traced, it originated from a commercial building in the Old Quarter. Luckily, the call came in as the ready teams were switching shifts, so I've loaded them all up. I have a fix on your location, we will pick you up en route; we are less than two minutes out, don't be late." He informed her, as she ran out of the studio apartment without so much as a backward glance, ignoring the lift, and headed to the stairwell.
The relatively low gravity allowed her to jump from one landing to the next without touching the stairs, and she was outside on the walkway fronting the apartment building with no other desire but to get to work.
She had enrolled at the Imperial Academy when she was eight, or about 12 Terran standard years old. Her induction into the ranks of the Imperial Guard had taken place the week after her 12th birthday, where she had pledged her life to the service of the Imperial House, and now she found herself in the unenviable position of being called to action on behalf of that oath. A Class Five emergency was reserved for members of the Imperial House itself, and there were no members of the MacMullen clan known to be on-planet.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of vectored thrust engines, specifically those of a Tsuji-Gibson VH-71A 'Spider Wasp', a variable geometry VTOL attack transport, that resembled an unholy union of Russian attack helicopter and jump jet. She could see it coming in at a speed and altitude guaranteed to infuriate the local air traffic controllers, police, and a host of corporate security services, but in that moment she couldn't have cared less if they'd shattered windows all along their path. The pilot didn't bother to deploy the landing gear, but instead cut power to the engines, while simultaneously boosting power to the antigrav, which put the machine down right in front of her, about one meter off the ground. She was running for the door before it even opened, and she simply jumped in without slowing down as it did.
She didn't have to tell them to take off, because the pilot had applied power to the VT, and extended the stub wings for additional lift and maneuverability, before she could even yell "Go!" In the close confines of the highly urban and incredibly built-up area in which they were operating, the pilot purposely selected a flight path at low altitude, which was illegal, but made it easier to avoid other air traffic. Thankfully, there was little traffic along their route, and nothing she could do about it anyway, so she put the thought aside and focused on getting herself ready.
Looking around the interior of the vectored thrust aircraft, she saw that the combat team was made up of a mix of personnel; Kenjirō and two other Imperial Guards, plus a squad of regular army for backup. The Guardsmen were wearing Hollis-DTI's K7 'Guardian' late generation exoarmor; consisting of an outer shell of metaceramic, laminated with carbon nanotube impregnated polycarbonate, over an ultralight metaplast 'skeleton'. Articulated with synthetic muscles, the K7 would allow the user to perform feats of strength that would be impossible otherwise, and its armor was proof against virtually all high velocity AP rifle rounds. It was possible that a glancing shot from a light anti-material rifle might be deflected, but large anti-armor rounds from 14.5mm on up likely would not. The squad of Darkaellan Imperial Army were wearing B4/6 'Interceptor' body armor, which, although it was moderately bulky and somewhat heavy, covered them from just below the chin down to the groin, plus the upper part of the arms, and would stop ordinary rifle fire cold, in addition to shell fragments and pistol bullets.
"Kenjirō-san," she said, once she'd tied her comm into the combat team's network, "did you bring my gear? Or weapons?"
"I didn't have time to grab much, but there's a set of HEX armor, combat fatigues, boots and your personal weapons: Rifle, pistol, plus HE and stun grenades. I figured you would want to be airborne sooner rather than later. If I have erred, I apologise." He told her over the noise inside the cabin.
She was less than pleased to hear that her own K7 had been left behind, but HEX armor was the next best thing, and she quickly began changing. HEX was an abbreviation for High Energy eXchange, although the armor's appearance of being made up of small hexagonal plates led people to assume that the name was descriptive. It occupied a niche between the Interceptor armor of the DIA and powered exoarmor; it was extremely light, and would stop almost any small arms fire, including high velocity armor piercing rounds. It was also proof against the hypervelocity flechettes used by the HIA Marine Corps in their Colt-Armacon M-125A1 rifles, which was the primary threat against which it had been designed.
Kenjirō had, however, brought her rifle, which she was very glad to see. The Imperial Guard were issued the best weapons of any military unit in the Known Sphere, the crown jewel of which was the Hollis-MacNeil 6th generation magrifle. Consisting of a slab-sided, flat charcoal metaplast shell, with an integral electronic sight, the 6Gen magrifles were capable of incredible accuracy on their own, but when linked to a user's cranial interface, they reached a peak of lethal efficiency that was completely without precedent. The magrifle was essentially a man-portable railgun, capable of accelerating a 7mm prefragmented metaceramic bullet with a steel driving band to velocities of up to 2150 meters per second. When a round struck a hard surface it would either punch through and fragment, or it would liquify, causing spalling and thermal damage. In a soft target of heterogeneous organic matter like a human body, the round would destabilize and fragment explosively, creating dozens of razor like fragments.
Naturally, they had been declared illegal in every system outside of the Imperium, and even there, they were restricted to military service.
"Commander, I have at least four local law enforcement VTOLs and air EMS units en route to our primary LZ, and one military VTA, a Kuàisù Jīngshén JS5-1 from its power output, set to intercept us; however, we should have time to drop your team off before that happens." The pilot, Captain Ackles, said over the vehicle's interior comm.
"Thank you, Captain. Unless that military flight begins targeting us with fire control radar, ignore it and put us down as close to the beacon as possible." Chevy instructed, as she secured her personal weapons for rapid deployment.
"Understood, Commander." He acknowledged. "We'll be dropping into the primary LZ in 90 seconds."
"90 seconds. Got it." She acknowledged in return.
She began to feel the adrenaline and dopamine rush that preceded combat, and even the moderate weight of her weapons and armor became unnoticeable, while every sense became crystal clear. She wanted to get in there and kick some ass, even if, intellectually, she knew the time for that was likely over, and there was probably going to be little more for her to do than pick up the pieces. One thing was certain: If it turned out that there was a member of the Imperial House injured, or dead, at their destination, then there was going to be hell to pay.
Her thoughts were cut short for the second time in less than five minutes when the interior lights went red, alerting the occupants of the fact that they would be landing in ten seconds.
She checked her rifle's power and ammunition levels, then let it hang on its sling while she made certain once more that her sidearm had a round chambered and the safety was on. The cabin lights went out as she finished securing her helmet's chin strap, and she grabbed a support bar, just as the pilot cut the VT and pushed the antigrav to the limit, causing everyone to experience a brief moment of weightlessness.
The side doors of the VTA slammed open, and Kenjirō's team jumped the last three meters. They hit the ground running, weapons up and sweeping across the dimly lit street in both directions. Shevaughn remained with the Army unit until the aircraft was closer to the ground, and she was the last one out. She could hear the sound of incoming sirens, and the noise of both rotor and vectored thrust aircraft.
"Captain Ackles, get airborne, and stay overhead, but under no circumstances are you to fire on anyone, unless you are fired upon first. Understood?" She said, immediately upon hitting the ground.
"Aye, Commander. Understood." He replied, already underway before she'd finished speaking. With their transport away, Chevy retracted her helmet's light enhancing visor, and took a look around.
There wasn't much to see. The street itself was poured concrete, and in desperate need of resurfacing; some areas had ruts so worn that major fractures had formed. Buildings of a commercial or light industrial nature - one of which, she noticed, was a local manufacturer of sex toys - fronted the street in both directions, this area of Níngjìng Bay being part of the city's original industrial park. There were vehicles parked along the sidewalks on both sides of the street, most of them locally made wheeled cars, and a few light cargo vans clearly belonging to businesses in the area. A few were wildly out of place; there was a Ducati Vetrano 1098 Superleggera, which was only available on Earth, and rare enough there to almost certainly make it unique on Minotaur. The late model NAC-Hyundai Aerodyne was also out of place; while not uncommon, it tended to be most popular with private security firms, and was definitely out of place in a neighborhood like this. That, and it was still running, its front windshield perforated from several well placed gunshots, and the driver slumped over, clearly dead.
She and the backup team secured the street while the Guardsmen, having pinpointed the structure from which the beacon was being sent, kicked in the front door. Each second that passed while she waited for them to give the 'all clear' felt like a lifetime, but she willed herself to be patient; when she finally heard Kenjiro make the call, she led the way for the rest of the team.
She could hear the sounds of multiple voices, and sounds of people in varying degrees of distress, as her team swept through a short hallway between the outer door and a beaded curtain at the far end. The inside of the nondescript building turned out to be a bar; one that looked like a small, probably unregistered, gambling den. The place was dimly lit, and a miasma of stale tobacco, spilled alcohol, and the brassy odor of fresh blood hung in the air, causing her nose to wrinkle involuntarily. The floor was littered with bodies, blood, broken furniture, bottles, and glass. Some of the bodies were still alive, although she doubted for long; even if the EMS units on the way showed up right now, it would be touch and go. Nevertheless, she turned to the backup squad's leader, and gave orders.
"Fan out, identify any wounded who are critical, and be prepared to assist the incoming emergency medical personnel. If anyone who is uninjured can be persuaded to help, use them, but don't get too aggressive. Go." She ordered, and turned to where Kenjiro had stopped with the other two Guardsmen.
She saw three men in identical Armorweave trenchcoats lying dead on the floor as she made her way across the room, each one had a Norinco QBZ-803 compact assault rifle on a tactical sling. They had all been killed with a weapon of fairly large caliber, and by someone skilled in its use from the placement of the shots. Her helmet's forward camera would record the faces of the gunmen, and she would run them past the embassy's intelligence section later, to see if they were known to the Imperium.
"Commander, we found the Medalert tag, but there's something you should see." Kenjiro told her, as she came to where he was standing, the other two down on their knees working furiously to keep one of the shooting victims alive. "This one," he gestured at the young woman being worked on, "had an Imperial House issued Medalert tag around her neck, but I don't recognize her, and her identification seems to be genuine." He concluded, handing her the woman's identification packet.
Chevy looked at the ID in her hands, and found herself with more questions than answers. She knew that the person on the floor was no member of the Imperial House, and yet the tag she was handed by one of her subordinates was one of those issued to direct relatives of the Emperor. How had she acquired it, and from whom? She examined the holo image on the ID card once more, looking for a clue when the locals started pouring in, yelling like a pack of cliffcats in a rut. She ignored the noise, and stared at the image in front of her.
Who the hell was Alexandra G.J. Chase?
All that changed the instant she recognized the emergency code.
She sat bolt upright so fast (and for someone operating in two thirds of their normal gravity, that was very fast indeed), that she nearly dragged her surfing instructor out of bed with her. There was no time to apologize, and she started grabbing her clothing from the floor where it had ended up earlier, and dressed herself with indecent haste as he came to and asked her the most obvious question.
"Where're you going, hái'ér?" He asked, sleepily, using a word that she now understood as a term of endearment, which translated literally as 'babe'.
"Emergency call, I have to go. Fast." She paused as a person to person call came in, and she scrambled to get her personal headset jacked into place behind her ear. The jack wasn't really needed, but it encrypted her communications, making them indecipherable to anyone not on her unit's network. Once she had it connected, she opened the connection, and spoke quickly.
"Turlington. IG identification number 211768. Give me a SitRep." She said tersely; identifying herself, and demanding information in the same breath, without any wasted effort.
Kenjirō answered in a similarly clipped tone.
"Commander, about two-point-six minutes ago, our monitoring station here at the embassy began receiving a Class Five emergency code from a broken Medalert beacon. I had the signal traced, it originated from a commercial building in the Old Quarter. Luckily, the call came in as the ready teams were switching shifts, so I've loaded them all up. I have a fix on your location, we will pick you up en route; we are less than two minutes out, don't be late." He informed her, as she ran out of the studio apartment without so much as a backward glance, ignoring the lift, and headed to the stairwell.
The relatively low gravity allowed her to jump from one landing to the next without touching the stairs, and she was outside on the walkway fronting the apartment building with no other desire but to get to work.
She had enrolled at the Imperial Academy when she was eight, or about 12 Terran standard years old. Her induction into the ranks of the Imperial Guard had taken place the week after her 12th birthday, where she had pledged her life to the service of the Imperial House, and now she found herself in the unenviable position of being called to action on behalf of that oath. A Class Five emergency was reserved for members of the Imperial House itself, and there were no members of the MacMullen clan known to be on-planet.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of vectored thrust engines, specifically those of a Tsuji-Gibson VH-71A 'Spider Wasp', a variable geometry VTOL attack transport, that resembled an unholy union of Russian attack helicopter and jump jet. She could see it coming in at a speed and altitude guaranteed to infuriate the local air traffic controllers, police, and a host of corporate security services, but in that moment she couldn't have cared less if they'd shattered windows all along their path. The pilot didn't bother to deploy the landing gear, but instead cut power to the engines, while simultaneously boosting power to the antigrav, which put the machine down right in front of her, about one meter off the ground. She was running for the door before it even opened, and she simply jumped in without slowing down as it did.
She didn't have to tell them to take off, because the pilot had applied power to the VT, and extended the stub wings for additional lift and maneuverability, before she could even yell "Go!" In the close confines of the highly urban and incredibly built-up area in which they were operating, the pilot purposely selected a flight path at low altitude, which was illegal, but made it easier to avoid other air traffic. Thankfully, there was little traffic along their route, and nothing she could do about it anyway, so she put the thought aside and focused on getting herself ready.
Looking around the interior of the vectored thrust aircraft, she saw that the combat team was made up of a mix of personnel; Kenjirō and two other Imperial Guards, plus a squad of regular army for backup. The Guardsmen were wearing Hollis-DTI's K7 'Guardian' late generation exoarmor; consisting of an outer shell of metaceramic, laminated with carbon nanotube impregnated polycarbonate, over an ultralight metaplast 'skeleton'. Articulated with synthetic muscles, the K7 would allow the user to perform feats of strength that would be impossible otherwise, and its armor was proof against virtually all high velocity AP rifle rounds. It was possible that a glancing shot from a light anti-material rifle might be deflected, but large anti-armor rounds from 14.5mm on up likely would not. The squad of Darkaellan Imperial Army were wearing B4/6 'Interceptor' body armor, which, although it was moderately bulky and somewhat heavy, covered them from just below the chin down to the groin, plus the upper part of the arms, and would stop ordinary rifle fire cold, in addition to shell fragments and pistol bullets.
"Kenjirō-san," she said, once she'd tied her comm into the combat team's network, "did you bring my gear? Or weapons?"
"I didn't have time to grab much, but there's a set of HEX armor, combat fatigues, boots and your personal weapons: Rifle, pistol, plus HE and stun grenades. I figured you would want to be airborne sooner rather than later. If I have erred, I apologise." He told her over the noise inside the cabin.
She was less than pleased to hear that her own K7 had been left behind, but HEX armor was the next best thing, and she quickly began changing. HEX was an abbreviation for High Energy eXchange, although the armor's appearance of being made up of small hexagonal plates led people to assume that the name was descriptive. It occupied a niche between the Interceptor armor of the DIA and powered exoarmor; it was extremely light, and would stop almost any small arms fire, including high velocity armor piercing rounds. It was also proof against the hypervelocity flechettes used by the HIA Marine Corps in their Colt-Armacon M-125A1 rifles, which was the primary threat against which it had been designed.
Kenjirō had, however, brought her rifle, which she was very glad to see. The Imperial Guard were issued the best weapons of any military unit in the Known Sphere, the crown jewel of which was the Hollis-MacNeil 6th generation magrifle. Consisting of a slab-sided, flat charcoal metaplast shell, with an integral electronic sight, the 6Gen magrifles were capable of incredible accuracy on their own, but when linked to a user's cranial interface, they reached a peak of lethal efficiency that was completely without precedent. The magrifle was essentially a man-portable railgun, capable of accelerating a 7mm prefragmented metaceramic bullet with a steel driving band to velocities of up to 2150 meters per second. When a round struck a hard surface it would either punch through and fragment, or it would liquify, causing spalling and thermal damage. In a soft target of heterogeneous organic matter like a human body, the round would destabilize and fragment explosively, creating dozens of razor like fragments.
Naturally, they had been declared illegal in every system outside of the Imperium, and even there, they were restricted to military service.
"Commander, I have at least four local law enforcement VTOLs and air EMS units en route to our primary LZ, and one military VTA, a Kuàisù Jīngshén JS5-1 from its power output, set to intercept us; however, we should have time to drop your team off before that happens." The pilot, Captain Ackles, said over the vehicle's interior comm.
"Thank you, Captain. Unless that military flight begins targeting us with fire control radar, ignore it and put us down as close to the beacon as possible." Chevy instructed, as she secured her personal weapons for rapid deployment.
"Understood, Commander." He acknowledged. "We'll be dropping into the primary LZ in 90 seconds."
"90 seconds. Got it." She acknowledged in return.
She began to feel the adrenaline and dopamine rush that preceded combat, and even the moderate weight of her weapons and armor became unnoticeable, while every sense became crystal clear. She wanted to get in there and kick some ass, even if, intellectually, she knew the time for that was likely over, and there was probably going to be little more for her to do than pick up the pieces. One thing was certain: If it turned out that there was a member of the Imperial House injured, or dead, at their destination, then there was going to be hell to pay.
Her thoughts were cut short for the second time in less than five minutes when the interior lights went red, alerting the occupants of the fact that they would be landing in ten seconds.
She checked her rifle's power and ammunition levels, then let it hang on its sling while she made certain once more that her sidearm had a round chambered and the safety was on. The cabin lights went out as she finished securing her helmet's chin strap, and she grabbed a support bar, just as the pilot cut the VT and pushed the antigrav to the limit, causing everyone to experience a brief moment of weightlessness.
The side doors of the VTA slammed open, and Kenjirō's team jumped the last three meters. They hit the ground running, weapons up and sweeping across the dimly lit street in both directions. Shevaughn remained with the Army unit until the aircraft was closer to the ground, and she was the last one out. She could hear the sound of incoming sirens, and the noise of both rotor and vectored thrust aircraft.
"Captain Ackles, get airborne, and stay overhead, but under no circumstances are you to fire on anyone, unless you are fired upon first. Understood?" She said, immediately upon hitting the ground.
"Aye, Commander. Understood." He replied, already underway before she'd finished speaking. With their transport away, Chevy retracted her helmet's light enhancing visor, and took a look around.
There wasn't much to see. The street itself was poured concrete, and in desperate need of resurfacing; some areas had ruts so worn that major fractures had formed. Buildings of a commercial or light industrial nature - one of which, she noticed, was a local manufacturer of sex toys - fronted the street in both directions, this area of Níngjìng Bay being part of the city's original industrial park. There were vehicles parked along the sidewalks on both sides of the street, most of them locally made wheeled cars, and a few light cargo vans clearly belonging to businesses in the area. A few were wildly out of place; there was a Ducati Vetrano 1098 Superleggera, which was only available on Earth, and rare enough there to almost certainly make it unique on Minotaur. The late model NAC-Hyundai Aerodyne was also out of place; while not uncommon, it tended to be most popular with private security firms, and was definitely out of place in a neighborhood like this. That, and it was still running, its front windshield perforated from several well placed gunshots, and the driver slumped over, clearly dead.
She and the backup team secured the street while the Guardsmen, having pinpointed the structure from which the beacon was being sent, kicked in the front door. Each second that passed while she waited for them to give the 'all clear' felt like a lifetime, but she willed herself to be patient; when she finally heard Kenjiro make the call, she led the way for the rest of the team.
She could hear the sounds of multiple voices, and sounds of people in varying degrees of distress, as her team swept through a short hallway between the outer door and a beaded curtain at the far end. The inside of the nondescript building turned out to be a bar; one that looked like a small, probably unregistered, gambling den. The place was dimly lit, and a miasma of stale tobacco, spilled alcohol, and the brassy odor of fresh blood hung in the air, causing her nose to wrinkle involuntarily. The floor was littered with bodies, blood, broken furniture, bottles, and glass. Some of the bodies were still alive, although she doubted for long; even if the EMS units on the way showed up right now, it would be touch and go. Nevertheless, she turned to the backup squad's leader, and gave orders.
"Fan out, identify any wounded who are critical, and be prepared to assist the incoming emergency medical personnel. If anyone who is uninjured can be persuaded to help, use them, but don't get too aggressive. Go." She ordered, and turned to where Kenjiro had stopped with the other two Guardsmen.
She saw three men in identical Armorweave trenchcoats lying dead on the floor as she made her way across the room, each one had a Norinco QBZ-803 compact assault rifle on a tactical sling. They had all been killed with a weapon of fairly large caliber, and by someone skilled in its use from the placement of the shots. Her helmet's forward camera would record the faces of the gunmen, and she would run them past the embassy's intelligence section later, to see if they were known to the Imperium.
"Commander, we found the Medalert tag, but there's something you should see." Kenjiro told her, as she came to where he was standing, the other two down on their knees working furiously to keep one of the shooting victims alive. "This one," he gestured at the young woman being worked on, "had an Imperial House issued Medalert tag around her neck, but I don't recognize her, and her identification seems to be genuine." He concluded, handing her the woman's identification packet.
Chevy looked at the ID in her hands, and found herself with more questions than answers. She knew that the person on the floor was no member of the Imperial House, and yet the tag she was handed by one of her subordinates was one of those issued to direct relatives of the Emperor. How had she acquired it, and from whom? She examined the holo image on the ID card once more, looking for a clue when the locals started pouring in, yelling like a pack of cliffcats in a rut. She ignored the noise, and stared at the image in front of her.
Who the hell was Alexandra G.J. Chase?
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