A Tale Out of Time

5100: The Ferros IX Campaign, Chapter One

TROOP BAY, DROPSHIP MCXXXVIII OF AWS DAMOCLES

The mission was clear. Battlemaster Aliok had made sure of that, making his way past the silent soldiers standing in full kit and ready to jump through the hatch at the back of the dropcraft. This wasn't a rescue mission anymore. The Kroget had seen to that personally, tearing the entire Ferros IX colony asunder from below the sand on which it stood. Now, it was a mission with one objective, evident as it burned red on the black databoard display: MERCILESS EXTERMINATION.

This objective was then subtitled, as if any subtlety was left in the two word synopsis of what they were to do, with: LET NONE SURVIVE.

The conditions of the planet, Aliok had made similarly clear, were 'as welcoming as a scorchwing nest in the middle of a Venusian rainstorm.'

Needless to say, the battalion was heading into the closest thing they could find to hell without plunging headlong into the Hadian Rift (hallowed be the names of those who'd sacrificed themselves at the Battle of Hades II).

There was a tacit understanding among the entire battalion, from the lowest requisition officer all the way to Aliok himself, that where they were going, they would likely die. If not on arrival, then certainly in quick order thereafter. There was also a second understanding, similarly shared in silence, that even if they were to die, they were going to take as many alien scumbags as they could with them in plasmatic blazes of glorious sacrifice.

A loud beep rang through the bay of the ship, and the databoard's red text shifted, now reading: ENTERING FERROS IX ATMOSPHERE.

Below the text, a readout of planetary conditions: TEMPERATURE: +79 SHU, TIME: 1344 (+6H TST), PLANETARY CLASS: Y, ALLEGIANCE: SOLAR ALLIANCE, INHABITANTS: KROGET, ESTIMATED TIME TO LANDING: 5 MINUTES.

Down the aisle of the bay, Aliok roared for the troops to make one final equipment check, and as they did, he felt a slight twinge in his stomach. Alongside the typical racking of shells and bolts, as was standard procedure for a final combat equipment check, one sound caught his ear.

Someone had taken off their safety.

Aliok could only pray they weren't a traitor.

COCKPIT, DROPSHIP MCXXXVIII OF AWS DAMOCLES

INCOMING COMMS REQUEST, screamed the red letters on the databoard set into the cockpit's control panel, itself laying just beneath the windowscreen through which Masterpilot Æderik watched the mammoth warship that was the Damocles slowly shrink as the dropship fell languidly to the Class Y world which had once been Ferros IX. Flipping the communication relay switch from STAND-BY to VERIFY, Æderik found another message on the databoard: VERIFICATION CODE RECEIVED: SR-143-9962.

A shiver ran down Æderik's spine as he read the code and mulled it over in his mind, a shiver that intensified as he saw a brilliantly shining ship of red steel and blazing orange engines, hurling itself down towards the celestial corpse of Ferros IX. Only one ship in the entirety of the Alliance had the SR prefix to her verification code, and to that ship belonged but one pilot. And now that ship and her pilot was hailing this relatively unimportant dropship as it fell towards an equally unassuming ball of spacebound rock. Again, he turned the switch, this time from VERIFY to ACTIVE, and flipped another switch, this one attached to the headset hanging beside the communication relay control array, from OFF to ON.

Through the static fuzz that screamed through the headset the pilot now donned, there came a single phrase, after which the static fell away almost completely and the pilot found himself able to focus and act with almost machine precision and speed: FOLLOW ME.

BRIDGE OF THE SR-143-9962 SCARLET RAVEN

The Damocles had been a proud ship once, the man who now was known as Commissar Bones mused to himself as he stood alone on the command deck, just as Ferros IX (later, the Commissar knew from his own travels, to be known as Death-World 791) had been. But for the Damocles, at least at the dawn of the Fifty-Second Century, her days of glory were long gone, as were her sister ships, the Kitikara's Redemption and the Serenity's Bane, forever lost to the void beyond the edge of the galaxy. For that matter, he reckoned, so too were the glory days of his own vessel. The Raven's days had been long ago, and across her scarlet plating laid the battle scars and scorch marks of every weapon that had managed to land a blow on the last true Knight-Ship.

The situation on the planet below was catastrophic. This he knew, as he'd encountered the vile Kroget on many worlds before. They were vicious, feral creatures of gnashing teeth, tearing claws, and a seemingly infinite capacity to tear flesh from bone as easily as a human might rip a sheet of paper.

In short, the Kroget were natural-born killing machines.

But, as Bones was more than eager to demonstrate to the men deployed to Ferros IX, they were not invincible.

The dropship he flew past caught his eye before his musings could reach any particular revelatory peak, and with a few strokes of his gloved fingers on the ancient keyboard, he sent a communications request. The reason for this was quite simple, and to the Commissar, a very personal one. The Iron Cross painted in red on the dropship's outer hull indicated the force that was being deployed to the desolate planet was the Crimson Knights, a force of master gunslingers trained in both marksmanship and swordcraft, just as the painted black skull would've indicated the Stygian Shadows, a force of ruthless nocturnal hunters and ace saboteurs.

The men on that dropship were his.

Almost as soon as he'd sent out the initial request, a reply had been sent from Dropship MCXXXVIII of the AWS Damocles, in the form of a verification check. Standard procedure, the commissar reasoned, just so the Dropship didn't think him a threat. An understandable procedure as well, given the Solar War some years before, which had ravaged the entirety of the Orion Arm and even a few sectors on its periphery. Shooting back the verification code, he waited a few seconds, until the verification light flashed green. He tapped the microphone, and told the pilot to follow him, before tapping the microphone off again and easing the throttle forward, the dull roar of the fusion engines increasing in pitch and intensity as the Raven made her way down to the surface of Ferros IX.