Skimmer
Cody "Coyote" Lococo landed his Warlock power armor with a slight running brake as he came to a slow trod to stop at the base of the target vehicle laying on its roof as his seven men, also in powered armor, landed around him right after dealing with the one outrider that had tried to intercept and lead them away who now was little more than scrap and paste on the ice.
They had tried to run. Had made a good showing of it too. But they couldn't outrun eight suits of powered armor hot on their trail.
Cody was not a bad man, At least he told himself that. But neither did he flynch away from a job when started and this was no exception. Having been in the navy himself he convinced himself that it was no betrayal of brotherhood or camaraderie to kill a few marines but instead, he was showing them the respect they deserved and acknowledging their struggle until the very end.
He wouldnt play games with them like the others would. Wouldnt torture or hurt them. He would put them down clean and as painlessly as he could before destroying the bodies. He would put in his report that they had perished either in the cold and could not be recovered or had been lost in whatever explosion overtook the megashuttle. They would be honored by the corps and Cody would remember them.
"My telemetry-" one of the golden-armored Kuvexian PA shouted, the kuvies accent bleeding through as he tapped the side of his head in what Cody had already deduced as soon as they got close. Something in the vic was jamming them locally; Codys optics and communications going near haywire as his HUD blurred and warped and the static drove him near mad to the point he had to cut it off completely until all he could hear was what was piped in through his helmet.
"Spread'oot!" Cody ordered, and the eight men fanned out around the skimmer. There were bodies inside, he could see them piled up, some moving sluggishly.
They weren't going anywhere, and a couple of his men were already tearing at the walls of the vehicle like walking can openers to pull them out. No, what he was looking for...
He found the man dragging himself on his hands and elbows on the other side of the skimmer some thirty feet away. His armor and suit had been torn in some places and lacked the facial gear to the point that even catching up to the man with a casual walk Cody could call up a name to the face even bleeding as it was.
"Kennedy, Right?" Cody asked, putting a gentle foot on Lupins back and pressing him into the snow as he pushed the marine over onto his back and placed the barrel of his rifle against the sternum of the marine.
"Nothing perso-" Cody started, right as he flopped forwards over and past lupin as Caffran revealed himself buried in the snow from his camo cloak, Svafnir in hand and bringing the grenade-pistol to bear at Cody before diving away as red energy blasts chewed up where he had just been a moment before as another mercenary in a VOID suit forced him away.
Cody was on him in an instant, hitting the non-com with a gravity pulse strong enough to send him skipping across the snow where he too landed in a pile twenty feet away, trying and failing to push himself onto his side.
"Coyote you want one of the wings?" A merc shouted, hauling up a frail, limp elysian woman by the base of one wing and shaking her around like an angler proud of his catch.
"Nah." Cody shook his head, bending and stretching his back to test the damage to his suit as he walked over to pick up his rifle. It was possible to assume it a ghost in his jammed HUD, but Cody caught sight of a form in the base of the trees, standing on a root as large as a bridge and watching them. He called out to his men just as one became two became ten became nearly a hundred as humanoid forms began peeling out of the treeline and from under and behind roots.
"Contact!" One of the mercs shouted, Tossing the Elysian girl off to the side and the eight mercs moved to take up an offensive line.
Drone, or perhaps robot soldiers flooded out of the forest and began a slow jog towards them, small arms in hand but not yet engaging. When the mercenary in the VOID jumped and took to the air, Cody was unable to warn him of the larger shapes he saw in the darkness until a beam of energy thicker than his arm punched a hole through the VOIDs midsection and bisected it in half.
From the forest, a swarm of drones of all kinds flew and flooded out, and from around a section of Roots the first mech strode out with its gait, weapons training on the seven remaining suits of powered armor even as more large mechanized forms could be seen behind it.
Not taking to the air, Cody and his men boosted backwards at ground level and began a serpentine pattern with the joint understanding of breaking away from the jamming. If they could contact the Unlucky Star they could call reinforcements and counterattack! Small arms struck around them then, and the mech, and two others now where firing ineffectually at them with frightening energy weapons and even some missiles that they were able to dodge. But it was close, and the more they moved into the open the more open of a target they became.
"Scatter!" Cody ordered, hoping his men could hear him as, luckily, they broke in different directions all at once.
Cody pushed for the sky. Or he tried to until something clamped around him like a massive claw and nearly crushed him then and there. He brought his rifle up despite the pain and unloaded at the massive scorpion-like mecha that burst out from the snow ineffectually until it clamped down.
And cut Cody in half.
Skimmer
"So what'd we supposed to do with these guys?" One of the tan-coated mutants asked, gesturing at the laid-out forms of the near-dead or unconscious marines as drone soldiers secured the area and the Terror wolves mecha strode about looking for any other surprises that might have come looking for trouble.
The faceless plate of a specific drone in a similar uniform appraised the situation and came to the most logical solution.
NPF SGR 195 - Cobra class NPF Gunship.
The Anonymous tip in any other circumstance would have been ignored if not for the geo-location data and the visual aids transmitted to the local branch of the NPF. Already the 195 was executing a search pattern on the other side of the settlement and had to only re-route and was little more than a few hours from the target location. Finding one of the butter-mercs ships already loitering in the area the 195 was quick to ground the ship with their jurisdiction and would scour it from the skies if it tried to take off before the captain of the DTR team grilled them thoroughly but it would have to wait.
Locking on to the coordinates and spotting the lingering radiation as a sign the 195 came down hot and within a moment of touching down, some twenty Golem armored DTR officers and a half dozen courier drones were moving on the area with support auxiliaries in tow.
They found the bastardized hulk of some vehicle overturned, smoke and wreckage everywhere. They found the remains of destroyed powered armor and evidence of weapons fire.
And then there was the large, almost circus tent pitched in the middle of the snow and a bunch of half-dead marines stacked like cordwood looking like someone threw them first off a mountain only to land them in a garbage disposal.
Two of them were dead. One elf of all things, and another woman. The rest barely in any shape to call living but were still somehow alive.
The few that were still conscious remained so for only as long as it took the combat medics of the NPF to sedate them; Their pleas and accusations of mercenaries and conspiracy lost on their tounges as black, dreamless sleep overtook all of them.
Except for one.
His IPG package doing half the work of fighting off the sedatives while he was still mentally in fight mode, Tobias stared off blankly into the officer's face, refusing to be put under half out of spite at that point as the officers argued about safe dosage and procedure as another form leaned over Tobias and the blurry shilhouette became a bit more clear as his voice sounded crystal clear compared to the distant officers as the drugs seemed to finally start to set in.
It took a moment in his fading consciousness to place the face. His worn green fatigues and 5-o'clock shadow sticking out on a grave expressing as Colonel Anthony Hargraves stared down at Tobias with an unreadable expression.
Tobias was suddenly burning, in horrible agony and pain as smoke filled his nostrils and kept him awake.
But it wasn't Tobias that was on fire. Instead the marines, the officers, all else including the tent had fallen away and he lay on a promenade that turning his head as he tried to shake it away saw that it overlooked a burning city that once floated in the skies but now listed and sunk towards the ground as it trailed smoke and the somehow clear screams of a million immolated angels reached his ears as tounge of flames reached for him.
A breeze hit him then. It was as cold as any he had felt before and cut the residual heat of the distant inferno to chill him to the very core even as Hargraves, standing over him as he watched the city fall through the clouds and towards the planet bellow with a disquieted expression not unlike as if he were simply watching the news disinterestedly.
"Nothing quite burns like the cold. Does it, Kid?" He looked then to Tobias, the wardens form now that of a concave chest where Locust had crushed it, and a nearly severed spinal chord from his battered body back on Ukk.
The drugs took Tobias then. And he knew only the cold.
