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Liza Grier     Letheia corp. erchius mining station S-113 is, even for a spacefaring civilization, not somewhere anyone would want to build without a very good reason, and not somewhere that anyone should want to attack for any reason at all. It's built into the surface of a tiny moon, circling a planet so close to its giant red sun that the surface is permanently magmatic, and its atmosphere glows a ruddy, fiery orange.

    The parts of the station above ground are very minimal, little more than a complex of white and grey, space-age buildings the size of a university campus, all sharp slopes, pristine heat shielding, polarized windows, and buried wires to the rows of panels belonging to a large solar farm outside. Relative to the size of even a very small moon, it's a white blip in a dusty, reddish desert, currently darkened by the planet's shadow. In less than an hour, when the moon edges around the planet's equator, it'll be six hundred degrees centigrade outside. The rest goes deep underground to escape that heat.

    Letheia, whose white and red logo can be seen emblazoned in five meter lettering on the outside, prohibits the construction of any warpgate inside the secure facility, but there is a very large, very powerful transceiver mast up top, which the station's personnel have used to send their distress call, and the company is more than willing to send one of their sleek space shuttles down from a high-speed transport to carry their response team to the facility ASAP.

    It's a short ride, with only the thump of a disengagement, the feeling of intense acceleration, a sudden, jarring slow, and the clunk of landing gear, to inform riders that they've docked. There's not even time to sit down; the rows empty between Elites are filled out with the company's private marines, stood up under lines of drop-down handholds in the ceiling, suited up in grey body armour, an environment pack, and an assault rifle each.

    The minute the side hatches pop open, they stream down the shuttle ramps and on to a heavy elevator lift that the clamped shuttlecraft is gradually riding down a deep, square shaft. The doors are already sealed overhead, leaving just the bright and sterile artificial lighting of the facility from now on, better suited for lab work than being comfortable to be around for months at a time.

    An informative holographic visitor's map right off from disembarking shows that you're at the top level of a four storey underground complex, each floor separated by a quarter mile of rock, bridged only by three personnel elevators, a main cargo lift, and three flights of emergency stairs, which is probably definitely a worker hazard for a station of several hundred miners. The access points are set inside clusters of important buildings, arranged in a triangle around the main shaft, which is a massive cylinder that bores a mile and a half down into the moon, and is visible from several rooms along the inside wall.

    This floor appears to be 'loading, arrivals, communications, sensors', and directly below you, 'crew quarters, barracks, cafetaria, recreation, terrarium', beneath that on the third level 'fabrication, hydroponics, research, cargo', and beneath that, 'engineering, reactor, atmosphere, hazardous storage, C&C, AI core'. There are entrances into the mineshaft from levels two, three, and four.
Liza Grier     You're also pleasantly informed by a pre-recorded message that visitors are restricted to the first level of the facility only. All personnel, including security inspectors, are to wear protective equipment at all times upon entering the main shaft airlocks, and mine workers are prohibited from spending more than ten hours in one forty eight hour period in close proximity to erchius crystals. Security may question you at any time for any reason and you are to comply with all demands. Reports of unfavourable security conduct may be submitted through the ansible relay at the first of every month, before mail hours. Today's cafeteria special is 'fush and chips' and next Friday is a mandatory six hour holiday. Letheia corp. urges you to have a nice day.

    Nobody is having a nice day right now. The marines split into three teams and hustle straight down the elevators to the floors below. There are alarms blaring over the cheery, pre-recorded visitors' prompts, and an even cheerier security alert alpha message is being played overtop of that, reminding all personnel to report to their secure shelters, and if encountering Letheia security personnel, to drop all carried items, get down on the floor, and assume their non-hazardous conduct expression position. You can hear plenty of people yelling, and see most of them running back and forth in the hallways in a state of disorderly chaos, rather than doing either of those things.

    Men in white labcoats stuffed with as much junk as they could fit are trying to muscle past men in heavy yellow coveralls who are currently trying to board the elevators over with steel beams and welding torches. A troupe of personnel in casual grey jumpsuits have managed to acquire shotguns somehow, and one is breaking the windows into the comms center, where someone in a blue uniform kind of looks like he's attempting to either steal the radio equipment, or secure it away before someone else steals it. There's a small explosion somewhere, and the mysterious enemy hasn't even arrived yet.

    In fact, absolutely nobody can tell you where they're going to arrive, or how, or how many, or any aspect of anything useful. Nobody has half a clue what's going on, but are caught in an absolute frenzy. You're pretty sure you heard the intercom say something about a leak.
Starbound Flotilla !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ALERT! ALERT! CONCORD TASK RECEIVED! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!! LETHEIA SECURITY COUNCIL ISSUED A SECURITY DEFENSE REQUEST! !!!!!!!!!

    +_+ +_+ +_+ +_+ +_+ +_+

    Several idle eyes light up as sirens go off.

A card-locked locker is shoved open, and a hefty shotgun, reliable pistol, and a cherry-red-and-black hardsuit bearing hefty sparking gloves are yanked out. A manic, grinning man scrambles and dashes madly through hallways.
Samurai-style armor is taken from its display site in a meditaiton room, alongside a gleaming, perfect powered katana and its energized sheath. A proud, calm Hylotl strides to his chosen place.
Wooden armor is yanked down from a tree, adorned with electronics and bone. Two sharp blades are sheathed at its sides before a heavy bow is procured. A Floran pounces and bounds through a window.
Plated golden robe-armor is pulled from the altar of a shrine, and a matching set of three floating gold spheres follows almost as quick as the scimitar. Airboost armor sends an Avian blasting in a high arc to her destination.
A young auto-squire runs with an armful of heavy techno-armor, joining another carrying a hefty axe, meeting at a royal arming room. Soon, a Glitch battle-princess strides purposefully to her steed of sorts.
A figure runs through a wide armory, pulling a rocket launcher and a half-dozen rifles into hardpoints on his shining gray field-scientist gear. An Apex battle-scientist rockets his way straight to his destination.

One man stands in front of the ramp up to the Rapacity III Rapid Response Ship, sheathed katana raised high. He calls out.

"Starbound Flotilla!"
"SORTIE!"
"SORTIE!"
"SORTIE!"
"SORTIE!"
"SORTIE!"
"SORTIE!"

    Six fists crash together in a hexa-bro-pound.

    The Rapacity III slams into local space, slingshots hard around the local sun, and retros at dangerous accelerations to get here quick as they can. It's only a they're deploying that Moonfin insists that George's armor adjust shade with a quick spray-painting, which he only begrudgingly accepts. The darker red matches local security just a bit better than cherry-blood-red does. The paint job will have to do, they're already disembarking into the airlock. It has been four minutes, fifty two seconds since the mission was issued.

    The Flotilla barge in through one of the airlocks they've docked to. "Take heart, Letheian workers! Your administration has purchased only the highest quality of Emergency Response Team. State the nature of your defense needs, and all shall soon be addressed." That's right: The Starbound Flotilla work as ERT now. They even rather look the part, with their fancy power hardsuits in those classic colors.
Gawain Gawain touches down on the station. He has an earpiece in, humming to himself as he drops off the ship with the group, listening to the Letheia fine print being droned through his ears. He won't get through all of it, especially at text-to-speech pace, but at least it's distracting from the, well...

Everything? There's an explosion already happening, men with shotguns trying to break into areas, and twenty minutes until an emergency threat. Deep breaths, Gawain, you've got this.

<"Alright, everyone. Keep your comms open. First priority should be the livelihood of the station's employees. Research can be replaced, people can't, not that we want to waste the research!"> It is probably for the best that Letheia isn't, necessarily, in on this communication.

The knight, in his full plate armor, pushes forward towards the alerts. He's trying to find where that explosion happened, looking for missing lights and electricity or the like, to see if anyone was caught up in it, so that he can get them out of there. Shotgun wielding lunatics can be stopped by someone else. A dangerous hazard like that is what he was born to do.
Xion GET QUEST?

In her room in Castle Oblivion, Xion looks up from playing her moogle-branded handheld video game when her monitor beeps. Connected to a complete sin against electrical device and cable management, with two smartphones, an old cable TV box, a bulky router, and a pair of analog bunny-ear antennas. All this jumble pipes a dozen streams of information onto the extra large monitor: A flipboard of world events, a cooking show, multiple social media feeds, a cartoon, and <Car Youtube>. At the top of the screen is just a Quest Tracker RSS. What draws Xion's eyes is...

"Wow! A happy place, where rugged individuals strike out and live like manly men, drinking manly beers and living a full life among the stars? Pff, who needs *Car Youtube*?"

ONE '''TELESCIENCE ACCIDENT''' LATER:

Xion, in a grey jumpsuit only zipped up to the waist, with a black undershirt, stands gormlessly in the arrivals shuttle, blinking. She has a strange burrito in her hand she found in a vending machine. Distantly, she hears the sounds of breaking windows, screaming, an explosion, and the general state of chaos. Marines hup-hup-hup into the area. Science bustles into Engineering.

Xion, spotting people dressed like her, wanders towards the shotgun-wielding greysuits. "Hey, um..." She looks down at her outfit, and then at the mysteriously armed greysuit she's addressing. "... should I have a gun too? I came here because of the..."

Her mind drifts back to Car Youtube. "... The thing."
Mordred     After hearing about the station's woes, Mordred's decided on a whim to join in the efforts! Maybe. She's physically there, anyway, donning her usual silver armor and horned helmet to cut a relatively imposing figure while seated in that shuttle heading to the facility.

    Thankfully, the ride's not long enough for Mordred to start getting bored and make a nuisance of herself, but she finds ways easily enough. She pokes at rifles, checks out her reflection in visors, and barely even follows the group with the sheer rush of people going everywhere. The cafeteria could be worth looking into later, but for now, Mordred focuses her attention on the odd job before her.

    <<"Right, right. The more of these folks that are alive, the more of 'em we can leverage for negotiations later!">> Mordred follows up Gawain sounding rather spirited about keeping these people alive, for better or for worse, and she already has her sword in hand as she watches the person in blue messing with the radio.

    Might as well get a little bit of a warm up in. Approaching the radio-fiddler, Mordred reaches for the thing, although she doesn't yank or slam it down right away. "You need this in or out?" If he answers plainly, she'll pull the phone out or shove into whatever compartment it looks like it could fit into. "And give us some info on where the fire is around here. Won't help anyone to just stand around like dumbasses all day."

    "... Night. Whatever."
Liza Grier     Moonfin descending the ramp in all his glory is met with what could be the least confidence he's ever been offered in his life. The colour-coded team of diverse and heavily armed specialists strutting in from a separate platform causes a brief pause in the chaos around them, as people stop to stare, sometimes in the middle of wrestling with each other over a pair of insulated gloves, until exactly the moment he says that they're hired by Letheia. The minute he makes that proclamation, the situation around him disintegrates back into an apathetic melee. All that really changes is that a few people manage to squeeze out in the pause, or choose to filter away with stolen masks and EVA packs, and everyone else makes sure to preemptively shuffle out of arm's reach of any member of the Flotilla.

    It would appear that they have very little reverence for their company's property, or faith in their hires. They even basically ignore the marines (except to get out of their way), who conversely don't have time to be dealing with the crew (yet).

    Xion, in the meanwhile, after she wanders up to 'some dude in a jumpsuit with a gun', doesn't even get to finish her sentence before the nondescript man withdraws another shotgun from his backpack, and shoves it into her arms, followed by a flimsy cardboard box of ammunition, before absconding towards the emergency stairs down. He appears to have several more. It looks like a whole herd of his ilk are rushing down to the second floor, possibly trying to get ahead of the marines.

    Mordred even so much as looking at the radio has the panicked technician pull it out of its power socket, then fiddle and clatter with the equipment until he ejects its drive, trying to stuff it into his blue jumpsuit. "Out! No, In! No --I need to keep it *safe*!" he yells at her in a hurry. Someone has clambered in through a broken window behind her and attempts to smash her skull in with the corner of a heavily loaded, titanium engineering toolbox. The man cries out and mashes his card into fob by the door in the rear of the comms kiosk, fleeing into a darkened back room filled with rows of servers.

    With the output having been removed forcibly from its plug, the audio defaults to the room's speakers, blaring out two things at once, audible for a ways around. One is an unmodulated voice, badly crackling due to poor connection quality, probably female, slow and emphatic. It's saying "Repeating again, this --- Grier, aboard Syndicate --- have five minutes and forty five --- to comply with --- assemble at arrivals for --- captain." The other is the same pre-recorded androgynous answering machine voice as the visitor's kiosk, loudly and frequently repeating "This is the Letheia automatic call response. The Letheia Corporation is aware of your situation. Outgoing communications from Station S-113 have now been shut down. We hope you have nice day!"
Liza Grier     Indeed, none of the radio equipment is able to send anything. Radios aren't reaching any further than within the station itself. They are absolutely not listening to Gawain, for the fact that Gawain would be blocked out of trying to talk to them anyways.

    Gawain will have to fight his way down one of the emergency stairwells to reach the explosions; all the elevators seem to be permanently in-use, and not very fast. Given his physique though, shoving his way through people shouldn't be very hard. For a while, the biggest threat is a half-finished job left by a janitor waxing the floor outside.

    Chasing the source of the sound, he can soon smell smoke in the air, and then the chemical tint of automatic fire suppression. He ends up on the third level, following arrows to the junction between 'fabrication' and 'cargo', where he finds an enormous stack of crates has been blown to little smoking bits, piled up against part of the station's interior wall. Given that they're underground, no atmosphere is vented, and foam dispensers from the ceiling are working to suppress the flames that are guzzling oxygen otherwise. Oddly, it also seems that there are no wounded. There are plenty of cargo workers around, in pale grey and brown jumpsuits and carry harnesses, but they mostly seem to be trying to haul everything adjacent to the flames away, while one piloting what looks like a wearable forklift is bringing in a stack of new supplies. None of them are trying to help suppress the blaze, or patch up the wall, just recover items. The cargo foreman even appears to still be on site.

    This also appears to be the location that one of the three marine teams are headed, a Gawain hears them charging through the route he'd just cleared after noticing the hallways where everyone has been shoved out by him. The other two, according to the trackers afforded to the Flotilla, are heading to research, and engineering.

    Xion's swarm of 'dudes who hadn't even put on job suits yet' are all swarming to hazardous storage and engineering, though she can see they've just recently raided cargo and fabrication. She is unfortunately almost *immediately* spotted by someone in a red jumpsuit with an armoured vest and mirrored visor, who begins yelling at her at the top of her lungs to drop her gun and get on the ground, obviously mistaking her for a saboteur or rioter of some sort. He has a floating security drone alongside him. He is a member of a whole squad who are chasing the rest, past the Flotilla.

    That security troupe is the only group willing to answer them anything. The head amongst them stops to tell Moonfin that "Those Syndie bastards are going to try and breach the station from somewhere. Anywhere. We have to cover every possible entrance. But these unwashed morons are using the opportunity to take everything that isn't bolted down and escape with it in the chaos, so we've locked down all the life craft until the situation is under control."
Gawain Given the time limit, Gawain gestures 'see you later' to Mordred and jogs down stairs, pushing through the crowds with superhuman strength and "I'm sorry!" being shouted out after he realizes his radios aren't going to be super useful. He notices the janitor waxing the floor, debates what to do, and then leaps over it, before helpfully telling him he missed a spot.

As soon as Gawain reaches cargo, he looks to the flames, and then tries to find a nearby fire extinguisher, hose, or similar to start putting them out, as he turns to the cargo personnel. "What are you doing? You need to get away from the flames, quickly!" He is absolutely /baffled/ by how they're still doing their jobs. "There's an emergency threat on its way, so please start evacuating!"

As the security team is headed this way, Gawain does tell the nearest cargo worker of 'importance' something. "The security squad appears to be on its way. Everything's going to be alright."
Mordred     A muffled grunt comes out of Mordred's helmet as she watches the technician panicking further with that radio, eventually shrugging once it's clear that she's not going to get any useful information out of him. "Rrrright. Don't think we'll be g-"

    And then Mordred gets brained with a toolbox. Were it not for her being exceptionally hard-headed in the literal sense and the helmet being... A helmet, she'd probably be on the ground after that! Unfortunately for whoever that was, Mordred instead just staggers forward for a moment before jerking backwards abruptly and swinging her hand around to try and grab them by the entire face, collar, arm, whatever's within reach and seems intimidating enough.

    "You got some balls trying that kind of stunt with me..." Although the mask hides her face, Mordred is audibly grinning as seh says that. She even goes as far as laughing, quietly at first, then growing into an almost mad crescendo before releasing her grip suddenly. "... Alright. You stick with me, you live. You run, you die." She taps her sword on the floor once for emphasis, then pauses to listen to the crappy speakers and the also crappy answering machine.

    "Any idea what that's all about? This Grier Syndicate or whatever?" Mordred starts moving once again, headed towards the server room that the technician had fled to earlier. She glances back once to see if that person is indeed following her. If they're not, she follows up on her promise and lunges forward to run them through. If they are, she leaves them to their own devices on the way in.

    In the server room itself, she continues to exhibit little in the way of subtlety as she starts shouting. "Hey! What's that thing you gotta keep safe?" She sounds more curious than concerned, easily giving off the impression in her tone that she might just want to take whatever it is for herself.
Starbound Flotilla     George winces, a bit awkwardly, at the head of security. "Ooof. Honestly, if you're asking me, just assume they'll make one wherever they want. I've got ideas." He heads towards the nearest working passage downwards, scampering as one does when they are in a space station and are like this.

    "Will this not represent some sort of... abandonment of principles on your part?"
    George pops the visor of his hardsuit to light a cigarette and plant it like an elegant garden piece. "Eh, whatever. After all that shit with Jane, you think I still have any good graces left with 'em?" He gestures to the others, intending for them to spread out throughout the facility. He's got his own objective. An ALERT COMPUTER should spew some atmospheric alerts for overheating in whatever area is breached, if he knows well.

    But he hears something, from down the hall. A familiar voice, echoing. He stops, suddenly, looking around and sucking a deep drag full of pre-emptive medical chemistry out of his cigarette and into his body, everything tensed and coiled like a cornered animal. But no, it's a recording, and... surely he misheard, right?

"I'm hittin' engineering, gonna keep eyes on alerts. Everyone spread."
"Tactically unwise."
"Bite me, we have zero idea where they're going to breach."
"Casting a wide net may ensure at least one fish is caught."
"Floran thinksss, at leassst one per level. Ssseft join human friend!"
"Protective. I will keep him safe, don't worry."
"If we've got a spare body, I could take flight surface-side, give you the divine wisdom from above."
"Overwatch. Effective. Do it."
"I shall make my way to the Terrarium."
"Floran going to cargo... lotsss of fire?!"
"Staying at communications."

    The Flotilla have gotten what seems like a go-ahead from the head of security, so they're going to start dispersing to ready up for combat. Albert winds up near Mordred, gruffly grunting. "Syndicate. Regional faction. Anti-Letheia militant coalition. Armed anarchist radicals. Don't know Grier." From someone who is a professional rebel, that's strong words. But Albert sadly isn't the one who knows Grier. That's a different one.
Xion Xion is immediately foisted upon a pump-action shotgun and a cardboard box full of shells. She instantly appears to understand and accept the weapon without complaint or objection, shuffling the box and shells about in a juggling jumble of gun into box, shell fistful into pocket, grumbling, shells into hand, shells into box, box into pocket gun into hands, shells into other hand, and then FINALLY beginning to load her firearm.

By the time she has shells and gun inventory managed properly, her benefactor is gone. In his place is an officer of Security who is bellowing about unwashed masses and telling her to GET ON THE GROUND RIGHT NOW EAT THAT DIRT DOWN MOVE MOVE MOVE.

Xion, while staring at the officer, disappears her loaded firearm into her inventory into a space-evacuating 'bip!'.

"I don't know what you're talking about." Xion replies calmly, each syllable drawling out.

"Are you talking to me? I had a shower before coming here. I'm going to go now."

Xion, while staring at the Shitcurity officer, immediately walks towards a broken window, steps over it, and starts rummaging through an open locker for scraps.

"Ooh, sunglasses!"

She slides a pair of shades on, clearly stealing from whatever office got broken into.

"A-are you still here? I told you, I washed."
Liza Grier     On Mordred's end, the guy who'd just tried to brain her with an engineering toolkit responds to being grabbed around the face by grasping her gauntleted wrist and then swinging both legs into her groin. Provided she were both human and a male, this would probably hurt a lot, since they appear to be wearing industrial magnetic boots, which accelerate both feet and are also very heavy and covered in metal. Instead though, when she tells him to stick with her and releases his face, as soon as he's finished choking, he suddenly, *aggressively* nods, and flips down a pair of goggles, which light up in the dark server room.

    He follows behind her at double arms' length, responding to her in one of those voices you could mix up with anyone in a teleconference call. "Yeah. They're Letheia's number one enemy. All kinds of bad blood in the past. They want to see the company belly up, and they'll do anything they can to get there. All types. Mercenaries. Spies. Cultists. Waffle manufacturers. You name it."

    Advancing deeper into the server room, she can hear the older, technician gentleman yell back to her "The codes! Central command remotely removed the station's management AI limiters! Take the codes to the AI core and it'll--" However, once she rounds the corner and catches sight of the man following her, he screams and books it through the next set of doors, slamming an emergency alarm that seals a thick bulkhead over them and bathes the server room in red alarm light. Another dispatch of security redsuits breaks off and comes her way. She can hear amplified, tinny drone voices yelling at her to put her hands up, turn around, and 'submit to a security wellness checkup'. They pass right by Albert who is arriving at communications now. The random guy she'd brought with her immediately uses the toolbox to stove off a piece of the wall paneling and start fucking with the wiring behind it in a real big hurry.

    George hustling his ass down to atmosphere is of course immediately obstructed by several security doors and redsuits pegging him as suspicious and ready to close in his face and/or body him on the spot, most easily subverted by the fact that he's technically here on Letheia's dime, and Seft is with him to defuse these situations without their futuristic batons involved. Arriving in the atmospheric monitoring and life support engineering core, men in sealed suits scramble out of his way and yell, one of them trying to bodyblock him from the monitoring station until either one of them remove him. He can easily detect the fire in cargo, as well as, from his chemistry knowledge, RX residue. There is, in fact, a teeny tiny leak in atmosphere there. Though the explosion Gawain sees leads to a wall of solid moon rock, the pressure there is a hair lower than the adjacent halls, and gradually dropping.
Liza Grier     Biteblade and Gawain on the scene aren't privy to information that specific, save for being told over the radios in a timely fashion. Having Biteblade on-station with the usual Flotilla scanners lets her know that most of these crates are filled with unprocessed ores, heavy industrial metals, spare components for repairs, and the like, but some appear to be filled with various chemicals and electrical signals that are definitely very dangerous, especially including the crate being carried towards the fire by the man wearing the mechanized lifter.

    "No can do." the grizzled cargo head says to Gawain, glancing at him sideways through tinted goggles, away from his PDA. "Too much valuable material to leave here. It'll be wage garnishes for the rest of the year if it all gets burnt. Now you can help us move it or you can get lost." he says, waving off a man who is literally a knight in shining armour, a famous member of the Paladins, and ostensibly here at the behest of his boss' boss' boss. When he mentions security however, the cargo foreman does a slow double take at him over tapping on his pad, then looks towards a couple of workers staring at him nearby and jerks his head. They begin sprinting towards the blaze as well.

    The cargo head is just starting to yell at people to clear out when the marines arrive, storming down the corridor and its two parallel routes, they surround the cargo bay fire and train their guns on the workers, holding a perimeter. The security suits, and their drones, run through the blockage, throwing a couple of flashbang grenades into the crowd to stun them, before they begin tackling, grabbing, and cuffing cargo workers seemingly at random. Even the drones get in on it, automatically tazing, beating, and restraining cargo techs who try to flee in panic. Only techs currently wearing loaders are currently beyond the reach of security batons.

    Pavo's vigil on the moon's surface doesn't detect much until there are only thirty seconds left until this supposed countdown reaches zero. The thin red streak of a teleporter being fired from somewhere further out into the system, intersecting with a barren section of the moon, aligned perpendicularly with the station's third level research center according to the Flotilla's scans, but without actually coming near the aboveground portion of the facility. It's around that time too that an atmosphere leak is detected in the mineshaft too.

    The security goon spends a minute boggling suspiciously at Xion no longer having a shotgun, watching her saunter off into an officer's quarters. When she picks up a pair of shades, he decides to make up his mind, yelling "Theft of company property!" and siccing the floating robot on her, crackly zap stick extended. The countdown reaching the ten second mark causes the floor to buck and rumble beneath their feet, sending the security guard falling on his ass, and knocking over the desk and filing cabinet in the room, albeit having no effect on the floating drone. Something *much bigger* exploded below. There is now a fire in engineering.
Gawain As the cargo tell Gawain to help, he thinks, but has already continued to speak, and then they're booking it. As he follows after them, security surrounds the place, and then...

Begins stunning, beating, tazing, and cuffing cargo workers who were, legitimately, just trying to do their job so they didn't get paycuts. Gawain freezes. The security's not after him, but- this isn't right. He needs to stop it, immediately, the best way he knows how.

As by this point in freezing, most of them have likely been robusted and are on the floor, Gawain dashes over in front of the nearest unstunned worker he can, kicking aside a tazer-bot as it probably tries to get past him. "Stop what you're doing! This is wrong on so many fronts! They're just trying to do their jobs, despite the fire, you should be assisting them in evacuating or dealing with the incoming threat, not subjugating the workers!"

Letheia is unlikely to be happy with Gawain, he reckons, but he's not very happy with them. /Everything/ he's seen about this corporation is something he dislikes. And if security's here in a pile...they're sitting ducks for the emergency threat.
Mordred     Between Albert's and the toolbox guy's answers, Mordred's got a much clearer idea about the Syndicate and Letheia situation, especially in the context of this station. "That so? Well, too bad for the Syndicate, I guess. Letheia's paying good money for us to keep this place from..."

    Well, the place is alrady on fire. She's pretty sure she saw Gawain going for fire exintugishers, though, so that'll have to do. "... Completely exploding, so. You're in good hands!" She shouts in a vaguely reassuring, yet threatening tone. She pauses, then quiets down to ask "Waffles...?"

    She could go for a waffle after the job's done. Hearing the technician shouting back, Mordred follows the voice with only the barest of ideas what he's actually talking about, and she sighs when he just takes off once again. "So you want me to bring those codes over or-" A beat as the bulkhead gets sealed, and then Mordred grunts in frustration. "... Not."

    "Jackass. Seriously, what the hell is wrong with this place and all these people?" She asks without looking at anybody in particular. Maybe the toolbox guy? The redsuits? They're relatively close by, at least, although their commands are met with a laugh and the sound of metal scraping against the ground as the knight raises her blade towards the oncoming redsuits.

    "Yeah, no. You got one chance to get this place open and bring us to..." Where was the place that old guy mentioned? "... The AI core, or you can die with nobody to mourn you. Your call." True to her word, Mordred does not strike first. She gives the redsuits an opportunity to comply with her own order, and she'll even follow them if they do so (or appear to do so). If they don't comply or if they go after the toolbox guy, though, she opts for MAXIMUM VIOLENCE with copious application of her large-ish sword to their entire bodies repeatedly.

    She did promise that she'd keep him alive, after all.
Starbound Flotilla     Biteblade doesn't really understand what's going on here, when it comes to the shitcurity doing their shitcurity thing. She doesn't know much at all when it comes to humans, in general, really. No thoughts, head empty, on that particular topic. What she *does* know is...

"Tele-drop on the third floor!"
"Atmos went wild at the mineshaft!"
"Floran isss near! Gonna run!"

    She brings out a hefty electromagnetic bow, nocks a tungsten bolt, and takes off towards Mining. She intends to be first to arrive there! She doesn't really understand anything about the greyshirts and their shenanigans, but the best thing she can do here is start howling a hissing, vicious war cry.

    The others are on their way. The probable arrival queue will wind up being Moonfin, followed by Seft, Albert, and George simultaneously, and eventually Pavo. Gotta cut what they assume is a nuke-ops team off before they can get to an easier passageway down and secure it behind them! George is shouting, "AI! Start bolting doors in front of licorice sons of bitches, slow however ya can!" He has to hope that the AI was ever active around here. And he knows how just how fast they can rapid-breach access-locked doors.
Xion Xion has done nothing wrong. The glasses were on the shelf, and then she tried them on. Having been shopping many times, Xion understands the rules of property... vaguely. Sometmes she goes to clothes stores just to try things on for the sheer cheap pleasure of it.

When the security goon begins shouting about theft, she looks around for the thief confusedly for all her reaction frames of the siccing and travel time of the droid. The first few hits are shocking enough to drop her to a crouch, holding her hand at the drone's zap as the officer staggers around. "Hey! I'm not a thief! I was just--"

Xion's big sparkling eyes had been captured by the wonder present in such a new place, but pain flushed the system of whimsy and the stimulus of the cascade of new experiences gave way to the experience of the flint-like point of the security goon's heart as it ground upon her like a chalkboard.

Rising back up to her feet while being shocked, Xion frowns deeply, her entire expression expressed in the flickering lights overhead as the station rumbles.

"I'm not going to get on the ground for you."

The shotgun 'shwink!'-s metallically into her hands, pre-aimed at the floating drone as Xion pulls the trigger, ker-chacks the slide, and pulls the trigger again in a swift series of actions, turning the floating drone into a sparking pile of scrap.

Holding the gun outward, towards the security officer by the middle of the frame, she drops the partially-spent shotgun on the ground. Her other hand slides off the sunglasses, side-slinging them at the staggered officer. "Take your junk."

She disappears with a backstep into a sworling abyss, a cardboard box and pile of shells occuping the space she exited.
Liza Grier     Mordred threatens the security and tells them to take her to the AI core. The leader in the back presses his visored helmet comm and calls the third group of marines, saying "We got one up at comms. They had a plant on the shuttle. Bring reinforcements." The blips on the map that Albert can surveill are not moving. The comms crackle goes "Negative, negative, explosion in engineering. Power is being diverted from the grid. We're moving to block access to the main reactor. We can't risk gravity going out, never mind the erchius containment field. Do your job."

    They do attempt to do that. "Weapons authorized!" says the security lead, and the officers around him draw and begin firing personal energy weapons at her en mass, pelting her with a whole team's worth of glowing blasts. Individually, they don't seem to be very powerful, and primarily have the effect of being disorienting and paralytic, as well as having a hefty concussive impact. A whole squad of them going off in her face is like being pelted with dozens of miniature stun grenades fired out of a baseball cannon, and all of them are mildly electrocuted.

    The goggles dude with the engineering box she's protecting manages to splice into the door pretty shortly after. Whether she chops up the whole security brigade, or decides to enter the next room instead of being hit eighty times in the face with pulse bolts, he smashes the keypad on the other side to keep it permanently shut, and says "You know, you're alright." to her, flashing a thumbs up, and chasing after the terrified comms officer and his 'codes'.

    Rushing towards the mineshaft side of the third level, George yelling at the AI over the comms is met shortly with actual success. Apparently, when Letheia 'remote released its limiters', they did actually send the authentication for their ERT as well, so the computer wordlessly obeys him. Doors slam shut and flash red lock lights all over the wing. Airlocks clamp down and vent their atmosphere. Bulkheads seal shut. Elevators lock up. He the others are directly above engineering now, and can smell the acrid smoke filtering through the station's vents, overwhelming the scrubbers.

    The last thing Albert hears on the comms is something about a power sink, and then the lights flicker and go out across the station. The intercom and alarm keep playing, the gravity and life support remains, but everything else stops working, plunging the whole station into darkness for thirty solid seconds, without any way to move between rooms or floors. The AI stops responding to George, even though it should have its own power supply by his memory.
Liza Grier     That's the timing where Gawain, and Biteblade if she's still there, are busy in the cargo bay with the melee of workers, security, and Letheia corp. marines. When Gawain begins yelling at the security and physically trying to stop them, a handful of cargo techs send up a ragged cry of jubilation. Most of them are trying to flee the scene while he kicks robots and tosses officers, but one yells out "Equal work for equal pay!" out there like a dogwhistle to him. The cargo head yells "Do it!", and the technician with the loader mechanically yeets the suspect crate onto the fire, detonating a second box of bootleg RX, just before the power goes out.


The second blast is enough to carve a good ten feet into the exposed moonrock, and crack station support beams embedded in it. The air begins to whistle out of the room, sucking loose papers and bits of debris towards it, muffling the sound of chaotic shouting and scrambling footfalls in the bay. A few seconds later, there is one last explosion, but it's from the *opposite side* of the rock. The natural stone wall bursts inwards into cargo, scattering thirty pound chunks of cold rock into the mob at random, and toppling the mechanical loader over. Gawain can see a long tunnel exposed in the side of the level now, bored through the rock over some amount of time, slowly, all the way out to space.

    There's a brief, intense rush of decompressing air being expelled through it, and then with a clunk and a loud hiss, the wind stops and they can hear again. Some sort of small, cylindrical craft has wedged itself in the tunnel, sealed the gap between itself and the earth, and popped open its doors, spilling out dim red light from the interior. Clusters of bright green lights -- four to a set -- glide through the blackness and towards the cargo floor.

    Both the security team and the marines start flicking on their flashlights, powerful white beams sweeping erratically across the bay, but it's already too late. Bright, hot flashes of gunfire splatter against the pitch black, and the sound of bodies hitting the ground can already be heard just before the emergency power comes on, and the station's electronics all begin operating again, with glaring red warning lights on all of them.

    The cargo bay is facing down six intruders, five who are heavily geared in bright, blood red body armour, with fully sealed helmets mounted with glowing green optics, and a sixth that is a menacing black and red robot on four legs.

    The robot fires a matter manipulation beam into the bay, and begins spewing generic prefab metal panels all over as cover, which the five armed men immediately hunker down behind, continuing to fire at the Letheia side. Three of them are using assault rifles, firing bullets and grenades into the back line where the marines are. One sets up a machine gun on a cargo crate filled with uranium, blazing indiscriminately into the crowd, gunning down security, drones, marines, and fleeing cargo workers alike. The last camps out in front of the robot and brings up a bright blue energy barrier, firing around the side with a submachine gun, and protecting the machine from incoming bullets. Twin turrets activate on the forward face of the breaching craft, joining the machine gunner in aggressively hosing the area.

    The security team absolutely doesn't stand a chance. Most of them are killed in the first twenty seconds. There are many casualties on the marines' side before they scramble behind columns and crates, and return fire. Though they have military equipment, they look overwhelmed already, and there is a clear mismatch in firepower. Most of the cargo workers who aren't dead or injured are staying close to the floor, trying to avoid bullets. Some are still running away. A handful are running *towards* the breaching craft, including the head of cargo and the loader pilot, waved in by the shield-using operative.
Liza Grier     At the center of it, Elites are almost an incidental fixture, more likely to be hit by bullets crossing both sides than actively aimed at. The cargo head points towards Gawain, inaudible with all the gunfire, and one of the blood-red suits nods and taps his radio, causing the team to adjust fire around him, and the same operative to wave him over to the craft as well, just as a grenade goes flying past his face.

    On the opposite side of the third level though, there is no second explosion, and no breaching craft. Most of the doors are properly shut, like George had told the AI, but when the power comes back on, the AI is no longer responding to anything he says. The second of three marine teams surges into the mining wing where the Flotilla is, shouting and rushing around, locking down exits, kicking over tables to make cover, partitioning off firing corridors, and basically entrenching in the travel hub that dominates the wing, still having space and time to work.

    The breach all the way into the mineshaft is something that can be identified by following air flow and using scanners; a wide hole, big enough to fit a forearm through, has gone through what must be fifteen interior walls, from the far edge of research, and broken the durasteel-laced glass that looks into the main shaft. It's a long, dark, unpressurized drop, more than a mile deep, laced with various elevators and hoverplatforms still frozen in position due to the AI failure. The bottom is lit with the angry purple glow of a fully uncovered erchius vein, coruscating with untapped power. George is pretty sure he saw Something in them, just for a second.

    Then, there is a loud slam against the opposite side of the furthest sealed door. The durasteel mushrooms inward under the force of a shaped explosive, and then is torn off by brute force following it. The crackle-fwoosh glow of a round blue energy shield blazes through the smoke, giving the marines a target to fire at. The research-mining throughway becomes a raging free-fire zone immediately.
Mordred     They're not shooting back at Mordred immediately, so that's probably a good sign! At first, anyway, and it's enough to get the knight chuckling as she shoulders that weapon. "See? Not that hard. Now whe-"

    And then they go ham with those energy weapons. The sudden onslaught of energy blasting projectiles has Mordred staggering quite a bit at first due to the sheer volume of blasts sent her way, and she even goes as far as stabbing her sword into the ground to steady herself while feeling the debilitating effects punching into her armor and helmet with all the finesse of nearly one hundred bricks smashing into her face

    "Ggh... Just had to do things the hard way, didn't ya? Well..." Through both stubbornness and force of will, Mordred remains standing as her weapon starts crackling with red lightning. It arcs out at the security officers briefly before she propels herself forward nearly as quickly, getting right to work pasting the lot of them.

    Literally, even. She did say she would, after all. Afterwards, Mordred rejoins toolbox guy and laughs at his apparent approval before shouldering the blade once again. "If a King says he's going to do something, it gets done. Although..." She glances back at the server room, then shrugs. "Eh, screw it. Doubt I'm getting paid anymore after all this, anyway. And after..."

    She presses a hand to the side of her helmet as more information starts coming in. It doesn't actually help her hear any of it better, but it feels right. Shortly after hearing of Gawain's aid in a worker revolution, Mordred laughs again. "Hah! Called it!" She doesn't offer any explanation for that outburst, of course, but she does start running after the toolbox guy and the comms officer he's targetting.

    It takes another fifteen seconds or so to realize that the chase could be shortened significantly if she just intercepts the comms officer instead, so... She aims to do just that. There's a burst of mana underneath Mordred's feet as she races to try and catch the guy by the scruff of his neck, although she does lose her footing momentarily when the explosions start up again. "Hold it! You know anything about the red guys busting in through cargo bay? They with you, the Syndicate, someone else?"
Gawain As the security is pushed aside, the cargo leaders...rebel? Before Gawain can realize what they're doing and say anything (and he's not sure what he'd say, because that's a reasonable thing to want), the crate /explodes/. The shockwave causes Gawain to stir backwards, and then again when the massive blast comes forward, though he's quickly steadied. As the Syndicate strike team comes out, firing bullets and launching grenades and tearing apart security to bits, Gawain pushes a cargo man in his way out of the way, and towards the ground. He should fight these people. The knight takes a deep breath as bullets ricochet across his armor, but when he moves to summon his sword-

The cargo head is having him waved in. This is the part where Gawain should strike them down. Where the knight should be the shining hero. But there's something wrong with this corporation, and with these people, and violence breeds violence. He needs an in if he's going to talk them down and help them reach an accord with Letheia.

Gawain pushes forward, running through the bulletstorm straight towards the breaching craft, moving to board without any signs of hostility. He's a shining knight, a famous Paladin, and...ostensibly on their side? For now? Maybe?

Today is weird.
Xion 'Outside' (just inside, really) one of the space-facing airlocks near the ongoing firefight between War Ops/Revolution and the local station security, a sworling vortex of darkness yawns open. Xion isn't really ready to put herself in the mess, but she feels a great need. A terrible yawning void in space that must be filled with shouting. Shouting and fire. Yeah.

Fire.

Fire feels good.

The airlock half-cycles, letting Xion back into the station (the airlock's seals and locks are not given a choice in the matter), mid throw of black-gloved hand full of magical napalm. "We're human too! GET STUFFED ON, CRUDSEC!" She hollers, an indulgent bellow into the ranks of interlocking fire shared by the roar of her flame spell.

Xion has conveniently changed into a Cargo jumpsuit, as she is a true patriot of the working class human.
Starbound Flotilla "We're not gonna get these guys to back down."
"Ahh, are you certain? With their ideals, you know, a peaceful resolution--"
"Nah, I just looked. The inside of this moon says 'no dice'."
"We were always going to kill them all. Focus."
"Surprised. George! The door!"
"Shit!! Moonie! I need you!"
"Ghhk! Star Four! With me, at Cargo! Back up Star Five!"
"You want my blessings in battle, all you had to do was pray!"

    The elevators are down; that means Moonfin has to use quick blink teleports to get out into the elevator shaft and head down! Albert rappels, and Pavo won't have a hard time slicing into it and down. They've got their designated spots they need to meet up at. Biteblade is the one who can hold her own for a bit!

    Bolt after bolt after bolt comes screaming across the shattered cargo bay. "Floran! Thinksss!! Labor dissspute!! Should not be nuclear!!" She howls! She's putting in all she can here, but between the fire that she hates (albeit likely dampened by the atmospheric situation breachwise) and the fire that's directed at her, it's well possible she'll be forced to take cover further and further back until she's driven out of the cargo bay.

    It'll be a matter of whether or not Albert and then Pavo can get here fast enough -- Albert with his rocket launcher to shove explosives down the front of that breachcraft, and Pavo to fly and flank above in the tall cargo area and move in for melee swipes! "Hey shiny! Stop playing buddy-buddy with the nuclear terrorists and start helping!!" She calls out in a kind of indignant rage at the signs of Gawain helping!

    Seft and George have other problems. Something just breached here. Moonfin blinks in fast, as Seft sets up her hefty tower shield and George brings his shotgun to brace against it, already firing with the marines. He takes cover with the shield. "What, exactly, did you see? What makes you so convinced that diplomacy is now no option?"
    "They're too deep, Moonie! Another two or three weeks and... You know how it goes!" George calls out over the gunfire. "OSHA crew here just aren't gonna back down! Too many lives on the line!"
    "And they intend nuclear retribution to ease that?"
    "Well, that's why we're shooting back!"
Liza Grier     When Mordred commits to chasing down the comms officer, she has the perfect opportunity. The power going out means the next set of doors stops him completely, on the opposite side of a surprisingly lavish officer's lounge, leaving him mashing the unresponsive keypad in a fit of hyperventilation while she strides up on him from behind. She's already got him in her grip when the red emergency lights come on, and a private intercom in the lounge starts telling her override codes to get to a private escape shuttle.

    "Agh! What?! What do you w-- what do you *mean?!* How do you *not* know?! It's the Syndicate! They're here to destroy the whole station, and anyone who works for Letheia with it! They're mercenary terrorists and they're going to blow you up along with everyone else!" Toolbox guy shuffles on past Mordred and starts rooting around in her captive's pockets, leading to a lot of slapping and struggling and complaining, until he retrieves the drive and makes it disappear into his jumpsuit.

    "Yeah, well, too late for regrets now mate. You picked the wrong side. You've had a good run. No complaints, right?" The officer is trying to kick at him, yelling "Don't let him take it! The Syndicate will use those codes to cause a self-destruct! We need to enable the station's nuclear defenses! He's a traitor! Get him before he kills us all!" The toolbox dude chuckles, saying "Not *all* of us. I've got my ride out after all. You're welcome on it too, big guy." He elbows Mordred. "Just grease this guy so he doesn't tell anyone. Got it?"

    The cargo bay definitely *involves* a ride out. A half-dozen cargo workers are packing themselves into launch seats inside a long, cylindrical thruster pod, clamping themselves in and affixing rebreather masks. Gawain is shoved in with them. The shield operative yells through a voice-modulated helmet, working hard to make "You with Carr? Or one of Grier's contacts?" audible over the gunfire. Energy blasts crackle and bounce off his shield. The robot makes a sequence of beeps and boops at him, whereupon he continues with "Find a corner and squeeze in. We're exfiltrating in five minutes." That means they don't intend to spread out from cargo and storm the station. Which is odd.

    The cargo head nods in that wordless, manly way at Gawain when he enters. "I know 'em when I see 'em." he says. "You came out because you heard the name too. Or maybe just got a sense of decency."
Liza Grier     Biteblade is being treated less pleasantly. Her bow punches almost straight through the barricades the robot is setting up, one hitting an operative in the side and sending him to the floor, crawling on his side to the nearest uranium-stocked crate while firing, smearing a blood trail on the deck. Another one almost guts the borg itself, but its bodyguard guard catches it, knocking him flat on his ass. The marines start shifting in on the flank she'd weakened. Gawain can hear 'Floran' mentioned in the comms chatter, and one of the operatives unlimbers a heavy automatic shotgun, charging the bolt, and unleashing gouts of flaming buckshot rounds in Biteblade's direction.

    Pavo and Albert swooping in are more able to start turning the tide back against the Syndicate team, if only just. Though they're outnumbered by marines and security, their armour seems to easily deflect most of the fire that hits them, and small injuries are patched up immediately by a medic amongst the coordinated team. Meanwhile, they're using all kinds of weapons you should never, ever, use aboard a space station, because it isn't theirs and they don't need it intact. They're sending soldiers flying with high-velocity explosives and ravaging delicate electronics and valuable substances with hails of armour-piercing bullets. Only the Flotilla's gear is up to par in going toe to toe.

    Albert's explosives are enough of a threat to the craft to draw attention, monopolizing both auto-turrets as they're forced to shoot them down before they hit the door and compromise everything, easing up the pressure on the Letheia forces. Pavo descends over their cover and gets in close quarters with the machine gun operator, forcing him to drop his weapon and flick out a bright red energy sword, clashing blades with her, but being driven away from his post, depleting their suppressive fire. The remaining workers use the opportunity to get off the floor and run for it. The marines begin moving out from their cover, advancing while firing, organized behind the remaining security forces and their riot shields.

    There's a very real chance they'll reach the pod, and then probably shoot Gawain alongside the would-be revolutionaries, until Xion comes flying in from very literally nowhere and disrupts the firing advance with her advancing fire. Cargo Xion causes much of the security line to stumble back and away from the firestorm, and blocks the marines' view of the enemy with the flames, though it begins rapidly rendering the air in the sealed area unbreathable. A squad of marines turns on her, and opens up with rapid laser blasts. Their commander radios something about 'shuttle was a ploy' and 'whole team are Syndicate infiltrators'. They've warned the station that literally nobody but the Flotilla can be trusted.
Liza Grier     The amount of fire that is dumped into the second breached corridor is much more extreme and much more focused. The thick cloud of explosives residue is vapourized by the amount of gunfire through it, the hallway behind igniting into an inferno. The blue glow of a personal energy shield intensifies, indicating at least some of the vanguard is still moving forward, just about to enter the fortified lobby that George, Moonfin, and Seft are holding with twenty five marines. A squad grenadier confirms with George that he had the AI seal the airlocks, then primes an HE grenade, waits for two seconds, and hurls it into the corridor.

    There's a clink, a bash, and then a sudden whoosh as the grenade rockets right back out again, smashing him in the head, breaking his helmet and cracking his skull, before instantly blowing his three nearest comrades to bloody chunks. Just one figure, carrying an energy shield out in front, surges out of the hallway at nightmarish speed, clad in an up-armoured variant of the suits in the cargo bay, black on red rather than red on black. He jams a futuristic hand cannon sideways through the notch in his shield and blows the brains out of two more marines on his non-shield-hand side, then snaps the gun to a hardpoint at his side, draws, and ignites one of those scarlet energy swords.

    He charges straight into a knocked over table, kicking it into the marine behind, smashing his squadmate with the shield -- both breaking the generator and the marine's neck--, beheads two more in the squad with two quick swings of the energy sword, and grabs the last remaining member as a human shield, swapping back to his revolver and blasting at Seft and George. He's way, *way* stronger than the marine he's holding, but it also seems the rest of the team isn't trained to spare one of their own, and they quickly end up skeletonizing their own teammate to render the sole surviving Syndicate operative without his cover.

    He has a tiny device in his former shield hand. He presses a switch cap. The station shudders again. The lights flicker. The gravity goes out everywhere. Marines, security, cargo workers, officers, traitors and Elites alike are now sent sedately drifting in microgravity, stationwide. On Gawain's end, he can see the squad lead counting down to the rest of his squad with his fingers, and then the whole squad activates their magnetic boots at the same time, remaining grounded. They use the opportunity to gun down several more of the Letheia security forces, now helplessly floating through the air.
Gawain The station's going to be nuked. Gawain realizes that. All these people are going to die. But- what's going on beneath the surface? Is violence really his only option here? And besides - coming on the shuttle at all has destroyed the trust security will have in him.

He kicks himself mentally over not thinking that through, but decides to commit to his current course of action. Turning both Syndicate and Letheia against him would be a mistake.

"I'm actually an offworld Elite. Sir Gawain, Knight of the Sun. This is my first time on world - at behest of Letheia - though it appears they are wont to...torture cargo workers for no reason?" He genuinely seems a bit perturbed by that, but he's also perturbed by everything else. Before they can decide to shoot him, he does raise his hands non-threateningly. "I've come here to talk and perhaps to find a solution, not on behalf of Letheia. It is likely my very actions have already blacklisted me."

"I owe no love to Letheia. I barely even knew the name before today. But I must ask: is killing all of their workers necessary? I understand taking out the enemy military force, but, your fellow cargo workers..." A gesture to the cargo chief. "Are they not also wanting equal pay and rights?"

Hopefully, honesty is important to them! Or at least, respectable. "Who is Greer? I heard a feminine voice on comms on my way down, was that her?" He sounds sympathetic yet terse, probably because of the time and impending nuclear detonation that is partly his fault, as he buckles in if still allowed. It's the buckles that save him from the loss of gravity.
Mordred     Why couldn't they have gotten in the lounge first? There's probably drinks and food in there. Mordred can't regret that too much, though, since there's more important things to be worrying about like all the fires and the apparent risk of explosions that could presumably destroy the entire station if the comms officer isn't lying about that. While she contemplates that, toolbox guy digs around for the drive, eyeing it briefly and doing absolutely nothing to prevent him from doing so.

    "That so? Yeah... No, I've been hearing a bit about that going on in the cargo station. Bay...?" She grimaces audibly, still having trouble sorting out the different names for all these areas. After a few moments, though, the knight shrugs before setting the comms officer down. "Yeah... No, that's fine by me. Letheia hired me to deal with this situation and then shot the crap out of me with those dinky little blasts, so..."

    Mordred taps an armored knuckle against her forehead. "Pretty sure that's a breaching contract on their end, so... Screw it. This place can burn. Better find a way out  yourself before you get blown up with this place, too." That's the closest thing she gives as a warning to the comms officer, shaking her head once at the followup request to kill him outright even as she shoulders the sword again.

    "Knights don't attack unarmed noncombatants. Kill him yourself if you feel like it, but don't ask me that again or I'm taking your head." There's an odd mix of irritation and challenge in Mordred's tone as she stares right at the toolbox guy from behind her helmet, and she's about to start walking once more when she notices that she isn't quite moving as quickly as she's used to.

    She's also moving way more vertically than she would have expected from just the one step. She kicks her feet a few times, noting that she's no longer on the ground properly, then shifts gears into just flinging herself around clumsily by grabbing whatever's still attached to the ground, the walls, even the ceiling. "Hey, this part of your guys' plan, too? It's..."
    
    A beat, and then she laughs. "Kinda fun! I could get used to this."
Starbound Flotilla     "Ahhhh!!! Fire fire fire!! Floran burnsss!!" Biteblade screams, immediately dropping and rolling as the incendiary blast takes her down. Albert swears angrily, roaring and moving up, using the grenades like chaff to draw off fire as he strides forward. Xion's fire is what interrupts him. Biteblade has to roll even further back.

    "Taking incendiary fire! Star Four, where the hell are you?!" He roars as he's forced back into cover to soothe his singed fur.

    Pavo, for her part, continues the blade dance, trying to keep the machine guns occupied. "In hell here! Inches off of these bastards going at me with these shotguns! MOVE UP!"
    "Negative, Star Four! I don't have a clear path!"
    "Then *make one* or I have to break off *fast*!"
    "Grrrrrh... pull back! Get Star Five and help her!"

    Pavo's elegant blade dance has to come to an end before she's shot to death by those shotguns, and she zips back as fast as she can, swooping low and using workers as human cover to make it to the Floran to administer some medical aid to the burns.

    And then the gravity goes out. She has to yank Biteblade into cover and pin her there while keeping her flight active! Albert air-bursts back down and slams his magboots into activation. "I'VE HAD ENOUGH OF THIS!" He howls, enraged. The crates are drifting through the air now, giving him one last tactical option, which is to launch off the ground and use his heavy hammer to slam them into a spinning, lethal spray of their contents, hurtling towards Xion, Gawain, and the Syndicates. Shoot THAT out of the air, auto-turrets! This leaves him *horribly* exposed, though.

    Seft barely keeps the shield up against the sustained assaults. SLAM SLAM SLAM! Unlike the other marines, George had to stop firing when he saw that human shield! And that revolver is forcing her and the others into cover, injuring the arm from the force! "*BZZT* Panicked. Gravity--! The sapper just took out artificial gravity!" She cries out as she begins to drift, taking a shot rather poorly and starting to spin! Only when the shield turns enough to expose her... Does Moonfin rush in!

    "Fifth Sea Hylotl Style: Drifting Stormclouds!" He shouts, twirling in a corkscrew pattern with his blade, intent on matching the sapper's own with a barrage of anti-gravity maneuvers! George rushes fast, trying to circle and come in from the other end with sparking stun-gauntlets intent on coursing dangerous electricity through the unknown sapper's body.
Xion Xion really wanted to light someone on fire. Someone supporting the *man*. Someone complicit with the corporate interest. She could feel the beats of the hearts of the people. The uncomplicit masses. She heard the call! The offer of brotherhood!

She and the grey suit with the cardboard box understood each other, at a primal level.

Choices aren't without consequences. Her health ring takes a savage blasting as the marine's directed blasting knock off a rapid-fire chewing of notable segments -- and Albert hammers the box of lethally spraying munitions her way.

There's one trick that Xion has that the floating rest of everyone has: she inexplicably is stuck to the floor. Gravity is no object to her, as she empties her inventory of golf clubs, steel pipes, sheets of metal and glass, and other nicknacks into a debris cloud that catch some of the shrapnel. Some, still chew up her health gauge and Cargo jumper up dramatically.

"How could you side with them? Are your hearts bought so easily? Do you even have them? From what I see, this whole station's biggest problem--!"

Xion gestures at her debris cloud in microgravity, the bits and garbage animating and spinning to aim at the marines and stacked-up Flotilla members.

"--You're all Heartless!"

The whole hallway fills with shotgunned garbage.
Liza Grier     "Shame." the apparently traitorous engineer says to Mordred. "You'd cut it good with us otherwise. Guess there isn't much place for a 'knight' out here though." He says the word in a funny way. "Alright alright, get moving. I'll handle this." When Mordred turns and starts walking away, she can hear the comms officer calling out in terror "No! No wait! Don't leave me with--" only to be cut off by the meaty whack and bony crunch of several heavy impacts caving in his skull. A few seconds later, once she's spinning into the air, she sees the nameless guy go floating past her, now splattered in blood, making a thumbs up and saying "Brace against a wall and kick off with both feet." before he goes sailing around the corner and out down an elevator shaft, now just another hallway for someone used to maneuvering like this.

    Gawain has a bit of a difficult time trying to hold a conversation under the circumstances, but he can hear the head of cargo belly laughing at him. "Blacklisted? More like you'll be lucky if there aren't USCM death squads on you after this. You took a big emergency job for the largest corporation in the galaxy and stabbed them in the back! They won't take that lightly!" He claps Gawain on the shoulder and shakes him a little. "Good thing you did though. Otherwise you'd probably end up like them." He even gestures to the field of corpses. "You kidding? Half of them believe the company line and think unions are 'immoral', the other half would rat you out in a second for a bonus and a relocation. If you attach yourself to the system like that, it's naturally you die when the system does, right? That's why revolutions happen in the first place." He leans back. "Gotta admit though, we weren't making much progress until someone called the bloodsuits here. Turns out they had an informant. Engineering assistant. Big sympathizer. We sent one of his encrypted messages out over the transport ansible. Told they'd be arriving in a week, and to prepare for their arrival. So we dug that hole in Cargo."

    When he asks about the name he'd heard, the cargo rep pulls down his goggles slightly to look Gawain over the top. The explosion and gravity outage happen conveniently a moment after. "They're a big dog in the Syndicate. Kind of a force of nature if you'd listen to the way our guy tells it. This team here? They're just here to pull their guy, and us, out. They're tough, well-armed, but they wouldn't be able to take on a hundred marines and how many security. They're here for this, and Grier is here to destroy the station."
Liza Grier     He hits his personal comm, and plays back the message from the station. Gawain can hear the same voice, clearer this time, so deadly serious that it almost sounds chillingly apathetic. "Attention Letheia and Letheia sympathizers. This is Liza Grier, aboard Syndicate infiltrator craft I09, along with six trained nuclear strike operatives. You have twenty minutes to comply with the following demands:"

    "Deactivate all station defenses, open your landing bay, surrender Letheia corporation's proprietary AI authentication codes, abandon all company belongings aboard the station, disarm all security forces aboard the station, and assemble at arrivals for an orderly evacuation. Letheia corporation has already shut down your communications; the company will not allow you to contact anyone outside, even with authorization from the captain."

    "All tier 3 and above Letheia personnel, and all security personnel, will be executed on sight. Any personnel who attempt to resist these orders will be aggressively terminated. Don't try to be a hero. The company is about to kill you already; I'll interpret any attempt to save the company as a wish for death and react accordingly. If you fail to comply, you will have ten minutes to convince the strike team behind me to extract you. Failing that too, you'll die in the same fireball as the station. I suggest you use any means at your disposal to secure compliance from your superiors; they don't care what happens to you; they have their own ways out."

    The playback ends right as the fight outside escalates even further. The auto-turrets on the exterior of the craft lock on and blasts the incoming crates launched by Albert full of holes, but all they achieve is spilling tungsten and uranium sheets out, and both sentry guns are crushed by heavy impacts. One of the gunners is struck by industrial plating, screaming where his arm breaks, and has to be dragged away by a teammate. Pavo escapes just as several shotgun blasts fill the area behind her, and drags Biteblade away while the Syndicate are focused on the Marines, who are just now engaging their EVA packs and using little jets of CO2 to find cover, switching to three-dimensional combat. They are, after all, space marines.

    It's the robot that swivels to face Albert, opening up its plating and unloading a heavy laser cannon straight into him, ejecting the burnt, one-use parts after. Xion's volley of random junk doesn't cause a great deal of lethal damage, but newtonian physics sends a wall of unlucky targets spinning out of control, either out of the firefight completely, or into the still-burning cargo fires. The cargo guys nearest to the front of the breach pod are screaming at her, waving their arms and trying to beckon her over, tapping at their wrists to try and make time-indicating motions.

    She has about one minute before, soon enough, a guy in a jumpsuit carrying a blood-spattered toolbox comes sailing through the cargo bay, vaulting over flying crates and tumbling into the pod. "That's it! We're out of here!" yells the team leader, waving the rest of the unit back up the ramp. The front of the pod is being potholed by laser fire, and the reinforced bulkhead for ramming will only hold up for so long. "Did you transfer the codes?" he asks the generic, bloody gentleman. "Yeah, so long as the codes you gave me were good."

    Outside, the leader of half the initial number of marines, and a quarter of the security team, can be heard yelling into his radio "Intruders in cargo bay are retreating! We've successfully repelled the boarders! Squad two, three, sound off! We'll reinforce at your direction!" There's a long pause. "Squad two, report. Squad two! Anderson, respond! Squad three--"
Liza Grier     George, Moonfin, and Seft can hear the same yelling on their end, from a commander on his radio, ducked behind a heavy steel lab table. It continues with "What do you mean they're all KIA?! Then who's in engineering?!" He shouts back "Probably their second team! The Syndicate owns the fourth level, head down there now and repel the saboteurs from gravity!" There's some crackling back. "No there isn't just one team, we have one-- I don't care if there's only one pod! Send your team down below now!" His comms unit is abruptly shot out of his hand by a bullet that rips through the table's two inches of steel just fine.

    With gravity gone from the research wing, and the air slowly venting into the mineshaft, the broken corridor is revealed, slagged to pieces by concentrated fire, and containing exactly zero bodies, or any other sign of Syndicate personnel at all, except a narrow smear of less-scorched floor down its length. It's just the operative Moonfin is tackling.

    Their boots anchor to the floor, giving them plenty of leverage in the face of the Hyotl's assault. He sees them lower their stance in anticipation of deflecting him away with the first exchange of blows, intending to adjust his trajectory through the clash of blades, and send him weightlessly tumbling into a helpless position. It's only the fact that he's mastered his swordplay in microgravity as well that prevents that from happening, instead forcing the hardsuited figure back towards the hallway under his flurry of strikes, their energy sword sparking and flickering as its containment field threatens to break under his barrage.

    The marines right themselves, jet to the nearest walls, and resume firing. Their bullets strike Moonfin's opponent dead on, only to be deflected away by brief flashes of blue energy, turned away by a personal forcefield. They disengage their boots, then allow one of Moonfin's heavy strikes to fling them back into the corridor to get out of the line of fire. Switching off their sword and tapping a few buttons on a wrist computer, they extend an empty hand, and a flash of red teleporter light places a belt of half a dozen grenades square in it. Arming the pin on one, they throw the whole string of explosives into the room. The first grenade goes off and kills two marines, then scatters the others into the room like pool balls, briefly bouncing off the walls, then going off on their own in a chain reaction. It's a variety pack of effects. High explosive, flechette burst, incendiary, EMP, poison gas. It's an absolute mess.

    There's an incoming transmission. George and Moonfin can tell especially because they're close enough to hear the communicator beep. George gets right up behind and hits them dead on with his stun gauntlet, overloading the suit's shielding and causing Moonfin's powered katana to deliver a clean, if shallow, cut through the upper arm.

    It doesn't bleed. It's really noticeable that it doesn't bleed, because red drops should be flying everywhere in microgravity. The Syndicate operative remains stunned for a fraction of a second more, then their whole body jerks as if defibrillated. They turn suddenly around on George, and their helmet comms blare out "You were better at this when you worked alone."

    They grab him, and engage a personal teleporter of their own, vanishing in a flash of light. Since the whole Flotilla has George's signal anyways, they can see he's been teleported right down to the AI core.
Mordred     "Heh. We'll see. I could use some dedicated vassals down the line." Mordred chuckles lightly, not flinching in the slightest at the pleas and the subsequent crunching sounds. She's still trying to figure out the no gravity thing, anyway, and it still takes the eventually-king a bit to find her rhythm even with the tip sent her way by the toolbox guy. Once she gets that figured out, though?

    She's actually managing to almost keep pace with the guy. Granted, she's not moving with nearly as grace and a whole lot more ricocheting into walls and the like, but at least she's not falling behind. With nothing else to gain from sticking around, she joins/barrels into one of the escape crafts, only mildly disappointed that the floating has to stop.

    She definitely isn't going to miss the explosions. The helmet might make it hard for whoever's sitting behind her to see them, though.
Starbound Flotilla     Albert pants heavily, staggering back through the antigravity. "Star One wounded." He mutters as he slumps into a drift near Pavo. He's immediately battered by debris!
    "Do I look like I'm made of healing miracles, you big furry idiot?" Pavo says, in an annoyed tone, before yanking his shoulder out of the way of another heavy strike before it slams him beyond her reach. "Kelotane is *expensive*. Get over here." She pins him and starts administering enough first aid to move, because he needs it. Biteblade's getting back onto her feet though! As much as one can be on anything here and now.

    How COULD they be so heartless? "Floran learned! Floran learned from human friend about red badguysss! Have good feeling and heart, but no more meat-human left inssside, becaussse go all-red!" She draws her bow, intent on driving Xion back if she hasn't retreated with the breach pod. "Heart friend though! Heart isss human thing! Floran have sapsqueezer!"



    George recognizes the lack of blood. The voice. His eyes go wide. "GET BACK!!" He shouts to the pair. And then he's gone.
    Seft and Moonfin are left behind. "Panicked. George?! George!!" She flicks the sensors on. "Frenzied. She took him to the AI chamber! We have to help him!" She's already taking off to the elevators, cutting beams at the ready.
    "Let's move, quickly. You know, I'd rather thought you wouldn't be so urgent in the matter of helping him after that Mortis business."
    "Determined. It doesn't matter what he did wrong before, he's my friend and my teammate! I won't let someone kill him!"

    He's in the AI core. Immediately, he's kicked off, spinning freely and gracefully in the blue high-security room. "You're *still alive?!*" He sounds like he can hardly believe it. "You're still-- how *many* are left?!" He sounds terrified of the idea, like he simply assumed the Syndicate has gently rolled over and taken a nap after Earth's destruction. He gets those dukes up, ready to fight for his life. He knows, above all else, he can't let Liza get a mental focus on where he is.

    "I *can't* work alone, L! Might'a figured by now I'm not like J, can't do any of that!" Grenades should do it. Something in the flash and bang family, a whole chain of them cooking off in clusters as he tries to circle around the AI structure. Gotta buy time and hope that Seft and Moonfin can get to him, and make sure that Liza can't get a focus on his blood! "The galaxy's changed! Gotta go with the flow! I can't stick with the old ways or I'm liable to *die*. Little past that expectancy by now!"
Xion 'Sapsqueezer'.
The word reaches the floor-attached girl, her hands dropping to her sides -- and opening her up for Biteblade.

They're shouting for her. Biteblade takes aim. Fingers on watch mean hurry up. Tick, tock. Tick, tock.

"I'll find out for myself, then, Biteblade. What kind of hearts they have."

Xion books it, shoes sneaker-squeaking across deckplate despite microgravity, towards the Syndicate team and escape.

She doesn't like the way she feels afterwards so much, she breaks out her emergency vending machine chocolate bar.

"Mmm, these taste funny..."
Liza Grier     Up in the cargo bay, Gawain gets the wonderful experience of seeing Mordred crowd into the same breaching pod with him, and the blood-caked traitor slap her on the back and tell her that she did a good job. This is liable to raise many questions, once the retro-thrusters are done firing the pod free of the cargo level breach, resuming the process of venting all the air out of it again while the last few lasers strike the hull, and the team leader reaches out to snag Xion by the hand, pulling her in just as the bulkhead closes behind her. The cargo head says "You look like hell. Here."

    He reaches into a duffel bag and hands her a canned drink. It says 'boda' on it. He begins sharing some stolen snacks out with the rest of the cargo crew, looking a little shook for all the action. They're being taken to a sleek, dark grey and red spacecraft, stealthed far away from the station, where they'll probably have plenty of time stuck in a much smaller loading bay to talk about it. Gawain and Mordred especially.

    Down in the AI core, things are different. George and the 'Grier' that the head of cargo mentioned are on separate ends of a circular room, sealed from the outside, cooled to an absolutely frigid temperature, and separated only by the CPU blocks that ring the central computational pillar. George can hear the tiny jets adjusting Liza's course around the opposite side from him, drifting in time with his movements, but not catching up to him. There's a crack-hiss and the sound of a helmet folding back. He can hear her voice without the comm static now. She almost sounds just like he remembers her. A little older. Yet, somehow, like there's more life in her. Usually it works the opposite way around. The edge of being content to be here is new. A little unsettling, contrasted against the more permanently shellshocked tone he recalls.

    "Not many." Those are her first words in reply. "I beg to differ. Earth is gone. Everyone else is dead. But out here, they still say 'We hope you have a nice day'. All it did was tank stocks for a quarter, and then it's been business as usual ever since. What's changed? Please tell me, because it all looks just the way I remember. The same systems, the same suffering, the same lies, the same delusions; even the same names and faces, once you go high enough up the ladder. How is the galaxy any different?"

    He can hear a few communicator beeps. A flash of red teleporter light. "Don't you get it? The Earth itself died before any of this did. Nothing in the whole wide universe can change this, unless we destroy it ourselves. The moment we stop, it becomes invincible."

    The room erupts with a deafening boom. Gunshot. Extremely high calibre. Ears ringing. Means she doesn't have a lock on him. There's a smoking hole in the ceiling. Straight through the deckplates. Where? "So why did you stop? It can't just be getting old. I can hear your heartbeat. Smell the frankly sickening amount of chems in your bloodstream. You still have some fight left in you." On the floor above. The marine team from the cargo bay, sent down here. That's where the shot went. There's a direct intersection on the floor plans. He can hear her adjust the rifle, then fire again, straight through the deck. Another marine's vitals go flat on the uplink.
Liza Grier     "And you know you do. You're not afraid of croaking." A third shot. A third flatline. She has their positions exactly. "So what is it you're afraid of? That you'll become like *her*? I remember enough. You know what I think?" Shot four. Just one more until she reloads. "I think J knew the truth too. I think she caught the sun in her grasp, and she refused to let go, no matter how much it burned. And I think that once she saw that abyss, she stared into it a little too long, and it got to her. Are you afraid it'll get to you too? That if you kept doing it, you'd break like she did? Another tragic visionary, turned into a mad animal?" Shot number five. One squad wiped out completely. He has an opening.

    "That's fine. Nobody said you can't be afraid. You don't have to keep fighting. But you still know what's right, don't you? I'm going to upload these authentication codes to the cluster. I'm going to unlock the shuttle bay for five hundred seconds. Give the crew some time to figure out who they think is worth the space on the life craft, once they're all there as equals. I'm going to set the nuclear destruct timer for six hundred seconds. And I'm going to spend every one of those seconds making sure that not a single security guard, not a single department head, not a *single* centcom lapdog even makes it to one of those shuttles. And then I'm going to leave just before this whole station goes up in a million degree fireball, and erases Letheia along with what they were planning to wake up."

    "If you're afraid, you don't have to help. But if you know what right and wrong is, you do have to stand by and let me do it. What's it going to be, G? Do you need me to knock you out to make it look good? Or will they believe you if you just say I did."
Starbound Flotilla     "Christ! You're as deep in the red-think as J is in the grey-think!" George winces hard at each gunshot, his heartbeat racing. Fear surges through him. Sympathetic neurotransmitters surge in his gut. He's got one hand on the stechkin, one hand running double-duty in wall navigation, and both eyes darting hard. "The people changed. You're so goddamn deep in this thinking. You figured out that these monsters are made of people and hierarchies, but you forgot to keep your eyes on the *people*." Little micro-adjustments from the thrusters keep him away.

    He checks, obsessively, for any cuts in his suit.

    "Galaxy's *traumatized* by now, L. Hasn't seen anything like this since ever, closest was that goddamn ancient-ass Floran-Hylotl war. Yeah, sure, trauma makes you revert back to how things were, stick to the routine, but that doesn't mean nothing's changed. I *stopped* because nobody can be like you and stay being a *person*. You looked at these giant evil monsters and just un-personed yourself into a death-message to grapple at their size. I can't do that because there's no George at the end of it, that's not *fear*, that's *facts*!"

    He bounces off one of the walls carefully, a white-knuckle grip established on the stechkin's handle. "Do you have any bits of human left in there after going this deep? Old hobbies, old friends, anything but this *message*-- this is insane!" Seft and Moonfin aren't as good as George is at breaching doors, but they're doing their best. A countdown from now until when George can hope to be extracted. But at half-capacity, it's unlikely the Flotilla could take on Liza directly.

    "You know goddamn well I can't beat you in a fight, huh? Yeah, these old knees aren't gonna cut it. Look. You promise you won't put a bullet or a blade in my crew and I'll figure out something to tell 'em. If they sue me for not falling on the sword of Liza fucking Grier, inhuman dark-messianic message on two legs, then they can go pound sand and to hell with the payout, but I need the other captains out of here and back on the shuttle. Is that enough to turn into some peace here?"

    He drifts, in a hopeful way, more towards the airlock of the exit. His earpiece screams with the worried cries of Seft and Moonfin.
Liza Grier     "Red thinking." Liza repeats, still just out of sight. There's the hard snap and clack of a rifle bolt. Anti-materiel and then some. "People say things about applying labels, but they don't really mean what they say. Words are never fair when they're applied to them, but they're perfect for describing everyone else. Do you think maybe all of these conclusions have names and labels, not because people are unoriginal, but because there are only so many conclusions that are possible to draw?"

    "Do you want me to tell you that I don't think in that way? A way you don't like? Would it make you feel better if I give you another name for it? If I told you I'm not 'on their side'?" In the tense, frigid, nearly empty computer core, George's clock is measured by the distance of the other captains shrinking with the number of vital indicators on his Letheia uplink. They seem to have had the idea to split up, but it doesn't help. They don't know what they're dealing with. Sooner rather than later, she'll run out of marines. "Well, I'm not. But not because I'm trying not to be. Some people really respond to that you know; they get upset and start trying to say or do anything else that lets them pretend their beliefs are all their own. But if you're going to ask me if I believe in the right thing, I'm not going to try and prove to you that I don't."

    He's starting to come up on the door by the time the second of three remaining squads is so much red jelly. If they break and flee too early, it'll be the other Captains that are the closest targets. "There are only so many things to believe in that make sense, and most of your life is being told which one is the right one by other people. Trying to make up slightly different ideas, ones that make less sense, but feel 'ours', isn't 'humanity'; it's our natural vanity. Accepting that evil -- pure evil -- really exists, took it staring me in the face, but I'm happier now than I've ever been. Once you acknowledge it, you can fight it, and when you fight it, you find out the world isn't that complicated."

    "Even if it looks worse than you ever imagined, once you know what's right, you know exactly what you have to do. And isn't that what everyone is always saying they want? Certainty? Purpose? The world making sense? Realizing things aren't too complicated for you to understand, or too big for you to make a difference, is when you *start* being human, G. All of us, deep inside, know what the world is supposed to look like. We just tell ourselves that we're wrong -- that it's supposed to be ugly and unfair -- because everyone told us so; and they told us so because the people who make it unfair told them so."

    "Do you still have that in you? That piece of you that knows that this shouldn't be complicated? That it shouldn't be hard or painful? Can you still feel that part of you that feels like everything makes sense when you put a bullet in the head of a centcom despot, and heals your psyche a little bit for doing good? Your sense of justice doesn't wear out like your knees, G."
Liza Grier     "What I'm telling you is that the systems are made of people, and the people in them are made of the system. Do you want to talk about trauma? I'm absolutely sure at least half of the people on this station lost someone with Earth. They're traumatized. But they're 'having a nice day' just the same, like nothing happened. You know why? Because the boss isn't traumatized. He couldn't possibly care any less. And if he's not traumatized, then you're not traumatized, and so the whole galaxy pretends nothing happened, because otherwise it'd be *inconvenient*. So don't try to tell me everyone changed. They might want to. They should. But the system didn't change, and so it won't *let them*." Every harsh word, every time she raises her voice, is punctuated by another thundering gunshot, and another flatline. Spent brass drifts around the perimeter of the room and bounces off George's suit.

    "It must be nice to be able to say that you can't accept it because then there'll 'be no George'. But you know what? When I signed up, there was no Liza. Liza was a thing that disappeared when my contract with Letheia did, and something I shed more blood and sweat and tears than you could imagine to find again. Liza stops existing when I look at what's happening, and tell myself this is fine. Once I close my eyes and say it'll fix itself, it'll go away, someone else will do it, knowing *full well* it won't; there's none of me at the end of that."

    She's stopped at the console. Going to the door will draw a direct line of sight to her; she won't shoot through the computer core while she still needs it. George has maybe ten seconds for a window to make up his mind. "I'm growing flowers on my ship. Did you know that I'm great with flowers? It'll be a couple more weeks until the latest seeds I came across are matured, but I'm looking forward to it. Once I'm done smearing these walking corporate cancers out of existence, I'm going to debrief, go back to my quarters, and I'm going to measure how much my lotus plant grew today. And I'm going to feel very, very good about how my day went, because I deserve to be proud of it."

    A loud series of beeps comes from the computer console, blaring AUTHENTICATION CONFIRMED, and displaying the nuclear countdown on every monitor in the room. He can see her as he comes around to the door. She's fixed to the CPU core by one hand, and has the fifty calibre braced up against one shoulder. Her helmet is mostly retracted, leaving just two of the four green optical pieces present, over one eye, linked to the scope. The rest of her face is eerily close to how he remembers it. He can see the curving, red-pink lines of unnaturally acting capillaries linked to her other eye. They're visible under the skin for the albinism; that much was never going to change. She let her hair grow out though. Less practical to fit in a helmet. It's long enough he can recognize that it's wavy. There isn't a scar to be seen; it felt like there should be a dramatic one somewhere.

    She looks him dead in the eye. The rifle is still locked on to the approaching captains, but her finger is against the trigger guard. "If you can go back to your 'captains' feeling proud of yourself too, then get going. You have ten minutes. Just like everyone else." She removes her emag from the console, clipping it back into her vacuum case. "This is your one."

    Her personal teleporter fires her out of the room before Moonfin gets there. A tiny disc fizzles and explodes on the ceiling. A teleportation anchor. They're probably all over the station by now.