107: The Seeker Swarms – Three
In Commander Usys Tase Ary Coit's personal ready room - brightly lit and sparsely furnished, just a semicircle table with a half dozen chairs around it, the burnished grey metal of both a cool contrast to the warmer cream colouring the interior of the room, with a sizeable view screen dominating the wall across from the door - they were stalking the media pages of both the Salsica and the Pelekys when the door hissed open, and one of their intelligence officers marched inside. Coming to a halt before the curve of the table Cdr. Usys was sat at, console up and open on Kith media feeds, the officer threw them a crisp salute before saying, "The AI's finished going over the data from all the flight recorders we were able to recover. A damn shame, really. Those mercenaries came highly recommended when it came to dealing with mech units."
They placed the data pad they were carrying on the table before Cdr. Usys and then stood smartly at attention, waiting for orders.
"Lucky for us, there's no shortage of merc bands looking for work, eh?" Cdr. Usys said as they picked up the data pad, "Reach out to our usual contact and see if you can get a few headed in our direction as soon as possible. I've a feeling we'll be engaging the enemy in relatively short order."
"At once, Commander." The officer said, saluting once more before they strode off to carry out their orders.
Cdr. Usys couldn't help the surge of pride they felt for their crew at that display. They'd hand picked every single one of them, each person aboard having a reputation for troublemaking in some way, shape, or form. The files of the crew were littered with complaints from their former commanding officers, of recklessness, insubordination, and un-Thalatte attitudes in warfare.
But Cdr. Usys was able to read between the lines.
Just like them, their crew was not afraid to use any means necessary to achieve their ends. And just like them, their crew were made pariahs because of it.
Cdr. Usys knew what their posting to the TNF Kladimo was the instant they'd received the order - a way to utilize their skills without ruffling the feathers of the rest of their peers. They knew that any other Thalatte commander would have taken the assignment as an insult - to be sent out along the border, alone, to clean up any and all messes that Thalatte command sent them after. But Cdr. Usys couldn't have been happier. They were just as put off by the attitudes of their peers as they were by them.
Lazy layabouts who wouldn't be caught anywhere near the front lines, they'd rather send in wave after wave of alien troops in order to overwhelm an enemy, observing the battlefield from the safety of their command ships.
Cdr. Usys preferred to lead from the front, in the thick of battle, shoulder to shoulder with their thalatte forces as they undermined their enemy's every advantage. And they knew their crew was of the same mind, as they'd insisted on them speaking it at every opportunity.
It was highly irregular for a Thalatte superior to seek out the opinions of their subordinates, and this, Cdr. Usys felt, was the most substantial flaw in how the Thalatte military was operated. How the Stratocracy itself operated. Power was held by those who came from lineages, the longer and more unbroken, the more influential. Cashing in on the actual military acumen of their ancestors, most officers in the higher echelons today wouldn't even be able to successfully manoeuver their troops out of a parking lot, let alone achieve victory in a pitched battle. But their family legacies kept them protected, insulated, any of their shortcomings in leadership being blamed on those they were supposed to be commanding, all because they came from lesser families.
And hand in hand with that, any victories that were secured by their forces in spite of their lacklustre leadership were not credited to the people who actually achieved them. No, the accolades for these successes were reserved solely for the commanders who were more hindrances than help. After all, how could someone who didn't come from a prestigious dynasty even hope to have the same savvy as someone who could trace their family's military service back to the Thalatte's pre-flight days?
Never mind that, regardless of family, they'd all attended the same military colleges. That they'd all gone through the same boot camps and training. That those who started the dynasties in the first place had won their fame and fortune with their own skills, rather than relying on who their parents had just so happened to be.
But these obvious facts were not something that the majority of the Thalatte military liked to consider. Tradition was the sword that would cleave them a path to their victory, after all.
Cdr. Usys couldn't help the scoff that escaped them at that thought. Tradition was the leash that prevented the Thalatte from expanding their borders beyond where they'd been pushed to in their initial surge in trying to take their rightful place as the rulers of all the galaxy. Centuries had passed since then, and they could only count their territory won in terms of lightyears, not civilizations. The Thalatte were masters of none but themselves, and they had only themselves to blame.
Rather than fostering the minds and talents of their own people, Thalatte command insisted on sticking to the status quo, to tradition, and doing things as they had always done. Their enemies, meanwhile, "Lesser" though they called them, had been making such leaps and bounds in their technologies and tactics that anyone with any sense could see that they would soon enough leave the Thalatte in their dust.
Thalatte command's insistence on filling their ranks with slave soldiers taken from their enemies to be used as raw cannon fodder was a ploy that could only ever backfire, as far as Cdr. Usys was concerned. Rather than filling their ranks with their own troops, dedicated to the goal of Thalatte expansion, they were instead filled with people who would betray them at a moment's notice, who undermined them in a million quiet little ways that had no doubt helped to perpetuate their current stagnation. By having a force composed primarily of prisoners - which, according to Thalatte command, was supposed to be a deterrent to prevent their enemies from attacking their own people - it had instead galvanized their enemies into finding ever increasingly advanced ways to combat the Thalatte themselves in order to free their stolen people.
Meanwhile, Thalatte command would throw a conniption fit if a captain flew their ship even a meter out of regulation formation. With this kind of regressive thinking, there was no way the Thalatte would ever be able to expand their horizons, both literally and metaphorically.
That was why Cdr. Usys had insisted on having a crew composed entirely of maverick thinkers, all of them thalatte, all of them from families of little to no standing, all of whom had gotten where they were through skill alone. These were the type of people who would usher in a new age of Thalatte expansion, and Cdr. Usys was more than happy to help nurture the potential of every single one of them. Cdr. Usys had the benefit of a highly regarded military family behind them - their family's legacy was the only thing that had kept them from being drummed out for insubordination, they were sure - and they were more than happy to take advantage of that legacy if they could use it to advance the careers of those under their command.
The future of the Thalatte could not be trusted to outsiders, their loyalty maintained with the ever present threat of death. Belief in a cause could not be secured by holding a gun to one's head.
Cdr. Usys' current assignment was proof enough of that.
As they'd been doing periodically ever since they learned who had been responsible for the deaths of Commandant Aparik Du Auaoy Pha - one of the few commanders who shared Cdr. Usys' disdain over Thalatte stagnation - and all the officers serving under them, Cdr. Usys brought up the information of those responsible for the deaths and thefts relating to the Pelekys. The majority of the crew had been aliens - a mistake to take so many foreigners on an experimental vessel's trial run - but the majority of them hadn't been the problem. From the scant few deserters that Cdr. Usys' forces had been able to track down from that ill-fated mission, they'd all recounted the same series of events: not long after bedding down for the night after the ship had entered subspace, some type of knockout gas had been pumped through the ship, and when they'd awoken, it was to find four of the alien conscripts admitting to killing the officers in order to escape Thalatte control. These four had then disarmed and removed the bomb-rigged Longan Units from the entire crew, and dropped them off in Apiarius space with whatever goods they could make off with, taking the Pelekys and the larger than average Odazaen for themselves. But not before setting the bodies of all they'd murdered adrift in a shuttle in subspace.
A hissing rattle burbled in Cdr. Usys' throat as he reviewed the information on these four treacherous aliens.
Doctor Marinos, human, as skilled with languages as she was with xenobiology. The number of lives she'd saved over the course of her career was staggering, and would no doubt carry more weight if they had been thalatte lives, instead of alien. Her records had been spotless, almost purposely so. In hindsight, it was clear to see that she'd done as much as she could to draw as little attention to herself as possible, flying under the radar so that her superiors wouldn't pay as much attention to her as they should have. Everything in her files said that her commanders had trusted her to run things without supervision, which was a dangerous oversight to have for any of the Thalatte's slaves.
Chief Khari, deorviran, a talent for mechanics that rivalled those of the Thalatte Stratocracy's best engineers. She'd been taken as little more than a child, yet despite her youth, she'd shown a competency with machines that those decades her senior lacked. Her early days had been plagued with insubordination, but that eventually stopped when she'd been injured in an attack on SR-R-1997 severe enough to cost her a leg. After she'd been fitted with a prosthesis and sent back to duty, she'd been a model soldier, and no further complaints were levelled against her. But when Cdr. Usys had gone through her information, they'd noticed a familiar name - Dr. Marinos had been her attending physician. The two meet, and CE Khari is suddenly on her best behaviour? Whatever escape plans Dr. Marinos had been building towards, CE Khari had no doubt been looped into them on SR-R-1997.
Sergeant vel-Ahllan, apiarian, a pilot of phenomenal skill. Another conscript with a spotless record, she'd received training and certification with every vehicle type within the Thalatte's fleet - if it could fly, she could fly it. She'd been on missions all throughout the territory controlled by the Stratocracy, her skill and professional demeanour landing her numerous deployments on classified missions, exposing her to Thalatte secrets that aliens were better off not knowing. Like the others, her good behaviour had given her an air of invisibility among command staff, so no one was quite sure how much she knew, making her a security risk worth pursuing. Given the fact that she'd been on countless missions with the other three perpetrators of this mutinous murder, it was easy to assume that she had been working on this escape attempt for as long as the others had.
And finally Corporal Killzar, deupazing, arguably the finest mech pilot that the Thalatte had ever had fight for them, a fact that was not advertised due to her alien status. She'd been thrown into some of the worst conflicts in the history of the Thalatte's expansion efforts, and not only did she survive every single one of them, but more often than not she managed to secure a victory from a hopeless situation. On top of that, she always managed to keep Thalatte casualties at a minimum, if they happened at all, and this quickly earned her a command role within their armoured division. The only black mark on her record came in the form of a formal complaint lodged against her by one of her commanding officers, as she'd disobeyed a direct command to retreat in order to rescue her unit at the time, which had been pinned down by enemy forces. Not only did she succeed in saving the lives of every single person in said unit, but she managed to turn what should have been a guaranteed loss into a decisive win. Attached medical records stated that she'd lost an eye in that particular endeavour, but a supplementary report stated that it had been her CO who had taken it, in retaliation for the disobeyed command. Due to the victory that she had secured, this breach in protocol was swept under the rug. Due to the extensive injuries she was prone to incurring while piloting a SH-3N mech, she was frequently sent to whatever medical facility was closest, and more often than not it was Dr. Marinos attending to her grievous wounds. Given that she had been captured alongside Sgt. vel-Ahllan, her collaboration in the escape came as no surprise.
This was all the information that Thalatte command had on these four, but Cdr. Usys had done their due diligence and acquired more.
After dropping off the rest of the deserters in Apiarius space, the Pelekys had made its way to Baithaiz controlled territory, to one of their colony worlds, one that just so happened to have a longstanding mech pilot tournament, the prize of that fight being the chance to pilot another of those strange, larger than average Odazaen. Just like the one found by the Thalatte, the one the Baithaiz had refused to move for anyone who sat in its pilot seat. Until the koleopteran civilian Clypeus came along and flew the damn thing out of there.
Then there came a report from a Zymeth museum on the world Ritroser. One of the mechs they had on display was another unresponsive and abnormal Odazaen. That was, until, a Kith of the Void crew composed of a deupazing, a deorviran, a human, an apiarian, and a masked figure with the general body shape of a koleopteran broke in and stole the mech from under the Zymeth's nose.
Finding the Pelekys in the Kith's network after that took no time at all, and Cdr. Usys was able to watch live as a disguised Dr. Marinos walked into a Necupole auction and walked out with another of those massive mechs - apparently called a Storlayacas.
The Kith were an annoyance that the Thalatte tried to ignore, as the ragtag fleet was so scattered and aggressive that it was often more trouble than it was worth to go after them, but after being two steps behind the Pelekys at every step of the way, Cdr. Usys had allowed frustration to get the better of them, and had ordered the capture of the first Kith ship they could find. They'd hoped to perhaps get a piece of Kith tech with which to help narrow the search, but instead they'd managed to stumble upon a Kith with a grudge against the very crew they sought. Captain Hulan of the Briddbragnan had a score to settle against the Pelekys, as it turned out, and so an unlikely alliance was struck.
An alliance which quickly proved to be as useless as any other attempt at work with aliens in order to achieve ones goals, as Capt. Hulan disobeyed a direct order and attacked the Pelekys before the Kladimo had a chance to arrive on the scene. With both Kith vessels long gone by the time Cdr. Usys' forces arrived, they'd cut their losses and sought out more professional help.
Despite it being the mainstay of Thalatte culture, not all thalatte were cut out for the military. The discipline and bureaucracy were sometimes too much for even Cdr. Usys some days, and so there were almost as many thalatte mercenaries as there were thalatte troops within their government's military. Cdr. Usys had reached out to these bands in order to spread out a wider net in which to catch the Pelekys.
A plan that nearly went to waste when the Pelekys risked a journey through Bernetigan space in order to retrieve another of these Storlayacas. As much as Cdr. Usys wanted them all dead, they wanted to be the one to pull the trigger, and so it was with no small amount of relief that they'd watched the Pelekys escape from that most reviled corner of the galaxy, a Hyttan ship carrying another Storlayacas in tow.
And then the Pelekys had an unexpected reunion with the Briddbragnan, where the usgaisjan that their intelligence had only recently managed to uncover went by the name of Fext had removed the annoyance that was Capt. Hulan, bringing a sixth Storlayacas into the mix.
Now they were spinning a fantasy that these odd creations of the Hyttan were built to stop some returning darkness, the force that had wiped out the Hyttan themselves, and that they could all link together to form an even larger mech. Clearly none of that could be true, but Cdr. Usys had to applaud them for their creativity, if nothing else.
All of this led to their current predicament. Turning to the data pad their intelligence officer had dropped off for them, Cdr. Usys went through the findings from the battle the Kladimo had missed. Using the captured crew of the Salsica as bait, the plan had been to lure the Pelekys to the TNF Horreum, whereupon they would be waylaid long enough by the mercenary fleet Cdr. Usys had contracted in order to allow the Kladimo time enough to arrive and bring these mutineers to heel. But from the information recovered from the aftermath, it was clear that they'd grossly underestimated the capabilities of the Storlayacas. It would appear that it was not just their size that was exponentially larger, but their firepower was equally as increased. Skilled as the mercenaries had been against modern mechs, they'd had no chance against the Storlayacas.
In order to achieve victory against these miscreants, it was clear that force multiplication was the way to go. For all that they'd done, for all that they could do with whatever secrets they'd stolen while in service to the Thalatte, command had wanted the pirates of the Pelekys brought to the homeworld in order to be publicly executed, as a lesson to all the rest of the slave soldiers under Thalatte control. But Cdr. Usys just wanted them dead, the sooner the better, and they wanted to be the one to kill them.
However, with the information they had on the capabilities of the Storlayacas, they knew that they couldn't do it alone.
Reaching over to activate the comms, Cdr. Usys contacted their intelligence officer, saying, "Lieutenant, in reviewing the information you brought me, I believe we are going to need more than just a few merc bands. Put out a call to any and all in the area. I want an army on standby for when we destroy the Pelekys, and everyone aboard it."