FSE

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She allowed herself a sharp inhale, rationing the air beneath her helmet as each shaky breath consumed it. Her eyes were closed, and her helmet allowed only the most muffled of sounds to penetrate it, the world hanging out of the range of her perception, taunting her to guess what awaited. Her gloved hands, already balled into fists, tightened and flexed, in, out. All she had to do was wait, but to her that was always the worst part. Her earpiece came to life, brimming with a bass, gravelly voice.

“Red Alert, Ensign! Objectives uploaded, get to it!"

Tanya Dawson's eyes snapped open, the bright red flooding through her eyelids and momentarily blinding her before the fading pulse of the alert relented, its descending whine lingering in her ears. The hallway was at least familiar, deck plating Alliance in its alabaster plasteel polish, modern and sleek save for the blackened pitting of debris from a sparking overloaded conduit hanging halfway free of a buckled wall, telltale scoring of weapon fire scattered up to the T-junction ten meters ahead.

She dropped her gaze to her crimson, black-zigzagged suit, raising her wristcomm up and tapping twice for the incoming transmission. Her eyes swept over text: boarders in the engine room, a likely reactor sabotage operation. Scale 0, human, like her, and the same scale as the engineering deck, judging from the deckplan Commander “Mishka" Arrun thankfully provided. Classic security scenario, as old as spaceflight, and an equal playing field. Easy start.

She set off at a brisk jog down the corridor, hand slipping down to tug the curve-handled pulse pistol free of its holster. She kept her eyes forward, resisting the urge to break into a sprint. A long hallway with a decent shot at the end might end her mission before she even set foot in Engineering. She broke left after a glance at her comm's map, memorizing the few turns ahead. At least they didn't have her crawling through subdeck accessways.

She rounded the corner prior to the engine bay's double doors before flinching back as her eyes pulled ahead of her aim. The whine of a pulse weapon and a brilliant blast of red burst past and scorched the corner bulkhead, inches higher than the crouch she'd fallen into, a perfect chest hit just a half second prior. She hissed through her teeth,

“Jeez, thought this was gonna be easy…"

She brought the pistol back up, indicator burning neon red; the safety of the ship meant stun was too great a risk. Whirling around the corner, she fired a quick pair of shots that caught the guard– a human in black, shiny plasteel armor and a chinless helmet–in the torso, more than enough to send them to the deck. She shuddered with a restrained exhale. A moment's wait, and no reinforcements appeared.

She moved up fast, dropping a hand from her weapon to tug a scanner from a suit pouch. It whined to life as she halted just outside the door's motion sensors, but its display crackled, fuzzy and blank in a radius surrounding all of Engineering. Jamming, likely from something carried by the saboteurs themselves. She shoved it away with a snort,

“Okay Mishka, make it hard, why don't ya?"

No scans meant they had their bases covered; if she went in, she'd be going in blind to something decidedly un-amateur. Not that there was a choice, of course; if they blew the reactor, even without getting off the ship, a stray pulse hitting an explosive or a threat she hadn't clocked would be the least of her problems. She clenched her eyes tight, took another sharp inhale, and looked ahead, pistol raised, into Engineering. The doors slid open.

Around the spherical antimatter core, within the rings of consoles and secondary relays that spread out from it, another trio of bodysuited humans lurched up from the controls they'd been furiously pressing. They lunged immediately for older, squarer pulse rifles, one slung over the nearest's shoulder, the other two resting to the side of the commandeered stations. The first fumbled with their rifle's sling long enough to fall neatly beneath her pistol's sights. A single trigger pull sent forth a streak of red, and they careened over their seat with a still-flaming chest cavity.

The other two had fully recovered by the time her aim fell upon them, and her next shot felt shakier, sloppier as she strafed forward and rightward. The second caught it in their trigger arm, and they screamed, letting their weapon clatter to the ground as they fell, clutching and batting at their smoldering limb. The third's shots were level and swift, three wailing ruby pulses tracing her movements, close enough she dove belly-first to the floor, energy whizzing inches above her head.

The impact forced a wheezing grunt of air from her lungs. She rolled onto her side, pistol still clutched in her left hand. Her eyes widened the instant she spotted that helmeted head, visible just above the console they had been standing over…and just to the right of the antimatter reactor chamber not fifteen meters back. A stray shot might be all it took to pierce an injector port, a coolant shunt, a magnetic seal…

Their head turned sharply, zeroing in on her form on the deck, rifle jerking upwards. They were a quick enough shot; she wouldn't get a second chance.

Her finger tightened, and a crimson slash ripped from her pistol. The human's helmet burst into shards of molten alloy, and they tumbled back to the deck. They lay motionless, the only sounds the gentle tones and hums of functional consoles.

She fell back and groaned in relief, a sigh large enough to fog up her helmet. She had only a moment of relief before her earpiece crackled anew, and Mishka's throaty rumble boomed,

“Not bad, Ensign. Got them before overload. But that was the warm up. New objectives uploaded, stand by..."

Engineering suddenly went dark. For a moment, she stood in total blackness. She took a short, soft inhale through her nose.

Blazing sunlight burst in from her helmet.

Tan sandstone, ridged and uneven beneath her boots, spilled out in a plane beneath her, reflecting the blinding fire of a sun a touch more yellow than the one she had grown up under. She already seemed to be cooking within her suit, humidity swelling within as sweat began to slick her skin. The seeming mercy of a massive, descending shadow from behind sent a shriek into her exhale. It was all she could do to dive to the side, flinging herself belly first to the stone. Never in the same direction as the shadow, or-

The resounding smash of a claw-shoed foot the size of a cargo container finished her thought. She shuddered as the walkway vibrated under the weight brought to bear twice, thrice as the great mass put distance between them. She scrambled another body length away, using the thin cover of a street sign's post to pull herself up before gawking up at what had nearly stepped on her. Each splaying, clawed foot, swathed in a fine sheath of hide and thickened soles, flexed under astronomical mass. White reptilian scales showed on a pair of exposed ankles. She followed them up from eye level, past bipedal, thick calves clad in tan trousers and the meaty, ridged tails that curled behind them. Broad torsos suited in sky blue loomed higher still, wide and tall as apartment towers, framed by thick arms capped by beefy, clawed hands. Their vast figures were crowned by long, thick-scaled snouts that yawned wide with every expression, bristling with fangs, the stalactites and -mites of their cavernous maws, saliva upon them shining in the sunlight.

They were huge, easily Superscale 3, maybe even 4, a dozen or more times her own tiny frame. Large enough that neither had noticed her below as they stood at the enormous streetcorner at midday, thankfully free of other pedestrians on their side of the road. The air was filled with the low, deep thrum of hovercars and the occasional sputter of an ill-maintained chemical engine. Honeycombs of buildings rose up on either side like vast, chiseled canyon walls, the din of the enormous lives within producing a background of hisses and shouts, roars and rumbles percussive and subtle alike. Just being at their feet sent her stomach falling, and her heart clenched itself into its own singularity in her chest.

She squinted, fumbling with a hand to block the sun's blinding glare from her helmet, struggling to get a good view of the enormous, crocodilian snouts up above, her head swimming as she tried to recall the name of the species from two semesters of Xenoanthropology…Karkon? Karkann? She flinched and muttered under her breath as the left giant turned to growl and hiss a remark to their companion, their voices carrying down to her like distant thunderclaps,

“Couldn't at least one of these have been easy? I'm not asking for the whole test to be a cinch, but Superscale 4 as the second friggin' thing-"

Mishka snorted back, “Ensign, please. This is the easy segment. Which you would know, if you checked-"

“Checked my comm, I know." She grunted, cheeks still burning from the shriek she had let out moments earlier as she stumbled to her feet, wordlessly grateful the two behemoths had stood still long enough for her to do so. Her comm flashed anew under her glance: plant a

short-range tracker on the target case, one of brown leather, unmarked, nondescript. She grimaced down at the screen's image, throwing her arms up and turning back to the titanic pair above–

“Oh come on, why couldn't it be anything more distinctive than th-..." She froze mid-syllable as the left giant pushed a brown leather case into the other's clawed hand, formerly blocked by the bulk of his thighs and tail, imparting a few hissing, thunderous words that made her question the lack of translation. It would have made the setup less usefully challenging; plenty of missions and contacts took place without the presence of a comms officer to whip up a suitable matrix.

She reached down to her belt, grasping the palm-sized triangular form of a tracker beacon, only it and an emergency tether upon her. No scanner and pistol, not that they would have been of much use. She would have traded them for mobility or protection in a heartbeat, anyways, at this scale.

“Wait, that's it? Just throw this thing up there and let it stick?"

The Karkanns suddenly lurched into motion, their titanic strides threatening to topple her. The case pulled away with them, even their most casual pace an impossible distance as the carrier parted ways. Their contact crossed the street at a brisk jog, thudding twenty meters per footfall in the opposite direction. Mishka answered, almost smug in his lateness,

“Well, not quite…you may notice the tracker is the ONLY new piece of gear you've received." She grit her teeth as he chuckled on the other end, pushing herself into a stumbling sprint before he had finished, “Good luck, Ensign."

“Ugh!...gah, no antigrav…no fields!" She snarled out between gasping breaths in the giant's wake, bounding over a crack in the walkway tile deep enough for her leg to fit in, “Tracking someone…who walks faster…than a damn car! I'm gonna get obliterated out here!" The monstrous reptilian had mercifully halted ten paces up, but a quick crane of her neck showed the crossing light he waited for, a flashing violet icon of a standing reptilian figure. She had seconds, and he was still a couple hundred meters up, if not more. Her lungs burned, her muscles slackened, and a growing dread crawled its way down her spine.

“No, no, I-I can't make it, he'll be too fast! I-I don't have any gear, I-"

“Ensign, calm yourself." There was no more smug jocularity in Mishka's voice, replaced instead by direct attention, firm and centering. “You have yourself, and your surroundings. Use them! Find a way!"

She skidded, stumbling to a stop, panting, gasping, regrouping. He was right: she wasn't closing the distance in time, not on foot. She whirled about as the signal chimed in baritone to confirm her fears. The behemoth stepped out into the street, case in hand, a wheeled car rumbling forth to obscure him behind a mountain of dirty, rusted chassis. Dilated eyes searched, begged for something. Anything. Anyone.

From behind, the tremors resumed. Rhythmic, faster, forcing her into a crouch as debris around her toes rattled and bounced. She flinched anew and turned to face the enormous figure slamming from foot to foot, rapidly closing the remainder of the mile-long block. Exposed Karkann claws cracked against the sandstone walkway, their lanky feet protected only by a pair of skimmer-sized sandals, soles smashed and cracking and straps tearing precariously from tens, hundreds of thousands of those pulverizing, titanic steps, somehow only less-than-urgent walk to his person. Their attire was equally weathered and dirtied, trousers of baggy grey polyester spattered with mud and a few other splashes she couldn't identify. An ill-fitting, garishly mauve shirt bounced against a white-scaled, lanky figure mottled with crimson spots, a thin visor over their eyes framing a dead-ahead stare as gawky arms held a trio of stuffed full, greasy paper bags each. He paid little attention beyond front and center, earbuds wedged firmly into their canals, tail swaying serpentine in his wake.

Dawson was already dashing to the building-side of the walk, tiny footfalls mercifully closing the twenty meters to pant, breath fogging her helmet in the heat, as the mammoth deliverer's thunderous strides bounced her on legs burning from exertion. Each quake rippled up her thighs like they were gelatin, crescendoing as her ground level view was briefly filled with the smash of sandal and paw upon dirt and grime, before they lifted off, debris tumbling like flotsam pulled by a current. She balked wordlessly as they lumbered to the sidewalk's edge, staring off the same as she, in the direction of the Karkann with the case, the walkway indicator again a violet silhouette standing upright. They shifted from foot to foot, grumbling and hissing to himself as a rusted old groundcar sputtered up and past to dissuade a jaywalk, a noisy mountain of antiquity as hovercars hurtled past on the main thoroughfare.

Gaping up at the enormous form that had overtaken her effortlessly, small details made themselves suddenly manifest. They seemed in a hurry. Their sandaled feet were at her level, within a few seconds' charge. They were headed her way. Her eyes widened, her heart tensed, but she didn't hesitate.

She bolted into a sprint straight for those sandalled paws, vaulting over foot-snagging cracks, a whirring scooter mercifully cutting ahead of her titanic target and earning another derisive snarl. The signal toned as she pulled agonizingly slowly up to the sole's edge. She took a flying leap, arms outstretched, and slammed into dirty, loose leather, wrestling herself atop the strap, twice her height over the walkway below. Arms and legs squeezed tight around her precarious perch as the behemoth shuddered and leaned back, panting and hoping against hope the thick, segmented scales of that vast paw would miss the scrabbling of her tiny limbs. Something in her head gave thanks to whatever soul hadn't given the suit olfactory sensors as the paw idly flexed, layers of dust and grime from the day's walking on display in nauseating clarity to her eyes. She frantically pawed at her belt, pulling a length of cable as long as her forearm, tipped by a fastening clasp. Throwing it awkwardly round the strap, she wrangled it back to her belt to form a crude loop. It wasn't much, but should a stride throw her free, it was all she had to avoid being slammed flat into the earth.

The titanic, sandalled paw surged with the force of an ancient rocket from its pad. The road rushed past below, and the Karkann strode ahead, unaware of their passenger as her stomach dropped away, only a scream in its place as she hurtled up, then back down to earth on a harrowing parabola.

Her entire body rocked hard against the shock of paw upon stone, a metaphorical meteor's fall to her form. Her jaws cracked and ground as her grasp slipped against grubby scales and fraying strap. The slam knocked the air from her lungs while her limbs trembled and flailed raggedy, and as she rose up anew she thought she might be sick in her suit before the cycle started again. Each time the crude restraint she had tied round her waist tugged tight, digging into layers of liner and the flesh beneath. As her giant cleared the crosswalk, the surge of wind and dissonant slams of a fellow Karkann darting behind, a large shape that narrowly missed clipping their sandal with a tailswing, brought a realization that Mishka probably had been right; the sidewalk was mostly clear on the street, probably a small avenue to these titans. She didn't want to imagine the perils of a main street.

She tried using the precious instant when her acceleration slowed midair to wedge her limbs in deeper beneath the strap, to get higher upon the footwear, something to lessen the forces that threatened to hurl her to the ground. A quick, blurry glimpse back amid the rollicking ride revealed a precious silver lining; there was only a single figure ahead, keeping pace but not pulling away, a distant blur of sky-blue suit, a square of brown. Through gritted teeth she thought might turn to dust with every smash into the earth of that worn sole, as another pointy-nosed hovercar darted past on the street like a vast skewer missing its morsel, she snarled,

“G-god I HATE th-this on f-foot…miniature shit!"

She slipped on the last syllable down the strap, thighs' clench broken as the behemoth's gait shifted, body-rocking pounds heavier than a ten-G world on her burning muscles. The blur of blue and brown had mercifully stopped ahead near the street's edge, rising high before surging past. Her unsuspecting ride thundered onwards, slowing before the next street crossing. Her white-knuckle grip slipped as the unbearable hammer of every step shook her like a soda before a cliche prank. She clung feebly as she slipped a hand free, groping to unclip the lining at her waist as the titan pulled away from her target, as the rushing of the ground beneath her fell far too slowly in velocity. Her fingers clenched, squeezed, and with one final tug of the clip and line, they came free, and with the next descent, just before that sandal crushed the earth, she jumped.

A yelp slipped out before she hit the walkway and fell into a roll. That was the good news, the simple fact the impact had not broken her outright, that she was cognizant enough to groan and grunt and tumble to a halt as enormous paws crunched detritus to dust within a single Karkann step of her, as her suit absorbed scrapes and slams that would have left her bare body pulped. Coughing, gasping for breath, she hauled herself to her feet, staggering in the direction of her target for shelter, before another lumbering, unaware, building-sized behemoth tread near to finish the job.

She staggered over and collapsed in a heap against a hulking tower of a public wastebin, and found herself grateful once more the suit did not allow for scents, groaning and shifting herself only when she felt an unidentified ichor sticking to the back of her suit. “G-gah…unf, c'mon, lemme get that big bastard…"

She hissed, ligaments straining as she pulled herself up, huffing and peering around the wastebin's curvature as tremors, softer but heavy still, rattled the sidewalk. The Karkann with the case loomed, hand raised to flag down a vehicle up the street, maybe a dozen meters away, and they held the case in the hand closest to her.

“Finally…" She tore the tracker beacon free of her belt, priming it and raising her arm as she drew unseen toward the gigantic reptile's ankles, “C'mere and gimme an easy shot!" She pulled back, hurling the tracker skywards with a valiant growl as the titan strode obliviously forth, another sleek, needle-shaped hovercar pulling up with a buffeting of wind. The brown case swung overhead as the tracker soared end over end in the air, as massive, clawed feet stopped off the curb. It slapped against the case, sticking only slightly off the dead center, and she whooped and pumped a fist back as she pulled back behind the wastebin.

“Woo! Tracker planted, Commander, we got 'em!"

The reply came with heavy, enthusiastic clapping, “Very impressive, Ensign, well done! Imaginative thinking. One more to go, I'll be radio silent from here on. Let's see how you handle this…"

The gargantuan midday street vanished into blackness, before that too faded, and Dawson was alone again. No longer did the ground rest concrete beneath her boots, but sank, crunched under her weight. The sky above no longer burned with the rays of an unfamiliar sun, but brooded with swirls of gray, smoldering clouds, tinged orange and layered with smog and ash.

She towered over a crumbling landing field, pockmarked with the scorches of energy weapons and the craters of explosives that had warped the field apron's markers and numbering to various levels of illegibility. The foundations of a pair of triangular hangars lay, coated in a flow of rubble, across the field, near a road that lead to a small, industrialized settlement in the distance, deep silos yawning between pockets of crumbling prefabricated buildings. To their right a trio of silos–one still burning off what remained of its contents–loomed, shattered open and jagged, fumes rising to join the miasma in the clouds above. A pentagonal control tower lay toppled and crumbled in the far corner, tearing open the metal fencing thinly defining the field.

Wrecks of air and spacecraft, fuselages thick and hollow, were scattered across the tarmac, split open or torn into vast chunks intermingled with their own airfoils and whatever ground vehicles were still intact enough to recognize. A few smaller and sharp-winged, likely local security interceptors, intermingled with the bulk of transport or passenger craft. She tried not to look too closely at the dozens of small figures she could see strewn about like crumpled dolls on the floor of a messy bedroom; they were puny enough that their demise and twisted aftermath was inversely more distressing than that of the saboteurs she had to fell.

She stepped back, flinching and freezing on one foot when her eyes spotted the overturned cargo hovercraft's chassis inches from her descending sole, as charred and mangled as its surroundings. She dropped carefully to her knees, wincing as she reached out to grasp the boot-sized vehicle's hulk in a gloved hand, swallowing and hissing out a held exhale, “Oh god…i-is anyone in there?..."

The blackened, blown out cab was mercifully empty, and the skimmer's bed bore no contents, living or otherwise. She gently replaced it, shuddering as though she'd just grasped an enormous insect, and stood back up to grimly assess the site. The rest of the shattered infrastructure was similarly scaled, easily subscale 4. Small enough that an errant step could easily crash through what remained of a building, crush thinly armored vehicles…and, should anyone have remained, squash flat undoubtedly frightened, traumatized survivors who had good reason not to make their presence known.

“This is horrible…" She muttered as she brought up her wristcomm, jabbing at controls with renewed urgency, brow furrowed, eyes glaring down to meet the glow of the screen as orders spilled forth.

The location's intel was, for once, available: Lareion, one half of a double world, split between Lareion's high-metal planet, and Neva, its lush, populous rival, locked in heated and occasionally bloody disputes over food and precious metal shipments for the past half-decade. Their worlds remained new arrivals to the modern galaxy; only a single contact with a prototype scale drive craft from Neva. The Veen, the local sapients that, to her, resembled miniature porcupines, made up both planets' populaces. Despite all appearances to the contrary, it was clear that no declarations of war had been transmitted by either world. Three objectives concluded: Respond to any remaining locals' following receipt of general distress call, assess and assist survivors, and determine identity and motive of threat forces.

She pulled the scanner from her belt, eyes supplementing sensors. Another sweeping, sobering stare across the landing field seemed to confirm the worst; no signs of bioreadings beyond background microbiota, and no interfacable networks or computer equipment still functioning amid the few sparks of electromagnetic activity in her vicinity. Ahead, past the sole roads leading in or out of the airfield, however, there was a glint of hope. Flickers of comms signals, residual gamma radiation, something akin to a hopefully-intact reactor…and a smattering of bioreadings just sound enough to represent a scant few members of a subscale population. No guarantee it would be more than a few dozen, or of their condition amid the bombed-out dwellings, but it was something.

She tried her wristcomm, jabbing communications over to emergency broad-channel, eyes still glued to her scanner, “To anyone receiving, this is Ensign Tayna Dawson, Interspecies Alliance. I'm here to render aid and assistance, please respond…is anyone out th-...?"

She frowned as a new pair of contacts flashed, coming up from behind, closing at a relative several meters a second to her, altitude not more than twice her standing height. Too small to be Alliance relief shuttles for a settlement this size, too slow and low to the ground on their approach…and utterly without friend-or-foe ID. She turned and looked up into the cloudy skies as a low whirring droned its way into her ear. It took a moment to spot the pair of twin-rotor helicopters at a stone's throw and closing, their bird-sized black hulls layered with hardpoints, mounted pulse cannons, finned missiles of every conceivable shape. They bore down upon her, too fast to slow to a hover in time, noses firmly leveled at her. Her eyes widened, and she reached for her pistol,

“Incoming aircraft, please hold your fire! I'm an officer of the Interspecies Alliance, please hold your-!"

A pair of missiles flared from the lead copter's port and starboard like rogue fireworks. Dawson lunged and dropped to her belly as their roaring tails threw a trail of exhaust where her head had been an instant prior. Her prayer that they were dumbfired was thankfully answered, the ground vibrated with an explosion somewhere behind.

She fumbled, pulled her pulse pistol up under her through the rubble, eyes front and center on the pair of copters as she thumbed the weapon over to a nonlethal setting, “Hold your fire, repeat hold fire! I'm here to help!" Her mind raced as one strafed off left, the other right. Her pulse pistol wasn't nothing, but surely they didn't think she had caused this…?

Either way, letting them encircle her was a death sentence. She snapped a single violet stun pulse at the copter strafing left, the crackling streak of static and light ripping close enough to make that pilot panic, bank off and around for a few meters' distance and a few moments of relief. She rolled in the direction of the other, suited body sprawled across the smashed tarmac, just in time for the second attacker to drop down, red pulses spraying a trail of fire straight to her helmeted head. She brought up her forearm to cover her face, gritting her teeth past the urge to flinch as she brought her pistol up.

A second stun pulse ripped through the air. A pair of crimson streaks smashed into her suit bracer in a shower of sparks and a burst of metal, fabric, and a singeing of her skin. She cried aloud, slapping the sizzling suit against the earth, and the copter, crackling with arcs of lightning as systems shorted and sputtered out, hurtled into a tailspin overhead and tumbled down with a shriek of metal into the ground.

She turned to catch the other aircraft receding into the distance, wisely choosing to regroup now that numbers no longer aided them. Holding her aim until it disappeared into the cloudy hazy, she gasped for breath and slowly sat up. Lowering the pistol so she could grab her scanner from where it had tumbled from her hand, she assessed her forearm. She groaned, rubbing a hand over exposed skin. The suit itself had burned away in a sizable gash, but the flesh underneath was fine save a few mild spots of pinkening. A small portion of her wristcomm, however, had been taken with the vaporized suit, and the device now flickered, sputtered, exposed wiring from a corner lost to the blast.

“Aw hell…" She snarled, static crackling uselessly, screen lit and peppered with a trio of glancing hits that had turned the display into a colorful garble. She thumbed the emergency transmitter for a second function as she got to her feet, a hot, dry wind now whipping at her bare skin,

“Unf…Ensign Dawson of the Interstellar Alliance…I'm hoping my comm isn't damaged enough to keep this all to myself…and if it's not transmitting, I at least hope the damn thing's recording." She added with a huff, taking a handful of steps to close the distance between her and the downed attack helicopter, boots crunching the shattered tarmac into finer dust as electric arcs fizzled away into nothingness upon its surface.

“Responded to a distress call at what appears to be a mining outpost on Lareion's northern continent…major damage, air and space transit center appears totally destroyed, habitation areas heavily damaged, use of conventional weapons highly likely…"

She loomed over the wreck, the model-sized craft cleaved in two, engulfed in her sprawling shadow. Its tail had snapped off in the impact, and even as she kneeled, delicately handling the craft and taking special care with her fingers near its motionless rotors, it trembled under her every press. The metal airframe flexed and creaked audibly in her grasp, and a few cracks within reprimanded her as small supports gave. Disabled, it appeared less a lethal, maneuverable fire-spitting sky beast than a broken children's toy. The ones she had swooshed around her bedroom, long before she had ever seen the controls of a starship.

“Attacked by two hostile terrestrial aircraft, one disabled, one retreated…" Grimacing, she noted the visible markings on the portside. “Neva craft confirmed, must have been dropped in by a ship somewhere…god I hope they don't think I did this…What could have caused a preemptive strike, and way out here?" She peered into the cracked cockpit, shuddering a little in quiet relief. “Pilot appears to be okay, visible respiratory motion…" She paused, staring down at the helmeted, black-suited Veen, still neatly strapped into their rounded seat, just to be sure their chest was actually rising and falling. “Continuing on foot into the settlement to the north."

The walk towards the settlement led her over the shin-high fencing and on a lone road towards the underground silos in the distance and the smoldering, boxy homes beyond. Plains of orange, arid terrain stretched to the horizon. What would have been a fifteen minute jog for the small, spiny inhabitants was a couple minutes of cautious strides upon cracking pavement, her footfalls sending distant unnerving echoes into the expanse, quakes she only now realized had been thundering the whole time. Only a pair of vehicles remained on the roads, both small skimmers like before, both overturned and destroyed, and both without signs of life when she crouched down to scan them, flinching at the sight of a ragdolled, charred figure within each's bombed-out cab.

“It still shocks me that a preemptive strike would target a settlement like this, with just local security…no one on the main route to the settlement. Faint lifesign readings at least a hundred standard meters out, possibly underground, given the devastation on the surface, and the silo structures present. Possibly a fuel storage or geothermal system…" She thundered over another set of fences, boots crunching against rocky soil as she ventured off the road towards the great, yawning chasms that lay before the clusters of surface homes beyond. Frowning, she crouched down as her gaze fell over the domed structures between them, ventilation tubes that still belched deep gray fumes, the small service roads that linked each to the other. Her scanner's output spilled across its screen.

“Moving past the silos and…" She stared down into the empty, platformed tunnel, deep enough that, were she absurdly thin, she could have clambered into herself. Somewhere below, smoky vapor curled and billowed up against her helmeted face.

“I don't think these are storage tanks…I was under the impression they contained scale reactor fuel, or coolant for a fusion plant given the low rad readings, but…they appear to have housed something enormous. I'm seeing support platforms for fueling, maybe service…shock mounts, maintenance tunnels for large equipment, heavy underground to surface ventilation…and residual vapor that looks…"

Another moment staring into the artificial abyss, and her eyes widened. “No…I've seen something like this…it's old, old tech, but…" She stepped carefully over to the third, open silo, and froze. Within, cryogenic fluids rising up from below in a heavy, thick mist, lay an unlaunched missile, nose pointed to the sky, bearing the Lareion insignia.

“I've discovered the source of the faint gamma radiation signature…scanner reads subscale 4 matter confirmed, local Neptunium-237 with sufficient critical mass and detonation mechanism within chemical-powered sub-light missiles." She swallowed, not bothering to edit her thoughts for the transmission, keeping her eyes firmly on the scanner's output. “Of the three silos positioned between the landing field and the settlement, two appear to have been launched within the last, a-ah, hour and a half, given residual cryo boil-off…there's still residual comm signals from one of the surface control domes. I'm going to attempt to access sensor telemetry, assuming it's not airgapped…"

The computer signals were decades behind the Alliance's decryption; even the hand scanner only took seconds to unravel what the Lareion military could bring to bear. She bit her lip.

“They're using an orbital satellite for targeting confirmation…of one of the major southern Nevan continents, by the look of it. If this is correct, this distress call was only sent after the Lareion had launched their missiles. This isn't a mining settlement, this was a base-!"

The low drone of copter rotors began to fill her ears, and her hand went for her weapon, aiming up to the darkened skies as another descended upon her, a fellow pair at its flanks, and, in turn, a pair each upon theirs. The half-dozen attack craft spilled down from the low-hanging clouds, their tiny engines roaring a dissonant chorus in her ears, coming about to envelop her within their formation, cutting off every route she dared pull towards. Her breath caught in her throat as they closed upon her, a pack of predators ready to tear the upsized interloper limb from limb.

Her pistol quivered in her hand, darting from craft to craft. A pair of lucky shots wouldn't clear enough of a path to leap from the line of fire, let alone enough of one to flee. They stared her down, hovering at eye level with her enormous frame, silent, unflinching, quietly seething with rage. She grit her teeth, and tried to plead over the broad-channel again,

“I-I'm Ensign Dawson of the Interspecies Alliance, and I-I'm not-!"

The half dozen copters unleashed a salvo of missiles upon her. She shrieked, pummeled onto her back by rocket-propelled fists, chest slammed inwards as the explosions roared in her ears. Fire burst across her helmeted view, and suddenly she slammed into total darkness.

She was left gasping, eyes clenched shut, and she pounded her balled fists uselessly into the ground at her back. She fumbled with the suit seal, practically ripping the helmet from her head as fresh air billowed in over her sweat-soaked brow. Her suit lay intact, black senseflesh slackening as the program ceased.

She stepped free of the sim platform, headset limp in her grasp as her feet hit the ramp leading off the miniature platform, terrain simulator's neon lit field projectors fading blank in her wake. She trudged onto the glossy black surface of the desk it had been placed on, a vast, smooth plane that showed only her exhausted, defeated, helmet-haired reflection to meet her downward stare. Above, casting the entire room in his shadow, Mishka's immense form leaned in, a towering wall of plump, powerful bear, clad in a gargantuan version of the crimson, striped uniform. His voice boomed, sonorous and of a timbre that vibrated the heart still sinking within her chest.

“Don't look so disappointed, Tanya, please. You did quite well, for-"

“But I didn't pass, did I?" She blurted, raising her head just in time to catch the enormous, shaggy-furred Ursong's ears folding flat against his skull. His attempt at a warm, round faced smile towering above devolved into a soft, rumbling sigh that billowed down to ruffle her hair.

“No, I'm afraid not, Ensign. You have suffered a failing mark on a Command level scenario."