Chapter 167 - Zero G Drills

Ceres breathed heavily as he crouched behind a rocky outcrop, his feet hooking onto the asteroid’s surface to prevent him from drifting.

The asteroid did not have enough mass for him to stay on the ground. Ceres glanced through his cover, seeing three human-shaped outlines via his vision.

He turned behind him to see Pris, Josef and Victoria all clumped up behind him, waiting as well.

[Tyson is guarding the flag really closely. We need to move Xander and Shai’li away from him so we can nail him. If we try to fight them head on, they’ll stall us long enough for him to get his drones into our nerval jack.] Ceres explained over the squad comms.

Josef nodded. [We should create a diversion, and force them to split their direction. They can’t block attacks from all angles.]

[Victoria and I will go under and behind them. You two should split up.] Pris suggested, tapping Victoria’s shoulder.

Suddenly, Ceres lunged forward and pushed Josef away, causing him to slam into Victoria and Pris. [What the hel.. Riker!] Pris frowned as the rocky outcrop was sliced in half horizontally, the blade of his sword nearly cutting their exosuit armour.

[Split up, now!] Ceres urged, himself moving to the right with Riker chasing him immediately.

Ceres’s thrusters flickered on and off as he rotated and flew around the asteroid, staying close to the surface. He turned around to see Riker tailing him closely.

[What’s the point of these exercises if you keep targeting me?! You should practice with the other squad members.] Ceres complained as he jettison himself out of the way, avoiding a few slices from Riker’s sword.

The sword cut through the fluffy layer of dust on the asteroid’s surface like butter, kicking up a plume of dust that circled around Riker’s sword.

Bursts of gas fired from Riker’s exosuit as the automatic orientation control kicked it, counteracting the reaction force from hitting the surface of the asteroid.

[You’re my goal, my target to overcome. Stop running!] Riker grinned as he sped up even more, unflustered by his overuse of fuel.

“Fucking hell...” Ceres groaned before suddenly slowing down, closing the distance between them.

Riker’s eyes widened as he was caught off-guard, his approach velocity towards Ceres being too fast. He tried to activate his thrusters in reverse, but it was far too late.

Ceres grabbed his warhammer from his back, swinging directly at Riker and nailing Riker right in the stomach, crushing the armour plate of the Azure Tiger!

The life-support system of the exosuit immediately kicked in, foam seeping out of the innards and flooding the exposed area, guided by the difference in pressure.

[Kill confirmed, Riker]

“One... one hit?!” Riker was shocked, but grinned to himself as his exosuit locked in place, preventing him from moving. “As expected of ‘Dumpling’.

“When will he ever give up...” Ceres sighed, checking back on his squad.

Unfortunately, his squad did not manage to split up as far as they planned. The moment Riker had exposed their position, Shai’li and Xander had directly confronted the remaining three squad members, preventing them from overextending too far lest they get picked off.

Ceres noticed Tyson was still waiting at the flag, which was the final objective of this entire training either way. Ceres began to circle around the medium-sized asteroid, rounding around.

He soon found himself at the back of the battlefield, with Tyson observing the fight. Stowing his warhammer and swapping to an energy rifle, Ceres prepared to do a flyby capture of the flag.

Tyson observed the fight, himself running countless commands to his unmanned drones, mounted on Shai’li and Xander in an effort to latch onto the enemy. [You need to get closer, otherwise I won’t be able to help!]

[How the hell are we supposed to get closer to them? Circling them is already the best we can do, and our shield isn’t going to hold much longer!] Shai’li shot back in anger.

Tyson frowned, but he suddenly realized something was off Where was ‘Dumpling’?

He turned around to see a distant figure aiming right at him, the glint of metal twinkling in the distance.

His battle instincts kicked in, making him jump off the asteroid surface to avoid a three burst shot of virtual beams. [‘Dumpling’ is at the flag, return to defense!] Tyson ordered hastily.

[Don’t let them retreat, buy time for ‘Dumpling’!] Josef and Pris pushed forward in a straight line, while Victoria was already floating high above at a different angle, trying to get around Shai’li and Xander’s shield.

The two tanks desparately tried to retreat as much as possible to keep both angles within their field of view while taking potshots at Josef, but their firepower was truly lacking.

[Damn it, if only I could use my mounted turret to blast them!] Shai’li grumbled.

[This is merely a team exercise – are you trying to kill one of us?!] Pris replied indignantly.

Tyson had no choice, he had to defend the flag against Ceres.

Ceres was closing in fast, firing shot after shot at the floating Tyson who dodged nimbly with his body’s mounted thrusters. Tyson shot back with his energy pistol, though he could barely hit Ceres.

His approach velocity to the flag kept picking up, with a zig-zag manuever that would make any normal human naseous. “This flag is mine!” Ceres locked his eyes on the planted flag.

Suddenly, Tyson jettison back on to the asteroid’s surface, aiming a different type of pistol at Ceres. With a squeeze, a quickly expanding net with four small bulky balls at the corner about ten meters across shot towards Ceres!

Ceres tried to juke out of the way, avoiding the first net, but Tyson shot another three more, forcing Ceres to slow down. He could not afford to get tangled up in those nets!

As he dodged the nets, he noticed Tyson grinning. “What does he have up his slee... ARRGGHH” Ceres shrieked as a strong electric current suddenly coursed through his exosuit, frying the wires and power supply system. The exosuit powered down, entering the reboot stage while Ceres was still reeling from the sudden electrical noise he experienced through his nerval jack.

The exosuit drifted along as Ceres desparately tried to reboot the system. [Reboot in ten seconds.] The Swift Storm finally responded with a bit of lag due to the discharge.

Ceres could see Tyson’s obviously happy expression from afar, but noticed that Tyson wasn’t shooting at him despite his immobilization. Instead Tyson seemed to be launching something towards him with his right arm’s inbuilt gun.“Shit, he’s trying to hack me.”

A lone unnmaned drone in the shape of a spider landed on the surface of the Swift Storm, immediately crawling up towards the nerval jack. The spider drone began attempting to cut open the rubber seals and metal seams to get into the exosuit.

“Too easy... huh?” Tyson was about to celebrate when he realized the drone was unable to break through the seal. Instead, it seemed to be getting slowly encased in some sort of black liquid goo-like substance. “What..?”

[Reboot complete.]

In a burst, Ceres charged straight at the flag with maximum acceleration, immediately bringing his rifle to bear and nailing the stunned Tyson in a flurry of virtual beams.

As his body swooshed past the flag, Ceres grabbed the flag, which got pulled along by the momentum out of the surface.

[Flag Captured. Wargame exercise complete.]

The squad members stopped fighting amongst them, clear beads of sweat dripping down everyone’s face except Tyson, who barely broke a sweat.

However, he was still in complete shock as to what he just saw through the drone. [‘Dumpling’, what the hell did you put in your exosuit?]

[Huh? Erm.... A special type of fire-suppression system of sorts. It’s a black substance able to immediately lock down the gaps in the exosuit...] Ceres tried his best to frame it properly. He wasn’t exactly lying about it.

Tyson had a expression epiphany. [Indeed, the way to stop my drones would be to trigger an internal fire-suppression system within the frame, flushing or preventing the drone from ever entering. Good thinking, ‘Dumpling’.]

Ceres gave a thumbs up, though internally he was sweating buckets. The black goo had reacted automatically, sealing up and blocking the area around the nerval jack in a fluid motion, as though it had practiced before.

“What the hell..?” Ceres never intended to rely on the black goo for anything apart from being able to see someone’s emotion from a distance, but this new developement threw him off slightly.

As they returned to the Corym, Ceres pondered on the implications of the black goo so far. Everything that has occured since he woke up from the vat seems to imply that the black goo has a sort of primal instinct, rather than being a simple chemical substance.

The forced absorption of the chaos slovesa core into his body reminded him of such. Was the black goo sapient?

Ceres wanted to find out where the hell the black goo came from, and how he even got it into his body in the first place. Only the Keepers and Doctor Wu had the answer.

“’Dumpling’... ‘Dumpling’! Are you even listening?” Pris waved her hands in front of the introspective Ceres, startling him. He had unconsciously moved to the engineering department on reflex.

It was already their fourth day in space, and Ceres was already fairly comfortable with the Corym.

“You got to fix Riker’s exosuit now, you crumpled the armor plate pretty badly but the internals are okay.” Pris continued, pointing to the Azure Tiger mounted on the repair rack.

Riker sat on a chair nearby, nursing his stomach with a medical cream. “Brilliant hit. I’m too used to fighting with a sword on the ground, I need more practice. I will find you again tomorrow.”

Ceres sighed. They had been doing a series of military combats to familiarise themselves with zero-g combat. Free-for-all, internal ship combat and siege tactics were all practiced.

He had to admit that the squad members were all extremely good, able to pick up on the nuances of space combat immediately, or at least learn at an impressive pace.

No wonder they were all lone wolves of some sort, with the rebellion’s central command assigning them high-rank to top-rank missions.

Ceres was no slouch either, training hard. Lisa and Braton’s life depended on him – he could not afford to fuck this up.

“Come to think of it, you haven’t slept yet since we arrived at the ship. Are you okay?” Riker asked out of genuine concern.

“Ah.. yes, I got a really bad case of insonmia.”

“Oh that’s easy to cure. Just swing a sword about a few thousand times in a day and you’ll knockout in no time. Want to give it a try? You can swing your warhammer instead.”

“Stop trying to get people to join your crazy training procedure, Riker.” Pris groaned. “In fact, why are you here waiting in the engineering department? Shouldn’t you be swinging your sword?”

A look of realization dawned on Riker. Without a reply, he immediately stood up and left, no doubt to swing a sword.

“Training maniacs, all of them...” Pris sighed.

Ceres gulped internally and nodded. He wondered what would Pris’s reaction be when she heard of how he trained in the slovesa temple. “Better not tell anyone. Only one I’ll tell might be Braton.”

It took less than fifteen minutes to replace the broken armour plate on the Azure Tiger. “We need to be a lot faster than this during the actual operation. If we get pulled into a firefight, that is.” Ceres frowned.

The major reason why the repair was so slow was because Ceres was still not as familar as he would have liked with the engineering department. Also, he was not used to working in tandem with Pris to repair a single exosuit.

While the prickly arrogance of Pris had toned down a lot ever since the public duel with Riker, she still had the same sense of superiority ingrained her, making her unable to become second fiddle to Ceres.

Ceres too was not really willing to relent on certain aspects of the repair. He too had his own pride as a repairer. It was fine working with Pris to upgrade the exosuits as they had a longer duration, but in a sprint repair, tensions between the two ran high.

“If you would just follow my procedure, we can finish this in less than two minutes. Instead you’re blocking my way and doing the exact opposite!”

“That’s not true, you’re the one blocking me. I’m the one who upgraded the Azure Tiger, so you should be following my lead.”

Through the argument, Ceres realized something terrible – he had never worked as part of a team before to repair an exosuit. And it seems that the same could be said of Pris. Both of them were true loners, solo geniuses but terrible at working in a repair team.

Pris seemed to have come to the same realization, mulling over it. She too had always harboured disdain for others, never working with them. Only after joining the rebellion had she realized she was a frog in a well, but she was unable to shake off the old habits yet.

“Okay, lets try this out: I’ll lead for half of the exosuits, you lead the other half. Deal?” Ceres compromised, sticking his hand out.

“That’s not going to work in the field under time constraints – there’s a chance one of us would be taken out as well! We need to come to an agreement on the correct repair procedure for each exosuit, and follow it to the tee.” Pris countered.

“Works for me.”

The two began drafting up repair procedures for each of the exosuits, rapidly churning out flowcharts for the general repair methodology. They still had bouts of bickering over what to do for certain edge cases, but their viewpoints began to gradually align, though not completely.

A few hours passed before they finally completed the procedures. “Good, this means if we repair an exosuit halfway, we will be able to pick up where the other left off immediately.” Pris tapped a few final notes into the procedures.

[Pris, ‘Dumpling’, come up to the lounge. It’s time for the final mission briefing.]

The entire squad was already at the lounge, waiting for them when they climbed up the central spiral staircase. Even Amelia had somehow managed to leave the comfort of her memory foam captain’s chair, a rare sight based on the past few days.

“Ok, straight to it. It’s exactly ten days till the main operation, and four days for ours.” Amelia led the discussion, seeing as she was the only pilot onboard.

“I have already deployed a few stealth observation drones to Haui’s Moon, obtaining updated images and readings.” She brought up countless videos and images, all centered around the main objectives.

“We have yet to determine who is in charge of what yet, so lets do it now. Anyone got any particular preference?”

Ceres immediately raised his hand. “I’ll like to take on the prison’s defences directly.”

“Okay, relax. You don’t have to raise your hand, this isn’t school.” Amelia joked.

“ I am already allocated to the observation post. Not to be rude, but I’m probably the best for that role.” Tyson pointed out.

“I’m with Ceres. No better place to put me than right in front of the guards.” Riker smiled with confidence.

Shai’li was also about to announce that she wanted to fight head on, but Amelia raised her hand, stopping her.

Amelia marked out the assigned roles. “Okay, we don’t have enough members to assign everyone to the front. We all want to fight, but we still got the solar array, hydroponics and radiator array to deal with.”

“I’ll hold the radiators alone, seems pretty simple.”Josef nodded.

“Well then I’m taking the solar arrays – Pris you’re with me, need someone to repair me in case we blow up.” Shai’li draped her arm over Pris’s shoulder, who groaned.

“Guess I’m with the lady on the hydroponics then.” Xander scratched his chin, with Victoria nodding in response.

The roles were settled. Now they had to pour over the data to make sure that everything was clear.

If there were any anomalies, they had to be sure of it – any firefight on the surface would immediately alert the enemies.

This meant that they only had a small window, and they had to cut the guards all off in one swift motion.

Ceres studied the collected data, burning the memory of the locations into his head as his eyes flickered across the immense information in front of him.

“Strange... no prisoners working the hydroponics...” Xander muttered. “It seems like the guards are doing it instead.”

“That doesn’t sound weird – the prison is supposed to provide food, right?” Ceres asked.

“No, Haui’s Moon is a for-profit prison. No way they’ll let free labour go to waste like that.”

“Is there a chance we’ve been exposed?” Josef asked with a wary look in his eyes.

“Let’s go through the data a bit more.”

The squad members sifted through the information in silence. Ceres was too focused on marking the important locations that he realized he missed a few layers.

He swapped to thermal imaging, but realized that the prison was resistant to infrared probing. None of the wavelengths the stealth drones had was able to penetrate or read signals from beyond the prison walls.

“I don’t see a battalion worth of guards here at all like what was mentioned in the original briefing, maybe only half of that at the most. Looking through the patrol pattern, it is barely enough to cover the perimeter of the prison. There’s so many gaps we can exploit.” Riker muttered, also pouring over the same data.

Riker was right. Ceres did not see the level of defence the original briefing had mentioned.

“Perhaps they shifted to the spaceport and New Saint. The enforcers are trying to attack Rockhold soon, are they not?” Xander concluded, leaning back and crossing his arms. “While the prison is privately-owned, I have no doubts the Five Families must have asked for their help as well.”

“Then they are underestimating us too much.” Pris scoffed.

Amelia shook her head in response, lazily dragging up another screen. “They have bolstered the defences around the space station as well as the public spaceport, so no, I don’t think they are underestimating us. They simply got our goals wrong, that’s all.”

Ceres gaped at the amount of starships around the enforcers’ space station and the spaceport. There were at least close to a hundred armed enforcer patrol vessels – mostly smaller than the Corym, but still deadly.