Sean-Michael Argo - Ghost Faction

The mercs broke through the other side of the clouds and immediately saw the train rushing to meet them. The gunners had been tracking the dropship and were still doing their best to aim upwards, but moving at such speeds had dramatically reduced their vertical accuracy. Some of them spotted the ten bodies falling from the sky, and of those, a handful had the reaction time in which to fire.

A jet of plasma burned nearby her, and Jada held a begrudging respect for whoever had been quick-witted enough to realize the merc’s ploy. Jada’s HUD lit up red and she knew it was time to activate her dropshield.

The mercs trained for hundreds of hours to ensure that they could stick such precarious landings, and though Jada had done so many times, this one was under fire and outside the controlled conditions of the simulator. Hard rounds whizzed past her as more gunners desperately brought their weapons to bear. The merc crossed her arms and ignited her shield.

The energy-spools in the greave plates that protected her shins and the vanbraces that protected her forearms roared as they uncoiled. The compressed energy of the crackling threads erupted outwards, creating something of a barrier between her armored body and the gravitational pull of the planet itself. The momentum of her descent was pressed back on itself as her descent slowed slightly. A millisecond before she slammed onto the roof of the train car, the shield dissipated. The blowback of the energy release was enough to send a shockwave outwards in a circle around her, and it knocked a nearby Helion trooper off of his feet and sent him sailing off of the train.

Jada had aimed her body with immaculate precision and landed on the thirty-seventh car, with a few meters to spare on either side of the massive train.

In the blink of an eye, Jada slid her sidearm from its holster and fired magnum rounds through the faceplate of another trooper, one who had been nearly fast enough to bring her rifle up and squeeze the trigger. The merc surged forward into the press of bodies, not giving the assembled troopers a moment’s respite. It was this blitzkrieg-style of close quarters fighting that had won the Basepholon facility so swiftly, and while the vast majority of the mercs had sustained minor to modest injuries that would have slain normal humans, there had only been two fatalities. Even the veteran Helion troopers were hard pressed to resist the armored giants effectively.

At point-blank range, Jada drove her pistol under the chin guard of another trooper and squeezed the trigger, putting all of her weight behind pushing the enemy’s body against one of his comrades. Armor smashed against armor as Jada shouldered her way into the gunnery nest, using her superior size and strength to knock over the two soldiers pushing against her and the dead man she was using as a makeshift shield. She lashed out with her off-hand and punched a third trooper hard enough in the chest that he lost his balance and fell backwards, the burst from his sub-machine gun going wide.

Several hot rounds bit into her mag-armor and Jada’s HUD went haywire with damage reports. She knew in an instant that one of her kidneys was ruined. The merc’s armor was potent, but the Helion rifles were famous for their armor-piercing capabilities, especially in such close quarters.

She would have collapsed to the ground in pain and shock, soon to be lifeless, had she not been so empowered by her gene therapy. Her blood was already clotting and her tissues were striving to re-knit themselves. Before, she’d have bled out in moments, assuming the shock hadn’t thrown her into cardiac arrest. Without pausing in her assault, Jada turned and knelt, firing her pistol on the offending trooper.

Helion battle armor, even the standard issue, was some of the toughest in corporate space, but the impact from her magnum rounds were enough to shatter the trooper’s rifle and knock him off of his feet.

Jada stood, and with her other hand, ripped the assault rifle from the mooring pegs on her back, at the same time lowering the muzzle of her pistol to fire the last round of the magazine into one of the two prone soldiers she’d knocked over moments before. At that range, his armor wasn’t enough to stop the powerful pistol from pulping his internal organs as it went through his chest.

Jada was mechanical and methodical in her rifle work, a quality that had served her well as a Reaper and made her devastating now that she had a more finely tuned body with which to apply that skill. Where her assault with pistol and fist had been a chaotic melee, once the rifle was in her hands, she became a different sort of warrior. With rapid precision, she raised the weapon to her shoulder, holstered her sidearm, and began unleashing death all around her.

The rifle itself was a new model, one of the long-promised pieces of modified Gedra tech. She understood little of the science behind it. It was enough to know that Grotto and Augur engineers had found a way to remove the ‘gun’ parts from the gun spiders that protected the tomb-worlds and turn them into a formidable weapon for the merc’s use.

Once the fleshy parts had been removed and the complex circuitry extracted, the basic frame of the weapon was of peerless quality. The Gedra frame could be retro-fitted with existing projectile systems. Something about the physical properties of the metal and the inherent rifling of the barrel gave hard rounds a unique ballistic profile when fired. There were a great many theories as to how exactly it worked, some insisting there was a psychic link between the shooter and the target, others that there was an unmeasured, yet quantifiable, quantum relationship between the shooter and the target which allowed the rifle to shape the projectile in such a way as to maximize its effectiveness.

When Jada needed her rounds to have the knock down power of hollow point rounds, the bullet would shape itself accordingly as it passed through the rifling of the barrel. The same was true if she needed armor-piercing rounds. It was strange, and it defied known science, though for the mercs, application, not theory, was all that mattered. They cared little for the why or the how, only that the weapon was effective and gave them an edge over their opponents.

A trooper opened fire with his rifle just as Jada cut loose with hers. The Gedra weapon gave her the exact rounds she’d needed, which were flechettes. She marveled at the power of the weapon as it sent her bullet screaming from the barrel in a cloud of metal splinters. Her hail of flechette rounds bit into the bodies of both the rifleman and the sub-machine gun-wielding trooper as he attempted to get back to his feet.

At such close range, they were all but shredded by the metal storm she subjected them to before Jada turned and stitched four rounds into the trooper who had wounded her, hitting him in the knee, mid-section, chest, and shoulder before he collapsed.

She could see other Dire Swords engaged in similar frenzied melees on the train cars ahead and behind her, though, as was protocol, she focused on her battle buddy.

Poe had landed ahead of her and was grappling with two Helion troopers, both of whom had discarded their rifles and attacked the merc with shock batons. The electrical discharge from their bayonets were locking up Poe’s armor, reducing his ability to end the fight quickly. It seemed he’d used his drop impact and pistol to clear out the rest of his enemies, but he was losing the fight.

No sooner had Jada assessed the situation than one of the troopers leapt back and his comrade lashed out at Poe with her baton once again. The discharge from the woman’s strike locked up Poe’s armor on his left side, giving the other trooper enough time to pick up a rifle and drive several rounds through Poe’s chest.