Sean-Michael Argo - Ghost Faction

Jada answered with shots of her own, calmly breathing out as she sighted in on the gunman first. Her burst of fire tore holes in his chest plates and blood exploded from his back as the Gedra rifle answered her needs. She then moved to the woman who dropped her baton and scrambled to yank her sidearm from its holster.

The first round took her in the hand that pulled at the pistol, the second and third sent her lifeless body sprawling across the roof of the train. The merc lowered the muzzle of the rifle to put a round through the head of the last trooper, one of the two she’d tackled to the ground, and then sprinted across the train car towards her fallen comrade.

Jada leapt across the small gap between the train cars and immediately hit the deck as machine gun fire swept across the air where she’d been moments before. Poe’s car had been the furthest back that the mercs had dropped onto, car thirty-six, and as Jada looked behind her, she could see that they had all but seized the four behind her. Helion troopers were firing back down the line now, desperate to hold their position.

Jada low-crawled across the roof of the train car until she reached Poe. It was a small mercy that the gun emplacements provided a decent amount of cover, though had she dared stand up, she’d have been cut to pieces. That was a concern for later, she told herself, for now there was her battle buddy to attend.

“You alive in there, battle?” asked Jada as she toggled over to their private channel, ignoring for a moment the overwatch updates that were coming in over the company channel.

Poe moved his hand to give her a thumbs up, though he said nothing. Jada could see that there was blood splattered on the inside of his faceplate, somewhat obscuring his features. It made the etching of his skull seem all the more gruesome. For a moment, Jada wondered how terrible it must be for their enemies to face such images in the heat of combat. The merc grabbed Poe by the mooring pegs on his back and slowly dragged him across the roof of the train car until they were right beneath the edge of the gun emplacement.

“Is your HUD operational?” asked Jada as she opened a pouch on Poe’s utility belt and grasped a clamp that had a tethering line spooled inside.

The wounded merc held his hand up once more with a thumbs down as Jada affixed the clasp to one of the utility moorings on the gun emplacement, effectively tethering Poe’s body to the armored nest.

“I have to keep going, Poe,” said Jada gravely as she gave his ravaged body a once over, realizing that she and her partner were going to have to rely on his enhanced physiology to keep him alive until the medicae could get him into surgery. Overwatch monitored all of their vitals and radio traffic, so they would already know to have med-bay prepped for Poe’s arrival, assuming he survived to mission completion. It was this acceptance that nearly every merc on the mission would be wounded that gave the Dire Swords additional degree of power, as they relied much on their meta-human bodies to absorb the heinous damage that they regularly endured. It was in this way that even just a handful of Dire Swords could engage an enemy easily ten times their strength in numbers.

There was no time to hesitate; the only way out of the situation was to continue the mission and she hoped he understood that. Jada nodded her head, though he couldn’t see her when the wounded man turned his thumb back up.

Rounds had torn into his lungs, which was likely why his helmet was awash in blood from the inside, and yet somehow Jada imagined he was smiling behind the skull. Poe was the odd man out among the otherwise downcast mercs. Even though Jada, too, was disposed to bouts of melancholy, she was happy to have been paired with the man.

She silently wished him luck and then used her HUD to activate the micro-magnets in her armor that would allow her to move more fluidly over the train cars. As she switched back to overwatch channel, she discovered that of the ten mercs who made the drop, only eight managed to land on the train, the other two having missed the train and were awaiting pickup from the dropship.

There were other Dire Sword elements on the planet, some raiding the mine itself and others running decoy missions in the ATVs to occupy the myriad security forces, but given the mission timetable, it was now up to the eight mercs remaining to complete the task at hand.

“Overwatch,” spoke Jada into her comm-bead, while she began to move, staying low to avoid enemy fire as the other mercs exchanged salvos with troopers in the next car, “Poe is secured. Proceeding.”

Jada crawled across the top of the train car and slid herself over the side, using the climbing magnets to stay affixed firmly to the surface of the car. Mors was already working his way across alone, his battle buddy Strega having been one of the mercs to miss her landing and the two of them continued their approach near the bottom of the car.

The shale ground moved past her in a blur of dull browns and blacks, only an arm’s length away. The train was moving fast enough that a single errant arm or lost footing would catch the ground and rip the mercs off of the speeding vehicle. Thankfully, the angle was just right for an approach, and the embattled troopers defending the car from above were as yet unaware that death crept up from below.

Above them, a brutal clash was in progress as Womack and Taymar led Berg, Ranec, and the others across the top of the train. The potency of the Gedra rifles was game-changing, and by the time Mors and Jada had traversed the thirty-fifth car, the mercs on top of the car had seized it.

“Raid Alpha, be advised,” crackled the voice of Marius in everyone’s comm-beads, “Elements from the fore section are moving up to reinforce the aft positions.”

“Copy that,” responded Womack over the company channel, and then followed up with, “Raid Alpha, let’s push hard! I want half this train before we dig in!”

“We fight as though dead!” bellowed Ranec as he leapt across the gap between train cars while firing his rifle into the Helion defenders.

Below the firefight, Mors held tightly to Jada’s arm and she shut off her climbing gear, pushing off the side of the train with her legs. Mors grunted and used the momentum of her launch to swing Jada around in a wide arc that placed her at the front of the next car. At the last moment, Jada activated her climbing gear and planted herself firmly against the side of the car. Once she was secured, Jada, still holding the other merc by the arm, repeated the maneuver, only this time it was Mors who flew through the air before smacking into the side of the train.

The fighting and moving continued liked that for what seemed to Jada like forever. Her world had shrunk down to nothing but climbing and leaping, and she put all thoughts of what might be happening above her out of her mind. In these moments of maximum exertion, there were no hallucinations, no moments of past horror come back to haunt her, only the purity of motion and violence.

There was a kind of tranquility in the cacophony of gunfire, and in those moments, Jada felt at peace. There was a deep sense of camaraderie as she once more hurled Mors across the gap in train cars and against the side of the next one, because she knew that her feelings were identical to the rest of the Dire Swords.

Though she and Mors did not speak, there was a silent understanding, and it made Jada think of the long extinct wolf packs that stalked the ancient worlds she’d learned about during her compulsory education. It was said that some of the frontier planets had similar creatures, though she’d never before cared to delve further into the subject. Such was the Grotto education and mindset; if a topic was not functionally relevant to one’s immediate circumstances, it was generally ignored.