Liberation

Maria

"Icey, engage that Shepard patrol at port fifty degrees three hundred M relative you; Xeno, take out the gen at nav One; Del, guard me at 45 degrees starboard relative me," she snapped as she spun the white Apocalypse in a ninety degree circle toward the trio of Adjudicators coming in from the east. She did not wait for acknowledgement, to do so would have been fatal. The lead Adjudicator lashed out with heavy lasers and railguns, the weapons fire shooting green sparks over her shield perimeter. Del's captured Shepard sprinted in front of her to her right and cut the Adjudicator's line of fire long enough for her to target its starboard wingman. She tapped the controls to fire the EMPs, narrowed her eyes as the blue globes splashed into the shields, fired again, this time with a pair of Shrike missiles trailing the EMPs. The EMPs struck sparks off the silver metal, and the missiles exploded on the long, curved leg of the Cybrid vehicle, severing it neatly. Two hundred meters now separated herself and Del from the two remaining Adjudicators. The two rapidly became one as Del sliced ELF/EMP/autocannon shots through the hull of the next vehicle and destroyed the Cybrid pilotform. The last Adjudicator fell quickly to her EMPs and Shrikes.

"Generator destroyed," Xenogears reported crisply, and the red dot that represented her battered Emancipator swung around on the radar to match pace with her twenty meters behind her, to port.

"Icey here, Sheps squikked."

"Bueno. Three Execs incoming 35 starboard 1200 M relative me," she said.

"Pooh. Potato bugs," Del said.

"Del, Xeno, attack the central one, Icey the starboard," she said as she locked her weapons on the portside Executioner. The Apoc rocked violently under the impact of particle beams, telling her her shields had dropped. She swerved to starboard as she fired, the EMPs glancing off the Exec's leg. Two more shots were enough to take down the shields, and the Shrikes impacted a moment later squarely on the vehicle's shell. The shockwave from the explosion blew off two of the particle beams. She fired again before the Shrikes locked. They traveled in straight lines. One missed entirely, the other slammed into the Exec's thigh, dealing significant armor damage. An MFAC burst from Xeno's Emac finished that job, and all four human vehicles swerved aside to avoid the massive reactor explosion.

The Apoc spun again, to port this time, as she arced around the massive stockade in the center of the Cybrid base. She started blasting the towers on the north side with EMPs, dodging the sudden fire from the Goads approaching from the north, and continued firing at the towers. One exploded, and she turned her aim on the forcefields crackling over the front of the stockade.

Her eyes widened as she saw a number of human transport vehicles powering up inside. A weak, staticky voice crackled over her comm. "If you're human, get us out of here!"

"Working," she replied, turning her head as the containment field collapsed with a blinding flash. "Field is down! Go to nav 5, coordinates transmitting."

"FREEDOM!" the voice roared, and as one the transports tore out the hole in the containment field.

"Xeno, Icey, Del, guard the transports! Some of them seem to have effected their own rescue."

"Let's hope that dropship is actually coming," Icey said.

The Ghosts formed two pairs on either side of the line of transports, Maria and Icey in the stronger Apoc and Gorgon on the east, Xeno and Del on the west where there were no Cybrid vehicles incoming, yet at least.

"Out of Shrikes," Icey reported. Fortunately, he had ELFs, which were sufficiently powerful on their own.

"Me too," she said. "Point me a target I'll take out their shields."

"Ya. The lead Goad."

She nodded, targeted the vehicle, which suddenly swerved in a left-right, backpeddle motion she had seen before. As Icey fired his ELFs, the Goad stopped on a dime and they passed harmlessly between its legs. Maria fired her EMPs that time and took out the shields with a single shot to the cockpit.

"It will launch to starboard and swivel counterclockwise," Xeno said softly.

Maria aimed her next shot in advance, and it moved precisely as Xeno said it would. Her EMPs severed the Goad's leg.

"That was me," she said. "They must have downloaded my mind into a pilotform too."

Icey cut up the other two Goads, which were not half as skilled, and suddenly they were in the clear. Their destruction of the Cybrid Nexus and the communications hub on their approach had left many of the Cybrid forces without instructions or assistance from the hive, which made their job far easier.

"Dropship Sixteen landing at designated coordinates," a new voice said. Maria watched, elated, as the transports rolled into the ship's open bay doors...

-----

"Three thousand seventy," the dropship's captain said several hours later, as they were unloading their passengers on the new Mercurian space station several thousand kilometers about the golden planet.

"Out of six thousand," she said bitterly.

"The Cybrids screwed up, you see. The computers in the Nexus you destroyed controlled the drug injections. The stupid glitches injected them with the antidote to the controlling drug, all at once. They overran the Cybrids by sheer numbers, and all squeezed aboard the transports. Amazing the life support systems held even long enough to get them to the dropship..."

"How are my people doing?"

"Pretty well. They want to get back down there and continue eradicating the glitches. Something else you should know. The war is not going well in the rest of the Solar system. Venus was wiped out--"

"My sister was on Venus!" she cried. "She was an Imperial Knight on patrol in Sa Thauri--"

"Sa Thauri was evacuated. It was the last human-held base to go."

"Gracias a Dios," she whispered.

"Earth is being mauled, Mars is gone, the TDF is heading for Titan to make an arc to save some of the human race... I bet your sister is going to Titan..."

Maria closed her eyes. So much for the strength of the Empire she had thought would defeat the Cybrids. "And Mercury?"

"The glitches seem to be using it as a testing ground. The Antipode side was wiped out... efficiently, and the Caloris side was evacuated awhile ago, months in fact. The only human presence on Mercury is a few monitoring stations hidden in some of the cratered highlands, and you people. And I suppose the question is now what to do with all the people you've rescued. We have no way to get them back to Earth even if it was a good idea to enter Earth space right now... which it is not..."

"Mercury is the planet of underground. The Cybrids left a lot of mining equipment around. We could tunnel out a colony somewhere in the Antipode, kilometers deep, in a week. Are there Cybrid overflights in the area?"

"No, they seem to be composed entirely of ground forces here now."

"Then it would be simple enough to do it without detection. And we have more than enough replicator equipment..."

"Perhaps you can start your own Dias Irae in the Antipode."

A furious banging on the door interrupted her response. Shouted words muffled by the thick steel filtered into the room, too faint to make out.

Maria's eyes went wide. Something about that voice--

The door opened suddenly, nearly torn off its frame. An Imperial navy lieutenant was blocking it, trying to prevent a man from entering. "You are not allowed in there, sir, that's the captain's--"

Frozen solid, Maria could only watch, with a mixture of terror and astonished joy, as the man forcibly threw the lieutenant out of the way and barged into the room.

The captain stood, outraged. Not turning, Maria planted a hand in his chest and shoved him into his chair. "You know this man?" he demanded.

She didn't answer, didn't hear, didn’t care. Her voice softer than it had ever been in her life, she whispered, "Yes... he's my husband..."

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