A shuttle at long last...

Jeodan floated, and upon seeing the approaching vessel, gave a last heroic effort to muster a welcome "It's about time", but the humor was lost to him as his water supply had run out some time ago and the parched mouth aided little with the pronounciation of anything beyond a rasp.

His last glimpse of of a shuttle of blue white glowing seems surrounding a dark pale blue skin. It over took his position and centered a cargo bay over where he floated. He'd ever seen something so beautiful in his life. Of course at this stage, a 200 year old mule-class excavator would have looked like Eden to this damn suit he'd be wearing. Of course, this damn suit saved his life. These are things a man's mind thinks about in these moment.

Moments later Jeodan fell unconscious. He's internal desire to live maintaining his sanity, and thus his life, gave out of the desire to repair itself, dream and sleep. He was saved, his unconscious knew it.

What seemed like an eternal's nights rest, Jeodan awoke. Finding himself as he would have expected, in a medical ward, he was relieved. The frostbite he knew his toes had did not bother him. This he was very happy with. The throbbing had been like a drum in his head. It has been meloncoli enough he had to fight it off to avoid falling asleep. Sleep that would have been his doom. He was glad the thobbing was gone.

He reached his feet up over his knee, and reached down to rub those damn toes, they didn't throb anymore, but there was quite at itch.

He's just gotten into a good routine of chasing the itch around his foot, and finally back to where it started when it finally gave in and subsided. Jeodan thought to himself. Glad to get that itch, nothing like a good scratch every once in a while.

Up until this time, the lights in the room had been dim. The slightly raised in brightness. A few candle power. Perhaps 5 or 10 candles. The room was dark still at its edges, as the light was low enough to basically illuminate the bed, and table to either side. He made out that his uniform was now cleaned, and pressed. This was strange to Jeodan, as it certainly not with him before. There was a brighter light over the uniform. It seemed appropriate to put it on. Why would it have been there if it hadn't.

Rousing himself from his bed, he put his two feet down. Tingling feel crept up from his toes. As if they had been experiencing this feeling for the first time. Must have been the frost bite. And damn, that itch is back. Taking a minute, Jeodan assulted the itch with the tancity of a reaver. Hopefully that was gone for good now. Dawning the uniform, felt particularly good. Again with the tingle, but there was relief.. no itch. This made him glad.

He took a moment to survey now the domain beyond the light. No walls were visable. Strange, he tought.. what am I, in a warehouse? I feel like a fish in an aquarium.

It was about this precise moment that a gentle soothing and female voice came from above. "Jeodan, how do you feel?"

"Tingley?" he said after a brief moment of reflection on the question.

"That will fade, Jeodan. Your toes and outter extremities were frozen solid when we came to your aid." There was something about that statement that Jeodan didn't quite feel was right. Something in his gut told him there was more to that statement that was was revealed to him.

"and ?"

"They were renewed." the voice spoke.

"Thank you?" there was some doubt to the sincerity of the thanks, but some apprehension due to that gut feeling he had still.

Jeodan turned and leaned up against the bed, taking a bit of a load off his feet, which by now no longer itched, nor did they tingle. That was comforting. At least she was right about that. Still, the gut feeling didn't quite go away. He just played it off to the 'fish bowl' feeling he had. It was a little strange to him that he'd never seen quite a facility as the one he was in at this time.

"So.." Jeodan said. "What's the prognosis, Doc?" and saying again with the humor, " Am I gonna make it?"

There was a pause. The voice sounded cold. "Perhaps."

Jeodan thought to himself, damn.. there is that gut feeling again.

"Jeodan" the voice spoke again.

At that moment, Jeodan had the clarity to understand the walls he saw were merely in his mind. How was it a mind such as his could be so easily confined. Controlled. Damn. 'What kind of a mess am I in now?' he thought to himself.

Jeodan braced for a reply. Were they reading his thought, or simply just implanting this reality in his mind.

No response. Ok, so they are not reading my mind.. or maybe they just don't react to my subconscious.. or damn. 'I'm being paranoid'. Damn, he thought again.

"One more question, I have seen your faces before in a vision I had. Your race gave life to multiple races, I

Everything was finally quite on Blacken, the investigation was still going, but the civilians were keeping their distance from any alien on the planet. Logan had a nagging feeling that he was late for something, but he couldn

"Are you watching this?" Carl asked Garrus over the line.

"No, should I be?" Garrus asked as he munched on a pear.

"I would think so, it has a lot to do with your friend Septimus." Carl answered as he watched the Talus press conference about the weapon released during an attack on a Kallum outpost.

"It is true, the Imperial Talus Navy did release biological weapons during the assault three days ago. It is also true that this biological weapon was released over the main outpost, how ever, all of our investigating teams have reported no Kallum civilians were present." Admiral Septimus spoke slowly into the microphone.

"Good God." Garrus said lowly over the phone, "They actually deployed Acid Rain?"

"What is Acid Rain?" Carl asked, turning down the volume of the television.

"Its a Bio-Toxin. It starts out as a gel, held in three capsules inside of a missile. When they detonate the missile, or it impacts, a series of small explosions occurs, which open a trio of vents on the sides of the missile as well as opens the tip of the missile. After the explosions open the airways, the capsules open and when the gel mixes with air it becomes a gas. It feeds off of oxygen and spreads quickly, but loses potency the farther it spreads. It eats up all the oxygen around it, which can kill most enemies, but due to the fact that oxygen masks are easy to produce, we took it a step farther." Garrus explained then paused to bit the pear.

"And that step is?" Carl asked, almost not wanting to hear the whole thing.

"It is designed to cause fatal damage upon entering a body. It hunts down oxygen inside the body and, in the process, it ravages organs, tissue, veins, you name it. If there is oxygen inside that body, the toxin will eat its way to it, which will destroy the body. It targets areas with the most oxygen first, such as the heart, brain, lungs and veins. Next come muscles and then basic tissue, but you wouldn't live long enough to experience that. If it got inside through the nose or mouth of, lets say a human; you'd be dead in less then thirty seconds. If it entered through a wound or pores in the skin, you might have a minute or two, depending on how much gets in." Garrus said.

"Jesus Christ..." Carl was shocked and nearly dropped the phone, "So they 'deployed' that on Kallum forces?"

"If they did then the units from the Umbrella Division, Special Forces Division, would have very little do afterwards, except cleaning up the bodies." Garrus replied and finished the pear, "How do you think the Alliance will take this?"

"If they understand what this does, I would guess not well." Carl answered and stared at the television, trying not to imagine the horrors of having 'Acid Rain' deployed against some one.

"How the hell did they know I got off the Loki?" Morna shouted at Captain Luchessi.

"The only way would have been for the shuttle's ID code to be seen entering the ship... Dicola was supposed to take care of that..." Luchessi said and turned to the Lieutenant.

"But, wait! I did what you sa-" Dicola's body fell backwards as a bullet blew through his forehead. Morna turned to Captain Luchessi and continued.

"They have us as rogues, plus the real Lance Baker has been dead for about a month now, which means they know who I am... We must move quickly if we are to survive, no doubt several ships are heading for us and the Anvil is far to small to be of any use... If we must fight, it would be best to stay away from the Talus, they have more reason to want us dead."

"But, Sir, how do we plan to escape? The Anvil is damaged from the nuke, even at full power we wouldn't be able to out-run the UEF and Talus ships that are coming after us!" Luchessi said.

"How many do they have after us right now?" Morna inquired and walked over to teh terminal.

"The entire Talus battle group and around a dozen assorted UEF and Blacken ships. ETA of the nearest ship, a cruiser, is four minutes. Though we may be able to lose them deeper in the asteroid field."

"Deper in the asteroid field? Oh, sure, we'd lose them... only because we'd be dead!" Morna shouted and rubbed his eyes, thinking hard. Suddenly an alarm went off and the ship began to rumble, "What the hell? Not even a cruiser has enough range to negate that distance!" They ran out of the room and sprinted to the bridge as the Anvil rumbled and shook.

Upon entering the bridge they looked at the main screen and saw the Reaper less then two kilometers away from the port side of the Anvil.

"Good evening, Admiral Morna, I am here to offer you some 'Ivy League hospitality' from the Talus Empire..." Within milliseconds of Garrus saying 'Empire', the Reaper opened fire with its full broadside and the Anvil ceased to exist. "Send a message to Blacken Colonial Command and let them know that Morna is dead... Carl believed he was quite clever, I'm surprised he forgot about a slip space jump."

Carl received an after-action report from the Reaper and scanned it over. The Anvil had been annihilated; there were no survivors. No casualties had been sustained by the Reaper.

The UEF Communications Service, a subdivision of the UEF Administrative Service, was working with Blacken Command to create a press release detailing the situation, though they had warned Command beforehand that "the Blacken citizens might find the news hard to swallow". Carl sighed. Xenophobia seemed to be a trait of humanity that they had never been able to shake off. Maybe a thousand years of war might do it, but the citizens of Blacken had not lived through that as the UEF had.

The UEF's predecessors, the Earth Empire, were guilty of their fair share of xenophobia, too. In 2557, just short of seven hundred years before the United Earth Federation was formally established, during a colonization expedition to Seraphim II, the expedition commander had met the native Seraphim with violence. It was a supreme example of how xenophobia never paid off; the resulting conflict resulted in the creation of the Aeon Illuminate and would, over a thousand years later, threaten to engineer the near-defeat of the UEF.

This lesson was deeply ingrained within Carl's mind by now, and General Stephen Clarke, along with the other UEF top brass, had seen the light with their own eyes. However, as for the Blacken population, there was still significant mistrust between them and the Cy'tan, owing to apparently irreconciliable sociological and cultural differences, and what gains the Talus had provided were mainly military and diplomatic in nature - their influence was difficult to feel on the Blacken surface from a resident's point of view.

Because of Blacken's people, the Alliance stood on a shaky foundation. Blacken Command's greatest nightmare was that the people of Blacken would stage a full-scale revolt against the military command structure and splinter off into a rogue faction - the means to do so were scattered around the city, safeguarded only by some UEF security programs that any seasoned hacker would be able to overthrow - all it would take would be a UEF commander to defect and provide, if not the necessary command codes, the required technical expertise, before such a resistance movement would have an instant army at their fingertips.

The UEF's military, of course, could steamroll the entire city if such a crisis happened, but a move like that would be diplomatic suicide - it could provoke the Aeon, the Cybrans, or both to pull out of the Alliance agreement and reignite the Infinite War.

Carl sighed. It was an unstable situation. He hoped that the situation would be localized to Blacken. Perhaps the citizens of the other Core Worlds, also under the arm of the Blacken Colonial Command, would take the news more favorably, having had more benign exposure to Talus culture.

But then again, he reflected, finishing off his tea, it was perhaps wise not to hope for too much, given the recent occurrences among what Carl had considered a tolerant population. Perhaps it was time to re-evaluate his opinion of the Blacken populace.

That could wait for later, Carl decided, keeping an eye on the network feed.

"What do you mean the cargo ship was delayed?" asked Kyle Gibson. Apparently the response he received troubled him greatly. Looking around the room, at the staff assembled from all the races in the alliance. "Could you excuse me, please, I

"You know what?" Garrus asked.

"What?" Darcon replied slowly.

"We really should put more funding into the Alliance Research Department, they managed to ease the situation a bit with this Scion Expeditionary Force." Garrus said, as they wanted the broadcast.

"I thought you were one of the people who wanted us to with draw from the Alliance Research Department and keep the scientists for ourselves." Darcon said amused.

"I was, hell I still am, but as long as we're there we might as well make it count for something. Even if we could be using the scientists to come up with cures for some of the disease the other members of the Alliance have given us, at least our people are getting the job done." Garrus said and stretched his arms. Suddenly his terminal beeped loudly and a light flashed on and off. Garrus quickly rose and pushed a button, "What is it?"

"Sir! We have a top priority message from High Command! Sending it to you right now." The Captain said briskly and tapped several buttons, sending the message to Garrus's terminal.

"What the..." Garrus's face turned pale and he looked up at the Captain, "Do you know what this means? Get us out of here immediately! Broadcast scramble warning to everyone we can, send a copy of this to what members of the Alliance we can, but top priority to get us to the Kalnoky System."

"Understood, preparing for Slip space jump." The Captain replied and Garrus ended the conversation. Darcon stood up, confused.

"Stay here, I'll be on the bridge. Send a message to Septimus and order him to put Nordok into lockdown, also attempt to raise General Raxian if possible." Garrus growled and hastily got his uniform on. He jogged to the bridge and looked at the ETA to the Kalnoky System; twenty-five minutes.

Half an hour later they entered the Kalnoky System and he received a message from the Vice Admiral in command here.

"Sir? Thank God you've arrived, we've been getting reports from Locus of heavy casualties and fighting all over the place. The Emperor is safe and in Omega Base for the time being. What are your orders?"

"Stay calm, Admiral. I take it the full Admiral has gone to Locus?" The officer nodded, "Alright. Stay here and defend the Emperor until the last. Give me a battle cruiser squadron and its attached units, afterwards I will be leaving to go to Locus." The officer nodded again and he saw the units joining his battle group. Garrus sighed as they prepared for a second slip space jump.

Wreckage of the initial clash were scattered around the planet. The orbital defenses were drifting into the atmosphere, a few of them burning up in free-fall. A few dozen Kallum ships held a tight orbit, firing onto the planet and dispatching shuttles of soldiers to the surface. One side of Locus's moon was scarred, the moon bases must have been wiped out as well, Garrus thought.

"Commander, how many of our ships are equipped with Acid Rain Missiles?" He asked the Weapons Officer as the battle group headed towards the planet, the Kallum forces turning to face them.

"About eighty-five percent of the battle group has Acid Rain Missiles, Kallum ships entering firing range in two minutes." Garrus watched the ships come closer for a long two minutes. After what felt like two years, Garrus raised his hand to stifle the Commander.

"Make sure my Officers understand that there will be no quarter given, period." The Officer simply nodded, having served under Garrus for several years, "Reduce them to hulks." With those four words, the Talus ships opened fire; the Kallum ships bucked under the heavy fire and returned with their own shots. With gaping wounds in most of the capital ships, a series of missiles impacted on these exposed areas directly after the initial damage was done. Within seconds of them impacting, the ship's ventilation systems spread large amounts of Acid Rain toxin, killing everything onboard.

"Sir, we have driven the few survivors of the Kallum fleet out of the system."

"Very good, Captain. Commander, give me firing solutions on the Kallum positions on Locus Prime." Garrus said and used his console to make a few adjustments to his ships before the Commander responded.

"Sir, firing solutions engaged, we have the entire Kallum ground force within range."

"Good, Captain, send a message to General Raxian to begin a ground assault. Commander, you may fire when ready." Garrus nodded and the Commander at the Weapons Control console began to move a joystick and push multiple buttons, Graser cannons and missile batteries responded instantly, raining death upon whatever Kallum had been targeted. Talus forces moved in against Kallum forwards positions, accurate Graser fire taking out key defensive positions and Acid Rain Missiles doing the rest, new gas maks and emergency counter-agents had been created for the Talus Military shortly after Acid Rain had been perfected.

An hour later, General Raxian, Darcon and Garrus were sitting in his quarters and talking, Garrus and Darcon drinking Sigwa juice while Raxian smoked a large cigar, a new habit of his. Then an Officer walked in with a report for Garrus.

"Thank you." Garrus saluted the soldier, read the report and grabbed a cigar from the wooden box. Raxian handed him a lighter and asked a question.

"So, what in that report made you start smoking?"

"No, read this." Garrus handed him the report, Raxian read it, groaned and then passed it to Darcon.

"Do you have to blow so much smoke in here, Uncle? Or at least turn up the ventilators!" He said and waved his arm around to clear the smoke. He read the report and looked up and noticed Garrus smoking as well, "So wait, this is healthy now? I thought you hated smoking more then I do?"

"I could get used to it." Garrus said with a grin and blew a smoke ring into Darcon's face.

"You better get onto that right away, it is your area of expertise." General Raxian commented. Darcon left for the bridge, leaving Garrus and Raxian to smoke in his quarters.

Logan called Carl and James and told them of his intent to go to rescue Robert right away. He was met with the same urgency through Carl. They boarded the Terranova, after Logan ordered his crew to step down, and his family to meet at the Terranova.

The ship lifted off, and minutes later they entered the split space-hyper jump realm.

"The ships in orbit," Carl said. "They're hyperspacing away."

They were. As if suddenly distracted, the ships guarding the planet were turning around. Soon, there were no Kallum starships left in orbit. All they had to worry about now were the automated defenses.

With the help of James and Amanda, the Terranova slipped through the defense perimeter unnoticed. Carl was about to initiate a scan of the surface, searching for a landing site, but James shook his head.

"We'll be seen," he said. "Let me take care of it."

He paused for a few seconds in deep thought, then whispered a set of numbers. Carl inputted those numbers into his navigational computer, and a waypoint appeared on the planet's surface.

Carl brought the Terranova on approach; the starship slid gently through the atmosphere and touched down in a small valley. Almost immediately, a camouflage net appeared, covering the ship and obscuring it from both visual and radar scans.

James and Amanda opened their eyes. James summoned his staff from where it had been laying on the weapons rack, while Amanda grabbed a sniper rifle. Logan loaded the Kyrozch energy rifle that had served him so well on the last mission, and Carl took his shotgun.

"Time to go," James said.