"Join up with mercenaries," they said, "It's the fastest way off of your podunk midworld," they said.

Featuring:
RazenHashikado
and
Mirumoto_Kenjiro

"The hatch on the lander opened, and we dropped a dozen feet to the dusty surface of the moon in silence. The bursts of proximity shells overhead were like brief flashbulbs. I could only hear my own breathing and the crackle of the radio as my boots hit the ground. At the command of Sgt. Kenjiro, I thumbed off the safety, pumped the action on my shotgun, and we moved up to a pile of rocks on a ridge overlooking our target. It was a small hab complex dug into the surface for protection from radiation. Its surface support facilities included landing pads, vehicle garages, a comm array, radiators, and photovoltaic panels. Inside of it was our objective..."

There was once a time when Ori broke things and killed people for a paycheck. During his four years with Assemble EX-11, his body was drastically modified, he had to fend off the advances of a reality-impaired lieutenant with a BTL addiction, suffered the loss of most of his platoon and his right ear on a jungle planet, and fought his way through a respectable assortment of Terragen colonies.

The combined arms brigade (About 5500 combatants, plus a legion of office staff and logistics personnel) was commanded by a one-eyed rhinoceros uplift from a glitterworld by the name of Basil Roan. (They actually have a cybereye under the patch.)

Most midworlders don't realize that laser weapons need to have a decent-sized set of optics in order to focus a useful beam on targets without excess diffraction. A laser pistol looks a bit like a handheld movie camera, wheras rifles resemble small reflecting telescopes. Ship-scale weapons are basically the big brother of the YAL-1 or THEL turrets, which in turn resemble large reflecting telescopes. (Ori is an assault specialist, hence the Neostead.) The standard sidearm for EX-11 Space Infantry is a Deathwind Gyrojet recoilless rocket pistol.

This career left Ori feeling a debt to civilization for his actions on the battlefield, and resulted in his present choice of work as a power system technician...

Artwork © of me
All characters © of their respective creators