written by dea noctifer
She was so tired.
She was tired of men of power pontificating at her. Dictating how she should fight, why she should fight, and who she should fight for. Commanders and slavedrivers - tyrants by any other name. They demanded respect that they had never earned from her. This Sith was no different. She had spent three years serving Khul and his hackflesh squadron. She was another body to him, more expendable than his troopers. If it wasn’t for her, the other conscripts would had perished long ago.. Three years for the Sith.
She spent her teen years holding a blaster and storming trenches for corporate interests. Bouncing between allies and foes following the Godhead of the Credit. She was spoken too in figures and bottom lines. There was a predictive algorithm attached to her that measured her will to survive in combat situations. This wasn’t a pedigree of skill, this was a test of desperation. Assets that fought against the dying of the night were more valuable. Unlike the employees, she was property. Nothing more, nothing less.
Corpo speak, practiced phrases, and motivational posters adorning her cairn of a room. A storage container with a mattress slapped upon the floor.
Internal trading sent her to different divisions. She was an artillery crewman, a grunt, a star fighter pilot, she tasted every poison that war could offer.
Only to be spoken down to like a she-hound by proud immortal men.
Scared? What would he know about fear. He walked the carnage as a God, empowered by the emotions that lesser beings drowned in. She knew, even now, that the bile of hate rising in the back of her throat would be pumping through his soul as magma through earth. She, with no more than a chestplate of betaplast and a battle weary rifle took charge of a broken squad, knew fear. Blaster hail, slaying your friends, but you press on.
That was fear. But she wasn’t a misbegotten wretch. She was a patriot of the Sith Empire.
Vulgarion looked down and flicked the setting on her BK-43, nodded as it hummed. Overclocked, she would melt the focusing crystals if she wasn’t careful.
<<Frag off, saber-jockey.>> She said, blunt as a fist.
<<Bounding overwatch! Over the top!>> She snapped her fingers at one of the troopers who sat his blaster rifle over the trench, letting it sing as she slung herself over the top of the trench. The blaster kept to her shoulder. Moving fire, slinging bolt after bolt downrange. Marksmanship was a lost art in the modern age of combat, combined arms fire is what mattered. She pushed up until she hit a corpse of a legionnaire, dropping prone she continued to keep rounds pounding into sandbags and barricades.
Keep their heads down.
<<Next man! Move up! Grenadier, call off when you’re in range!>>
Another leaped out of the trench, mud squishing under his boots as he followed the example set by the impromptu squad leader. Flicking his own shots, popping a rebel with a double-tap to the chest before kneeling behind the cover the hostile was behind.
This repeated, over and over as they inched closer and closer to the AA position once more.
<<Vulgarion, grenadier in position!>> Barked the comms.
<<Danger close, pop it!>>
Stepping partially into the killzone, a trooper with an underslung tube on his blaster dropped to a knee. Bracing the rifle against his hip, he fired with basic intuition. The THUMP sound of the ordinance broke through the blaster fire and screams of the dying.
And it broke into a scatter shell over the AA position.