T E A R D R O P S
MAJOR NOEL "DEADER" STRASZA
N E W I M P E R I A L W A R M A C H I N E
Sometime ago...
'I can't feel a thing.'
The earthen haze invoked by her exhalation curled upwards, raking along what few organic features she had left, stinging at her gleaming lenses and tracing the edges of her messy hair. It was only five-standard and she already had a cigarette tucked between her lips. She turned her gaze towards what light blared over her head, how it swayed in idle response to the fluttering coats and desperate hands reaching to adjust it. The cyborg lay on the cold, indifferent table centered in the operating room, listening to the resonate hum of the mock-heart in her open chest and the erratic buzzing of the lights overhead. Long ago now, she had mastered the art of tuning out the technical speak of those biological engineers chipping and cranking away at her cybernetic body. She was the machine they spoke of, but she didn't understand it.
She didn't want to.
"Major, are you still with us?" That voice was enough to earn her focus and her whirring eyes shifted from their vacant study of the glowing bar, flicking to settle on the masked face of the woman leaning too close for comfort to her own. "Can you hear me?"
"Y-" Noel started to speak, but found the sounds warbling and confused, tangled up on themselves as the processors implanted in her throat scrambled. "Y-e-" she couldn't get it out properly, forcing her brows to pinch together in irritation. What had they messed up this time? She took another drag from the smoke lodged between her mismatched lips, siphoning strength to bolster her patience until gloved fingers stole that from her and tossed it into the tray poised by her left shoulder. "Fu-" Right.
"Her vocal processes are scrambled, the probe must have struck the encoder." The cigarette rat turned towards her colleagues, leaving Strasza to turn her focus back to the light overhead.
"Perhaps if you would have monitored the camera as I suggested-" that voice stoked up some warmth in her exposed guts, forcing her augmented lungs to draw a full breath. Tally. "-then you would have prevented such blatant oversight. Step aside, please, let me look." The shadows of the room shifted, moving and with them, so too did The Major's head, tilting so she could fix her crimson eyes on the familiar face. He was her kin, in a sense. The augmented medic born from the same program which had rebuilt her after Bastionfall. A friendly face in a room of scientific indifference. Had she been able to smile, perhaps she would have. "Major, can you move your hands?"
The soft, mechanized whirr by either of her hips indicated she could.
"Good, now, keep your hand where I brace it, okay?" Cold metal met cold metal as Julian lifted her limp hand, drawing it closer to her chest to tuck fingers beneath her jaw. "Hold it there."
Strasza did as he told her, locking her elbow into place to support the tilt of her head backwards, forcing her eyes away from one of the few faces she had come to enjoy seeing, and towards the back wall of the lab. Upside down, she viewed the holo displays, each one magnified to expose the inner workings of her reconstructed body. A heavy sigh escaped her, the foil to the steadying breath Julian's presence had encouraged of her, and her augmented eyes screwed shut beneath split lids, refusing to acknowledge the blueprints to her reconstruction.
She didn't want to understand.
Some rampaging voltage along the sensitive, fleshy cords woven between those myomers in her throat made her lips twitch, and she hissed a soft warning through her mismatched teeth.
"You're okay-" that warm voice coaxed, "just hang in there for a few more seconds."
She rumbled some apathetic response, far too used to the discomfort by now to complain of anything else. Heat warnings flashed across her HUD, blaring alarm in her mind as the medic took the warp iron to her, welding the frayed cords back into proper alignment. Something in her neck clicked, spinning backwards on itself to lock back down into proper place.
"There, that should fix it. Try speaking, Major."
One eye creaked open and she parted her lips, fighting against the heat in the back of her throat: "Thank you."
"Good, now then, enough of this cruelty, put her under." Julian hissed, drawing her hand back to settle by her side. The servos in her fingers told her he gave them a reassuring squeeze, one too quick for her to return, before he drew away.
Some scrambling to her left caught her attention and she turned her head, glowering towards the biomedical engineer who approached the line plugged into the base of her skull. The man scooped it up in a hand and plunged the syringe he wielded into the feed, compressing the plunger down until the golden substance filled the line, rushing towards her in promise of relief.
Darkness devoured her sight, peeling her eyes backwards until they locked behind her lids and at last, she felt nothing once more- left to sleep on the table.
Not just from the bloody path she carved through it on her way to the fortress, but from the celebratory galas thrown in the fortress after their victory had been secured. Victory. It was easy for the higher ups to deem it a clean victory, wasn't it? When those troopers on the ground were a mere statistic and not the very lifeblood of their veins. When they were helmets and uniforms and armor, just voices crackling across comm-links, not friends to share drinks with in the bar, or carry back to the barracks in the early hours of the morning after starting drinking games. When their blood was only stains on the duracrete at the end of it all. It sickened her to think of the victory won here as anything but a struggle. The sacrifices of her brothers and sisters would not go in vain.
She knew this day would come as soon as the Iron Sun had been planted before her eyes at the crown of the fortress. Anyone who knew anything about the workings of the galaxy could have predicted it. The Sith had suffered a critical defeat here, sent running off with wounded tails between their bloody legs, and it had been people who were like her that had dealt the final blow. People like her. That was a thought, wasn't it? As far as she knew these days, there were no people like her. Even her kin in Julian, and now, Tyrell Paxxus were so different from her she found sparse comfort in their presence.
The squared helmet tucked beneath her arm was flipped about as she flicked the cigarette between her fingers to the earth below, crushing it with a twist of her boot. They were coming. The wolves were at the door once more. Strasza twisted her head around unnaturally, turning her eyes up to the blood-stained banner planted those months ago. She thought of
Agrippa
then, the sacrifice he amongst thousands of others had made to usher those flag-bearers up there. The bayonet charge. The bloody clash to scale the stairs after gutting the fortress's internal defenses. Words of remembrance graced her lips as she turned her focus back towards the winding streets and stepped off, planting her helmet on her head and twisting it into place.
She had been left to choose what it was she was to do this day, left unassigned and to her own judgment to adjust and go where it was she was needed the most. The rattle of communications resonated through her bones, echoing through her mock-jaw and into her skull to arrange themselves in proper order and priority, forming coherent sentences and statements. Orders. Requests. Death knells.
It wasn't long until explosions rocked the streets, blaster fire screamed through the air, and soldiers clashed on the ground as armadas met in the atmosphere.
The Major hunkered down behind her cover, acknowledging the information fed into her systems by the bladed droid socketed into her shoulder. She had chosen a nest for herself, making the most of her countless hours of training and the peace she found in surprising solitude, a place where she could focus. The place that had damned her to this titanium cage forever.
The crown of Fortress Imperator.
Quickly, she reloaded her rifle and rolled back out, scramble cloak fluttering back over her frame to conceal her from detection systems, and zeroed in, gazing at the battlefield below through the narrow tunnel of her scope. A Sith Imperial battalion was pressing hard on a squadron of NIO troopers whose armor bore the familiar winged skull insignia of her former comrades. Doom Division. On the front line, as always, bullet sponges scattered amongst ranks of shocktroopers to utterly obliterate any who faced them. The horrors of the walking dead combined with the snap-decision making of elite commandos. Strasza sighed some wistful note as her finger brushed the trigger and swiftly torqued it backwards, suffering no consequence of recoil as her weapon fired its silent round.
The slug rocketed towards the group, splattering their dark armors in the bloody brain matter of the one The Major assumed was their commanding officer. She grinned as the expected scurry and rush for cover unraveled in her sight, each trooper running for cover. "If you didn't want me to shoot you in the head, you shouldn't have brought one so big." The sniper muttered to herself as she swept around, pivoting on her elbow to check the left of the group she had silently vowed to defend.
Down in the streets she caught sight of a familiar group moving in between the streaking threads of chaos, the Ghost Vipers. The back of their commander surging at the head of the effort. She shifted her hips, leveling her rifle on their position, sweeping the path ahead of them. "DIAMOND_SNAKE, this is DEADER, covering you boys, over." The cyborg droned through the channel, mere seconds before a trio of Sith Imperial troopers rushed around the corner ahead of the commandos. Strasza's trigger-finger flicked and flexed, squeezing the trigger as she fired rapid shots, unimpeded by the normal restraint of a fleshy marksman.
Her targets dropped in sequence, clean shots, one after another. All but one were motionless, and she trusted Djorn and his men to solve that problem. She slid out the clip of her rifle and tucked it in between two posts of her battlement, exchanging the magazine for a fresh one. These damn Sith were eating her slugs like candy.
She could only hope she had brought enough ammunition.
Another roll out from cover and she focused back on the Ghost Vipers, sweeping the rooftops over their advancing position now. "I don't think so, hon." She mumbled to herself as the gleaming edge of a trooper rearing back to throw some sort of charge down onto the unit caught her eye. A flick of her wrist angled her weapon in minor adjustment and she swiftly pulled the trigger, sending another bullet screaming through the air towards the soldier's shoulder. The high velocity round splintered his armor on impact, knocking him backwards into his comrades as the charge clattered to the rooftop, rolling off the back edge to explode away from the NIO's troops.
"Shit- DIAMOND_SNAKE, you've got a building crumbling on your three, eyes up-" She warned the company, keeping an eye as the rubble started its rapid slide and buckle, shedding integrity. The Sith Imperials left standing on the top scrambled, rushing for safety. The perfect distraction for the quickly forgotten sniper to send a lead-kiss through the back of another helmet. "-the path on your left, coming up, go that way, over."
Another bout of suppressive fire sang from the mouth of her rifle as she forced the impeding Sith Imperials to cover.
She definitely didn't bring enough ammo.