Chapter Text
Calypso Orbit.
Cassida sat in silence aboard the Pelican as it followed its course to the SES Spear of Integrity. Although the B-01 tactical helmet obscured her face from the two comrades sitting across from her, there was no mistaking the body language of someone who had just witnessed unspeakable things. She was slumped forward, head bowed, right hand gripping the damaged fabric of her armor while her left was in a death grip around her SMG-72 Pummeler. The other Helldivers knew not to question her mental state.
No words were spoken aloud – not when the trio disembarked from the Pelican, not when they ascended to the main deck, not when the ship master summed up the debriefing quickly and curtly. Beneath the surface, however, Cassida’s mind was a cacophony of voices, all horrified, all questioning, all searching for answers amidst the chaos of what had transpired planetside.
The SEAF crews who stripped her of her armor and helmet made no mention of the changes in her eyes. None needed to. Although nobody knew the deeper details, everyone aboard the ship knew that she, just like every shiny-eyed youth in the Saleria Sector colonies and beyond, dreamed of becoming a Helldiver, and that she had accomplished that goal and spent the last 2 months in cryo-stasis aboard the SES Spear of Integrity.
What none knew, except for Cassida herself, was that her father had pulled some strings and gotten her registered into the SEAF trials before she was the sanctioned age; that if it wasn’t for his intervention and his faith in her belief in Democracy, she would be among those poor souls on the surface.
The surface of her homeworld, Calypso.
Cassida’s mind raced through the images that it retained from the deployment. The sight of her home beneath her feet, as she gazed down from the bridge. The realization that something terrible must have happened for the Super Destroyer to be here. The declaration of the Democracy Officer that the dreaded Illuminate had returned, their goals unknown, and that Super Earth had ordered all hands to LIBCON 1 to contain the crisis. The doubt that mantled her mind as she boarded the Hellpod and dove to the surface.
The horror at the sight of her first Voteless.
This image froze in place in Cassida’s memory, twisting and contorting in that way that only fear can do, changing the faintly human features of the be-tentacled victim into that of her parents, her family. The moment seemed to crawl as she watched once more the mutated figure’s face become flayed by the pellets of her comrade’s SG-8 Punisher, only for him to be swept off his feet by an Illuminate overseer and crushed by its staff.
This time though, instead of turning and loading the alien filth with Managed Democracy, she stood in place, gazing at the mutilated remains of her father – the father that had saved her from death, that had cursed her with this fate, that had likely been subsumed by this very conversion.
'No.' The last shred of her psyche that refrained from despair finally spoke. 'He is an important man. A high-value citizen of Super Earth. He’s alive. He has to be. Pull yourself together.'
Cassida snapped back to reality, blinking to awareness in the midst of her mandatory post-operation sanitation. She closed her eyes for a time, galvanizing her resolve into a single iron wall that no Voteless claw nor Illuminate tentacle could penetrate. When she opened her eyes, it was with a steely hardness that came with a clarified mission.
She would live through the next mission. She would live through the Siege of Calypso, however long it took, no matter how many undemocratic hordes tested her strength of will. And so would he. When all this was over, Cassida and her father would see each other again.
And if it turned out the heartless squids had claimed his life, she would make them pay. Every last one.