Chapter Text
Captain Hadrian Sanon couldn’t remember when she last got to relax.
The United Colonies’s forays into weaponizing aliens started right as she left Basic. The endeavor was represented at meetings by the highest ranking members of each team only, and she didn’t learn the minutiae unless her direct superior—a thin, nearly middle-aged man by the name of Walker—felt it important enough to pass along. For the most part, she was happy to shadow the scientists for a few hours in the unpainted halls of their temporary facility on Mars, and they were fine with her, too, as long as she kept her mouth shut. Her name only carried so much weight when they could see her rounded face and hear the cracking in her voice. If she was to lead, she needed to change that.
2304. While the scientists worked, Hadrian chose to spend more of her time with the Marines in scenic Cydonia next door to their lab. The veterans, the ones born and raised on Mars, saw weakness in her brown eyes and spotless uniform. Hadrian looked at them, at their red eyes and dusty spacesuits, and saw a challenge. When she wasn’t doing drills or attending meetings with Walker, she would grab a laser cutter and follow those red-eyes down from the barracks and into the depths of Mars. She spent upwards of fourteen hours a day in tunnels so thick with dust she couldn’t see. She relied on gravity and the tethers holding her to the next miner in the chain for any sense of direction. She moved in lock step and held fast when the ground shook, and when the others got knocked down, she pulled them up. Live-fire exercises against robots and simulated dogfights in the starfield taught her to think as a soldier. Cydonia taught her to think as a member of a team.
Hadrian might not have been Martian, but she crawled out of those tunnels a Red Devil. And almost as soon as she had, she and her siblings-in-arms shipped out.
2306. Dr. Walker’s side of “Project Petshop” was the acquisition of prospective Xenoweapons. She and he scoured reports of distant worlds, filtered out the noise, and selected predators to hunt down. When they made planetfall, they observed their quarry to get a picture of their habits, their life cycle, their prey, their aggression. If it was a match, they would sedate a few individuals and ship them off to be tested. But it was Hadrian who pulled the trigger on the Ashta, a feared species of predator native to the Freestar Collective’s capital world of Akila. It was just a few jumps away from Alpha Centauri, early reports were mixed, and system security was as heavy as it would get. Screwing up an acquisition now would cause an interstellar incident, possibly even spark a war. Walker blinked. Hadrian didn’t. And when her team brought back six croco-dogs without a peep on FC channels, he never doubted her again.
2307. Hadrian got her first hands-on look at what Xenowarfare meant on the tiny moon of Kreet, right after the UC finished building a new main research lab there. Kreet was in Narion, one of the FC’s three star systems, but security was lax, to put it mildly. She had first set foot here to hunt down a species of a man-sized crab, and they had been the most promising candidates so far. After the Ashta proved impossible to control, Hadrian was itching for a win. The engineers carted out one of her crabs and showed off the black metal helmet bolted to its face. The holes in its chitin still oozed plasma. Hadrian was handed a headset and a gauntlet and told to give it commands. So she ordered it to move where she pointed. After a slight delay, it moved exactly there. Hadrian ordered it to return, and it came back with no hesitation. Then she ordered it to target a ballistics test dummy the engineers set up, and she got a front-row seat to the beast ripping it to shreds, throwing gelatinous chunks and red goop all over the training yard. Once the crab was back in its cage, she laughed, wiped herself off, and said goodbye to her Devils. They would get to stay here and train with their brand-new Xenoweapons. She was still needed elsewhere.
September of 2307 saw the officer and her crew docked over Phobos for routine maintenance on the heavily retrofitted barge she used for acquisitions. Months worth of mail came through to her all at once, and while her colleagues took the chance to be anywhere else for a few days, she stayed to read it all. Most of the news regarding the crabs—designation “Obedientes Pes”, but everyone called them Stalkers—was highly positive: hundreds had been captured, equipped, and trained at Kreet since February, and the Red Devils had been comfortably running drills with them on Mars since June. A preliminary study into a species of quadrupeds native to a moon in the Lantana system seemed promising. She sent it up the chain to Walker with some notes and requests. Surveillance indicated the Freestar Collective was ramping up its arms production, including mechs, but that had been the case for the whole year. Probably nothing. And as usual, House Va’ruun continued its stance of neutrality and non-interventionism.
All in all, it was shaping up to be a rather uneventful week. She didn’t know how much she needed one until now.
Hadrian caught with her mail two coffees deep into a Wednesday, her fifth day at port. She wasn’t sure when she developed the habit of counting time that way, but she felt inclined to blame her fellow scientists and their novelty mugs. In uncaffeinated terms, it was still fairly early in the morning. So she got to her physical training right away: stretches, planks, crunches, sit-ups, push-ups, pull-ups, squats and lunges, running a couple miles on the treadmill, the works. When she was done, she hauled her sweat-drenched self into the shower, thanked whatever higher power there was for plumbing and artificial gravity, and spent a long time letting hot water rain down on her bare skin. On the rare occasion she found herself bored and missing the strict schedule being an infantryman gave her, she reminded herself that she never really got to enjoy bathing until she was an officer. Perks of the job.
She gave herself a thoroughly self-indulgent wash, braved the sensory hell of shaving her legs, and spent a while drying off with a towel around her waist. As she got up to collect some clothes, she caught her reflection in the bathroom mirror. An inch of tight black curls covered the top of her head. Another half-inch, and she’d probably shave it all off again. She swore she would do something with it one day, maybe braids, but a buzzcut was what her father wore. The only thing about her face that she could call wholly her own were the red eyes and the thin scar on her lower lip. She used to pride herself on just how closely she resembled him. Now those little touches of individuality just leave a knot in her chest.
The inward gazing got cut short by a shrill ringing from her slate, back at her desk. She cleaned up the bathroom area, pulled on a pair of pants, and hurried across the room to answer.
“Captain Sanon speaking,” she spoke into the mic of her tablet phone.
“Hadrian!” came the deep rumbling voice of Dr. Walker. “It’s good to hear your voice again! How are you?“
“Just fine, sir.” The woman grinned and leaned back in her chair. She rarely heard him in high spirits. “Dropped off our last shipment of the month at the main lab last week, so everyone’s getting some well-earned R&R while our ship gets a check-up.”
“I didn’t mean ‘how is your mission going?’ I mean ‘how are you?’ It’s been nearly six months since we’ve chatted.”
“Percival, I’m fine,” Hadrian said, waving a hand dismissively as though he could see it. “You really don’t have to worry about me. I like being on the move and busy. Though, I still haven’t finished reading that book you loaned to me back in January.”
“Really? I thought ‘Blackstar Apocrypha’ would be right up your alley!”
“Acquisition is hectic work, doc. I don’t always have the time. I have enjoyed it, though.”
“Good, good. And before you ask, I’m doing good. Stressed like hell, as always, but good.”
“Wouldn’t be the XD if our blood pressure was normal.”
“No, it would not.” Percival laughed. It was a raspy thing that Hadrian seldom heard, and she cherished every time she did. “I just got back from MAST. I didn’t realize your emails had been coming from Sol. I would have waited to bore you with the details myself.”
“Bored? By you? Never. Wynn, on the other hand…” Now Hadrian laughed. She cut herself off quick because she hated the odd snort that came at the end of a fit. “So, anything important happen this time, or should I log it in the section of my mind labeled ‘when I’m older’?“
“Well…” Percival paused. Hadrian leaned in on instinct. “I hate to spring this on you on an off day, but Colonel Kasarov agreed to move some assets onto our acquisition teams. He’s calling it a trial run. The brass wants to see us work with them for a bit.”
“Assets. More robots? I still have my proposal for some upgrades to the Model As if you—”
“No, no, not robots. Soldiers.”
Now Hadrian paused. She held it longer than he did. “That’s a strange way to talk about people.”
“I know,” groaned the older man. She could almost hear him squeezing the bridge of his broad nose. “It is what it is. Look, Kasarov is pushing this one hard. Says there’s real promise. I’d like you to make that decision for me.”
“May I ask why?”
“You’re the one running the teams. You’re my partner. And… it’s a little closer to home for you.”
Hadrian used to know how to broach the topic of her family. Percival never got the details—it was ancient and highly classified history—but she told him the broad strokes, back when they first met. She hated the look he got in his eyes when he first heard it, and she thought of that look every single time he dropped his tone around her. Like it was something to be sad about or ashamed of. The knot twisted. One of two topics were at hand, and Percival was going to dance around it no matter how hard she pried.
“Understood,” she answered, keeping her voice steady. “Tell me about the soldiers.”
“I’ll do you one better and send you the files on them.” Percival started typing something up on his end. “Don’t tell anyone I did; it’s a little above your pay grade. Hope you like skimming, ’cos you’ve only got a week to make up your mind.“
“No pressure.” Hadrian looked down at her hands in her lap. She wondered if they were now the same size as her father’s. “I’ll let you know on Saturday.”
Percival sighed. “See you then, kiddo.”
The call ended there. Within the hour, the captain had a proverbial library of documents on her hands: preliminary studies, xenobiological research, genetic tests, personnel reports, damn near everything that had ever been filed by someone on the team. Most of them dated back years, over a decade, long before the Xenowarfare Division was even a thought in some bureaucrat’s mind. Some of the oldest documents were directly related to her and her siblings, but the rest was novel to this one particular project she’d never heard of before today.
“Project Rosegold.”