Year 248 P.L. Rychter Calendar
Coordinates: 39.2°S; 62.3°W
Site Designation: Brekka (City of)

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Ryke felt his soul settle just a little as the armoured mass of Brekka came into view on the horizon. Home, battered and bruised but still standing proud – a symbol of humanity's stubbornness and tenacity.

The Hunter-Killers thumped their way across the war-scarred plateau, Rychter's twin-suns searing down on them every step of the way. Brekka rose like a mountain in front of them, its outer walls sheathed in blast-plating and topped with immense quad-barrelled cannons. As they drew closer the diminutive figures of militia troops could be made out, the spines of their anti-armour rifles pointing at the sky like spear points. Beyond them the clustered white stone structures of the city proper rose.

He could make out the newer sections of wall, gleaming in the sun, some with vestiges of scaffolding still clinging to their exteriors. Reminders of how close they'd come to losing the city little more than a year ago. The siege remained raw in his mind. He'd lost a lot of friends that day.

It was difficult to reconcile in his mind. The Scraegan assault on Brekka had been the single largest battle of the war, and it had been a bloodbath. They might have been working side by side now, but every time he came back, Ryke felt that little kernel of anger and bitterness burn just a little brighter.

"HK-Rupture – Forge CC3B," he called down the comm as they drew within the firing range of the great wall guns. "We are on approach to the South East battlement. Acknowledge?"

"Acknowledged, HK-Rupture," replied the Forge officer – safely tucked away somewhere in the military nucleus of Brekka. "We have you on approach, all guns stood down to friendlies. Welcome home, and from what I've heard, nice work."

"Happy to be back," Ryke replied. "HK-Rupture, out."

"Home, sweet-sweet home," Scantlin crooned. "You buying, Lockjaw?"

"Don't remember agreeing to that," he answered, smiling as much as his face would allow. The callsign reference the slab of metal that replaced the left side of his jaw, where on his first mission his mech had taken the full brunt of a furnace cannon shot. Ryke survived, but that plate served as a reminder.

"C'mon, Haze," Brigg cut in. "When was the last time you fronted somebody some shiner?"

"His shiner's disgusting," Ricardo put in grimly.

"Yeah, well with Ivy off digging up the world, our best brewer's a good stretch of the River away. Someone's gotta start learning."

"The engineers always make the best," Ryke told them, the armoured South-East Gate looming larger and larger in his vision as they approached. "I'll ask around."

"Thank the Lords."

Then the gates were opening. Huge slabs of solid armour two feet thick, heaved apart by pistons the size of tanks. On the reinforced battlement above he could see the boxy heads of the main guns watching the approach for a moment, before they were lost to sight as the Hunter-Killers past through.

Brekka spilled out before them. Balloon wheeled trucks trundled over the heat-cracked streets, disappearing behind clumps of white buildings. Civilians traffic filled the main thoroughfares, but all over the city, strips of roadway remained empty for use exclusively by Brekka's military.

Ryke and the Hunter-Killers thumped onto one of those fenced off roadways, following thick, red arrows emblazoned into the ground. The sheer volume of operations that the Brekkan troops undertook meant they couldn't ever afford to get held up by the population they needed to defend. These routes entwined the city, letting the soldiers of the Scout Cadre, militia and Hunter-Killers to deploy wherever they needed.

A skiff flight zipped past them in the opposite direction, hulls gleaming with the sheen of new armour. Ryke followed the reverse of their route, looping around the city's eastern edge, through outer districts that still echoed with the war.

Cubes of scaffolding dotted the tight-packed structures, teeming with civilian contractors and groups of Brekka's combat engineers supervising them. He remembered the fires; the explosions that had levelled those buildings as the Hunter-Killers fought the Scraegans, street by bloody street what felt like a lifetime ago.

How times change, he thought wryly.

Their route swung north, onto one of the major military transit arteries that cut through the city, leading straight to the dried up lake bed of the Stamm Basin complex. As they started up that long road, however, he noticed something on the edge of his HUD – a thin bulwark of grey-armoured militia soldiers lining one side of the avenue.

"Parade on that we don't know about, sir?" Fenix De Lunta asked, walking on his left.

"Not that anyone told me." Ryke frowned, looking down one of the connecting streets that the militia were blocking.

Down one he saw maybe a dozen agitated looking people, civilians from their clothing – all factory overalls, baggy jackets and heavy work boots. They were gesturing angrily at the soldiers, and their ire only seemed to increased as the Hunter-Killers stomped past.

"Protesters, I think." Preese sounded very uneasy.

"Protesters?" the voice of Landis 'Headstone' Garrett was incredulous. "Protesting against what?"

"Probably some of those drowning pacifists again," Brigg rumbled. "Easy to tell everyone to down tools and ride the high tide when the Scraegans aren't knocking their damned doors down, eh?"

"There's some truth." Ryke felt his hackles rising. There wasn't a lot of civil disobedience in Brekka. It was a good way to get your teeth knocked out and a trip to a jail cell, and with the unifying threat of the Scraegans, most people felt they could tough out whatever they had to.

But not everybody. He'd glimpsed the handful of pacifist activists in Brekka a few times over the years. Mostly derided and ignored, they seemed to be trying to take full advantage of the truce.

He couldn't help but think of them as vultures.

They stalked on, ignoring the groups. There didn't seem to be that many, not enough to trouble the platoon of armed and armoured militia troops that lined the thoroughfare's east flank. Ryke tried to put them out of his mind, trying to focus on finding a cold scorch beer, and on seeing his messages from Ivy.

Then something banged off the shoulder of his mech.

If a sensor warning could be polite, this one tried its best, bleeping in an almost apologetic manner to show where the object had struck. Ryke frowned. The impact was meaningless, but the direction it had come from filled him with confusion.

He looked to the right – the mech's head section swivelled with the motion – bringing the Hunter-Killer's optics to bare on a fresh crowd of protesters, this one larger than the last. They didn't look like pacifists, and he saw banners waving above the heads of some.

ONE WORLD. ONE RACE.

SCRAEGANS KILL HUMANS.

PEACE IS THE GREATEST BETRAYAL.

NO ALLIANCE. NO TRUCE.

A SCRAEGAN PAW IS A TRAITOR'S HAND.

"Oh, pissing Rivers," Ryke muttered. The other side of Brekka's coin, this one more than willing to use violence. They shouldn't have known about the joint ops, but somehow word had gotten round. And some people really didn't like it.

Another rock sailed out from the clump of protesters, clanging harmlessly off of Preese's mech behind him.

"What in the Watching Lords..." Preese muttered. "What's gotten into these clowns?"

A few more stones and bottles rained down before the soldiers of the militia cordon decided they'd seen enough. The response was swift, and brutal. As one, the line of armoured men and women stepped forward, using their heavy anti-armour rifles like clubs.

The heavy guns were more than equal to the task, clobbering a dozen of the nearest protestors to the ground before they even had a chance to react. The second rank of soldiers swiftly trussed up the downed protestors with thin wrist and ankle ties – ready to be processed and charged. The first rank kept moving. Some of the protestors tried to stand their ground, and were bludgeoned to the ground for the trouble.

It was over in seconds. The remaining thirty or forty agitators broke and ran, and the soldiers didn't seem overly bothered about chasing them. He could see the militia exchanging frustrated glances, making obscene gestures to the fleeing protestors as they moved to take up their positions again.

A female soldier detached herself from the ranks, striding back towards Ryke's squad as the apprehended protestors were dragged away. She raised one hand, tapping the side of her helmet with the other.

"Sorry about that, Sergeant," the militia officer said, her voice dripping with contempt. "Been seeing more and more of these idiots washing up on the streets recently. A right pain in the ass, but nothing to worry about. Rest of your route's clear."

"Copy that," Ryke replied, watching from the corner of his eye as a buggy laden with another squad of militia troops trundled off after the fleeing protesters. "No harm done." Shaking his head uneasily, he opened the comm to his squad. "Alright, show's over everybody. On my lead."

The mechs resumed their march, but he could feel his stomach turning. Seeing disunity among humanity was not something he was accustomed to – not in such a fundamental way.

"Ungrateful little drowners," Kim hissed. "We were saving this city a year ago and now their chucking rocks at us? I ought to stamp one of them into the pissing sidewalk. That'd shut them up."

"Easy, Haunter," Ryke grunted. "They're our people, you know."

"Yeah, but Sarge, c'mon...?"

Fenix cut in next. "I'm with you, Haunter. Those folks need their skulls clanged."

"I've heard there are more of them now," Scantlin interjected. "First it was just the folks who wanted to keep the war going, but now that we're working with the Scraegans... I think more people have gotten on board."

"Seriously?"

"Got a friend who works one of the fabricator districts that got torn up in the siege. Says people there are pissed."

"Morons," Brigg snorted.

"You think so?"

"You don't?"

There was a pause, before Scantlin continued. "Well, I don't know. Do any of you actually like working with the Scraegans?"

"That's enough! All of you!" Ryke barked with the full volume of a Hunter-Killer sergeant. Instantly the comm dropped to static and he could feel the surprise of his squad mates. "We're not here to do things because we like them. We're here because we're soldiers, because we're here to defend Brekka, by any means necessary. If that means killing Scraegans one day and doing a bloody River dance with them the next, that's what I'll do. Now belt up. Our job is to follow our orders – somebody else can sort out the politics. Acknowledge?"

Muted messages filtered back over the comm, sounding thoroughly chastened from the rebuke. As Hunter-Killers went, he ran a fairly loose ship, but he wasn't above knocking their heads together if he had to. The last thing Brekka and the world needed right now was a revolution.

Mercifully the perimeter wall of Stamm Basin came into view a few moments later. Sighing, Ryke opened the comm again, speaking as though nothing had happened.

"Ladies and gentlemen, it's time for some well-earned R&R."

But as he stepped through the armoured gates, he couldn't shake the creeping sensation that times were changing once again. No more simple solutions. 

No more easy targets.