>>5251157>>5251174>>5251209>>5251235Both of them accept your offer. Liscia's eyes almost light up as she sees a way out her predicament, and she jogs out of the tent to ready her mount for departure.
Alberico spends more time deciding. He makes a show of mulling over the situation and consulting his sergeants before he commits, but it was obvious to both of you that he had few other options. A royal contract was royal contract, and good mercenaries knew that there was a key difference between posturing about insubordination and and actually being insubordinate. One would hurt your reputation. The other would leave you swinging by the docks.
And so, by late afternoon, you were leading one of the most peculiar military columns ever assembled in federation history. A battered automated weapons platform at the front, a retrofitted civilian lifter at the rear, and a smattering of pre-spaceflight-era skirmishers in the middle. At Alberico's request, some of the more heavily wounded men in his company had been transferred to the top of your chassis, which only made the experience stranger. As you try to triangulate the precise location of your base-station using your sensor array, you hear Alberico and his soldiers exchange stories of old campaigns and long-dead friends. A faint tinge of nostalgia washes over you, even though you do not recognize a single name nor location in their conversation.
It takes three hours for you and your band of irregulars to arrive. First impressions were not promising. Like all military-grade bunkers, the hexagonal entrance of the station was sintered from nanite-bonded ferrocrete. It was a material optimized for both strength and resilience, capable of self-repair through the exploitation of ambient temperature differentials. You see evidence of that system failing here. The ferrocrete in front of you is marred by organic whorls and lattice-marks, signifying corruption of the underlying forge-templates. You hope that a similar blight has not condemned the inside of the facility as well.
