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...But the will of the Creator cannot be stopped, and in many other star-systems believers rose to challenge the corrupt and wicked...
Exempt from the teachings of the Legion
...The mad crusade to convert the system of their founding had inspired other, like-minded madmen in the Auriel, Romulas, Birshud, Muril, and Canaar systems to engage in acts of rebellion, mass murder, and sabotage...
Exempt from a CGC propaganda broadcast
Calina looked around the room. It had taken two days to clean it of blood. The whole craft was shining as if it had just been build. Now the Templar were busy dirtying it up, to make it look innocious. But even as she stood and looked around in the room that was to be her quarters for the next three days she remembered.
It seemed to her as if the walls were awash with blood. As if the floor was still red and sticky. But most vividly she remembered the man that they had found here. Someone with her had shot him in cold blood. She didn’t remember who. It didn’t matter. She just remembered the body. It hadn’t had the pleading look in its eyes. In fact it hadn’t had eyes to look pleading with at all. The same thing could be said for most of the face.
All the corpses had been disposed of through the outer airlocks, but it had taken a while before the smell was gone. She remembered all too well. Her dreams would turn into nightmares that night, as they had done for the past two nights. Nightmares of screams, deaths and faces. Faces displaying raw fear, terror in its purest form.
She had already done her share of the work, but there was always need of another pair of hands. Not that they had lacked hands lately. Only some of them didn’t have bodies to match. Dreading the horrors that would come when she closed her eyes and let go of her control, she had worked like no other.
Her strategy was to work until she was ready to drop. Only then would she cease. A tired mind dreams less, and so she could get at least some sleep, without being disturbed by the visage of a score of faces, all asking the same question: “Why?” In the end, though, it didn’t matter much. She would wake haunted by memory anyway.
There was an unusual level of activity aboard the craft. Calina knew that it was caused by the arrival of the decoys later this afternoon. ‘We have to fill the space left by...’ She didn’t finish the thought. She didn’t like it.
Calina put other thoughts in its stead. She considered the excuse for arriving late: They would claim that the engines overheated while being pursued by Legion ships. She wondered whether the local staff would accept it.
While the CGC sometimes didn’t care to pursue a ship with dead engines the Legion punished captains who didn’t see to it that their prize was either blown away or captured. But perhaps the Planetary Defence Force didn’t know that.
She also thought of the briefing. It seemed straightforward enough: Move into the city, get to the main reactor powering the thing and blow it all to kingdom come in an extinguisher class meltdown. Then Jump back to orbit. Simple. If only it wasn’t for the unprecedented Jump length making it imperative that no other mind-over-matter activity was undertaken. And all those civs.
The Paladin had called it ´excessive unarmed casualties.´ ´A bunch of dusted civilians´ would have been closer to the truth. Literally dusted.
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