The Highlander shuddered for a moment in dynamic stasis before settling to the thruster burned earth. The yellowish local grass flashed to fire for an instant but was quickly snuffed by the hungry intakes of the settling starship. The low scrubby bushes surrounding the hillside came alive for a moment as dozens of small reptiloid animals, local fauna who had chosen to freeze rather than flee when the metal behemoth roared down from the heavens, reevaluated their choice and bolted for safety.

The Highlander perched on a slight hillock several hundred meters north of one of Fornax's outlying hamlets. The village, whatever it was called, differed only in arrangement from the dozen they had already visited. For that matter it seemed of a piece with a half dozen worlds Sayeeda had seen during her time with the Armored. To a tanker, villages were places where indiges with RPG's could hide, or insurgents could melt away into in times of trouble. They provided no real cover from plasma weaponry though, provided you were willing to use it on what some might consider civilian targets.

"Disembarking," came the mechanical voice of one of the Knights as they unassed the vehicle through one of the boarding gates, already striding across the charred hilltop towards the gawping villagers, integral speakers blasting edicts of evacuation. It would take them a few minutes to convince the villagers that they really should abandon everything they owned and flee to the massive fortress-like fabrication cities. Junebug viewed the knights with a certain amount of professional contempt. They were certainly brave and skilled but their structure was too feudal to allow for much tactical flexibillity and their armor, impressive and effective on lower tech worlds, wouldn't be particularly effective against the kind of modern plasma weapons or high intensity EM pieces Sayeeda was familiar with. To a rabble of villagers like those below, they must have seemed the the emissaries of an angry god.

Sayeda sat in her command chair, though her body below the head was covered with the metal plasitc shell of the auto-doc which she had moved from the medbay/galley to the bridge. Periodically she felt her flesh jabbed by needles or cooled by the infusions of various drugs. According to Looney's somewhat jaunty assessment shed be 'fit to wrestle a greased pig' in no time, although the abominable accent rendered the word as 'peg'. In the background she kept an audio feed of the battle in orbit playing. Sayeeda was no Navarch but it didn't sound to her like things were going well. Most human warships of any size relied heavily on manuevering through the RIP to close interstellar distance and evade their enemies. The strange dark matter shadow the aliens were casting made that impossible and the Fornax fleet didn't seem to have the training in squadron operations to make up the loss.

After the meeting they had been 'escorted' to their ship and had their cargo off coffee unceremoniously dumped onto the dock. Sayeeda had objected stenously before the commander of the Knights curtly informed her that the Duke would indemnify her for the loss. After that they had flown from one outlying village to another, ferrying people back to the central cities as quickly as it was possible.

"We really should have lit for orbit when we had the chance," Sayeeda spoke softly so as not to be overheard by the pair of Knights who had remained on board.

"This is likely to turn into a real shit show."
[@POOHEAD189]