The assault boat roared away from the farm burning farmstead at several hundred kilometers per hour, driven onwards by its trio of ion thrusters at full output. There was no need for such haste, but aggressively pushing an advantage was beaten into legionaries from the earliest days of basic training. Sabatine flew a nape of the earth pattern, also completely unnecessary given the lack of any anti-aircraft capabilities beyond rifles. Her face, illuminated by the holographic HUD being projected onto it, seemed to shift, the farmer retreating to be replaced by an older and harder visage.  Within moments Cereys was gone, replaced by Athena.

"Thirty seconds to target," Sabatine reported mechanically. Tiber had already left the gunnery station and was readying his personal weapons, snugging pouches and equipment in a familiar, if lately unpracticed, routine. The assault boat screamed in over the village, shattering windows with its down draft as Sabatine executed a stomach churning turn before setting down in the town square. The approach was deliberately too fast, prompting the chemical boosters to fire to slow the decent at the last moment. The old assault landing trick blasted grit and gravel out in all directions like a fragmentation warhead a moment before the boat crunched down on its skids. Sabatine slapped the hatch release and the rear landing hatch crashed to the ground bringing with it a could of dust that mingled with the bleach smell of the cleaning products they had used to get rid of the marine life. She stood up and took her gladius, racking the mechanism to ensure a fresh round was chambered and ready to go. Tiber was already down the ramp, his helmet on and visor down against the dust. Sabatine followed, feeling the tingle of ions from the engines arcing little sparks of heat lightning in the dust. The ramp retracted and sealed. Normally, an assault boat of this type would be defended from enemy infantry by a quartet of 3mm hypersonic gatling guns, but even the remarkable resilience of the craft hadn't spared ammunition in exterior pods from the ruinous effects of sea water. Sabatine doubted it would be a problem, the locals lacking the ordnance or time to force their way into the craft. If the did manage it, well they would burn that bridge when they got to it.

Tiber was already striding towards their target a large pilastered building which had once been a library but now served as Chieftain Gorm's treasure house. Two guards, slovenly dressed thugs with shotguns, were shielding their eyes from the downdraft when Tiber came out of the dust at a fast walk.

"Hey! What are you..." the first one asked, spitting a cigarette from his lips as his eyes widened. Tiber shot him twice, once in the chest, and once in the face in a classic spec ops doubletap. The second guard's eyes bulged a moment before his face exploded from Tiber's third round. He didn't bother with the doubletap this time. Both men were dead before the cigarette hit the ground. He slung his weapon and grabbed the door of the library. Uncharacteristically it was locked, more effort than the local thugs were usually capable of. Somewhere an alarm siren began to blare. Tiber stepped back, racked his weapon and fired. A brilliant bottle shaped blast blossomed from an underslung attachment of some sort and the door, wood veneer around a steel core, flew from its hinges with a scream of warping metal. He had neutralized the guards and breached the door within the few seconds it took Sabatine to catch up, her weapon questing across a landscape now devoid of targets.

"Clear," Tiber reported, sliding the nearly full magazine from his weapon and replacing it with a fresh one.

"Copy that," Sabatine reported, moving through the door with her helmet set to a thirty percent mask of thermal. There were no heat signatures beyond the cooling bodies of guards and their smoldering cigarette butts. The interior of the library was a mess of crates and boxes. Looted artwork, boxes of credit chips, statuary, the assembled loot of decades of drug dealing, prostitution, racketing and other crimes for which there were no names. Sabatine grabbed a hover dolly stacked with jewelry and credit chips and powered it up. For a wonder the mechanism worked and she began to haul the thing back towards the assault boat. Tiber started opening boxes, making a quick inventory of what was most portable and most valuable.

By the time the first thugs arrived, they had made a respectable dent in the loot, piling boxes and crates into troop compartment of the assault boat. Sabatine was tossing a sack of jewelry into the hatch when the first gunshots sparkled off the hull. A group of thugs, apparently the hangers on Gorm kept around as a personal guard, were fanned out across the street, the wiser ones taking cover behind dumpsters and ground cars. Others, often with eyes dilated by whatever drugs had gotten them out of their customary drunken stupors, stood in the open, rocking uneasily. 

"Time to go!" Sabatine called to Tiber who was muscling the hover dolly through the shattered doorway. She ducked behind the landing strut and fired twice, dropping one of the drug addled goons in a spray of blood. A vehicle was making its way down the street. The thing had started out as an earth mover with a heavy steel blade, but had been augmented with welded sheets of steel and a trio of pintle mounted automatic slug throwers into an improvised armored car. It chuffed out diesel fumes as it came, brushing stalls of timber and canvas into ruin as it moved too close to the curb. Loud hailers mounted on the cab crackled to staticky life. 

"Drop your weapons and I promise to kill you quick," a gravely voice, made worse by static, snarled. Sabatine had never met Chieftan Gorm, but she would have bet her last sesterce that he was the speaker. As if to punctuated the pronouncement, all three automatics opened up in a defeaning roar, kicking up tracks of dust and sparkling ricochets off the hull of the assault boat. Tiber shoved the hover dolly along at a run and then leaped aboard it, the frictionless antigrav gliding across the open space between the library and the assault boat. Bullets struck the boxes around him as he crouched in cover, spraying the street with credit chips and precious gems. The dolly sailed across the street and up the ramp with the precision of a pool ball being slotted home by a master.

"Very well since you choose to die..." the voice snarled. Sabatine pulled a stubby metal cylinder with a blue band around the top and struck the igniter live against the landing strut.

"Ave imperatrix! she shouted, and then tossed the cylinder through the open door into the library. It was doubtful Gorm or his thugs saw the missile in the dust and gunfire but its effect was unmistakable. The plasma grenade was a separated solution of liquid crystal compounds that fused together into a solid microseconds before smaller explosive charges compressed the newly formed lattice in a psudeo-nuclear explosion. There was a flash of bright blue light that was visible even through the stone wall, literally stunning to the untrained. The cerulean fireball ripped through the library like a devouring star. The walls survived long enough to channel the blast upwards before they shattered outwards in an exploding wall of debris. Sabatine was already halfway up the ramp when the concussion knocked her from her feet, driving her up the ramp and slamming her into a bulkhead with force enough to cripple an unarmored man. As it was her armor drove into her at half a dozen points hard enough to leave bruises in the days to come. Behind her the library and loot of Chieftan Gorm was a foretaste of Hades. At the temperature of crystal plasma everything burned. There was no orange, wood and other organics vaporizing in a heart beat, but rather the brilliant white of blazing sandstone, highlighted by the gorgoues red and green of burning metals. Several of the thugs that had been in the street fled burning, their clothing ignited by the terrifying intensity of the blast. Everything Gorm had worked for was gone in a heartbeat, his empire bankrupted, his hold over his men gone. After a debacle like this, he was unlikely to live out the week.

The heat beat at Sabatine like a hammer for the few seconds it took the powerful hydraulics to snap the landing hatch closed. Tiber grabbed her by the shoulder and half carried, half through her over the mess of boxes and crates into the pilots compartment. She cursed and groaned as she stumbled into the pilot's seat. She slapped a preplanned take off sequence and the chemical lifters roared, flaring the blaze behind them deep into the blue spectrum as oxygen was supplied at the pressure of a jet stream. The assault boat leaped skyward, jolting again as the ion thrusters lit, blasting them skyward away from the inferno below. Tiber was in the gunnery station but they were already beyond effective line of site of the settlement, though the glow of fires spreading from the library could be seen on the horizon.

"Going up," Sabatine said, lifting her visor to accept the projection of the HUD and angling the assault boat up and towards open space beyond.