"These new power suits are amazing!" Jessica gushed as she tested the sleekest armor in the Federation. "The Brass promised they'd be more responsive than the Mark III's, but for once they actually UNDERSOLD next-gen hardware."

"The perfect tool for the job," Alison agreed, drawing a fierce nod of approval from her squad mate. "But if rubes like these stupid moon-dwellers wouldn't rebel every six months, I might be able to actually use my procreative license."

Jessica scoffed with open derision, "I don't understand why you even applied for that thing, Captain. Why disrupt your career when you can just lease a synthetic womb or pay some mouth-breathing surrogate? Another two or three deployments and you'll make field officer."

Alison smirked, "Call me sentimental, but I don't like the idea of paying someone else to do my job. Without breeders we lose a piece of our culture that goes back further than the species itself, and backwards as our history might be, it's important not to completely lose touch with where we came from."

Jessica gave a devilish grin, "You can't fool me: you're just aiming for a rack of stars. No birther has ever made higher than field officer in any Federation military branch--you want to be the first General to have given birth the old-fashion way. You're aiming at the history books."

Alison returned Jessica's grin with a mischievous one of her own, and the two women shared a taut moment of laughter. It was the kind of insincere gesture that was second nature to people of their abilities and ambitions.

"Well, at least it doesn't rain in this hellhole," Alison looked up at the cold, black sky overhead, which featured the green semicircle of Praelon, the fourth planet of this accursed star system. Praelon was a mid-range gas giant, with a relatively mild EM field and a dozen moons in orbit. Praelon IX was the largest of those moons, but only the third most 'habitable' according to Federation surveyors. Rich in rare minerals, possessing a relatively soft crust, and featuring an eighty percent strength gravity field, it was ideal for small-scale industrial operators to move in and start turning a profit. The drawbacks were that it lacked significant sources of water or an atmosphere thick enough to breathe for more than a few minutes before suffocation.

"There's barely any atmosphere here," Jessica snorted. "Why do people choose to live on a cold, barren lump of rock like this when there are literally new cities being built every day in the Core Worlds?"

"Why do primitives do what they do?" Alison shrugged. "I'd rather not crawl between their ears if it's all the same to you."

Jessica nodded in approval before launching into a series of powerful movements in her Mark IV battle-suit. Each punch was powerful enough to crack a man's skull, each leap would have cleared the tallest man (natural or gene-mod) and each kick was the equivalent of a mid-speed auto collision. But the armor was so lightweight, flexible, and powerful that she moved with the grace of a ballerina.

After she had finished the impressive display, Jessica mimed the wiping of her nose ala Bruce Lee, "Better to put them down."

Alison grinned eagerly as she flexed her left gauntlet, squeezing hard enough to crush a two-by-four into splinters, "Early and often."

"Who's your top gene match?" Jessica asked.

"Braddicus Eight," Alison replied nonchalantly, prompting Jessica's eyes to widen.

"No way!" the junior woman squealed. "THE Braddicus Eight? The one who set records in all five Solar Sports Leagues?! THAT Braddicus Eight?!"

"The one and only," Alison could no longer conceal her pride.

"How could you ever afford it?" Jessica boggled. "I heard his stock costs ten years' salary!"

Alison mimed buffing her nails, "Not if you're active-duty military with honors from three separate theaters. It's just two years' salary, and I've been saving half my earnings my whole time in the Corps."

Jessica whistled appreciatively, "Now I understand why you volunteered for Praelon IX just two weeks after Jiro IV."

Alison's buoyant mood fell significantly at that last, "I'd rather not talk about Jiro IV."

"Understood," Jessica agreed. "I heard it was a goddamned mess."

"You have no idea..." Alison shook her head as images from that horrifying engagement flashed through her mind. "Those fucking patriarchs treated their women like livestock and their children like slaves." She gritted her teeth as muzzle flashes stabbed at her mind's eye, with each one accompanied by the terrified face of a rebel in their last moments, "...they deserved everything they got."

"Awomen," Jessica nodded somberly. "My sister was there with the 82nd Valkyries during the first two months. She was rotated out right before the Pacifiers moved in to do the real work."

Alison had been there for the 'real work,' and had done more than her share of it. If she was honest, the first few communes had been a pleasure to cleanse from the face of humanity...but after that, even she had grown a little squeamish at the severity of their orders. But her orders had been clear: the insurrection on Jiro IV was a cultural upheaval that could threaten the entire Federation. It was a matter of interstellar security, not just for those few hundred thousand colonists, but for the hundreds of billions all across the Federation.

"...it had to be done," Alison muttered low enough that her suit's mic didn't transmit it to her squad mate. She shook her head to clear it of those macabre scenes, "Good riddance. The fewer men like them in humanity, the better...in fact, the fewer MEN, the better."

"Awomen," Jessica agreed. "But with suits like these, we'll put the patriarchy and all its vestiges in the ground--where they belong."

Alison was about to reply when an alarm sounded in her visor's HUD. She quickly cycled through the incoming stream of updates and set her jaw, "We've got inbound."

"Aircraft?" Jesica quirked a brow in surprise. "Here?"

"Looks like low-orbit ingot lifters," the Captain scowled as she examined the telemetry. "The kind they use to put rare minerals up high enough to get scooped up by ferries and taken to the bulk transports."

Jessica cackled, "You'd have to be stupid to ride one of those things. Fucking low-brows; leave it to frontier folk to turn a perfectly good piece of industrial hardware into a flying deathtrap."

Alison nodded in silent agreement as a trio of the rocket-powered lifters arced overhead. She and Alison had been assigned to a Mobile Defense Platform on the northern flank of the Federation line. It was an all-in-one system measuring eight feet by ten feet by eighteen feet, complete with telecom gear, life support supplies, and a pair of fifty-caliber autocannons slaved to the MDP's automated control system.

The fifties swiveled toward the inbound targets, which were less than two kilometers up and coming down on a hard parabolic arc aimed straight for their position. The autocannons whined to life, feeding live ammo into the chambers before sending a dozen rounds skyward at the makeshift drop pods.

Alison smirked at seeing four of those rounds hit home, with one reducing its target to scrap as the lifter's fuel pod was ignited in a spectacular conflagration which instantly ended its passenger's life.

"Fucking rubes..." Jessica sneered as she hefted her plasma rifle. The weapon weighed a hundred twenty kilos, but in her sleek battle-suit she swung it around as easily as any soldier might manipulate a standard rifle. "Time we showed them the error of their ways, eh, Captain?"

Alison nodded, "Weapons free. Engage."

"Copy that," Jessica acknowledged with a gleeful grin as she sent a plasma bolt roaring up at the nearest pod. The blue-white bolt of superheated gas left a conical wake of thick, black smoke in the atmosphere as it soared up to meet its target. But it was only when that bolt missed the mark by less than two meters that Jessica realized her HUD had stopped auto-updating.

"What the hell?" she scowled, turning to the MDP and seeing the fifties standing motionless on their turrets. She immediately commanded the MDP to give her a status update, but it failed to acknowledge in any way. "Dammit..." Jessica growled. "They spiked the MDP."

Jessica laughed as she sent another plasma bolt skyward, "It's not like it matters. Even if they land, they're no match for us. Let the pod take its sweet time restarting; it'll be more fun this way."

The second plasma bolt struck its target center-mass, tearing it apart and sending flaming debris out in a fiery shower worthy of any Founding Day Festival.

At seeing the second of the three enemy craft neutralized, Alison gave a brief cheer. She shared her comrade's enthusiasm, and knew their new suits were more than a match for anything the rebels might have lashed together on this forsaken lump of rock.

She was moderately concerned at how quickly the rebels had managed to spike their MDP. Her suit should have registered an EMP powerful enough to neutralize the MDP's hardened control systems, but the logs showed nothing.

Hefting her own plasma rifle, Alison cast all doubts aside as the third lifter unfurled its built-in parachute and slowly began to descend toward their position. Alison fired her plasma rifle up at the slowly-descending platform, which was no larger than a compact automobile, and the platform exploded in a spray of glowing metal which clattered off the ground and their armor like drops of molten steel rain.

"That's the last of them," Jessica declared with satisfaction. "I'll take a look at the pod's systems. Maybe it just needs a--"

A violent impact slammed into the junior squaddie center-mass, and even the Captain's elite reflexes and half-decade of hard training left her momentarily stunned as a hover-bike drove Jessica's armored form into the ground. A metal-armored figure leapt off that hover-bike just before impact, aiming at Alison while the hover-bike sent Jssica skyward as the hover-bike rose with her pressed against its bow.

Alison instinctively dropped the plasma rifle to grapple with the enemy, and their combined bulk went tumbling violently across the rocky terrain until they finally came to a stop twenty meters from the point of impact. The rebel drew back into a fighting crouch, but Alison deftly reached her feet while drawing her sidearm. In one fluid, inhumanly precise motion, she sent a round into her foe's primitive, welded steel breastplate just right of the midline.

The fifty-caliber armor-piercing round struck home, but somehow failed to penetrate. She sent a second round into her enemy, then a third and a fourth, with none piercing the surprisingly effective casement.

Ignoring the impacts, and with much slower reflexes than Alison's, the rebel drew a homemade grenade of some kind and tossed it toward Alison's feet. Using her supreme, chemically-enhanced reflexes, Alison sniped it from the air before it hit the ground, then sent another two rounds into her foe--with these striking the helmet.

It wasn't until that second shot cracked her foe's visor that she realized her suit's systems had stopped responding. A sudden bolt of panic shot through Alison as her opponent drew what looked like a homemade shotgun and strode calmly but purposefully toward her.

The Captain backpedaled, hoping her suit's systems would reinitialize before her foe reached her. The rebel's shotgun bucked so violently the muzzle went vertical, and a shower of glowing tungsten slammed into her helmet, blinding her as the visor went opaque with a spiderweb of cracks. The suit's systems would normally have compensated for the damage in less than a second, but those systems were still offline.

Aliison fired her sidearm blindly and drew her combat knife, swiping defensively as she struggled to buy time for her suit to reinitialize. A sharp kick struck her left knee, buckling it and sending her to the ground. She tried to retaliate, but without its powered servos and mimetic-gel-driven reflex enhancing systems online, her high-tech battle-suit was little more than a fully-body shackle which slowed her to less than half her unarmored speed.

She fell to the ground, but her knife found purchase in her adversary's soft steel greave, burying to the hilt. Alison wrenched the weapon left and right, hoping to sever a nerve or major artery. Her foe's shotgun roared again, blasting her forearm with such painful force that she wondered if it had been blown completely off.

The shotgun blasted a third time, hitting her right leg just below the knee. The fourth shot hammered into her visor, causing it to hiss as its self-contained breathing gases began to escape into Praelon IX's thin atmosphere. Alison's sidearm was empty, so she used it as a club to batter her adversary from her back. The rebel wrenched the weapon from her grip and threw it away, sending a wave of despair through Alison as she lost her last weapon.

She flailed with her right arm, finding purchase on what felt like the rebel's breastplate. As she did, she realized her left arm was still attached and responsive. Her helmet absorbed an impact, then another, and another, until finally succumbing to the fourth as it was knocked completely off her armored gorget.

She looked up at the heavy, iron helmet of her adversary, which looked very much like a welding mask. The ironclad rebel straddled Alison's torso, reared back with a cocked fist, and drove a bone-crushing punch into the Captain's face. Another punch knocked out two teeth, another caused her left eye to stop working, and yet another rendered her unconscious for a length of time she could only guess at.

When her vision returned, she looked up at her assailant in a daze, slowly realizing her enemy's heavy, iron helmet was gone. She could not see her enemy's face through the fog and blood in her eyes, not that it mattered. All she wanted was to spit up at her would-be killer, but her mouth failed to respond to what she knew would be her final command to it.

Then her enemy spoke, and she felt confusion mix with crushing despair at what she heard--and, perhaps more importantly, the sex of the person who said it:

"In what universe..." a woman's voice seethed. "...could YOU ever be MY equal--let alone my MASTER?!"

Before Alison could realize the full magnitude of her enemy's words, she was struck in the head and the universe spiraled into darkness.

Six weeks later, and with a dozen colonies joining Praelon IX's rebellion, the Federation formally acknowledged the commencement of Civil War II. Historians concur that while the Siege of Praelon IX was far from the most tactically important battle of CWII, or even the most dramatic, its cultural importance rivals that of any single event in Federation history.