The elevator doors opened up, revealing a cold, frozen landscape. Rocky mountains surrounded fields of ice and snow, while rivers of viscous, blue liquids that definitely were not water poured into a large lake, dripping from various ancient Orokin structures and cooling the air around them.
“It’s cold!” Rhino blurted, ruining the magnificent silence of the Orb Vallis, a Corpus attempt at revitalizing the otherwise burning lands of Venus. “Really cold!”
“It’s not that cold…” Frost grunted back as he pulled out his favourite shotgun. “Just a breeze.”
Volt glanced at Excalibur, who had insisted on joining the squad even though he was supposed to have been practising for a mastery test. Excalibur shivered a little, but shook off the snow that was gathering on his shoulders.
“There are 40km/h winds blowing round, Frost! You’re fine though, you have a coat!” Rhino retorted as he tugged on Frost’s sleeve. “We’d be fine if we had your coat!”
“Well you can’t have it!” Frost snapped back. “Anyway, what are we doing out here?”
“We’re helping the people of Cet- uh, Fortuna!” Excalibur beamed. “You know, the poor, singing debt slaves!”
Frost tilted his head to one side. “So how are we going to do that?”
Excalibur bounced around excitedly. “Eudico said that we need to do some things around here that will lead us to a data vault that will erase the debt of some Fortuna citizens! They’ll be saved from debt!”
The other three Tenno glanced around.
“And where is this data vault?” Frost asked.
Excalibur hesitated. He glanced at his UI, not sure how to answer. Eventually, Eudico, the leader of Solaris United, spoke through their communicators, sending them a message.
“Hey, Sparky.”
“Hey, Eudico!” Excalibur replied. “Where’s this data vault?”
Rhino laughed and pointed at Volt. “He’s Sparky! Not Excal!”
“You’re all Sparky to me, boys. There’s three data vaults, but just so we know which one’s right, I need y’all to catch a Corpus drone. That’ll give me a clue which vault it’s in.”
“Cool!” Excalibur seemed overly excited as Eudico put a waypoint on their maps. He summoned his K-Drive hover board and sped off. Rhino grabbed his K-Drive too and chased after Excalibur.
“You going to join them?” Frost asked as he glanced at Volt.
“Yeah, but not on a K-Drive.”
…
Rhino and Excalibur arrived at the little Corpus bunker where the drone was located, only to find that Volt and Frost were already there.
“How…”
“Archwing,” Volt immediately replied. “Why go around mountains when you can go over them?”
Rhino shrugged, then shot off the drone’s shields. Immediately Eudico got to work, remotely hacking the device.
“Do me a favour, Sparky, stop them Corpus from mucking that drone up!”
“What Corpus?” Excalibur asked.
“That Corpus…” Volt sighed as Corpus soldiers streamed out of the bunker, all of them using fancy weapons.
Excalibur shrugged then started shooting at the Corpus. Frost tried to make himself useful by shielding the drone with his Snow Globe, then complained whenever the drone moved. If it hadn’t been for Eudico apologising over comms about it all taking so long, Frost probably would have been in a worse mood.
Once Eudico was done hacking, the drone teleported away.
“Perfect! A couple of dents but otherwise intact! We’ll make use of this later. In the mean time, I got an idea where this vault is, but you all gotta make a ruckus, cause a distraction and clear out some troops!”
“So we’re just murdering people?” Excalibur asked.
“I guess so…” Volt replied.
“You’re causing a distraction, Sparky. Them Corpus wouldn’t spare ya if your roles were swapped!”
Excalibir shrugged then shot a Corpus drone. “Maybe we should head to a more populated place then.”
“Like that base with the massive orb thing on it?” Rhino suggested as he pointed at the nearest Corpus stronghold. “Sure!” Rhino leaped onto his K-Drive and sped off, running over several unlucky Corpus grunts.
After about twenty or so dead Corpus though, not to mention two dead Hyena robots and a Jackal proxy, the alarms continued to blare but the Corpus well and truly had their hands full. The Jackal though had taken Excalibur by surprise. He had recently fought the Jackal prototype on a ship and now the Corpus were suddenly deploying them like normal robots.
“Alright!” Eudico’s voice echoed. “We got them scattered and distracted and on the run! Now we just need you to sneak into that base there and erase those lodgers!”
“Which base?” Rhino asked.
“The one we’re standing at, dummy!” Frost hissed.
“Yep, that’s the one, Frosty. Do me a favour though, security’s tough, try not to set off any alarms. Otherwise they’ll just wipe the data and transfer backups elsewhere and we’ll have to do all that muck again.”
The four Tenno glanced at each other.
“Not it!” Frost immediately proclaimed.
“You can’t just say not it to get out of spy missions!” Frost tutted. “That being said… not it.”
Volt rolled his neural sensors. “Well we ain’t sending Excalibur in there, so I guess I’ll do it…” Volt grunted as he headed over to the base’s main entrance. “Try not to get yourselves killed in the meantime.”
Rhino waited until Volt was out of earshot, then decided to shoot some more Corpus. “Screw him, I’m gonna shoot what I want!”
“What about that big orb thing up there?” Excalibur pointed at the thing that was obviously alive.
“I’ll shoot that too! Once I’m finished killing these things here.”
Frost and Excalibur chilled out inside a Snow Globe while Rhino went back to murdering things. After about five minutes, they began to get bored. It wasn’t until Eudico suddenly started talking that they all remembered that they had a mission or something.
“Excellent, Sparky! You wiped that vault clean and stopped them transferring it elsewhere! Good job! I got some stuff to do, head back to Fortuna if you want more work.”
Eudico’s voice faded away and Volt emerged from the base.
“You know, it’s not easy doing fricking spy missions when you guys are making Hyenas spawn everywhere!” Volt sighed.
“You got it done though.”
“Yeah, eventually…” Volt glanced at Rhino. “What is he doing?”
Frost and Excalibur both shrugged.
“He’s trying to kill it.”
“You know that Orb is invulnerable to traditional weapons, right?”
“It ain’t stopping Rhino from trying.”
Volt shook his head. “You also know that it starts shooting you and calls in aerial bombardments when it gets angry, right?”
Rhino suddenly flew past the three Tenno, having been knocked off his feet by a giant laser.
“Maybe we should leave it alone…” Excalibur suggested as he grabbed his gun.
“But I want to kill it!” Rhino shouted as Frost helped him up.
“You can’t kill it right now, idiot!” Frost snapped. “Let’s get out of here before it blows us all to bits!”
Rhino pouted, then relented. “Fine. But when we can kill it, I call dibs on the final blow!”
“Whatever…” Frost sighed as he and Volt both rubbed their faces in annoyance. “Let’s get out of here already…”