Steel waited for Amy to get Anne to the other side of the base. She had no need to see Steel like this. He picked the unconscious raider up off the floor, took the man to an empty room, threw him in and waited for him to wake up. As the man awoke, Steel dragged two chairs to where the man was lying on the ground and sat down. "My friend, you have a lot of explaining to do. Not to sound cliche, but we can do this the easy way or the hard way. Both of them are going to suck for you but you get about two chances with the hard way to ever walk again. Do I make myself clear?"
The man looked at him and spit in Steel's face. "You have no idea who we are, and you never will. Go spend some time with your loved one's fucker, because I'll personally make you watch me burn them alive."
Steel wiped the spit off of his face and stood up. "You people are just horrible at answering questions," Steel said as he hit the man hard across his already bleeding face with the shotgun, knocking out some of the few teeth the man hadn't lost to rot.
"We're going to try again. I want to stress that that was about as nice as I'm going to get if you keep shit like that up. So let me at least ask a question this time," Steel said picking the man up off the ground by the throat and slamming him into a wall. He pointed the gun at the man's knee and asked his question,"Who do you work for?"
"Fuck off asshole, you're wasting your time."
Steel shot the man in the foot, causing the man to scream in pain. "Who do you work for. Next one goes in your kneecap."
A combination of fear and recognition spread across the man's face as he looked into Steel's angry green eyes. "Oh my God... I watched you die... I watched those aliens kill you. How... I watched that Hunter put his knife through your chest," the man pulled himself away as memories flooded into Steel's mind. Steel reeled back as a new portion of his life came flooding back.
"I remember..." Steel said quietly. "Monsters! You killed them! Women, children... all dead because of you."
He stood up, again grabbing the man by the throat. "I just wish I could make your death as painful as you made theirs," Steel said raising the gun to the man's head and leaning in close. "I need you to deliver a message to your boss."
"So you're going to let me live?"
"I never said that." He pulled the trigger.
Steel came over the radio, "Amy, tell Anne I need her to find their ship. I need to send it back to its owner."
He walked into the hangar with the mangled body over his shoulder. He threw the body on top of the sort of pile he had created earlier and found his knife still lodged in the now cold body of one of the thugs. He removed it and wiped the blood from the blade.
He walked slowly back towards the control center, feeling more tired than he had felt in a long time. Not physically tired, but emotionally exhausted. He remembered his own apparent death. The genocidal spree he watched the Decimitians run. How they used humans as their pawns to do the most heinous crimes against their own kind. Cities burned. Innocent people slaughtered, tortured, and sold into slavery. All because the aliens promised men like this just a little bit of power in their new found ownership of the human race.
The Empire was an example. The Decimitians staged a defeat to allow the Empire to take control of the human race as a puppet government. Those in the farther outreaches of space realized the fiction of this. Humans away from the central ring were still subject to the horrors of their true overlords. Random settlements were wiped out when their usefulness ran out. Steel had been living in a bubble. With his memories coming back he realized once how he and men like him had been the tip of the spear, driving towards the heart of the Decimitians. They never made it. He had been one of the lucky ones. Anyone that he had cared about were already a part of the fight.
He looked at the bodies of the men that he had killed. He realized what he was capable of. He had just killed a man in cold blood. He was better than that, but never before had he been filled with such anger, such grief, and such regret all at once. It was too much for him to take. His heart was still pounding, he knew the feeling. He was losing his grip on reality. The killer inside of him was gaining control, something he had never let happen in his entire life. His parents taught him better than that. He wondered if they had ever expected him to make it here. To the forefront of the war
He heard light footsteps behind him. He turned around to see Anne standing next to the pile of bodies, the usual spring in her step gone. She stared at the one that she had knocked out, now dead and faceless. "He was going to take me away..." her voice quiet and shaky, as though she was on the verge of tears.
"You didn't kill him. I did."
"To protect me."
"If that helps you sleep at night."
She stared at the super soldier standing next to her, covered in blood, looking at the carnage in front of him. Before he had been friendly, understanding. She wondered what had happened in that room.
Steel snapped back to reality and looked at the woman standing with him. His anger subsiding "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to snap. These men... they were more evil than you could imagine. Until I find who they work for I can't do any of your missions anymore. I need to end them. These men are no match for men like me or Nash but they terrorize innocent people. They're slave traders, murderers, thieves, con men."
The couple continued staring at the bodies for a few minutes. As Steel began to search the bodies Anne left the room.
About an hour later Steel stepped into the control room and looked around. The computer monitors were blank and Anne was holding a hard drive the size of a large book.
"What is that?"
"Daddy."
"I'm sorry?"
"As I told you before my father designed an incredibly complex series of codes that allows me to access security feeds from across the universe. It takes a few days when he's this embedded in the system but we need to move so here he is. It's quite fascinating really. My father gave me this, it was his life's work and has gone extremely far in sowing the seeds to destroy the Empire. For example, it found you."
"Thank your father for me then."
This was met with a long pause.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to-"
"Not your fault. The man who was at fault was taken care of not too long ago. Moving on, you looked like you had a question."
"A favor really."
"Shoot."
"I need the team."
"Done. I needed you men boys for security. There were dangerous contacts that I had that knew too much about me. So that's what I had your friends do. Taking out my former friends before they could kill me. It's a fucked up world isn't it Max?"
"So what are you going to do now?"
"Rebuild a network around contacts that you make. You're very well connected Captain Steel, you just don't remember it yet.  Heck, I have someone working for me now that wants you dead. Don't worry though she's not a threat. I'm also going to try to prevent the Empire from acquiring anyone who would even remotely do what I do. Give me a week, Max, and I'll be back to full speed. I've still got all of my security codes that give me eyes everywhere, I'm just lacking in some people who execute my orders. So do you know where you're going to start?"
"Did you find the ship?"
"Of course I did."
"Good. Then we start by sending the bastards back to where they came from."