I run, fleeing past the bunker’s entrance to our previously captured side in a frantic flight to escape nerve gas, a compound so volatile that if one were to fill a soda can with the most well known, ie Sarin Gas, then it would possess enough fatal doses for three and a half thousand people.

  Meanwhile that nervous nelly was closer to a watermelon. Almost a gallon of fluid, roughly nine times more volume than a soda can.

  “Get everyone back! Evacuate!” I order, scrambling out of the bunker and into open trenches.

  Only to find we’ve left the wounded Tulverians behind. Our future watchdogs, the bulk of our allied fighting force. Without them I’ll be stuck on guard duty until I fill every armor and every waiting Juggernaut.

  >Terran Thena: Will Emurine be able to survive the nerve gas?

  >Matriarch Hygieia: uhm… yes and no

  >Matriarch Hygieia: Collective organisms have a higher resistance to it but if they’re trying rawdog nerve gas they’re gonna melt

  For one brief instant I contemplate what she means by melt, then stop. Hygieia is the least human of us, if she says melt, she means something awful and quite explicit.

  “Good enough.” I mutter, activating my tight beams, “Emurine, evacuate the wounded, start with anyone who can hold a rifle.”

  “Alfway done, ya bloody legend!” Emurine calls.

  Jetpacks blur through the shadows, moving our watch-dogs, correction, watch-lizards, to the foundry tunnel, keeping them within the bunker. I’m about to snap at them when Worm sends a mental image of the bunker, including areas that will be poised by the gas and areas that will be unaffected. He’s already done the work and issued orders, just as a good Sergeant ought to.

  “Oh, uhm, thanks.” I respond, jogging back into the bunker to the position he labeled as ‘Athena’s command closet’. The post is an empty supply room, with spare furniture and an eclectic assortment of supplies, half armory half cafeteria, with places for armored and unarmored personnel to sit.

  Splendeur and three iguanas are already tearing into supplies, fangs chewing through tin cans to get at various meat pates and the occasional shortbread loaf. Fulfilling our half of the bargain. Technomancy rations aren’t great, especially for saurian creatures, but they’ll keep the Tulverians alive for now. Still, they’re down to roughly forty fighters and almost that number in wounded.

  Our symbiotes got a number back on their feet and I see Wormface call in more of the symbiotes before returning to my side. I grab him by the collar and drag him into the darkness of an empty supply closet, where only he can pick up my tight beam.

  “Hey! Who the hell gave you permission to infest our allies? What do you think will happen if Splendeur finds out what you just did? He’ll shoot me first and you second!

  “Sorry sir. If he called me on it, I would have posed as an infiltrator and had Spiderman shoot me in the head until a human would be dead. Then he could claim not to have known what I was doing and act equally disgusted, maybe provide the medical scanner to the Tulverians if further evidence was required.” Wormface answers.

  I blink. The idea is so stupid it might just have worked.

  “You beautiful buffoon. Look- ah. Just get my permission before infesting anyone. That is a risk only I have the right to accept.”

  “Yessir. May I have permission to infest any on the verge of death?”

  I step back, tapping my foot in consideration. Maybe it was my dozen stepsiblings, or Whorely, but part of me doubts Wormface. He has never failed or given any hint of disloyalty, yet I can’t shake the feeling that he is loyal to Hygieia first, Collective second, and me third.

  >Terran Thena: Did you put wormface up to infesting the lizards

  >Matriarch Hygieia: hmmmmm not directly

  >Matriarch Hygieia: his orders are to collect all possible biomass and infest everything he can get away with

  >Terran Thena: You aren’t the one who gets fragged if he gets caught Hygieia.

  I can feel her eyes roll.

  >Matriarch Hygieia: there

  >Matriarch Hygieia: orders amended

  >Terran Thena: This isn’t a joke! If he gets caught I get shot! How would you like to be cut in half? Or mind controlled and locked away in stasis by your other half?!

  >Matriarch Hygieia: FINE i get it

  >Executrix Alaea: We’ll bring Kerrigan back Athena. I’m with you. We’re all with you. This was just a slip up. We all want to go home and Hygieia got a bit too eager. Like you and shielded Thors. Kerrigan is perfectly safe and the stasis pod has done full brain scans on her, down to the individual electrons running through her neurons. Which also showed me what Red injected her with.

  I jerk to attention, accidentally smacking Wormface.

  >Terran Thena: Can you fix her?

  >Executrix Alaea: That’s complicated…

  >Executrix Alaea: I can turn her back into the cat-scorpion she’s supposed to be, or I can make her more humanoid. Like Trinity. The sort of flashtraining Red used isn’t permanent either, he needed a few dozen more sessions. I just don’t know how to undo it right now. An MRI brainscan is one thing, neurosurgery is another, I’m not confident enough to risk it. Not when she’ll recover naturally. Although… If you can capture a Technocracy AI that would greatly increase my ability.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  >Terran Thena: Sure, let me just capture the planetary ruler, and all his subprocessors which are scattered across their core worlds. The most heavily fortified and industrialized worlds of an alien civilization. No way can I get one of those, and that assumes we find the AI in charge of processing data from Red’s lab. Which is a needle in a haystack of needles except each needle has about a million thermoneuclear warheads.

  >Executrix Alaea: Considering that they build nukes from fusion waste products, add a couple zeroes. They stockpile them absurdly deep, but yeah I get your point about it being difficult to capture a core world AI. Which is why I was talking about the Syrak local AI. Should be wayyyyyy smaller. Less capable, but more focused.

  >Terran Thena: Hmmm… Doubt it. They could have left the AI in orbit or somehow negotiated its landing on the good half of the planet. There are at least three other continents. All fully developed and shielded. No reason to land the most vulnerable AI to the frontline. If it’s even functional, I don't know about you, but these Novans have performed like dumbasses at every turn, they might only have the most minimal support AI instead of one of the full blown Industrial machines. Like, ChatGPT-0. There isn’t really enough here to justify sending all the hardware. Memory banks alone for a sentient AI would be… Larger than this entire bunker?

  >Executrix Alaea: Guess you’re right.

  >Matriarch Hygieia: YAWN

  >Matriarch Hygieia: Zazathur says he made the cat immune to nervous grenades

  >Matriarch Hygieia: send in the pussy patrol

  >Terran Athena: Always knew cats were overconfident.

  I know the other parts of me laugh, but that only deepens my annoyance. Hygieia went behind my back to achieve her own wants while putting ME in danger. That’s not something I would ever do. Unless… Unless I considered the other bodies as nothing more than Starcraft units, something to be bought by the platoon, ordered to fight and kill, before being deliberately sent to die in the hope of building something more. Trading ‘dead supply’ for battlecruisers. In general using tools to achieve any end.

  Inhale, then exhale. Nothing can be done about Hygieia’s inhumanity right now, not over a chat interface. So I sit down, trying to summon the lightning cat I’ve forgotten about.

  Our minds touch, and I receive a strange offer from it. The option to see through its eyes and hear what it hears. To meld our senses together as we hunt. Whether my curiosity or hubris got the better of me, I’lll never know. Either way I’m out of my body in a second, prowling through the bunker with strides so great nothing can compare.

  Crystalline claws find purchase in the epoxy floors or the steel walls, traction I’ve earned. Though it takes time to wall walk down the bunker and past the Novan defenders. Mainly due to the stealth, skin cells are constantly shifting colors to accommodate the terrain behind and around me.

  Still we stalk. Silently padding forward. Eyes see in three spectrums, infrared, visible and ultra violet shifting between the three by opening or closing a variable number of eyes. Not that I think about oscillations consciously. To me, the vision is unified, part of a whole, and gloriously clear.

  Smoke fills our mouth, metal particulates cutting on the way down. We are built for this and drop a mucosal filtercros our esophagus, trapping the worst with phlegm for later disposal. Some will be coughed up like a furball, other molecules will find integration with our crystalline fur, serving to armor us. Pain is suppressed under satisfaction, we are fulfilling our purpose for being, a dopamine spike that spreads to both our minds. Slowly advancing through the tunnel to maintain stealth.

  Why we bother is a mystery. I can already see the first grav sled. All occupants are dead, eyes gone and mouths dripping a red froth, as if lungs have liquified and ejected in a gasp. My human body shudders, nerve gas is no joke, I see why this shit was considered on par with nuclear weapons back on Earth.

  The predator doesn’t even blink. Just keeps on breathing, rapidly purrrifying the air like a cat shaped filtration vacuum. I can feel our fur growing as we walk and I’m forced to wonder why we don’t just build a couple hundred of these badass kittens for the next bunker. Uncle Swann would be so proud of them.

  We pause, looking down on a fallen soldier whose black armor and shielding is still intact, but the way he’s hanging off the grav sled with his head below his chest tells us everything. We climb atop him our slow steps passing right through -turns out Technomancy shielding has a speed threshold for activation- that’ll be great information for future shenanigans.

  >Terran Thena: I need a rocket launched bomb that can hit a shield and then slow down enough to fall through it. Kinda like a slow thrust of a crysknife.

  >Executrix Alaea: Nerd

  >Terran Thena: the slow blade pierces the shield. YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN

  >Executrix Alaea: Easy. Takes more cycles on the nanofactories than I'd like but we can work a few in. Techno-nerds already figured out some designs with reverse thrusters that trigger near shields, something about proximal polarity, idc.

  I’m already planning how to use those when my fingers tear through armor; treating reinforced, multilayed, ceramic plates, and anti slashing layers similar to kevlar all fall away like a scratching posts’s ablative cardboard. In seconds we’re through the plate and suddenly I understand how this particular creature killed six earlier guards with minimal help from Helen the coward.

  “Cmon, move on.” I order, still wishing to move cooperatively rather than taking total control.

  Somehow we both understand I can hijack this body, but for now sharing senses is disorienting enough, almost like being a carsick passenger. I can see the world passing around me but cannot direct it.

  An hour later and the Predator reports no nerve gas remaining (partially due to a very short half life) nor any bodies unchecked. We’ve searched every supply room, alcove, and the barracks in this tunnel. Human supplies get sandwiched between food stuffs and waste disposal rooms. Because of course the Technocracy considers humans to be equipment.

  There is only one room we cannot access. Entrance blocked by a reinforced vault door with deliberate accommodations to be as difficult as possible for anyone attempting a forceful breach. Positioned behind a long narrow tunnel with an especially low ceiling I understand it's probably a deadfall trap where an explosion is guaranteed to cave in the tunnel for a solid quarter mile.

  Doubtlessly, that is our AI core room, but short of driving the super-laser-tank over here and melting our way through that door, I have no answers. We can only benefit from a functioning, unburied AI. Still, it makes me smile when I see an Ereaper parking the superlaser tank in front of the vault door, sending a message unfettered by vaguery.

  ‘Behave, or else.’

  We haven’t the time to waste cracking vaults. So we divvy up the tunnels and let the Tulverians take the first two watches while we recover. Twelve hours from now we’ll more than double in fighting strength and I need sleep. Unaugmented humans aren’t meant to be inside Technomancer armor at all, let alone days at a time. But this facility has decontamination showers, a real hot water shower that I haven’t enjoyed in weeks. To say I'm ripe is a disgusting understatement and I spend a criminally long time abusing the decontamination shower’s purpose. With my new cat to stand watch at the door and keep all iguanas or curious emus from peeking.

  If only the Novans used real beds and not metallic cubicles that are temperature regulated. For an advanced ‘Technocracy’ I find all their tech to be pretty basic shit. Like really, is it too much to ask for a blanket? Or an Ipad? Or a damn pillow that isn’t the skull of my enemies?! Why is everything neural jacks and replacing eyeballs?

  “Whatever.” I mutter, settling for a freshly reincarnated pillow in the form of Ling1.

  After a quick scrub of course, Hygieia might have cooties.

  25 / 25 Biomass (Hygieia’s pool of available biomass)

  734 / 2000 Courier Ship Progress

  15 / 72 Powered Armors (+16 combat types from the gassed tunnel)

  15 / 65 Mechanized Units

  1 / 1 Protochronian Artefacts (Alaea’s warp engine)

  2 Nanofactories

  1 MacroFactory (Foundry) Novan Primary Fabricator

  0 / 100 Project ‘ODIN’

  +68 human bodies were gassed and recovered. (Hygieia will take 17 for building her own forces.)