I awake abruptly, brought into consciousness by the sound of pulser fire. Slow and methodical, as if two soldiers are repeatedly firing at the same target.
“Target practice?” I wonder aloud, blearily reaching for my old Singularity uniform and finding an identical replacement instead.
Someone entered my room last night. Well, someone besides the eight spinolings who lay in pairs around the room, squished together like conjoined twins. Vertical pupils following my every move. I swallow, heart racing at the plethora of puppies. Uncertain if I’m food or mom. Until Ling1 licks my face, reminding me how far we’ve come.
“Oh, whose a good boy, you are!” I say, giving him belly rubs.
We’ve come a long way from when I first warped these puppies into life, ready to blast them at a second’s notice, a feeling that returns in front of their hungry stares.
My tech suit was cleaned and polished during my sleep, practically shining in the dark. Just how long was I out?
I start slipping into my spandex-like anti-rad layer when I realize both fingernails and toenails are no longer clear, but a lustrous black, smooth and shiny like a synthetic diamond. Or chitin. My complexion is fair, and has only grown paler under the protection of armor, giving me a goth chick vibe I am in no way a fan of. Dark lipstick and dyed black hair just isn’t for me, especially cause my eyebrows are brown and would look funky unless I dyed them as well.
>Terran Thena: Uhm.. If someone ran a bioscan on me, would I read as human?
>Executrix Alaea: About time you woke up. Uh, depends on the scanner, if it was a quick scan or if they logged every molecule, or if they were capable of detecting my nanites. You’d show up as human or humanoid on most scans, a few would probably flag you as a Collective engineered bioform.
Her words hang in my mind. Collective Engineered Bioform.
Black fingernails run over my ribs seeking the bullet hole that once gave me a heart attack. Smooth skin, unblemished by scars only makes me shiver more. I’ve become something no other human being has. A hybrid of sorts.
My hand extends, about to test my newfound telekinesis when more pulser fire echoes down the hallway. I don’t have time for mental push ups and hastily stuff myself into uniform, scowling as regrowing leg hairs complicate things.
My new fingers tap open the polished tech suit, only for an error to appear on Its internal HUD, visible through an unpolarized faceshield. In big bold red letters.
“CHECK YOUR WARP HUD ATHENA”
Out of curiosity I comply, finding a new combat suit waiting in inventory for me, labeled ‘Don’t get shot TriThenar Shielded Edition’ with another note in big bold red letters saying “PICK THIS ONE ATHENA!”
“Goofballs.” I laugh, warping in the new power armor.
Unlike my earlier models this one was fully customized, based off the combat suits Red’s elite guard were wearing, specifically the sergeant’s armor which carries a shield generator. Explaining why some combat armors were shielded and others were not.
“I’m a little higher than a sergeant.” I say, exploring the suit.
There are four bundles of tentacles, one in each arm and leg from my old technician suit but the armor is double layered and reinforced, meaning this suit probably cannibalized parts from six others. Then there is the reactor core. Somehow Alaea crammed five reactors into this slick bitch, enough to power three independent shields, all with different recharge times as they each pull from a different reactor, the first shield was the weakest intentionally designed to break first so it could begin recharging and allowing the second layer to take damage in the meantime. Best of all is a display in the top right of my Suit’s hud, a wireframe outline of my armor accompanied by shielding and health readouts, like a four health bar Hero-marine.
10 / 10 Outer Shield (+1 per second)
50 / 50 Second Shield (+0.5 per second)
100 / 100 Final Shield (stable*)
150 / 150 Health
Regen rates for the outer shield is a constant 1 per second, while the second shield is half that, and the final shield is an entirely different model, one that takes hours to fully charge but is highly stabilized and will not decay if power is removed, so power can be shifted to other suit functions. Like charging my new weapons.
“Don’t get shot is right!”
>Terran Thena: Thanks for the armor! It’s clever.
>Executrix Alaea: You’re welcome, muhwa!
Onomatopoeia always seems weird, but I can picture her blowing me a kiss. An uncanny mental image considering I see her as myself, like making a kissy face after talking to yourself in the mirror. I shrug off, moving to the weaponry. My pulse rifle has been shortened into a pulse carbine with multiple fire settings, old classics like semi auto and full auto are there, but three burst options have been added, each designed to defeat variable levels of armor or shielding without dumping the entire magazine and getting stuck watching my battery charge.
“Hawt damn. This is the best christmas present a girl could have.”
But the new toys don’t end there. I’ve been given a proper railgun that slots into a selfsealing scabbard between my reactors where it can be concealed and protected, while maintaining a charge.
The cherry on top is a sleek plasma pistol, long and thin, slotted into my extra thick leg armor and large enough for my power armor to grasp it, while also possessing an odd custom grip carved into the handle. Based off it’s position I can immediately guess what it’s for, and awkwardly open the armor to grasp the plasma pistol in one human hand.
Ah, feels good. Now I’m armed in and out of the suit. With sustained firepower, burst firepower, and ‘oh shit’ firepower. All before I see the launcher icon. Two anti tank missile icons seem to wink at me, perfect armaments for yesterday’s battles. Both missiles are tucked away in armored silos, keeping the shoulder mounted launcher free to select from missiles and a magazine of twenty Monster-can sized grenades of various flavors from High Explosive to Incendiary to smoke to mustard gas all sitting ready to be fired.
The mustard gas option confuses me. That would have killed all the Tulverians, so why hadn’t the Novan’s deployed them?
>Terran Thena: There are chemical warfare grenades?
>Executrix Alaea: Specially made, only Red’s elite guards had them.
>Terran Thena: I got lucky again didn’t I?
>Executrix Alaea: Not really. All told we didn’t find many combat suits and the gas grenades seem out of style. Leftovers from a previously conquered faction. There are a lot of odds and ends like that. All the tech suits are actually cobbled together from six different humanoid factions and made with resources mined on three hundred individual worlds. Logistical hell. But the AI is cooperating. Or at least he’ll cough up manifests and is not attempting to hinder Factory production.
>Terran Thena: Focus, what happens if I fire a gas grenade?
>Executrix Alaea: Probably nothing. I’m not sure they work. Well, let me clarify, they are fully functional mechanically and will survive an EMP, but Azurhai fight with robotic sculptures, Tulverians aren’t biologically susceptible, and Singularity gas masks actually work. With all the radiation and poison on the world already no one is going to succumb to a gas they don’t breathe. Maybe if you get inside a bunker and pop smoke in their air conditioning unit…
Niche utility is very likely something I’ve wished for in the past, but this is ridiculous!
“Great, I have four universally accepted warcrimes sitting inches behind my head and they aren’t even effectively evil! Ugh, is this how Mengsk feels after missing with a nuke?”
Armored up, I exit the supply room, finding three lings on one side and a single ling standing about twenty feet to the opposite. Subtle distortions in my view clue me into the predator hiding there, and I can do nothing but laugh at how he’s using the ling as a sort of traffic cone.
‘Ha, Stealth hunter, you did great, time for a real name.’ I say via our hive mind, immediately bombarded with suggestions.
‘Prowler kitty.’ Spiderman.
‘Fluffy.’ Wormface.
‘Death from Below.’ Emurine.
‘Buttlicker.’ Barker.
“Yeah… I should have seen those coming a mile away.” I mutter to no one.
Invisible beasts are somewhat rare in Mythology, probably because it is hard to imagine a null value, like, can you mentally picture invisible?
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
No, of course not!
So my natural preference to look at myths for names like I did with Spiderman and Helen comes up dry at first. The only thing I recall being invisible in myths has to do with the Helmet of Hades, or the modern interpretation of it as Harry Potter’s silly shawl, an item that granted the user invisibility, kinda a long fall from Zeus’ lightning bolts or Poseidon’s trident.
“Hades, the fluffy death.” I say, laughing as more shots echo.
This time the cause is evident by a gaggle of Tulverians who seem to be shooting into the floor and rolling around in blasted dirt. Probably some iguana ritual for their dead. Or just lunch, either way it's not for me. So I beat feet, double timing it past the Tulverians, nearly making my way past when General Splendeur notices the procession of lings trailing behind me, like a row of spikey ducklings. Our eyes meet, a twinkle in his bulbs despite the fresh hole in his throatsack. Must have been shot yesterday.
“Ah, just the commander I wanted to see! Your men seem to be under the impression they are in total command of this bunker and it was not a joint operation between allies on equal footing.” Says Splendeur, all hints of his former accent gone.
The change is so stark my feet lock up. How could an accent just disappear? Was it some kind of translation error, or did he just realize talking like a frog was weird for amphibians? A bit of drool leaks out of his throatsac’s gunshot wound and I’m forced to consider the answer might be a bullet through the tongue. He does have multiple, and judging by the pink fleshy mass at least one tongue is plugging the gunshot.
Great, his version of a lisp is talking like an American. Goddamn aliens. I think.
“Ah, uhm. Walk with me General, I’m just about to make my rounds. We still haven’t gotten past those two blast doors or the lab.” I say, marching right on by and really hoping I don’t have to deal with him.
The sound of webbed feet slapping against epoxy floors tear my wish to tatters.
“That tis exactly what I wish to discuss with ze! Our Soldiers should split the watches, and have equal access to the facilities, not be shunted into a closet and forced to stand guard day and night!”
I scroll through my roster, noticing two Plasma Juggernauts are now listed, complete with fusion reactors, shielding, and collective drivers instead of surgically added humans. Ah, small victories like that make this siege worth the price, but I need to catch up on what Hygieia’s been cooking.
As soon as I chase off this frog. I wonder if Hades would eat him, my old cat Whiskers always seemed to enjoy eating frogs. A rumbling from an empty spot in the congo lings warns that Hades would be more than happy to oblige.
“Ahem!” I cough, waving the cat down, “You have more men than I do, so splitting watches evenly would be foolish. Sure my individual soldiers are stronger and better equipped but what are you expecting? We can staff the control rooms and we are the ones who need to refurbish the tanks, and armor because this is a human bunker! We’ll be commandeering their armor and weaponry for days while we sort out repairs and get suited up. I’d love to share power armor with you but it barely fits us, in fact, it would be easier to not bother with modifications and build entirely new designs or equipment that needs no modifications for your men- or uhm, soldiers.”
Splendeur’s throat inflates, and six iguanas cut me off, passive sensors detect movement behind me, and tremorsense shows that they’re creeping up the tunnel, cutting off my retreat. I’m surrounded by thirty or so man eating iguanas, with only a third the number of lings. Plasma rifles vs teeth, claws, and spines. We’d give as good as we got, but I’m the biggest target, and even with triple layered shielding I can’t forget how few plasma rifles it took to bring down those two shielded Juggernauts.
Although, those Juggernauts weren’t armed with even a single rear-facing autocannon. A very simple design adjustment that might have kept them both alive.
>Terran Thena: note, make sure Juggernauts have the capacity to deal with massed light infantry, something like a rear facing autocannon. Especially the Plasma Juggernauts, losing hardware like them is like hold-positioning a Thor at the bottom of a cliff while one marine kills it from out of vision. Inexcusably sloppy.
>Executrix Alaea: I’m generally giving them four minor weapons, always contrary to what the main armament is, energy based main cannons get machine guns, while our autocannon based Juggernauts will get a plasma fusilade or two, one facing backwards, one facing forward, and sometimes one up top or two on the sides for full 360 degree coverage. But uh, we got a shit ton of missiles, like over a hundred thousand, and the AI keeps building them in satellite bunkers, places where nanofactories are still functioning. So each Juggernaut is getting at least one launcher, and they’re all equipped with smoke grenades already so they have a little flexibility there. I’m planning to split them up, divide them into offensive squads of two or platoons of twelve, with every other Juggernaut getting enhanced sensors and having at least one in twelve be a command-naut. Then we can mix four long range missile-nauts in with plasma-nauts and also have up to date scans of terrain and movements. Ooooohhhh. We have plasma repeaters… Those are perfect for anti infantry duty! High volume of fire, low armor penetration, and runs off a self contained reactor with the option to pull from the main reactor! Which frees up some weight for the main guns or launchers to carry more shots–
Alaea continues talking to herselves, it’s irritating enough I wish for a mute button and the text vanishes, no longer interrupting my thoughts.
I’m glad Alaea is working on it, unlike the frogman stepping a bit too close. Mentally I contact all my minions, suggesting I need assistance if Spledeur decides to make things ugly.
Try it frog boi. I think, loading an incendiary grenade into my launcher. The ka-CHUNK does not go unnoticed.
“General Yurten, come now We are allies. Tis az you say. We must retrofit our living quarters, they are not fit for mongrels, let alone proud warriors of Tulveria!”
I make a show of turning shoulders to face him head on, then back to his renovations. A few iguanas are still digging, occasionally shooting, probably to break up rocks or dig deeper.
“No one is stopping your renovations.” I say, waving a hand at the supply room.
“Oh but zey are! One room! For sixty warriors! And our wounded need treatments, you cannot expect us to all share the same baths. This cannot stand! Surely a commander of your preeminence can understand zat.”
I just look at him for a moment. Froggy is literally about to gun me down in a hallway over who gets to use the extra shower?
Clanking footsteps save me from force feeding Splendeur his rear legs. Four suits approach, visors open to display singularity gasmasks. One wears the armor of an engineer, while another comes up the tunnel limping in a recently patched tech suit, cloaking module visible just behind her head.
“Ah Boss, I just came to find you after getting back- uh, I mean- just woke up after getting shot, yeah… looks like the bioinjections did their job and corporal says the General has been insistent on certain uh, Tulverian facilities he wants-” Helen begins, rambling through excuses.
Splendeur already knows about our swarm, but keeping the warp engine secret is still a priority. Or, if not secret, then retaining plausible deniability.
“Wants! We do not want zes facilities, we require zem! Our blood took this bunker, we overthrew ze Novans and deserve a fair split of ze spoils!” He calls, loudly enough for several iguanas to start hooting in ascent.
Five power armors, the lightning predator, and a dozen lings vs a minimum of thirty Tulverians. I’m liking my odds a bit more with each passing second. Which is when I get an insidious idea, and pop my helmet open, taking my gasmask off as well so I can see eye to eye with Splendeur. He’s probably fourteen feet long measured from the tip of his skull crest to the terminus of tail, which ends up positioning him about a foot beneath me.
“General, come, show me the rooms you want remodeled. Truth be told I’m already remodelling the first tunnel we cleared, in fact, we’ve already cleared out a number of supply rooms so there ought to be plenty of space. Once we get the Juggernauts up and running there will be some space in the foundry and you can custom manufacture anything in the database. But look here, we’re still scrapping Novans off the walls and licking our wounds! Baths can wait!”
Splendeur proved to be quite the diligent listener, nodding and humming at the right moments, right until the ending three words when his mouth drops open, throatsac inflating a bit. As if I just slapped his mom. Wait… Do frog generals even have mothers?
Weight shifts, Tulverians moving to elevate their guns. Whatever I said wasn't the right thing. A pity. As the Tulverians could have been useful allies, without them we’ll be stretched thin, scouts and infiltrators will be easy to miss, almost impossible really. Bummer. My pulse carbine flicks to full auto, a borderline imperceptible click that does not go unnoticed by any of the fifty organisms present-
-Helen pushes her way between Splendeur and I.
“Hey boss, I think there has been a cultural misunderstanding here. The Tuverians are amphibious so a bath is their version of an infirmary and how they purge free radicals or accumulated radiation. It’s how they moderate mutations as well.” Interjects Helen.
“Bathing to cure cancer? Damn, that’s a hell of a bath.” I blurt, curiosity and confusion overcoming my annoyance. “How would that even work? Actually, forget it, just get them however much water they need. Why is this a problem that requires my attention Helen?” I snap, motioning for those in front of me to clear a path.
Infested troopers step aside, iguanas do not. Helen taps the side of her head, closing her suit’s fishbowl helmet. A gesture I copy.
‘What’s up Helen?’
‘They need a whole lot more than just water. Their stupid fucking bath requires twenty biomass to build, besides that, they want ten of the things! Two hundred biomass wasted to save fifty! It’s ridiculous, and Hygieia is absolutely refusing to budge on their requests!’
Ugh, this feels like we’re back in middle school and someone just hit puberty. A curse of being hormonally passionate and completely unintelligibly impotent in words and experience.
>Terran Thena: Hygieia, why are you aggravating the lizards? Cmon, how many of their bodies have you uhm, what do you do with them? Actually, I don’t want to know. Would it kill you to keep me from getting shot for a day?
>Matriarch Hygieia: worm infected fifteen of them
>Matriarch Hygieia: just blast em in the back
>Matriarch Hygieia: you already outnumber them
>Terran Thena: You’re being difficult in the dumbest way possible. Cmon girl. I need manpower, something like a hundred more soldiers just to hold this bunker from the counterattacks that are inevitably going to arrive. Not to mention we still haven’t cleared it yet, there are two vaults we can’t get through. One is an entire tunnel! If Novans are behind those blast doors what do you think will happen if we kill each other?
>Matriarch Hygieia: …
>Matriarch Hygieia: fine
>Matriarch Hygieia: i am not giving them TEN kiddy pools
>Terran Thena: Start with one, then Helen can figure it out. Ten is preposterous, but I’m fine with three or four.
>Matriarch Hygieia: add another month to our timeline
“So snarky.” I hiss, wondering if that’s how we naturally respond to difficulties.
A hundred biomass can’t be a month’s worth of shipbuilding and she knows it.
Still, any delay to going home makes my spine itch, Earth needs her people back now, not in a month, and every day we delay is another day the alien scouts have to entrench themselves. If we aren’t quick, we could find ourselves leaving the irradiated trenches of Syrak-9 and landing on the irradiated Trenches of Sol-3. My teeth snap shut, killing that thought.
My helmet whooshes open.
“Alright fine, project approved, get these guys a bath. One for now, Helen, build them sequentially, but understand that ten isn’t possible given our current logistics. Shoulda just said it was your medical facilities.” I grumble, watching with a smile as Hygieia’s centipede warps into my private room and skitters through the hallway, slithering between lings to begin renovating the ‘bath’.
The emotions running across Splendeur’s face are priceless, rage, annoyance, satisfaction, and a gleaming twinkle of hope. One I share. The look of someone who believes they are going to make it home.
“General, you’re alright. Now move, I got a lab to burn down and a recycler to purge.” I say, pushing past everyone on my way to end Kerrigan’s abominable cloning.
