FSE

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Chapter 27

One of Clicks' warrior drones exploded, as a coherent energy beam lanced through its center with a terrible crunching curdling noise, instantly atomizing its viscera and detonating its shell, chunks bouncing off the armored walls. SSGt Herrin growled, long leonine tail lashing hard behind him, as the electronic lock fizzled and clicked open under the angry ministrations of his fiddling paws. A shove of his shoulder and he was inside the Star of Aden's computer center, as Clicks and her bugs shrieked and redoubled their savage assault in the hallway behind him, ripping into Marines and Naval security staff that had responded in force and with great speed to their invasion.

Stinging pain surged hot from his scalp, as one of the technicians inside yelled and fired, skimming his skull with a pistol round. Herrin threw himself flat and returned fire, splattering the tech's guts across the far wall behind him. He didn't waste time, firing again to kill the second tech, bullets tearing into his flesh and bouncing him off the weapon safe he'd been desperately trying to open.

Not bothering to check the bleeding wound in his scalp, Herrin pushed himself up and ran down the readout-stuffed chamber, booting open a second roo just as someone had been about to open it. The fur beyond yelped, falling back as the door caromed into his face, then screamed and covered his head with his arms as the burly, furious, bloody lion came rushing through.

Herrin never slowed, as he assessed. The rifle came up, and as if by some mystical Marine autopilot began finding targets and putting them down as he looked around. The computer chamber was old-fashioned, large banks of glittering consoles lining the walls, entirely stationary, of a massive two-story chamber festooned with catwalks and scattering computer technicians.

He knew there would be a half-dozen Naval security staff here, two of whom he killed with deadly-accurate center of mass shots as he charged into cover behind a heavy steel desk. The other four he noted moving into position and trying to develop flanking actions, two of them letting loose a stream of hip-fired shots that danced and spanged off his cover, jerking the bolted-down desk with the force of their impacts.

Herrin rolled to one side and under the desk as the first flanker opened fire from a catwalk above, ringing his steel-case cover like a bell and scattering plastic flimsies everywhere in chunks. The old lion whipped his head and rifle out of cover and put two in the wolf's crotch and out his upper back, sending the leaning creature into a slouch that slid it over the rail and had its corpse smashing to the deck not ten feet from him.

He saw the grenade belt and grimly took in what it meant. When something heavy clunked off the floor plating five feet from him, he surged out of cover, vaulted the desk, and threw himself flat just in time to avoid being juiced by the high-explosive device's detonation.

Driven from cover, his only defense was to attack. In the moment of surprise, his opponents not having expected him to move so swiftly, he squeezed off a rippling burst of fire that forced both attackers in front of him to duck behind their cover. The Staff Sergeant surged to his feet, charging toward their position as the remaining enemy on the cat walk lined up and squeezed off.

Herrin grunted, and vaulted over enemy cover before the two Naval crewmen could react. His rifle butt slammed into one of their heads with a meaty thwack, sending the fox spinning to the ground, his scalp spurting blood and rifle flying from senseless paws. The other turned just in time to receive a booted foot to the muzzle, howling out an agonized yelp as the bone snapped. Herrin brought the rifle back to his shoulder and popped off two shots into the thrashing wolf, an instant before thundering automatic fire drove him under the same cover they'd used against him.

To either side, techs scattered, throwing themselves to the floor or fleeing the chamber in a panic. Herrin grabbed at the dead wolf's belt, yanked a grenade free, pulled the pin, and flung it out at nobody in particular, bracing just before the thing exploded with a somehow metallic thud, adding fuel to the chaos. He popped up then, and squeezed off a three-round burst, sending hot iron rounds up through the catwalk and into the wolverine who'd kept him pinned down until that moment.

As the last security sailor collapsed, spurting blood from his gut and chest, the coherent light beam was back, curdling air in the hall outside with a sound like bacon thrown raw and greasy onto an overheated griddle. The responding shrieks raised his fur even a room away. Despite instinct's call to hide, Herrin didn't waste time worrying about the bugs and the Naval personnel they were fighting. He just ran to the computer consoles, ignoring the growing warm wetness running down his back and gut.

That first shot when he'd broken cover had passed right through him, he knew, and only steely determination and twenty years of being a hard-boiled stubborn old Leatherneck kept him from crying out in pain like a child. Nonetheless, he shouldered the rifle on its sling so he could press a paw to his gut, refusing to look down and assess the injury. To do so could encourage shock, and falling down wasn't on his itinerary for the next five minutes and change.

A fast-expanding sense of cold was radiating from the wound, which he knew wasn't good. The smell was a bad sign too. He brushed aside the stink of a ruptured bowel, and grabbed onto the computer bay for stability before staritng to work.

With his right paw, he started tapping out instructions into a console older than he was, and thanked his lucky stars for those five years he'd spent aboard the Star of Aden back in the early days of his long, long career.

Mr. Gunner flexed his sweaty paws once, twice, and stared for another second at a screen that seemed over-large and confused with a swarm of calculations, numbers, and readouts. Then he jammed his thumb down on a final entry key, dedicating his station to the course he'd plotted.

"Firing!"

Outside, Void Shadow startled, his virtual world jolting in surprise as the Fist of the Nascent Dawn suddenly flared to life with a fussilade of shots. Shots fired from the wrong bloody side, he growled to himself. Then he sat and stared, despite his lightning-quick reflexes and pilot training, as the four silvery rail gun bolts did something that shouldn't have been possible.

They curved. They curved and climbed, like a skater in a half-pipe, up the side of a suddenly-detected gravitic field. In a graceful arc, they reached its apex and seemed to hover there a moment to his eyes, like a doomed surfer on the crest of a collapsing wave, contemplating the inevitable crash down into darkness.

Something in the neural link, his sensors and computer core, perhaps, told him that the pause at their arc was entirely perceptual. They were, in fact, accelerating, the centrifugal gravitational force of the Fist's great grav-rings putting their own simulated weight and mass into using those metal slugs like stones from a gigantic sling.

All four crashed straight into the Star of Aden with such force that the great battleship rippled and shuddered, before letting out a torrential stream of tortured, sundered mechanical parts, bits of armor, and crushed corpses from the areas immediately around its docking gantries. The gantries themselves flew away in a spreading cloud of pieces, torn polymer fabrics and armored supports warping and flailing like rag dolls.

Then the torpedoes hit, in the stunned moment between taking such severe direct hits and recovering from the shock of a sudden overwhelming attack. The first struck near the Star's aft, plunging through her armor with a sickening silence that made the jacked-in pilot flinch. Before it could explode, two more of the ship-killer fish slammed into her amid-ships. A fourth was swatted down, blown to twisting bits in space by a lance of coherent light that arced up from the Star of Aden's frontal batteries.

A trio of glowing balls of light expanded out from the penetration holes, filling holds and chambers with the lethal atomizing power of those ship-slaying warheads. He could see molten ejecta hurtling from her, spewing like blood from sword wounds. A lesser ship would have instantly broken up from such a savage sneak attack. Even some of the fleet's largest cruisers would have been gutted, utterly ravaged. The Star of Aden was built of tougher stuff than that. Her maneuvering thrusters ignited, and the great vessel, spewing billowing light and smoke, turned ponderously to face her frontal batteries toward the until-now immobile Fist of the Nascent Dawn, preparing to blow her into tiny pieces.

As suddenly as she had opened fire, the nimble Fist of the Nascent Dawn accelerated, going from a dead stop to thousands of kilometers per hour in a punishing burst of speed and power through her triple engines, even though one of them began immediately venting glowing streams of plasma from damaged systems.

Void Shadow grinned, vicious and feral in his quiet darkness, and waited for the Star of Aden's guns to begin tracking so he could hit them from the blind side. They didn't. The guns didn't even move. Stunned, he stared a moment, wondering if one of those torpedoes had somehow disabled her fire control systems.

As if stunned herself, the Star of Aden shuddered again, and began giving chase, even though her guns had gone silent. Then one fired, sending an arc of plasma bolts spewing into the night, missing by a wide margin before a rail cannon bulls-eyed the Fist but deflected high off her gravitic shields.

Void laughed, as he willed his star fighter to power up, making sure his camouflage and ECM were still functional. For now, he would follow the chase. The small wounds his little bird could offer wouldn't be enough to matter much against the Star of Aden's massive armor and bristling armaments. But, at the right moment, he could be just enough of a distraction against an unescorted capital ship.

"Captain, they're coming again!"

"I see that, son, get back on your gun!"

The scruffy private, filthy from hours of battle, finished reloading his mounted machine gun's ammo chain and opened fire, blasting out hundreds of rail-accelerated metal slivers into the charging 'indigs' as a massive wave of them crested the edge of a collapsed building and charged toward the Junta position amidst rubble around the hospital.

It was the tenth wave attack that day, and the private was starting to wonder, in a frantic chest-pounding sort of way, whether they would run out of bullets or enemies first. To either side of him, other soldiery opened fire with rifles, grenade launchers, sonic amplification cannons that juiced enemies' innards and slapped them to the ground like jello-filled rag dolls.

Return fire from the drug-maddened gang hordes came in every form he could imagine, from antique jacketed steel rounds to light plasma weapons, and the private pushed away the sense of terror that told him he'd be hit at any moment. He knew, now, that the only thing standing between victory and slaughter was to hold their morale and keep firing regardless of risk.

"Regimental field artillery, this is squad seven, we need fire support! Danger close, at coordinates..."

"Fuck fuck fuck that's a lot of them!..."

"I gotta reload!..."

"SNIPER!"

Through the red haze of battle, over the burning, flashing lights that came off the end of his rotary rail gun, the private saw something shimmer out there amidst the teeming horde. They eddied around it, a river of psychosis and slaughter around the base of an invisible mountain.

Then, for the barest moment, he saw it, as flame and death spat from its upheld paws. A glimmering, shimmering ghost, see-through and warping the very air around it, unleashed a flood of ordnance. His eyes watched the incoming shells, frozen in slow motion, as a stream of high-explosive concrete-shredding grenades and heavy cannon shells came straight at him, fired from what looked to his eyes like a pair of gigantic antique six-shooters.

He had enough time for a tear to half-fall, before he was shattered to pink spray by explosives that blew out the concrete structure's main support column and brought segments of the defensive section smashing down with pulping force.

"Yeah, Jingo, you heard me right. Stop fuckin' around and get this shit done."

Derrypunched the button that shut off transmission, and dumped the stolen radio transceiver. Then he stood up and issued the only command he needed to.

"Move out."

With that, the Dragonslayers were off, clambering over rubble heaps and scrambling down their sides, swiftly moving their prisoners and wounded precious cargo inexorably toward the embattled hospital fortification. Somewhere off to the west, thunderous explosions were ripping the air, as artillery fired from some other place in the vast underground structure dumped heavy fire on an attack Derry had just added to.

He prayed the carnage was beign wrought on the psychotic gangs that ruled the undercity, and not on the more intelligent and decent humans and furs he'd just called in his last favors with. If he'd had time to think about it, the black wolf would have realized the hole in his ethics. As it was, the only thing he stopped to think about was when Nivea tilted her head, listened a moment, as one of the bursts flew clear of the hospital's side.

"Shit, they're using flesh-ripper shells. Won't do a damn thing to Olly, but I pity the grunts..."

Another shell sky-burst, andDerry's ocular was fast enough to pick up and render the expulsion of white-hot shrapnel for a fraction of a second before the majority had passed beyond sight. The black wolf frowned, but never slowed his pace, despite the burning pain in his wounded rear.

They had to stop a dozen times, as enemy patrols rushed past them toward the fight. Even with the whole unit in active camouflage being effectively invisible, they only had one spare camo blanket, which had been wrapped around his sister. Their prisoners' muzzles had been gagged, their paws tied together and balled up in tape to prevent them making noise with rubble, but they couldn't be trusted not to try making a run for it, no matter how gimpy the cuffs that kept their ankles almost immobile made them.

Unfortunately it also made them slow and clumsy, and by stop number twelveDerrywas starting to consider asking Derkin to drug them unconscious, just so they could bury the prisoners for a while and come back for them later.

Kerr called out, from a spot some distance ahead, through the communal audio feed.

"Major reinforcements are being pulled off this flank and sent towards Four's position. If we're going to make the move, lead, it needs to be soon."

"Understood, Seven. Eight, see if you can find us an easy path through their defenses. We'll wait for your signal."

Candace made a paw motion akin to tipping a non-existant cap, and was up over the berm of rubble before he had a chance to admonish her to be careful. Kerr continued then.

"I'll stay where I am, if you don't mind Lead. Good vantage point, I can cover your entry."

"Which will leave you outside after we're through. No, Seven, you're with us."

"Lead, with all respect? I'm not much use in close quarters, not like I am with a rifle and nobody looking. Let me stay out here, I swear I'll be fine."

Derrysighed, and gave Nivea a long-suffering look. She shrugged at him, from where she knelt next to the near-naked feline prisoner, rubbing warmth into the shivering girl's back. He'd forgotten, thanks to the climate-controlled body suit, just how cold the underground could get sometimes.

"Alright, Seven, but don't make me regret this."

"I won't, Lead. I won't."

Derkin was knelt down next to his sister, holding her wrist to check vitals. When he looked up,Derrycouldn't see his face through the mask, and felt his heart lurch with sudden terror. The slightest shake of the armadillo's head would have signaled all the wrong things, things he just couldn't accept.

"She's stable, Lead. Best move quick, the last bit's going to be rough on her, and it's better to do while she's stable."

He blew out the breath he hadn't remembered holding, and nodded. As if by providence, Candace's voice came in again just then.

"I can already see a path. A couple of confused-looking vulpines standing guard and some entrenchments with boards over them for mobility. Whoever pulled this side bare was idiotic."

"Good. Let's get moving, everybody."

Cassy paced, paws clasped together behind her back, clammy inside her suit, ten paces to the bank of corpse lockers, thirty paces from concrete wall to steel security door. On the table behind her, Tenh Kandal lay spread out as if offered up to the autopsy gods, naked of his ruined clothing, his hamburgered chill flesh exposed through burnt-off fur. He hadn't spoken to her since they'd entered the hospital, and she had followed his instructions.

Convincing a Captain that his soldiers needed to follow Stalker as an escort wasn't difficult. Convincing him to think nothing of abandoning a post to a single fire team pair had been far more difficult.

Then the lion in her head had gone silent, as if he had never been. An hour on, she wasn't sure he had ever spoken in the first place, and was sweating the possibility that she was just simply losing her mind. She had, after all, been talking to a corpse that talked back, against all reason, after having what she was starting to think of as a nervous breakdown back in the tunnels.

The walls shook again, and she flinched, sucking in a breath that hurt her chest. Two quick strides took her back to the uncomfortable metal chair she'd dragged down from the ground level, and she plopped down in it. Feeling suddenly claustrophobic, she ripped off the cloth full-head mask and threw it across the room in claw-baring anger, before bending nearly in half, slapping stripe-furred paws over her long, delicate face.

"Get it together, Cassiopeia...Shit..."

Then she jumped out of her seat in startlement, letting out an involuntary rowl of a gasp, when the voice abruptly returned.

"Soon...You will...Be captured. Accept it..."

The tigress stared at the massive corpse. Seven feet tall and many hundreds of pounds, the beast had slain enough of the Stalker's special forces psychopaths that she had at first been unable to believe grenades could bring him down. When they had dragged him out of the dead-end cave, flesh smoking and fur largely burned away, she had felt as if a shadow bogeyman had been brought low.

Now he looked, somehow, as if he were still freshly dead. His skin was pale, but not the off-blue of an hours-dead corpse, and now that she thought of it there was no sign of rigor mortis. As if not under her own control, her feet carried the tigress to his side, and she saw herself lower a paw, touching a raw, hard bicep, palpating it, a dribble of blood sliding free of the ruptured skin.

Her gorge rose and she almost vomited in nervous terror when his eyes snapped open. Intense, hard things, they stared into hers with an undeniable flame of life and intensity, captivating her in an instant in the same way Stalker's eyes had once done. She couldn't look away, trapped in the endless pools of thought and memory, until he closed them again and freed her mind, let her breathe again, with soft gasps as her chest swiftly rose and fell.

His paw, skinless and bleeding, was now wrapped around hers with iron-like strength, a vice that was just resting on the verge of painfulness.

"I need...Nutrients...To escape...They won't...Be able to...Carry me..."

This time, his jaw actually moved, the words gurgling up from his mostly-ruined throat. Cassy stared at him a moment in open-mouthed shock, then tried to pull her paw back to go for her bag and the MRE's within. His steely grip didn't budge.

"I...I need my paw to get the food."

"No..."

With inexorable, glacial slowness, he raised her arm, at first utterly without her resistance. When his jaw opened, to show cracked but razor-sharp and steel-hard teeth, her heart lurched and she nearly screamed, with the sudden revelation of what he was about to do. Morbid horror shivered up her spine, every instinct shrieking for her to run, to fight, fingernails on chalkboard flinching echoing through her mind.

"Do not struggle...It will hurt more...Roll...Sleeve back..."

As if on a strange form of autopilot, her off paw came forward, and she rolled back the armored fabric, exposing her delicate flesh to the maw of this terrible predator that lay helpless before her. Helpless but for his terrifying ability to mesmerize her, an ability she suspected was of her own granting.

For a moment, her wrist was surrounded by hot, wet warmth. Then, it was full of biting, cold pain and unbelievable pressure as his jaw closed and steely teeth punctured straight through her skin and muscle, rupturing the blood vessels beneath. She tried to howl out in pain, to jerk away, but her body refused to respond, fixated and staring in shock as hot, scarlet blood flowed to the beat of her heart, out of the wound the giant, ancient lion had just made.

He swallowed, and swallowed again, as pain began radiating out from where his teeth were sunk into her, followed by a strange numbing sensation that frightened her if anything more badly. The tigress found herself leaning against the gurney, her free paw wrapped around its edge, gasping, sucking for air she felt wasn't entering her chest. Finally, as the room was beginning to spin dizzily in front of her eyes, he let go and she collapsed, clasping at the injured arm.

To her staring amazement, the wound was simply gone, as if it had never been. Her skin was pale, and she felt dizzy, a knot of nauseau burbling in her gut as evidence the blood loss was real. As further evidence, the orange and black-striped fur along her arm was stained with the stuff, slightly sticky, though as she watched it seemed to be fizzing like soda.

"H...How...?"

For a moment, he didn't speak, just laid still as the corpses in lockers around them. Then he sat up, slowly, hand-paws taking tight hold of the gurney's sides as his massive tree-trunk legs swung down. By instinct, she rolled under the table, as his foot paws landed, testing his weight before settling on them.

She watched, startled to silence again, as he lifted up on his toes and bobbed slightly. The torn meat that had hung in ribbons from his legs was rapidly healing, so fast her eyes could see it happening. The flesh knit together, bundled itself back into proper place, with skin re-sealing over it in moments.

"The iron and other minerals in your blood are acting as fuel for my nanites to replicate and continue repairing my body. I deposited some in your wound, to make certain the ruptured arteries would not cause a bleed-out."

Cassy shivered and looked down again at the wrist she held in her paw. The gashes inflicted by his powerful jaw were gone, reduced to mere pin-pricks of pink on her skin where fur had been matted to the sides.

"Now come out from under there. Our rescuers are close, and Stalker will realize their presence soon enough. When he does, he will attack them."

"H-how do you...?"

"My implants allowed me to intercept your headset's frequency. What makes you think I could not intercept another's?"

Her mind struggled, dazzled at the concept. Meanwhile, he turned and crouched, and reached under the gurney to gently grab her shoulder. With his help, she was soon standing, though so dizzy she felt she might vomit and collapse.

He was handsome now, a male perhaps in his early forties, only barely showing the signs of silvering fur and wrinkled skin. His muscles pronounced themselves like topographical maps of his body's lethal training, especially with much of his fur still gone while the nanites repaired more important things.

"Why don't you...W-warn them?"

She stumbled before he could answer, and was abruptly wrapped up in his massive arms, pressed against a chest that felt as if it were made of titanium and heating mesh.

"The transmission range is very short, and transmission is easier to notice than interception. I could not afford the risk. Still cannot. We will rendezvous with our rescue by tracking their signal."

"H-how...Did He not know?"

"Each Shadow is unique. My regeneration is better than his."

Cassy was about to protest the fantastical, insane plan. They wouldn't get more than a hundred feet, with so many guards about. A seven foot tall, naked lion, carrying a half-conscious tigress, wouldn't go unnoticed by Stalker's elites. She passed out before the protest could make itself from her lips, and was soon over Tenh's shoulder in a fireman's carry.

The rampaging Ix'kat queen slashed through another enemy, rending straight through armor made for stopping bullets and not carbon nano-tube filled chitin claws. As his gore sprayed on her and the lizard spun away from her lethal blow, she heard the terrible curdling-noise of the coherent light cannon firing again. With a coil of powerful legs, she hurled herself upward, slamming both foreclaws into the roof's armored paneling to hold her in place as the largely-immobile weapon lanced down the hallway, cooking another of her drones.

Squealing and shrieking in insectoid fury, she threw herself down from the ceiling with terrifying force, hitting the deck so hard that some of her enemy were knocked flat as the armor plate's bolts tore and the whole sheet bucked. Well used to the rigors of unarmed high-power combat, she scuttled forward in their moment of disarray, slamming into another crowd of screaming, wildly-firing Naval personnel that had marshaled to fight her.

Something in the back of her strange insect mind told her that the enemy hive had sent too many of its warriors out. Not expecting such a counter-attack, they had left only worker drones behind to defend themselves. Even so, the humans' worker drones were smarter than her own species' mindless worker sub-species. Not truly drones at all, just not trained for combat so significantly.

The coherent light ray arced again, and Clicks flattened herself against the floor, crawling over the mounded corpses toward the warrior who had slain nearly half of her escort. She continued to leak pheromones, by sheer instinct, never registering that she was still calling for more reinforcements.

As she was rising again, shrieking out another ear-pounding blast of sound, the whole ship jolted, and her massive body was slammed up against a bulkhead with force enough to crush the ribs of a Seaman trapped between the two heavy objects. Then she was flung the opposite direction, mirrored in the flailing, sideways-falling forms of her enemies as the fleshy workers were slammed around like ninepins.

When the lights went out, she smiled, mandibles crawling upward until they spread in an eery, horrible maw. Blood red emergency lights flicked on as power failed, glowing upward from the floor to limn her alien form in bloody-scarlet light and three-dimensional shadow that crawled along her carapace.

Terrified, stunned, Seamen began panicking and trying to flee, limping with limbs broken by the sudden jostling impacts. Something had hit the Star of Aden hard, Clicks registered. Very, very hard. Smoke was beginning to flow down the halls already, as claxons began blaring, ordering Seamen to their battle stations.

Instead of pursuing the light-cannon wielder as he turned and ran, she spun about and chased terrified cut-off workers ahead of her, ignoring them utterly on her way back to the squishy-queen Herrin. Her clicked, chattered orders had the remaining three drones rounding up prisoners, shrieking at them to stun before grabbing them by a leg or arm to drag them into a heap by the computer center's doorway.

Clicks was through it before they could block the way with their enemy's squalling soft-creatures, a tactic that would surely slow the inevitable assault en-masse.

Intelligently, she thought, the enemy was beginning to seal emergency bulkheads. Shifts in pressure, too subtle for most human sub-species to perceive, told the bug queen's sensitive antennae that tey were being closed off. Somewhere on the deck in which they stood, feet-thick armored doors were being slammed into place, as the ship's primary queen must have decided the interlopers were of low priority if they could be sealed off.

Simple insect mathematics told her that such a leader was likely squishy-human, maybe fuzzy-human, and would be hesitant to sacrifice the captured workers. Thus, she wasn't overly concerned with the atmospheric venting that could be used to kill her own fuzzy-squishy-friend. As for herself and the other insects, she wasn't terribly worried. Ix'kat were hatched, matured, worked, and died aboard the Great Hives, enormous space-faring structures built so far in her peoples' past that no one still alive knew how long ago or even where they had been made.

Her people operated regularly in vacuum, though the act of sealing her shell would be painful and take unnecessary amounts of energy if it could be avoided.

In any case, as she stooped to slide her long body through the last door of the lightning-reeking metal chamber she also scented blood, strong and familiar. Faceted eyes fixated on the muscular lion-shaped shadow that leaned heavily on a wall console, one paw dangling loosely and dripping.

It took her two great, leaping lunges to spring across the entire chamber, landing with a squawk of urgency she distantly acknowledged was too high-pitched for the furry creature to hear. Her landing also seemed to dislodge him, and he slid limp to the floor with a grunt of distant pain, his fur beginning to soak up the blood that flowed from his wounded body.

Herrin's voice was guttural, full of the growl she'd come to acknowledge as a sign of authority and wisdom. His face showed something she'd never seen from him before, though. A smile that wasn't full of impending shouting.

"Shorted their computers...Brought down the whole tactical network. They can't aim automatically now...Pretty good for an old fart, right?"

"Yes! Inefficient digestive gasses aren't normally able to break computers!"

He snorted out a laugh, then dragged in a sharp breath as her claws grabbed him, stiffening in pain as she felt for the wound. It stank of digestive juices and waste products, and she crooned to her drones, receiving a counter-croon that acknowledged her information and began spreading it. A queen was dying, and whether Ix'kat or not, it was a sad thing.

If she had been humanoid herself, or even wearing a more humanoid-shaped carapace, she might have been able to do something for him. Press the wound shut and hold it there, to prevent the precious liquids from flowing out. She even had the knowledge, from her obsessive training on human anatomy and custom before being deployed from her birth-nest as a military exchange soldier.

As it was, her razor-sharp claws could do nothing but worsen his pain. She tried to apply pressure, but without the softness of humanoid flesh was unable to do much but make the big lion squirm slightly and grunt in barely-suppressed agony.

"Clicks...Ngh!...You Ix can make it in vacuum right?"

"Yes! But I have no carry-space in this carapace for you! Will stay and defend until rescue comes!"

The lion shook his head and snorted, giving her a wan look.

"No rescue is coming, Private...If you have to, wait for me to die...Either way, cut off a bit of me and take it with you. I got family back home that'll need confirmation."

She nodded, bobbing her armored head, until his paw weakly rose up and touched her angular chitinous face. Clicks stilled one of her mandibles, to make sure she wouldn't slice him. His voice was more quiet now, the authoritative growl gone from it. Death, she realized, was stealing his energy, and he had something to say that wasn't a command. Such things were rare but not unknown among her own peoples' queens. Often, the last words were messages intended to be delivered, or words to be recorded for their successor to warn of some danger.

"You're a very good Marine. Thank you for coming with me."

Then his paw fell away, leaving a streak of blood down her face plate. Cocking her head to one side, she pressed up against him, laying her body along his smaller, fleshier form. She felt as his heart drifted to a stop, and heard as his breath slowly released.

Her croon was sharper this time, in mourning for a lost friend.

It was answered by chattering, querying calls that echoed through the hull. Clicks' antennae perked back, receiving the noises of distant burrowing, acid splashes, the hissing of dissolving metal punctuated by the belching rattles of firearms and the crunching sounds of bullets impacting chitin.

The power outage, she realized, wasn't from the bombardment. It was from her own people tearing their way out of the engine room!

Rear Admiral Vernier watched through the main view screen of his shuttle as something amazing happened. The Fist of the Nascent Dawn, despite being locked down tight by boarding gantries that should in theory have been able to short out all of her computers and keep her utterly immobile, fired a brutal fusillade of torpedoes and strange arcing silvery lights that couldn't possibly be rail cannons into the Star of Aden's immobile sides.

Blossoming smoke and debris, the great hulk of a battleship listed to one side, before struggling to get itself turned around. Meanwhile, the nimble Fist hurled on a burst of speed that had her plasma-driven engines surging and leaving a trail of glowing faery light as it leapt away like a nimble gazelle, blasting back shot after shot of fire meant to discourage the behemoth that was soon chasing her.

Vernier's placid façade cracked a moment, and he grinned, letting out a wolfish bark of pleasure as he pumped a paw in victory. The pilot, staring at him a moment, caused the wolf to harrumph and straighten his uniform jacket, as if his sudden motion of enthusiasm were just a misinterpreted bit of propriety.

Ahead of them, the rendesvouz point for the parlay and expected surrender waited, engines shut down and brooding. It was a shuttle just like his own, an identical model designed for rapid transit between capitol ships in battle. Heavily armored and maneuverable but lacking any significant weapon systems, such ships were built for quick acceleration and to survive attempted interceptions more so than for comfort or direct combat duty.

The pilot, sticking to his duty as stiffly as any relatively new-minted serviceman should be expected to, announced their eta.

"Docking in twenty seconds, sir."

Vernier nodded, and glanced back over his shoulder, making certain the Lieutenant was ready. The mouse nodded back, relaxed yet upright in his handsome dress blues, pistol strapped to his thigh and briefcase under his left arm.

"Take us in, and good work, Sailor."

The pilot blushed a bit, surprised at the praise, and seemed to inflate a little while directing them to dock. Vernier settled back in his seat for those last few moments of rest, and steeled himself for the uncertain. Anything could happen in there, from a unit of commandos storming his shuttle to shoot him in the head to an attempt to capture him to the least likely thing; an honest parlay that would be more tense and stressful than either other likely possibility.

His pilot seemed unaware of the danger, likely so heavily inculcated in Naval lore that he honestly believed a parlay would be considered sacred. The mouse that sat next to the hatches wasn't so naïve, and stared readily at the door, prepared mentally and physically to draw his pistol and make a good accounting of himself should it come to that. Vernier just stood up, grabbing a headrail as the two shuttles gently docked together, sealing a plastic shaft between them with a hiss.

Once the docking umbilical was connected, a crackle preceded an open-channel communicaton that emanated from the shuttle's comm. set. The voice speaking was male, crisp but non-aggressive, in the way of a soldier giving direction.

"Please proceed through the umbilical and onto our shuttle, sir. Our negotiator is waiting for you."

The pilot keyed a speaker, nodding to Vernier, before the wolfhound responded.

"Understood, on my way."

The Rear Admiral felt a bit annoyed that ship-to-ship etiquette was being ignored. He hadn't had to ask permission to come aboard, nor been granted it. Such behavior didn't bode well, the enemy acting as if he were already a prisoner and his surrender a foregone conclusion. Parlay should have been formal, not informal and insulting.

"Be ready, Lieutenant."

His personal assistant nodded, and opened the hatch with a tap of his finger pads. Vernier couldn't help a slight smile, then, at the idea of his own internal kvetching. It wasn't as if he had highly kind plans for this meeting either.

The hatch opened with a hiss, as pressure in the umbilical tube equalized with their own. Across it, an opened hatch greeted them, showing the shuttle beyond to contain a meeting room complete with chairs riveted to the floor and a short rectangular table. Seated at its head, a white-scaled iguana stared at them both a moment before standing gracefully and extending a delicate claw-tipped hand to gesture them forward.

Vernier's stride was confident, calm, cool, as he crossed throught he opaque plastic tube. All around him, a horrific death of decompression and bone-shattering cold lurked less than a meter away, ahead of him potential capture and imprisonment, yet he strode with cool collected confidence. Behind him, his adjutant scanned with ever-watchful eyes for any trick or trap.

"Welcome, Admiral."

To Vernier's well-hidden surprise, the lizard extended a hand, which he clasped with his own furred paw. The grip was firm, the eye contact strong without being a stare-down in disguise. His lizard counterpart's hand was chill but dry, not clammy as he'd expected the moment before touching. To his right, a uniformed pilot stood at attention.

He was mostly shocked by the lack of tricks or ambush. Given how his enemy had comported themselves so far, he had expected such. Anyone willing to use their own ships as kamikaze weapons couldn't be trusted to act rationally, to his mind. A quick glance through the enemy shuttle's main view screen told the story of what was happening here, at least to some extent.

Out there in the void, the fleet of newcomers had slowly begun approaching his own, but hadn't merged with the remnants of what he had smashed in the earlier engagement. Two admirals, he mused, loyal to the same political faction but divided somehow. Their methods and formations were dramatically different. Where his initial enemy had been brutal, cold and quick to sacrifice his sailors' lives to cause maximum damage, this Admiral led a formation from the front and used arrays that would keep his vessels well-protected if somewhat less tactically mobile.

"You have the advantage of me, sir. It is normally polite, under these circumstances, to introduce yourself."

The lizard blinked, his cool hard eyes nictating momentarily as he digested that tidbit. Vernier had never liked lizard faces much. Too hard to read. Finally, the iguana nodded and raised his hands as if to apologize.

"My name is unimportant, but nonetheless you are correct. I am Janos Rikkar."

Rear Admiral Vernier settled himself carefully into the chair that sat directly across from him, his adjutant taking up a spot behind and to his right, setting his brief case down for the moment. Vernier's canny grey eyes scanned over Rikkar's empty table top, then the lizard himself, noting no carrying cases, folders, none of the usual accoutrements of a negotiator.

"Rikkar, then. You'll forgive me if I dispense with formality and get to the point. This doesn't look to me like a proper parlay. Even if I were to surrender unconditionally, you aren't carrying the codes and procedures that would allow you to link directly into my vessels' main frames. What is this about?"

"The future, Rear Admiral. Yours, the fleet's, and Earth's."

The wolf hound's hackles rose slightly, fur ruffling on the back of his neck as his impassive stare gained the slightest hint of glare. This iguana, who he was now certain wasn't even military, was daring to tell him of the future and his own fleet's fate, and it rankled hard on the old ironsides' pride. Not to mention a bullshit-sense that could pinpoint traps and stupidity two systems away.

"Speak plainly, Mr. Rikkar, or I'll be turning around and heading back to the Sword of Sol. I don't enjoy being the target of intelligence games, nor do I enjoy sitting in meeting with smug civilians who think they know something they don't."

The iguana just smirked, as Vernier's hard, annoyed words slid off him like water on a duck. Then he shrugged. Vernier felt the urge to hit him, to grab and shake the little weasel for wasting time and disrespecting Naval tradition so thoroughly. He bided his time, though, patiently, and felt his watch vibrate ever so slightly as the twenty minute mark on his timer passed. Five more minutes, he reminded himself.

"First Fleet cannot hope to win this war, Rear Admiral. The United Galatean Dominion has just completed negotiations with what you were calling 'the Junta.' You've seen firsthand how corrupt the civilian government has become. How enslaved we are to the humans and their obsolete genetic legacy. The UGD offers you the power to do as you see fit, Rear Admiral, to pursue the rights and goals of the military. To protect your own servicemen from bureaucratic failures like the former Senate."

The wolf hound stared for a moment, eyes hard and unreadable, then reached out a paw, to have it filled by his adjutant's brief case. As the lizard quieted down, eyes shiny with propaganda and enjoyment, Vernier unlocked the case, flipped it open with the back facing Rikkar, and considered his next move while looking at what was contained within.

"Military governments make poor standing arrangements, Rikkar. I've seen bureaucrats waste military lives before, but not half so many lives as were wasted when men with guns made all the rules. If this is all you wanted, and there's to be no offer of real parlay, you can go home. I serve the United Systems Federation, not my own petty interests."

The iguana merely smiled, and leaned forward, curious as to what was inside the armor-paneled briefcase. He looked to the Rear Admiral like a preacher sensing converts.

"The Shadows have always ruled you, Vernier. The UGF merely acknowledges it. Join us, Rear Admiral. You can keep your fleet, and be promoted besides that. Think of it! You will be finally free!"

"A warrior free of constraint doesn't deserve a uniform."

Vernier's paw shot forward as he surged to his feet. Before he could complete the motion, his adjutant's paw had flown to his pistol, drawn it, and fired a pair of rail slugs into the enemy pilot's chest. Before the lizard's eyes could go wide, Vernier's own pistol had come free of the case.

He didn't hesitate, putting two into the iguana's smiling face.

With the air full of the stink of electrical discharge, Rear Admiral and adjutant turned and walked straight back to their shuttle.

"Sir, was that wise?"

"Have faith, Lieutenant. Galatean agents started having cortex bombs implanted just before the civil war began. If we refused too much longer, we would have been dead."

The hatches closed, as Vernier sat himself into the copilot's chair again, and began tapping out a code on broad transmission to his fleet.

"Pilot, get us back to the Sword of Sol."

The fur on the back of his neck was already starting to crawl upright, and his pilot looked confused, as he experienced the same sensation, as if electricity were building in his skin. The adjutant looked down at his paws, then at the Rear Admiral, raising a brow.

"Sir? Is this...?"

Vernier smiled and turned off the timer on his watch. Phase two of the plan was a minute or two early.