Note: My, my, my. I have neglected what few fans I have of this fic, haven't I? 2 YEARS without updating? Yikes! Well, I was very proud of the action spectacular of Chapter 7 I have to say, but this chapter—nearly 22 thousand words of it—has the duty of pushing the story forward again unlike its predecessor, where the epic action sequences were the things I had been writing towards from the very start—literally the very images I had in mind when I set pen to paper on this fic (not that this chapter is devoid of thrills and spills).

Yet pen and paper has been the biggest problem in terms of getting this story updated. See... I don't like typing, and this fic is being written the old fashioned way—longhand in notepads. I knew I had a monster chapter to type up and procrastinated over it for ages, even though it's been written for almost 2 years. I've been distracted, of course, with trying original fiction, but this tale needs finishing. I have it outlined, and that perhaps too is at fault for the delays, since I know how it ends—who lives, who dies, the twists and turns (Oh, the twists! another thing I've been working towards from page one) right up to the epilogue which crosses over into... well, you'll just have to wait and see (don't ask, I'll never tell! Mwah ha ha!)—I guess that I'm not exploring the story blindly any more; not finding where it'll take me, which is half the joy in writing. I already know how it ends. Add to that the release of Halo 4 last year and suddenly my story becomes anachronistic—an altered universe tale—since it begins where Halo 3 ends but won't be ending in the lead up to Halo 4.

Still, upon re-reading much of the text, I encountered glaring errors and realised it needs revising to alter some awkward syntax, correct call-signs, rectify any unintended contradictions, nail down the geography (I've lost the map I drew to keep myself right) and re-trace characters I've lost track of along the way, not to mention grammar corrections, which is my weakest point—maybe I'll find a sympathetic beta one day—and errors in uploading, specifically chapter breaks that have mysteriously vanished for some reason or another.

Happily, I'm excited about this fic again (partial credit also due to a few reviewers and PMs for telling me to get a move on), even if I have been a bit remiss in my duties in not updating for 25 months (again, YIKES!). So, by way of apology, I give you my next super-sized chapter. I hope you enjoy.

Beta Fett

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Chapter 8: Quench

Sands' brow was knitted into a scowl and his cheeks flushed brightly betraying his anger at Sparks' insistence the route was safe; there was something moving around down that corridor that nobody could see, but everyone could hear the distinctive hissing breaths that Rain and Pharaoh had described. "I'm not crawling around the ducts, pal. No way, no how. You run into one of 'em in there and you're toast. History." he said firmly but quietly, his usually roving eyes fixed on the end of the dim corridor where it met its counterpart that ran parallel to it on the port side of the Sentry.

Sparks looked over his shoulder to the others waiting behind him. Desaille, Mboko and Garza all looked as scared as he felt. As scared as Sands must. "Listen," he began with genuine sympathy for everybody's fears, "the only way is forward. You know they've been locking down the bulkheads behind us. And I don't know about you, but I don't want to march down to the next one right into one of those things."

"Better to fight it where we can move than trapped in the vents, china," said Mboko, gesturing with a nod to Sands. "I'm with him on this."

"You plan on sticking around if we do run into one? You really think any of us do?" Sparks' retort was incredulous and curt.

"Roughnecks are a closer knit group than fleet." commented Garza in a bare whisper, looking Sparks and Desaille over with barely hidden contempt. His comment was cemented by the affirming nods of camaraderie from Sands and Mboko.

Desaille's mouth tightened as he glared at everybody. "Maybe now isn't a good time to get onto this!" he said, the ending syllable a quiet hiss that seemed to parody that all too deadly one emanating from the hidden source somewhere up ahead.

Sands felt his guts knot. It was all he could do to hold onto his last meal and keep the lid on his rising terror. His stomach felt like a cold, empty void from the start, and the trembling had started soon after, but he found focussing on the objective gave his wandering mind some respite from the hundred different scenarios of doom and destruction it would inevitably conjure up if he let it. Now, exposed and at a standstill, his imagination decided to up the ante by offering a little fleeting horror of having his face dissolved off after running into an alien while crawling around the ducts. What if...? It asked again and again. What if...? What if...? Each grim little poser punctuated by a new gruesome vision of his doom.

"Look, we know they were gathered near propulsion," Sparks said, trying to buoy up his argument. Sands gave a weary nod. "and we're not even midship yet..." he continued, pointing to the slate-grey plaque on the wall that listed the corridor and deck numbers with little white arrows guiding the way to other subsections.

"They got legs, man." reminded Garza dryly.

"We are wasting time!" Sparks flushed in anger for the first time. He nudged his way out of the small huddle and approached the sealed recycler hatch at the foot of the wall a few yards ahead before thumbing open the four sprung clasps that held the grille in place.

"What are you doing?" Sands questioned angrily as he followed.

Sparks got to his knees and peered into the hatch using a small flashlight he had pulled from the myriad of utensils in his tool belt. "I'm not arguing any more. Stay here if you want to, but I've got a job to do. And I've got the tools you're going to need to acquire those flame units from the mark fours. You find your balls and decide you want something useful to fight these things with, follow me." He bit down on the handle of the flashlight, leaving him speaking mostly in vowels as he peered into the duct. "Ih uhh ooo yoo."

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The captain led Michel Lambert, the Sentry's chief engineer, and his hand picked team to the ship's systems deck, where primary functions were controlled by the GUARDIAN computer core—the military precursor to the fledgling MOTHER system. As they walked Lambert beckoned individual engineers to him, pointing to areas on the hard-copy schematics in his hands and assigning each a task to carry out based on the strategy they had formulated to wrest control back from GUARDIAN and its bureaucratic masters back on Earth. In reality that meant no less than mutiny and the hijacking of a federation flagship. Treason. It was going to take watertight evidence of the callous corruption at the heart of the crumbling federation—which was so prepared to sacrifice all the souls aboard the ship and on the ground in order to fulfil some mysterious agenda—to keep the captain and his officers from the scaffold on the steps of the ministry of justice. It was a decision the captain didn't make lightly, but one he was prepared to see through to the end, whatever the conclusion may be—a medal or a rope. There was more souls in danger than his own, and though he knew he might go down in history as a traitor, he wasn't inclined to go down as a coward and an incompetent who let an alien species over-run his ship, or the the very real possibility that his name might go down in infamy as the captain of a vessel that returned home a derelict ghost ship—a modern day Marie Celeste. Or worse, another Ishimura.

"We'll have to hit guardian simultaneously, sir, so that it doesn't have time to compensate and start re-routing systems. If we let it get ahead of us we'll be chasing it forever trying to figure it out."

"Do what you have to, Chief. But I want this ship back in human hands as soon as possible. And I want communications back yesterday, for Christ's sake."

"With all respect, sir," Lambert said, quickly delegating another task to an accompanying engineer before continuing, "Communications is one of the flagged sections. We need a green light from the grunts before we send our guys in there."

"Don't worry about long range comms, Lambert; just get me talking to the men on the ground." He checked his wristwatch, "They've been cut off for nearly twenty-nine hours now and the clock is still ticking."

"Yes, Sir."

As they rounded the corner to the GUARDIAN core they were confronted by Eben standing stolidly at the entrance, flanked by two junior officers and Deveaux, the captain's first officer. All were armed with stun batons that buzzed and crackled with static, the junior officers each also holding a pair of titanium shackles from the brig. Eben had that infuriating look of superiority to him again. The captain and his trailing tail of engineers came to a halt as Deveaux stepped forward to address his commanding officer. "Captain." The executive officer's usually stiff posture seemed somewhat deflated now, his face betraying the deep contrition of having to be the man to stand in the captain's way.

"What is the meaning of this?" The captain pointed to the weapons they carried, his mind furiously trying to remember those disarming techniques he had learned through all those mandatory hand-to-hand refresher courses he had taken over the years if he couldn't talk his way out of the fix.

"Sir, your course of action is contrary to our orders. And by not trying to stop you it could be surmised that I was implicit with your decision which I would like to go on record as saying I resolutely do not condone."

The captain stood nonplussed for a moment; even for Forrest Deveaux, who held that stiff, antiquated view of naval regulations and discipline, that answer was particularly ascetic and formal. So Deveaux wasn't prepared to hang for the captain, that seemed obvious. But there was a subtext to the answer, he was sure of it. The X.O., he hoped, was asking for a way out—a way for his record to stay untarnished but to have no further involvement in the developing situation he was in. Hell, he was still young, and in quieter, less formal, meetings Deveaux had expressed his wish to command his own vessel one day. His self-preservation was understandable. Stubborn and badly timed, but understandable. Their working relationship had always been a little cold, and no real prospect of friendship existed between the two men, but he and the X.O. respected each other as (competent) officers must do, and both knew the meaning of honour, even if they each had different interpretations of it. The captain decided gamble and to take the branch he hoped he was being offered. "Your objections are noted, executive officer Deveaux. They will be noted in my log. In the mean time I am relieving you of your post. You will be confined to quarters for the mean time, do you understand?"

A tense moment passed with the captain thinking he had read Deveaux's intentions all wrong. Thankfully, after a moment, the X.O. saluted dutifully and stepped aside after dropping his baton to the floor. "Yes, sir."

"What about you two?" asked the captain, peering past Deveaux to the junior officers that flanked Eben. "Where do your loyalties lie?"

The taller of the two, skinny and balding, holstered his baton and saluted. "With ship and captain, captain. We were simply acting under orders from the executive officer, sir."

Deveaux nodded a silent affirmative. The remaining junior officer echoed the sentiment after a fleeting moment of indecision, holstering his weapon and joining the X.O.

Only Eben stood in their path now, that smirk unfaded despite his support leaving him hanging in the wind. The captain had a feeling that dealing with him—IT, he reminded himself—would not be so easy.

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Sparks grunted and puffed in the cramped space, noting with grim humour that the duct he was crawling in must be about the same dimensions as the boxes he had seen many a serviceman repatriated in during his time in the service. He squirmed up to the grille where the light leaked through from the corridor beyond and pressed his face against the lattice, peering awkwardly left and right. The corridor looked empty, and he estimated that they were now only twenty metres from cargo one.

"How's it look?" Sands grunted as he tried to negotiate the bend Sparks had made look a lot easier just moments before.

"Ook eah." Sparks let the little flashlight fall from his mouth."Looks clear," he repeated. He hoped his tone sounded earnest; in truth he couldn't see very far in either direction. With more shimmying and squirming he managed to work his right hand up beside him bearing a screwdriver. He slid the shaft through the gaps in the lattice, pushing the sprung clasps from behind where they overlapped the grille. Each went with a thin metallic clunk that seemed to ring loudly in the duct, making Sparks grimace every time. He hooked a finger into the lattice to take the weight and pushed gingerly. The light aluminium grille came away quietly and, for a mercy, without rattling to the floor. He shimmied forward again, peering out into the corridor proper. "Yeah, all clear," he murmured, more assuring himself than those behind. After gingerly placing the grille on the floor he used the freed arm to lever himself from the duct and got quickly to his feet, trying to remain vigilant, eyes searching, ears listening intently. Only then did he realise just how noisy their crawl through the ducts must have been—every shuffle and grunt from the passage sounded like it had been amplified by a megaphone.

Sands' head suddenly appeared at the mouth of the duct, fingers curling around the cusp, both of his hands trapped under the weight of his body. Sparks couldn't stop the gruff snort of amusement that escaped him—Sands looked like he was doing a bad impression of a tyrannosaurus-rex, but he apparently didn't see the funny side. "Yeah, laugh. Don't help. That's great. Only both of my goddamn arms are going to sleep."

Sparks stepped forward without trying to suppress his mirth and grabbed Sands' head, pulling him from the duct like a bizarre birthing rite. His smile died as he thought of those other bizarre births aboard ship not so long ago...

Sands got to his feet, flexing his hands into fists, willing blood to return to them and banish the pins and needles. Sparks snapped up the little flashlight again and started off alone in the direction of cargo one, leaving Sands to help Garza out, each man assisting the one behind until all five men were on their feet again and assembling at the large bulkhead stencilled with the large letters: CARGO ONE.

The bottom deck of the Sentry was now as quiet as a mausoleum. No constant hum of the engines, no clicking relays. No voices. Only the barest whisper of the air recycler. Sands became aware of the sound of his blood rapidly pumping in his ears, and wondered if anybody else could actually hear their own heartbeat.

"C'mon," whispered Sparks, dialling in the access code on the numerical touch-pad. There was another loud clunk, and the hermetically sealed bulkheads suddenly parted from each other an inch, leaving a gap in the middle that sucked air into the dark space beyond with an audible hiss. Everybody started at the sound, even Sparks who had expected it. "It's cool, guys; it's just a shift in pressure is all." The doors parted, each bulkhead sliding with a mechanical groan into their recesses.

The over head lights flickered to life revealing the room to them. The space of cargo one seemed cavernous, extending forwards for one hundred metres and upwards for twenty-five. Within, stacked from floor to ceiling, lay crates and boxes of all shapes and sizes filled with the various supplies a self-reliant starship on a long sortie would need, and more. A single forlorn power loader painted in yellow and black DANGER! slashes stood abandoned at the food stores row in its final pose, one forked arm pointed to the ceiling, the other almost appearing to laze at its side in a lonely tableaux. Above, suspended from its tracks and painted in the same yellow and black slashes, loomed the huge grasping claw of the heavy duty crane—an instrument capable of surprisingly delicate and fine stowing, given its forbidding appearance. Hanging from the ceiling itself was a tangled maze of air ducts, coolant tubes, and waste water pipes that the ship designers hadn't deigned to try to conceal running dutifully to the reclamation plant.

The wall to their far left seemed more ordered than the rest, consisting of seven rows of large steel cubes stacked three high. Each of these containers was painted olive drab and looked big enough for for three men to stand abreast of each other at full height. Each was stencilled with a three digit number, though they had been stacked in no discernible order. "The mark fours are bound to be a thing of beauty to watch in the field, huh?" asked Sparks, beckoning the others to follow as he approached the stack.

"Wouldn't know." Sands' answer was curt. "They were mothballed for review years ago. Something to do with the old man. We don't know why. Might have saved a lot of lives if we could still use 'em in the field."

The marauder units were twelve-foot tall walking battle platforms armed with myriad bug-busting technology. A pilot housed within the mech suit could operate for days at a time thanks to a full life support suite—even the need for sustenance could be met by the application of a simple drip feed that supplied the body with a cocktail of nutrients, acids, proteins and sugars which could belay the necessity for food, at least temporarily. It was a brilliant stroke of forethought by the thinkers and movers of the E-MIT, since marauders inserted into bug-strongholds could be cut off from relief and re-supply for anywhere from a day to a week. Or, if you believed the rumour about the old man, twelve days. For years now some kind of hidden stigma had affected the viability of the suits—something that Field Marshal Rico was at the centre of; something which only the higher echelons knew about, and guarded zealously. The old man had never set foot in a unit for over ten years now, and had campaigned vociferously to have them removed from the service altogether. Perhaps due to the E-MIT footing the colossal price tag attached to the marauder programme, his campaign had failed, but in the absence of any hard facts a superstitious fear had blotted the reputation of the marauders as the ultimate bug-busting tech. Most, like these twenty one sleeping giants upon the Sentry, were stowed away in dark cargo holds all but forgotten.

Sparks led the way through the maze of supplies to the marauder stacks. Each crate contained a single suit, plus a suite of spare parts for repairs. He stopped by a crate marked 578 and thumbed a scanner to release the mag-locks. The front of the case slid forwards four inches before sliding aside.

"All this talk of the mark fours and I just realised I never saw one in person," remarked Mboko as the crate's contents were revealed. Before them was a confusing mish-mash of scratched and dented olive drab armoured plates nobody could make head nor tail of that left everybody—except perhaps Sparks, who never really seemed taken aback by anything—feeling utterly underwhelmed.

"That's it?" Sands said sourly, "I thought these things were supposed to bitchin' bad?"

Sparks smiled wryly, unbuckling his tool belt. He handed the tools to Desaille and pressed a button on the miniature console mounted just inside the crate. "You're not getting the full picture yet." He pulled the wireless console from its dock, dialling in commands as he back-pedalled a few steps away from the crate. The contents began to slide forward on pneumatic runners, fully revealing that mish-mash of armour plates.

The suit was curled into a position that was almost fetal, its knees drawn up to its chest, arms folded neatly at its sides. Even tucked up like this it was so big that it must have taken every inch of room within its crate.

Sparks prodded more buttons on the console in his hands, running start-up sequences and sub-routines. An electrical whine like charging dynamos, whirring servos, clicking relays—the metal beast had come to life as it ran diagnostics and calibration procedures for the first time in years. Sparks placed the console back in its dock within the crate and slipped around the back of the suit. Unseen by the others, he climbed into the cockpit, slipping his arms and legs into the suit's extremities and feeling the sensor rods probing him as they set their negative feedback thresholds, allowing the machine to mimic his movements, so that walking in the mech was as easy as a stroll in the park. The tech had come a long way since its advent and made even the most up to date power loaders look slow and cumbersome. He waited for the heads-up display before his eyes to give all start-up systems the green light. Since climbing in he felt like his centre of balance was way off, and he had a stark moment of doubt that the moment he moved the whole thing would topple backwards. In his head he knew that his centre of gravity and the suit's were totally different, and he trusted enough in his sense of logic to be confident that he wouldn't end up on his back. He plucked up the courage and willed his body to rise.

Nothing. Only a flashing warning on the HUD that the suit was not sealed. Below the warning scrolled the words: VOICE COMMAND ASSUMED. SECURE COMBATANT? Y/N? Sparks answered the query like an unsure child, knowing the rookie error he had made, "Yes?" He immediately felt the padded plates of the inner hull slide into place behind him, starting at the base of his spine and working upwards, quickly adjusting to his body shape. He felt tightly squeezed but comfortable as the last one came to rest behind his head and the outer armour shell slid into place, sealing him in. A dozen more warnings suddenly scrolled down the left hand side of the HUD informing him that this life support system and that life support system had not been activated. Feeling a little out of his depth now—after all, he had never piloted a marauder—he answered yes to every query that popped up on the HUD. This only seemed to make more warnings pop up. "I always thought they would be bigger," he heard Mboko remark clearly in his ear through the suit's comms. He smiled. You want bigger? he thought and willed his body to stand.

The whole mech suddenly lurched effortlessly upwards with a robotic drone. He watched, still grinning as everybody in his HUD scrambled backwards in fright. "Sorry!" he said, though his tone was gleeful and not the least sorrowful at all.

Sands, recovered now from his fright, approached the twelve-foot tall metal giant that towered over him. He smiled now, fully appreciating its scale. "Bad ass!" he murmured.

"The mark ones were bigger," said Sparks, his voice tinny over the suit's external speakers as he countered Mboko's earlier remark. "They were big clunky things that relied on boosters to get around the battlefield."

"They flew?" asked Mboko incredulously.

"More like bounced; marks one and two were capable of short booster-assisted leaps rather than fully sustained flight—but only because the pedi-drives were so damn slow. They solved the coil problem with the mark threes so that they didn't shake to pieces when walking at more than a couple of miles an hour, though the threes retained the boosters. These things—the fours—refined the pedi-drive further, and the redesign removed the booster to make them easier to mass-produce and more cost-effective. Even these things are out-dated now; I heard they're shipping sixes to Pandora next year."

One of the metal clad arms suddenly reached forwards to full extension before lowering slightly, and the whole mech lowered to a squat. Desaille immediately got to work on the arm which, Sands realised after a few moments of being so entranced by the steel beast, housed the flame unit they were here for."You seem to know a lot about these things," said Sands, hovering around Desaille, trying to figure out how he could be useful but mainly getting in the way.

"I oughta. Spent ten years building them on Corsica prime before I joined the service," Sparks' tinny voice died away towards the end of the sentence, and a few moments later he reappeared in the flesh from behind the mech. "That's why I'm here," he finished, fishing a tool from his belt that now hung around Desaille's waist and setting to work with the assuredness of experience. "We'll need to chop the fuel lines when we strip the tank out, and jury-rig something so your guys can carry it on their backs. But it ain't going to be a picnic. With a full tank it's going to be damn heavy. And remember: quinitricetyline isn't jellied like napalm; it's gonna stay liquid—a little more viscous than water—so it's going to slosh around in the tank and throw your weight off if you're moving around too much."

After a moment Garza, who had scarcely spoken a word since arriving on the bottom deck out of sheer paranoia, said: "Maybe we have one man carry the tank and another torch the nasties, yeah?"

Sparks, Desaille and Sands all exchanged a glance, quietly impressed and all in agreement that it seemed a pretty viable idea. "You volunteering?" asked Sands dryly.

"You mean would I rather be the man at the back with the tank, or at the front with the flamer? I'll take the back, my friend."

Sands had no real counter, so only said: "Sounds like a plan to me," as he hovered around Sparks and Desaille again.

"Good," said Sparks, lifting away the first armoured plate with Desaille and Mboko's help, "Let's do it."

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The sound of water trickling down the craggy walls and dripping to the rocky ground echoed within the vast cave network. Here and there in the darkness hisses broke the maddening monotony of the drip, drip, drip. Dh'anha'thu stirred from the pit of semi-consciousness into this cold pit of darkness, unable to move and weary like he had never thought possible. His visor had been ripped away, leaving his tough skin welted and tender around the seal points, and without it supplying him the nitrogen-rich mix he found the air thin and breathing laborious. His vision too was impaired with the loss of the visor, leaving him only to see in the yautja's natural infra-red spectrum. He could hear the hard meat stalk the darkness around him, but seeing them unaided was tricky against the cool blue and black of the cave.

The air hung with the acrid taint of hard meat blood and the distinct sour pheromone odour of a dying hard meat queen; they were smells of a hunt gone wrong—when a queen was too badly injured to be of any further use to the nest, or a yautja seeding party. The dying queen's pheromones would activate an evolutionary adaptation within her clutch of eggs, triggering a chemical signal within the clutch that would begin the process of forming breeding fetal forms—crawlers which held within them the embryos of what would eventually grow to become future queens once safely implanted in a host.

Before him the eggs lay, each branded with distinct yautja markings. These were processed eggs, brought here for controlled dispersal but gathered up by the drones from the various seedings and brought to this dark place in the womb of the world at her silent behest. As for the fearsome hard meat queen herself, he could not see her in the murk, but he could hear the deep hissing breaths that laboured to stave off her death.

His memories coalesced together again from the fragments left by his waking:

...his ship had taken a direct hit from an unknown source and had crashed hard into the ground...

...saved from total annihilation by the heroic deeds of the leader...

...many hunt brothers had burned alive...

...many hard meat had escaped from the crashed seeder...

...he and J'ehna'han had given chase to the fleeing queen...

...despite her injuries and their own the chase had become a long rampage through forest until the queen had run blindly into a swamp and cornered herself.

Dh'anha'thu and J'ehna'han had however been expertly bluffed. The queen reeled on them, charging headlong into the drowned and dead trees where both hunt brothers believed themselves out of harm's way. The sodden, rotten trunks crumbled easily, throwing the hunters into the stagnant water when the tree toppled and their perch had collapsed. Dh'anha'thu was on his feet quickly, bellowing in outrage, and even as the queen charged him he searched the mire for his hunt brother, his eyes seeing only an arm and a leg bobbing on the filthy water under the fallen tree. Broken. Dead.

Searing pain ripped down the flesh by his spine, and when he wheeled around he saw the group of drones that had been giving chase had finally cornered him. The leading drone, with his blood still fresh on its talons lunged at him again, arms outstretched. Its claws hooked around his mask and, as he used the heat meat's own impetus to hurl it away behind him, the mask came tearing off his skin still in its clutches with a painful gaseous POP! as the seals failed and left his face bruised and welted.

Cursing himself for giving chase to the queen with such singular focus and purpose as to ignore all other dangers, he threw himself sideways, out of the path of the lunging drones, which crashed onto the fallen tree in a cacophony of sodden cracks and vehement screeches. Before he could turn to finish them, long needle fingers curled around his waist and plucked him from the morass, bringing him to bear, face-to-face, with the livid sneer of the alien queen. Her vice grip squeezed all the air from his lungs, constricting so tight he couldn't pull another breath. His arms, trapped against his body in her grip became weak, and what fight was left in him began to drain away. His eyes rolled up in his head as the black tendrils of darkness crept in from the periphery of his vision, consuming all until only the queen's horrific grimace remained, until that too faded into nothingness.

And here he had awoke. Hurting, senseless, almost blind in the freezing darkness, but coming to realise the true purpose the queen had kept him alive—it would be her perfect vengeance; the only price a yautja would not willingly pay for a successful hunt: his body was to be used to disseminate the species, to host an embryonic hard meat within him until it was ready to hatch. It was a shameful, unworthy fate meant only for low beasts and fell creatures.

The glistening secretions binding him to the cave wall had little to no give in them when he struggled against them. The hard meat passed by him in the gloom, at the verges of his vision like hissing phantoms as they delicately tended the eggs that littered the uneven surface of the cave floor.

Movement.

In the egg before him, something stirring within. He railed against his bindings as wet squelches and moist sucking sounds began to emanate from the leathery ovum. The top segments folded outwards like the petals of a delicate flower in bloom. Something writhed beneath a milky-white membrane and sucked again at the air. Long, slender digits eased their way from within, hooking over the cusp of the folded petals. The crawler pulled itself from the peaceful sanctuary of its egg with singular instinctual purpose...

Dh'anha'thu struggled harder against his bonds as the crawler came into full sight. The mysterious reaction to the dying queen's pheromones had done its work well, for this crawler emerged different from most others; its body was nearly a quarter bigger again than a normal crawler, its back covered in thick, tough plates and hard, sharp spines—a body altogether tougher and more resilient than a mere drone carrier, since the embryo it now housed had become far more precious.

It began creeping towards him at a torturous, leisurely pace over the other eggs and damp rocky floor. Its cold, wet flesh pressed up against his leg as it began climbing its way up his body to deposit its precious seed, and the hunter hauled against his binds so hard that he felt muscles and sinews snap and detach from bone, but they held firm. Pain and exhaustion finally finished his efforts.

The crawler hooked its slender digits around his head as a slimy proboscis covered in dangling arcs and beads of mucus slid out from within its body and forced its way down his gullet, violating his body and mind. A dark dreaminess overcame him, and the hunter felt the world fall away around him. He slipped into blackness and dreams of drowning in blood.

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"Stand aside, Eben," the captain ordered, trying to sound calm. Somehow the solidarity Eben showed with the GUARDIAN computer core—the sentry's brain and nervous system, for all intents an purposes—was at once both intriguing and infuriating. After all, both the synthetic humanoid and the computer system were created to assist mankind, not hinder them. Yet here Eben stood, defiantly blocking the doorway to GUARDIAN, his eyes shifting endlessly from the captain to the engineers behind him, soaking up data, calculating odds, formulating strategies.

"I know you are aware of the orders from command, Captain. I thought they were quite clear," said the synthetic, "by allowing you access to guardian I would be violating my orders and allowing you to endanger the crew, the ship and the alien species."

"The crew and the ship ARE endangered, Eben! Those creatures running loose on my vessel are a threat to everything!" the captain spat, "And the lives of my crew mean more to me than the ship or my orders!"

"The orders are irrefutable."

Before the captain could reply, Lambert spoke: "Then you're conflicted, Eben. As a synthetic you have three tenets to obey that no orders from command can override: Asimov's laws. And by barring the way you're in contradiction of the first two."

Eben's ever shifting eyes finally halted on Lambert. The effect was a little unnerving. "Were that the case would not guardian have to conform to these tenets, Chief Lambert?"

The engineer paused to collect his thoughts for a moment, clearly disturbed by Eben's words and scrutiny. "It would, Eben; those are dictated by the laws of robotics. You cannot allow a human being to come to harm through inaction, and you must obey us except where it conflicts with the first order."

Unsurprisingly, Eben seemed unconvinced and turned his unsettling scrutiny on the captain. "I am not your enemy, Captain; my orders come from higher in the chain of command than any person aboard this vessel can supersede. May I add that by allowing you and your crew full access to the ship I would be allowing you to endanger yourselves. As long as the aft of the ship is sealed, you and your... humans... are the safest I can make you, aside from placing you all in hyper-sleep."

"And what about those on the ground?" asked the captain, "what about all the lives that you and guardian and all those soulless bastards back at command are so prepared to abandon?"

"There is no evidence that the rescue team are in direct or imminent danger." Eben's voice was cool and measured.

The captain exploded into fury, grabbing the lapels of the flight suit that Eben wore and hauling the synthetic face-to-face with him. Eben never fluttered an eyelid, enraging the captain even more. "That's because we've had no contact with them for over a day now, goddammit! You know the contents of my report, you know what they could be facing down there!"

Without warning the taller of the junior officers, who just moments ago had backed Eben at Deveaux's orders, lurched at the synthetic, knocking the stun baton out of Eben's grip with his own. Eben broke the captain's grip and swiftly sidestepped another strike as the junior tried to catch him with a back swing. With expert aim and inhuman reflexes Eben jabbed at the nerve cluster below the armpit of the junior's extended arm with merely the tips of his left index and middle fingers. Before he had even hit the floor the junior officer was unconscious and Eben clasped his hands behind his back, calmly facing the captain again.

"So much for Asimov's laws." murmured one of Lambert's techs somewhere behind the captain.

"He is quite alive, ensign," Eben addressed the rear of the gathering, "and will suffer no more than some light bruising. I would refer you to the third law of robotics if you believe my actions were inappropriate."

"Eben," the captain's voice was a near growl now, "I order you—I ORDER you to stand down. Stand down, Eben."

The synthetic merely shook his head. "The command structure aboard this vessel is irrelevant now, Captain. It would be best if we let guardian guide us all home."

Without another word to Eben, the captain turned to Lambert and his team. "I'm out of patience, we're out of time and flat out of options."

"Captain, please don't do anything rash." said Eben. There was not even a hint of entreaty within his plea; it was a statement imbued with expectation more than anything else.

Ignoring him, the captain turned and appealed to everyone: "If we're in for a ducat, we're in for a dollar. For everybody." Lambert nodded silently in understanding, and a few of his techs looked apprehensively at the comatose junior officer lying on the floor beside where Eben stood, correctly guessing what was expected of them next. The captain crouched and picked up the stun rod that had been knocked from Eben's hand.

"My systems are shielded, Captain. The baton would be quite ineffective."

The captain wheeled around, wielding the stun rod as a club. Eben foresaw the move, ducking under and sidestepping it easily, still with his hands clasped behind his back, preparing to strike at the same nerve cluster that had so easily incapacitated his first attacker. Lambert had prepared for that eventuality from the start and lunged to grab Eben's arms. The synthetic broke Lambert's clumsy grip, and his fingers struck squarely on the engineer's solar plexus, knocking all the wind out of him so hard that he collapsed vomiting. With his other arm Eben simultaneously deflected the captain's second attempted blow and stamped his foot into the inside crook of the captain's knee, who went down with a howled curse.

A tech lunged forward from the rear but stumbled awkwardly over Lambert and the captain as they went down in near unison. As the tech floundered, Eben struck him open-palmed behind the ear with precisely judged force. The tech's lights went out like a switch had been thrown and he went sprawling, his full weight landing atop the captain who was struggling to get to his feet again. More techs surged forwards trying to rush Eben and overwhelm him but they toppled like dominoes, tripping over those on the floor, their inchoate attack halted before it had a chance to begin by a few choice blows and minimal use of force by the synthetic.

Beneath the crush the captain cursed and looked up to face Eben scowling, burning with anger. The face that looked down on him was almost as angelically serene as a renaissance Madonna.

"Please, Captain," again, that insincere sincerity, "this is fruitless-" Eben's face suddenly froze, his eyes peering off into the middle distance in an expression that seemed numb and startled at the same time. The captain felt something lukewarm drizzle his face like a summer shower. The synthetic's legs suddenly buckled, and Eben keeled over sideways, spraying milky-white conduction fluid—the synthetic form of blood plasma and lymph—from a gaping wound in the back of his head.

The other junior rating stood directly behind Eben, clutching his own baton. It was misshapen and spitting sparks angrily, nearly broken clean in two by the sheer force of the blow it delivered. "Damn glorified toaster."

The captain looked at the ragged flap of tissue and matted hair that had been torn from Eben's scalp, feeling dizzying nausea rising in him. He vaguely heard Lambert finally manage to draw much needed full, deep breaths as the others got to their feet, relieving the crush. Someone offered him a helping hand up, but he still couldn't take his eyes from the gruesome sight of the back of Eben's head. When he finally did look up it was the junior rating who had finished Eben that met his gaze, looking exalted and worried at the same time. "Good work, son," puffed the captain, as he rose stiffly.

"Choi, Sir."

"Good work, Choi."

Choi's face set now with confidence and righteous determination. His dark hair and the harsh overhead lights which made dark shadows of the features of his angular face made him look like a hood in a noir book.

"Son of a bitch!" spat Lambert, rubbing his chest and grimacing with pain, "what happened to 'do no harm'?"

"Don't take it personally," said the captain, placing a grateful hand on Lambert's shoulder, "I think the blow was meant for me."

"Doesn't make it hurt any less," grumbled the engineering chief.

The captain let Lambert gripe as he approached Deveaux. The X.O. looked embarrassed and couldn't meet the captain's eyes when he approached. "Your concerns have been noted, Forrest. I want you to dispose of that," he cocked a thumb over his shoulder to where Eben lay, "and confine yourself to your cabin; I can't have you standing in my way... in any sense of the expression."

Deveaux flushed almost purple with humiliation. Whether it was true integrity or sheer yellow cowardice that compelled the ship's X.O. to act in his own interests instead of ship and crew no longer mattered to the captain, only that it not happen again.

The icy atmosphere and sense of mistrust was almost palpable between them now as the disgraced officer shuffled by, trying to maintain a semblance of dignity. Eben had been a synthetic, and the idea that Deveaux had been prepared to leave the sentry to the mercy of a mere collection of macrochips and a few lines of binary code was not so unexpected; that he would collude with Eben in his own interests was—he was supposed to be a leader, a man the ship's crew were supposed to be able to look up to, but his actions had proved he would rather look after his own, to potentially conspire with the onboard artificial intelligences than risk his neck for anybody else. Already there were murmurs; Judas and Jonas being the most popular among the crew as Deveaux quietly set about moving Eben with the help of Choi. He passed the group of techs in silence, which they returned frostily.

"Let's get this ship back in human hands, people," the captain quipped, trying to sound determined and enthusiastic, "When we're done I don't want guardian to be able to do so much as turn on a light bulb."

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Sparks and Desaille were at work on their third marauder now, having made short work of stripping the flame throwers from the previous two. Sands, Mboko and Garza were busy at work refitting the cut down fuel lines to the tanks and fitting the harnesses that Sparks had improvised to allow a man to carry the heavy fuel tank on his back.

"Three ain't gonna be enough," Sands remarked as Mboko helped him shoulder the a tank onto his back to test the weight.

Sparks shot him an irritated look, borne more out of frustration at the stubborn bolts he was trying to shift than Sands' remark. "The five of us can't carry one each. We're already pushing it at three."

The lights within cargo one suddenly and unexpectedly blinked out, and Sparks' usually measured and calm voice was the first and loudest to ring out in the darkness: "What the goddamn hell?!" he cursed, his frustration more evident than ever.

Dim battery powered back-up lights glowed gently into being, but their light was wan and only illuminated shallow pools every ten meters around the perimeter of the cavernous space, and only threatened to make Sparks' task all the more difficult.

In cargo one the only sounds, besides those of their efforts, had been the gentle background drone of the air recycler swapping out the carbon dioxide for new—if not exactly fresh—air. They had all become accustomed to the drone that they barely noticed it, and it only registered to them again when the small turbines suddenly dropped lower and lower in pitch, as if winding down, before stopping altogether.

Sparks downed his tools and took a few steps forward, until he stood directly underneath the nearest air vent in that tangle of pipes, tubes and ducts twenty-five meters above him. He stood motionless beneath the vent, right arm held above his head, palm up, trying to feel the gentle waft of recycled air. "There's something up with life support," he said apprehensively, "the air's stopped."

"What you mean it stopped?" asked Garza, getting to his feet in what he was loath to admit was a fearful and almost involuntary impulse; his greatest fear since childhood had been suffocation or drowning, and Sparks remark had shot the nerve that kept the lid on that nightmare and his adult rationality, striking that primal place in his mind where childhood bogeymen once reigned, crafting night terrors of being buried alive. "What you mean it stopped?!" he barked again, panic rising.

Sparks fixed him with a look. "Relax. I'm sure it's part of the master plan. The tech team are probably having to take the ship back system by system. It shouldn't last long."

Even before Sparks had finished the sentence a strange giddiness overcame all of the men standing in cargo one; butterflies in the tummy, and a sensations of lightness, of a physical weight lifted. Only when Mboko watched one of the spanners he had set aside while fitting a fuel line start to rise from the floor and float gently into the air did he realise the sensation was very real, and no trick of the mind. "This can't be good," he said with rising alarm when he too began to float.

"The artificial gravity," Sparks observed with real worry for the first time, "they shut down the gravity systems!"

Sands chuckled to himself in spite of it all; he had experienced zero-g plenty when strapped into the seat of a free-falling drop ship, but this was the first time he had ever experienced it while untethered in any way. He smiled nervously as the butterflies rose in his tummy—a unique, but not unpleasant, vibe. "So what?" he commented

The hundreds, perhaps thousands, of crates, boxes and containers of all shapes and sizes within cargo one, ranging from the size of a footlocker to the ten-foot cubed marauder containers began to float freely now, nudging each other gently; some drifted away gently with little-to-no force, others gently tumbling over and over like a graceful aerial dance. The marauder stacks were airborne now, silently approaching where the men tried with varying degrees of success, from ungainly to awkward, to find a form of locomotion through the air to avoid them.

"Careful," Sparks advised, nodding to where the stack of cubes crept upon the Desaille and the others. It was a strange sight, three of the cubes with their decanted mechs still anchored to the runners in a partial state of disassembly, gliding gracefully and silently, "the weight of all this stuff obviously isn't an issue right now, but impetus is; try not to touch anything, or you'll risk turning this place into one big meat grinder," he finished, trying to avoid a five-hundred pound ration case that was rising to meet him like a feather on an updraft. As an afterthought he added: "And don't get caught under anything when the system reactivates, or it's adiós muchachos."

A sealed marauder cube nudged Mboko who, heeding Sparks warning, just let it carry him away gently. He clung to it as if it were a life boat in calm seas and smiled to himself. Despite the potential danger posed, there was an inherent beauty in experiencing zero-g like this.

Sands' felt something brush gently against the nape of his neck, his hand automatically swatting at whatever it was like a pesky bug. There was a sudden moist sensation on the back of his hands and mingling through the hair on the back of his head, adding to the slew of oddness he was already experiencing. When he looked at the hand it was covered in a vile looking brownish liquid he recognised straight away, and a cold void replaced the butterflies in his stomach instantaneously. "Help me!" he uttered, "Help me, it's leaking!"

Sparks twisted around to see perfect little globes of quinitricetyline ooze out of the fuel tank on Sands' back where the flamer hose has been cut down and reattached. Globules of the yellow-brown super-combustible liquid floated freely around Sands, soaking into his fatigues and hair. In his panic Sands had sent himself into a weightless tumble, thrashing endlessly in futility as more and more of the fuel seeped from the tank, disorienting him and screwing his terror down deeper.

One of the overhead air ducts began to rattle and clang violently, almost shaking loose from the brackets that held them in place. The dread sound of livid alien screeches and feral hisses followed shortly after, and everybody knew the situation had gone from bad to all out clusterfuck. The rattling moved though the vents inexorably towards where all five men floated as helpless as motes of dust, the hidden creature within as as confused and disorientated as they were.

Mboko gently—ever so gently—nudged himself away from the marauder cube he clung to, aiming his body for the second flame unit which, unlike the one Sands now bore, hadn't been cut down or jury rigged yet. The heavy tank and burner weren't an issue in zero-g, and when he grasped the bulky burner it felt good to have something to be able to use against the bastard alien that wasn't a tazer. His fingers searched for a trigger instinctively, though after a moment he recalled Sparks telling them there was no trigger; the activator was a steel cable that linked into the marauder's solenoid which had to be cut when it had been disconnected. He turned the ungainly weapon over, finding the braid of high tensile steel wire and wrapped it around his fist.

The hidden alien was directly above Sparks now, only a few feet from a vent. Sparks' looked helpless and lost, eyes darting from Sands, flailing and tumbling, yelling in fear, to the vent where black, slender fingers now slid into the grate. The grate buckled with a metallic shriek and spiralled away into the dimness, mangled. A horrendously dark and eyeless head, wearing a loathsome grimace peered down at him, the first time Sparks had actually seen the alien face to face. Somehow it knew he was there. The creature's thin lips curled into a hateful sneer, its instinctual urge to destroy flooding every fibre of its being. It launched itself from the duct straight at him. Sparks grabbed the nearest thing to hand—a ration case— and threw it with all his strength. The steel case caught the monster squarely in the face and send it tumbling backwards through the air where it hit one, two, three other cargo cases, leaving them spinning like tops. The alien snarled and hissed at him, clambering over weightless boxes to get to him, searching for any kind of purchase. Its sneer and guttural hisses made Garza's blood turn to ice water in his veins, the bogeyman of his childhood nightmares, that thing that lurked under the bed to clutch at your ankles in the darkness, the monster in the closet, all made flesh before his eyes. He turned flailing awkwardly and tried to flee for the exit, but in doing so managed to draw its attention from Sparks. That smooth eyeless head, those needle teeth turned to face him now, and he watched in black terror as the creature gripped a crate and drew its body into a crouch before kicking off it towards another that hovered near the exit. It landed deftly, as lithe as a cat atop its target. Already it had adapted to using the environment to convey itself where it wanted to be, even in zero-gravity. At that moment Garza knew their numbers had come up; from its position it could spring on any one of its human prey. The bogeyman had come to collect.

Again it crouched and kicked off. The crate slammed hard into the wall giving it a solid surface that it used to its full advantage. It sprung forwards at full force, talons clawing at the air, jaws ready to strip flesh from bone.

Sparks watched it go for Garza and desperately tried lobbing another crate at it but was too wide of the mark. Garza grabbed the nearest crate, using like a shield it to take the impact as the alien crashed into him. They tumbled, weightless, together, the terrified human trooper facing the alien creature, just out of its reach. Its inner jaws snapped from its mouth, lancing at his head, its tail and claws splitting the air, only a flimsy little crate between him and death incarnate. His back slammed into something hard—wall, floor, ceiling, he couldn't tell—and suddenly felt hot agony as the creature's talons buried themselves in the flesh of each arm. He could smell its ammonia breath, feel its cold grip, hear the start of a guttural hiss. His mind cried out in silent prayer as he awaited the death stroke...

Mboko reared the flamethrower at the beast as it leapt for Garza, but its leap was so nimble and quick that he was forced to make a difficult turn in the zero-gravity. When Garza and the alien hit the floor together he steadied his hand again, training the nozzle at the creature, praying that Garza could escape its clutches for just a moment and give him a clear shot to roast the thing alive.

Sparks saw what was about to happen and tried to scream for Mboko to stop, but the sound arrested in his throat when he felt the perfect spheres of burner fuel dapple onto his skin and flight suit. Sands still wrestled with the flamer and tank, trying to free himself of the tightly cinched straps over his shoulders. More and more little globules of brown-yellow liquid leaking, chains of flammable pearls, and Mboko was aiming right for them. Again, Sparks tried to cry out for Mboko to stop, but somehow Garza had managed to curl his legs under the crate that shielded him from the alien and pushed it away from him just enough to give Mboko the opening he needed.

He was too late.

Mboko pulled on the braided wire. A jet of flame erupted from the weapon in his hands, instantaneously igniting the weightless pearls of quinitricetyline. Chains of flame everywhere, burning blue and hot, igniting and winking out like the muzzle flare of a machine gun. The alien screeched and leapt away in pain, doused in fire. Sands' screams joined cacophony. He was completely aflame—a human inferno, writhing in agony and completely beyond help, as even more of the liquid oozed from the tank, literally adding more fuel to the fire.

Sparks stripped out of his flight suit; a large patch at his hip had been doused and was burning, the skin beneath already blistered and angry red.

Garza soon realised his hair was on fire and rubbed at it frantically as Desaille helped, both men pulling away lumps of fused and singed hair. Aside from the wounds in each arm where the alien's talons had punctured the flesh, he had miraculously sustained no life threatening injuries.

Mboko, struck mute by the chaos he had wrought in just trying to do the right thing, watched in horror as his friend flailed weightless and ablaze.

Sand's screams and the alien's screeches echoed together in the cavernous space of cargo one, a twisted, discordant chorus of agony, and just when Sparks and Mboko thought the situation could get no worse, fate dealt them another blow.

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Lambert watched the screen lividly, knowing GUARDIAN had just played dirty. His techs had done a beautiful job of severing its controls, the plan of simultaneous attacks on its systems successfully sending it into overdrive. But the planned meltdown didn't happen; GUARDIAN had started fighting back.

First the life support systems crashed. Then the primary power systems, followed closely by the secondary and tertiary draws. Air, heat, light and gravity, GUARDIAN cut all the systems that its human masters needed the most.

Like Eben before it, GUARDIAN was refusing to play by human rules.

"Where's the mainframe?" Asked the captain, steadying himself against a flashing bank of lights and buttons as he felt his feet leave the floor. His face was bathed in the glow of GUARDIAN's readouts, now the only means of illumination in the core.

"Under your feet," said Lambert, still unconsciously rubbing at the spot in his chest where Eben had struck earlier, "the walls, the floor... the ceiling—the core IS the mainframe."

The captain feigned understanding, though he had no idea how all the parts fitted together. Eben, GUARDIAN and the damn bureaucrats back on Earth has played a blinder of a trump card and proved that every life aboard the Sentry of Eons was worth less to them than a vile alien creature they had stumbled across. Big brother was watching, big brother was listening, and big brother had a callous machine heart that only considered the worth of a human life as a 1 or 0, nothing more than a soulless string of binary. Big brother had to go. "How do we kill it?"

Lambert looked appalled for a moment and shook his head—until now he had thought that the captain's talk of killing GUARDIAN had just been hyperbole, "Not advisable, captain; there's too many systems that need to be run by computer. And with Eben gone... if you shut down GUARDIAN, if you kill it stone dead, every tiny little thing—things we would easily overlook—would have to be done manually. It's almost impossible."

"Almost?" the captain arched an eyebrow at the engineer.

"That's the optimistic version. There aren't enough people by a long shot to run all the little background systems that guardian does."

"Life support, power," the captain counted on his finger tips, "comms, propulsion and for crying out loud gravity. Five systems—that's all we need."

"And every one needs a thousand start-ups and sub-routines to run," Lambert countered.

"Well we better think of something. We better think of something fast," sighed the captain.

"Sir!" somebody shouted from the gloom behind them. Both turned, thinking they were the one being addressed. One of Lambert's techs, Geddiman, sweating heavily, his face and flight suit smudged here and there with greasy smears, rose from a hatchway in the floor pit. His mop of red hair, usually meticulously combed and presentable, was a wild, weightless nest that made him look like a mad scientist from a kid holo-show. Seeing he had their attention—anybody's attention, as long as they were senior to him, really—he beckoned them over. "I found a redundant comm port left over from the refit!" he beamed proudly. The grin began to fade when the captain and engineering chief only returned silent, blank looks, oblivious to the potential importance of the discovery. He waggled a finger at them and scratched at his chin, a man taking a moment to think, "You don't get it. Okay.. erm... the comm port is what the core uses to relay signals through the systems. If you get a decent off-network computer and somebody with some programming savvy, you can make guardian your dancing monkey," grinning widely again, bursting with exuberance he added "you can make it chase its tail forever."

Deadly serious, despite the young engineer's almost contagious energy, the captain floated over to him gently, placing a hand on each of his shoulders and looked him dead in the eye. "How?"

Less than five minutes later, Davitch was in the pit and hooked into the redundant port . The computer pad in his hands raced with command lines flashing by, hundreds of thousands of commands per second. "It's been a few years since I had to do basic prog skills. I guess it's like riding a b...b...b..."

"What's the plan?" asked the captain, for now just a gently bobbing head peering upside down through the hole in the floor grating. Geddiman awaited up top, flicking through pages and pages of vast mathematical equations on his own computer pad. None of it made any sense to him or anybody around him, though he seemed gleeful at the complex formula before him. "Quantum algorithms," he proudly announced to the bizarre gathering of floating techs and engineers around the pit, "Guardian's running so many qubits it could do this in the blink of an eye, but we're feeding it through the comm port. Me and Davitch corrupted the integers, and thanks to some clever thinking it thinks it's a crucial command linked to a primary system. It's looking for an impossible answer over and over, but only being fed the data through the comm port byte by byte. It's like a bug in the mud. We got guardian by the balls and it's too busy to know it!"

"You broke it with maths?" remarked one of the engineers, "sounds like me in high school!"

Lambert took the pad from Geddiman's hands and scrutinised the endless equations, apparently impressed. "You gave it a problem that involves some lateral thinking."

"Creativity. Imagination." nodded Geddiman. "Things that computers find harder than hell."

Human qualities that still hadn't been fully replicated by computers—things that couldn't be broken down into binary sequences or quantifiable equations, as alien to them as the concept of a human soul. Lambert handed the pad to the captain, who barely glanced at the symbols and figures before handing it back to Geddiman, quietly impressed by the ingenuity and simplicity—at least as he saw it—of Geddiman and Davitch's solution. The whole thing literally looked Greek to him, but the flock of engineers seemed enthusiastic about the approach and its chances.

"The beauty of it is that we can have guardian's primary and secondary systems wrapped up in this," he pointed to the pad, "but we can programme it's tertiary systems to take up the slack human hands can't manage." Davitch's hand appeared through the top of the pit, flapping a 'gimme that' gesture. Geddiman passed it over, and in moments it was jacked in to the redundant port.

"Ruh...running." Davitch stammered calmly.

Everyone waited with baited breath. The quiet hum of the core began to grow louder and louder becoming a deep throb. Huge cooling fans far under the core began blowing air through the grid of heat exchangers, cooling the core to the point that most of them began to shiver. GUARDIAN, after only a few minutes of being tasked to think creatively, began to struggle. Each attempted cycle only multiplied its erroneous integers at the near exponential rate that it could think. "Gotcha." whispered Geddiman with unabashed satisfaction.

"The ship is our, s... sir." Davitch manoeuvred himself out of the pit. "I can give you whu... whu... what you want, but it'll take time."

The captain gave a brief nod of satisfaction. "Turn us around. Set a course for our teams on the ground." He turned, awkward in the air, and peered back over his shoulder, grumbling, "And can we get the damn gravity back on?"

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Cargo one was a scene of utter chaos: its gravity systems offline, contents tumbling freely though the air, all the freight acting like hammers in some kind of giant meat tenderiser. The smells of quinitricetyline and burnt hair assaulted the senses, of which smell and hearing were the most acute in the vast dimness of the hold.

And worse.

Sands, completely aflame, his skin blistered and split in places, blackened to a crisp in others. The subcutaneous fat cells beneath the surface rendering into a creamy grease that his skin slip-slided over. The intense heat of the flame had scorched the lining of his esophagus and sensitive membranes of his lungs, which now filled with fluid as his immune system tried to fight the damage. His throat was swelling shut, his screams reduced to wheezy gurgles. His eyes were milky white, a cataract of seared film over his corneas, eyelids burned away completely.

Above this horrifying sight, screeching and writhing, battered and buffeted between tumbling inventory crates, the alien. Its talons raked at the air in futility, as if it could claw its way back to its intended prey. Its lips were peeled back from its teeth, snarling, hissing. Black. Insectile. Its instinct to kill! kill! kill! had overcome its fear, the flames which had scorched its hard exoskeleton now all but forgotten.

Garza's nerve had shattered. He clawed at the smooth floor, scrambling, trying to flee to the exit—to escape this place of pain and death.

Mboko started this way and that, also in the claws of blind panic which pulled him in every direction at once, compelling him to act—to do something—to do ANYTHING! He was jabbering in vowels, forming no articulate sounds as behind him, unseen, one of the decanted marauders cartwheeled through the air. The stripped-out arm that once held the very flame unit that Mboko had wrought so much carnage with collided with his mouth, mashing his lips against teeth that shattered into dozens of shards in his bloody mouth. He went spiralling towards the ceiling, mercifully unconscious.

Sparks had been shouting for Garza to help Sands; for Mboko to look out; for—please, God—somebody to save them. But if there was some omniscient force watching over them it was a cruel, petty master, for at that moment his guts suddenly felt as if they were weighted with lead as everything and everybody in the room suddenly slammed hard to the floor again.

The massive snow globe of churning crates and bodies within cargo one crashed to the deck like they had been dropped. A sealed marauder cube, all two tonnes of it, smashed down onto Sands legs as they hit the ground almost simultaneously. The sheet metal of the casing warped and buckled with the impact, but Sands' wail was weak and wet.

Sparks hit the floor, his lower back glancing hard off the corner of a steel crate. He exclaimed in pain, somehow still having the clarity of thought to throw his arm over his head to shield himself as another small crate fell onto him. He lurched to his feet, grimacing and nursing his spine, eyes searching for the loathsome alien creature. His eyes fell on Sands, making his gorge rise in his throat immediately. He threw up.

Sands' legs, already split and swollen where his fatigues has been burned away, were crushed; his flesh and jellied fat ruptured through the skin like pus from a boil. Worse than that, Sands—blind, scorched and dying—was still trying to crawl away despite being hopelessly trapped. He was reaching, fingers grasping at the floor, but when he tried to pull himself forward naked muscle and bones slid from the seared skin, leaving the blistered husks of his fingers, hands and forearms stuck to the floor like empty sausage skins.

Sparks threw up again.

There followed a rattle and a crash of crates close to his right as he faltered, half-concussed, towards where Sands lay. The creature erupted from a haphazard mountain of boxes, no longer hissing but growling with antipathy. Its head reared on Sparks immediately, jaws parted teeth bared. It hauled its body from beneath the crate that had it trapped and dashed after Sparks, clambering over the rubble of inventory that had landed everywhere. When Sparks reached the flamethrower that lay beside the dying trooper he realised his time had run out. The alien leapt at him, a dark skeletal nightmare springing through the air, a seething monster ready to rip him apart. Sparks twisted away, cold panic dropping from the pit of his stomach. His legs buckled beneath him, weak from fear and the horror of everything he had witnessed in the last few minutes.

The stumble saved his life. The alien overshot its mark and slammed full force into one of the decanted marauders. Stunned, the creature slid languidly backwards over the mech, trapping itself in the empty cube from which the marauder had emerged. Its talons screeched down the olive drab paintwork of the compartment to bare steel beneath, its tail thrashing and whipping hard enough to drive dents into the sheet steel of the walls.

Sparks' instincts screamed for him to run, to follow Garza and flee for his life, yet still his legs couldn't obey the commands from his mind. There would be no flight—he could only fight. The flamethrower unit beside him was heavy and cumbersome he knew, but he didn't have to lift it—only to aim it.

The cornered xenomorph wheeled around to face him. Silent, baring a macabre grin, as if it knew its end had come. It eased its inner jaws past its teeth and hissed. Sparks returned the sneer as his hand found the actuator wire. The pale blue pilot burner snapped into life. "Sayonara." He growled, and pulled the braided wire all the way.

The jet of flame consumed the alien, the fire condensed and focussed by the crate in which the creature was trapped. Its screeches were high and pained and unlike any sound it had made before. Its agony was a satisfying song to Sparks who was unaware that he was laughing, harshly and without real mirth, mocking its pain as it roasted to death in what had become something alike to a blast furnace. Weaker and weaker, its wails petered out and still Sparks kept roasting it, just to make god damn sure it was as dead as he wanted it to be until, finally, that numbing red rage in him began to abate. He panted, exhausted, trying to pull in a decent breath into his tight chest. He clumsily tried to get to his feet, legs weak and quaking all over from fear and adrenaline. The crate was scorched until the olive drab paint had peeled off and the metal beneath had turned a kind of pearlescent blue-black. Curled up in the bottom corner of the marauder cube lay the creature, its insides crackling and spitting like cooking meat, wrapped in on itself in a fetal ball. Somehow that seemed fitting. He could only despise it; less than forty-eight hours ago it was wrapped in a fetal ball as it gestated within the chest of one of the poor bastards brought back from the planet surface. Yes, somehow it seemed fitting.

His breathing was becoming laboured and rapid, his heart a hammering fist in his chest. He tried again to draw in another deep calming breath, but found he couldn't sate his need for air. White spots began to dance at the periphery of his vision as the tips of his fingers and toes began to tingle. He tried again to rise to his feet and again his weakness prevented him. Nausea sank and twisted in his stomach, yet at the same moment he felt a euphoric lightness wash over him.

Understanding now what was happening to him he looked ruefully at the smashed air vent the alien had used.

The fire.

The fire had eaten up all of the oxygen in the room and life support hadn't kicked in to recycle the air yet. He was suffocating. The barrage of sensations his body was going through were all symptoms of hypoxia. Sparks gasped as his eyes fell on the scorched ruin of what used to be a human being, Sands. A bubble of mucus swelled and contracted minutely between his swollen, blistered lips and popped when he groaned weakly.

Throbbing in his temples and behind his eyes, Sparks felt the unbearable ache of a migraine crush his oxygen starved brain. His last lingering conscious thoughts was only what a mercy it would be for Sands, whose suffering would now be short lived, one way or another.

Blackness encroached on his vision, sweeping away all before him, consuming everything.

He could hear his heart hammering in his chest.

His pulse in his ears, throbbing behind his eyes.

Then there was nothing.

Not even darkness.

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Thomson dashed through the corridors as quickly as his legs could take him on the orders of the captain. Geddiman and Davitch were hard at work trying to regain system control at the core, taking back what GUARDIAN had done. Dozens of crew members were double-timing it back to their posts in readiness for when their system would come back online. At the captain's insistence power and the grav-control centrifuges had been restored before all the others to prevent a ship full of floating crew swimming in the air to reach their posts—the thought was amusing, and he guessed it was a good call on the captain's part. Still, life support would have to be restored soon before it became a problem. He mentally ticked off the remainder of the checklist: life support, comms, propulsion—the must haves. He was comms. Right now all other systems were secondary. What did it matter if there was not hot water, or the heads didn't flush when you were slowly freezing or suffocating to death in the dark, right?

But, damn... even if he did get back to his post and find his station already operational, there was a hundred and one diagnostic tests to do before he could so much as ping a sonar. On top of that, it would all need done manually: the transmitter and receiver would need realigned; the frequencies scanned and set by hand. He was going to be busy, for sure. But he was equally sure that he was up to the task.

As he sped into his station in the communications deck, he was pleased to see that Brier and Schultz were already there, despite them officially being off-shift. Good. Three hands would make light work, and Lieutenant Brier, his superior, would keep him focussed.

As he took his seat, Brier faced him, her raven hair tied up and held in place by the handle of a spoon from the mess. Impressive improvisation there, el-tee, he thought, adjusting the back rest.

"Good work, Ensign," she said.

Thomson noted the sheen of sweat on her brow. He couldn't tell of it was from worry or exertion. Maybe both.

"Set magnitude, impedance and phase," said Schultz, his hands darting over the buttons of the comm before him. He was thin and wiry, hair scraggly and with five o'clock shadow darkening his cheeks and chin, he looked exhausted. Or maybe he had just turned out his bunk. "Zero-zero-six degrees. Declination adjusted. I need HKR tac-comms before I can scan for beacons."

"Thomson, get on it." Brier ordered.

"Yes, sir." Thomson's fingers danced over his console, reinitialising the powerful transmitter array that Schultz was at this moment realigning. "Their last known coordinates were logged," he added.

"Then we'll start there. Remember to adjust for divergence; once propulsion and navigation kicks in we're going to lose that window for a while."

All three programmed their consoles as quickly as they could. The occasional frustrated sigh escaped them as they backtracked to correct some error made in their haste, or sometimes picked up by another member.

"Coordinates locked in." Schultz finished typing and swivelled his chair to face Thomson who sat on the other side of Brier. "C'mon, noob, we're waiting for you."

Brier herself finished rattling buttons on her console and slid out of her chair to Thomson's side without missing a beat. She peered over his shoulder at his screen. "Good," she said with quiet approval in his ear, "Good work , Ensign. Bypass the macros, guardian doesn't use them anyway."

Thomson felt himself flush hot and sticky with sweat now—the pressure was on; the pressure to establish contact with those left on the ground; the pressure to find out if they'd be returning to rescue anything but corpses. As his fingers slid off the last command button he sighed heavily, "Locked in, Lieutenant."

Brier slipped back into the seat at her comm. The screen blinked with a single word in bold white type, stark against the black screen:

INITIATE?

She pushed the button confirming the order and all held their breath.

Every screen in the room suddenly went blank, and the men on either side of Brier felt their hearts sink. They turned to her to ask of their efforts had come to nothing. She held her finger up to hush them before they had even spoken. "Give it a moment; it's all running through that old port, remember; the transfer rates will be pretty poor."

Thomson was unconsciously holding his breath, and he noticed that Brier was just as unconsciously biting her bottom lip.

Brightness flared back into the room as Schultz's display bloomed back to life, hundreds of radio frequencies tumbling down the screen, each live one locking into a sidebar on the right hand side of the display where the operator could monitor the comm channels. "It worked. It worked!" Schultz exclaimed, "I've got the Sentry's contacts."

Brier slipped out of her seat again to his side, her eyes scanning the myriad of frequencies, "These are short waves. Deck to deck comms," she said almost dismissively, "set high gain, high magnitude. Look for anything with the slightest decay—that'll be our our marks on the planet."

Schultz nodded keenly. "On it."

Thomson's display bloomed to life as the others conversed—a series of criss-cross symmetrical lines that came together and multiplied exponentially. They warped and bulged into an undulating virtual wire frame. The sluggish computer system slowly started adding terrain details to the wireframe: Ocean and lakes, geological formations, forests, polar ice caps, small pockets of desert; a topographical representation of the planet they had left behind slowly coalescing on screen before him. "Where are the transponders?" he murmured to himself in concern.

"Let it work," Brier assured, taking her seat again in expectation of her own station going active again, "try setting the refresh rate higher, but remember we're running only about a tenth of the flops we're used to."

Thomson tapped in commands. The view of the terrain zoomed away until the representation of the planet hung in the inky black void of virtual space. A yellow crosshair scanned down the planet, starting at its northern pole to an area between its tropics and equator and flashed white as it locked on to something. The view zoomed in sharply, until they were looking at the verdant sea of of the forest canopy bisected from south-west to north-east by the rude dark slash of a chain of mountains. Rivers ran like veins and arteries across the landscape—water, the very life blood of this lush, fertile world. "This is it," Thomson remarked, tracing the thick shadow that the cliffs and mountains cast over basin to the west, "that's where the search and rescue team went on op. But where the hell are their transponders?"

"Easy, ensign." Briers assured again, "stay focussed."

Thermal details started filling in the virtual topography: the heat bloom from the alien wreckage; the distinct grazing trails up to a kilometre wide where the planet's warm blooded mammals moved across the surface; temperature fluctuations induced by changing barometric pressure and moving weather systems. Then, suddenly, the cross hair locked on again. A single yellow blip flashed onscreen at the cliff edge, where a titanic waterfall plummeted into the basin. "There!" his finger jabbed at the screen. Another blip appeared. Then another, and another. More and more little pockets of hits until they counted seventeen altogether, including the strange signal that had lured the search and rescue team to the planet in the first place.

"Look how scattered they are," Schultz commented, "Jeez, they're all over the place."

"Yeah." Brier's remark was without emotion, though she rubbed both her cheeks absently, as if in a quandary. "Notify the captain. We have them locked in."

"Wait." Thomson uttered.

"Wait?" Brier almost bristled at Thomson's tone that had sounded too much like an order. Her fleeting irritation faded when Thomson pointed to an anomaly on the display. Her brow furrowed down in curiosity. "What the hell is that?" she asked in wonderment.

The display highlighted in a false blue hue a large anomaly that seemed to cover an area of almost three square kilometres. The amorphous mass seemed to shift and bulge, constantly changing shape. And it was moving east, directly towards the transponder signals on the ground.

Brier was tapping on her keys again in a flurry of activity.

"It's absorbing all the mammalian readings. Just swallowing them up. What the hell?" Thomson's voice was thick with some apprehension that the others were silently acknowledging in themselves upon seeing that shifting mass.

"Thank you. I can see that." Brier remarked, still tapping keys.

"Noob, I'm not registering any movement in any of your contacts. Check for ECT readings. And while you're at it look for meat wagon beacons; they still use them to zero dropships on KIA." Schultz said, making it sound like an order, though he didn't have the authority to do so.

Brier suddenly leapt to her feet, awestruck. Her own updated topography showed masses of arachnid clustered not far to the south of the transponder hits. Here and there were small but swiftly moving readings of lifeforms that registered as silicate based life forms—these seemed to be badgering the clusters of arachnid endlessly. In fact they appeared to be so preoccupied with each other that the moving transponders seemed to be making good an escape to the east. But that shapeless mass moved inexorably towards them all, swallowing up all life before it, growing, multiplying like bacteria in a petri dish. Her readings had to be wrong. Had to be. "Raise the field marshal right now, raise anybody you can" she said in a bare whisper as Thomson and Schultz watched her display in stunned silence, "tell them to run for their lives."

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The spartan climbed over the cusp of the cliff edge beside the waterfall. A clear aspic-like fluid oozed from a gash in one of the rare chinks in his armour, under his armpit, where the kevlar weave undersuit was exposed. The plates of his armour were considerably more scored than before, criss-crossed with dual parallel slashes.

Other than that Rico thought the chief looked pretty darn good, considering what he had just pulled off. Somewhere in the cove far below was the carcass of a hunter he had taken on hand-to-hand and, miraculously, killed. "You must be cast of iron, son." Rico remarked with a small spark of pride in his breast as the spartan got to his feet.

Master Chief rapped his knuckles against his helmet. "Not iron. Carbide."

Rico stood, quietly non-nonplussed, unsure if the chief had made a joking remark or not.

The spartan turned this way and that for a moment, searching the trees. "The other one?"

"Toast," Rico remarked, acknowledging Azumi, who watched the chief in steely silence. Luminous green blood was crusted in spatters up her arms in places and on the sheath and handle of her combat knife. A distinctive trail of arterial spray speckled her from naval to neck. Somehow, the chief surmised, the little waif of a girl before him had got the jump on the hunter and got close enough to cut its throat.

"That's incredible," he stated plainly.

"That's lucky," Rico replied dismissively. Azumi still watched the spartan in silent accusation. "What you did was incredible."

"Your friend?" the chief interrupted Rico, addressing Azumi.

"'Douris is none of your damn business," she answered, barely keeping a lid on her resentment of the chief, "it's your fault we're here in the first place."

"Secure that mouth, trooper!" Rico barked.

Azumi's mouth set hard. She turned without another word and began walking back upstream, towards where Poledouris' body lay.

"Don't take it personal." Rico advised the chief as they both watched her walk away, "I think she would've aimed that at me if she thought she could've gotten away with it."

The constant drizzle had soaked into Rico's fatigues. Tumultuous grey clouds roiled, and lightning scoured the sky here and there, slowly heading towards the south-western horizon. All the static hanging thickly in the air had been making the comm in his ear buzz and crackle. Every now and then he had let himself hope that he had head a voice in the static, but each time his hope had been dashed. In the distance a blanket lightning flickered and flashed, looking like the sky above a distant battlefield. There was a surge of static in his ear again, and Rico was close to plucking the earpiece out when he realized it wasn't wholly static. He heard something that time—some articulate sound, he was sure: "uffneck.. eeder... errah.. one.. do ..ooo ..op?"

Rico's hand shot to his ears, plugging them. Oh, so distant, crackling and tinny but definitely a voice. Rico waited anxiously for it to repeat. "Roughneck leader, this is sierra-echo-one. Do you copy?" An unabashed smile of relief and delight bloomed across his face, and he keyed the button on his helmet to respond. "Yes! Christ! I copy sierra-echo-one—this is roughneck leader. Where the hell have you been?"

The male voice was soft and polite—a voice he recognized as the ensign who had picked up the fried transponder signal. This time he seemed more coherent and less flustered than when they had been face-to-face. "Roughneck leader, we have your signal locked in,"

"Great!" Rico interrupted, "Now get us to hell off this rock!"

There was a pregnant pause; even over radio and the gulf of space between them, Rico could sense the weight of that silence. When Thomson spoke again it was direct and personal, unlike the officious, professional coolness of other comm-techs, "We're working on that. Right now you have to run. Run as fast as your legs can carry you."

Rico's brow knitted into a frown as he keyed his helmet's mike, "Keep to the point, son; I need clear, precise communications.

There was another crackle of static fizz and the muffled angry voice of a woman barking a rebuke or order. She picked up the conversation, her voice flat, professional and scratchy in the earpiece. "Roughneck leader, this is sierra-echo-one, be advised there is a considerable mass of organic matter heading towards your position, copy?"

Rico's frown deepened, "Copy sierra-echo-one. Clarify 'considerable organic mass', over?"

Master Chief watched and listened to Rico attentively; the words 'considerable organic mass' had caught his attention, and not for the first time in his life.

Again her flat, unperturbed tone in his earpiece, "Anomaly of unknown origin, sir. All we know is that it's consuming every living thing it touches," her tone suddenly changed a little, tinged with foreboding, "and it's heading towards your position like a god damned tidal wave."

"A tidal wave?" Rico said sharply, getting ready to tell the comm-techs to stop speaking in riddles. As soon as he said it the spartan stirred noticeably, and turned to the cliff edge, looking intently over the vast vista of the basin below that their high vantage point offered him. It was the most agitated he had seen the warrior yet, and again another piece of the puzzle snapped into place for Rico. He felt a cold shudder run through him. "A tidal wave," he murmured, "...or a flood."

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The massive shearing jaws of one of the hideous insectoids snapped shut just centimetres from the tree limb where Phay'd stood, firing relentlessly into the shrieking, hissing hordes on the ground. If it had actually gotten to the bough, Phay'd was sure those forbidding jaws could have lopped it off easily. He fixed his targeting glyph on its thorax and fired. The hot plasma blew a hole the size of his fist through its vital organs, and the thick off-green soup of its innards started slopping though the charred breach.

He was swelling with pride and exultation at having found the Dek'd'tor and Gryshh, whom Phay'd had left behind to guard the ancient one when he went to investigate the fate of the main seeder, though the situation he had eventually discovered them in was perilous—surrounded by two warring hard meats in the lashing rain: the kainde amedha that his species had brought to this world to breed and hunt for sport; and the insectoid hard meat, the zabin amedha, that they had unexpectedly stumbled over. Both species were locked in a battle for survival now, and it was impossible for him to tell which way the phenomenal battle was going. For every strength one species had the other seemed to have a counter to it. The insectoid zabin amedha had strength and numbers, the kainde amedha had speed and nimbleness. Their acid blood was their greatest asset, and inflicted heavy damage upon the insectoids, though it cost the kainde amedha just as grievously to inflict it. The great grinding battle of these two species threatened to result in a pyrrhic victory for which ever one remained alive at the end. Everywhere was the chewed up remains of the hard meat, quivering next to the dissolving cadavers of the insectoids. Yet still they warred on, clambering over the fallen.

Below, one of the hard meat began climbing into the tree, its talons gripping deep into the soft bark easily. The glyph of his mask's targeting system locked onto the alien's head, the small actuators that drove his shoulder burner fixing upon it, but he was saved the effort when one of the insectoids clamped its jaws on the alien's long tail and hauled it screeching back into the fray and its almost inevitable doom. Elsewhere he watched three of the aliens corner a lone insectoid in the burned out hollow of an old lightning-struck tree before proceeding to take it apart, piece by piece and limb by limb, with almost surgical efficiency.

Phay'd was preparing to scout a route out of the jam to safety, but knew that the Dek'd'tor may not have the strength left to escape; the ancient yautja looked exhausted as he crouched in the safety of the boughs high above, his long scarlet cloak was wrapped around his withered old body. Of Claw there had been no sign, and he presumed he had made good headway towards investigating the mothership wreck or died in glory.

There was a steadily growing scent carried on the breeze that perturbed his olfactory glands. It smelled like decay; like rotting flesh and corruption. Carrion. Death itself riding on the air currents, sweeping by them, an invisible phantom.

The battling hordes below also seemed to sense what hung in the air. Their vitriol petered out, then halted, leaving only twitching corpses and those in their death throes in the churned mud. The aliens and insectoids alike halted and looked west, almost as one. The air was heavy with grim expectation as Phay'd and Gryshh too peered west, seeing only trees stretching away forever. Yet still, that malodour of decay grew until they could almost taste it. A moment so quiet and still that Phay'd might not have believed it save for the fact that he trusted his keen senses.

Then chaos. Both species of hard meat, the aliens and the insectoids, erupted together in a cacophony of shrieks and hisses, ear splitting screeches and roars of absolute antipathy. These warring species now stood side by side, oblivious of the instinctual imperative to destroy each other. They were held rapt by something in the west. Something which had them truly alarmed.

Phay'd climbed higher into the tree followed closely by Gryshh. The Dek'd'tor's breathing was a low grunt, and Phay'd wondered if all the recent effort had proved too much for the old one. A deep uncharacteristic unease crept into him again, telling of a danger that was yet to come. As he passed he took the time to activate the elder's chameleon field before activating his own. Gryshh followed suit, and soon all three trapped predators were veiled, rendered nearly invisible in their almost perfect optical camouflage.

When he peered west again Phay'd found himself startled by the sudden appearance of... something. Something his mind couldn't quite assimilate. From out of the blue a wall of shifting organic mass had crept up on them, moving easily over the undulating terrain and between the wide tree trunks. It's lukewarm thermal signature showed in wan yellows and greens to him, the colour of pus and corruption. The shapeless mound blotted out the horizon, and Phay'd came to a stark realization: it was not one moving mass, but a host of millions of swollen creatures moving forward as one—an unstoppable living wave. The vast majority of its mass consisted of small gaseous sacs that seemed to flit lightly and swiftly through the air using short appendages that hung from beneath their bodies oddly. They seemed to grasp and feel the air with three tendrils which ended in bizarre organs that were almost feathered in texture. Charging through this biomass were larger creatures, bipedal creatures of a sort that loosely resembled yautja, though their bodies were bulbous and twisted and gnarled. Some lacked limbs and had sprouted tentacles in their place that carried out the same function; others were headless, or their heads hung on spines that were snapped and twisted to such a degree that Phay'd puzzled how these things lived at all. These forms resembled the small gaseous sacs very little, save for that cluster of feathered tendrils that erupted from placed in their necks or chests. Waddling awkwardly through the throngs were large bulbous creatures, their hugely bloated bodies undulated and pulsed from within, waxy skin distending, inflating, deflating, as if their very innards were constantly in motion. They had no heads to speak of, and seemed to lack limbs altogether except for the short, stubby legs that protruded from their bloated, malformed bodies. All had tough mottled skin that looked like rotten animal hide.

Phay'd rose from his crouch, instinctively sensing the threat that this new faction posed. The small motorized drone of the burner on Gryshh's shoulder locking on brought him back to the moment. That living wave was just seconds away. His eyes fell on one of the closer of the bipedal beings as it got closer; when he had first observed them he had noticed a kind of superficial similarity to the yautja, but only now did he realize with absolute abhorrence the significance of that comparison; the creature's gnarled skin was covered by a yautja body mesh; the one arm that remained intact wore a gauntlet and fingerless hide gloves which were now bursting at the seams because of the swollen and twisted flesh within. Its burner hung askew from the hump its shoulder had become, the hide straps taut and biting deeply into its flesh. Those feathered organs he had observed sprouted from the neck.

Phay'd growled in disgust. This new life form—whatever it may be—seemed to infest the body, desecrate it until it was almost unrecognisable, and use it for its own ends. His fellow hunt brother's body had been reduced to a marionette for this low being.

He spotted another walking ruin of what used to be a proud hunter then another, and another, each looking worse and worse by degrees, their skins blackened. Another realization more awful than the first gripped him then, making him roar with outrage: the last of the infested hunters he saw was recognizable to him; its flayed skin and the scowl on its crooked head were the last thing he saw of this yautja earlier. It was Noc, the leader who had burned to death in the main seeder when it had crashed, now reduced to a puppet of meat, the relic of his remains defiled and corrupted.

Blistering rage gripped his heart like talons. His legs became rigid, quaking with anger. Against these vile creatures there was to be no peace, even in death. They were not a foe worthy of honour; not worthy to hunt. They were low. Contemptible.

Syuit-de thei-de.

The low death.

Honour demanded that they be exterminated. Destroyed. Annihilated without mercy. The parasites must be cut from the body of a hunter like a rank tumour.

The mass of low parasites met the screeching hordes of aliens and arachnid, washing over both hard meat species like a wave breaking on rocks, rolling over the top of them, closing in on where Phay'd stood invisible, watching the carnage unfold below from his vantage point on a high, thick bough.

The din of the hard meat grew louder, sounds of distress that were rare to hear, save for if one killed a queen in their presence. The small gas sacs swarmed over anything they came into contact with, tendrils searching, searching...

He witnessed a host of them overcome one of the insectoids, all of them probing around for soft spots in its chitinous outer shell. One feeler settled on the huge wet orb of the arachnid's eye and thrust the tendril in, burrowing into the flesh of the berserking insect until only the feathered organs remained exposed, hanging obscenely from the empty orbit. The arachnid's encased flesh reacted instantly, swelling up so hard and so fast that it erupted from every joint in its exoskeleton, insides spilling out. With a grim satisfaction Phay'd realised that both the zabin amedha and the low parasite that had burrowed into its body had been killed; the pressure of the infected flesh swelling up within the hard carapace of the insect's body had killed the infector. The corrupted insectoid collapsed dead, those feathered organs still and lifeless. Nor was that the only one it had happened to, he noticed. Throughout the insectoid horde they screeched and flailed and snapped their jaws in distress, innards splitting though the joints in their outer shells, each to an identical end.

And again he noticed how the acid blood of the kainde amedha served them as the infection abominations attacked them also, trying to find a soft spot to burrow under their skins. The parasites tried, and the parasites failed, as each successful breakthrough deluged them in a stream of dissolving acid that consumed them.

The desecrated yautja husks, twisted and mutilated as they were, waded into the throng using whatever weapons were to hand. Phay'd found himself surprised as they sprang on the hard meat, burners blasting and slashing with their kic'ti-pa, using the weapons as they were intended; it showed real indisputable intelligence—a trait unheard of in parasites. The wave continued onwards, consuming all below, and before long the infesting gas sacs were swarming up the tree towards him and the others, somehow sensing their presence and rendering the chameleon fields useless. He grunted a command to Gryshh, who quickly dropped from his higher limb and took position beside Phay'd, ready for a final stand. Both aimed their burners into the swarm, their weapons set to wide beam. It would cut the effective range of the burners but would allow the scattered plasma to take out more foes at a time and allow them the best chance of destroying the encroaching abominations before they reached them.

An old, withered hand fell on his shoulder, and Phay'd turned to see the Dek'd'tor's blind eyes meet his somehow. The elder's hands groped down the length of his arm, coming to rest on the gauntlet mounted on his wrist. With the ease of long years of experience, the elder slipped the destruct module from the mount on Phay'd's gauntlet and slid on the holographic module—the record of the ancient elder's life bestowed upon him now, an honour beyond measure. The elder slipped the destruct module onto his own gauntlet and solemnly bowed his head at Phay'd. Before they parted ways the ancient yautja bestowed one final slice of wisdom—part honorific proverb, part warning that was instilled in all unbloodied hunters before their first hunt:

Thin-de le'hsaun 'aloun'myin-de s' bpi-de gka-de hou-depaya.

Learn the gift of all sights, or finish in the dance of the fallen gods.

Though Phay'd was far from unbloodied, he thought he understood the subtext within the proverb: there was something he was yet to see. Some knowledge that he had to know, or piece of crucial information that had been entrusted to him for protection. A piece of the past that had to survive into the future. The elder's record was more important to him than his very life, which he was prepared to lay down to protect.

Stunned, Phay'd could think of no gesture of thanks that would match the honour he felt. The ancient one sighed heavily, then dialled the destruct command into the module he now wore, fingers entering the code easily despite his blindness. As the low parasites raced up the tree towards them the countdown began, red glyphs ticking away the last moment of his life. Phay'd and Gryshh sped away north-east, moving through the treetops swiftly, despite their wounds biting into their flesh with each bound and catch.

The Dek'd'tor waited until the last moments of the count, when the tones changed to a higher pitch, indicating the reaction had almost reached critical mass. He sighed again, lighter this time, as if with relief. He stood tall, forcing his withered old muscles and bones past the atrophied limits they had withered into with extreme old age. The pain of his proud posture was exquisite. He roared triumphantly to the sky. Roared until his breath gave out. For that briefest of moments, with the rain dappling his face and the wind billowing his scarlet cloak and cooling his skin, he felt young again.

Then he felt nothing at all.

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The sky to the west, pregnant with dull, heavy clouds, suddenly flared with white light. The spartan was the first to see it, and the reactive tint of his visor automatically filtered out the initial brilliant flash. Rico stood behind him, shielding his eyes and grumbling about this being the second time his eyeballs had been seared by a flash of brilliant white light. Azumi came running forward, helping the field marshal as he wobbled on his feet, a perfect phantom image of the sea of treetops burned into his retinas and fading slowly.

"It's happening again!" Azumi exclaimed, looking to the sky, eyes searching.

"Hell it is!" Rico growled, squeezing his eyes shut again, sourly trying to regain some sight, "do you feel your fillings buzz?"

"It's an explosion," remarked the spartan. Less than a degree below the western horizon a huge expanding bubble of seething electrical energy tore up the forest like a thermo-nuclear detonation. The radiating blast wave flattened the forest for miles. "somebody just did us a big favour. Against a flood force that big we wouldn't have stood a chance. Us, or this entire world."

All stood in awe as within minutes a great mushroom cloud roiled miles into the air on the horizon, white and grey ash roiling into the atmosphere like an angry titan. "You think anything survived that?" asked Rico, still blinking and rubbing his eyes, straining for focus.

"I think..." Master chief paused, searching for the words, "if I know the flood, they never have their eggs in one basket. Maybe their numbers are more manageable now, and maybe that'll give us a fighting chance. But don't hope that they're gone; they're too smart for that. Get your people off this planet and wipe it clean. Glass it."

"Fuckin' A." Azumi remarked with decided approval.

"The Sentry's carrying four Q-bombs," Rico mulled over the idea, "planet breakers."

Rico watched the growing mushroom cloud tower into the atmosphere and drown out even more of the daylight, but its destructive power paled into insignificance compared to the capabilities of the Q-bomb. The debates still raged as to whether the weapon capable of destroying an entire planet was the most reckless and needlessly destructive force ever conceived by mankind, or a necessary evil that saved many lives on worlds infested by rare 'master brains', a gargantuan monstrosity at the very top of the bug caste that could grow underground to the size of a small country. Only nine had ever been deployed, mostly on barren ice worlds or parched desert rocks. Worlds like this one were so precious. So rare, this new Earth...

The decision could wait. They had to get moving. Rico selected Dalray's frequency and keyed his mike. "Roughneck leader to roughneck two, do you copy?"

The lieutenant's response was quick, and there was an edge of urgency in his voice that Rico had rarely heard. "Copy, roughneck leader. Glad you're okay, sir."

"What's your status, over?"

The spartan, not privy to the conversation, watched Rico's jaw clench, his free hand ball into a tight fist. He guessed the answer to his question was not good.

"Copy that, lieutenant. See if you can rendezvous with the whitecoats who put down at the wreck site. We're getting off this damn rock asap, over and out." Rico hoisted up his blazer, wincing as the pain caught in his ribs. "We head east. Let's see if there's somewhere clear enough upstream for a dropship to put down without us having to cross the river again." He set off without another word, followed by the spartan warrior.

Azumi's eyes fell on the partially covered bodies of 'Douris and the others they had cut down from the tree. "What about our guys, sir?" she called after him, her voice wrought with frustration. Without turning or stopping, Rico reached in a breast pocket and fished out seven blood crusted dog tags, letting them dangle from his fist.

"Their troubles are over, trooper. I think ours have just begun."

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The survivors had made good their escape but that was cold comfort to Dalray, who still found himself trembling, now more out of anger at himself than the fear and adrenaline that had instigated the shakes. The taint of his failure was bitter.

They had left the basalt plains a few clicks at their heels, and that bizarre conflict between the bugs and, well... the other damn bugs. Everybody was straining now, running on empty and sustained by sheer adrenaline, and still they double timed it haphazardly down the slippery scree-strewn slope of the promontory that demarcated the eastern boundary of the mountains. Everybody had taken a spill at some point, shredding their palms on sharp rocky splinters, cursing breathlessly and taking to their heels again. Before him was an almost featureless expanse of greenery, only broken by an oily black column of smoke rising into the sky a ways off to the south-east that might bear some investigation, preferably from the air. If only the pick up crew would light a fire under their asses...

Ahead, the huge expanse of meadow was covered in tall, lush grass. Breaking up the sea of swaying grasses were occasional thickets of thorny vines that could be traps or perfect cover. He was all too aware it was the perfect place to walk into an ambush. Having had his squad taken to pieces in one ambush already, he wasn't prepared to march into another potential ambush situation. He needed time to compose himself and gather his thoughts, dammit. If he had his bearings correct they were somewhere a few miles due south of where the alien ship had crashed, though there was no sign of it.

As the shale and scree turned to solid rock again, he ordered a halt. Everybody collapsed onto the wet rock where they stopped. Nicks and Hooper slumped onto their backs panting, having shared the effort of dragging Cox, who was mercifully unconscious, to safety after he lost both legs during the ambush.

"Ammo check. Get some chow if you can." He ordered, wearily tugging his canteen from his webbing and draining the last of the lukewarm water. His stomach grumbled. Hunger pangs so bad they felt like cramps knotted his gut, but his appetite was non existent. When nobody else made an effort to eat anything he guessed they felt the same. His mind turned again and again to the ambush. Van Buren's and Cox' screams echoed in his mind. Dammit, he had seen men fall before, why was this time screwing with him so badly? Looking over the survivors the answer was plain: Frears, Nicks, Troy Hooper, Woods and himself had made it out alive and intact. Cox had made it out alive, at least for now. Van Buren, Kovacs, Aguerre, Sommers and Ryker had not. Damn near half his squad fed to the mobile infantry grinder that just loved to chew up troopers. It was a bitter, bitter thing his self-imposed sense of failure.

Long minutes passed as he blamed himself, but those few minutes of rest seemed to have done the others a power of good. Frears cradled Cox' head on his lap, trying and failing to get the unconscious trooper to take a sip from the canteen at his lips. The others were yammering and jabbering in disbelief and a thousand different emotions, coming to terms with what had happened; nobody could remember a single action where they had lost so many people at one time; those kind of statistics were consigned to the history books, back when field marshal Rico had been a young man. But then there had been what had happened to Keever's squad. Dalray felt a sour brush with ignominy as he thought of how his losses and Keever's losses would be compared and analysed in the debriefs and post-action reports, regardless of if he survived or not. His tired legs were threatening to cramp, and he grumbled to himself as he tried to stretch his stiff limbs. They couldn't stay here, they were too exposed. The high ground they had left behind would've been a perfect place to wait out a pick-up, but recent events had proved without a shadow of a doubt that sometimes perfect still isn't good enough. And there was the field marshal's orders to consider too. Dalray, ever the professional officer, obeyed these vague, rushed commands despite his doubts. The field marshal may have had supreme command on the ground, but he was not infallible. Dalray knew he should have called him on it. And just how was he supposed to wait for extraction when the comms were for shit?

Get yourself together, worm! an inner voice berated him; an old voice he hadn't heard since his days as a green recruit.

"Never say fuck it," he spoke the mantra of his drill sergeant during basic. It wasn't exactly Tennyson or Boze, but it didn't have to be; those four words had got a lot of green recruits through their training and instilled in them a rare determination that he knew he still possessed. Dalray had been a sickly boy, and that boy had grown to be a slight, but tenacious, teen, and it was that teen that sergeant Cross had plucked from the mud and yelled in his face over and over and over again. The memory was hazing over with a decade of soldiering behind him now, but that face loomed large in his mind: sharp features and an impossibly square jaw that seemed have been carved from granite; that giant man grimacing, teeth as large as tombstones, his good eye glaring like his cyclopean ire could penetrate your skull and make your brain melt into mush. Cross may have been a ball buster; he may have been uglier than sin and built like a brick outhouse—hell, knowing what he put his recruits through, he may have been the devil incarnate—but he knew how to take a wad of spit and shit and turn him into a god damned soldier. And a god damned soldier of the mobile infantry at that.

God damn it. He sighed heavily, and followed it with a deeper, cleansing breath. Second Lieutenant Karl Dalray wasn't the type to wallow in self pity, or to give in to a crisis of confidence—both were for the weak and self indulgent, and as a man he had allowed himself to be neither. He wasn't about to start now; if he allowed himself to go to shit, all of them might buy it, and that was an ignominy too far for his taste. Lemons and lemonade and all that jazz.

There was no miraculous renewal of spirit, no new vigour in his flesh and bones—he was too dog tired; just the grim determination instilled in him by the mental and verbal recitation of the mantra instilled in him by a one-eyed grizzly bear of a sergeant: "NEVER say fuck it."

Dalray scoffed at himself, then allowed himself the luxury of a chuckle. Cross. What was that joke? That old joke they used to love telling each other at lights out? Recruit A says something like: 'You see who reamed out Forbes?' and Recruit B says: 'Cross?' Recruit A says: 'Cross? Shit, he was furious!'

How they had laughed. How they thought they were so damn tough. So damn righteous.

Never say fuck it.

Dalray got to his feet wearily. It was time to—

"Roughneck leader to roughneck two, do you copy?" the field marshal's voice in his ear was a thick buzz of static, but that alone was enough to ratchet his hopes up a few notches.

The radio call was brief and to the point. Dalray laid it out the way it was; there was no way to dress it up—men had died, and died horribly. If the field marshal blamed him, he couldn't tell. All he had was his orders: go north, hook up with the whitecoats if possible and await extraction.

Just as he was about to bark his orders to the survivors, inspired a little by the memory of a certain old grizzled non-comm from his youth, his eyes caught movement to the north.

Whatever it was that moved hidden through the grass seemed to wander aimlessly, and he only caught brief glimpses of a dark shape before the sea of grass swallowed it up again. The path it had trampled through the meadow seemed to zigzag wildly, as if lost. He silently signalled the danger sign to his men while he edged forward a few feet at a time. He saw them tense up immediately, but they got to their feet fast and were staying frosty—a good sign that they hadn't cracked. He edged forward slowly, crossing the threshold where the mountain ended and the rich, loamy soils of the grasslands begun. As he approached, he realised with some surprise that the sawgrass was a good deal taller than he had first thought, and towered at least a foot above him, and even higher in some places. Here at ground level the grass was a thick impenetrable screen. It was too risky to go any further; they would have to stay put and let the contact either come to them or pass them by; moving through the meadow would offer excellent concealment, but would utterly blind them to what lay ahead. It was a gamble too far. He cautiously fell back on his squad's position, always keeping his eyes on the swaying curtain of grass. Whatever it was that was moving through it was going to breach into the open soon, and only a hundred meters to the left of his squad's position. He ordered Woods and Troy to watch the rear; Frears, Hooper and Nicks were to follow him as they skirted down the slope to the left, hoping to catch the flank of whatever emerged in hope of blind-siding it.

"Remember: short controlled bursts," he whispered, particularly catching Frears' eye as they waited. In a short time the footsteps of the hidden thing were audible—a mixture of rustles and shambling through the cover with an awkward rhythm that took a few moments to fix as footsteps at all. It was close now, maybe only ten feet from the open. Dalray loosened the crick in his neck, pulled the stock of his blazer against his right shoulder. He squeezed his left eye shut and peered down the sights with his other, aiming at the fringe where the grasslands met the mountain. He held his breath and depressed the trigger until it was a hair's breadth from firing, such was his familiarity with the weapon in his hands. Even another ounce of pressure would set the gun blazing.

Five feet now...

Four. Three.

What emerged was some bizarre three-headed beast with worried human faces he vaguely recollected. His wits quickly snapped together again and he realised it was three people: a blood spattered Asiatic man and a striking brunette woman, both shouldering the weight of a badly wounded Caucasian man. Aside from obvious wounds, all three were bleeding from a thousand thin paper cuts over the unclothed parts of their bodies, inflicted by the jagged edges of the tall sawgrass.

Both groups exchanged short, bewildered looks with each other, as if they had stumbled into something they had least expected, before a collective relief washed over all. Dalray signalled for his squad to stand down, lowering his blazer slowly.

The wounded man's head rolled aimlessly, senselessly on his neck, and pink froth drooled from between his lips with every moan or racking cough. His clothes were seared around his left armpit at a cavity of cauterised flesh in place of where his left lung should have been. Crimson bubbles frothed from the wound here and there where it hadn't been completely fused and cauterised.

"Help... Help us!" the brunette pleaded, breathing in exhausted wheezes, "I don't know if they followed us."

Dalray signalled for everyone to fall back to the rear. "What hit you?" he asked as he back-pedalled, keeping a watchful eye for any more trails cutting through the grassland, his gun trained into the gently wafting meadow.

"The ones from the debrief—the hunters," she answered, palming away a mixture of dew, rain, sweat and blood from her brow, "they came at us out of nowhere, like ghosts."

"Ghosts?" he echoed, bewildered.

Fran nodded, puffing with the effort of helping the wounded Gibson up the slope. "Their camouflage is near perfect... nearly invisible. We only saw them when they moved. And by then they were so close... too close."

"You're the whitecoats?"

Fran said nothing. Her eyes had a glazed look, an empty thousand yard stare.

"Are you the science team that hitched a ride with us or not?" demanded the lieutenant.

Fran's eyes stirred into life again. "Yes." Her reply was quiet, almost inaudible. Her bottom lip quivered on the verge of tears.

"Where's the rest of you?"

Distraught, she shook her head. On this world it was answer enough.

Troy suddenly came running down the slope to their position at full tilt, his finger stabbing to the plains at the north. "Sir, I think they're being followed," he puffed, catching his breath, "...three independent trails, all converging on our position. We've only got minutes."

Dalray's face was still and emotionless, though his mind was a turmoil of deeply ingrained survivor instinct being strangled by the tendrils sprouting from seeds of despair he had allowed to take root. They were stuck between the proverbial rock and hard place, and ammo was getting seriously limited after the earlier deadly encounter. Fight or flight, neither presented much hope, but he had been hardened with that never say fuck it attitude from recruit to decorated vet to officer who was well respected on and by all levels. It wasn't over yet. Not yet it wasn't.

"Whu... where's the drop ship?" Fran cried, looking to the air and on the verge of sounding hysterical.

Dalray tried to take her by the arm and lead her up the slope, but she shrugged him off, insisting on supporting her wounded colleague. "We're still establishing comms. Now we've got to move."

"No! It's here!" she nearly wailed, "I have its beacon! I have its beacon!" She thrust her geo-plotter device into his hands, though the lieutenant couldn't discern what he was looking at; the tech was more advanced and way more sensitive than what grunts got in the field. Her finger stabbed at a pulsating yellow dot in a murk of other puzzling nodes, glyphs and waypoints.

"I can't read this. I have no bearing."

She thumbed in a quick combination on the minuscule button pad with a trembling hand and the view onscreen turned onto that of a regular topography survey. It made his heart simultaneously leap and sink, and he came to a halt in spite of himself, feeling barren hopelessness. He had his bearings now, and lifted his head to look to the south-east. There the mystery column of oily black smoke leaned into the sky and was carried ever eastward on the wind. His eyes fell back on to the device, and he shook his head solemnly. "The drop ship is gone."

She had followed his gaze, and when he uttered the words her quivering bottom lip curved to become an anguished wail. "Nooooooo...!"

His head was buzzing again, but now he felt a plan begin to emerge that unexpectedly offered a quantum of hope: crashed or not, there would be salvage of some sort to come from the drop ship: the precious ammo reserves each ship carried; the heavy entrenchment weapons which were stowed and could be parachuted into defending lines.

They could make a stand, he realised. A real stand. Hell, if the bird wasn't a complete wreck it could be set up as a fortified position. "We have to sneak by these things," he murmured as he watched the three snaking tracks in the grass converge and zero in on their position, "Hooper, gimme your medkit."

"Sir?"

"Now!"

Hooper fished the pack from his webbing pouch and tossed it to the lieutenant, who handed it to Shigeru. "Fix him up if you can, but be ready to move fast when I say."

"uhduhnwunnadie..." Colm groaned, forcing more bloody froth from the wound in his chest.

It would be an exercise in futility to try to reassure him; from the looks of the wound the hurt whitecoat was a dead man walking. Instead he beckoned Frears, Nicks, Troy, Hooper and Woods to him. "I think Cox is dead, sir." Frears said dejectedly on arrival as the lieutenant plucked the last grenade from his vest and tossed it to Troy.

"We have to stop them in their tracks. Stall them at the very least so we can make a run for it. Trips, frags, I don't care. I want a defensive position on that perimeter, mined with everything we've got." His eyes fell on Cox, who lay motionless on the wet rock up the slope. "Put him in his poncho. Take him with us."

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"What the hell was that?" marvelled Brier, rising from her chair as the realtime display of the planet below suddenly bloomed with a massive white-grey ball.

"Barometrics just went off the chart, Lieutenant!" said Thomson anxiously.

Brier cast her eyes to Thomson's readout and back to hers, unconsciously biting the dried skin around her lips again. "It's an explosion."

"Negative," said Schultz immediately, "rads are holding steady."

"Then it's a clean explosion! Don't second guess me!" she barked, loud enough for the grunts guarding the corridor outside to hear through the steel door. "What's going on down there?"

"Lieutenant?" Thomson's voice was quiet, mousy. Brier's eyes fell on him and just willed him to second guess her too. Eschewing a second nut-busting she would give him after chewing him out for his conduct on comm with the field marshal, Thomson instead pointed to his readout for her to make her own assessment. "Something weird."

"No shit," she remarked as she crossed over to him, "I'm getting really tired with surprises already. What has barometrics found?"

"Not barometrics, sir; radar and sonar came back on line and ran a diagnostic. Just a single ping, but it got this..." the ensign enlarged a small thumbnail at the corner of his readout to fullscreen viewing. The image was a basic wireframe of what appeared to be a partial dome shape. The computer began tagging sections here and there with mathematical readings and statistics.

If it was possible, Brier's frown knitted together just a little tighter, but it was out of piqued curiosity and bewilderment now instead of frustration. "This is the echo from just the diagnostic ping?"

"Yessir. Look at the readings, sir," Thomson pointed at the stats that tagged the image, "it's mathematically perfect; a euclidean sphere."

"A what?"

"Jeez, only neutron stars are thought to be so perfect..." he pondered in wonderment.

Smart kid, thought Brier, but the issue here was not his education, but what it was he was trying to tell her. Unless this jargon-speak related to his damn day job it meant nothing. "This is underground," she remarked, as her finger traced the dome shape on screen, "and you think it's spherical. You think it goes deeper?"

Thomson nodded emphatically. "It has to. If these readings are correct it's a void of some sort, right underground. And it's big. It has volume."

"How big is big?" Brier asked, but Thomson was already doing the arithmetic in his mind to quantify the area within the void. He gazed at the ceiling, then squeezed his eyes shut, lips moving in silence as his mind went over the formula. Again, Brier marvelled at how intelligent he was. When he finished he blew out a small sigh.

"Well, pick any sports stadium in the world and it'll fit with room to spare," he announced, pursing his lips, hands and shoulders doing a that's the way it is; take it or leave it shrug.

Brier looked back to the readouts. The equipment was designed to locate and map the maze of underground bug tunnels so that informed tactical choices could be made and implemented. She had seen a lot of bug bolt holes over the years before, during and after the TAC-nukes had fried everything within them, but she hadn't seen anything like this before. "Do a full scan; I want to know what it is," she ordered.

"Yessir." Thomson hit a few buttons then faltered again. "Wait a minute... wait a minute. The coordinates!" he added in astonishment.

"What about them?"

Schultz, who had been standing behind them unseen, answered for Thomson, pointing at the diagram: "That's where Field Marshal Rico reported the electrical storm; that's right where he said it hit the ground."