Chapter Twenty-Six (2/2)
It made her giggle again.
The fleets were moving ponderously toward one another.
THERE IS ONLY ENOUGH FOR ONE
DIE ALONE
Her pinfeathers trembled as she screamed back through her implant just like the Terrans screamed back with upraised voices, upraised fists, and upraised spirits.
”Tango One has reached Point Alpha,” One of the Com-Techs signaled.
”Send the Doorkicker signal,” the Admiral ordered.
Cheekeet's implant showed her an image of a male primate answering the door only to find an armored half-naked female with an expression of rage and swinging a battle axe with the caption ”Popular Amazing Delivery Service just shows up at your door and kills you.” It was loaded with nihilistic humor and Cheekeet pinched herself and giggled again.
The Terrans were insane.
But there was comfort in insanity. Much more comfort than the artificially induced calm and seriousness insisted upon by the Unified Civilized Races. In insanity emotions may surge uncontrolled by gene-therapy or cybernetic implants, but at least they were felt and not just pale echoes.
Cheekeet felt her wingtips flutter with anticipation as another horned teardrop suddenly blinked into existence, hundreds of ships, the point of the teardrop and the horns pointing at the rear of the Precursor formation.
Her implant broke her agitation by tossing up an image of a huge green biped with tusks and armor kicking in a door screaming ”THIN MINTS OR TAGOLANGS?” and beating the home owner with boxes of cookies.
she pinched herself and giggled, then snickered as she remembered that the biggest reason Terrans found physical violence funny is they were so resilient.
The tension increased as one of the scan-techs reported that the Precursor fleet was charging its Helldrives.
”Signal the Eye.”
Her implant broke her tension by sending her an image to her crafted by the ship's psychiatric health section. it was of she herself swooping through an open window, landing on the end of a bed inhabited by a shocked and just awoken Terran, wrapping her claws around the footboard, fluffing her feathers, spreading her wings, raising her head, opening her toothed beak wide, and screeching ”GOOD MORNING, MOTHERFUCKER! WOULD YOU LIKE TO HEAR ABOUT OUR LORD AND SAVIOR FEATHERED RAPTOR-JESUS?” and the caption: ”Scientists of the department of 'No Shit' suspect rooster genes in new friendly xenospecies.”
She didn't have to pinch herself that time. The idea of her just flying into a Terran window and shocking a just awoken primate was ridiculous. At the very least, it would be rude, but the sheer terror and confusion on the Terran's face and the way she was drawn to be so fearsome looking was just... just...
...funny.
”Incoming Helljump! Many many sources!” The scantech called out.
Cheekeet's tension started to ramp up even further.
Admiral Yamamoto checked his guest's vitals and saw that she was withing tolerances, a little stressed, but that expected on the edge of battle. He looked back at the screen at the Precursor fleet and smiled.
You jump out every time you mathematically compute you can't win. There's no running this time, he thought to himself, allowing a small cruel smile to cross his face.
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The Devourer that Leaves Darkness was getting fleet reports that his ships were almost ready to jump out the system to a few light years from the system to recompute the battle plans and choose a new vector to come at the feral intelligences.
There was no use in wasting resources and allowing itself to be surrounded.
It blinked in electronic surprise as multiple Helljumps were made inside its own loose formation. The torn open Helljump exits all merging together into a raw bleeding wound into realspace. Rather than the 'door' shutting The Devourer that Leaves Darkness heard the sound of heavy metal chains rattlling into place and holding the portal open.
Reinforcements? it wondered. It demanded that the newcomers identify themselves.
Instead great ships pushed their way out of Hellspace and into realspace. Not as massive as even a Jotun, but massive for cattle or feral intelligences. His senses reported that these ships were different than the sleek forms of the cattle ships or the bristling aggressive ships of the feral intelligences.
These ones were still wrapped in Hellspace energies, were ostentatious, baroque, and heavily armed and armored. The Devourer that Leaves Darkness realized that these ships had traveled Hellspace without shields, had exposed themselves to the ravening energies of that realm. The ships were blackened, covered in twisted runes and spikes and trailing great lengths of chain.
THERE IS ONLY ENOUGH FOR ONE was sent out.
DIE ALONE BENEATH GAZE OF THE EYE was roared back, sending The Devourer that Leaves Darkness shuddering as the rage filled return bellow shook and rattled his psychic energy shields.
The ships were close enough that several of the Precursor machines attempted the electronic equivalent of boarding actions, assaulting the newcoming ship's firewalls and computers to crash the programs and destroy the hardware.
Instead of normal smooth logical code they found madness.
Shrieking, gibbering, raving, howling code raced through computers made up of bound and pierced and flogged and whipped screaming biological brains in bodies bent and twisted, burnt by Hellspace, their minds twisted by the ravening energy and from staring directly into the mad energy of that horrific place. Programs that shredded at one another even as they assaulted the computers that they should have used and the computers fought back screaming and raving with Hellspace energy coursing through their circuits.
THE GREAT EYE SEES YOU rang out in the Strategic Housings of the three Jotuns who touched those insane computer systems.
One opened fire on its supporting ships, blasting out gibbering code of madness infected binary sequences. One screamed out 10102001 100001110112 2002 2222 TWO TWO TWO at maximum broadcast power and began firing into its own hull and setting its servitor machines into ripping and tearing at its own superstructure. It used Hellfire cannons to carve a twisted and vile runes of electronic blasphemy that lurked in the depths of Hellspace into its own hull. The third triggered its self destruct charge, vanishing in the momentary hell of a new sun spawning in the middle of The Devourer that Leaves Darkness's mathematically precise formation.
Before The Devourer that Leaves Darkness could do much more than cut the two insane ones out of the Fleet tactical net and recompute his battleplans all three forces of the feral intelligences opened fire on his own ships.
The Devourer that Leaves Darkness ordered Hellspace jumps.
Nothing happened.
THE EYE RULES THE TWISTED CURRENTS OF HELLSPACE! the ships in the middle of his own formation, firing wildly, launching small attack craft, roared at him with a psychic scream of roiling madness and chaotic glee. WE HAVE FOUND YOU FOR THE EYE! WE WILL BRING YOU BEFORE THE EYE! BEFORE THE EYE WE WILL BIND YOU!
For a split second The Devourer that Leaves Darkness could not decide which fleet had priority. Then he ordered his suboridinate units to fight. To destroy the feral intelligence who dared stand against them. The Devourer that Leaves Darkness released the inhibitors that only allowed carefully computed amounts of resources to be used to subdue and destroy opponents. His forces, ancient, massive, undefeated, outnumbered the opponents by a factor of ten.
Victory was his. It was as certain as radioactive decay and just as predictable.
One the bridge of The Bride of Despair the human Captain, clad in heavy armor covered in spikes, chains, and vile twisted runes laughed, rich deep voice filled with malevolent glee, and ordered his gunners to go to maximum power, gave permission for the mat-trans to send out boarding parties, and ordered his Marines onto the boarding craft. No orders. Orders were for those who had never tasted Hellspace deep in their soul.
Chaos was his bride. His lover.
War was chaos.
The human Captain, who no longer remembered why he fought, laughed in glee as his C+ cannons opened up on the enemy ships. As plasma cannons vomited fire, as his ship opened a hyperspace gate and lensed the compressed energy of a white dwarf's solar flare across the shields of one of the larger ships, the energy beam twisted and wound with Hellspace energy.
His only regret was that they were only machines and would not suffer.
Admiral Yamamoto watched the reports of the damage that the first four attacks had done to the vast Precursor ships. He knew they were heavily shielded, heavily armored, with solid superstructures that didn't need the open spaces and attendant machinery that a living crew would need, which made them immensely resilient.
It was of no matter. Terrans had lost battles, even been defeated, but they had never been beaten.
Captain Cheekeet stared at the images her implant was letting her watch. She rode a high-velocity torpedo through the darkness of space, dancing with the VI guidance program through starry space, slashing through point defense, and she held the VI's hand as she leaned forward and kissed the flank of a massive ship with her beak of collapsed inversion beam wrapped in nuclear plasma. From there she jumped to a tiny nanoparticle-computer, more waveform than mass, at the leading point of a C+ shell skipping in and out of the lowest band of hyperspace, fighting and clawing and mocking the half-mad particles that screamed over the speed of light, mocking them, bobbing and weaving and dancing to lead them in a ravenous horde to reach out and touch the hull of another Precursor machine and laugh for nanosecond eternity as the particles followed.
She fluttered and preened and spread her wings wide, convincing an entire shoal of enemy missiles that she was, in fact, a Terran superheavy battleship, and when the enemy missiles detonated as one she laughingly mocked the launching ship's battle computer with a snippet of code and by touching the thousands of beams of coherent energy with a graviton generator, twisting them in the split second she had, twirling in place with her wings spread, to wind the energy together and use it to sweep across the very ship that had disgorged them.
Captain Cheekeet laughed and danced and flew and preened as her subconscious added her own dreams to the rapidly fluctuating chaos seed for the hashes and the encryption and the compression and the evasive maneuvers and the variable wavelengths and anything else that reached out and touched her, begging for attention, letting her look through its eyes.
She laughed as she held a C+ hammer in each hand and rang out a tune of wrath and hate on the hull of a Precursor Goliath, ringing out a tune of spite and anger with each C+ impact of the hammers she grasped in each wingtip. Each slam of the hammer blowing craters kilometers deep, tens of kilometers across, each ringing howling singing impact driving the crater deeper deeper ever deep into the hull of the Goliath.
The C+ battery finished impacting and she found herself in another system, a dodging spinning weaving bobbing attack craft who's chaos seed had expired and the oncoming Juton's point defense system was getting more and more accurate. She closed her wings tight around her and crouched down then lept into the air, spinning and spreading her wings out. She danced the mating dance, her steps sure and quick, ruffling her feathers, turning them so first one color then the other.
Everyone gangster till the Confederacy come around the corner, she giggled as she folded her wings halfway through the loop. She could see the floor, see the gleaming flashing circle of perfection, and she dropped straight into it, her feet touching. She felt the tip of the craft slam into the Jotun, felt it fire the nuclear penetrator charges, felt it fire the secondary plasma arrays, felt the ramming prow collapse, felt the density increased sharp ramming slice through armor. Felt the toothed gears around the prow engage, grabbing Jotun armor and pull the craft deeper as she danced and wove and sang in the perfect circle of light.
The boarding portals blew free and she felt the moltlings clustered around her stream out from her and gave a cry she had heard from a human mating video she had watched out of curiosity.
To the Jotun she cried out the phrase as she poured her hate in the form of armored warborgs into the Jotun's very body.
IT FEELS SO GOOD INSIDE YOU!
The Devourer that Leaves Darkness ran the computation again.
It was impossible.
Something was happening that had never happened before.
He reached deep, into his OEM cores, looking for something to help him in this situation.
He was losing...
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CONFEDNAV COMMUNICATION
Joint Task Force Argo has engaged the enemy. Casualties are light and 80% below NAVINT estimations.
Battle should be concluded within 3 TerraSol standard days unless unprojected event occurs.
--Admiral Yamamoto, Commanding
------NOTHING FOLLOWS----------
Unified Intelligence Council Memo
Despite the Terran Confederacy's claims so far they have not been able to defeat a single cluster of Precursor machines. Every time it becomes obvious that the machines may be defeated the machines leave the battle via unblockable travel technology.
Any claims of the Terran Confederacy defeating a Precursor Fleet should be considered propaganda.
--------END OF MESSAGE-----------