Chapter 411 (1/2)

The floor felt soft, spongy, slightly slippery and sticky at the same time. The fog/mist was knee deep and swirled around everyone's legs as they walked. The walls were twisted, black and dark red, conduits, bulging sections, twisted swirling sections that looked more like they had been grown than manufactured. The water dripped from the ceiling and far off, loud in the silence, but the hiss of armor and the clink of weapons was strangely muted, seeming to come from far away, muffled and silenced.

Off in the distance was screaming, crying, begging, and weeping in a hundred different languages.

The passage, which the mapping seeds had recorded as a straight 340 meters, now twisted and turned, no single straight-away longer than a dozen steps of the massive armored human at the front of the small group.

Palgret held tight to his rifle, the IR sensors in his visor turned all the way up to give him any warning he could possibly get.

His mind still shuddered at the memory of those terrible five armed creatures, the bony plates in their mouths, they way they oozed acidic slime that ate through warsteel and flesh in equal measure.

Palgret swallowed thickly, forcing down stomach acid, at how Culvit had been alive, suffering, in agony, before the big Terran had crushed his head with a single stomp of a boot.

The Terran stopped at a T-intersection, his cutting bar idling in his hand, the red hot teeth dripping molten warsteel on the floor.

Heavy infantry, monster class, went through Palgret's mind.

--this was not here-- 030, the Mantid Captain, said over the text system.

”It is here now,” Mu'ucru'u said softly. He checked the display in his hand. ”We have been moving steadily away from the Strategic Intelligence Housing and toward the surface of the hull no matter what directions we take.”

--mapping seeds out-- 030 ordered.

The other green mantid, 281, lifted his back legs and the small mortar on his lower abdomen fired six space shots. The tiny drones unfurled mylar wings, applied electricity to firm them up, and jetted down the hall on pinprick graviton engines.

Palgret was just happy there hadn't been any more of those terrible Mar-gite starfish creatures.

”What is the plan, Captain?” Mu'ucru'u asked. He was trembling, feeling at the end of exhaustion, and knew his men couldn't be that far behind.

--get out-- 030 admitted. --we won't find SHI ship is infested need to exfiltrate--

”Do we have a ship?” Mu'ucru'u asked.

--unknown-- 030 said.

Two gave a shudder. ”I can tell you, something's twisting weird.”

030 looked over at the black Mantid, knowing that under his warsteel armor his thorax and abdomen had pearly white stripes, including what Terrans referred to as 'eyebrows' over his compound eyes.

--twisting?--

Two nodded. ”Don't ask me how I know, Captain, but we need to get on the hull, set up an emergency beacon and some deep space signal munitions,” he gave a human-esque shrug. ”Not sure how we'd do that.”

030 toggled a set of icons giving a 'eh, whatcha gonna do' reply as he ran the numbers again.

Making it to the hull was just a goal to keep the troops moving. Getting the SHI was a bust, he could predict that much. Hellspace energies were still leaking through the passageways, through the hull spaces, meaning that the PAWM's interior was twisting and changing even as they tried to navigate it.

The hull, though. At least they could try to get a fix on their location, get a good look on what other problems were going to pop up.

He'd learned at East Point Military Academy that for every solution he managed to reach there would be a half dozen new problems. Military leadership seemed to consist of 90% boredom, 9% stumbling from one disaster to the next, and 1% of armor shitting terror.

The squad was quiet as they marched after the huge Terran, who moved with steady exaggerated movements of heavy power armor clad troops.

Why switch to an Imperium troop, an Idiot? Why not stay Monster Class Combat Chassis if there were Mar-gite aboard? While Hellspace might have changed him, what really instituted the change? 030 thought to himself from where he was sitting on Palgret's shoulder. It is not the PAWM, not just Hellspace, but something else that guided the change, but why?

030 had no answers, just a string of questions. He wondered if there were answers or if this was just going to be another time in his career where the questions did little to search for answers, just ended up stacked up on other questions, to create a great big pile of questions that merely sat under the label of ”Why, though?” without any hint of an answer.

Palgret had no clue about the thoughts running through 030's brain, just held tight to the heavy rifle in his hands as he followed the Terran down the passageway, avoiding the walls. He had his IR cranked up, looking for any variance on the walls.

The whole thing had gone belly up as soon as he had followed the Terran into the ship.

I'm not getting home, he thought to himself. We're all going to die here and not one of us is going to get home. Nobody will know what happened to us, nobody will know where or how we died.

The mist was knee deep, the floor felt soft and spongy beneath his boots, and there was a chill in the 'air' that he could feel through his armor.

Two blinked slowly, giving his opaque eye coverings a moment to block out his sight. The cold, the damp, all of it was combining to sap his strength, make him miserable, make him doubt himself and his decisions.

He refused to give in, refused to let whatever it was get into his head.

Things always get tough. That's the nature of war. You buckle down and power through it. If you can't shoot it, can't kill it, then you seek to endure it, find a way around or through it, but you don't give up, he thought to himself. I haven't spent fifteen years in the Confederate Army to just give up the first time some PAWM scoops me up and carries me off like a hunchback climbing a tower with a virgin thrown over his shoulder.

Two, AKA Sergeant Kalkik, glanced down, checking his rifle, then looked back up at the back of the Terran leading them through the twisting passageways.

Behind him Three was moving steadily, holding onto his flamer. He was still having trouble wrestling with the fact that there had been Mar-gite aboard the ship. He knew they couldn't be actual Mar-gite, those were gone, obliterated from the Cygnus-Orion Galactic Spur by the Terrans.

Except, he'd seen them, seen what they did.

Mar-gite's outer covering shifted to match their surroundings, giving them a slight bit of photo-optic camouflage. Gave them a slight split second to act when their prey was surprised and that split second usually allowed them to bite deep and bite hard.

Except there's no way those were real Mar-gite. Mar-gite can't handle Hellspace energies, they catch on fire. Those Mar-gite had pink and red cilia, which means they were fully fed, which is impossible inside a PAWM. That means that someone, something, made a close enough facsimile that it made Sergeant Purohit complete lose it, Three, AKA Sergeant Caldo, thought to himself, watching Captain 030 ride on the Maktanan's shoulder. Training had us going against Mar-gite in simulators, now I get to fight them in real life. How glorious.

Three gave a slight smirk, his sarcastic nature overwhelming the feeling of futility and doom.

Eh, fuck me if I can't take a joke, he thought. He glanced at his rifle again. I got my gun, I've got ammo, I've got rations and oxy, I'm better off that those poor bastards facing off against the fucking Combine on Anthill.

Lieutenant Mu'ucru'u was glad the burning pain in his right rear flank had eased up. To be honest, he had been afraid that the weird looking creature that had landed on him had injected him spores or some kind of weird semen and he'd end up with his lower body swelling up to explode in a shower of gore and tiny little creatures while he was screaming.

And the humans fought those things world after world to eliminate them from the universe, he thought to himself, staring at the back of the massive armored human in front of him. Not just by attacking, but by creating new ways of making warfare, by twisting their own bodies to be able to fight better.

He checked his armor's status. The patch was holding, his medcomp was reporting everything green, well, his right rear flank was yellow underneath the painkillers, and he had nutricud and water to last him a few more days.

My people, the Great Herd, think that they'll just swarm the Terrans under. Don't think that the Terrans will change their fighting style, their weapons, even themselves, to achieve victory, the Lanaktallan thought. He realized something with a slow creeping dread. My people are doomed.

He closed his rear eyes and shuddered even as he walked.

My people will not rule another hundred years, maybe not even a single year. They have chosen to engage in warfare against a species who does not understand the concept of unacceptable losses, he thought. I can only hope that Most High Mana'aktoo does not pit our people, our worlds, against the maddened lemurs of Terra.

Lieutenant Mu'ucru'u huddled slightly inside his armor even as he walked forward, his tendrils curled in despair as he followed his men through the twisted hallways. On his back sat 281, who was busy assembling a device from the parts he pulled out of the micro-forge cybernetic system implanted in his abdomen.

The small green mantid, the veteran of a hundred battlefields, paid no attention to his surroundings except to double check the walls and ceiling for any more Mar-gite. He could feel the cold thoughts of despair and misery pressing in on him and simply shut them by ignoring them.

He was a green mantid.

His kind had spent the majority of his species existence pressed down, a prisoner in their own minds, until the freeing rage of the Terrans had allowed them to break free.

281 could feel that it was outside of himself seeking to overwhelm him, to make him lose hope, to make him give in to despair.

But he had genetic memory of true despair. Of liftetimes spent silently screaming inside his own head.

He simply looked out from the fortress that was his mind and curled mental antenna in disgust at the feeble attempt to reach him.

281 continued working, building, piece by tiny piece, a superluminal distress flare.

Let the others worry about despair and misery. Even if he was to die right this moment, he was more blessed by the Digital Omnimessiah than ten million generations that had come before him.

Even if he was to die right this second.

I die free.

------------------

Marduk didn't bother with Hellspace shields. The twisting foul and debased energies of Hellspace, the scorched and riven beings trapped within the ravaged hyper-atomic plane, were nothing more than ancient echoes of unlucky victims and the weak as far as Marduk was concerned.

He knew that all things ceased eventually.

Even the universe itself.

It was the way things were.

Even the mass that had made up all of the universe had ceased to exist when the Big Bang had occurred, and there was no sense in mourning it.

From death came life came death came life.

An eternal cycle.

He knew, without a doubt, that once the universe itself died another would be born only to eventually die.

There was no shame in realizing that to exist was to eventually cease to exist.

The whispers of Hellspace energy through his hull's maintenance spaces held no blasphemous truths or heretical epiphanies for Marduk. That was for others. Marduk had no concerns of what the burned hyper-atomic plane might whisper to him.

That was for others to concern themselves with.