Chapter 641: The Spoked Offensive (2/2)
”Live,” he said. He looked at her, seeing the tears, and said a simple sentence that made her nod.
With that he let go of her hands and moved away, vanishing into the building. She watched him leave, the tears welling up but unshed.
She took the taxi back to her own apartment. She sat there and scrolled through the options on the nanoforge in her apartment. She found what she was looking for and printed it out. It was a simple thing. A wooden frame, an LCD screen, a stand.
She uploaded the picture into it.
The man smiled back at her from the picture.
She went next door and watered his plants. She watched on the Tri-Vee as the news reported that her people were once again at war.
She learned to pray, for her neighbor. The quiet man who was always willing to help was in her prayers to the Digital Omnimessiah. She prayed for his safety. She prayed for his soul to be guarded. She prayed that the new war not take him away.
And she watered his plants while he was gone.
Who was she?
She was a Locust. One of millions just like her.
Like the others, she prayed for her neighbor, she prayed for her people, she prayed for herself, she prayed for beings and people she had never met and would never meet.
She was all of them.
She was all of us.
She was those left behind.
She was a thing of beauty to those like her quiet helpful neighbor.
And they would die in droves, had died by the millions, to protect her and those like her.
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The drop pod slammed into the ground, the retrothrusters burning and baking the ground into a hardened mass and the last of the compressed atmosphere vented around the pod to cool the ground. The sides slammed down on the pod, just like the hundreds of pods around it.
The Dwellerspawn screeched as they rushed forward, across where the blast wave of the three hundred drop pods had reduced their brethren to slurry, ash, and crushed gore.
From inside the pods waded out five man teams. All dressed in power armor, all carrying heavy weapons.
All firing as they left the pods.
The weapon fire was not what made the Dwellerspawn pause, was not what attracted the attention of the Atrekna leadership caste.
No, that was the invisible wave that rolled out from each power armor troop as they exited the phasic shielding generated by the pod.
The Atrekna had tasted wrath, had tasted hatred.
This, this was much worse.
It was cold, it was bleak, it carried with it the memories of exploding suns and cracked worlds. It carried with it the nihilistic emptiness of those who had looked so long into the abyss that they had become a part of it.
The Dwellerspawn quailed back in the face of the invisible cloud of empty nihilism.
Lord Captain Reshall fired a drone into the air from the backpack launcher. It arced into the sky and detonated, creating a short-lived flag of fireworks that hung in the air for long seconds.
”All platoon leaders, ensure proper fireplan interlock,” Reshall ordered. The icons blinked affirmative and he knew that the junior officers would do as they had on a hundred worlds before this one. ”Priority target are Atrekna leadership caste. Keep a look out from chronotron bursts or phasic interference.”
Again, the icons winked.
”Minimize civilian casualties when able,” he ordered as he strode forward under a purple sky.
His men followed him, firing their weapons without fear into the very face of Dwellerspawn.
He was Lord Captain Reshall and he had been born on a planet that had died in a system that had been nova-sparked, in a galactic arm that had been denuded of life, in a galaxy that was now nothing more than scattered stripped systems that had been shorn of everything they could be by the detonation of the supermassive singularity at the galaxy's heart.
His men had marched across a hundred worlds, fighting in a war they were born into, a war that nobody even knew why they fought any longer.
But this war was different.
He knew it. His men knew it.
This war was against an alien species from beyond space and time. A species that wanted nothing more than the complete possession of all of the universe.
To take possession of what they wanted, they would take away what he and his men had.
Worse, to Lord Captain Reshall, they would take away what she had.
Peace. Security. Plenty.
To Lord Captain Reshall and his men, there was no wrath, no hatred, as they marched into the face of the Dwellerspawn, as they advanced into the very teeth of horrors from beyond space and time.
There was simply a clarity of purpose.
It was done, simply, because it must be in order for those like her to live.
As Lord Captain Reshall grabbed an Atrekna and threw it to the ground, ignoring its panicked psychic attacks as the squealing of the already dead, there was no anger or hatred in what he did as he plunged his power armor wrapped fingers into its back.
There was no wrath or fury as he closed his hand around the creature's spine as the purple blood flowed and the creature shrieked in agony.
He felt nothing for the creature as he ripped its spine out in one yank.
They were the enemy.
And the enemy only existed to be destroyed.
It wasn't personal as Lord Captain Reshall ordered a sonic detonation device deployed against the glittering fantastic architecture of the Atrekna fortress and then marched his men into the cloud of sparkling crystalline dust.
There was nothing personal in it when Lord Captain Reshall jumped down into the waist deep cerebral fluid and waded through the fluid, passed through the shimmering phasic screen that parted around him, moving to the massive glob of neural tissue, leading fifteen men to the thing the Atrekna had fought the hardest to protect.
Nothing personal in it as he drew the clattering chainsword in his hand, his men following his lead.
To the Elder Brain, there was nothing but bipedal holes in space as the ice cold teeth of the chainsword began cutting into its flesh. No wrath, no fury, no joy, no love, nothing.
It was nothing personal.
It was just the enemy.
And to Lord Captain Reshall and his men, to the Locusts, the enemy only existed to be destroyed.
Because, for the first time in their lives, they had something to fight for aside from surviving just one more day.
Those they had left behind had potential to be more than the men who fought next to Lord Captain Reshall.
They had the potential to live. To be more than the men who fought.
They had no fear of death. No wrath. No rage.
Just clarity of focus as they swept aside the Dwellerspawn, rent the Atrekna, and tore apart the assault upon a planet full of small creatures who barely had the written word.
To the Atrekna, Lord Captain Reshall and his men, every man in the counter-invasion force, was nothing more than a blank spot, a hole in reality. An empty shape that did nothing more than advance and kill.
Nothing stopped their inexorable advance. Not casualties, not hopelessness, not being cut off, nothing.
The last Atrekna fell to Lord Captain Reshall, who grabbed it, threw it on the ground, and tore its spine out while it screamed.
It wasn't personal.
The Atrekna were the enemy.
And the Locust Troopers would not suffer the enemy to live.
They had no fear.
As Lord Reshall had told the girl who lived next door.
”Don't cry for me.
”I'm already dead.”