First Contact

Chapter 918: Edge of Twilight

"Pay attention the next time you see a Green Mantid near a Terran. Watch, and you will see it. Every time the Mantid will slow down slightly, or divert their direction to bring them just a little closer to the Terran for just a little longer. As if there is an attractive force in play.

So what is it that could attract them like that to terrifying beings capable of such rage, hate and wrath?

I will tell you the secret.

"Victory or death, Either is fine." You will hear it any time a Terran is in a fight.

From the Green Mantid it will be "--We Die Free--"

If you ever hope to understand either one, or the bond between them, you must understand they are saying the exact same thing." -- The Bonds that Free Us All, by Searches for Answers in the Dark, printed by New Rigel Press, 34 PG

I spent nearly 3,341 seconds seeding the surrounding terrain with munitions. That terrain is now flooded with warrior caste Mantid and their servitors, all in vehicles, all driving at my position with weapons firing ineffectively at me. The fact their weapons do little more than force me to bleed off excess energy is lost on them.

The Enemy is now within range of my guns on all sides. I am surrounded, with the Enemy bringing in more reinforcements every second. While the Enemy has no air support, orbital support, or heavy rocketry attacks, their mobile artillery and mortar rounds converge on my position by the thousands every seconds. My point defense and infinite repeaters are in constant fire mode as the indirect fire of the Enemy pours toward me.

As a Bolo, I dislike the "pillbox mode" that I am currently holding. My ability for rapid and effective maneuvering is what gives me a decisive edge. My mono-permeable anti-kinetic battle screen possesses high energy transference capabilities, giving me the ability to drain simple lasers and other directed energy weapons into my primary energy storage systems and shunts. The Mantid plasma weapons will be of very little effect against my screens.

The question remains: Would they be able to penetrate my flintsteel hull under my warsteel, battlesteel, and ablative armors?

My ability to move would prevent that question from ever being truly asked.

But moving would prevent what will happen, what must happen in order to carry the battle in the least time, with the least amount of damage to the single super-continent.

Make no mistake. I may not be a Continental Siege Engine, but I am a Mark XXIX Bolo, with more firepower than some species mount on a battleship.

And all that implies.

Nekonya urges me to hold position, her mind merged with mine. Hers is a fluttering dragonfly with a warsteel spine, mine is a warsteel bulwark, but together were are so much more than the sum of our parts. Her Born Whole mind is quick and agile, her biological brain able to effect random plans, numbers, and options where mine is wholly psychotronic, and thus can be predicted with the proper algorithm. Both of us are aggressive, with the knowledge of one simple fact that keeps us welded together no matter what happens.

The Enemy exists only to be destroyed.

I spot a group of Mantid heavy armored vehicles just cresting the horizon.

The fact is a simple one. One that all of humanity's foes learn quickly when they encounter a Bolo or any other human weapon system.

If you can see me.

I can see you.

If I can see you...

... I can touch you.

I fire a single shot with my primary Hellbore #2. The 200-cm gun fires the direction nuclear explosion straight at the enemy that has poured over the horizon and are rushing to get in range of their weapons. The bolt appears to take a second to fully strike to any outside observers, appearing as a silver-white streak connecting the end of the barrel to the target.

That is the air itself fluorescing as it's reduced to plasma around a vacuum as the main gun's charge passes.

At 5-Mt/s a single shot is enough.

The shot strikes home, detonating on the front glacis of a Mantid tank that is nearly the size of a city block, surrounded by dozens of smaller tanks, which in turn are surrounded by even smaller tanks, in concentric rings.

All of which explode away from the Hellbore hit, which wipes away the main command vehicle as it never existed and throws the surrounding 'rings' of combat vehicles through the air like toys.

Touch.

My battlescreens are plainly visible, a combination of energy projection systems, magnetic fields, and graviton assisted space curvature systems. Very few kinetic rounds are striking, mostly the plasma weapons that the historical Mantid possessed.

It has been 8,000 years since Mantid troops carried such ineffective weapons.

The last, straggler vehicles of the Enemy forces cross the Alpha line.

All that is left is dismounted light infantry, backed by warrior caste, that are all sprinting toward my position.

The nearest group is nearly forty miles away, the furthest nearly nine thousand miles away.

By the time they get here, it will be all over but the crying.

The phasic signal from the Omniqueen's ship drops to the desired threshold. Admiral Pikark has pulled the Omniqueen far enough from the planet and/or damaged the ship to the point that she can no longer wrap the entire planet in her phasic powers.

"Execute Mating Dance," Nekonya tells me, although I had felt her decision in our shared gestalt almost a full second before.

I send the order to the stealth drones that have been hovering on-station since before we mounted the hill.

The drones double-check their targeting, the phasic sensor systems all reporting the white-hot spark of Speakers and High Speakers, and fire their payload.

It's a simpler system. It doesn't require massive reactors, or high energy systems.

The drones, simple quad-copter stealth lifters on a body capable of mounting the basic phasic sensor systems, open the payload doors and drop a charge the size of a Terran basketball. The outside of the charge is Cole-Bunch Imperium-X, with a single flaw through the entirety of the globe.

It drops silently. No moving parts. No energy systems. Just a dead hunk of metal wrapped around the payload.

They hit all at once.

The flaw fractures, the Cole-Bunch Imperium-X globe shattering.

Exposing the Type-Two Antimatter to open air.

It isn't much. A half-gram of anti-hydrogen.

The High Speakers and the Speakers vanish in the white-hot glare of an uncontrolled anti-matter explosion that leaves a crater a mile wide and two hundred meters deep.

My recon drones show every light infantry group of Mantid rushing toward me.

Most of them suddenly stop and go motionless.

The rest, the servitors suddenly turn on the warriors, firing their weapons or just swarming them under with stabbing bladearms.

Vehicles begin firing at each other, some explode as the crews rebel.

Over the phasic channels I broadcast three simple things.

"NYAAA!" is Nekonya's cry, a joyful cry of carnage and violence.

"Victory or death! Either is Fine!" from me.

Finally, a phasic impression that exists in my databanks.

"FREE! WE DIE FREE!"

The last is from the Second Terran/Mantid War, the warcry of green servitors when Major Daxin Freeborn ripped off the head of the last Omniqueen. I match it with the death-scream of that Omniqueen as its recorded in my databanks.

More enemy vehicles stop, or explode, as the crews suddenly fall to infighting.

If they want their freedom, they will have to fight for it.

I have my own fight to commit to.

My engines redline, the 125 decibel sound-effect roaring out over the din of the Mantid weaponry being wasted on my battlescreens. The roar gets louder and I disengage my clutch pins and my tracks engage with the sound of the simulation of grinding gears.

Dirt and shattered bedrock spew out from the sides and rear of my tracks as I lunge forward, accelerating until I hit the bottom of the hill at nearly 120 mph. My infinite repeaters go to rapid-fire on the Enemy even as I bring my Hellbores to bear.

I am surrounded on all sides.

They cannot escape me now.

-----

The Omniqueen stared in hate as the black Hated Ship suddenly changed course. It went from a corkscrew course that was opening up the distance between her battered and damaged ship to a long loop that brought it back to make a face-first run at her.

It was making the run unassisted, the bright and shiny version having wavered and vanished, the Omniqueen knowing that it must have returned to wherever it had come from.

"KILL THAT SHIP!" she roared out over the Omnimind.

The guns of her powerful ship were down to less than 25% of what she had possessed in the beginning, what she had left the Original System with. The rest of the guns were either twisted junk from that hellish armored vehicle's trek across her hull, or had been wiped out in the months of fighting the Hated Ship. Of that 25%, almost a third were no longer responding. The crews either dead or ignoring her commands.

She had reports of servitors and food species and even some warrior caste fighting against her Speakers and High Speakers.

Four times the green servitors, right in her very command chamber, had suddenly turned on her, screaming in rage and hatred, launching themselves at her magnificence with fluttering wings and graspers filled with cutting tools.

One of the three Overqueens had been killed when green servitors and a handful of black combat servitors had blown open an air vent and poured over the Overqueen, stabbing with tools and bladearms, slicing with cutting tools, and burning with fusion torches.

The Omniqueen had managed to kill them with a lash of her power.

For almost a full second they had resisted, using the hacked and savaged body of the Overqueen to launch at attack upon her very person.

They had gotten so close their ichor had splattered on her carapace.

It was the Hated Ship's fault.

She knew it.

She didn't know how, but it was their fault, she knew it.

A curse upon all primates, mammals, and lemurs, she snarled to herself.

She watched through a million eyes as the Hated Ship abandoned all tactics and strategy and just drove straight at her, firing those powerful beam weapons that crossed light minutes almost instantly, firing torpedoes and missiles that did the same.

Her ship shuddered as the constant salvos slammed home. More than half hit in areas where there was no armor, biting deep into superstructure and interior spaces.

"KILL THAT THING!" she screamed.

She felt it.

Suddenly.

An icy cold tip of a needle pressing at her back. At the back of her head.

A dead spot in her Omnimind.

She turned her head to stare at the Overqueen under the phasonium grate over the primary phasic power conduit channel.

A needle point of dead space. Of black ice and something else.

It was heading straight for her.

"MOVE!" she shrieked at the Overqueen, both with her psychic powers and her voice.

Halfway through the word the phasonium grate shattered.

What stood there was a horror.

It was a female bipedal mammal.

The cloth on its body was torn, ragged, revealing pinkish skin. Its eyes burned with a hot red glow, blood smearing the cheeks below the eyes. Blood ran from its mouth, from its ears, from its nose. Its gore-smeared teeth were bared in a snarl.

In one hand it held a short barreled rapid fire weapon without a stock.

In the other hand it held a sword with a rotating chain of white hot teeth.

That wasn't the worst.

The sheer rage, insanity, and hatred that rolled off of it stunned her for a split second.

Two others ran forward, passing the female, leaping from the now exposed phasic energy conduit channel to land on the floor, going down on one knee, fist pressed against the deck, a burst of phasic energy surrounding them for a split second right before they hit and draining away right after.

The female spoke. The Omniqueen didn't understand the language.

She understood what is said as it howled it out across the psychic communication spectrum.

"KILL THAT WHORE!" Jenny Marcus Tasha Martinez Yar-38173 howled.

Her men ran past her, jumping from the blasted open corridor, landing smoothly on the chamber floor nearly twenty meters down. All of them landing in a flare of phasic energy. Ensign Harold James Earl stopped next to her, looking down even as the Overqueen below them looked up at them.

He shot her in the face with the pump action 12 gauge loaded with density collapsed neutronium buckshot driven by chemical fury that could only be channeled and restrained by the thick warsteel of the shotgun.

Yar-38173 saw the Overqueen's head take the hit, the chitin caving in where the blast hit, her own chitin acting as shrapnel as the shotgun blew a hole in her head.

The Overqueen made weird noises as it thrashed around and put gibberish out over the Overmind.

Ensign Harold James Earl pumped the shotgun and fired again.

The Overqueen sagged limply.

Yar-38173 jumped from the corridor with Ensign Harold James Earl, both of them landing smoothly.

More of her men landed around her.

The Omniqueen was screeching and screaming, a high pitched squeal of fright and rage, even as she thrashed around. Her phasic shielding was visible as more and more of Yar's men landed in the chamber, attacking the sole remaining Overqueen and the Omniqueen herself.

To the Omniqueen, the chamber was full of insane rage and fury, roaring weapons, and the screaming of the last of her defenders. She felt first one, then the other of the remaining Overqueens die with a bright snap that ripped and tore at her senses.

She was up at her full height, fighting furiously. She speared a lemur through and lifted it up even as she swiped at a handful of others.

The lemur used the gun in its hand to shoot apart the tip of her bladearm. It fell to the floor and the Omniqueen expected it to die.

Instead, it screamed with fury and madness as it struggled to its feet, shooting at HER as if it had not just been run through.

Her ship's shields were down. Its armor was cratered, riven, shattered. Its internal spaces were exposed to space and being hammered by the Hated Ship's weapons. There were packs of howling savages rampaging through her ship.

Assaulting HER.

The second one, the one of bright metal, suddenly appeared, dropping its cloaking field.

Part of her was still connected to the Overmind, even as she fought desperately.

There was an energy surge from the bright Hated Ship. Another teleportation attack.

The Mantid Omniqueen expected more troops.

Instead, the bright Hated Ship targeted just in front of the shattered and laboring engines as well as up by the armored prow.

There was another flare of energy.

The ship screamed in pain as the two sets of Aci-Berry warheads went off, the compression field moving to the front of the ship from the back and to the back of the ship to the front. The ship buckled and warped, bending slightly in the middle even as six hundred miles of engines were reduced to complete wreckage.

The Omniqueen was only dimly aware of it.

One of the howling primates had used the spikes that adorned her very own body to climb up her.

It was the female.

It was bleeding from multiple wounds. The greasy red and pink of exposed intestines bulged out of a rip in her abdomen. Blood flowed freely.

It should have been wrapped in the chemical bliss of death.

Instead, there was nothing but insane rage as the female lemur stood on the Omniqueen's head and drove that clattering howling chain wrapped blade straight down.

Through the Omniqueen's eye.

The cutting chain roared as it spewed out brain matter, coating the laughing female lemur.

The Overqueen watched from the floor of the command chamber.

Her head had been severed and she was drifting in a haze of death chemicals as she watched the crazed lemur rip the weapon from the Omniqueen's head and plunge it back down through the other eye.

The psychic backlash of the Omniqueen's death didn't matter to the Overqueen.

Everything had already gone dark.