Chapter 3: Newer Frontiers

[Acewing13]

Outremer System, O-1/Bohemond, En Route to New Martoille (Theradectan Colony)

"Flight 301, Walpole," the radio squawked. "You're clear for landing at NMT airfield. Over."

"Walpole, Flight 301," the Gleesman's pilot replied as he flicked a couple of switches. "Copy, clear for landing at NMT. Thanks for the guidance, over." Turning on the intercom, he said, "Hello, this is your Captain speaking. We'll be landing in a few minutes, so please put your tray tables upright and thank you for flying with the AU Air Force."

"It's times like these I kind of get tired of the jokes," Captain Schembri said, sighing at the lack of tray tables and other in-flight ameneties. "They'd take out the fucking bathroom if they thought they could get away with it."

Eliza was armed, as usual, had been every day for months now. As far as she was concerned, the spiders were not to be trusted. It didn't matter that months had passed, seemingly without incident, it was instinctual. No one that could so easily murder people, even children, could ever be trusted with a simple 'Our bad, lol'. The spiders were not to be trusted. Here they were, heading to Spider town.

Eliza was tired, pushing herself further than usual. She'd actually done the paperwork, which was draining on it's own, and on top of that she'd been poking at the nerds, teaching them how to shoot a sidearm. It wasn't like training infantry, with better weapans like hers, but it was enough to give them a fighting chance in case the spiders decided to stop pretending to be friendly.

Despite running herself ragged, she kept up the aura she projected naturally, large and in charge. It wasn't a lie, or a cover, it was just her being herself. Short cape over one shoulder, she was on alert. "Don't kid yourself Cap, they'd get rid of US if they thought they could get away with it. We're expensive."

Maksim sat with his back against the shuttle wall, his inner-ear music player quietly playing "Radio Ga Ga" by Queen. He could feel his cigarette case in one of his pockets. How he wished he could've had at least one smoke before they headed out. Maksim had been smoking a lot more over the past few months. Usually he only did it maybe once a day or so, but now he found himself smoking two or three times a day. This is supposed to be the greatest opprotunity of my life, he thought to himself. So why am I so stressed? Maksim closed his eyes and leaned his head back. Don't kid yourself, idiot. You know why.

He was glad that between Eliza's training and assisting Benjamin and the other scientists with their work, he was able to keep himself busy, even if he did feel out of his depth when it came to the science part. Busy was what he needed. And Maksim was relieved that they were able to settle things with the spiders peacefully. Their society was so much more advanced than he had realized, and they certainly had a lot to learn from each other. His stomach flipped with excitement as he thought of the fact that they were now heading towards the Theradectan's own colony, but as with everything, it was excitement with a tinge of anxiousness.

Benjamin, who had been reading the entire flight, jumped out of his seat at the tannoy announcement, ripping the page of his book. He sighed, murmuring something in Dutch with a sad tone, before stuffing the book away in the satchel that he had managed to bring on board. He flipped the tray up, before rubbing his hands together and adjusting his glasses.

In the few months that had passed, Benjamin had grown more dishevelled. He had dedicated the entire time since the last mission to two things - training with Eliza, and studying the Theradectans. As a result, he had... changed a little. His hair was much longer, the blue streak somewhat faded. Until today, when he had to shave, a small beard had been forming on his face. The perpetual bags under his eyes seemed even larger, almost like a monochrome clown's facepaint. He didn't look great, but his personality was still there - the strange, awkward scholar.

Caleb nodded at Eliza's remark. "Yeah, if the Magnetic Assembly wasn't so far ahead of us in the cyber domain," he said, "we'd have been replaced by robots by now."

"Fucken robots," Eliza chuckled. "Ain't bullet proof at least." She looked down at herself, nodding. "I could kill a robot, it's got a brain too. Bet they just fold up and you can stack 'em like crates."

After a few more minutes, the popularly coined 'spider island' came into view. Instead of the dark shadow that had greated them a few months ago, the island now glittered with signs of industrialization, with the most obvious sign being a tall metal tower jutting above the island's hills. As they got closer, they could see that the tower was dotted with an array of dishes and antennae, with another dish being pulled up by a spider, with a human sitting above them, apparently waiting to install the hardware.

More infrastructure became clear as they slowed down, the shuttle's engines roaring as it switched from horizontal flight to vertical. Where once had just been a bare beach now stood a more permanent landing field, built out of rocks that were melded together with the spider's 'mana'. The path to the main colony was guarded by a pair of bored, but armed and armored AU soldiers.

"Kind of unreal to see how quickly the Theradectans have built the place up, once we gave them the materials," Caleb said, picking up his pack as the shuttle got ready to land. "And they weren't worried about starving to death."

Maksim's face was pressed up against the window of the shuttle, trying to take everything in. He couldn't believe how fast the Theradectan's had progressed in the space of just a few months.

Eliza was slightly offended that the spiders were doing so well so quickly. The humans had to carefully coordinate their work to be time efficient, cost efficient, and manpower effcient, leading to a base that was cramped and borderline haphazard, and in the space of a few months the spiders had built themselves a settlement. A real, non-air-sealed settlement. It wasn't fair. They should have died. "It's probably because they got like four arms available at any one time. That's how they work so fast."

"They are... v-v-very clever..." Benjamin smiled, stroking the stubble on his face. "They aren't... uh... s-spiders like uh... b-b-back hooome," he grinned dorkily.

Eliza turned to Benjamin, and sighed heavily. She wasn't angry at him, but Eliza was never one control her tongue when in a mood. Which wasn't uncommon. "Is that your professional opinion, Benny boy? Are these talking spiders, that are big as a car, who are older than every human on Earth combined, a little different from the spiders we're used to?"

Benny blinked. "I..." he trailed off and shrunk a bit in his position, looking smaller and older than he was, before mirroring Maksim's actions and gazing out of the window. That had been mean. She was right. But that had been mean. It reminded him of university.

Eliza groaned, sitting back in her chair. She knew it was mean. She hadn't known when she started saying it, but by the end she had realized it was kinda harsh. She wasn't the sort to stop talking in the middle of a sentance, once she had it started, it kinda just went off. Crossing her arms, she was faced with a difficult choice. Apologize, or be cool and don't apologize. She took the middle road.

"I apologize," she grunted as she stared at the back of the seat in front of her. Now she had technically done the thing, but had been too cool to look him in the eye while she did it.

As the conversation dried up, the shuttle rocked for a moment, before the engines shut down. "Come on, let's get going," Caleb said, waving the group to follow as he walked out. "Apparently we're going to the bunker. I still can't believe that we were this close to the controls of a magic space laser and just couldn't figure out how to use it."

Taking a short walk past the, now alert, guards and a line of Theradectans carrying boxes back to the shuttle, the group soon turned into the valley, which had also changed dramatically. What had once been a ruin-filled wasteland, was now almost entirely cleared of debris and now stood a number of pre-fab human modules from Base Alpha, with the radio antannae standing in the middle of the valley. There were a number of teams working around the area, with various compositions of humans and spiders. The closest team was working on the last bits of Aos Si architecture, with human scientists going over and cataloging the structure, while Theradectans followed behind, digging up the marble and bronze column and slowly packing it away in crates lined with their silk.

"Hello, Captains, Doctors," another scientist said, waving to the group as he walked towards them. Once closer, it became clear that it was Dr. Boden, who smiled as he stopped in front of them. "How was the flight?"

"Boring, didn't even get the inflight pretzels like advertised," Caleb said, shaking his head.

"Well, if you're hungry, could always grab a Fungus Bar," Boden replied, chuckling as Caleb gagged. "Regardless, we have an appointment at the bunker, so I'll lead you to it," he said, nodding towards the onyx bunker in the back of the valley, before starting towards the structure. "Do you guys have any questions?" he asked, looking back at the group as he led them through the valley, with groups of spiders and humans dodging the oblivious scientist.

 

[Acewing13]

Maksim stopped his mad sketching of all the various structures being cataloged and packed away to look up from his electronic pad at Dr. Boden. Again the enthusiasm took over in his voice until Maksim's thick, rough Russian accent broke through, making him almost unintelligible. "Well most of my questions I would prefer to ask the Theradectans themselves, but you've excavated a lot of structures in so little time—did you get enough aerials? Soil samples? Have you set up GPRs? The formation of these new structures might cover up possible future dig sites, not to mention..." He went on rambling for a bit mentioning something about foundational deposits and site integrity while mumbling little bits of Russian words for when he couldn't remember it in English.

"One of the first things the original team did when the ruins were discovered was taking aerial photos, setting up radars, etc, since that was the easiest thing to do while waiting for the next wave of personnel that we came in a few months ago," Dr. Boden said, half turning to look back at the group. "Some of the archeologists are pretty pissed off that we didn't leave the site intact, but General Thomas and Matriarch Antinhinan overrulled them. The Theradectans need the space and the wofleonium that's in the columns. Apparently it's needed for their magic stuff."

Maksim nodded. "Oh...I see." He went silent, a bit embarrassed at accidentally letting himself get too excited again. He worked on more of his sketches as they walked, but thoughts floated through his mind. Didn't the Theradectans care about preserving the past? Didn't the AU care? Maksim knew that they must've had good reasoning that he just didn't understand. Even still, it made his heart fall a little to see so much of the ruins done away with and replaced with pre-made structures.

Not wanting to dwell on it anymore, he lagged behind a few feet to get a view of the whole group in front of him and opened a new page on his pad. Maksim started sketching everyone with the sprawling landscape behind them, the giant radio antennae standing as a focal point.

Eliza was on high alert, at every moment, towards everything she could see. Weapon in her hands but held in a way she could pretend it was just casual, she kept her eyes wide open as she watched the spiders do their work alongside the humans. The humans seemed way too chummy to be working alongside the same creatures that had murdered, yes murdered, her kinsman not long ealier, indiscriminately.

No, even if it had been years it still wouldn't be okay! This was months ago that the humans had been hiding in their bunker waiting for big ass insects to knock on the door and kill them all, and here they were, working together. Surely someone had to pay for the actual murders committed, right? She spoke up to the Doc, Boden specifically. "Have the bugs been any trouble?" Her voice was lined with dynamite, just waiting for a reason to explode, low and angry it was.

"No, the Theradactans have been quite accommodating," Dr. Boden said. "I'd say they're bending over backwards, but that's kind of impossible for them."

"Acommodating?" Eliza scoffed, venom dripping from her words. "Oh how nice, how accomodating they've been. You know who else is accomodating? A fucking host, at a party. The owner of the house when people are over. They're accommodating. That's called common fucking sense, and you don't get a medal for common sense. The first thing these spiders did was slaughter innocent people, soldiers and scientists alike. If you forgot that so quickly, Doc, I worry about your priorities. They should've been locked up for crimes against fellow sentient beings, but I think a field execution would serve just as well." Her grip on her weapon was tight, knuckles almost white as that piece of enginerring took the brunt of her wrath.

Caleb frowned at the fellow officer's remarks. "Captain," he started, before shaking his head. "Eliza, remember what they went through before going into stasis. They were slaves under the Aos Si, forced to work on the pain of their lives, and then left in stasis when the knife ears left. When we woke them up, a third of them were dead from being in stasis for too long and when they looked around, a bunch of bipeds were poking around the place they built for their oppressors. If you say that you'd act with any less fury, I'll eat my weight in Fungus Bars."

"And what did they do when they realized their mistake?" he continued. "They immediately returned our weapons and equipment, and deactivated their laser. They're doing their best to make up for their mistakes, even offering up their warriors that did the killing. But you know what General Thomas decided? To let them off the hook."

"Why?" Caleb asked, rhetorically, "Because he knows that there's only two options for a foreign army to successfully conduct an occupation. First, a full lockdown of the population, to deprive insurgents and saboteurs from the cover and support of the civilian population. See the Second Boer War if you want an example. It aint pretty or humane, but it works if all you care about is getting submission from the population. Now, we couldn't do that because we needed the cooperation of the Theradectans to keep us fed until the Statesmen got here. We didn't have enough personnel or expertise with the equipment to keep them in line while making sure they didn't poison the food they gave us or do other sabotoge. We could have tried it, but it would have been half-assed and there's a long and storied history of half-assed American occupations. Vietnam, Afgahnistan, Iraq, Columbia, Iraq again, I could go on. So, the General went with option two, being as gracious as possible. See West Germany and Japan after WW2 for the best examples. War criminals are punished, but otherwise the populace is given all the support they can be given to rebuild. And in our case, we didn't have war criminals. We had oppressed slaves lashing out at what they thought were their enslavers after losing a third of their comrades. Finally, there was the thought of how the rest of their civilization, if it still exists, would react to how we handled the situation, for better or worst."

"To sum it up," he finished, "General Thomas decided to honor the deaths of our personnel, not by enacting vengance, but making the best of a bad situation and learning all we can from the Theradectans. You're not required to like it, but please try and not cause a diplomatic incident, okay? Or do I have to order you to do that?"

Elizabeth was fuming, staring at the Captain with barely lidded actual rage. That wasn't fair at all. The isects would get off with an 'oopsie, my bad' for the actual murder of people. They were scared? Thought they were in danger from their enslavers? Too fucking bad. They weren't, and people who meant them no harm died. They were sorry. How sweet. How gentle and loving. How kind. They get a pat on the back and a 'you'll do better next time, sport.' They offered to pay for their crimes, but the people in charge, scared to look like the bad guys again, said 'no no sweetie, it's okay.'

Elizabeth couldn't even do anything about it. Didn't have the authority to demand anything, any sense of justice for the kid's literal murder. She had to sit here and be lectured in public as if she were a child, and that just made her even angrier. But she couldn't do anything about it. So what she did was take a bottle already shivering under the pressure within her soul, pack more into it, and just let it shake inside her until she died, or something more drastic happened. Honestly, she was just hoping to a reason to crack that bottle.

"Captain," she started, words dripping with venom. "I'll respectfully ask you not to lecture me on American history. I'll respectfully ask you not to lecture me on philosphy and all that subjective shit. You are asking me, captain, to just let the death of so many innocents vanish. Just delete it from history. You're telling me the spiders had the presence of mind to offer justice, and we DENIED it. You are correct captain, I do not like that. I will disagree with that, on every front I can. I will not shut up about it. I do not apologize in advance."

Elizabeth did not ask to be excused, eyes narrow and filled with fire, she merely stepped away and moved to the back of the line. She didn't put her weapon away, she didn't look at anyone in particular, instead just staring into nothing, and she couldn't smother the anger that almost illuminated her eyes as she did so.

Maksim pretended to be absorbed in his sketching while Caleb and Eliza spoke, but his ears were open to their conversation. He looked up as Eliza moved closer to the back where he was and debated whether to say something. Her face looked like she was about to snap at any moment. He told himself to wait.

 

[Acewing13]

The arguement quickly attracted an audience, with humans and spiders both looking at the pair of officers. The AU and GDW personnel had a variety of reactions, nearly evenly split between agreeing with Caleb and Eliza, though Dr. Boden just looked uncormfortable being there at all. The Theradectans were harder to read, partly due to them looking at their fewer screens as English got translated into their language, the translating software having rendered Aos Si unnecessary as a go between in the last few months. When they heard Eliza's words, they chittered among themselves, much too fast for the software to pick up more than a few words. "...I knew...brilliant people...Kadinle..."

Benjamin missed Elizabeth’s apology, deep in thought. He wasn’t really meant to be here. He was meant to be in a lab back at base camp zero, not out on the frontline. He barely snapped back to reality until they exited the shuttle, the walk prompting one moment of brief lucidity before he was once again back in his dream world, scratching his beard as he walked. He needed to shave.

He drowned out the majority of the conversation, occasionally affording a few nods or a ‘yes’ when appropriate. His focus remained on the spiders, until Eliza suddenly… exploded. Metaphorically. Well, it probably could be deemed literally.

“Eliza-” he prompted in a warning tone, before almost immediately regretting saying that. She was… correct, in certain ways. She had reason to distrust and dislike the Theradectans, and Benjamin couldn’t fault her on that. Instead, he repeated her name in a more sympathetic tone.

As she stepped away, Benjamin made a move to follow, but paused. “Captain, w-w-with all due… respect…” he paused, took a deep breath, and then continued. “A degree of emp-empathy is… necessary. C-Captain Bakara w-w-witnessed the… the deaths of colleagues… no- of fri-friends… at the hands of… the Thera-Theradectans.” He paused again, scratching his beard. “I do not… agree w-w-with her… animosity. A-And I know you… knew them… t-too. But they… should… b-be accountable. W-We cannot… g-gloss this over. We m-must atone… for our crimes… too. Mutual justice.”

People were taking notice. Perhaps Eliza had put into words what so many had been feeling, but were unable to do anything. Then she was doing the right thing, moving for justice. That's what she told herself, and whether she was right or not didn't even cross her mind. There was only being correct. No room for error.

Of course, even this light agreement didn't stop her from fuming with anger. Even when Ben spoke she couldn't help but be enflamed again as she rolled her eyes across the crowd. She wanted to be able to say she didn't need his help, but people responded better to his soft-spokenness than... her usual, casual tone of voice. Casual in the bombastic way.

Despite rage fueling her actions, current action being to stand there, fully armed and armored, she could still feel some amount of... joy? No. Happiness? No. Appreciation, that was the one. Her heart was so mixed with passionate rage and grief that more nuanced emotions were a little hard to grasp. She was never that good at the nuanced emotions anyway. She felt appreciation for the little guy, little Benny with the stutter and the adorable excuse for a beard.

He may not be good at it, but he sure was vocal about the situation.

Caleb wished he hadn't brought up the subject or had somehow done a better job to diffuse the situation. Unfortuately, he couldn't think of a better (or worse) way to tamp down dissent than to lean on authority. "Look, at the end of the day, General Thomas' decision is going to be reviewed back on Earth, so it's not the last word on the subject," he said with a sigh. "However, that's no excuse for being insubordinate, so I'm-"

"Excuse me," a black Theradectan interrupted as it stepped forward, a number of it's legs covered in silk bandaged. "Can I say something to God's Oath?"

"Uh," Caleb said, looking down at the spider. "Sure, I guess. What's your name? And how did you get injured?"

"Barbamadu and you shot me, Full-Heart," the Theradectan's translator replied with a nod, before turning to Eliza. "God's Oath, you probably can't tell, but it was I that attack you a few months ago and killed the brilliant one that you were carrying. As has been explained, we thought we were defending ourselves, but looking back, there were signs we should have picked up on. Previously, I offered my life as payment to make up for the loss of life I inflicted. I now do so again." He bowed his head and spread his pincers to the side. "I hope my death will help bring justice to the situation."

Benjamin let out a sharp exhale at the suggestion and instantly lurched towards Elizabeth in an attempt to block her path. "Don't, Elizabeth, don't," he said in an oddly commanding tone, devoid of any stammering. But his eyes were full of anxiety, and a hand reached out to grip her shoulder.kl

Maksim was now fully focused, head up and looking back and forth at Barbamadu and Eliza. He froze, knowing what was about to happen but too fearful to do anything. "Wait," he said softly.

Eliza was stuck. Elizabeth was just stuck in her position, not because the nerd thought he stood a chance to hold her back but because she was in shock. Who just... admits to murder? This was her chance, justice, finally, she could plunge her combat knife into the bug's head, right between all of his many eyes, or just empty the clip into it's face. Why was Ben trying to stop her? This was what she had wanted, what she had dreamt of when she got like 4 hours of sleep: justice.

She was staring at him, just a little bit down at him, face a mask of pain and rage and boiling, frothing grief. "Why," she whispered, voice shivering with anger. "Move Ben. I need to do this."

His brown eyes met her rage-filled gaze and it was... frightening, to say the least. What was even more frightening, however, was that he couldn't give her a reason that she shouldn't do this. Not one that she would deem adequate anyway. He took a shaky breath in. "Would... would she have wanted this?" he whispered, mirroring her tone in all but anger. Benjamin was clearly referring to Dr Grey, which was a risky manoeuvre. His grip on her shoulder tightened ever so slightly. "Please..." he trailed off, his voice hoarse and barely above a whisper.

"I don't know," she hissed, leaning against his grip, "And she can't make that call anymore, Ben." She was shaking, that bottle inside on the verge of shattering. "Stupid kid wanted nothing more than to free the bugs, and because she did they killed her." Breathing heavier, the grip on her weapon was white, knuckles drained of color, but both hands were dropped to her sides.

"They can have their freedom," Eliza growled, but still her voice was a hoarse whisper, "But the price needs to be paid. That way everything is fair. Let me have this Ben, you can hate me later. Everyone can hate me later, I don't care. He needs to die."

Benny was breathing heavily now as his other hand came up to Eliza's other shoulder. "Think a-... about this... revenge won't m-make you feel better," the stammer had returned, almost as if Benny wasn't convinced of his own words. "I could... never hate you. I just know that y-you wouldn't be... the same. I don't want that... f-for you." He paused and gritted his teeth. "You deserve... justice. But this isn't... justice."

"Then what is, Ben?" She was asking, perhaps genuinely, but still she shook her head. "I'm already not the same, Ben, I'm already like I am. I can't not be." She was lightly stammering, speaking was hard when being crushed by the weight of every single varied emotion she had trapped in her bottle. "I don't know what to do..." her head lowered, ever so slightly, tears behind her eyes but trapped. "Tell him to run. If I keep seeing him, I will gut him like a fish, and I don't know if I'll stop there," she whispered desperately.

Benjamin turned his head slightly to look at the spider, and then Schembri. "He c-can go... but he... n-n-needs to go," he spoke softly, emphasising the last word. Turning back to Eliza, the hands on her shoulder loosened, and then tentatively pulled her in for a hug.

Caleb, having taken the advice of his first NCO, to not give an order he knew wouldn't be followed, took Benjamin's effective distraction as a chance to get Barbamadu out of there. "Get out of here," he whispered to the spider, pointing at the cave they lived in. Despite Barbamadu's previous apparent death wish, he took the chance given to him and scuttled away at high speed.

She closed her eyes, not willing to look at the insect anymore. She was telling the truth, the more she looked at him the harder it was to deny what she felt was right. Now she wasn't even sure it was right, or just another expression of what she doesn't know how to feel. She wasn't expecting a hug, she never was, honestly, her body tensing up as a reaction, as if she was ready to fight or flight. Knowing her, the answer would have been obvious. Instead, her arms went limp, the surpise being swiftly replaced with those emotions she was trying not to feel.

 

[Acewing13]

She was grieving. Not in a normal way, not yet, and certainly not in a healthy way, but she was forced to contend with that. It had been so long, she'd forgotten how hard it was to be enraged when being hugged. Even if she hated how small it made her feel, needing support. Just this once, she promised herself, then she could go back to being herself.

Benjamin noticed the change in posture, from tense to relaxed, and realised that the hug was 'acceptable'. He tightened it ever so slightly in an attempt to be more supportive. "It's okay..." he whispered instinctively. It wasn't okay at all, and he regretted saying it. "It... it wasn't your fault, Eliza..." he said, even more quiet than before. It didn't feel right to call her Captain or ma'am in this situation, or even Elizabeth. For some reason, Benjamin had a hollow feeling in his chest. Like the organs had been removed from behind his ribcage. It was sadness, yes, but he didn't know why. "It wasn't your fault."

Yes it was, Eliza knew it was. If she'd been faster, her reflexes been just a bit quicker, all would have been well. He was lying for her benefit, Eliza was sure of it. At least someone cared enough to do that, she had to reason. She couldn't just let her arms hang loose, she felt like she needed to do something with them, so the arm without the literal assault rifle slowly wrapped around his back, halfway returning the hug.

Much like Eliza, Benny hadn't been expecting the half-hearted hug in response. He also tensed, before becoming concious of his position. He briefly relaxed, the realisation that he had possibly just saved a spider and disuaded the most stubborn person he knew from doing something that they had dreamed off for ages... holy shit.

It was a few moments later that he became acutely aware of two things - the presence of everyone else, and the gun lodged at Elizabeth's side. He released her from the hug, clearing his throat, before putting a hand on the barrel of the gun. "You d-don't have to... al-always fight."

Despite her best efforts to the contrary, she let go of the hug reluctantly. She had tried to hype herself up, letting the hug go would be no problem, and yet when the time came letting go was harder than she'd expected. She looked down at her weapon, frowning. "It's my job Ben, because if I don't fight, people that aren't nearly as well prepared have to fight instead." Unsure, she gently punched his shoulder. "Like you Benny Boy." She slung the weapon over her shoulder, joining it with her other rifle, and stood there awkwardly.

"Stop looking at me," she said suddenly, "I don't know how to respond to that."

And there it was, back to normal. The punch was gentle, yes, but Elizabeth's idea of gentle wasn't normal people gentle. Benjamin rubbed the spot with a frown, before following Elizabeth's instructions and not looking at her. He gazed at the ground instead, clearing his throat slightly. "I uh.. y-yeah." Benny was back.

Still not knowing how to end this conversation and yet reluctant to do so, she reached up, ruffled his hair and chuckled, "The beard is adorable, it's like you're trying to prove you're all grown up." She turned around, very visibly avoiding even looking at the spider, and started fixing herself. She wiped the tears away, those droplets that hadn't had the chance to fall freely, still in that bottle but now the bottle was no longer shaking, threatening to shatter.

She adjusted her shoulder half-cape, fixed her armor. Sorrow was really not a good look for anyone, so back in the bottle it went. There was work to do.

Maksim stared at the direction that Barbamadu ran with a blank expression. He was trying to atone for his mistake. She should've killed him. As the tension in the air dissipated, his mind started working again and that thought made his stomach twist. Maksim let out a steadying breath and smiled, watching Eliza and Ben go through their usual banter, but this time their conversation seemed to be paired with a newfound understanding.

"Dr. Boden," Caleb said, looking over his shoulder at the scientist, "Let's get to that presentation."

"Yeah, just follow me," the scientist said, turning on his heel and walking towards the bunker. Everyone else went back to work, moving out of the newcomer's way.

Reaching the bunker, with it's onyx exterior, the now open entrance was guarded by a full squad of armed and armored soldiers. Their sergeant looked at the group's name plates, before nodding and letting them enter the bunker.

Entering the Aos Si structure, the humans were again struck by the sheer riot of colors that greeted them. This time, however, the room was packed with scientists, recording the symbols and projected image in the middle of the room, now showing the entire Outremer system. In between the busy humans was Kadinle, the lone Theradectan that was now allowed in the sensitive area. The green-bristled spider looked up at the newcomers and showed his newly bronze-capped fangs in his attempt at a smile.

"Alright, people," Dr. Boden said to his fellow scientists, pointing out of the bunker. "Sorry, but we have a briefing to attend to, so you have to leave. We'll be quick."

The other scientists whined and complained, but after a couple of minutes, it was just the Captains, the three scientists, and Kadinle.

"Good to see you again," the Theradectan said, tapping on the controls of the projector. "We've all been too busy for, hmm, chit chat? Did I use that correctly?"

Maksim's face perked up. He always felt proud when he recognized English slang. "You did!" He motioned to his mouth. "I like your fangs. If you don't mind me asking, are they some sort of status symbol?"

"Oh," the Theradectan said, tapping his fangs. "No, that's for your peace of mind. They're blunt caps so I can't get my venom out or stick my fangs in anything too deeply. Makes eating annoying but," he added, waving his pincers at the firework show of the bunker, "I just think about the matriarch-fucking Aos Si, who would roll in their graves if they saw me in here and that all goes away."

Maksim hadn't thought about the possibility of Kadinle or any other Theradectans attempting to harm them. But he inwardly cursed himself for not having that presence of mind, not when Eliza had broken down over the death of someone at the hands of one of them only minutes before. Maksim had spent so much time studying the Threadectans themselves that the fact they were still spider-creatures while the rest of them were just fleshy humans became hard to grasp. If I had to, Maksim's eyes flickered for just a second to Eliza, would I be able to treat them as an enemy?

Eliza's first instinct was to be snarky, to say something mean to the spider. However, her most recent expereince with those cursed emotions gave her pause, eyes shifting to Benjamin and causing her to sigh with... dissapointment? She couldn't just revert like that could she? Damnit, this wasn't supposed to be complicated! With her arms crossed, she grunted quickly. "Cut to the chase insect, what's the goal in this room? What are you looking at?"

Benjamin blinked at the image of matriarch-fucking and frowned a little. It wasn't a nice thought. Instead, to distract himself, he began to inspect the architecture of the room, before becoming very interested at the floating symbols. He crossed his arms and looked around, like some sort of middle aged man inspecting a new house.

"It's to show you what the next objective is," Kadinle replied, as Boden pressed a rune by the door and the bunker's door slid up from the ground and locked behind them, which made the floating symbols glow even brighter. "I'd prefer to have it open, but the dumb thing doesn't fully work until the door's locked."

Maksim jolted as the door clanged shut. "чёрт!" He hoped no one had heard that. He took a deep breath and ran a hand through his hair. It's fine, Максиа. It's just a dark, enclosed space that you can't leave. For a few minutes at most. Maybe an hour. That's nothing. He decided to focus on the pretty floating symbols instead of the slight panic simmering in the pit of his stomach.

"I don't know how much you've been following the reports I've been sending to your scientists on magic and it's workings," Kadinle started, focusing the projection on the outermost planet, a barren rocky body unofficially named Godfrey, and a dark purple icon orbiting nearby. "To, hopefully I'm saying it right, make a long story short, magic is another form of energy that can be used to perform rituals for a variety of effects. From the Fungus Bars to the various 'anomalies' you picked up before awaking us, there's a lot of examples for you to look at when you have more time."

"Magic only works in systems that have nodes," he continued, pointing at the purple icon. "Usually, those are connected to other nodes and you can travel between them, but for some reason the one in this system isn't working correctly. Something to check when we go out there."

"I'm sorry," Caleb said, turning his attention from the projection to the spider. "Go out there?"

"Yes," Dr. Boden said with a nod. "Keep listening and he'll explain."

 

[Acewing13]

"Thank you, Doctor," Kadinle said, before manipulating the controls to zoom out to cover the local stars, with a net of gold lines connecting a number of them. "These are the known node lines, as of five thousand or so of your years ago, when the Aos Si left and put us in stasis. We're here," he continued, with the Outremer system blinking blue in the sea of black, "and these are the system that connect back to our world, one of which is apparently your homeworld."

As the Theradectan spoke, one line turned from gold to red, tracing a crooked line from Outremer, through Sol and several more stars, before stopping at another star. "So," he said, turning to the group, "after we get all packed up, we're going to the system in this line after your homeworld and see if we can make contact with the rest of our civlization or not."

"Hold on," Eliza held a hand up.. "I may be talking out of turn, but why on earth should we ever be going to Spider World? I feel like y'all are really brushing over the 'magic' part of this. I gotta know what sorta science these bugs think magic is, and there ain't no way the Fungus bar was magic. It if was, you'd think you'd put in the work to make it taste like food."

"I meant the machine that turned the planet's fungus into an edible product," Kadinle said as he clicked his pincers, which the translator turned into, "LOL."

"Same difference. It's a machine, ain't nothing magic about it." Eliza sighed, her hand twitching at her side. The spider fucking lol'd at her. She almost shot it for that. "LoL at me again I will shoot you."

Maksim's mind was reeling from the casual mention of magic. Was this a translation error, some kind of cultural difference in definition, or were those far-flung theories he skimmed over for fun during his time at university actually real?

The sudden "LOL" from Kadinle broke him out of his thoughts, and for once in Maksim's entire stay on Bohemond, either because of his nervousness or the sheer comedic timing, he laughed. It was a light, bubbly giggle that seemed to float out of him.

"I'm sorry, that was just," he giggled once more before clearing his throat and smiling sheepishly at the ground. "Pretty funny."

Kadinle looked between the two humans and the different responses to his attempt at human levity. "Hmm, seems like I need to do more research on this subject," he said, taking a glance at Eliza's gunhand before focusing on the console. "Really hard to sort out visual gags though."

"Anyway," Boden said, trying to get the briefing back on track, "on the subject of magic, we're still trying to sort it out. Yes, there is definitely machinery that we can identify and see the results of their work, but it's either in a black box that we can't see in or when it's visible, it's doing some weird stuff. Like the disk anomaly," he continued, referring to the artifact they'd messed with before even coming to the island. "The closest comparison we could come up with was like an ancient personal computer device. Except it can't do math, but can directly change an area's temperature. Dr. Peters got it to boil or freeze a cup of water from 3 meters once the controls were translated."

"Nodes are the epitome of this phenomenon, " Dr. Boden said, pointing at the purple icon. "We didn't detect anything in that position, even though it's almost right along the line the Statesmen have been burning down to get to Bohemond. That's why we're going to try and find more worlds with nodes, so we can see if we can find one that hasn't been disrupted like we found here. Thankfully, the line bends back on itself, so the target system is within one jump from here, so we don't have to use two Statesmen or tanker to get there."

Eliza was staring at everyone as they spoke about this, acting like it was just more facts that were known by all. Nodes, magic, all this shit, it didn't sit right. She was reminded of the weird objects they'd been playing with before, the things that had made water heat, and could sense nerds, that one might be misremembered, but the explaination seemed lacking to her.

"So... the idea is to go searching through space to find an imaginary node, and... what? Gawk at it?"

"Scientifically gawk at it, yes," Boden said, which got a snort out of Caleb. "From Kadinle's reports, there should be more observable phenomena along with the node. Electric fields, radiation, et cetera. Couldn't be too energetic, otherwise we'd have seen it by now. Militarily, we need to know what these things look like to make sure we don't have backdoors in our space."

Benjamin hadn’t particularly liked being locked in - he liked small spaces, they were comforting, but the context was not… great. The explanation of… magic… was confusing to say the least. The content was not difficult to understand, but the concept was. Benjamin couldn’t help but feel like everything he had learned about science had just been thrown out of the window. Surely it worked hand in hand… science and magic? Or was this a desperate attempt to piece everything back together?

The linguist was shocked into reality by Maksim’s laugh, causing him to look around blindly. He removed his glasses and began wiping the lenses with his sleeve before putting them back on. His hand trembled, and this was his odd way of trying to stop it from doing so. He then frowned, and began to type away at the notepad tablet he had bought with him.

“Interestingly, ‘node’ is a b-b-botanical, anatomical and tech…. technical term,” Benjamin murmured, without looking up from his frantic scrolling. “I wwwwwwonder if it’s been slightly mis….translated.”

Maksim thought on Benjamin's words, eyes narrowing a bit in focus. Somewhere in the back of his head, he knew he was partially thinking so hard to distract himself from the increasing amount of time that was being spent in this enclosed space, but the comment itself made the gears in his brain turn. "It's certainly an interesting word choice..." Images of the greenhouses in Palatinsk that Maksim had spent countless hours in flashed through his mind. He wondered how much of all of this was just getting lost in translation as Benjamin put forward or if magical, world-connecting nodes really existed, like the unseen roots of a forest.

"Sigh," Kadinle's translator said as he shook his head. "Do you know how many dictionaries I had to go through to find a decent translation? It was a giant pain in the abdomen. Speaking as the ancient alien in the room, I really don't get why you guys get hung up on this. Maybe it's having lived in a society where magic was a natural thing or knowing that we didn't know everything because the knife-ears were essentially gods among us, but after we got over the shock and awe of the Aos Si weapons, we never really tried to make a distinction between technology and magic. Probably need another non-magic species to compare with."

"In other words," Dr. Boden said with a shrug, "Kadinle specifically picked node as the word to use. Said it sounded neat."

"And fit some of the symoblogy of how the Aos Si think about the whole network," the Theradectan said. "Nodes, connected by branches, et cetera, et cetera. I made the report so I didn't have to repeat the whole thing every ten minutes, so if you want to know more, get reading."

"So," Boden said, walking over to the bunker's wall and touching a rune, "that's the briefing. You've got a couple of days to pack and then you're off to the Walpole and the next star system."

"Did we name it yet?" Caleb asked as the door to the bunker started to open, letting Outremer's light pour in.

"Yep, we're going with Antioch," Dr. Boden said.

"The Greek place?" Eliza grunted, "Are we as a people really out of ideas? We keep coming up with the same names for new things, honestly." She sighed, crossing her arms as mental checklists started filling themselves out in her head. "Will it have breatheable air? I need to know what helmet to bring, to maximize effectiveness, and how cool I'll look when I save our asses from 'magic'," she said with air quotes.

Maksim attempted to wait patiently as the door slowly opened, but he found himself bouncing on the balls of his feet before practically running out the door once everyone else was out. From the back of the group, he took a few breaths to quell his heartbeat and pretended to listen back to the conversation as though nothing had happened, clenching and unclenching his hands to stop their shaking.

Benjamin's hands typed away on the notepad as Kadinle spoke, occasionally nodding and making small noises of interest. When Boden paraphrased, Benjamin looked offended. "Y-Y-Yes... I under...understood that," he frowned, crossing his arms like a petulant child.

"Technically, it's... T-T-T-Turkish," Benjamin said to Eliza. "A-A-And you're from... N-New... Texas..." Benjamin grimaced, his mouth a completely straight line. It was okay. She couldn't hit him in front of the boss.

"Yeah, well that was already named," Eliza grunted. "It's something to think on for the future, water boy." She had glared at him, but compared to the many glares she'd handed out recently, it was of a smalller magnitude.

Caleb chuckled at Benjamin's jab at the New Texan, while walking over to see if Maksim was okay. "Is there anything else, Doctor Boden?" he asked.

"Yes," Matt said, following the rest of the group out of the bunker as the scientists went back in. "We're sending several Theradectans along with you. Kadinle's staying, but you'll have met at least one of them."

 

[Acewing13]

"That ought to be fun," Caleb replied, doing his best to not look at Eliza. "Let's go pick them up and then get back to Base Alpha."

"Sure," Boden said, pointing over to a group of spiders that were helping load the shuttle back to Base Alpha. Two spiders, a black male and grey female, were off to the side, chittering away. "That's Thakozois and Camelia. Thakozois will be your main liason and Camelia is to help the scientists"

"Oh, the guy that we peacefully ambushed?" Captain Schembri asked as they walked up to the group. "Hope there's no ill will there."

["Now, I want you on your best behavior,"] Thakozois chittered, looking the larger female in the eye. ["If we're going to survive, we're going to have to stay on the human's good side. I don't want a child, no matter their birthright, messing that up. Do you understand?"]

Camelia chitters in response, her tone on the more annoyed side. [“Why do I have to work with the humans? I blow up one lab and suddenly I’m the pariah who deserves to be treated like how we should be treating them? Not to mention, this is insane. They’ll kill us. First chance.”] Camelia eyes the humans, coldly and untrusting.

Before Thakozois could reply, the rest of the group arrived. "Thakozois, Camelia," Dr. Boden said, nodding to each Theradectan in turn. "I'd like to introduce Captain Caleb Schembri, Captain Elizabeth Bakarra, Doctor Benjamin Hase, and Researcher Maksim Sedova."

Thakozois clicked his translator on and said, "Greetings, compatriots. I promise we'll aid you in this mission to our best ability."

Camelia, one more time, turns to Thak and chitters, [“If I die, tell my mother she’s a bitch.”] She would then compose herself, and turn to the group before her, turning on her translator. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. Thakozois told me I’ll be working with the scientists?”

"You'll be working with the scientists," Elizabeth grunted, arms crossed as she stepped forward. She could take the small amount of discipline for talking out of line, but she knew she needed to make her presence known. She had her nerds to protect from alien elements. "Which means you'll be working with me, which means you, bug," she said with ice in her eyes, "do some fucken science. As long as you got that, and don't hurt my boys, you get to keep breathing."

Camila's eyes travelled over the speaking woman carefully, with a bit of what was almost defiance in her eyes. She took a moment of silence, then turned off her translator and began chittering one more time, looking over towards her Theradactan colleague. ["I'm gonna punch her."] Camila chitters in annoyance. ["What gives these humans the right to speak to me this way?"]

She cleared her throat, clearly not expecting an answer from Taco. She turned her translator back on and looked to Eliza. "I'm more worried you and your... kind will be hostile towards me, not the other way around. It does sure seem to be going that way, does it not?" She crossed her front pedipalps, clearly upset by what the human woman claimed, chittering under her breath. Thakozois just brought his claws up to cover his face.

"Good," Eliza said, standing stock still in front of the spider. "That was the intention." She brought up two fingers, pointing to her eyes, and then pointed like, four fingers at the multi-eye arachnid. "You should be worried. Because I, bug," she said with venom spilling from her voice, "am not fond of you. Keep away from my nerds, or we'll get to run a little experiment called how thick is your hide and how many bullets does it take to penetrate."

Now, technically speaking, she didn't have the authority to murder the spider without good cause, and even if she had great cause it would still put her in hot water with the Army and possibly the remains of the Geneva Convention, but the point was made. Her point delicately made, she kept starting down into those multiple eyes, not entirely sure which one to intimidate.

It also crossed her mind to wander is spiders had a dominant eye, but that was suppressed for blind rage.

For some reason, Camelia was not only annoyed, but the way that Eliza's eyes kept switching from spot to spot... Simply amused Camelia. With a small smirk, Cam took a moment to overlook the situation, and chuckled. "You know, you don't scare me, little human. And my name. Is Camelia. You little shit stain." Cam's face moved forward a little, Eliza and her stuck in a little staring contest - Which wasn't fair on Eliza, considering Cam could blink every one of her eyes individually.

"Ohhhhh," Eliza's face broke into a smile, fingers twitching. God, she could just cowboy this bitch and be done with it. She'd be left with the dude spider, and they were passive anyway it seemed. Tempting. "Looks like the bug comes equipped with some balls! I was starting to wonder. The last new spider to talk to me offered to die," she huffed, "And silly me, I thought maybe you'd all be like that. It's good that you're not." Her eyes looked back, seeing Caleb, that ever present reminder of duty and law-abiding military code, and sighed.

"Lucky then," she said suddenly, eyes finally fixing on a single eyeball, "That we don't live in an unordered world." She reached forward, patting the spider derisively. "But if you hurt anyone, I'll still kill you." She turned around, her back to the spider, and looked back to the two nerds under her protection. "Do play nice. Can't have our guests thinking we're hostile or some shit."

Camelia snived derisively. "If your little minions are really that scared of a teenager, I'd be more worried about them growing their own set of balls." Her eyes glanced over to the two that would apparently be under Eliza's control. "I'm not going to hurt anyone, duh. If I do, my mother will kill me. I'm just here to do a job."

Eliza stopped, and looked back towards the bug with gritted teeth. "You don't get to talk to them like that," she said with an outstretched finger, before continuing to stalk off and stand behind Caleb, her arms crossed to prevent her fingers from twitching towards the multiple guns she was covered with.

Sensing the rising tension in the air, Maksim had started to zone out again. He snapped back to reality as Eliza turned and addressed him and Benjamin. He nodded. Of course he would play nice, Maksim didn't really know any other way.

"Um," he did that little nervous half-smile. "Hello. Like Doctor Boden said, I'm Maksim Sedova. You can just call me Mak or Max, if you'd like. It's nice to meet you!"

Benjamin had a white-knuckled grip on his notepad. "I'm s-s-s-pider," he gripped the note pad harder at his error, eyes wide. "Benjamin. I m-m-meant... Benjamin. D-D-D-Doctor... Hase."

"Camelia." she replied simply. They really didn't deserve any more of an explanation, but as she glanced over to Thakozois, she groaned slightly."Im only here because it was either this or the pits, so..." spider shrug.

"Now that we're acquainted," Caleb said with a strained smile, "Let's get going. Do you have anything you need to bring, Thakozois? Camelia?"

"We have sufficent for our needs already packed," Thakozois said with a nod.

"Alright, then let's get going," Captain Schembri said, starting to walk out of the valley towards the shuttle. "Hopefully we'll not have anything eventful happen before we get to Antioch."

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

Outer Outremer System, AUS Walpole

"I still can't believe it," Caleb said, messing with his new gold oak leaf rank pin.

"You get used to it, Major Schembri," Lt. Colonel Allison Duncan said, looking away from the bridge window to look at the newly promoted officer. "Though you're going to ruin your uniform if you keep wiggling the pin. We're at the coordinates, by the way."

"Yes, of course," Caleb said, taking a moment to restraighten his uniform before looking out the window. "Doesn't look like much, does it?"

"Not beyond the usual starfield at any rate," Duncan agreed, looking down at her datapad as she sat strapped down to her chair. "Sensors, are we getting anything unusual?"

"Nothing beyond baseline background radiation, ma'am," the Sensor officer replied, floating in microgravity next to his controls. "Maybe the node's moved over the last 5000 years?"

"That sounds annoyingly possible," the Colonel said, frowning as she looked out the window. "Let's get one of those spiders up here. Maybe they got something that can help us with this magic stuff."

"Might as well get my guys up here as well," Caleb said, sending a message to the rest of the group.

We're at the coordinates where the node is supposed to be. Please get to the bridge ASAP, including Camelia. - Major Caleb Schembri

Eliza floated into view, already armed and armorered, and scoffed openly. "You're telling me you can't find the mysterious magic node? Shocker," she said flatly. "Have you tried tuning yourself into the force, young man?"

Maksim soon floated in after her, buried in a white hoodie and looking like he hadn't slept in days.

His tired, grey eyes lit up a little. "I love Attack of the Clones!" he said, starting to float sideways.

Slowly, a white silky string would pop out from behind Maks, and Camelia would, for a lack of better terms, slide in, in what could be described as upside down, while clinging on to the screen. With a free pedipalp, she would click her translator on. "What is attack of the clones?" She questioned, genuinely confused. "And why am I here, human?"

Eliza turned, in quick succession, to Maksim, then to Camelia. She was dissapointed. "It's one of the worst movies of it's franchise, Mak. Did you never see the others? How in hell can it be your favorite? The only good thing was the bounty hunter in armor, a sweet ass jetpack, and a helmet. Now that's a good look right there."

 

[Acewing13]

Maksim stared blankly at Eliza, still rotating slowly in the air. "I don't know, I like the clones." He shrugged. "Also, the romance is really heartwarming. And Jar Jar Binks is funny."

"If you like Jar Jar," Caleb said, lightly kicking off the deck to turn around, before halting his spin by grabbing a console, "You should watch the remake where he's a Sith Lord. It's great."

Benjamin tapped away at his tablet as he floated in behind the rest. "I l-like Yaddle," he said, with a small goofy smile. "Especially when... she uh... m-m-m-mugs Yoda... in the r-remake."

Maksim tilted his head. What was this remake everyone was going on about? It must've never hit Kitezh.

"If we can stow the ancient movie talk for now," Colonel Duncan said, turning her chair around to look at the new arrivals. "I asked Major Schembri to call you up here, because all of you are effectively our main experts on these nodes. In particular, Camelia at the very least has experience in actually traveling through this node. From Kadinle's paper, you should be able to sense the node and what direction it's in from here. So, do you sense anything, Theradectan?"

Camelia was just.... confused. Movies, she knew about, obviously. But this human one sounded like a bunch of nonsense. "I-- what...." She listened for a little longer until Duncan had spoken. She turned, looked at her, and then sighed. "Is that the only reason you had called me here? Because you guys can't sense a magic node?" She rolled her eyes (Well, as best a Theredactan could at least.) "I suppose if it gets me out of here faster..."

Camelia turned away from the others, and took a deep breath, closing her eyes. After about a minute, she turned and pointed to her left. "It's not far from here, but it's in that direction."

"Navigation, turn to 280 degrees, 1 milligee acceleration," Duncan said, nodding to the duty officer. "Let us know if we need to change direction, Camelia."

"Guess this is the best direction we're going to get until we understand this better," Caleb said, slipping a shoe into a deck strap as loose items started drifting to the back of the bridge as acceleration began.

Eliza sighed, openly and aggressively, gesturing to the spider. "Captain, sorry, Major," she corrected herself with an eyeroll, "Are we expected to follow the intuition of a bug that's been frozen for untold millenia? Do they know what they're looking for? Would they even tell us? You're taking a lot for granted here, Ca- Major." She crossed her arms, floating with an air of annoyance.

"It's the best we got at the moment," Major Schembri replied with a shrug. "I know it sounds nuttier than New Texan Coco-Walnuts, but that's the stuff we're dealing with right now. It's an entirely new field of research that we barely have the tools to detect, let alone actually study by ourselves. That's why we're listening to a teenage spider, cause she has the context we don't."

Maksim furrowed his brows. They both had a point, but his own curiosity made him side with Major Schembri on this one. Camelia could be completely wrong, but there was no way of knowing except to try. And he saw no reason for the spider to be deceptive -- they all seemed to want the same thing, after all.

His head bonked against the corner of a low-hanging compartment, breaking him out of his thoughts. Rubbing his head, Maksim pushed off the wall and glided over to a spot he could strap himself in. Floating around like this made him smile. He had to resist the urge to spin and bounce around the space.

As per usual, Benjamin was terrified of Captain Duncan, and it didn't help that floating about was incredibly hard to control. He kept bumping into things and spinning around by accident, so he reserved himself to keeping silent and relatively still.

"I don't... l-l-like this... atmos-atmosphere," he eventually complained after floating into Maksim. "I trust... C-Camelia."

Eliza sighed, watching them float like dumbasses. "How are you having difficulty with this? Scientifically, you have less holding you back than on a planet.." She was floating just fine, used to the campaigns in deep space. That's where all the pirates were after all. She couldn't be mad at the two scientists, not actually, but she feigned dissapointment. She couldn't be mad at those dorks. "Ben," she said, "There is no atmoshpere here."

"I-" Benjamin flushed in embarrassment. "I know th-th-that..." he murmured, adjusting his glasses. "My d-d-d-doctorate is in lan-language... not... uh... space," he grumbled, clearly offended by his own stupidity.

She chuckled at him, shaking her head. "Do I need to put you in a seat? Or maybe just strap you to the wall like luggage until we find land again?"

Benjamin grumbled something in Dutch and crossed his arms like an impetulant child. "I'm f-fine," he said, as he rotated mid air in a perfect but completely accidental 360 spin.

She chuckled again, holding in a laugh. "Hey look, you're pointing space north. Which is everywhere. And nowhere. Because space is ginormous," she said, teasing him with the existential size of eternity. "And you never know where is up. Take a seat Ben."

"If only-" Benny liked the thought he'd just had- "If only y-y-you were... as g-g-g-good a fighter... as you... w-were a... space... n-nerd..." he quipped as he tried to scoot over to the seat, finding it difficult to sit down without having to pin his leg to the chair forcefully. That was embarrassing after (in Benjamin's opinion) such a good comment.

Eliza stared at him, just long enough to make him think she was mad, before she grinned. "Now there's that language degree coming in handy huh?" She kicked off the nearest wall, launching herself towards him, a hand pushing against his chest to put him in the seat. "It's really not that hard." She kicked off again, spinning in place. "This makes for great fun when you're not a wimp."

Benjamin initially went to slap her hand away, completely not used to physical contact, but realised it was oddly helpful and began to pull the harness across himself. Eventually, he was completely attached to the ship and seemingly much less grumpy. "I'm nOoOo-" Benjamin's voice broke- "not a w-w-w-wimp. I j-just... l-look like it."

Upside down, she stared at him with a pretend critical gaze. "Hmm, wimp detected. Bet you don't even know how to adjust yourself to match the speed of the ship. Bet you've never raced from one end of a battleship to the other in 0g."

Benjamin didn't like this. No, he hadn't. "W-Well... I bet... uh.... y-you've never... t-t-tripped down a f-f-fli-flight of stairs at a... uni-university. I n-n-nearly died," he hissed. Suddenly, he realised what she had said and his face blanched. "I h-h-have to match... match the sp-speed???"

She poked him in the chest, still upside down and smiling impishly. "Yes, Doc, with your college degree in words, you gotta brace yourself. Ship will move slowly, and the momentum usually isn't much to work around, but imagine the middle of a pitched battle with bloodthirsy space pirates." Still teasing, she added, "But hey, you survied a flight of stairs. What a big boy. Stronger for it I bet."

Benjamin flushed again, holding his tablet obnoxiously close to his face and hunching his shoulders more than usual. "I d-d-do not wish to t-talk to you a-a-a-at this c-current time," he said in an oddly assertive tone, as if he'd rehearsed this many times.

She sighed dramatically, spinning back to an upright position. "I'm sorry for teasing you about your near death experience with a bunch of archicture stacked in an upward manner." Floating back to the other wall, eyes narrowed at him, but still she smiled. "But I'm always gonna be arounnnnnnnd."

Somehow, the tablet got closer to Benny's face and the shoulders were even more hunched. Ignore. Ignore. Ignore, Benny focused.

Maksim's eyes drifted back and forth between the two of them as "Play the Game" by Queen played through his inner ear music pod, their banter halfway muffled by the lyrics. He tried to hide the smile that crept up on his face and doodled on his electronic notebook, quietly humming along.

Camelia had no idea how to respond in this situation, really. The stuttering bumbling boy seemed to understand the situation better than the slightly hostile nerd herder. She watched them for a moment, taking a moment to simply examine how the humans interact with each other and, for reasons unknown to her, wished to sort of... replicate it? Oh hell no. She refused to feel what she could only describe as jealousy for the friendship they have. Absolutely not. She pushed the thought away, and rolled her eyes. "Theredactans have a connection to magic, though not all of us are skilled in it. I can sense it, though. I'm surprised the humans can't," she explained, though Camelia seemed slightly quieter than usual, her little arms crossed as she turned away from Eliza and Benjamin.

Maksim stopped humming and looked at Camelia, letting go of the stylus in his hand. "What can Theradectans who are skilled in magic do with it?" he asked. He wondered if sensing the magic was strictly biological or some sort of technique. If it was the latter, then, theoretically, humans might be able to learn how to do it. He quickly grabbed the stylus again as it began to float towards the back of the ship.

Camila looked over at Maks, a little confused. "What can humans who are skilled with computers do with computers? What do you expect me to be able to do? Thats like asking what Wikipedia is or how to order something off the interne.." The sarcasm was palpable. "It's magic. It's a skill we can learn just like how one learns a hobby. Just some of us aren't interested in it."

 

[Acewing13]

Maksim nodded and ran a hand through his hair, eyes drifting back to his notepad. Clearly. He seemed to have hit a sore spot. Well, Maksim would have plenty of questions to get answered later.

"Glad someone got caught up on cross-cultural info," Duncan said, looking askance at Caleb. "They're under you, Major."

"Yes ma'am, I'll get them caught up on the trip to Antioch," Caleb replied. "Who's ready to read more papers?"

Maksim smiled and raised his hand slightly. Yay, more reading material!

"Woah," the Sensor's officer said, before clarifying. "Ma'am, we just got a huge spike of alpha and beta radiation for a second there."

"Nav, flip and burn back down our path," the Colonel said, before looking to the Grey spider. "Camila, did you feel what side of the ship that was on?"

Camila rolled her eyes, and pointed to the east. "Couldnt you guys invent something to detect these for yourself? I suppose that's something I could work on." She held on tightly to the silk that she produced that is keeping her in the same spot.

"Nav, change our course so we get closer to the anomaly," Duncan said, as full microgravity returned for a moment.

"Yes, ma'am, flipping now," the Navigation officer replied, before the RCS thrusters fired and the floor rose up to meet the floating crew, as the ship started turning around.

Benjamin was grateful for being strapped in. He shot a quick, slightly weird thumbs up at Eliza. It was entirely out of context but made sense in his head.

Eliza stared at Ben, wondering why the gesture, before she realized what he meant as she felt the ship turn. Adjusting herself in midair, leaning with the ship, she gave him a thumbs up back. "One of these days we'll ship train you."

As the ship finished it's rotation and turned it's main engine back on, Thakozois bounded into the bridge, using a silk line to bring himself to a stop next to Caleb. "Sorry I'm late," he said, cutting the line and sticking it to the deck as an ad hoc restraint, "I didn't get the earlier message."

"Uhh," the Major said, looking at his tablet, "Whoops, forgot to put you on here."

"That would explain it," the black Theradectan replied, his two upper pincers rising in a shrug. "I realized we were close when I felt the node. Haven't felt that amount of mana since before we went into stasis."

"So, Bohemond used to have that level of background radiation?" Duncan asked, looking at the older spider.

Thakozois shrugged again. "The Aos Si didn't seem concerned, so I assume not," he said. "I agree with Kadinle that the radiation isn't the only manifestation of mana, otherwise our homeworld wouldn't have been habitable."

"Guess, we'll find out eventually," Caleb said, pulling up the ship's particle sensors up on his tablet and watched as alpha and beta radiation started to climb again.

"Slowing," the Nav officer said, as the ship's engine shut back down and RCS thrusters brought them to a relative stand still.

"Now what?" the Tactical officer asked, bored with the lack of things to shoot.

"Well, you have to reach out and 'touch' the node," Thakozois said, looking between Caleb and Duncan. "It probably has to be either me or Camelia to do that though. Do I have your permission to try?"

"Well, we didn't come all the way out here to not try and interact with it," the Colonel replied. She nodded and said, "Go for it."

The black Theradectan nodded, closing his eyes as he prayed, "Oh, Neolath, the Weaver of Fate. Guide us home through thy web of stars. Help us connect to the rest of our species. In thy name we pray, amen."

For a few moments, silence permeated the bridge, whether in awkwardness or some shared reverence in the prayer. The silence was shattered by the radiation alarm blaring, bulkheads slamming down, and the sudden gravity as the ship was pulled towards the suddenly blinding light of the node.

"Holy shit!" the Sensor officer said, staring in disbelief at the readings. "Every sensor is overloaded. Ionizing radiation, neutrinos, magnetic fields, light waves, we shouldn't be alive at this point."

"Nav, get us out of here," Duncan said, grunting as the apparent gravity increased.

"I'm trying, ma'am," the Navigation officer said, with a sudden easing as the ship's main engine lit, but soon it became clear they weren't pulling away. "We're still being pulled in. I've got the engine redlined, but it's not helping."

"Comms, send a data dump to Base Alpha," the Colonel said, looking at their trajectory. "Looks like we have ten seconds before we're inside the node. Godspeed, Walpole."

Maksim hit the ground with an "oof" as the gravity increased. His head whipped around, searching for some kind of explaination. Was this supposed to be happening?? He looked at Camila and Thakozois, eyes wide.

"Is this normal?" he called out over the noise.

"No," Thakozois said, struggling on the end of his silk line. "Not normal. I think this is what you humans say, fucked."

As the Walpole passed through the node's horizon, each of the crew got their own personal sensory overload. For Caleb, this resulted in a blizzard of rainbows flooding his vision and the contradictory sensations of his hair standing on end while drowning in freezing water. Being so disoriented, he let go of his foothold and crashed into the back of the bridge, knocking his head in the process.

Maksim's stomach churned as he felt as though his body were rolling down a cliff at an uncontrollable speed. His vision blurred -- everything in front of him duplicated itself infinitely and dozens of voices in both Russian and English sounded in his ears. All Maksim could do was curl up and shut his eyes, keeping his hands clasped over his ears.

There was a thousand possible colors shining through a thousand possible gaps in memory and sight, as Elizabeth's eyesight was utterly overtaken by the forces at hand. Forces she could not have comprehended even with a lifetime of study. There's no understanding this, not in any conventional or helpful way. The universe had proved to her time and again that she was in danger, at all times. For the most brief of seconds she could see Home. The middle of nowhere, her uncle and her armed in the woods. She was in danger from the beasts in the woods. Scaled and unafraid, she needed to be unafraid in turn or be singled out and killed.

She saw herself growing, stronger, faster, angrier. In the military she learned even further the practical applicaton of tempered fear. Still she was in danger, this time from people. Then, as she moved about in the galaxy, the threats became alien. Subversive discount animorphs and their created animal people slaves, elves that weren't called elves who could grow to move with such unexpected speed. Now there were spiders, giant and utterly deadly. With a single thrust a brillant young scientist was deleted from the world thanks to them.

Light poured into Elizabeth's eyes as she forced them open. Throughout a lifetime of fear and anger and destruction she had not given up. Now the threat of the universe was bigger than ever. She had been skeptical of the spider's religious mumbo-jumbo, and here proof was given in a way that was impossible to refute. It was terrifying. Yet, despite that deep, existential fear, she pushed herself to a standing position and just glared at the crack in the universe. Fists balled, teeth gritted, a growl in the back of her throat, she refused to bow to the universe's uncaring light.

The blinding light streaming through the Walpole's windows cycled from white, to green, to red, before it coalesced into a ring of eyes, each of which blinked independently. The ring looked around the bridge, at every being there before they all focused on Eliza. Passing through the window like it was just a puff of air, the ring turned into a rainbow of colors, slowly rotating as a pair of tendrils reached out from the center of the ring, before touching Eliza just above the heart and between the eyes. When they made contact, the pain was instantaneous, feeling like white hot irons were stabbing into her.

This too was a test, surely, she had to believe. The low defiant growl became a confused yet still angry hiss of pain as something unbelievable had grasped her heart and mind. Trapped in place, it was as though steel had been shaped to rough edge and then heated in a star, and then pierced into her. Yet she did not bleed, and in a fit of agonized rage she flung her arms about in a wild attempt to fight the Universe itself. Her mind barely understood what she was seeing, a fight or flight reaction, and as usual she chose fight.

Benjamin could feel his head begin to spin, and before he could state anything regards his sensations, it was like a hand had clamped down on his throat to silence him. He squeezed his eyes shut, cemented to the back of the seat as he began to tremble.

To his right, there came a sudden warm feeling, like being sat in the sunny spot coming through a window. Benjamin's eyes opened of their own accord, but he could feel that they were still shut - was he hallucinating? He was definitely panicking. His eyes settled on a form next to him, a woman in a lab coat, except her features kept shifting with every second that passed. The only thing that remained completely visible was a name tag on a lanyard - Dr Jessica Grey.

 

[Acewing13]

"You're supposed to be my replacement?" the apparition asked, looking Benjamin up and down with visible distaste. "They couldn't have found someone competent or at the very least good looking? What have you done, anyway? Kadinle's doing all the translation work, you're just the human taking the credit. If I was still there, I would have figured this magic stuff out forever ago and Eliza wouldn't be this close to committing murder."

Benjamin continued to tremble, but whether this was from a cocktail of negative emotions or a side effect of the substance was no longer clear. "Please... don't..." he mumbled out, voice strained against the invisible vice-like grip on his throat. "She... w-w-won't.... I.... w-w-won't let... her..." he hissed, trying to close his eyes. They wouldn't close, a fact that the figure seemed to be amused by. "It's n-not real.... n-not real..." he repeated to himself, eyes squeezed shut whilst remaining open in his hallucination.

"Ha, yeah, remember when your mother said giant five foot spiders weren't real?" the spirit asked, her smile betraying that she already knew the answer. "Well, turns out that was wrong. And so what if I'm not physically present? At least I'm not a literal weight around Eliza's neck, just another socially inept nerd that she has to take care of when shit hits the fan."

Benjamin kept repeating the phrase, drowning out 'Jessica'. However, it was the part about being Eliza's inept nerd that got to him. He opened his eyes and stared at the hallucination, speechless. In reality, it definitely just looked like he was staring into the space next to him. Staring directly at the figure caused it to wither slightly as his brain struggled to create a face for Jessica, destroying the illusion and causing it to fully disintegrate. "You know I'm right," were the final words Benjamin heard before he slumped forwards, unconcious.

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

?????, AUS Walpole

After what felt like an eternity, the Statesman shot out of the node and back into space, though all the crew were able to do was deal with their disorientation as they could.

"Fuck," Colonel Duncan said, groaning as she straightened in her chair. "Think I tasted forest green there for a minute. Anyway, Sensors, you back up? Where are we?"

"Ye-," the Sensors officer started, before barffing into a sick bag. "Yes, ma'am, the ship's systems are rebooting. The star trackers are running, but it'll take a minute to sort out our position."

"Update me when you know," Duncan said, before looking around the bridge. "Captain Bakarra, could you make sure Major Schembri doesn't choke on his own vomit?"

Maksim blinked and looked around the ship with wide eyes.

"что это было?" He slowly uncurled himself from a fetal position, shaking a little. His gaze hit Caleb's unconcious body. "Господи! Major Schembri?"

Caleb was unconscious, spinning in the back of the bridge, a red bump swelling on his forehead and spittle slowly spreading across his face, the liquid sticking to his skin thanks to surface tension.

As the ship suddenly came to a stop in the dead of space, Eliza was shoved forward to her knees, panting as she shut her eyes. She pushed herself up to an uncertain standing position, slowly opening her eyes. All the colors were wrong for a second, as if her vision was a swimming miasma of half-seen shades, before she blinked and all was more or less how it started.

Her eyes focused on the Captain, and as instict was driving her, she shakily pushed herself forward to keep the Cap from dying in a very unflattering manner. With a hacking cough she checked his state, grimacing at the bump on his forehead. "Come on Cap, this ain't any way to go out. Get your ass back up before you choke on your own spit."

Caleb twitched at Eliza's touch, coughing up a very nasty loogie before looking at her and touching the gold maple leaf on his lapel. "If I die, I die a Major, goddammit," he muttered, before resuming his cough.

She scoffed and rolled her eyes, chuckling, "You'll live, jackass," she laughed before she realized rolling her eyes had thrown her completely off balance. She pulled herself to a wall and clung to it, eyes darting about to the windows, the people. Somethign was missing. What was missing? Where was that thing? What fucking dream had gotten in her head through that fucking space portal? The entire thing was bullshit, in Eliza's mind. This magic shit was not impressive, it just sucked.

"Who else gonna die?" She said suddenly, an attempt to force herself into action. "Sound off nerds," she barked as she slowly pushed herself off towards the two intellectuals.

"Я -- I in ... I am fine," Maksim muttered, frustration mounting on the edge of his voice as he shook off the echoes of mixed voices in his head. He took a deep breath. Everything was okay. He turned and looked at the rest of the crew.

Benjamin, still strapped into the seat, only jostled around instead of flying across the floor like the others. His neck ached, and his hand still trembled slightly. "G-Good," he replied, succintly and with a definite not-goodness about his tone.

"Other nerd accounted for," Thakozois said from a back corner, with Camelia and an unfortunate rating cushioned in an elaborate web. The black spider was wrapping one of his legs with more silk, the reason being evident from the globs of dark red blood floating nearby. "And if you didn't hear me earlier, no, that was not a usual experience of going through a node. I've gone through multiple and never had something like that."

Camelia was trying very hard to dab some of the blood away, out of apparent concern for Thak, but she seemed relatively unharmed, though a little shaken. "I am also here, I guess." She mumbles halfheartedly.

Eliza drifted towards her nerds, ignoring the spiders as she did, and stopped with the help of the wall next to the two scholars. "I know y'all are shaken, but, as I alwasy say, you ain't dead so there's not much need to complain." She chuckled before she stumbled again from her once confident position of standing on the wall just to mess with their sense of direction, the lights in the room causing her to squint as they shifted colors again. They became normal in an instant, but still the effect is seen on her pained face.

"Wait, what?" the Sensor's officer asked, looking at his display before shaking his head and tapping at the controls. "Sorry, I think the computers have been confused. Resetting them and running them again."

"Let me know when you've got something," the Colonel replied, not taking her gaze off of the ground team. "Yeah, all of us feel like shit. Everyone that isn't busy right now, go get checked out by the medic, schedule a session with the psychologist, and then you're done until your next shift. That clear?"

"Yes, m-" Caleb said, before coughing a couple of times, the effort sending him into a spin. "Sorry, yes ma'am."

Maksim said nothing and just stared at his hands, still trying to get his breathing under control. He hated the idea, but he couldn't resist an order.

Eliza rolled her eyes, which just made her more dizzy. She didn't need a therapist, she needed a medic. At least medics dealt with useful science, in her humble opinion. So she practiced a useful tool in her aresenal, shutting up strategically, so she wouldn't need to take time out of her busy day of getting ready for sudden violence to see a shrink for... what she hoped was a minor problem.

Before the crew even had the chance to leave, the Sensor's officer groaned, covering his eyes with his hands. "What the fuck?" he asked, before remembering his surroundings. "Uh, ma'am. The computer's come up with our location."

"Well, where are we, Sensors?" Duncan asked, eyebrow raised.

"Antioch," the officer replied. "We're in the Antioch system."

 

[Acewing13]

Antioch System, above A-2/Tancred, AUS Walpole

"Alright, quiet down everyone," Colonel Duncan said, standing solidly on the floor, thanks to the Walpole's braking burn. "I know it's not every week that you get 'yeeted' hither and yon by a magical portal, but if I don't have silence here and now, you won't have a ship hull between you and the void of space." After a few moments of silence she nodded, and said, "Thank you. Now, Dr. Boden, what have you learned from scans of the planet?"

"How long do you have?" Matt Boden asked, smiling as he looked up from his tablet.

"15 minutes until we're in orbit, so about that long, Doctor," Duncan replied with a glare.

"Yes ma'am," the Doctor replied, clearing his throat before tapping his tablet, bringing up a picture of the planet, it's surface covered in light blue foliage and even brighter oceans. "We're calling the planet Tancred for the moment and as you can see, it's very bright and reflective. We're thinking that's because it's getting so much light from it's star and all the excess CO2 feeding the plants, but that's just after two days of looking at it. Besides the general high points of having another life-bearing world to look over, the main highlights that are of military concern are these ruins on and orbiting the planet." As he spoke, several pictures of non-natural objects popped up on the screen, the smallest showing orbital debris, with a mix of metal and organic parts strewn together, the largest being a partly overgrown facility on the planet's surface, new growth partly hiding craters of destruction.

"Preliminary readings seem to show that there's at least two different factions' debris mixed up," he continued, pointing at the orbital debris, "but we'll need physical access to know for sure. We've got spectra of the debris, with the most interesting readings being plutonium and uranium daughter products, so it seems likely that one of the factions were at the very least using fission reactors and most likely also using nuclear weapons in ship to ship combat."

"Last big point is the readings we're getting from the planetary facility," Boden said, turning to said ground site. "Now that we have the data from the Outremer-Antioch node, it seems like there's another one down on the planet itself. Apparently this is relatively common, according to Kadinle's report."

"Indeed," Thakozois said from the back of the room, "We have one on our homeworld like that."

"Fair enough," Boden said, nodding to the Colonel. "That's the high points, ma'am."

"Thank you for being quick, Doctor," Duncan replied, looking at her own pad before nodding. "Alright, so, here's the plan. Ground team's taking the shuttle down, and check out the facility while the shuttle takes on water to stock up on our reaction mass. Meanwhile, we'll be launching probes to gather bits of orbital debris. Make sure to keep quarantine on anything that you pick up, we have no idea what potentially three or more different biospheres interacting could come up with. Any questions?"

"Any known hostiles, boss?" Eliza stated plainly. "Wanna know how many guns to bring." She was probably just going to bring them all, again.

Camelia was sitting quietly, but only not to admit she was also curious about the hostile. She did raise her hand after a minute, though, similar to a small school spider waiting on being called on, but she did not wait to ask a question. with slightly hopeful eyes she turned to Caleb. "If we do find hostiles and trigger finger doesn't kill them all may I have one to experiment on? This is a new system for me and i would like to have some insight on the affects of this sun system on the biological side of things."

"Hey, their death ain't on me if they're hostile," Eliza said with a roll of the eyes. "Besides, you can learn things from their corpses. Like dealing with E.T.s, start with bodies, then capture if possible. Safest way to do it."

Camelia resisted rolling her eyes. "I cannot get a proper reading on the environmental effect if they're dead! And this isn't even including the psychological evaluations I'd like to do... if you're worried about your nerds, I'll keep them far away from the hostile. I am also very capable of killing them myself if I need to."

'That's not fucking funny, four eyes times two," Eliza growled, "That's exactly the last thing you need to be saying right now. They not teach you conversation in the egg sac? Saying you could murder people is generally not a good thing."

"But you do it all the time! Double standard much, trigger fingers?" Camelia seemed not only genuinely confused, but also like an annoyed 16 year old.

Eliza leaned forward, staring at the bug. "Because I don't respect you. You have not done shit to earn it. The eggheads have pulled their weight, and your chief profession seems to be assuming you are important." Eliza leaned against the wall, arms crossed.

"I am not asking for your respect or honestly, dear, even your opinion. This is why I asked him-" she gestures to Caleb- "and NOT YOU!" Camelia rolled her eye. "now if you're done flapping your tail feathers in an attempt to seem more important than you actually are..." She turned to Caleb "I would like an answer from you."

"Major," Eliza said, looking at Caleb then back to the spider, "Why is she here again? Taco seems reasonable, agreeable even. We didn't need more bugs than that. Too many cooks in the kitchen, too many fucking pests in the rafters, same shit." Behind Caleb, Thakozois blinked at being mentioned and given a nickname, but just scratched his head as he hoped the argument would calm down.

"The only pest I see here is you and your fucking ego." Camelia mumbles under her breath

Maksim stood off to the side with a thousand-yard stare, clenching and unclenching his jaw as his teammates argued. He put on some music in his earpiece and turned up the volume to drown out their rising voices.

Caleb looked surprised that the questions were directed at him and before he could reply to the first one, Eliza and Camelia went at each other. Once the ladies stopped snapping at each other, he cleared his throat and said, "Camelia's here to give us the Theradectan perspective on science and magic. Thakozois, as far as I know, is mostly a layman on those fronts?" he asked, looking down at the black spider.

"If by layman, you mean I only know the basics, then yes," Thakozois replied with a nod. "I also accept the name of Taco, if that helps ease conversation."

"If you're done," Colonel Duncan said, glaring at the ground crew for having a side conversation. "I"ll take the hostile question. No, we don't expect anything, but go loaded for bear, just in case. I'm sure Camelia, the biology team here, and the one back at Base Alpha would love live samples, but only do that if you're safe doing so. If the node we came through doesn't work, we're a long way from civilization, so don't take unnecessary risks. This is an in and out infomation gathering operation. Am I clear?"

"Yes, ma'am," Caleb replied with a quick nod.

"Good," Duncan replied, as the Walpole's engines shut downa and micro-gravity returned. "Ground team will leave tomorrow morning. That'll get you to the facility around noon local time, with enough supplies to last three days. That's how long it'll take us to fill up on reaction mass, but a shuttle will be on planet at all times, so if you run into trouble, just get to where you can be picked up and you'll get picked up. Let's be about it then."

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

Antioch System, A-2/Tancred, outside Abandoned Facility

"Thank God the pilot didn't do the stupid joke," Caleb said, adjusting his pack and air mask as the shuttle lifted off the ground and flew towards the nearest body of water. "Guess they're as spooked about the situation as the average grunt."

"I'm not new to the experience and I'm still in awe," Thakozois said, looking around the group's surroundings. The shuttle had dropped them off in a clearing of dark blue grass, with the alien forest to their back and the scarred ruins to their front. "The gods have clearly directed us here and I'm grateful to be their instrument."

"Sure, Taco, godspeed," the Major said, not sure how to react to the spider's religious fervor. "Sergeant Irvin, set up camp, we're going to take a look around."

"Aye, sir," the NCO said with a salute, before getting back to yelling at grunts to set up their tents properly.

Maksim stared in awe at the landscape around them before quickly snapping his eyes shut, the gust of wind from the shuttle taking off flying particles of dust into his eyes. He had never gone camping before -- no one would be stupid enough to do so for fun on either Kitezh or New Texas. Of course, this situation wasn't for fun, either, but it was as close as he could get.

 

[Acewing13]

Eliza's first action was to contribute to the camp-building, with two main weapons strapped to her back and the same two pistols at her sides. Armor on, helmet closing around her face to keep the alien nature out, and her little half cape moved in the breeze just how she liked it. She felt cool. She had been camping numerous times. When she could escape her bullshit parents and go to her uncle's house, they'd camp in the New Texas wilderness just to give a middle finger to nature itself.

Sure it was dangerous, but what did either of them have to lose? He was a paranoid hermit, she was a jaded bisexual bitch. So naturally Eliza knew what to do here, her training both before and after the military proving useful. She was less wowed by the circumstances, more worried than anything. Even now she'd sometimes feel a pain behind the eyes, one that she'd assured the medic was temporary in her usual bid to not be helped by other people. Might have been a lesser idea, to be fair.

The enlisted soldiers nodded in thanks to Eliza, as one of their superiors deigning to help them out with their labor. The NCOs were deferential, though slightly exasperated to have an officer essentially looking over their shoulders, though that softened when they realized the Captain was actually helping instead of judging them.

Major Schembri busied himself by checking sentry sightlines and keeping Thakozois from running off by himself. "I don't care if it's divinely inspired," he said, looking down at the spider. "People can still die on those and I would rather no one die if I can help it."

"But you said godspeed?" Taco replied, scratching his head with a pincer. "That doesn't mean to go?"

"No. I mean," Caleb said, sighing as he pulled out his datapad to run a quick search. "Oh, yeah, I can see how that happened. I meant it more in a well wishing in general instead of well wishing and permission to get going way."

"Words can be a pain, sigh" the Theradectan replied with a shake of his head.

"My bad," the Major said, before a beep brought him back to his datapad. "Oh, apparently we're getting more people anyway, so good thing we were taking so long to get going. This is what happens when you don't have a month to plan things out, lots of last minute adjustments," he added as another shuttle landed behind them.

Coming out of the shuttle fully armored up, a squad of GDW soldiers disembarked, their officer looking around until finding Caleb and walking up. "Leutnant zur See Simonne Marchant, reporting for duty," the French officer said while offering a salute.

"Welcome, Leutnant Marchant," Major Schembri replied, returning the salute. "Almost feel under dressed with how you've come prepared."

"Kapitänleutnant Hernandez said to not take any chances before we left Base Alpha," Simonne said, tapping the armored faceplate. "Doesn't want any wipe outs like we had before we made friends with the spiders. Sorry," she continued, looking down at Thakozois, "Theradectans."

Taco lifted his pincers in a shrug, before replying, "I've seen pictures of your spiders. I can see the resemblance."

"Alright, people, let's get going," Caleb said, gesturing at the joint team before starting to walk towards the ruined facility. "No rest for the wicked."

"And money don't grow on trees," Eliza quipped, full automatic in her hands as the Major started walking them along. "Major," she asked pointedly to Caleb, "Why in hell are we bringing the nerds? The last planet was supposed to be empty too, you know."

"Cause they'll know what to look at and document it better than we will," the Major replied, holding his rifle at the ready. "If there wasn't science to do, they wouldn't be here. This time, I'm not going to get caught flat footed when something more advanced than fungus shows up."

Benny looked personally affronted by Eliza's remark and crossed his arms. "I am...a-a-a-also paid... to d-do a job, E-Eliza. C-Captain. I m-mean Captain. S-Sorry." He looked rather sheepish and focused his gaze on the ground.

"Well you can't very well do that job if you get eaten," she grunted in response. "Money don't matter to things tryna kill you, it don't make you more or less juicy of a meatbag." She'd have crossed her arms if she wasn't holding a portable death machine, but at least her hands had something to do. "Excuse me, Doc, if I prefer the big brains to be alive and thinking big-boy thoughts instead of being eaten by wildlife."

Camelia had, for a lack of better terms, absolutely nothing to contribute to the situation, so she sat back with Ben and Maks. Though she occasionally tried to walk up to Thak and attempted to help, she had eventually gotten shooed away, so she opted to stay back - Out of the way. She just sort of sat there, her pedipalps touching like a small child putting their fingers together.

Maksim hadn't given it much thought, but the idea that Eliza was right started to make him nervous. Last time hadn't exactly gone like he imagined, who was to say that this mission wouldn't also be just as dangerous? Then again, they just discovered the possible existence of magic -- if that and more was in store for the crew, then maybe the danger was worth it...maybe. Yeah, it was worth it.

His eyes wandered down to look at Camelia, exiled to the back of the line despite her attempts to do something with Thakozois. Maksim thought he would have an infinite amount of questions for a spider-alien, but he was coming up empty in the brain department.

"Um...how are you doing?" he asked. He couldn't think of anything else to say, but he was genuinely concerned for their new team member's wellbeing.

Camelia, surprised at anyone interacting with her, though pleasantly, kind of cleared her throat. "I feel.... useless," she notes. "Is that normal for people like us? The, I guess, nerds, as she refers to?"

Her direct response threw Maksim off for a moment. Since leaving his homeworld, he had learned that most people preferred to answer that question in a roundabout way before getting to the hard stuff. It was refreshing and somewhat nostalgic. But that feeling faded quickly as her words struck a cord with him.

"...I don't know if it's exactly normal," he answered quietly. "But I often feel the same. What we're doing here is bigger than I think anyone could've expected...and I don't feel qualified at all." At this, he gave a little smile. "Sometimes I just want to go back to New Texas, you know? At least in my studies there, I knew what to expect."

The spider mustered what smile a spider could muster, feeling somewhat thankful for the honest talk from the male human. "I miss my home as well. Nobody treated me like an outsider there, but here...." She turns a moment to glare at Eliza. "Even Thakozois gets more respect than I do here, and that's just... weird."

"It is backwards from the usual for sure," Taco agreed with a nod.

Taco would feel a small pebble hit the back of his head. "Don't listen in on my conversations, please." The black Theradectan waved a pincer in acknowledgement, focusing back on watching the group's surroundings.

As the joint team continued on their way, one of the trooped from Leutnant Marchant's team had broken off from the GDW's group and loitered slightly around Maksim and the two Theradetans. Similarly armoured up like the others, Safaa cradled her automatic weapon as she couldn't help but stare slightly at the group's latest visitors, definitely not having 'giant alien spiders' on her metaphorical bingo card. Still, for the moment things were going relatively smoothly and Safaa moved with a visible spring in her step over the new terrain.

As the group neared the first ruined buildings, the silence of the area started getting to Caleb. "Pilots said they saw flying animals while they were coming in," he said looking around at the blue-tinted underbrush. "You'd think there'd be more wildlife around."

"I can't hear anything close by besides the camp behind us," Thakozois said, his bristles standing on end.

"Maybe they were scared off by the shuttles landing?" Leutnant Marchant asked, bringing her rifle up as she scanned the half collapsed walls.

"Yeah, but this area doesn't look like anything has moved for decades at least," Caleb said, poking his head into a more intact structure. "Like, I can see dust on some shelving? Really low-" he trailed off, pulling a flashlight out and pointing it at a corner. "Taco, Camelia. You said that this wasn't Theradectan space, right?"

"No, there wasn't even a substantial knife-ear presence," the black Theradectan said as he walked in behind the human officer.

"Then what's that?" the Major asked, pointing his rifle at a half-eaten corpse of a black chitined Theradectan, with what looked like a misproproportioned WW1 machine gun in its pincers.

Benjamin made a little noise of surprise, although it sounded happy. "H-H-How interesting," he murmured, pulling up his notebook-tablet and typing away on a document. He suddenly remembered that two of the team were Theradectans themselves, and sheepishly lowered the tablet. He kept his gaze on Camelia as the youngest, trying to gauge her reaction to the corpse. What were the Theradectan approaches towards death?

Thakozois approached the long dead spider, bowing his head as he held a pincer above the corpses head. "May Maluk Al-magh take your spirit to rest and Sekhreth guide me to the destroyer of your body, to enact her vengance," he prayed, before looking back at the group. "Now I know why we're led here. We must give the warriors that died here proper rest."

 

[Acewing13]

"Once we know the area's safe, sure," Caleb said, lowering his rifle, yet again not sure how to respond to the alien's piety.

One upon a time Eliza would have had grounds to tease the spiders further. Not in a religious persecution kinda way, but it was more ammo for her usual snark machine. Now she had no idea what to think. She just stood there, staring at the rites, and wondering if she'd been stupid to not care. In her mind's eye she saw that writhing light, like a flag waving in a hurricane, it's myriad eyes giving clue to its potential for being, welll... a being. At this point, she figured she didn't have the grounds to be a dick about this.

"Let's uhh, keep eyes up." Ugh, she didn't sound as confident as she usually did. She knew it the second she spoke. So, mentally pulling herself up by her bootstraps, she voiced her opinion more gruffly than intended. "It might have been millenia, but that don't mean the danger is gone. Whatever killed your boy there might be lurking."

Maksim stared at the corpse with sad eyes, lowering his head respectfully. He made a note to ask Thakozois more about the burial rites later so he could write up a report about it, but now wasn't the time. What -- or who -- had killed them?

Noticing her for the first time, Maksim looked up at Safaa. He gave a slight smile, feeling a bit better knowing that there was another soldier in their group.

Safaa noticed the look from Maksim and reflexively smiled back, only to realise her helmet's visor wasn't full-face and it was unlikely her smile was actually visible. Internally kicking herself she nodded back at him in an improvised attempt to be friendly. Turning her attention back to the remains of the Theradectan a somewhat uncomfortable thought crossed her mind.

"I don't want to be alarmist, but should we on the lookout for wild animals then?" she asked, not really at anyone specific but rather leaving the question on the floor for the group. "Actually, do Theradectans even have natural predators?"

Turning on the spot, Safaa panned around to survey the area around them, keeping an eye on the group's flank as they were held up with the current matter.

Camila followed suit with Thakozois of course, though she seemed a little more... distraught, as death was a new concept, despite the war and all the bloodshed that came with it. the repercussions were still new to her, would be the guess. Still, she bowed her head with the rite, and then just kinda stared for a minute.

Her focus was broken by the alarming question, but she just shook her head. "Animals had most likely scavenged this, but I do not believe that this was an animals doing. A theredactan would not go so easily."

"Everything has natural predators," Eliza grunted, "if they don't, they will eventually." She started patrolling around, eyes up for creatures and people, though "people" might be a broader category than she first thought. "Don't underestimate animals. If they attacked at all they must have thought they had a chance, otherwise they'd have waited for this guy to be asleep. Working together, I think this guy would have had a fight on his hands. And that's just if this was an animal, if this was another E.T. who knows what's possible."

"Yeah... humans 'would not go so easily' either, and yet I don't see anyone reliably surviving a bear attack." Safaa replied. For a split second she thought about correcting the other woman's point that technically they were the 'E.T.s' on this rock, but decided against it for the moment.

Benjamin bought his tablet back up and began to tap away, jumping at the new voice of Safaa. Despite having travelled with her the entire way, it was like he had only just taken notice of the new figure.

"they have a gun. Can your bears survive bullets?" Camelia replied snarkily to the new figure. Who even were they?

"Sometimes," Eliza said with a derisive chuckle. "Get used to it kid," she said to the spider, "People ain't invulnerable. Spiders included. At any moment something could decide to end your life, a creature, a person, doesn't matter."

"R-Robots. Robots... t-too," Benny proposed as an additional being that could end lives. He just wanted to be included in the conversation in his own bizarre, nerdy way.

"Yes, there's a lot of things that can kill us," Caleb agreed with a sigh. "Let's keep going though, eyes up. You alright if we take the gun looking thing, Taco?"

"Was going to do it anyway," Thakozois said, picking up the weapon and turning it over in his pincers. "Real question is if it still works after who knows how long not being maintained."

"Rule 42: Never fire an unkempt weapon." Safaa replied almost reflexively, then realised she had effectively blurted out something with zero explanation or context. "Unit commander's rules from back in Sol, not exactly CSC standard, but it worked."

She walked over to Thakozois and leaned over to see the weapon, admittedly a little impressed with its size and apparent robustness, but nonetheless still not confident. "Technically there's 42.A: 'If you do so, make sure it's only your ass that's on the line.' But that said, it's not like it did that guy much good anyhow." the Tech Specialist continued, nodding sideways at the dead Theradectan.

"It'd just be nice to have a gun that's fitted for four appendages instead of two," Taco replied, pointing the gun at the ground as he took stock of it's handling. "Though I don't know what's a safety or trigger, so that's the first problem."

All of Safaa's CSC training was not enough to stop her from momentarily flinching at that last line. "Well typically they're pretty distinct from each other, but maybe let someone with more weapons experience carry the mystery weapon then?" She began to shuffle away slightly before breaking into a flat out fast walk away from the Theradectan's potential field of fire.
Maybe this is how the first one went out. She couldn't help think.

Eliza slowly grabbed the gun from Taco's grasp, a hand on it gently to slowly start pulling on it. "Taco, it's not gonna work. It's unclean, rusted through by probably centuries, if not more time than that." She slowly put pressure on it, pulling it away more firmly. "When we get back to camp, I'll clean it, and I'll teach you the ropes. Leastwise so you don't accidentally gun us down in a hail of fire, okay?"

The Theradectan resisted the pull at first, but as Eliza made her argument, fed into his cultural biases, and promised him shooting lessons, he buzzed in acknowledgement and let the human take the firearm. "You're probably right," he said, looking up at her. "It does look dirty. And I'm still wondering what all the levers and stuff are for. Your rifles didn't have those."

"So, are we going the right way to the node?" Major Schembri asked once outside, looking at the two Theradectans.

"Essentially," Taco replied, pointing his pincer past yet more damaged structures. "Feels like we're pretty close, but of course it's close when compared to the distances we were trying to find the last node."

"Space is bigger, yes," Caleb said with a nod. "Well, let's get going. The sooner we confirm the node's location, the sooner we can go make some smores back at camp."

Maksim tilted his head. Make some snores? Was this another term for sleeping he hadn't heard before?

"Did y'all bring marshmallows?" Eliza asked with some amount of hopefulness. "S'mores would be great. All this danger and camping, at the same time... reminds me of home. Anything might try and kill you, at any moment, but I bet the stars are magnificent. Just like home."

Even Camelia had to admit, the idea of smores made her ears perk a little - Lingering death in the air seems not as important when sugar is involved.

This didn't help Maksim's confusion. He would have to ask about this whole snoring thing later. And how marshmallows were somehow involved.

Moving deeper into the compound, the ground became more and more littered with the detritus of war, weathered concrete and rusting metal beams scattered across bright blue pseudo-grass. Soon their path was blocked by another destroyed building, keeping them moving deeper.

"Guess we have to see if we can cut through one of these buildings," Caleb said, mentally flipping a coin before picking the right most building to go through.

The rusted doors of the structure opened and utter ruin welcomed their sight.

Where there should be flooring, furniture, and other signs of civilization was instead replaced with the sight of collapse and turmoil. The "floor" if it could be called that had long since fallen away, crushed under the weight of a colossal arthropod figure that took up the entirety of what should have been a massive commons area. Its exact shape was difficult to ascertain but a long, dense body of overlapping carapace plating a faded white-grey emerged from beneath its blanket of collapsed ceiling and piled debris. Its head stared with long since emptied ocular domes at four corners of a long and flattened cranial structure, almost like that of a grasshopper or a tree lobster but the overlapping mouth-blade mandibles were clearly not intended for herbivorous usage.

Whatever malice it could have acted on rested solely in the realms of imagination. Even as it started upside down, its massive primary limbs jutting through the ground like long, toothed arches jointed by jutting segmentation, it was clear that whatever snuffed the life from its body was likely just as powerful. There were craters amidst what remained of the original flooring and furniture, frozen in time with blackened scars and gashes, leading to gaping holes within its body. A look through these ancient wounds revealed not only complex internal biomechanisms, but what appeared to be gangly, clustered collections of overlapping cybernetics.

 

[Acewing13]

They were easily mistakable as some sort of parasites that normally might colonize such megalithic entities, but their lack of movement and dust-covered, metallic forms spoke otherwise. Organic material was attached to their bodies but it had withered away and complex organ-like if defunct electronics could be seen within the shreds of shells and exoskeletal structure. It appeared they might have functioned as part of its internal anatomy; they had clealry been deliberate additions to its body.

The only way across this room was over the remains of this long-dead titan. As large as it was, the corners of the room had remained somewhat more intact.

"Well, fuck," Caleb said, looking down at the alien remains. "Uhh, Taco? Theradectan tech?"

"Not as far as I know, Holy Neolath," the black spider said with an accompanying hiss, all of his bristles standing on their ends.

"Yeah, I didn't think so. Kind of a jump from old guns to...whatever that is," the Major replied.

The hairs on the back of Maksim's neck rose as they all gazed at the creature before them. He froze in place as though any wrong move could bring that thing back to life and finish whatever destruction it had started.

Safaa muttered something under her breath before taking a few steps into the building, sweeping the new sight with her weapon as she took a moment to comprehend just want was staring back at them. At first glance she thought this might've been a native creature to keep an eye out for, but the tell-tell signs of cybernetic implants put a different spin on that idea quite quickly.

"So, are we still cutting through this building? Because I'm pretty sure that'll involve a weird climb." she asked, not really at anyone in particular, it was a little unclear who was actually in charge at the moment. "Well, actually that's not quite right, pretty sure there's a few in this room who can probably scale that in a heartbeat." Safaa smirked under her helmet slightly, unable to let the opportunity by to show off but also wondering how the Theradectans would take the comment.

"I'd rather not," Caleb replied, before turning to Leutnant Marchant. "Go check the other building and see if it's clear."

"Yes, sir," Simmone said with a nod, before looking to Safaa. "Stick with these guys, Sergeant. They could use more shooters to cover the scientists."

Safaa nodded in acknowledgement.
"Understood." she replied, doing her best to hide the sheer disappointment in her voice at being told to sit still and babysit.

"About time," Eliza said with a laugh, a laugh that more than adequetly made up for the instinctual sense of 'Jesus what the fuck' when in range of that monstrosity. "I been holding up this team since day one." Despite that confidence, her eyes traveled around the scene, hunting for movement. This battle may have been millenia ago, but that didn't mean danger was a distant memory.

Camelia stayed back in the line, only focusing on using her magical sense to try and detect anything that could be of use, while also looking around for anything small but important. The devil is in the details, as she has heard in the human saying. The spider's arcane senses were nearly overwhelmed by the chaotic energies of the node, shining brightly. However, she did feel/see other presences around her, interference in the ethereal plane. Only one presence was could be pinned down and that was the annoying human matriarch, Eliza 'God's Oath'.

"Ouch," Caleb said, looking over at Eliza after her solo carrying remark. "What am I, chopped liver?"

"If it is true, then you need to pick up your part, Full-Heart," Taco replied, backing up his new shooting buddy. "It is rare that a male is given power over a female. If you want to keep your position, you should be at the very least chopped ham, if not chopped bacon."

"We need to update your idiom bank," the Major said with a sigh.

"Major Schembri, this is Leutnant Marchant," the French officer said over the radio. "The other building's entrance is collapsed a few meters in. If we want to get deeper in, looks like we'll have to either back up and come around from another direction or go over the alien corpse thing, over."

"Joy," Caleb said, looking down at the dead colossus. "I'd love to bring in more back up, but if we need to get out fast, then we don't want to be trying to bring more people than we already have back through here." Shaking his head, he triggered his comms. "Leutnant Marchant, understood. Regroup on our postion, we'll head in deeper when you get here. Over."

As the group waited for the GDW squad to return, Major Schembri talked to the camp, telling them what they'd found so far to relay to the Walpole when it came into range and to put them on high alert. "Yes, I know it's probably overly cautious, but I do not want to get another camp over run, Sergeant, so keep up a reinforced guard until we get back. Over," he said, grumbling about subordinates and sass as the group was assembled. "Alright, we're headed in deeper. I want everyone to be prepared for the worst case. So-"

Camelia hated interrupting, but goodness, these guys spoke way too much. "There are others here..." She said, barely loud enough to hear. "Well, not HERE here, but.... I can't tell if they're violent or not, the node is... keeping them... around? I guess?"

"...huh," Caleb said, looking down at the grey Theradectan. "I mean, it is really quiet, so I wouldn't be surprised if something is out there. But how do you know that they're, I don't know, aliens and not weirdness coming from the node?"

"Come on magic bug," Eliza chuckled, "Can't tell the magic tunnel from alien lifeforms?" Eliza, admittedly, had no grounds to stand on currently, as she had no idea how this spider voodoo worked. "Spandalf here can't just smell them normally?" She was staring into the dark corners of the location, weapon primed. She'd placed the spider machine gun on her back, with the rest of her guns, and realized she promised gun training to a spider.

The universe was a fucken wacky place. "Are we goin past the dead bug, or are we moving back? Spandalf senses danger, and I hate this place. It's not even cool looking, it's just sad. Come on Major, gotta do your part, Full-Heart."

Camelia gave Eliza an annoyed look. "They look like shadow figured holding... Something. I know they exist, because I can see their essence, and yours as well. Like you're also stuck on the ethereal plane. They're alive. Something is keeping them here. I just don't know if they are friendly or not..." The young spider looks to Caleb. "We need to be careful. I'd rather not test their tendencies."

Eliza's blood ran cold as the bug looked at her with that info. She looked to the Major, lightly shaking her head. "That's not possible. That's NOT possible." She started looking around a little more frantically, trying to see if there was something attached to her.

Camelia watched for a second before shaking her head. "Wait no, I promise I didn't mean anything... Bad.. You're fine, I promise. You're not in danger, I'm sorry I didn't mean to scare you..." Camelia seemed to panic a little, as clear in the look in her eyes. After all, if these two, especially Eliza, as annoying as she was, couldn't keep it together, how could she? They were the leaders, after all.

"Then what the fuck does that mean, wizard?" Eliza growled with exasperation, white-knuckling her rifle as she glared down at the spider. "I don't wanna be on the ethereal plane, I wanna be here! Where I can shoot my problems." She took a deep breath, and let out a low growl. "Problems go in," she breathed to herself, "Solutions come out. Can I shoot the dark presence?" She asked Cam sincerely.

Cam had to genuinely consider the answer for a moment. "I-i..." She stuttered. "I don't... I don't think so?" Cam grabbed a rock and threw it through one of the dark figures. It went right through. "N-no... No you won't be able to... S-sorry..." It seemed to be near-full-blown panic for Camelia now.

Eliza sighed, taking another deep breath, and shrugged. "Well then that's that. Tell me if they become solid, because that's my realm, the realm of things to shoot at." She tilted her head,looking down at Camelia. "Hey, chill. Sometimes you can't shoot your problems," she... attempted to place a hand on the spider's shoulder and very quickly realized that's not how that works, so she just awkwardly pat her head. "So the best you can do is wait for it to be a problem you can shoot. Or talk to, but that's Ben's area."

"Do you even have a weapon? What do you do here?"

"Sense magical things, I guess." Cam said, raising her pincers as if to shrug with them. Though Eliza did seem to calm her down a little.

"Alright, so with that information, here's the plan," Caleb said, deciding to mostly ignore Eliza's jabs. "Bakarra, El Fassi, and I go in front, ready to shoot whatever looks at us funny. Behind us are the scientists and the spiders," he continued, pulling out his pistol and handing it to Maksim. "Feel free to get something more substantial from Eliza if she'll let you," he said to the scientist before turning to Marchant. "You guys bring up the back, make sure we don't get ambushed."

"Yes, sir," Leutnant Marchant replied with a nod.

"At least someone listens," the Major said under his breath, before making sure his rifle was secured and then started slowly walking along the thin concrete-esqe shelf that seperated them from the alien corpse.

 

[Acewing13]

Safaa nodded at the order before glancing over at the ledge, biting the corner of her lip slightly as she made a few mental calculations. Given the close quarters and delapidated state of the building she figured a free hand would be a good idea.
"So, what's the plan if that thing starts moving?" she asked nobody in particular while nodding at the remains of the giant creature. "I've got some ordnance on me but somehow I feel like we'd need something bigger to do a real dent."
Never mind the fact that it'd probably bring down what's left of this ruin by just moving.
As she spoke, the Technical Specialist flicked the safety of her weapon and stowed it on an armour hardpoint. With both hands available for the moment she turned her left arm and tapped at the terminal in the inside of her wrist, priming a few systems on the suit just in case this little expedition began to go south.
"Also, not that I'm complaining about exploring things on an alien planet, far from it actually, but can someone remind me what we're looking for?"
Satisfied that her suit was ready, Safaa drew a pistol and followed Caleb, keeping a hand against the wall as she methodically walked forwards.

"If it wakes up we run like hell," Caleb said, doing his best to focus on where he placed his feet instead of the colossus below. "And since you weren't at the briefing, the goal is to get all the info we can out of this facility, so we know what specialists to bring with us when we come back from Outremer." If we get back to Outremer in the first place, he left unsaid, but was an obvious thought on his mind.

"Right. Specialists such as civil engineers." she replied, her grin hidden by her helmet. "What's the top speed of the average Theradectan then?" Safaa asked more loudly so that she didn't need to turn her head to the others behind her.

"Uh," Taco said, looking at the soldier in front of him as he tried to figure out the best way to get his wide frame across. "Do you want that in miles per hour or kilometers per hour? Also, why do you humans have so many different units for the same thing?" After a second of consulting with the translator, he said, "40 mph or 64 kph. That's back home on Atos though, haven't really tried to do much sprinting since I woke up."

"Because the Americans claim they're doing it the right way even when the rest of the planet disagrees, which is basically how things have been going since the get-go." Safaa shot back. "Don't ask them what the temperature is, we'll be here all day."
For a moment she pictured the mental image of a giant spider tearing down a corridor slightly slower than most cars and shuddered.
"I guess you two'll be fine if we need to bail in a hurry."

Maksim checked that the safety was on the pistol before following the group. He tried to keep from glancing at the giant insect as they slowly moved past. Please don't wake up, please don't wake up, please don't wake up.

"It ain't hard to tell the temprature in a completely neutral way," Eliza said, fully weaponized as she slowly worked across the path. "You take a second to feel, and then you know. It's either hot, or cold, or maybe somewhere in between. Only the nerds need to worry about the exact number."

Waiting until the majority of the humans had gotten across the gap, Thakozois shot three silk lines up to the ceiling, carefully holding two lines in his rear pincers while keeping one in his spinnerets. Carefully, he shuffled along the concrete lip, balancing his weight between the concrete and the actively crumbling ceiling. He barely made it across before the ceiling cracked and sent one of the lines falling on top of the alien corpse along with some concrete. The room echoed with the sound, with Taco ccringing and looking back a Camelia. "Probably should put up more lines for you," he said, letting go of his remaining silk.

The dry cuticle echoed with a hollow thump, booming through the long since emptied out internals. It sounded louder than the crack actually had been as soundwaves channeled and boucned across the armored, semi-metallic interior and droned through the various openings whether made by battle wounds or the decay of time. The cement broke first; cracks spread along where they had impacted before crunching from the impact, clattering onto the empty carapace below and turning the echoes into those of leafy, hissing shrieks.

It took a minute for them to silence and the tense quiet of the room returned. Debris could be heard scraping about inside, tumbling away and falling into old exit wounds. It sounded like a thousand little feet scurrying around, albeit distantly beneath them coinciding with the tumbling of the ceiling and broken shelling.

A shiver ran down Maksim's spine. If he weren't completely creeped-out right now, he would love to get a site set up down there and get some data. Right now, however, he just wanted to go back to his room and have a smoke.

Satisified nothing had happened beyond the loud noise, Safaa relaxed her grip on her weapon and holstered it, having turned on the spot moments before as debris had fallen.
"Fucking hell, next time you'll get people jumping out of their suits with that." she quipped.
With both hands free again she reached for her main weapon and double-checked it was prepped, flicking the torch on near the barrel.

"My bad," Taco replied, looking at the humans while giving a shrug. "Wasn't sure how to get over otherwise."

"Do Theradactans have an equivalent to the phrase 'Having two left feet?'"

Thakozois looked at Safaa for a second, before pulling out a datapad. "Two left feet, two left feet," he said, looking at the idiom dictionary. "Oh, yeah. We call it 'falling off the broadest branch'. Way more derogatory though, since it's harder to fall down when you have eight legs."

After the rest of the group got over to the other side of the monster corpse, with a minimum of creepy echoes and building crumbling, Caleb led them forward, deeper into the ruined maze of hallways. Keeping on their toes, the soldiers checked each room as they passed, finding various detritus, the majority being crumbling paperwork and empty metal barrels.

After a few minutes of passing repetitive concrete room after crumbling concrete room, the ruins opened up into another large chamber, this one thankfully without the giant alien corpse, with sunshine coming through an open entrance on the far side of the room, with a number of other hallways branching off in other directions.

"That the right way?" Caleb asked, looking at the Theradectans.

"Yes," Thakozois said, before shivvering. "I honestly don't know how you can't sense the pressure coming off of the node."

The other two magic-sensitve team members could feel the node more clearly than before, though the intensity was wide ranging, from Camelia feeling like a strong wind was pushing against her to Eliza's tingling sensation of a light breeze against her skin.

Was this what the spider felt? Both of them? No, it was just her imagination. Despite her calming words to Camellia, Eliza herself still felt unease at what sort of side effects this magical bullshit would have.

Having, as far as she was aware, no supernatural capabilities beyond her cybernetics, Safaa just raised an eyebrow at the comment before disregarding it with a shrug.

"Alright, keep your eyes up," Caleb said, keeping his hands ready on his rifle as he walked forward, with the rest of the group following right behind him.

All the while they moved, the sounds of echoing debris tumbling throughout the depths of the facility continued. The ambience of the scraping and rustling became a tedious backdrop but it at the very least filled the silence of the empty chambers. It had probably started even before they came here; an abandoned facility this old had likely all kinds of things falling apart hidden from sight.

The sounds were diminishing however, fading the closer they neared, still present but diminished as if partially muted. The floor had grown not just dustier and messier; wreckage and ruin, the aftermath of battles long ago. Holes that gaped and scattered remains of segmented, carapaced shape - some bestial in their stature, creatures that might normally creep beneath uncaring feet yet rendered the size of hunting beasts or small vehicles.

Others bore similar armored features and mask-like, living machine faces but there was a stark difference. These long dead beings, punctured with wounds innumerable and sometimes with theradectan cadavers impaled on their bent long rifle-like weaponry's underslung mandible-bayonets or grinded between their multi pronged claws, would seem to have been the masters of such creatures. They were massive in size even when on their fronts; more than a few had died standing, slumped to the walls or impaled by bladed weapons. They seemed at least six and a half feet with more than a few around six foot twelve ranging up to eight and a half.

Somehow, the bipedal capabilities they possessed did not seem to make them less bestial; as if standing in such posture came with the same barbaric nature as the way others had clearly crept across the ground onto their prey. Whatever sapience they might have possessed was indistinguishable from their bloodthirst.

It was perhaps best for the comfort of the squad's mind even greater cadavers of crusty, carnivorous beings had been buried under rubble, the shape of their massive claws and the pointed, barrel protrusions half shrouded in cobwebbing and rampant mossy growth.

 

[Acewing13]

The whole floor was covered in some sort of moldy, mossy growth - long silk like threads similar to the cobwebbing stretched across almost like paths through the maze of corpses and rubble. Cobwebbing that had snagged against a certain point man's foot.

"Someone's going to have to give me the abridged history of the Theradactans at some point, preferably in audiobook, because I feel like I'm missing some key facts here. Like who were you guys picking a fight with back then?" Safaa paused for a moment, shining her light across some of the bodies. Though it wasn't exactly terrifying, the scene did paint a somewhat unsettling picture.

"I'll let you know when I get it, cause I need to read it first," Taco replied, looking back and forth across the field, too much age old carnage to take in all at once.

"Ah, shit," Caleb said, shaking his foot free of the cobweb.

The material stuck but it was far from the mess typical terrestrial spider or Theradectan webbing was. It looked almost more like some stringy, fungal growth but Caleb might have noticed something unusual. As his foot shook, the threads tugged against his foot. As if they too were not trying to ensnare him but release themselves.

All the while, the sound of clattering debris in the background amplified from a dull ambience to a growing, pulsing, living sound. Not random pitters and patters of falling stonework and broken architecture, but scrapes and taps patterned and deliberate. Little marches of hundreds of living legs, working in intricate tandem and marking their awakening with criss-crossing rhythms, shimmering sonically as rain and as falling grain.

The thread tore from Caleb's foot, jerking across the ground in sudden twitches and flops, tugged by a force the squad's eyes could follow. Beneath a pile of debris, something looked back their way, peeking from holes beneath the layers of debris with movement shrouded in the obscurity.

In the holes from the battle, flitting shapes not quite as black as the shadows cast darted, skittering sounds amplifying into angry, clattering taps. Rumbles soon followed, crumbling noises in the wake. This makeshift burial ground was awakening and it noticed them.

A living coldness fell upon the squad. Not of the air temperature dropping but as if hidden fingers were pressing into the skin, as if threatening the digging pain of nails. On board computer systems on the armor of GDW personnel began to flash with warnings; unusual readings, potential radiation, electronic interference.

As if something was trying to get a target lock on them.

Caleb would receive a barrage of notifications but soon, the rest of the GDW team would find their HUD's flooded with notifications.

Rock began to shift and displace, sloughing off forms awakening from whatever lurking slumber they had feinted for ageless centuries. Shapes like widened out human spinal cords, long centipede limbs emerging across their sides between bulkhead sections of bio-rusted armor once a bone white but rusted into a depressive grey, longer and thicker claw-limbs emerging in sets of four nearer to the upper bodies. Their bodies widened and thickened into almost shoulder like formations, matching the bulkheads in size but with flattened heads of semi-curved half radiuses, continuing the centipede esque appearance crossed with that of a four-armed vinegaroon.

Where should be cruel mandibles and gnashing, snapping arms were protruding spines and pointed barrel-like structures, laden with years of overgrowth vegetation that did not conceal the architectural, hydralic-esque mechanisms that lined their bodies. Some of it looked made of the same chitin-esque material, others clearly metal glinting in the sun. Silence from their mouthparts, but a hateful malevolence radiated from eyes lifeless save for the contemptuous, arrogant, emptiness that glared at the squad.

Four in total - spread out too deliberately to be accident. Trinagle formation, the front two furthest out to the sides, middle two spaced out evenly - maximum firing arcs.

The guns screamed. Flashes of purple light, bolts of yellow, the ripping of walls and the applause of thousands of tapping, scraping feet egging on the carnage erupting. It was not wild and random; as walling and ceiling tore apart, shapes could be seen moving from behind the cover of smoke and debirs.

That was only for the shots that clearly went wide. With multiple eyes and limbs, each one was targetting different areas and entities. What appeared to be some sort of automatic weaponry of heavy calibre fired a barrage Caleb's way from the back-left bioform. Front right fired a pair of long purple beams, ripping across the floor not with heat but a pure, burning coldness that tore and ripped. The others began to open what appeared to be holes across their broad shouldered backs but loud crackling could be heard; their ill maintained systems strained to release whatever deadly cargo they were adding to the violence reawakening in this battlezone.

What was it with this corner of the universe and bugs? Creeping, crawling, and hostile bugs on two seperate planets connected by a vague magical tunnel. They should have glassed the planet to be safe before heading down, though they didn't really have the option with what they had in orbit. Instead Eliza did what she'd be able to, and grabbed the two scientists and shoved them behind cover. Adrenaline that had been lying in wait was burning through her veins now, finally free of the prison of inaction, and so the two scrawny men where shoved behind one of these unfortunate stony covers.

She hoped to god Caleb had the good sense to not be in the open longer than -5 seconds, meaning he needs to get to cover tomorrow. This was an ambush, no doubt about it. Either these new bugs were waiting for them for some reason, or a bunch of insects just woke up on the wrong side of the gun barrel. Her gun was in her hands, assault rifle. Things looked tough, but their bigguns didn't survive the rockfall. Hopefully, neither would these smaller ones. Good god, these were the smaller ones. This planet sucks.

Safaa was quietly thanking the Pioneer project for tuning up her reflexes, having narrowly managed to make it cover. One the one hand this made for an admittedly refreshing change from running patrols on the space lanes, on the other they were literally being shot at and Safaa hadn't quite made her mind up yet which side of the fence she was leaning on. Double checking her assault rifle was still in working order, she leaned forwards slightly to give her suit's backpack some space. Moments later part of the upper section hissed open as a robotic arm unfolded itself and partially extended.
"Anyone want to chime in here as to what's shooting at us? Because this doesn't feel like a misinterpretation of 'hello' or something." she sourly quipped over the comms.
As she fired off the remark, Safaa's cybernetic implants quickly brought themselves out of standby and began to relay information between her and the suit. She gently manoeuvred the arm around her cover to see the incoming enemies and poked out to fire a burst back for a moment.
"Related question, what kind of hardware are did people bring to the party? As tempting as it might be to let the explosives off the chain right now, I don't want to be part of the debris."

If it weren't for Eliza, Maksim would've probably been full of holes by now, because as soon as those creatures arose from the darkness, he froze like a deer in the headlights. Suddenly, he was behind cover with Benjamin next to him and the rest of the squad firing away. He clasped his hands over his ears -- as though that would do anything.

A gun. He had a gun. Should he shoot it? A purple ray blasted above his head. Maybe not.

Panic, panic, panic, fight or flight response, and Camelia chose flight.She'd shoot a web behind her, and end up in the same hiding spot the two scientists were, and would web up a shield - albeit, a weak one - for the three of them. "I'm going to trust them to take care of this," She said in a decided tone, though she was shaking like a leaf. Her goal right now? At least try to keep the scientists and herself alive.

Caleb, for his part, had fallen to the floor just as the bugs had fired, rolling until he found a divot in the floor, his relief for finding some cover marred by the crunching of ancient Theradectan chitin underneath him. "Really hope the funeral arrangements don't need the bodies to be whole," he muttered, bringing his rifle up and firing at the bugs.

Thakozois, lacking any kind of range option and seeing Camelia covering herself and the other scientists, he charged at the hostile aliens, zig zagging to keep from getting shot, pulling out a line of silk as he went. Jumping to the side as he drew close to the bioforms, he attached the silk line to the hostile's weapon and kept running seeing if he could pull the weapon from the monster's grasp or just pull it off balance.

The GDW soldiers scattered, diving for cover and firing back as they went. Unfortunately for a lowly enlisted soldier, he wasn't fast enough to dodge the bioform's attack.

The first few bolts slammed into him as hammreblows staggering him across the ground. Stunned into place, the next few tore into his armor, biting into flesh and tearing the bonds that kept steel linked to steel and flesh connected to flesh. His upper body became undone, a gargle in the place of a scream, limbs reduced to stumps and skull into shattered, shimmering metal and cloudy, gaseous mist a faint red colour.

His weapon clattered to the ground as the remains of his upper body were spread from his lower torso to the same door they had entered through.

 

[Acewing13]

The monstrosities wasted no time turning their guns to the rest of the squadron and continued their onslaught. Rubble whether stone or metal tore away forcing anyone ducking behind it to crawl on their bellies, whittling whatever lay between them and suffering a similar fate as their dismembered comrade. The furthest left of the four sentinels turned its guns towards the spider, its rounds seeming to glow with pure malevolence as they slammed into its shield. She had made it into cover before they could peel it away to her limbs.

Multiple rounds slammed into their bodies, pinging and crackling with sparks against their armor. No screams, no gargles, no reactions - one of the entities swung one arm towards Caleb and a series of tubes emerged from the underclaw. They cracked rather than screaming, firing a quartet of spikes his way, one of which tore open a few brick-like chunks of some cover on their flight path.

Thakozois broke cover and the two rear bioweapons immediatley shifted their attention towards him. The ground in front of him exploded into clouds of dust and lacerating fragmentation from the sheer savagery of the gunfire, the dreadful impact of even a single round increasing substantially the nearer he ran. Mere centimetres separated his limbs and his body from the same gruesome fate as the human.

Yet his aim was true; silk snagged onto the arm of the rear-right bioform and it jerked his way, pulled by his eight-limbed strength and crushing over the mess of debris it had emerged from. Yet it was no turret - the calvacade of limbs that lined its dense, myriapod body twitched and stretched, digging into the floor as its main arms dragged it towards him, its smaller feet scrambling to put it into a skittering run after lifetimes spent un-used.

With at least 20 limbs, it ran faster than a mere eight. With a swipe of its free claw it smashed it into the side of the spider with crushing, hateful force.

[Matriarch fucker,] Thakozois buzzed as his chitin cracked and he was sent across the floor, tumbling until he was stopped by a high outcropping, with an accompanying crack and the Theradectan slumped from the shock and pain.

Entrenched behind cover, albeit cover whittling rapidly, the stationary creatures were spending more and more ammo for relatively little gain. That was what those creeping through the holes they had made throughout walls, the ceiling, and the floor were taking care of.

The glances the squad had were soon replaced with the full picture of these grotesque beings. While the sentinels were akin to a hybridization of centipede and vinegaroon, these had a more compact, stocky form. Their claws were larger and thicker, akin to those of thalassina mud lobsters but compact and shortened like a crab. Their bodies were not flattened as most insects were, with curving pale-white carapace on their sides and the section from head to abdomen-rear textured like water that had been morphed into clay during a storm - as if what once flowed had been trapped in motion and frozen into stony carapace. Shorter multi-segmented limbs ending in prickled feet, long and sectioned, lay flat to the ground pulling them across in rapid, skittering motions.

Their eyes, clusters of triple-dots above a mess of mangling, sawing, surgery tool mouthparts, were no less empty and aggressive than their compatriots. With how quickly they closed the distance, what at first looked to be the sized of domestic dogs back on earth soon revealed to be the size of adult male lions. Almost instinctively, one of the silent aggressors made a beeline for Camelia, lunging her way with all the murderous intent a stare of pure emptiness could provide.

For the moment Safaa was in some kind of zone, she'd seen the GDW soldier be torn apart by weapon fire but for the moment she seemed to be compartmentalising it almost without thinking. The bigger concern was that their own guns didn't seem to be doing much while the enemy's weapons had just torn through power armour with all the ease of rain through a sheet of tissue paper.
Shit.
Able to peek up from cover inbetween shots, Safaa saw the creature madly charge at Camelia. Figuring she didn't exactly have much in the way of combat options compared to the armoured soldiers, Safaa tracked the incoming target as it closed in. She focused on the timing, waiting for it to get close enough to the group that turning around would be too late to be useful. Moments later she popped up from cover far enough to open fire, aiming for the creature's head, or closest equivalent of it, as it closed in on the spider.
"Any chance the Americans would like to take charge here and suggest a plan?" she called out over comms.

A spray of blood from the mauled soldier flew across and hit Maksim across the cheek. He blankly stared from behind cover before feeling bile begin to rise in his throat. With Cam's web shield, his vision was at least obscured somewhat -- but not enough. The rubble sheltering them began to give way, forcing them to duck closer to the ground. Maksim looked up just in time to see the creature scurrying with unnatural speed towards them. His eyes squeezed shut as a hail of bullets fired off nearby.

Camelia was panicking, and so she did the thing that comes naturally to most spiders - She bit, injecting poison into as many of the enemy creatures as she could, while still trying to protect herself - and Maks and Benny - with blanket webs as well as she could - Which was honestly not that well.

Eliza was already thinking, speaking quickly but with a clear and authrotative tone. "Small arms ain't gonna do shit against these bitches, unless you can find a chink in their fucking bug armor." She tossed a hail of bullets towards the encroaching monstrosity. "Did we not bring armor crackers?" She growled. "Alright, work on a retreat option, and if you can, bring down the fucking ceiling on their heads. Nothing much is immune to hundreds of tons of brute force."

The construction of this place might well be thousands of years old. Hopefully that just meant it was ready to crumble anyway. Better a time-consuming entry than a deadly one. Rocks were far easier to go through than unidentified Xenos.

Between the gunfire of the human squadmates and Camelia biting the rushing bioform, the alien was rendered to a broken mess. As the grey Theradectan worked to repair their web shield, Leutnant Marchant slid next to Maksim. "Come on, soldier," she said as she reloaded her rifle. "We need everyone involved to get out of here alive. If you have a gun, use it." The GDW officer then followed up her sermon by firing at the monsters still hanging back.

Despite the ongoing firefight, Safaa flashed a smile at the mention of bringing the roof down.
"You're in luck, demo work is a specialty of mine but doing that neatly isn't exactly easily rushed."
She ducked down behind cover to survey the ceiling, running the numbers to improvise what could be graciously called a potential "controlled demolition" that would give them enough time to get out.

"Fine, but we need to be able to pull everyone back before we can bring down the ceiling," Caleb said, pulling out a grenade and tossing it at the alien that'd slapped Taco across the floor. "And killing half of our Theradectan contingent would be real bad," he muttered, waiting for the grenade to go off before popping back over his cover, firing at the bioform attacking the black Theradectan.

The charging bioform's body shredded and twitched, close range rifle rounds biting through carapace armor, tearing it off in fragments to reveal a mixture of meat, wiring, and synthetic internal structure, interwoven in the war-poetry of biomechanics. No screams of pain heralded her scoring shots but the amplifying clatter of its myriad limbs bringing it ever closer to the theradectan at a relentless pace.

Not a singular rhythm but a cacophoneous symphony of scraping, ancient carapace and hundreds of stamping, skittering legs. Over cracks in the floor and piles of debris, their advance remained consistent in its speed. The whittling cover barely protecting the squad from the hail of gunfire grew thinner by the second and ever easier to simply hop over for the aggressors. Another GDW soldier learned this the hard way, ducking back down after pinging a few rounds off the larger upper body of the centipedes. She swung back down and shimmied to the right as the chunk she was hiding behind simply exploded, shards of purple-white fragmentation bursting forth that would have torn her apart like her comrade.

That was the opening that one of the skittering creatures needed; breaking into the human-theradectan lines and claiming its first victim. The woman drew her sidearm as the whole body of the creature slammed into her, multiple limbs stabbing into armor and grasping at her limbs and shoulders, a collection of mouthparts like a chaotic tree branch's worth of surgical mouth parts ripping, biting, and mulching through visor, flesh, bone, and metal. Her skull mulched faster than she could release a choking gurgle, another soldier emptied a whole magazine in panic as two more leapt on top of the cover, causing the sentinels to stop their firing.

The same synth-creature, bits of the fallen soldier smeared onto its feeder-ripper limbs, turned to Safaa and charged without a second thought.

As her life hung in the balance, the centipede-sentinals began repositionining as they advanced outwards, sticking out to the sides and attempting to find firing angles that would harm their bestial compatriots.

 

[Acewing13]

The same one Safaa had shredded faced an additional barrage, a few bullets flying wide only to slam into legs and faces, drawing splatter and causing a few to stumble but not to relent. Even when a few limbs were blown off, they squirmed and crept, dragging themselves with a madman's tenacity and a cannibal's hunger. Hunger that for one was directed at Maksim as it somehow skittered even faster, tossing itself over his cover to stumble in front of him, head turning before its frontal limbs raised and it lunged his way.

Camelia's fangs dug into one, then another, a third - but the onslaught was relentless. One of the more grievously wounded ones recoiled and twitched falling on its back and releasing a piercing hiss, another staggering before drunkenly swinginf with its larger frontal claws, a third staggering back and clumsily swinging. Yet those that had faltered were crept over by those whose biosynthetic bloodthirst had not lessened. One simply leapt off of the others, aiming to slam its armored body and fangs into her, trying to grab at her legs to rip and tear with serrated claw-teeth.

As carnage grew and the swarm of ravenous, hateful limbs swarmed the interspecies alliance, the ones who had set off the mess loomed closer and closer, circling around as scything claw limbs flexed open and close. Humanity and its allies were the harvest for whater empty malevolence guided their actions. One of them loomed closer than the others, two of its lengthier auxiliary limbs coiled back as if waiting to pick up a target... before turning to Caleb, shooting its limb forward like a dragonfly nymph's mandibles, ready to snatch and snuff out his life.

Leutnant Marchant's words barely got through to Maksim, but he somehow nodded, opening his eyes. More sounds of carnage and despair echoed through the structure, but, hands shaking, he lowered his hands from his ears to his gun. As he stared at the monster charging towards him, memories of Eliza's training flashed through his mind. We are surrounded by beings that would eat you alive. He took aim, steadying his hands. This is our greatest strength, our adaptability, our numbers, and our sheer fucking firepower. Was he really going to let all that work and trust given to him go to waste? Somehow, he felt his fear drain down his body until even his heartbeat disappeared from his awareness.

What I'm trying to say is, this shit is inevitable. At some point, there is a chance that someone, or something, will try to end your life before you've finished your work in this universe. A different voice faded into his head. You have a work to do, Максиа. Don't let fear waste your chances.

The creature was practically on him, now. Every disturbing detail of its anatomy revealed itself before Maksim's eyes. Eliza's words came back to him one last time. Take your time, breathe, and at your leisure, gun the bastard down.

He pulled the trigger. His aim was true, shooting it right through the center of its head.

Safaa felt a chill run down her spine as her cybernetics rapidly fed information back to her on the incoming threat, having spotted the incoming charge before she had turned her head. Well aware that this, thing, would likely hit with all the force of an oncoming small tank, she immediately clocked staying in this place was an extremely bad idea. Her robotic arms reacted practically on instinct as she stood up, with one of them quickly securing her rifle and the other able to enable its safety before it was pulled out of the way and onto her backpack. Safaa raised a now-empty arm to the side and fired a grappling cable into the ceiling above them, letting it quickly reel in to speedly swing over the combat zone like some kind of armoured gymnast.
If her suit's systems had calculated the arc properly, she should land right by Eliza and the others, though admittedly this wasn't exactly how she'd intended on using the gear when she'd selected it. Safaa looked back as she moved through the air, taking note of the small round object she'd thrown in a low arc at the creature as she'd taken off, and then looked down at the pin in her free hand that had come out of it.
From me to you pal.

There was no higher thought at this moment. Eliza had been right, as usual. There was yet another thing in the universe that could kill you even more easliy than the last thing could. Typical. Just fucking typical. Aberations concocted by a failed race of something slimy, these machine montrosities didn't feel pain or fear, but at the very least they could die. If they weren't just regenerating until they returned to conciousness, like some fantasy bullshit. Where was that angel from the deep now? That being that floated from nothing to her.

For the time being, she had an entire assault rifle aimed at this creature that was right before her and Maksim, and she barely had to think about it. With the force of her full power of her shoulder, she pushed Maksim to the side, sending him towards the next piece of cover. Her finger twitched, calculated, as she stepped to the side of the rampaging monster, like something out of the worst comics about space, and pulled the trigger to empty the mag into it's stupid little bug head.

As Eliza fired her rifle at the charging monster, her bullets flashed blue the instant before hitting the enemy, adjusting their course so they all hit the same chink in the armor. The alien's rotten face was exposed for a moment before it was torn apart.

"Fuck," Caleb yelped as he jumped back from his own alien, his uniform tearing as the claw barely missed him.

"Get back, Full-Heart," Thakozois said, weakly waving his pincer at the Major from his uncomfortable resting place. "Protect Camelia."

Caleb looked over at the spider for a moment, before sighing and firing a burst at his attacker. With the alien hopefully distracted, he sprinted back to the broken line, firing at aliens that weren't directly between him and his squadmates as he went. Landing on the opposite side of the scientists from Eliza, all he could say as he reloaded and continued to fire was, "I'm sorry."

Multiple bullets slammed into the creature's head, tearing off chunks of shell, flesh, mandibles, and eyes. The first few rounds staggered its skull but as its cranial mass sharply reduced its wild swings turned into drunken stumbles. Pulpy fluid gushed from a once-head stump as limbs convulsed and innards, electronics, and whatever other strange machinations powered the entities body revealed itself through the mess Maksim had made. It was not just squishy organs inside, but a complex network of machinery, maddening in its intertwining nature with its artifcial counterparts. They had not slain a flesh and blood creature but a homunculus of cybernetic imitation bound to primordial, pulsing bloodlust.

He would likely not have much time to marvel at the gorily unveiled intricacies as Safaa's grenade detonated and the internals of another of the biomachines became a mid-air impressionist art piece. Blast force propelled shrapnel through carapace and through limbs, shredding once deadly weaponry with sprays of gushing purple and now a cloud of gore intermingling with fragments of flesh and chitin. Three quarters of a carapace sprawled into the floor, the rest splattering around it in a confetti rain of fluid and fragments.

Eliza's rounds fared better, shredding another bioform but the problem was that more and more kept coming. As her target's body convulsed and shook in its death throes, two more rose in its place with the same empty malevolence. The same went for Maksim and Safaa; the losses were notable but far from tide turning.

Combined with the massive, centipede like sentinels closing in, the shadows cast over them seemed as much literal as they were symbolic of what was to come.

Eliza's bullets gored another, Caleb missing the grasp of the crustacean-like claw, but the other centipedes closed in. One smashed through a dusty pillar, knocking a score of troopers out of the way to be mangled by its smaller kin. Another crushed its way past a small wall, multiple limbs scything about for their harvest of arachnid and human meat. A third made a beeline for Thakozois, a fourth nearly crushing another trooper with one vertical swing of its mighty claw.

A centipede jerked forwards as a shrieking roar pierced the ambience of carnage. The towering whole body staggering as it crashed head and shoulder first into a pillar, chitin loudly crunching as the horrid sounds continued For every shriek, a heavy thud and a meaty smack as armor was punched through and vital organs crushed and torn. The roach-like ones stopped abruptly, heads raised as a GDW trooper, covering his face from the barbaric onslaught, saw two drag across the ground. A blurring bolt slammed into one, then another, a third tearing through flesh, ripping it out in chunks as mutilated messes were sent sliding over the ground.

Biomechanical combat processes struggled to adapt as they realized they were caught between two hostile forces. One centipede-sentinel swung away, half crouching as it fired an array of ripping shells towards the increasingly wide walls through which sunlight and armor-piercing salvation came. Beams of light tore through, illuminating the confused, scattering hordes as much as the blur-fast bolts slamming holes through the growing amount of now lifeless bodies.

 

[Acewing13]

What were once shriek-reports of weapon fire were replaced with resounding crack-thuds. The centipede that had fired its projectiles now found itself a primary target. A storm of rounds slammed into it, convulsing its form as if by electric shock. Explosive charges detonated and cratered its once horrific, imposing form. Where was once the imperial might of ages old bioforged armor stood a landscape of reeking meat and sparking electronics, struggling to return fire as more functionality was consumed by unseen, wrathful saviors.

Another swung away from the group, completely abandoning its original mission of human-theradectan mutilation as the missile ports along its shoulders opened and buzzing, trailing projectiles shaped like flies' eyes attached to tubular, quad-winged bodies. Zig-zagging through the air as they passed through the growing number of holes, their detonations filled the air, drawing a momentary reprieve from the punishment.

Moments counted in seconds before all ordnance was repaid. A crackling bolt of angry red-white, lashing bolts of electrical power, bore into the one that fired. It flinched as an insect might when avoiding the swat of an angry hand. Directed energy was faster and crueler, flashing as it began expending its energy eating through reinforced armor, detonating in a wide flash of luminescent power and angry heat. A half-melted, meat-cooked upper body fell with a heavy thud to the ground, joining another previously ravaged by explosive, armor piercing ordnance.

Through the light, shapes coulud be seen; lumbering and heavy in their form but hunched and multi-segmented. Arthropod-like, heavily armored, yet silhouetted by the piercing sun. At least four could be seen, seemingly humanoid in posture if not for the strange limbs and claw like appendages wielding long, rifle-like weaponry while others swivelled along side-mounted limbs and shoulders. Their movements were marginal; rooted in place but weapons adeptly tracking the rippers and the sentinels alike. Sometimes they abruptly jerked from side to side, dodging streams of retaliatory fire. Yet the ones that did impact them seemed at best only to shake and shudder them; their weapons may have fired slower but the sheer difference in stopping power was undeniable.

The sentinels priortized volume but every shot fired from these segmented soldiers easily rewarded the unlucky with deep, cratering wounds if it did not reduce them to a splatter-outline of limbs and innards. Missed shots slammed through flooring, walls, and ceilings as the smaller bioforms attempted to divert their attention towards them, charging towards the openings in the wall. The two remaining sentinels skittered away, attempting to find cover amidst the ruins. All their toughness seemed to mean nothing to the cannon-like rifles and their bulk presented them as moreso of moving targets than monstrous threats.

Maksim would've smiled at the sight of the tide turning if it wasn't for the fact that he was zeroed-in on aiming and not freaking out. He managed to break his concentration enough to look over at Caleb, however.

"It's not your fault, sir," he said between rounds.

Safaa landed on her feet with a slight skid, not having the time unfortunately to flourish the acrobatics. She quickly took cover alongside the others as the robotic arms on her back returned the assault rifle to her hands. Taking aim, the tech specialist fired a controlled burst at the smaller creatures to help mop them up.
"Anyone know the new guys?" Safaa called out over the noise, before grabbing another grenade and pulling the pin out with her thumb. She quickly eyeballed where the the centipedes had slunk off to and passed the grenade to a robotic hand, letting her cybernetics hurl the weapon behind enemy cover. "I'm not complaining exactly, but knowing what langague to say 'thanks' in would be good."

Camelia was reeling. Everything had happened so quickly for her. "Where's Thakozois?" She called out, looking up at Caleb. She would thank him properly later. Right now they were a little pre-occupied.

Eliza had barely a second to process the uncanny accuracy of her bullets. Firing so quickly shouldn't result in such pinpoint accuracy, yet each shot found the same hole to deepen. The second passed, and Eliza was pushed to move cover again and watch as backup arrived. More of the same creature, it seemed, but if this meant that the bugs were divided amongst themselves, all the better. The enemy of my enemy can very well amount to an ally in time. Reloading her weapon, she worked on finishing the enemy bugs. She had no words, only action.

Caleb dodged the claws of the bioforms, before coughing from the dust that was kicked up by another, groaning as he loaded his last ready magazine. He put his focus on damaging the monsters that were separating the human contingent, with the hope that someone could retreat out of this hellhole. It was surprising when his bullets were put in their place by the newcomer’s weapons, “Hopefully they keep being accurate,” he muttered, firing at the bioform’s open wounds to try and hit something vital.

“They’re new to me,” he said with a shrug to Safaa. “Make sure we keep Dr. Hase alive so he can do his job.”

“He’s in between us and our hopefully new friends,” Caleb replied to Camelia, pointing over to where the black Theradectan lay, somehow overcoming his pain to get closer to the ground. “Keep up the pressure so they don’t go after him.”

Camelia seemed a little relieved - Not that she'd ever let that show too much. Still, to further protect him and the others who were down, rubble would adjust itself around all of those who were down, though would generally focus around Thakozois a bit more. Camelia would have to keep that focus up, but now with a little more confidence, she would use the rest of the rubble around to aim at the hostiles. It wouldn't do much, but a well placed pebble here and there would at least kill one or two of them, right?

Unlike the humans, the rippers had marginal success against the larger arthropods. If their hellishly loud, hammerblow intense gunfire did not splatter them into a pulp, barrages of auxiliary weapons fire might. Smaller arms swivelled beneath the larger pseudo-crustacean claw-arms as nightmarishly intricate collections of tubular barrels and mandibled maw-appendages viciously attacked. Green white flares of angry light, gaseous hisses of insectoid anger, shattering carapace, limbs, and organs alike in buzzing reports of wrathful accuracy; these creatures were not mere soldiers but living weapon systems.

The sheer bulk of the onslaught was being rapidly withered to mere scraps, scraps that were no less demoralized as they lunged and leapt through the air at the titanic armored hulks. Clawed hands shot out to impale them against scything limbs of curving blades or to ensnare them in overlapping ,flattened claw-digits. They squirmed, thrashed, gnashed, and bit but a close of the hand or flick of the wrist and they fell to the ground in pieces of two or ten.

The ones that had remained behind to harass the humans and their theradectan allies did not fare any better. The massacre of their compatriots was responded to with hesitancy amongst their number. This indecisiveness in turn was rewarded with well earned gunfire, shredding their once mighty carapaces into fragments littered with meat and broken electronics.

A few more simply broke from the humans, mad enough to try their luck against the heavy weaponry and militant intensity of the now approaching, slowly advancing biohulks. Far more pathetically than their predecessors, many were simply crushed beneath their dense clawed legs, stomped into the ground or near lackadaisacally shredded to meat sauce with the flick of an auxiliary gun limb and a shriek of organic weapon fire.

It was not long before the four "bipeds" were facing down the centipede-sentinels, emerging from behind cover for one last stand. One swung its claws in a massive swipe, another launched its missiles high into the air, swinging them downwards for an overhead strike.

Both of these would prove ineffectual.

A shoulder-mounted auxiliary weapon on one of them, resembling some six-mandibled worm-grub emerging from a crevice on shoulder armor, jerked its head upwards as cyber-bioluminescent lighting lit up around its mouthparts. A storm of blur-like needle rounds ripped through the ceiling and the missile, detonating it into a nauseating array of purple-blue energy and showering the ground with fragmented debris. Another of the arthropods swung one of its main arms forward, a weapon resembling something like a water tiger beetle larvae's body filtered through an array of slanting, overlapping black metal plating and architectural, segmented components. Where there would be piercing fangs was instead a series of rail-like components outlining a barrel-mouth.

It roared with a monstrous, reverberating blast and the sentinel's torso, face, and anything contained therein fragmented backwards into a conical spray of metal, innards, various internal fluids, and crackling biolectrical components. In a ghoulishly amusing fashion, all that remained was a body with a caping "U" shaped gorge, worm-like organisms squirming and wildlly flailing in the gore-valley of exposed components, squiring out life sustainining fluids onto wriggling pseudo-parasitic internal maintenance organisms, limbs convulsing as their bodies fell to the ground beneath.

 

[Acewing13]

The massive swing was caught by a somewhat less titanic arm, crab-like and dense, blocking it as the creature in question lunged forward, slamming its massive bulk against the larger but not exactly denser bioform. The impact crushed armor and stumbled it backwards but not before the pseudo-biped's partner grabbed its other arm, yanking it violently forward. Muscle and metallic joints ripped and bent as it fell to the floor as a large, ten fingered, clawed and smashed into its skull. The first hit fractured the armor, the second crumpled flesh, the third reduced it to a blur of colourful internal matter and shattered metallic under-structure.

In mere minutes, the mist of spilled internals and melting machinery was all that was left as a testament to their wrathfulness. This close, it was not difficult to see what they were exactly.

Like their aggressors, they were entirely arthropod-like in appearance but far larger and bulkier. The smallest among them was at least 8''10, the largest around 11. Beetle-like was the easiest way to describe them, primarily a mixture of predatory carabidae and flexible staphylinidae with elements of dense crustacean sturdiness. Their bodies were hefty and dense, segmented along the middle with thinned out plating, a sort of almost worn, bark-like rough texture or eerily smooth and almost shaped as if by artisinal, otherworldly hands. Their midsections and below seemed oddly flexible in spite of this, almost like the bodies of rove beetles or even earwigs, but with the pronounced denseness and overall weightiness of ground beetles.

It was armor regardless, layered with complex series of interlocking or overlapping sectioned plating made of the sort of nightmarish, jointed biometallic components as the creatures they had slain but here the marriage of metal and biomass was far more deliberately interwoven, blurring the distinction where one began and the other ended. These were not uniform augmentations to their bodies, maddening to analyse or otherwise behold as if each one was a deliberate patchwork expression of some ultra-idiosyncratic, hyper-engineered specificity.

Their limbs were numerous; even numbers for all but varying sharply. Each one possessed at least eight of them; two large legs bent digitigrade but actively shifting their form as if through a series of specifically modified gears, some mimicking human posture and others remaining as they stood. They all had two primary arms minimum; large and like the claws of various decapods but multi-segmented, ending not in a binary claw but multiple complex segmented claw-fingers closer to those of insects. Some of them could be seen fusing these together, sometime supwards of eight or so digits into larger claw like structures. The inverse as well; a larger claw would seemingly fragment into a perplexing, visually overwhelming array of specialized tool-limbs like a nightmarish surgical array.

The smaller limbs emerged across their sides, spindly by comparison but a bit larger than a human's, though multi-joined as a theradectan's. Some of them were clearly cybernetic, others seemingly pulled from completely different kinds of arthropods altogether, and some actually appeared to be long centipede or larvae-like creatures, antennae waving and elongated clasper-limbs snapping about as if hungry for futher flesh and flaying. Sometimes all kinds of auxiliary limbs would retract into their bodies and emerge again, each one almost bearing a life of its own.

Their upper bodies were where they seemed the densest if not for the fact that they were slouched forward most of the time, reducing their effective height by up to around one to three feet. Their shoulders were emphasized when they stood like this with the shadows they cast under the light. Yet they were no longer silhouetted and the particulars of their facial features were finally revealed.

Unlike in mammals, there was no flesh on their faces. Every inch was the same crusty exoskeletal mass as the rest of their bodies. Their heads were longer than a human's, predatory in nature, elongated and flattened as a rove beetle's might be or the tapering, smoothed, almost shovel like head of a ground beetle. One of them seemed to be somewhere between the two, its skull very relatively close to that of a human's by comparison in general outline. Any further similarities were nonexistent when it came to the particulars of their cranial structure and its constituent elements. Long, curving mandible pairs sometimes up to eight opened and closed against a backdrop of appendages and feelers, best described as ranging from what looked like longer finger-sized caprellidae to what looked like extra-flexible ball-jointed antennae with metal tips pointing out at their ends. They did not appear to have noses with their mouths taking a large part of their faces.

Along the sides of their heads and positioned higher up were their dome-like eyes, the side ones almost blended into night-black of their armored carapaces. The ones up top notably lighter in tone and semi-translucent. Some had smaller eyes notable within these top domes; almost glowing beneath, sticking out on little prong-like appendages, and each one swivelling about. Sometimes, the domes were completely black but various outlines of some sort of wiring, augmenting structure, and what might be potential bioelectronics wired through.

This was especially easier to notice as once they turned their attention away from their annihilated enemies, bites of foreign meat stuck to their limbs and armor, it was now upon the joint human-theradectan team. Their weapons remained at the ready; none pointed their way. At the distance they were at, perhaps they would not nead to if they were every bit as malevolent as what they had slain.

They were however, speaking. It was difficult to make out but they were not whispering. Sounds like scraping, grinding, crackling, tearing, and subterranean guttural echoes emerged from behind their mouthparts. Carried over the ruins like a low, heavy wind it was more like a stream of chaotic radio signals being intonated than conventionally "spoken". At first it seemed mindless, random, white noise even, but there was a particular orderliness and structure to it, the waves of sound layered to an absurd, intricate degree. It was a language but it was not one that appeared to be intended to really be understood by anything not raised in whatever strange society these entities emerged from. It was more like they were speaking programming code to one another in terms of complexity.

The hybrid-head one, roughly 9''01 if they stood fully (currenty he was around 7''11 slouched), turned its head to face them. Their face was pointed towards Caleb but given the way their miniature eye clusters seemed to constantly twitch, it was clear he was not necessarily focusing on him. The weapon in their hand, the one that in a single shot had simply blasted away most of the sentinel's upper body, swivelled about, jerking here and there. It was clear that even as they "looked" at the squad, their other eyes were still scanning for any potential targets.

That was not counting the auxiliary arm weapons mimicking the motions.

A deep intonation emerged but this time, it was digital, modulating within fairly rigid shifts of pitch and tone. It held itself as a drone.

The drone then turned into speech, heavy and clear. Too fleshy for machinery, too stiff for mammalian life.

"Identity. Reveal. Purpose of deployment. Reveal. Governmental allegiance. Reveal. Presence of allies. Reveal. Hostility; unrequired. Foreign entities - four limbs, sighted previously... identity. Reveal. MHNOCHETNED. Combatant-species. Known to the Axis. Known to the Voice. Known to the Nest. Known to the Sect. Potential alliance; common problem. Ruins alive. Among both your number, those who are not."

[REVEAL. REVEAL. REVEAL. REVEAL.]

Camelia tucked herself safely away back where the other spider layed. now that it was safe, the telekinetic shield broke and safely layed down the rubble around the two theredactans. She would not only be checking in on her guardian to make sure he wasnt going to die, but also would be peaking over the newly built stone wall between herself and the creepy things that saved their lives, and Caleb. Though Camelia worried slightly for the stupid human male, she would be too stunned and scared to do anything about it.

Maksim stared stiff-faced at the anthropod-like speaker. As though it had a mind of its own, his hand floated up and landed at Benjamin's shoulder. If Maksim's brain had processed the action, he would've known it was partially for comfort and partially to say 'You're the linguist, do something!'

Benjamin almost jumped out of his skin at Maksim's touch, before staring at him. He wasn't the leader of this group - sure, he was a linguist, but not the leader! For heaven's sake... fuck this.

"Greetings," he began, slowly, and without stammering for once. "I am Benjamin Hase..." his speech was painfully slow and to those who knew him, it was evident that he was purposefully trying not to stammer.

"I am not in charge of... this group. My speciality is... with language and... words. I am a scientist.... as are... many people in this... group."

He paused, took a deep breath.

 

[Acewing13]

"I... personally... am not at liberty to... discuss why we are... here. I am sure that you... understand the responsibilities that... my role cannot account for. I can, however, give you... some information, if you... would like. We are... humans... so you can replace... 'foreign entities' with our... species."

"We are... alone down... here. Without you... we may well... have died. So... on behalf of... everybody here... we thank you. If we can... continue a good relationship... we can provide you with... information, resources... in return for... our safety."

He cleared his throat.

"I can provide... more uh... more information once I... have spoken to my... commander. If acceptable... I am sure he would be... much more inclined to... provide this information... if we were able to know... about your... allegiances and indentity."

Safaa lowered her weapon, flanking their group slightly while keeping a curious eye on the the newcomers.
"Doc I don't want to steal your thunder here, but I think they're suggesting we work together. 'Common problem' and all that, at the very least that's cooperating to deal with these... 'centipedes'." she piped up as her robotic arms motioned with air quotes for her, before shrugging slightly. "Dunno if it's a translation issue, but that sounded more like someone read a data file out loud to me."

"I mean, they're the friendliest aliens we've had first contact with," Caleb said, before looking over at the two Theradectans, "No offense."

"Yeah," Thakozois said, weakly nodding as he was tended to by Camelia. "Having a common foe definetly helps."

The Major nodded, before looking between their saviors and the linguist. "Go ahead and tell them what they want to know. Though I really do want to know what they mean by that last bit. 'Those who are not', alive?"

The huge one that had spoken pointed its gun towards one of the fallen GDW soldiers. Whatever they had looked like previously was impossible to tell with the mulch their entire head had been degraded to.

"Ahh, fair," Caleb said, sighing at the sight of dead squadmates.

Benjamin flushed at Safaa - had his answer not come across as if he was also offering information? Oh dear. At Caleb's signal to go ahead, he cleared his throat and began to speak, explaining how the team had reached their current situation.

"Can we uh... h-" he paused, about to stammer, before starting again, "Can we have... some information about... you in return... please?"

A few seconds passed and the enormous machine-creature hybrid held perfectly still save for some of its mouthparts and antennae twitching.

"Arrange meeting for human command division. The reason for our presence; withheld. We share not without being given in turn. We shall speak with them. Your departure from here is without threat. These ruins contains unknown quantities of machine-chitin-weapons. Derelict by vrexul current standards. Beyond what your kind are used to. Worse things may be waiting. That is our reason."

The creature's voice gradually picked up speed, phrasing and tone becoming clearer as if it was learning on the fly. It clearly was not actually talking; absorbing information and somehow programming some sort of device to speak its reply.

"This world is not unknown to us. There may be other vrexul. Do not engage with the purple-white nor the orange-violet. The Primordial Voice have desired this world. The Blood Axis may be helping them. We know of humanity and Mhnochetned as neighboring species. They perceive of you as resources or as prey."

"Oh, that's fun. We're going to need a lot more firepower," Caleb muttered, looking at the remains of his squad. "Alright, we'll go back to base camp and talk to our commanding officer. Do you want to come along or do you want to wait nearby while we get communications going?"

"We follow, you depart. Dormant bioforms awakening. We cannot linger. Vehicular transport would be fastest." The creature's "voice" had sped up and the others were beginning to spread out, their complex sensory apparatus sensing life within the ruins.

"We have reinforcements present. They will cover the escape. We leave sooner, not later." It continued as it began to scuttle backwards towards the hole it and its comrades had made in the walls. Given the size of the unintentional exit, it seemed about as good a place to rapidly leave the area as any.

"So," the Major started, looking between his mobile squadmates, "I think we should follow and try to get a shuttle to pick us up. We're not going to be able to get any of our casualties over the way we came."

"Sounds like a plan, sir," Marchant replied, nodding before going to help stabilize the wounded.

"Yeah," Caleb said, looking at the dead soldiers lying on the ground. "Yeah," he repeated, before turning on his comms. "Walpole, this is Major Schembri," he said, helping one of the walking wounded towards the hole their new friends had made. "So, you know how you said to not take any unnecessary risks?"