Chapter 615: Interlude

Roca ducked underneath flailing tentacles, punching the ground as she did so. The graviton generator in her forearm howled as it dumped 25G's of gravity into the ground. The earth leaped up in a torus around her, the bedrock cracked and shattered, and the air boomed out in displacement.

The Dwellerspawn facing her erupted into chunks of biomechanical armor and gobbets of flesh even as she lunged forward, stomping one foot forward to add in the kinetic shock as she brought her hands together in a clap that exploded the air out from in front of her. The shockwave knocked down Dwellerspawn, blew smaller ones into chunks, and flipped a car that had been hidden end over end for nearly two hundred meters.

"ROCK N ROLLA LOCK IN ROCA!" she bellowed out.

Alarms were ringing in her head. Her close quarters weapon was offline, she was showing cracks across the warsteel Mark-V, her heat was up to 70% and her slush was at 60%. Her mass bladders were down to dregs, her bioware endocrine system was running on fumes, she had cracked skeletal structural members as well as damaged muscular systems.

She ignored it as she grabbed a flatworm, ripped the spines from its back, stabbed the flatworm with its own spines before tossing it to the side, and hurled the spines into the air.

The Atrekna missed the spines, busy keeping its shield up to stop the 20mm rounds from hammering it apart. Three missed, the rest of the dozen hit it in the back, erupting from its chest. It wobbled for a second, the phasic shield dropped, and the 20mm rounds chewed it into hamburger.

"Chronotron levels rising, Roca," Ishiro t-linked.

"Get ready!" Roca snapped over the linkage. She could see it, the hazy, indistinct illusions of something slowly manifesting, feel the prickle of chronotrons on her skin, see the sparkling at the edge of her vision.

She grabbed another Dwellerspawn and ripped it in half before wired reflexes took over and she bit its head off. Her mouth flooded with acids as she chewed it, letting the grinder at the back of her throat rip it up and push it into her mass bladders.

The Atrekna hit the phasic construct as hard as they could, desperate to get something, anything, in between the six lemurs and their own bodies. Half of the Quorum was down already, one of them having got too close the ground and grabbed by the lemur who just ripped it in half.

The phasic construct locked in, reaching back despite the interference provided by the lemurs themselves, the sats in orbit, and the munitions going off near the black ship. It hummed, began to break apart, and started throwing sparks and arcs of phasic energy and pure golden chronotrons.

Right before it exploded it managed to bring through the target.

A new species, one tailored by the Atrekna in hopes it would be able to take on the lemurs.

Uplifted from a highly developed primate, it walked on two legs, had no tail, opposable thumbs, was an omnivore, and was covered in hair. It had binocular vision, capable of operating under a yellow sun and in up to 2.5G's.

The Atrekna had uplifted their minds, enslaved them with psychic energy, and created war material for them to learn to use.

The Ancient Ones and the Young Ones smirked as the entire area, two miles by three miles, suddenly filled with the slave species and their war material.

They also realized that there was only two lemurs left, not six.

They blinked, wondering where the other four had gone to, when the machine exploded. Phasic and temporal energy rippled out, blasting into the Atrekna, washing over the slave species, covering the entire area.

The wormhole wasn't closed yet when the machine exploded, the half-real phasic construct collapsing under the strain.

Everything in the field was sucked through the wormhole. The slave race pulled back to their home world, the Atrekna sucked through the wormhole, but worse, oh so much worse...

The lemurs came along for the ride.

The field flickered and danced, the exploded in golden and purple energy. When it cleared there was nothing left but grass and torn up dirt. Steam rose from the dirt, the grass did what grass always did, and the smoke slowly cleared.

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Mbutu felt the t-link adjust, felt the odd echo feeling it got with long distances, but ignored it.

The Atrekna was quick and clever. Twice it had gotten behind Mbutu and fired off a barrage of phasic energy the first time, phasic enhanced pebbles and a couple pinecones the second.

None of it had done much more than mar the Mark-V Warsteel extrusion armor he was wrapped in.

Another time Mbutu had moved forward to the Atrekna's location, sure he'd be able to close with it and kill it, only to discover that the Atrekna was a clever phasic hologram over a land mine built by infusing a rock with phasic energy. It had gone off underneath him, throwing him into the bushes, and the Atrekna had blasted a tree with its power, dropping it on him.

None of it had damaged the armor, but Mbutu was starting to feel bruised inside the armor as he slowly moved through the forest and stopped.

There was an industrial complex in front of him. He could see the eddies of phasic energy swirling in the parking lot where the Atrekna had hurried across. An open bay door twinkled with phasic energy and Mbutu knew that the Atrekna had opened the loading bay to vanish into the industrial complex.

Mbutu knelt down, scooping up a few handfuls of dirt and putting them in his mouth, letting the built in grinding plates rip the dirt apart so it could be compressed into a slurry and deposited in his mass bladders.

His primary nanoforge was still acting up and he took the time to do a factory reset on it. It would take ten minutes to cycle, but he hoped that the slush levels and the templates would be good to go afterwards.

The cars in the parking lot got highlighted, telling him exactly what he needed from them. He began drooling, knowing that the super-capacitance gel, the superconductor wiring, the molycircs, would all do him good.

Endosteel, it does a body good, he thought to himself as his onboard systems showed him the vehicles that he could quickly and easily scavenge for much needed complex materials.

I'm hungry and that Atrekna isn't going anywhere. For some reason, it wants a fight, Mbutu thought to himself.

He moved forward, into the parking lot, keeping one eye on the industrial complex.

The Atrekna watched as the big lemur moved into the parking lot where the vehicles were. As she watched the black chitin shivered like jelly and suddenly was absorbed by the lemur's skin. The lemur was large, covered in thick hide, skeletal extrusions, and dense muscles.

She nodded to herself as she watched it rip open the hood of a ground-car and start pulling pieces off the engine. It was strong enough to twist endo-steel and hyperalloys like taffy. She watched as it crouched down and began eating wiring, circuitry, and other parts.

She sat down on the phasic platform only a few inches above the ferrocrete. The lemur was content to graze among the vehicles and she was tired and her energy depleted. She used her psychic powers to lure some small vermin to her, grabbing them and lifting them into the air as she tilted her head back. She dropped them whole into her mouth, her teeth grinding them up even as she swallowed.

Psychic potential snapped away, absorbed by her nervous system, with each death, giving her a much needed replenishment of her psychic abilities even as the vermin's body provided her with needed nutrients.

The lemur had gotten close a few times and was a canny opponent. Twice she had tried to get behind it only to have a branch trigger, sweeping forward to shatter against her psychic defenses. A handful of thrown seedpods had barely been stopped by her inertial dampening field, the seedpods exploding as the kinetic energy was deflected by her abilities. Once a rock had missed her and destroyed the trunk of the tree behind her and she had realized almost too late that the real target had been tree. It had fallen, knocking her to the side, almost dropping her stealth, and she'd gone up and away just seconds before the lemur came pounding in to look around. She dropped down quickly right before the lemur had scanned the high up branches.

She was feeling an odd feeling. Like defeating a well prepared foe after hundreds of years of planning, or discovering a secret that others had tried to keep from her.

She was unsure of what the feeling was. At first it had caused dissonance inside her carefully constructed mental fortresses, but as time had gone on she had come to relish it, enjoy the feeling, even savor it.

The Atrekna held up one hand and concentrated. Phasic energy surrounded her fingers, her hand, until she had what looked like a clawed mechanical glove covering her delicate hand, made entirely out of phasic energy. She extended out the construct, down her arm, adding 'straps' around her forearm, thickening the phasic construct, adding a large 'wheel and gear' system over her elbow, then up her biceps, across her shoulder, and over her chest and upper back.

She stared at the lemur as the lemur flipped over a car and ripped apart the graviton system, shoving parts in its mouth. She built the phasic construct over her shoulders, down her other arm, then held up her other hand.

It looked like an Atrekna version of the carapace the lemur was capable of extruding from its pores, only built of phasic energy. She had clawed fingers with strength enhancement now, strength enhancement on her arms and across her shoulders.

She reached out with her powers, grabbing a hyperalloy bar. She twisted it up, watching it heat up from the stress, then twisted it apart and looked at the different sections.

The lemur was moving to another car, drinking the contents of a superpressure hydraulic cylinder.

The lemur is an expert at close quarters combat, a hunter born and bred, that would have viewed my kind as little more than a competitor that could have its brain beat in with a rock, she thought to herself. My kind ended the evolutionary arms race by developing our psychic abilities, there can be no other conclusion. But psychic powers and phasic energy manipulation can be done by animals with the correct neural patterns and phasic sensitive organs and neural wiring.

She used her power to shred the hyperalloy bar, turning it to liquid, moving it along the phasic construct until she could coat the phasic construct on her biceps with the hyperalloy.

The lemurs picked up a rock. No matter how strong my people's phasic powers were, a rock takes almost no training. No decades, centuries of honing and perfecting the use of phasic energy, just sheer muscle power, binocular vision, and the ability for action/result prediction, she thought.

The epiphany rocked her in place.

My people had to have been predators, just as their people were, she realized. I can feel my powers and know that they've improved tenfold, she reached out and pulled another piece of hyperalloy to her, ripping it from the wall with a strength she would have never been capable of only a few hours prior.

The lemur ripped apart a dash and shoved parts into its mouth. It was still drooling liquid substance-w, still standing beneath the yellow-white sun with dark brown skin.

The Atrekna cocked its wrist and a blade of hyperalloy wreathed in phasic energy, crackling with psychic power, erupted from the now-opaque construct around her forearm. She concentrated, pulling phasic energy into the hyperalloy, imbuing it into the hyperalloy's atomic and subatomic structure.

She stood up, holding out her hands, and pulled more hyperalloy to her.

My people have learned to disdain anything that is not crystalline or grown, she thought to herself. We sneer at mechanical constructs yet build vast autonomous war machines to protect us from our enemy's mechanical devices.

The hyperalloy was rent down to its core molecular structure and flowed into the phasic construct.

It will never stop tracking me nor would I want it to, she thought. I will not stop tracking it and it would not want me to.

The lemur had stopped in place, grabbing a vehicle and throwing it to the side.

The Atrekna had finished what it intended as she drew herself up to her full height and gathered her replenished power.

Mbutu was looking right at the wall of the industrial complex when it exploded outward, ferrocrete cinderblocks turning into gravel shrapnel that showered over the parking lot.

The Atrekna floated out, supported by a spiked and rotating disc of phasic energy. It was wrapped in metal armor that gleamed in the sun as it slowly lowered to the ground.

Mbutu pounded the ground for a moment and straightened up. His 20mm was offline but the vibroblade in his forearm crackled with energy as it slid out from the forearm housing.

With a bellowed roar and a high pitched shriek the two threw themselves toward their opponents under the burning gaze of a yellow star.

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The stars wheeled around as the Steamboat Willy rolled and dipped to avoid the nCv shells that ripped through space only kilometers away. The massive ship was burning, the aft guns twisted and ruined, the aft deck buckled upwards from a terrible wound that had robbed the Steamboat Willy of half of its engines. Smoke and fire belched from the huge gaping wound despite the vacuum of space. The hull was ripped and torn, exposing internal works.

The few Atrekna ships left could see welders going, see small figures dragging cable and struts of metal and sheets of armor into place inside the wounds.

Another cloud of fighter craft erupted from the ship.

The Atrekna knew that it didn't matter. The ship was still outnumbered, was now heavily wounded, and had no hope.

It didn't matter that the autonomous war machines had rebelled, with half ending up destroyed and a third of the remainder escaping, leaving them with only a few dozen.

The lemur ship was doomed.

They closed in and Admiral Thennis stared with one burning eye, the other covered with a blood stained bandage. She held one hand against the deep puncture wound in her stomach from where the Steamboat Willy's engine room had exploded, the other she held her crop. She spit blood on the deck and lifted her chin defiantly.

She opened her mouth to give the orders to fire when nearly two dozen Hellspace portals tore open.

The ships that came through were massive, twisted lines and ancient hulls of Precursor Autonomous War Machines.

From two of the vessels rang out greetings to the Atrekna even as they powered up their guns, brought their battlescreens online, and reached out with targeting systems.

To target the Atrekna.

TWO! one roared.

HEY-O, FUCK-O! the other cried out.