Chapter Number Goes Here

Falmo'o woke up to someone shaking him.

"Psst, man, wake up. Wake up, horse dude," he heard.

Falmo'o groaned and opened his eyes. His whole body hurt from where that psychotic human had literally torn him to death with her teeth. He couldn't remember why, just that she had taken her time about it.

In front of him was a massive human. One of the big 'Combine' ones, skin drawn back in places to reveal cybernetic implants. He had clotted blood on his face and chest and down one arm.

"Come on, horse dude, if you don't get up, I'm going to leave you," the Combine Terran said. He slapped Falmo'o's jaw with strength that was probably gentle to him but rattled Falmo'o's brain.

"Wuh, wuh iz goo nin awn?" Falmo'o asked.

"We're going to try to get out of here, horse dude. Me and you, we're all that's left," the Combine guy said. "Digital Omnimessian and his twelve biological apostles, we're in serious trouble. Come on, I'll help you up."

The strength was incredible, even though Falmo'o knew without a doubt that the Combine Terran was enhanced. Still, he got to his feet, feeling a little unsteady.

The Terran pushed a heavy gun in his hands.

"Here. Use both hands. The shells explode, so don't shoot too close to yourself," the Terran said.

"What are we going?" Falmo'o asked, examining the weapon.

"We're going to make a run for the Dominion, it's got a Helldrive," The Terran said. He squinted. "It was your idea, horse dude."

They started moving down the hallway. It was trashed. Craters from kinetic hits, scorching from lasers, discoloration from plasma, gouged from chainswords. Falmo'o could tell they were moving toward one of the docking arms. The human kept checking his corners, checking the flanks.

Falmo'o had worked with security forces before, but he had to admit, the way the Terrans were designed, bipedal with forward facing eyes and forward reaching limb, made them exceptionally skilled at it.

"Horse dude, I'm telling you. I've faced Mantids, I've fought men, I've taken on Treana'ad, hell, I've even fought Dwellerspawn, but this, this is a whole new level of bad news," the Terran said at one point. They were leaning against a wall, waiting for a blast door to decide it was going to raise or not. The electronics were spilled out of the control. There was Lanaktallan writing on the panel instructing Falmo'o to pull out a pistol and fire to the right.

"What are we fighting?" Falmo'o asked. He imitated the human motion of rubbing the sides of his head with all four of his hands. "My memory is all mixed up."

"Something old and nasty, horse-dude. Really old, really nasty, that fucking belongs here," Combine Terran said.

The door cycled and the Combine Terran glanced around the corner, still slightly ducked down. "Whew, clear."

He moved into the corridor and Falmo'o followed.

"So I never got it straight. Where are you from, horse-dude?" the Combine Terran asked. "You one of the coreward races or something they designed for this station?"

Falmo'o frowned. "Designed?"

The Terran stopped at the next blast door, looking at it and shaking his head. "Yeah. You know, bio-synth, gene-jack, whatever. I'm not judging, horse-dude, I'm just asking."

Falmo'o watched the Terran rip open the panel and pull the wires out, twisting some of them together. He stripped the insulation from the copper wire with two of those short blunt finger talons, pinching it and pulling it off.

"I don't remember," Falmo'o asked.

The Terran twisted the wires together and the door began to slowly rise.

"Where are we?" Falmo'o asked.

"I don't know," the Terran said with a sigh. "I'm just a grunt."

"Grunt?" Falmo'o frowned.

"Infantry. Power armor infantry," the Terran answered. "Technically, I'm Combine Power Armor Assault Infantry, a Combine Marine, the guys who do face first charges into emplaced enemy positions."

Deserters. Combine infantry. From Anthill, Falmo'o remembered. It was amazing how much the Terrans would share if one feigned ignorance and confusion.

"By the blessed Omnimessiah, I wish I had my chainsword," the Terran swore, ducking into the hallway and taking two steps before straightening up. "There's the docking arm. We're almost there, horse-dude."

Falmo'o just clopped along behind the Terran, someone bemused by how easily it was to fool humans.

"So what is she?" Falmo'o asked.

The Terran glanced back. "She's bad news, horse-dude. If we'd known she was here, someone like her was here, we'd have stayed off at a distance and planet-cracked this place."

"I don't get it," Falmo'o said honestly.

"Hope you don't. I mean, you should really hope you don't," the Terran said. He stopped at the air-lock that led into the docking arm. He punched in the code number, a different one than Falmo'o had seen before, and pressed his thumb on the enter code.

The airlock started to cycle.

The airlock opened partway up and Taynee ducked under the partially open door, that knife in her hand. She sliced the Terran across the inside of the thigh, stabbed him deeply in the side, and then in the back, moving completely around him and stabbing the whole say.

"BITCH!" the Combine Terran roared, swinging a backhand at Taynee. Taynee ducked under it and stabbed him twice in the armpit.

Falmo'o watched them fight. Taynee's speed and accuracy against the big male's ferocity, raw strength, and skill. Taynee slapped aside or blocked most of the hits, rolling with them, bouncing right back, stabbing, kicking, even biting. Falmo'o watched kicks hard enough to dent durachrome slam into walls, punches hard enough to shatter armaglass, all being thrown by the two combatants. It was obvious to Falmo'o that it was some kind of fighting style, not random violence, something that allowed them to perform physical acts that should have been impossible for mere flesh and blood.

Finally something changed. Falmo'o wasn't sure what, they moved to fast for his brain to process easily, but Taynee ducked when she should have slid to the side and caught a knee in the face that threw her against the bulkhead. Before she could move the Combine Terran grabbed her by the throat and punched her in the head three time. The first deformed her skull, the second crushed it, the third ruptured it and he pulled back a bloody fist with smeared cerebral tissue on the knuckles.

Taynee began melting, steaming, slowly turning to ooze. The steam reminded him of something but he couldn't think of what.

The Combine Terran straightened up. rubbing the clotted blood from the slices in his skin. "Thank the Omnimessiah for my coagulation implant," he sighed. He looked at Falmo'o. "Know why I'm afraid of her?"

Falmo'o nodded, thinking about the fast and furious fight. "She was a capable combatant."

The Combine Terran looked at him. "She's unmodified. Pure Terran genetic stock. No gene-mods, no cybernetics not even an implant, no nothing, and she can damn near take me."

Falmo'o nodded. "Yes, that would be frightening."

The Combine Terran started walking down the docking arm, shaking his head. "Horse-dude, I'm a Combine Marine and she's a... a... whatever the hell she is. Hell, that's pretty much it. She's from Hell. That's why she's here," the Terran turned and looked at Falmo'o. "She's in Hell. Where she belongs."

"So she's the face in the neutron star's gravitic field?" Falmo'o asked.

He turned and looked at Falmo'o, his eyes wide. "You really don't remember? It's trying to get away from..."

The airlock into the Combine ship opened up to reveal Taynee standing there. Naked. With a knife.

And a rivet gun.

"Me."

She triggered the rivet gun at the Combine Marine as she moved, fluid, fast, ducking underneath the Combine Terran's fist and stabbing Falmo'o down the flank with the knife even as she drove two foot rivets into the body the Marine.

Falmo'o went down on his knees, coughing up blood.

The Combine Terran crashed to the floor and Taynee straddled him, slamming rivets up his spine and two into the back of the head.

Falmo'o looked up as she moved in front of him.

"You've always been my favorite, Falmy," she smiled, her naked body covered in blood. She wiped away two fingers of blood and then sucked on her fingers.

"See you in a little bit, Falmy," she smiled.

"BOOM! HEADSHOT!" she yelled as she triggered the rivet gun.

And put a two foot duralloy rivet through his forehead.

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

The station was clean and brightly lit. He was in the maintenance section, laying on his side. He managed to scrabble to his hooves, looking around. He was in his normal covert action uniform that he wore under the armor. He had his wrist computer which was connected to his implant as well as his pouch of tools.

He remembered boarding the ship with his team. Remembered setting up the atomic charges. He also remembered the sirens that had gone off.

WARNING! MAT-TRANS IN PROGRESS! WARNING! MAT-TRANS IN PROGRESS!

Then everything had gone black. He wasn't sure where his armor was, or his weapons. He remembered setting his weapons down by the atomic charge.

Did he take off his armor?

He wasn't sure. He couldn't remember anything except for the Demand Answers had arrived in system again. The System High Most had determined that the safest course of action was to destroy the vessel. He had hand-selected his team, all beings who were supposed to join the Fourth Wave into Terran Space in order to destabilize Terran worlds.

Half of the plates were off the walls, duralloy and durachrome plates stacked up around the room. Plas packs covered in words that Falmo'o didn't understand. His implant absorbed the words, choked on them slightly, and started to try to put together a lexicon.

He could hear singing, faintly.

Falmo'o picked up a wrench and followed the sound of singing.

A Terran was knelt down, an open floor plate in front of her, working on something that Falmo'o couldn't see. Her yellow hair was cut short, making her look almost bald. She was dressed in an orange jumpsuit and had a metal collar around her neck, a small box on one side of the collar sporting a red light that slowly blinked. She had on plas boots that looked new to Falmo'o's eyes.

"I'll get done when I'm done," the Terran female said without looking up. "Coming down here and bothering me won't get this all hooked up and working any faster."

Falmo'o stopped, staring at the back of her head. There were no scars, no markings, just a number on the back of her neck and some kind of block of close lines with irregular spacing between the lines. The number was at the bottom of the block of lines. She had no cybernetics, no datalink in her temple, just smooth unmarked pinkish skin.

"I can hear you breathing," The Terran female said. "I still want to know, aside from being unthawed, what's in all of this for me? You said Earth is gone. Destroyed. You said that this will help, but I still want to know, what exactly are you offering me?"

Falmo'o couldn't understand a word that she was saying. The language was curt, full of hard stops, glottal clicks, and other strange parts. His implant kept twinging.

The Terran female turned and looked up. Her eyes widened and she gave a slow smile. "Wow, what are you? Holy shit, you're an actual alien, aren't you?"

Falmo'o just stared at her.

"Hey, any chance you can take this off? It hurts my neck," The human female said. She tugged on the collar.

Falmo'o knelt down, examining the collar. It looked like some kind of explosive was built into the ring. There was a radio receiver as well as a narrow frequency jammer. It was fairly simple to undo, Falmo'o had disabled a lot more complicated devices in the field before.

Assisting slave caste could find disaffected beings who could be used as sources of information as well as infiltration and fifth column forces. Falmo'o thought for a moment and figured that the risk was outweighed by long term reward possibility. He quickly disabled the jammer, spoofed the transmitter and reciever, and disabled the explosive before unlocking it.

When the light went green it unlocked and fell in the Terran female's lap.

The female Terran smiled at him. "Oh, you are amazing, alien guy. You're my new best friend."

Falmo'o noticed his lexicon creation program was having an incredibly difficult time working on the language.

She looked back down and then back up. "This is going to be fun, trust me," she said. She picked up the collar, used her tools to open it. "Man, this stuff is really advanced. Still, electronics are electronics and Ohm's Law rules all," she said. She made some adjustments, the light turned red, and she put it back on, smiling widely. "See, that's the thing those guys who thawed me out don't get. I only need one chance. Just one."

Her smile changed, making Falmo'o have to grab a hold of his training to not flinch. It was a fierce, cruel thing. Her eyes glittered and she licked her lips. "I can taste the mat-trans from here."

She shook her head, standing up. "Follow me, new friend."

Falmo'o resisted an urge to bash in the back of her head. He had released the explosive collar and then watched as she'd expertly jimmied it to act as if it was armed without putting her in danger.

I'm just an engineer, her voice whispered in his head. He wondered when she had said those words.

She led him into some kind of main maintenance section, where computer cores were, the sides open to reveal all of the computer systems. The computers were heavily shielded, had coolant lines run to them, and were covered in blinking lights. She led him back, to where the keel plate was in the station.

It was a Combine Star, something Falmo'o was familiar with. Combine logos showed up on some of the fiercest warriors of the Terran Confederacy. The Unified Intelligence Council wasn't sure where Combine space was located or who exactly they were, and it was a high interest datapoint to discover. Finding a Combine facility meant they were near Combine space.

"Look at that, new friend," she said, as if Falmo'o could understand her. "Look at this, how they're acting like this is all their invention. Acting like they discovered it, like they are the ones who discovered this, perfected it."

She turned and walked away. "Ignorant stupid children demanding that I give them my secrets. They don't even promise me anything, don't offer me anything. Just tell me to work. That plate should have the DARPA logo on it, not whatever crap it is they replaced my country with."

She barked a laugh. A harsh cruel laugh. "Probably some New World Order crap from the UN. Surprised they aren't all wearing blue berets and raping villagers."

Falmo'o watched the female move over to one of the computers. He couldn't understand her, but the fury, mocking, and cruelty in her voice was familiar.

The Terran female knelt down and unlocked the lock on the mechanical keyboard quickly with her tools. She started tapping on the keyboard, and Falmo'o watched her type.

No, I don't understand the language, her voice whispered in his brain as the computer cores spun up to full speed, the coolant system kicking in.

The Terran Female turned around, looking at Falmo'o. "Don't be frightened, new friend," she said. She lifted up a standard cutter. "You know, I think you're going to be my favorite."

She set the cutter on the desk and went back to typing rapidly.

The door to the computer core hissed open. Falmo'o moved back slightly, making sure he couldn't be easily seen.

"Dee Taynee, put your hands in the air and get down on your knees," came a male voice. The language Falmo'o could understand. There was the hissing of powered armor and thumps of heavy steps approaching.

Falmo'o looked over. It was two humans in the Combine power armor. Both of them had batons that crackled with electricity as they came in. Falmo'o shifted slightly to conceal himself better.

"Kneel down, hands behind your neck, Dee Taynee," the humans in Combine armor ordered. "Step away from the keyboard."

She ignored them, constantly typing, if anything the speed picking up.

"Dee Taynee, step away from the keyboard," They ordered again, moving forward.

"Make me," the Terran Female stated, still typing.

One reached out with the baton to touch the human female.

The Terran female moved, grabbing up the cutter, spinning under the baton, popping back up to jam the cutter into the seam of the armor, twisting it and pushing it. She pulled it out as the armor suddenly sagged. She grabbed the baton as it fell, turning and sticking it into the face of the other armor. The armor jerked back and the Terran female jammed the blade under the chest plate, at the flexible mid-section, twisting the blade and jamming it all the way to the hilt before yanking it out.

Both armors went down on their knees, slumping forward slightly. The Terran female moved behind them, jamming the knife deep into the back of the neck seal, twisting it, and pulling it free of each one before going back to the keyboard.

Falmo'o stared. He'd seen video, seen recordings of humans in battle, but seeing it first hand was something else.

After a moment she turned and looked at Falmo'o, smiling.

"This will be neat, new friend. See," she tapped a big key on the right side of the main group of keys on the keyboard with the blade of the knife.

"Now, I'm not trapped in here with them," her smile got wider. "They're trapped in here with me."

Falmo'o looked down, saw steam or fog gathering at his feat.

"Quantum foam byproduct. It's harmless," the human female, Dee Taynee, smiled. "Normally, you'd be asleep and would miss this part," her smiled got wider. "We are all made of star dust."

Falmo'o couldn't understand anything the human female had said, but he still managed to scream as his molecules were ripped apart, then those particles were ripped apart, and something sucked him in.