Chapter 231: (Hesstla)

The striker thumped as it set down, Mukstet sighing as he disconnected from the fly-by-wire systems of the graviton hover-striker. The rear port armor was still smoking from a Crawler hit that had blown through his battlescreen and ripped most of the armor off of that section.

--gonna get crew-- 973 told him. --she's in rough shape--

"Good plan," Mukstet said. He tabbed up a piece of stimgum as he got out of the co-pilot's chair. He knew he could take the pilot's chair, he'd been running the craft for two straight days, but he also knew that his perceptions would subtly shift from the different perspective angle and that could spell disaster at this time.

Plus, even though the blood had been largely wiped away, there was still streaks of rusted red where the Terran had died.

Not died and will come back, not from what he had been told.

But dead dead.

Just like everyone else.

He went back through the crew access hallway, noting that his crew had already gotten out. Four greenies of the 'base maintenance team' (made up of greenies who's craft were deadlined) had the panel of the commo station open, pulling parts and replacing them.

That hit to the armor had blown out the commo station hard enough that Kanput had been knocked out by a combination electric shock and some kind of psychic hit.

Foxtrot Niner-Two had been pounded during the day. First rescuing the half-mad Space Force Army Ordnance unit that had been throwing atomic weapons like confetti, then doing close air support for scattered units before picking them up and ferrying them back to the Striker Base.

Two greenies were pulling off the maintenance panel, a remote control wagon full of battlescreen projector cores on the ground, and Mukstet nodded to them as he went by. One waved a wrench then went back to work.

"Mukstet, this is Major Screams, I need you in the TOC," he heard on his radio. He turned, switching from heading to the makeshift mess hall to the jury-rigged Tactical Operations Command, which was just a bunch of computers wired together inside a Terran Heavy Tank drop-cradle that had been recovered.

"On my way, ma'am," Mukstet said. He stopped for a second to bang on the hip of his armor when it sparked and started grinding. Something clicked and he was able to walk normally again.

I wonder what she wants me for? he wondered. He pushed through the EM-strips, then opened the heavy battle-steel door.

Chaos greeted him.

"...a shit, my men are here to fight!" a Terran was yelling at a Rigellian. The Rigellian had a regrowth cast on her arm, attached to the point where her arm had been severed, the exoskeleton part roughly the size of what her arm would eventually be. The empty part was full of nutrigel, quickheal compounds, nanites, and the hair thin fibrous matrix for her body to regenerate the missing arm.

"You are all red-dotted, Sergeant! If you're killed, you don't come back!" the Rigellian yelled back, stressed enough that she instinctively flexed her arm.

"So?" the Terran asked. "Terran Descent Humans make up 80% of Space Force combat personnel. There are still 3.2 billion people on this planet. The Type-IV's have a third wave coming in. We can't retreat, we can't fall back, we can't evacuate," the Terran yelled.

"All the more reason to keep you out of the fight till the SUDS gets fixed," a Treana'ad missing a back leg, an antenna, and a blade-arm said, his regrowth casts clicking. The Treana'ad lit a cigarette. "We're going to need you for the long haul."

"You want to pull 80% of your combat, 60% of your support out of action just because 'oh no, we might get boo-boos' in the hopes that you can restore the SUDS?" another Terran, this one a tank maintenance officer, yelled, his brown face darkening in anger.

The sheer rage in the room made Mukstet's head ache and he clamped his teeth on the stimgum.

"What if it never comes back?" Major Screams asked, trying to keep her voice calm, but Mukstet could see her antenna were curled in response. "What if you get killed and they can't bring you back? What then, Sergeant?"

The Terran Sergeant turned around and Mukstet took a step back.

The humans eyes glowed a bright red.

His biological eyes.

"What if Chrome Saint Peter comes back and parts the Precursor forces with a wave of his cybernetic hand?" the Terran snarled. "If if if! You're in here telling us we can't fight, telling us to hide in hole, and people are dying out there!"

"I know that, Sergeant," Screams said, trying to modulate her tone.

"You have no choice, Major," the Captain in charge only two score Multichannel Transmission Systems Operator/Maintainers snarled, his eyes a dark red as he slammed his hands on the table.

Mukstet saw dark purple arcs of electricity move from his knuckles and up his finger before disappearing halfway up.

Screams looked around her, backing up slightly.

"You can't medically relieve all the Terran Descent Humans from this battle. Most units are engaged out there, there are critical jobs that so far are only being manned by humans," Another officer said.

Mukstet's helmet kept glitching out. The names and ranks of the Terrans fuzzing away. He could feel his back teeth tingle as his helmet cranked up the psychic shielding.

"Excuse me, sirs," Mukstet said, stepping forward.

A half-dozen sets of red eyes turned to stare at him, both Rigellians turned to look, and the two high ranking Mantids shuffled around, nervously moving so their backs weren't to the Terrans.

"Yes?" one, a Terran Staff Sergeant, growled.

"I realize I'm only a PFC with less than two years in Space Force," Mukstet said, moving forward. "But I'm also the ranking striker pilot as well as combat arms."

There were nods. Two of the Terrans were somehow mollified enough that their eyes cooled to amber.

"My people are new to the Confederacy," Mukstet continued. He picked up a stimcone off the table from the box marked "Emergency Only" and bounced it in his armored hand. "Which means that we, like every other species but the Terrans, are not connected to the SUDS array."

That got more nods.

Mukstet turned to Major Screams. "Do you intend, ma'am, on pulling back every soldier and Marine who is not connected to the SUDS network and having them shelter in place till the SUDS network is reconnected?"

Major Screams opened her mouth to answer then closed it, shaking her head.

"So you are telling the Terrans that they are too fragile to enter combat without their SUDS, and asking them to hide behind all of the other species that do not have SUDS because they might get killed?" Mukstet asked, tugging off his gauntlet.

There were growls of agreement from some of the gathered Terrans.

"I know you have undoubtedly known Terrans far longer than I've been alive, Major," Mukstet said, taking the stimcone and pressing the tip of the vein in the back of his hand. A puff of air dilated a pore and let the injector shoot the chemicals directly into his bloodstream.

"I'm sure that they'd be perfectly happy standing around doing nothing but trembling in fear that they may be killed in battle during a war to protect billions of people who do not have the advantage of SUDS," Mukstet said, setting the empty cone down and tugging on his gauntlet.

Major Screams shook her head.

"Just as I'm absolutely sure that Terrans did not engage in warfare before the invention of SUDS. I'm sure they never risked their lives or their body in any risky endeavor until they were able to rely on SUDS to keep them from dying," Mukstet said. He shrugged as he activated the mag-seal on his wrist and flexed his fingers.

The Terran's eyes had all cooled to amber.

"Would you order my men and I, the striker pilots of Second Telkan Marines, to stand down because we might be permanently killed?" Mukstet asked, querying his implant quickly for a term search. It pinged almost immediately, meaning the information had been examined enough times and recently enough it was in Fast-RAM.

"No, private, I wouldn't," Major Screams said. She could think more clearly, the sheer rage filling the TOC having cooled to a light simmering static.

"I realize you're following doctrine," Mukstet said. "The Confederate Code of Military Justice states that red-dotted troops may not be forced into action."

"That's right, private," Screams said softly.

"I realize it says damage or enemy action, and the latter is what we are seeing," Mukstet said. Screams and the Terrans and even the Treana'ad all nodded. The Rigellians were looking thoughtful. "However, while this may cover 'mass troop failures', it does not appear to cover an entire theater of operations."

"No, it doesn't," Screams said. "However, it does set precedence."

Mukstet shook his head, moving over and sitting down on a crate that had previously held a quantum communications cryptographic array. "Is there any precedent for an entire theater of operation where victory or defeat means life or death for several billion people?"

"No," a Terran said. "Which is why we have to take the fight to the Crawlers."

Mukstet nodded. "And if you are deadlined or medically relieved of duty, what will that tell every non-SUDS'd trooper? That they aren't worth a Terran's life?"

Several of the Terran's eyes began to heat up from cool amber to dark red.

"Are you going to tell the Terrans that their lives are worth more than my life or the lives of my men, Major?" Mukstet asked mildly.

"No," Major Screams relented. She heaved a sigh. "Get back to work. All of you."

The Terrans all nodded, leaving the tent, their eyes cooling back to amber. The Rigellians and the Treana'ad followed, leaving Mukstet alone with Major Screams. It was silent for a moment and the heaviness slowly dissipated like a smoke round exposed to a cool breeze. Mukstet felt his psychic shielding large release, the tingling and ache from his back teeth easing away. He reached up to his neck and released the neck catches before taking off his helmet.

Major Screams let out a long breath. "Is your race psychically sensitive?"

Mukstet nodded, wiping his brow and flicking his ears to help dry them. "Low level, but we are."

"Could you feel that?" She asked, slowly cleaning her antenna with the specially grown hairs of her elbow.

"Feel it? I could see it. Their eyes were all glowing red or amber like they were warborgs," Mukstet said, giving a rough chuckle.

"I've never seen that before. Everyone all assumes the documentation from the Mantid-Terran Holocaust was warborg eyes, or cybernetics designed to show those colors," the Major said. She delicately moved over to a makeshift stool and sat down, sighing as the stool took her abdomen's weight. "Now I know different."

"So that isn't a common thing? I saw it during the Telkan Biowar, toward the end, when the Enraged Ones landed," Mukstet said. He rubbed his face for a moment with a rag that was sitting on top of a box of mag-ac battle rifles. He set the rag aside and continued. "Not just the Enraged Ones, some of the Space Force troops had their eyes doing that."

"They did?" Screams said. She made a humming noise, an unconscious vocalization of heavy thinking, and the lights on her datalink lit up. "Oh. Oh no. Oh no no no."

"What?" Mukstet asked.

"Oh, ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of the time it wouldn't matter," Major Screams said. She made a tossing motion at the holotank and a translucent image of a human brain appeared with the cyberware in wireframe. She moved up and tapped various parts. "Here's the SUDS linkage, where it makes synapse and electrical charge recordings before sending the data here, then here to the quantum communication linkage."

Mukstet realized she was really dumbing down everything but nodded along anyway, grateful for the easy to understand concepts.

She tapped another section. "Space Force members, as well as a lot of Terrans who interact frequently with other species in stressful situations, have this cyberware and this piece of too. One's a phasic energy harmonic disruptor and this one is standard intracranial psychic shielding."

"Terrans require psychic shielding to protect them from psychically active species?" Mukstet asked. He frowned. "Huh."

Major Screams shook her head. "No, no. See, unlike your helmet or your psychic barrier cybernetics, it isn't designed to provide an external bulwark. Instead, it's designed to provide internal shielding."

She sighed and moved around the holotank. "For someone like me, the entire world is full of soft malleable clay with a few pebbles in it and rocks here and there."

"Terran are the rocks," Mukstet guessed.

"No. Rigellians are rocks. Now, imagine in that soft clay are straight razors, surgical scalpels, unexploded grenades, chunks of razor sharp glass," the Major said. "Meaning that you'd be running your fingers through the clay, enjoying the feel of it, once in a while rolling the pebbles in your fingers to feel their texture, and bam! You hit a wadded up razor that slashes your fingers to the bone. That's Terrans."

"Oh," Mukstet said, wondering where this was going.

"The internal shielding prevents some human who's annoyed at the weather from wandering by and hurting someone who is psychically sensitive," the Major said.

"All right."

She pointed out several pieces of linkage then waved her hand twice more, bringing up two more images. She pointed at the first one. "This is a diagnostic pattern. Note there's no bioelectric movement, no synapse firing or axion particle charge changes."

"OK."

She pointed at another one that kept getting lit up by blooming sparkles and electricity through the cybernetic linkages. "This one is an active Terran brain with everything working correctly engaged in modern combat against an equally capable force."

Mukstet just nodded as she pointed at the third one. Sections of the cyberware were dark, or fired strangely compared to the other two.

"This one is from Sergeant Callups, who right now is out there trying to get the communications systems working," Screams said. She pointed with her bladearm. "The SUDS system is offline, so it's dark. Here's the problem," she pointed at the other dark section. "This is the psychic suppression system and the phasic energy harmonic disruptor," she turned and looked at Mukstet. "They're both offline. Some type of interaction with the SUDS as well as Terran's brains and whatever is affecting the axion and quantum particle systems."

"Meaning they aren't shielded and you aren't protected from them," Mukstet said, everything suddenly gelling together.

"Oh, from what I've seen, it's worse than that," Screams said.

Mukstet frowned. "How?"

"They're affecting each other."

Mukstet thought about it. That just meant they'd be more like they were before they got SUDS. Part of him estimated that they'd be more careful in combat, more careful throwing atomic and nuclear weapons around, be careful to keep themselves out of situations where they'd get killed.

But he knew they wouldn't.

His implant pinged and he held up the two fingered sign that he was getting an incoming message. Major Screams just nodded, going back to looking at the displays.

"Mukstet here, go ahead," he said.

"Wing Three is taking off, Wing Two is landing so they can reload and go on standby," Private Relpuk said. "Wing-Two caught some Crawler action, enough they've got dents and craters all over the warsteel armor."

That made Mukstet frown. "Don't repair the one with the worst damage. Tell the greenies to back off from it."

"Roger. Relpuk out."

"Mukstet out."

He turned and cleared his throat to get the Major's attention.

"Yes, PFC?" she asked mildly, trying to push away the annoyance at how the readings from Sergeant Callups were starting to look.

"Do you have anything that can register and measure psychic residue? Like you could use it to tell if someone had been under psychic attack and it had damaged them?" he asked.

She frowned. "Not here. Hang one," she moved over to the creation engine, punched up the template, and waited. Ten seconds later the nano-forge pinged and she picked it up. "Here. It's an old design but still in the template banks now that we've got the Enraged Ones running around."

She handed it to Mukstet, who looked at it. Looked pretty easy. Handle, LED marked bars on the side that would extend the higher the levels were, some analog dials on it labeled to measure intensity.

"Warsteel requires wrath to forge, right? Which is why only Burning Nano-Forges can create items from it, correct?" He asked. Major Screams nodded both times. "The psychic rage output by the Enraged Ones is what makes their weapons burn red hot, correct?"

"Yes, private. Why?" she asked, starting to be intriqued.

"And Mantid bladearms can scratch, score, even tear through thin enough warsteel, correct?:

Screams nodded again. "Yes."

"All right. I'm going to tie this thing to Holotank Delta so you can see my readings. I'm going to go out and check out a damaged striker with this," Mukstet said.

He left the tent, walking out into the whirling confusion of the striker base. Here a mechanic was replacing the motor on a powered lift exoskeleton. There a medic was checking the injuries of a Hesstlin civilian. Over there sat a dozen Terrans all eating ration packs and talking. Over here a Terran was digging to lay cable from the communications systems to the massive antenna array the commo guys had put up.

The strikers were ahead and he jogged up. Striker Foxtrot-Niner-Fifteen was badly damaged, the armor cratered and in some places penetrated to the warsteel airframe below. He waved over one of the Treana'ad mechanics who was still in full armor.

"I need you to tell me if you can detect what kind of jacketing was on these armor penetrating rounds," Mukstet said. "Forward the combat logs for this ship's systems to me also."

The Treana'ad nodded, exhaling smoke through his legs as he opened his kit up and pulled a sampler out.

Mukstet scanned the craters and the penetrations, watching at the detector startled warbling and screeching, the arms extending all the way out and the green lights flickering from base to tip repeatedly.

"Must have been laser weapons, sir, I'm not finding any residue," the Treana'ad said.

"Thank you. Forward me the data please," Mukstet said, heading for the TOC again. Less than two steps and his datalink pinged to let him know he had the data.

When he entered 3.25 and 3.54 were both examining the contents of the table, leaned forward and examining it closely while tapping rapidly with the tips of their bladearms on the small dataslates they held in their hands. Mukstet moved over to Major Screams and tossed the data from both his scanner and the Treana'ad technician's scanner.

"You know what it's saying, don't you?" Screams accused.

Mukstet nodded. "I had my suspicions, this just confirms it."

Screams shuffled around the holotank to get a better angle, a habit that Mukstet had noticed. She did that rather than spin the hologram.

"No residue in the impacts. Cratering, striation, and spalling points at a physical kinetic round hitting, not high energy," she looked at Mukstet.

"Look at the logs, specifically, look at when the battlescreen failed," Mukstet said. He didn't need to check, he'd realized it subconsciously.

"Battlescreen failed..." Screams mused. "Then the psychic shielding began taking damage like the battlescreen. When it failed is when the airframe and the armor began registering impacts."

She looked up. "You know what this means?"

Mukstet nodded. "The enemy is using psychically enhanced munitions," he tapped his finger on the holotank and looked slowly over the data. "Has anyone else ever used weapons like that?"

Screams shook her head. "No."

"Well, the Terrans have and do, just look at the Enraged Ones," Mukstet said slowly, thinking back to his time during Second Telkan.

"Oh."

"And look at Lieutenant Vuxten."

His implant pinged. The commo guys were in contact with a Terran logistics company that was in need of close air support.

"I have to go, ma'am," he said, nodding to her. He put his fingers on his implant and spoke out loud instead of subvocalizing. "Wing One, this is Mukstet. Prepare for combat operations."

Major Screams at Ta'Xet stared at the data.

She could smell the air of the Homeworld and felt cold icy fingers run down her back.