Chapter 742: The Inheritor's War

Chapter 742: The Inheritor's War

"There are many races that have physical adaptability. From the ability to thicken their skin to adapt to high gravity to even being able to adapt as a living organism to their environment within days, months, weeks, years. The ability to adapt to their environment via tool use and protective equipment creation is a standard with most races.

"Then what, you may ask, gives the Terran Descent Human the reputation for being one of the most, if not the premiere, adaptive sentient organism we know of?

"No, looking to your anatomy and biology textbooks won't help you. True, they have a three layer epidermis measured in millimeters with the ability to thicken rapidly. Yes, they have excellent heat retention and dispersal biological systems.Rêạd new chapters at novelhall.com

"No, it isn't their cybernetics, symbiotes, or genetic engineering.

"Ah, now you're looking at your psychology textbook.

"Yes, there it is.

"You see, the Terran Descent Human advantage for environmental adaptation is psychological. Properly motivated, a TDH can endure almost any suffering up to the point that other species would die of traumatic physiological damage.

"Terran Descent Humanity has two sayings that are applicable to this study module.

"Life is pain.

"Something gain without suffering is worthless.

"Now, turn the page to "Terran Descent Humanity, cultural and group self-delusion". - Introduction to Intermediate Terran Descent Humanity Studies, New Rigel University of Applied Knowledge.

Commander Jane Marcus Prastini strode across the battlefield in her Mobile Armored Fabrication Combat Unit, the footsteps of the massive two hundred and fifty meter mechanized combat robot making the ground shudder.

Square cubed died screaming with the invention of graviton systems, she thought to herself.

Before her there were multiple Atrekna mobile command globes fleeing from her forces.

One took a missile to the bottom and there was the snap of phasic energy as the crystal anti-grav system gave out.

The command globe fell to the ground and Commander Jane popped it twice with a munition she'd come up with during the fight.

A suspension gel that converted to thick hazy vapor upon exposure to atmosphere. That was a standard, but it had required a little bit of template tweaking and going through the new updates before she found it.

A crystal developed on Smokey Cone itself.

She had empowered it with a standard particle generator once the crystal was fabricated and ground into microscopic grains.

The globe was hit by two of the munitions and suddenly vanished in a cloud of smoke laced with suspension fluid. The cloud twinkled and glowed gold as the chronotrons embedded in the crystal suspended in the mist popped in and out of existence.

The Atrekna in the globe screamed. Two grabbed onto each other as the massive fingers of the lemur warmek grabbed the globe and lifted it up.

TOTAL WAR AUTHORIZATION flashed in Commander Jane Marcus Prastini's vision block, in the upper right corner, just past her peripheral vision.

She aimed the scanner/deconstructor on the back of her mek's massive hand at the globe, ignoring the screaming Atrekna.

She tore apart the globe, scanning it at a submolecular level, scanning the particles that made up the parts of the atoms. Cateloguing and scanning the energy flows and atomic particle spins.

The Atrekna screamed as they were torn apart over the course of several seconds.

Jane didn't care much. The suffering of the Atrekna didn't bother her at all.

The whole time she kept moving forward, following the Atrekna that were fleeing what was left of the field of battle.

She knew they'd made a mistake.

They had given her 154 hours to prepare and her battlefield control had grown exponentially after hour 38 when she had managed to get her Master System Control Unit repaired.

By the time they had landed the only temporally unsecure areas were the ones she had chosen and either mined or surrounded with autonomous weapon systems armed with temporal reflex triggers and temporal lensing targeting systems.

Her systems beeped as it corrected a minor flaw in the last few scannings.

If she wanted to, she could build a cloned Atrekna and load it with Born Whole memories now.

She smiled as she typed with one hand, the other hand jamming a Countess Crew Strawberry and Mantis Shrimp fruit pie into her mouth, letting the robot's automatic systems follow the Atrekna.

She brought up some of the older templates, moving a few things around.

Remove the A4-N0-LD biological camouflage system, replace it with Atrekna biological systems, use the last fifty or so Atrekna she'd ripped apart while scanning them to randomize features. There wasn't much difference between them that was easily noticeable, but phasically there were a lot of differences and the computer had identified nearly thirty thousand variables in their appearance, sweat and pheromone signal systems, and phasic aura.

She looked it over and smiled, moving it to a tissue press system as she tossed the paper wrapper into the disposal and grabbed a can of Bingo Cola out of the fridge without looking.

She'd use the basic hyperalloy endoskeleton chassis.

Rather than use the front of the Atrekna skull she modified the tissue press and the machine fabrication unit to put something else hidden behind fat deposits to conceal it.

She'd upload it to the Autonomous Combat Unit master system as soon as she set up a hyperlink so she could log her reports.

That made her sigh and sag. She knew she forgot something.

She tabbed up a micro-ansible as well as the rocket systems to lift it out of orbit on countergrav and graviton drive systems. It wouldn't have great reach, but it would be able to hit the hypercom wave if it had reached this deep into Lanky territory.

She kept stomping forward, the mechs and supporting units behind her slaughtering the Dwellerspawn that the Atrekna threw at her. She could sense their panic, their knowledge that they were on the receiving end of the ass kicking for a change was throwing them into confusion.

Their attempts at defense were sporadic at best.

There was only a single t-shift area left and every Atrekna on the planet was heading straight toward it.

She checked her sat-recon, the micro-sats delivering crystal clear images. She shifted through the phasic scans, the chrono scans, and every other type of scan she had been able to tab up.

Except a drone swarm was coming in, broadcasting a hologram of a female lemur's face.

"YOU THOUGHT THE PLANET WAS UNDEFENDED!" the laughing lemur's voice boomed across the battlefield even as the point defense started lashing the drones of the swarm.

"BUT IT WAS DEFENDED BY ME, COMMANDER JANE MARCUS PRASTINI!" the voice laughed.

The Atrekna had a moment to feel despair.

The charges buried under the ground of the t-shift zone at the depth of two hundred meters detonated.

"Confederate Heavy Atomic Demolition Mine - 1.5 Megaton Range - One Each"

-----

Everything contracted and expanded at the same time.

Everything turned inside out and upside down.

Dozens, scores, hundreds of herself spanned out in every direction, all of them different based on choices made in their lives, in history, in the actions of others.

Commander Jane Marcus Prastini grabbed the 'oh-shit' bars on either side of her command cradle and gritted her teeth on the soft plastic of the mouth guard.

She lived her life a thousand times, each time with different decisions leading to wildly different outcomes.

Finally it was over and the warmek exited the gate.

She got its arms up, landing on her hands, elbows, and knees. Struts screamed and alarms howled, but the heavy skeletal structure held.

The graviton systems spun up and the screens cleared as Jane moved the mech, and her own body, to the recovery position. Jane sliding out of the couch and onto the decking in front of her.

Knee down, fist down, one fist up, head bowed. Breath deep to the count of ten.

There wasn't any incoming fire.

She stood up, sitting back down in the command couch, and activated the systems, the controls popping out of the surfaces they'd recessed into.

Survey, she thought.

Reddish-purple sun, terminal giant phase.

Clear sky, light the night sky.

O2 levels a point low. Nitrogen three points up. CO2 high. CO low. More argon than normal.

Cool outside.

Thick psuedo-fungal growth preferred by the Atrekna.

She ordered the warmek's master computer to run a physics check as she slowly turned and looked at everything.

She could see the gate off in the distance. There was an energy bridge, or perhaps a temporal-energy conduit line. It was shattered above her but the two ends were rapidly reaching for each other.

Mountains. Check.

The physics check came back good and the computer ID'd where she was as the primary dimension with an accuracy of 80%.

There was a large Ohm Class Dwellerspawn nearby, idly munching on the thick green and purple mat of fungus that covered the ground that was shot through with green and red veins.

Jane walked slowly over to it, watching her computers running error checks and template CRC checks.

The Ohm Class just stood there as Jane moved next to it, the back of the massive creature coming up to her chest.

She patted the top of it even as she brought up the technical data she'd shared with the Farm Yard Guard. A pheromone dusting that would calm it down when combined with flashbangs.

It showed no interest in anything besides munching on the moss and plants.

The computer beeped, telling her that it had ID'd where she was.

High 'up' in the galactic arm spur, Confederate end (aka anti-coreward) of the Long Dark, roughly twenty light years from the edge of the Long Dark.

She looked around slowly again, then started launching stealth drones even as she knelt down next to the big Ohm Class Dwellerspawn.

Her fabricator beeped and Jane activated the system, covering her mech with a firm light hologram.

Now there were two Ohm Class Dwellerspawn contently munching on the thick moss. The moss where she had landed after the conduit had shattered/failed was already regrowing, covering the furrows she dug in the sand.

Let's see what kind of fight this is going to be, she thought to herself as she reached for the freezer, watching the conduit overhead.

Her smile grew wide as she saw a half-dozen combat globes, all of them damaged slightly, whip by overhead inside the conduit. She estimated their speed at Mach-12. The globes of the ones she had faced had all been transparent with a slight gold sheen and a bluish tint at the top. These were silver with an orange tint at the top.

They passed right over her.

Her smile grew even wider.

Improvise.

Adapt.

Overcome.

Lucy, I'm home... she thought.