Chapter 861: Those Left Behind

Chapter 861: Those Left Behind

The mountains were wreathed with clouds and fog, the road slick with rain as it curved and twisted across the mountainside. Thunder snarled from the sky, lightning flashed inside the clouds, and now and then large bipedal figures could be seen, in silhouette, struggling with one another, all impossibly huge.

On the two lane twisted highway that lacked guardrails and in many places a shoulder, a lone motorcycle sped along the asphalt path. The wheels sprayed water, the driver was hunched down behind the handlbars, facing the wind and the rain as they skillfully navigated the road.

A side road appeared and the driver turned the bike sharply, sliding slightly as the back wheel skidded on the wet road, but the rider got control of the motorcycle expertly, gunning the engine and speeding down the mountainside. There was an exit sign ahead and the driver gunned the engine.

Just in front of the exit sign, across the road and to either side as far as the eye could see, was a thick band of burning flame, sending up greasy smoke that contorted and often looked like hands or long limbed bipeds with faces made of holes in the black smoke.

The bike roared through the flame, coming out the other side shedding fire.

It crossed the exit markings and everything shattered into pixels.

In the pilot's armored shell protected couch, Francine "Call me Fran or Fanny" Frensky twisted slightly as her brain went from easing down out of the Theta bands until she hit the Delta bands, and from there a crash translation.

Her ship, The Football Headed Boy, was bigger than a Confederate Super-Dreadnaught or even a Max-Monitor. It was a Super-Heavy Eta-Class Freighter. Physically larger than the majority of naval vessels but massing less than a 10th. The biggest weapon the ship packed was a single plasma wave phased motion gun mounted along the spine and four sets of eight light nCv cannon batteries to cover the quadrants. The ship could drop over a hundred missile pods in a wave, and a wave every twelve minutes, but it wasn't like it was a Weber class podnought.

The huge ship burst into realspace with a splash of liquid protomatter that quickly evaporated away, huge sparkles with trails thousands of miles long, and a reverberating "RING A DING DING, BABY!" that echoed off the rings of the gas giants.

Franny gasped as her monitors realigned with realspace. She checked the stellar system's configuration and relaxed when she saw that she had reached her destination.

There was still no superluminal carrier wave reception.

The system was safe.

Maybe.

The sensors inside the ship went live and Franny checked them.

No phasic energy detected in the main ship's sections. She ran a check for Hellspace energy, which took a long moment, and relaxed when nothing came back. The massive cargo pods and holds were taking longer, drones sweeping the areas, sensitive systems looking all over the place.

Prior to a few weeks ago, the holds had featured walls of blank gray of endosteel hyperalloy. Now the walls were painted an even red color. The phasic shielding twinkled in the thin layer of sprayed salt crystals, although some people claimed the phasic shield just made things worse. Which is why Franny ran it in between the hulls.

It took nearly an hour to check the holds. Franny took a quick thirty minute nap, then had a snack.

She kept her command couch's shell closed. It was painted red now, with a thin layer of mylar that was doped with aluminum.

She double then triple checked the command deck.

Swallowing thickly, Franny ordered the shell to reconfigure into a captain's chair and relaxed as the memory metal reconfigured into an ergonomic seat with monitors and holocontrols around it.

The command deck was silent. The robots, VI driven, were leaving their protective cradles where they had stayed during the crash translation. Their brain cases were more heavily armored, more physical shielding on them.

Franny smiled to herself with the restrained power and near-clumsiness the heavily modified robots showed. She had deliberately gone with the crude looks and the jerky movement packages. It looked a little eerie at times, but she was starting to find it comforting to watch the robots move through the red lit command deck.

Her command systems had come back online and the first thing she did was ping for a buoy.

There was one only a few light seconds away.

Cordexen was concerned as he had his translator repeat the words.

He remembered what a Terran was. He had seen one in a powered exoskeleton and even at a distance he had felt the malevolence, wrath, and terrible eagerness for carnage.

Cordexen bent down and picked up the little engineer, heading into the house.

He was still fifty paces from the house when he heard the warbling alarm.

Hurrying, Cordexen ran to the comlink, stopping and staring at it.

The words were all one shade in the red visual light range.

He read them several times, very carefully.

There was an addendum, that the stellar system he lived on was under interdiction, so be wary of any ships attempting to land. Demand proof of life through text or numerical broadcast only.

He stood there, for a long moment, staring at the communications equipment that connected him to the network, from there to the sats, and from there to the superluminal arrays.

He looked down at the engineers.

--take it all apart-- he ordered. --you and your peers make something else out of it. no visual broadcasts until further notice--

The greenie perked up at the news and the others rushed in.

When he went out of the room the combat servitors all asked what was happening, their black carapaces shiny. He told them and many of them wanted to get power rifles and try to fight off the shades.

Cordexen put on an episode of Charlie the Moo Moo, handed out foil bags of juice, puncturing the bags with the straws himself, then gave them all strips of sweet fruit pounded into inch wide and quarter-inch thick strips that had been rolled up.

Seeing the black mantids calming down, he walked out and went over to the tractor.

The nearest 'town' was thirty miles away. That would be a little over two hours.

He got some water canteens from the barn, picked up Corey the Turkey, then got on the tractor and headed for his neighbors to see if the neighbor was willing to go to town.

And hour later his neighbor and he pulled into the 'town', Cordexen driving his tractor, his neighbor driving his beast pulled cart. The other nearby warriors were all discussing what to do.

Cordexen got down off his tractor and pulled his power rifle from the inlaid leather boot it rode it.

"We must do this," Cordexen said. He aimed his rifle at the top of the tower where the repeaters were and pulled the trigger.

The top of the tower exploded.

"Pass the word. Audio only. Radio waves to be audio only. No visuals any longer that were not encoded onto visual mediums that have been checked for phasic residue," Cordexen said.

The other warriors and the sole speaker all nodded.

Cordexen walked back to his tractor, putting the power rifle with its inlaid and carved stock back into the leather boot. He reached over and petting Corey the Turkey, who was alarmed by the power rifle discharge and the explosion of the top of the communication tower.

"It's OK," Cordexen said, petting the fat fowl. "I'll take care of you."