Date Point: 14y4d AV
Camp Farthrow, Lavmuy, Gao
Regaari
It was an inspiring speech. Regaari should have felt inspired. He should have been raring to get his teeth into the biodrones with the rest of them. He should have been…
He wasn’t even sure. The last few days had numbed him to the point where he was no longer entirely sure what emotions he should be feeling, let alone what he was actually feeling. He was floating somewhere above himself, watching his body work without him. Not inattentively—in fact, he was quite sure he was performing his duties with the greatest focus and precision of his life—but…removed.
As though he was waiting for something.
The chance to let go, maybe. Of whatever it was that was stopping reality from sinking in. There was a wall up in his mind, keeping him from quite grasping just what he’d personally lost to this war, and when it inevitably came down…
Until the right moment arrived, he would hold it up. Even if it destroyed him, he’d hold it up because failing to do so would mean losing even more.
But losing Ayma had been beyond hard enough. Losing Daar, his ‘most bestest’ friend and Cousin now imprisoned forever behind the title of Great Father…How much more was there to lose?
Not much. Just all of Gao.
He retreated to the HEAT’s little enclave in the camp, working through the mental exercises he’d first learned as a Whitecrest associate, long before he’d even finished growing: Know one’s own mind, and compensate for it. As a natural pessimist, Regaari knew his inclination was to see the worst in every scenario. He was the kind of ‘Crest who saw more darkness than light. Were things brighter than they first appeared?
It was difficult to see how. The little silver thread of hope he was able to tease out of it all was that Daar would still need close advisors and confidants. Probably.
But that wasn’t the same thing at all.
Warhorse and the rest of the HEAT were performing suit maintenance when he reached them. They had all stripped down to their skin to air out properly, each with new undersuits nearby that were still sealed in their airtight packaging. Unfortunately, those marvels of primitive-yet-sophisticated engineering were one-time wear, custom made for each operator, and so horrendously expensive that there was a powerful motivation to wear them as long as possible.
Which meant they had all spent the last several days marinating in themselves. Regaari was used to the nasal assault by now but he did appreciate the little things they did out of consideration, like doing their stripdown outdoors and the scented candle they lit in the middle of their circle.
It was slow going, both airing themselves out and cleaning, inspecting, and resealing their suits. The all knew the Mass intimately of course, but maintaining them really wasn’t their job. Without the techs, their tools and their expertise, an EV-MASS could take hours to properly maintain.
Sikes was sharing an old story with Parata, Newman and Butler that the “FNGs” hadn’t heard yet. Not that the trio were really ‘new’ to the team any longer, but there was a lot they hadn’t been there for.
“…so ‘Horse an’ ‘Base book it back down to him and the old man just waves ‘em off, right? Hobbles the last two hundred yards with his calf muscle fuckin’ near torn in two. Hard. Core.”
There was appreciative nodding.
Adam sat on a pile of sandbags with his suit in a state of complete disassembly all around him, as unselfconsciously free and pungent as Regaari had ever smelled. “Still about the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen him do,” he opined. “That really shoulda needed surgery even with Crude.”
“Still fuckin’ hardcore,” Firth chimed in.
“Well, yeah! But even I know when to stop,” Adam pointed out. “…Though…Still ain’t as dumb as the time Daar maxed out his time trials. That one was…”
“Inspiring.” Regaari coiled himself up on the sandbags next to him. There was an immediate nasal note of concern on the air.
“Good speech, ‘Dex?”
“It was rousing,” Regaari replied, curling up in a way that a human would have found to be spine-stretching agony but which was a perfectly comfortable posture for a Gaoian trying to relax. “They went into that hangar stinking of skepticism and with a general air of ‘let’s get this over with’—”
“Sounds about right,” Akiyama muttered.
“…and came out of it motivated,” Regaari finished. “He wears his new title a little too well.”
Adam gave him a scratch between the shoulder blades, in the exact spot where a Gaoian just couldn’t reach properly. “You okay, bruh?”
“…For now.”
There was a general air of concern among the humans, but they knew him well enough by now to trust him to handle his baggage. They resumed their work, and pretty soon Blaczynski was relating the story of the guy who tried to stab Adam in a bar.
“…What was it you said? Somethin’ about steppin’ on people?”
Adam shrugged as he reattached the life support pack. “I don’t even remember, bro,” he replied.
“You said you’d literally scraped bigger men than him off ‘yer boot,” Firth chuckled darkly. “Gentled the idjit up right quick.”
Rebar piled on. “Especially since that was a true statement.” He shook his head, “Dumb motherfucker managed to pick a fight with the most dangerous man in the galaxy.”
“Mhmm.” Not even Firth argued the point and everyone nodded along.
“Eh, he was just a drunk idiot.” Warhorse was never comfortable boasting about his skill as a warrior. He was, however, perfectly happy bragging about his other violently brutal abilities, like his absurd strength. “He wasn’t as stupid as the guy who broke his fist on my abs when he tried to gut punch me, though! I mean—heads up. LT’s comin’.”
The men made to stand up but Costello waved them all down. “Keep working. The old man needs an update on suit maintenance. How ready are we?”
Rebar fielded the query. “I figure we can be suited up in…hmm…two hours. We got somewhere to be, LT?”
“Yeah.” Costello aimed a finger skywards, significantly. “…Briefing’s at eleven-hundred for immediate suit-up after. Dexter, round up your Brothers. Vacuum combat is likely, so it’s a purely gauss loadout.”
Adam looked behind him and towards the containerized shower that had just been installed; the line to use it coiled around the block twice as everyone tried to complete their mandatory hygiene before deployment. He sighed and instead reached for his pack, dug through it for a moment, retrieved a package of wet-naps and started giving himself a field-expedient wipe-down.
“I’m gonna be itchy as hell by the time we get back I bet.”
“Fuck that,” Rebar growled. He put on his best unstoppable confident stroll as he headed in that direction to clear the showers out for them. “You’re gettin’ a shower. We all are.”
Abbott left his NCOIC to handle the dominance display and returned his attention to his remaining men. “On that note, don’t make a big scene if you can but all of you take care of everything you gotta get done. This is gonna be an important mission.”
Regaari unwound off the sandbags, duck-nodded respectfully, and put himself to work. By Costello’s standards, that was a grim warning—the lieutenant was usually so quietly assured and confident as to suggest that there was not really any such thing as danger.
Whatever they were about to hit, it had to be big. Something on a scale they hadn’t seen since operation NOVA HOUND and the day Regaari had first met the HEAT…And Regaari remembered perfectly well how that had turned out.
He flexed his mechanical paw, and went to find Faarek. There was a lot to get done, and not much time to do it.
Date Point: 14y4d AV
Three Valleys, Planet Gao
Second Lieutenant Martina Kovač
Gao had five moons.
Four of them barely qualified for the word. They were pock-marked and irregular lumps of rock with all the lunar charm of a bag of potatoes, and their only contribution to the night sky was to be a set of four tiny points of light that were never in exactly the same place twice in the same year.
The fifth was about a third smaller than Earth’s own moon but substantially closer. Whereas Luna could be obscured by a person’s little fingernail at arm’s length, the largest moon of Gao required a thumb.
It looked gargantuan, and compared to Cimbrean’s twin, half-sized moons locked in their permanent ballet around a shared center of gravity it was positively Jovian.
…That made three night skies on three different worlds that Marty had taken the time to appreciate. Perhaps one day she’d get to visit Akyawentuo, or Lucent, or Nightmare, and appreciate their moons while a cold wind stung her cheeks and made her grateful for the warm mug of hot chocolate in her hands.
Moon tours. Sounded like an idea.
The farm was practically unrecognizable. For a start, two convoys from the escape pods had arrived, doubling their personnel and introducing the complication of looking after the wounded.
There were four seriously wounded. Three were burn victims, and Marty could completely relate to their predicament. One was unlikely to ever walk again, considering how badly the flaming deck had roasted his feet through his boots. One had withdrawn quietly into himself to contemplate his new blindness from where a gout of superheated air had played across his eyeballs. One was dying. Slowly. He was mostly unconscious, and chewing through a lot of their anaesthetic.
The fourth was Commander McDaniel, and it was a fucking miracle she was still alive.
The able-bodied men from the convoy—many of whom were sporting minor burns and cuts of their own—had all pitched in alongside the Gaoians, and there were a lot of Gaoians. Yeego had been desperate to find some constructive work for his new Clan of the Clanless to do, and between them they’d transformed the farm and built on what the SOR technicians had already achieved. A four foot trench had gone in around the perimeter, dug out by a Clanless work gang who’d worked to a lone drum and voice to time themselves as they clawed each section out of the earth and built the spoil up outside for an embankment.
Wilde had tutored them in installing a firestep, parapet, elbow rest and ammunition shelf, part of the barn had been cannibalized to make duckboards, and overall it looked straight out of the history books…but Rees and Hodder had done a patrol outside the perimeter and reported that it was no longer possible to see into the compound from the fields.
Between that and the camo netting strung between the buildings, it was actually something resembling safe to go outside again, just for a few minutes to appreciate the beauty of a clear alien sky and the feeling of a glacial wind turning her nose and cheeks red in the dark.
“LT.”
Marty turned. One of the marines from the second convoy—Lance-Corporal Creed—was a medic, and she’d made him their doctor. He looked even more frazzled than she felt, and she honestly couldn’t recall when she’d last strung together more than three hours of sleep.
“News?” she asked.
Creed shook his head. “No change.”
“God. Every five minutes I keep expecting you to tell me we’ve lost McDaniel.”
“That makes two of us,” Creed admitted.
Marty made a point not to sigh. McDaniel’s continued survival was a tiny ray of stupid light in the middle of all this. A stupid and totally irrational one—even if the XO did wake up, there was no way she’d be mentally capable of taking over. She could remember how bad Adam’s dad had been, and he’d woken up by himself after a minute or two unconscious.
For all she knew, the Commander was a permanent vegetable now. But she could hope.
“Supplies?” she asked.
“Three days,” Creed said. “Then we run out of lollipops for Richards. Burn bandages, we’ve got enough for a week. Oh yeah! Reminds me.” He handed her a small box. “Paracetamol.”
Marty took it gratefully. “Thanks. How did you know?” Her constant low-grade headache wasn’t debilitating, but she was definitely looking forward to some respite from it.
“My missus gets headaches all the time,” Creed smiled. “I know.”
“You’re married?”
“Yup. Two kids, age three and two. You?”
“Not yet. Engaged. But I am definitely having kids when I get out of this.”
Creed chuckled. “Give it a couple months, you might wish to be back here,” he warned, straightened up and turned away. “I’ll keep you posted if anything changes,” he promised. “Ma’am.”
Marty nodded to him, and was left alone with her thoughts again, for nowhere near long enough. She was interrupted by Yeego.
Something about the Gaoian landlord said “slimeball” to her, but right now being picky was probably a good way to get dead. His Clanless had certainly made all the difference in turning their farm into something that looked like a springboard for real military action in the area…But his mannerisms grated at her—the way he groomed his whiskers as he approached, the too-straight, over-upright posture that spoke of a sense of tremendous self-importance. His quick, calculating, darting glance that took in everything around him and paid whatever was actually in front of him only the bare minimum of attention.
He was everything a Whitecrest or Stoneback wasn’t.
“Lieutenant.” He sniffed the air as he sidled up. “It smells of pain in there.”
“What can I do for you, Yeego?” Marty asked, carefully refraining from a reply as she sipped her hot chocolate.
“The last of the work is complete,” he said smoothly. “My Brothers are resting for now, but they’ll need something else to oc cupy them shortly.”
At least his mind was on the job, wherever else it might also be.
“Our food supply would be the next pressing concern,” Marty told him.
“Yes. Your people eat a lot. One of your ration packs would feed a Gaoian for several days.”
“Any ideas? I know this place was farming fodder for livestock, so where’s the livestock?”
“At this time of year, the Naxas graze up in the highlands,” Yeego pointed toward one of the low, rolling, purple mountains that framed the wide valley their farm was in. “It’s the wrong time of year to slaughter them, though.”
“How so?”
“Each herd is one male and many females, the lucky fuckers,” Yeego chittered. He caught Marty’s arched eyebrow and reined it in. “…All the females will be pregnant now. They carry their young through the winter, give birth in the new year.”
“Calving season, huh?”
“If that’s the human word for it,” Yeego made the curious variant of a duck-nod that was the Gaoian equivalent of a conceding shrug. “I suppose we could round them up and eat, but slaughtering a pregnant Naxas is…”
“Unethical,” Marty finished for him.
Yeego duck-nodded. “Also bad practice. You want the next generation to replace the one you just ate. I intend to survive this war, Lieutenant. I want there to be Naxas to eat next year.”
“So where can we get food? Nava?”
Yeego chittered again. “There isn’t a Nava farm anywhere nearby. Too cold for them.”
Marty frowned at him. “I’m hearing a lot of obstacles but no solutions, Yeego…” she pointed out, warningly.
Yeego groomed his whiskers again, scratched at an ear, and cleared his throat before lowering his voice and ducking closer. “Lieutenant…I aligned with you because I thought you had the solutions,” he confided. “Four hundred years ago, a farming community like ours would have been producing seasonal food all year round. Now, thanks to Clan Goldpaw and their global trade network, we’re just as dependent on imports as anywhere else. We could afford to be.”
There was a familiar story. How many people would starve on Earth if there was a total failure of logistics like they’d seen on Gao? Hell, there were whole planets in the Dominion which imported their food. Wealthy developed civilizations meant access to all kinds of food all year round thanks to the old miracles of refrigerated containers and global shipping.
…Which was nice, but in a crisis like this there needed to be seasonal crops growing and cured meats hanging in the stockpiles. Rip the rug of global distribution out from under a developed economy, and this was the result.
“We do have solutions,” Marty assured him aloud. “But until our line of supply is established, I have to assume that it won’t be established and that we need to be self-sufficient. I am not going to starve here because I was too optimistic and held out for supplies that never came. Okay? If we have to eat the Naxas now to avoid starving now, then we’ll do it and worry about the long-term with full bellies.”
She straightened up. “Fortunately, that isn’t necessary yet. Our lifeboats carry enough food to support their occupants for weeks, and Gaoians don’t eat much. But if you can’t think of a solution then you need to find the people among your ‘Brothers’ who do have a solution and send them my way.”
Yeego flinched, just a little. Maybe she’d stung him, maybe he was just responding as most Gaoians did to an irritated deathworlder. Either way, he duck-nodded eagerly and straightened up.
“I will ask my Brothers,” he said clearly, stepped back, duck-bowed respectfully and made himself scarce.
Marty let out a long breath once he was gone and chased down a couple of Creed’s painkillers with the last of her hot chocolate before turning back indoors. She had an opportunity to sleep.
Somehow, she knew she wasn’t going to.
Date Point: 14y4d AV
Farthrow Facility, Lavmuy, Planet Gao
Lt. Col. Owen “Stainless” Powell
“The target is a facility called Dark Eye.”
Mission prep for the HEAT was weirdly delicate. The suits did not tolerate muck, dirt or grit inside them, the undersuit could take a little foreign body and turn it into a scratched-raw bleeding hole in a man’s leg. Which meant that suit-up had to be done in the most sterile conditions available.
Meanwhile, mission prep ideally involved carbing up, caffeinating, defecating, slamming a dose of Crue-D, and shaving. The HEAT mohawk was kind of iconic by now—the only reason Powell didn’t wear one himself was that his own hairline now started somewhere behind his ears. But the Lads, Costello included, were deadly serious about the step of getting their hair helmet-ready. It was like putting on woad, a ritual to focus the mind.
Once they were safely in the undersuit without any outside contaminants in there with them—a process that the techs made look like a ballet, and the operators themselves made look more like the same ballet conducted by a herd of rhinos—they were staying there until the job was done.
Powell sorely wished he could suit up with them again. If Dark Eye had been more remote and out of contact, he might have been able to justify his personal involvement, but as it was the target was well inside their sphere of communications. He wasn’t going to be out of the loop, and so there was no reason for him to present.
Still. This one was going to be tough, and sending them into it without him gnawed at everything he’d ever prided himself on. God only knew how Daar felt—since entering the room to observe the briefing, the newly-minted Great Father hadn’t said more than three words together.
The equally newly-minted Champion Goruu called up the schematic on a Gaoian tablet and let the HEAT take a good look at it. At first, they seemed to be looking at a potato the size of a car, but within seconds the view pulled in sharply and highlighted an arrangement of more regular shapes on the potato’s surface.
“You may not be aware, but Gao has five moons,” he explained. “This is the smallest, Shasu. It’s little more than a captive asteroid and it’s on a slow re-entry orbit—About two million years from now, it will hit Gao. It seems my Clan decided to address that problem early and built an experimental propulsion laboratory up there.”
“Ordinarily, we wouldn’t give two shits about it right now,” Powell elaborated. “It’s unarmed, it can’t accelerate on account of bein’ a fookin’ moon and it has a permanent population of fifty—all implanted. But, the bastard thing has a nanofactory in its core. A big an’ advanced one. The enemy could be cookin’ up anything in there.”
The men nodded, and Powell indicated to Goruu to roll on the schematic. Most of the facility was a long narrow shaft that vanished into the moon’s innards. “Nukin’ it to Hell is, sadly, not an option, because Shasu is overall about the same size as Mauna Kea. We could fling the entire Deep Space Strategic Weapons Reserve at the bastard…or we can be smart about it.”
“Your mission,” he concluded grimly, “Is to capture this facility.”
The HEAT had the solemn, serious expressions of men who knew this was going to be a big one. Powell gave them a second to let the gravity of it sink in, then continued.
“Ingress is only possible at one point: This surface facility,” he said. “These are the landing pads, loading bays, hangars and Dark Eye’s only defences, a flight of four FTL-capable fighters and some point defence. Our Firebirds will clear that out for you, but the result will probably be damage to the surface structures. Expect depressurization, loss of gravity, fire, water, electricity, all of it. The facility is probably under the direct control of a Big Hotel agent, so you can expect a funhouse.”
That was the HEAT’s private and thoroughly ironic name for a controlled spaceborne facility where the enemy had been able to prepare traps and environmental hazards and they were the bane of their training lives. Every step in a funhouse was potentially deadly, every corner a potential trap, and every meter of ground was going to be exhausting at the very least.
“Below the facility is a loading tunnel connecting the landing pads to the shaft top station here.” He indicated it. “That shaft is how material is delivered to and from the nanofactory and lab in the moon’s core. It’s a straight drop into the main facility from there—That shaft is five thousand meters long, and Dark Eye itself is at the far end of it. Keeping your line of communication open will be vital.
“Once you’ve reached the bottom o’ the shaft however, things are fairly straightforward,” he finished. “Fortify the first good position you find, set up your field jump array an’ secure the location for the techs, so we can effect control and claim that nanofac.”
“The access shaft is kept in vacuum and microgravity so the maglev trains can traverse it in seconds,” Goruu said. “They’re on maglev rails on the shaft walls, and the five of them neatly fill the whole shaft. Furthermore, they’re controlled from the Dark Eye control facility rather than the top station, and they move fast. You can’t rely on being able to hijack one.”
“And they’ll bug-on-a-windshield anything trying to enter the facility through the shaft,” Powell concluded. “Your best route is the utility tunnel that runs alongside the shaft, here. That’s where the gas pipes, water pipes, electrical conduits and all the other stuff run so there’s plenty of opportunity for sabotage, but it’s compartmentalized into sections about five hundred meters in length and the pressure doors are purely mechanical. Alas, it does have gravity plates, so it’ll probably be a drop corridor. You’ll have to climb it.”
It was always painfully obvious when Righteous was genuinely worried. Instead of boisterous snark he went dead silent and nodded grimly. He may have been as monstrous as a Protector but he was their weakest climber and everyone knew it.
Warhorse, bless him, rested a hand on Firth’s shoulder. He said nothing and nothing needed to be said. Nothing was appropriate to say anyway; the silence around the table spoke to how serious all of them were.
“…Are there any questions?” Powell asked.
“I know this is a pipe dream,” said Rebar warily, “But we didn’t happen to get any extra reaction mass for our suits through the gate, did we?”
“Aye, but it won’t matter. We only had the one set of extended-duration maneuver packs and we can’t top up while underway.”
“…So it really is gonna be a climb.”
“In theory, we could control gravity in the shaft from the surface facility,” Goruu said. “In practice, a Hierarchy agent trumps any computer warfare we could ever bring. Even Champion Meereo is only flesh and blood, and our prohibition against true AI is…longstanding.”
“I have the FIC combing the schematics as we speak,” Powell assured them. “If there’s a way to cut power to the gravity field generators from this side of the shaft, we will.”
Baseball spoke up. “It’s gonna be slow-going, sir. ‘Horse and I are gonna need to be anchored to the wall, and we’re gonna need to anchor the team to us. We’ll be sitting ducks for the most part.” He paused for a moment, then reached for one of his high-energy MREs. ‘Horse immediately did the same and so did the rest of the team.
“Aye. We’re relyin’ on the Whitecrests an’ their gecko-glove suits to screen for yer,” Powell agreed, and ripped open one of his own. He might not be deploying with them, but he’d damn well eat with them.
“Fifty biodrones,” Regaari observed. “And with a nanofactory we have to assume that they’re well equipped and have drone support.”
“Aye. I’ve seen the specs on this nanofac, it can turn out summat the size of a Weaver in twenty minutes.”
That piqued Firth’s interest. “Shit, that fast? Um…bein’ perfectly honest sir, this is sounding like a damn near impossible mission suddenly. Can’t we just drop a nuke down the shaft?”
“That nanofactory is absolutely on the cutting edge. In logistical terms, it’s the equivalent of the Farthrow generator.” Goruu pointed downwards at the device below their feet that was keeping a large part of the whole star system blanketed in protective wormhole-disrupting quantum white noise. “With it intact, we could build prefab shelters, ration ball factories, weapons, vehicles, blankets, spaceships…It would be the strongest possible foundation for reconstruction. Sacrificing it would be…”
Great Father Daar finally deigned to speak. “I have assigned paramount importance to this facility,” he said, in a low and determined growl. “With it, a billion lives or more could be saved.”
He straightened up. “And yeah. I know this one’s gonna be a fuckin’ nightmare,” he added. “Yer my Brothers, all’a you, you know I wouldn’t send you into this if I thought it wasn’t absolutely necessary. But Gao needs this, it might just make the diff’rence between survivin’ this war and winning it.”
The room went silent again. Warhorse had the easiest hero button of anyone Powell had ever met, and it was immediately obvious that the chance to save that many lives had somehow drawn even more resolve out of the monstrous Protector than ever before.
His heroism was also, when that button got pressed, deeply infectious. Even without a word being spoken, a whirl of steely resolve whipped around the table. Grim expressions became determined ones. Stony expressions became hungry. Only the people who really knew the HEAT would have noticed, but among that select group there may as well have been horns, trumpets and a rousing choir.
Warhorse rolled his shoulders to get his crushingly tight undersuit seated more comfortably. A perennial problem for him more than the rest. “We’re gonna save that nanofactory.” He said it matter-of-factly.
Everyone nodded along, even Powell. He was such a natural leader that even Powell felt led by his example in moments like these. In a way it was a shame the young man never became an officer, but what a loss that would have been in turn.
“Aye,” Powell agreed. “Nobody else could even try. You lot? I have absolutely no doubt. Now let’s get this plan finalized. Lay your thoughts on the table.”
“…We’re gonna need a fuck of a lot of rope.”
“Nuh. We can’t carry that much anyway. Too bulky. We just gotta leapfrog.”
“Slower.”
“We can handle it. What we are gonna need is…”
Heads bowed, the table creaked as several pairs of hands leaned on it, and the mission began in earnest.
Date Point: 14y4m AV
Deep Interstellar Space
The Alpha-of-Alphas
There was not much left of the Alpha-of-Alphas now. It had retained enough biology to support its brain, though even some of that had been replaced by more advanced technological alternatives, but for the most part it was now a creature of cybernetics and steel.
It found nothing disturbing about its self-inflicted condition. Hunters never did. As a breed, they practiced augmentation casually, easily and freely. The bodies they originally spawned with were just the foundation for the superior technological predator to come. They staggered from their incubation pools and straight into an enhancement theatre before they had properly grasped that they were conscious. Their first true waking experience was the moment their neural implants came online and connected them to their brood.
After that, looking back was an alien concept. The Alpha-of-Alphas had simply followed the trajectory of its life to the natural summit. It was no longer a single hunting body. It had become a ship…and from there, a fleet.
It had learned patience early in its life, as a talented Beta. When it seized the rank of Alpha, it did so on its guile and discipline. When it had single-handedly slain a Vulza, the beast had fallen to a trap carefully prepared over the course of four days. A lesser, less disciplined brain would have strained against the inertia of its “limbs” now. It would have demanded that the fleet prepare itself unreasonably fast, attempted to achieve the impossible and failed.
The Prey weren’t going anywhere. How could they? A species’ most populous planet could not reasonably be evacuated. So the Alpha-of-Alphas ignored the Hierarchy’s insistent whining, and the limp-willed fretting of its subordinates. The Hunt was on, and the Swarm would feast on something. They did not, after all, have to hunt what the Hierarchy wanted them to hunt.
But the furry-faced Gao were precious to the Humans. That made them both a sweet and delicious target, and a clawed and deadly one. The hunt was not going to be trivial.
It relished the challenge. More importantly, it relished that the Swarm’s preparations were finally complete.
With a thought it jumped the entire Swarm-of-Swarms to a staging beacon well outside of Gaoian sensor range. With a second thought, it aligned them toward the prey and went to warp.
The third thought rolled around every Hunter brain in the fleet, building and gaining fervor with every passing hungry second.
<Meat to the maw!>