System of the Damned

  Chapter 24

  Sharing the recipe for peace.

  It took a couple of hours for everything to get moving and for the team of suit techs to replace enough of my suit’s broken bits to make it mobile again. I was told that none of the canisters or tranquilizers and such were in it, and that it was barely working for more than being a bashed to hell suit of armor. It looked like a bashed to hell suit of armor, there wasn’t a plate on it that wasn’t dented or gouged to hell and back. My knee was wrapped well and the suit’s knee had been replaced, the same went for my right shoulder and the shoulder of the suit.

  Thankfully my wife was busy helping her mom with her new brothers, so she wouldn’t be here during this bit of fun. Maestro was working on fall back plans if this went south, most of which started at a full rolling bombardment. This left me in the warg wearing my suit and rolling at the head of a wedge formation, the rest of it being tracks. I also had four pounds of worried husband laying against my neck. Sure Xavier had been gleeful about the statue, but he was worried about how things were going to go. In the time it had taken us to get ready and moving, the crabs had finished laying out their offerings.

  Thousands of crabs of all shapes and sizes…well more like three main shapes and a ton of sizes sat calmly in two rows. Those rows were a hundred yards or so apart and at the end was a group of warriors, which had the angriest woman I’d ever seen at their head. Said angry woman was larger than the other warriors, about the size of an old dump truck, and wearing armor. This woman was also a crab, and the armor had offerings of weapons, bones, and broken armors melded into it. She also didn’t have a gun, instead of the spine shotgun the crabs loved, she carried…they looked like some sort of armored organic pickaxes.

  We all stopped at our end of the lines and I climbed out of the warg and waited for Lola to walk up from the trailer to start forward. It was a very quiet walk as five other damaged suits tromped along behind Lola and I. Miss Li, Lady Jira, Thomas, Honey, and I know I said suits…but Mel and Tom were walking a Hopper made from their mechs. Each of us was toting melee weapons. This is also the first time that I got to see that the crabs had three castes, warrior, a definite worker caste, and a technical?

  The latter was absolutely creepy as hell, a crab without pinchers or arms, but had really dextrous looking tendrils and tentacles. The technical cast looked like Lovecraft and HR Giger snorted acid laced cocaine and made it. The worker caste though, take a coconut crab and give it a tail like a lobster. Now take and think of them in floral colors and normal crab lobster mutants with extra limbs for the young. Then do a line of pure nightmare and give the adult form a half assed torso with all the eyes in it and an extra set of big limbs able to use tools. Needless to say Lady Jira and Miss Li were walking dead center and not looking to either side at the creatures that would make hentai writers twitch in glee. I actually smelled a dash of fear from one of them, and I couldn’t tell who because I had to keep looking forward.

  We stopped at about ten yards from the queen and her most loyal guards, which is about the time that I heard a cart being pulled up behind us. It was also about that time that I noticed there was a larger worker and technician than the others, and that they were standing with the warrior queen. They were definitely queens too, larger and each was adorned with things of value and relative to their fields. I blinked as crates were brought up and opened showing thousands of devices inside that looked like seriously modified versions of what the Lo’Kar and Ca’zeze had wore for translators. Then it clicked, Lola was aiming for peace!? She killed and cooked the crabs like a homicidal homemaker feeding her cheating husband to a potluck. Then the flashing started and I had to close my eyes and nearly cover them to keep the streaks of blurs from making me blind. Two maybe three seconds and then there was a near unified cry of panic, which rapidly translated into over a thousand panicking shouts.

  The trio of queens twitched and looked at each other before there was a screech and I heard the command of “Silence!” They’d all heard the stories of battles, and they knew what the blurs could have done to all of them. Nice trick Lola…and quit purring in approval Xavier…they have translators, I can’t say shit aloud without a helmet. I also still couldn’t use my implants like most others and have conversations. Voices in my head made me have bad thoughts and do stupid violent things, so my implant had certain functions on lockout. Well they were locked out aside from a very few situations, and hopefully none of them would happen today.

  And then I was staring like a moron at the trio of crabs that scuttled up behind and to the side of Lola. All three were warrior caste, and all of them had cybernetics of some form or another grafted to their bodies. One had a cybernetic eye and smaller arms, another had both big snipping arms replaced and the last had the legs on one side replaced along with a limb. I hadn’t known a thing about them, and apparently they served Lola. Of course they served Lola, and didn’t make a sound as they moved to drag up a trio of carts that were loaded with…food?

  “Don’t say anything, we captured and saved them after their assault on the FOB. They’re females, and Lola has been teaching them…” Xavier chittered very softly under my ear as we both stood guard….while the trio of suv sized crabs set up the stuff from the carts. Tables were set out, stoves set out, and then they started to cook. They were cooking a massive meal for everyone, and Lola’s suit dropped its hands a second before she too started to go into action cooking. She was also wearing that little apron with the crossed ladle and flail, and I couldn’t keep myself from looking over at her every so often.

  When the smells of roasted beef, chicken, O’Pang, and even seasoned Rika filled the air, stomachs growled. The scents of freshly baked breads and other oven cooked things mixed into the air as the three crabs and Lola moved about at the center of everyone’s attention. The trio of queens kept their eyes on Lola for the most part as she made two big pots of her famous stews, and then it happened…the first hungry kid scuttled out. A bowl of stir fry about right for it was set on a lower table by the crab doing that sort of food and it shot forward to snag it. Happy noises from a crab are seriously strange to hear, but the translation made me smile. “Hot hot hot hot…is good! Oh, it's so good!” Aaaand then the horde of crab kids shot forward from the rest and got in line, three lines to be exact.

  This went on for an hour as the youngest were fed, then the next in line of age and size came out and formed lines. Lola didn’t help the trio serving the thousands as they sliced and snipped meats, vegetables, breads, and fruits. Once or twice a greedy crab got whacked with a ladle by the trio, but no one fought. And after a few hours almost all of the horde had been fed, and I’d had to help set up a table and seats. Three of the seats were just massive pillows and when I was given a nod, I helped bring the two pots to warmers on the table, and my reward was getting handed two skewers of roasted beef and veggies by one of the crabs.

  The table was for the women of power though, and I offered Xavier the smaller skewer as I munched on the bigger one. I noticed Miss Li and Jira hadn’t cracked open their suits a bit and were still standing in roughly the same spots they had been for hours. Asians, everything's fun and games till the tentacle crabs come out into the open. “This is really good…we’re still going to talk about this later, but the food is really good.” I said softly as Lola ignored me and motioned for the three queens to come to the table.

  She had to use her suit to fill and set out the bowls while the three crabs who’d cooked for and fed the others worked at cleaning up and eating as they did so. Miss Li and Jira both stepped back a dozen yards when the trio of queens casually scuttled forward. And they didn’t scuttle like terran crabs, they could move just as fast in any direction it seemed. Those two titanic pickaxes were left behind and the trio happily plopped their armored asses onto the big pillows. Wait, do crabs have asses? Focus Roderick, biology thoughts later, diplomatic cookout now.

  Once Lola had finished setting the table and her own place, her suit opened once more and she moved to sit on a pillow on the folded down chest. “Please try some, and those utensils should work well for the three of you…” She trailed off as the queens inspected the oddly shaped spoons and forks. The worker was first to take a sip of thick broth, then started to dig in and make odd noises. It took me a second to realize that they were happy noises, and I will do everyone a favor and not describe how it looked to see the crabs eating. The technician came next and used her tendrils to work the utensils and the same thing happened, happy noises and she dug into her food. The warrior queen gave her counterparts a momentary stare and then she too started to eat.

  Lola of course was happily eating her serving, which was a mug of beef stew. The serving sizes for each of the queens was basically a standard pot you might cook spaghetti in for a small family. I was also handed a few more skewers to munch on and share with Xavier. Mel and Tom had also used their Hopper to snatch up Miss Li and Jira to make them eat…or they were torturing them. I’m not sure which was happening, possibly a little of both. Thomas stood with Honey and both were eating some sort of chicken and rice dish. Basically everyone there had eaten a hearty meal and was fighting a food coma, or eating with hopes of a food coma.

  And then it happened, one of the titanic crab queens, the technician, looked at the warrior queen and rattled out in her odd language. Lots of clicky clacky sounds and odd pitches, kinda sounding like it was trying to speak klingon. But the translation! Dear heavenly father, Why! “Oh ma god, this is so good. You just have to give me the recipe!” Then a tilt of the head. “Like, what do you think sister, isn’t this just like the best food. Like ever.”

  I had to keep a straight face…I couldn’t run away in terror as the warrior queen responded. “Oh I know…this meat is just like soooo good. It’s like Rika, but like softer and not so salty. I just so have to get the recipe and some of the animals.” She looked to Lola. “Can we um trade for some of them? We can keep em away from the Rika…they’re like the fluffy ones right, with the horns?”

  The worker queen gave a quick look at the warrior. “What’s this we stuff? You mean me and my babies will be watchin them. Cause like you know the Rika are gonna try and eat em sis. And we can’t have that, cause like this food is sooo good. Oh, I know…we could like trade Rika for them. They’re like so useful for more than like meat and stuff. They’re a little bitey though, gotta give em like a swat or like make a big show of killin a big one and they calm right down…”

  I felt a tiny hand patting the side of my head and cocked it to the side to look at Xavier with one eye, a cheeky grin on his face. “Honestly it’s the best we were able to do with translation to english. The valley dialect for the females and a Chong dialect for the males seems to work ninety five percent of the time. They’re still homicidal as can be, but you can somewhat understand them. Lola worked for a season to get the language as good as we have it.”A sigh flowed from me and I rubbed the top of my muzzle and up between my eyes for a few seconds as I thought. “So a year’s worth of work to get it to valley girl and stoner levels of understanding for english speakers. What about the other languages?”“Mandarin works better in some cases, German I’ve been told sounds like autistic adolf, and it’s a toss up for the other human languages. Admiral Wulf left the linked channel already, he was laughing too hard.” Xavier shrugged cutely. “The best translation is the Manti language, though they hate each other. No manti diplomats will talk to the crabs alone. The Lo’Kar and Ca’zeze are still working on full translations. The issue is the language is simple with dashes of being complex. Body language is a tiny part of it, there’s even a smidge of pheromones to it. It won’t improve much with implants, but it will improve some.” He gave me a cheeky bunny grin. “Remember our spoken language is based on yours.”

  That made me groan. “Joy, I just hope your wife can work out what we need from this meeting without it turning into a well fed bloodbath.” I muttered that softly, the translators had a threshold for the volume of speech they’d translate. My implants would translate muttering that my ears picked up, but it would still be muttering unless I risked having it be more sensitive.

  Xavier shrugged. “I’m sure she can work out trade and treaty with them, this clan is one of the older ones from what we’ve managed to get out of the Manti. They have to fight dragons during the warmer seasons. This valley is their main territory and home area, but they stretch out nearly to the ocean during the warmer months for farming and gathering. Rika are also omnivores…” He rubbed his ear as he thought for a moment. “They’re like hogs, only angrier and creepy looking.”

  I was still snickering when he held up a smoke for me to light, which I did and popped a cigar into my maw to puff on. “Kinda taste like pork too, like a pork chicken…” I noticed him looking thoughtful. “No, you are not asking or letting Albert make abominations.” He slumped. “You can instead have Jackalope pipe tentacle hentai to Miss Li and Jira’s rooms later on though.” He perked right back up and I smiled. Sadly though I had to listen in on the negotiations and occasionally give a nod of approval to Lola, all while keeping my braincells from committing suicide from listening to the three crab queens.

  Hours later we headed back for Vehicular Manslaughter and had managed not to start twitching when I heard the words. “Like, Dude, and Totally.” I was also walking through the hall where my quarters and the quarters for the other berserkers were when Jackalope piped japanese porn into Lady Jira and Miss Li’s rooms. Ah, the wonderful screams of panic and rage from your soldiers is lovely. It was good training. That said, the scouts checked the path that Lola had gotten for us in the talks with the local queens. “Cause like it’s totally safe ya know. We like haven’t done any mining or digging, and totally no traps there either.” Cue eye twitch.

  The land train had made it mostly past the main settlement in the valley before the cattle were delivered to the crabs. As it turns out, cattle do Not like crabs. There was quite a bit of panic, a few stampedes, and a track or three got flipped. Yinyang had sent through some of the stronger ones and a few of his biggest bulls. It was almost as entertaining as watching the panic from a few ancient mimics making a land bridge in the larger river that ran through the valley. It was almost exactly like the stampede of the cattle, only with alien crabs. Honestly it wasn’t that bad with the crab stampede once they figured out the two overfed and mildly glowing warehouse sized mimics weren’t going to try and eat them. Kinda reminded me of a friendly version of one of the blob movies, only the blob doesn’t care about the locals. Except that one idiot warrior that shot Boom…he got hog tied and spat into the river.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  The sad thing about the meeting was that we had come to peace with a group of crabs, well more like a small kingdom’s worth of them. They weren’t the crabs we’d been fighting for two damned seasons, we’d just battled because we’d kicked in the proverbial door like a super power back home finding out they had oil, Murica. I was born there, I can make fun of the idiocy of its former politics. We might not of brought them democracy, but we left them with a really nice highway and some bridges. I also did not sit atop Vehicular Manslaughter’s tower with binoculars and a drink and laugh like a madman at the chaos. Oh wait, there’s recordings, I didn’t get drunk at least.

  The Order and a very small selection of the general races swooped in and started to work on trade and other fun things. Sadly since the highway went by a populated ocean, all of the trade had to be done with shuttles or the occasional portal. As it turns out, portals suck for trade with the limited time each one can be open. I’ve also been bitched at, I mean informed that it takes time to recharge the special caltunium portal gems. If there wasn’t a group of larping people soon waving the staves around like they were casting spells…I would be disappointed. I mean come on, were-people, big dog people, squeaky fish people, crabs…dear gods the crabs, and others. Toss in magic staves and dragons! If Anderson hadn’t gotten himself flambé'd, he’d of started one by now.

  I was going to have to do a roll call of the surviving nerds and set up a game night, maybe I could corrupt the other races with dnd. Focus Roderick. Ok, so it was a day and a half or so travel time between our stop in the valley and the border of the next territory. This gave me time to heal, eat the weight of a child in food, and do paperwork. I also took a portal back to the Skull and hung the tags of our fallen on the wall, taking my time and making sure I did it proper. Then it was another portal hop to the enlarged Lo’Kar labs to visit those coming out of or waiting to go into the tanks. The Spots were all in recovery and were eating nearly as much voltage to recharge their bodies as they were eating food. As was befitting their names, Left and Right Spot were on the left and right side of Spot. I ran into Evans while making my rounds, literally ran into her.

  Now a Major, Evans was in dress uniform as crisp as her fiance's always was. That was another recent event, Rowland had taken a knee and Evans had said yes. She was very quick at grabbing hold of my vest to keep from losing her balance, and then glaring at me like it was my fault that I was a walking wall. “Roderick, glad to see you up and about and able to not be fluffy.” Her eyes roamed over my arms and then up to my face. “Well less fluffy.”

  An old joke that still made me sigh. “Yes, I am a mangy panda. What brings you to the labs?” I asked curiously as I looked her over and yep, spotless uniform. I still had not mastered that trick, and had to use the excuse of being a berserker for an untidy uniform. People had a choice of crisp or spotless, I had not been a sergeant that had learned the mastery of both.

  I saw her eyes flick about and she glared when she saw my brow snap up. “Come over here…” She grumbled as she headed down a side hall. “Easier if I could send it over implants, but no the yank has to have issues…giant hairy pain in the ass.” She muttered.

  “Your ass isn’t hairy, I thought you’d gotten laser…” I commented and got jerked into a storage room away from others. “So, what’s up? Pregnant?”

  Evans had such a cute growl, like one of those small poofy dogs. The glare wasn’t so cute. “No, I’m not knocked up ya bleedin twat. We got a trio of the fighters working again and I was checking on pilots since Blitz is the primary Raven pilot and I can’t grab him.”

  I blinked. “I thought they’d gutted the engines of all of the scouts and fighters to keep the shuttles up and going. They got three of them going again?”

  “Yes, but heavily modified. Technically there are four, but the fourth was claimed by The Order and has a crew already. It was the deal for getting the other three up and going. They’re fighter bombers and they’re not as useful in space now, but they can do it.” She shrugged. “The engines burn through their reaction mass faster in space, in atmosphere they’re nuts. I need modified pilots to fly them, and I mean modded and changed. There are two here I need to steal to do the final trials.”

  I shook my head. “Everyone here is either waiting for a tank or recovering. You know that, got a hard set base of a week off physical work. And changed how, you need a speeder or a tank?” I asked the last bit curiously.

  She sighed and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Tank, they’re heavier, but they can handle more G’s and Roderick…these fighters are scary now. The rabbits renamed them Brynhild Assault Craft and removed half the safety systems they’d had. Andy can’t fully pilot one…” She said to drive the point home.

  I whistled softly as I thought that over, Governor Andy Rowland was a stick jock, and a really good one. I thought for a long moment and nodded softly before clipping my com to my ear. “Fluffy to Panda Express and Nightmare.” It took a few seconds for both to answer. “You two know about the new Brynhild fighters?”

  I was getting stared at as I spoke and listened to the answers of “Of course.” and “Yep, looking at them now.” The last was Price and I grinned. “They just brought them all topside and they say they’re waiting on pilots….are you calling for…”

  “They need tested, they’re tuned to hell. Both of you grab a bird and drive em like you stole em.” As I said that, Evans’s jaw dropped and she took in a deep breath to speak. “Bring them and yourselves back in one piece.” Then I killed the link and grinned.

  “They’re not going to be able to just….Panda and Nightmare….Yinyang and Price?” Evans asked and quickly touched her temple. “Major Evans to…no don’t shoot, that is Lt Price…yes I know he looks scary as hell. He and Yinyang are….” She winced as she apparently got some feedback. “Did he really have to knock out the security detail!?”

  I just shrugged. “No, but they were acting scared and Yinyang doesn’t like to kill people.” I held out my elbow to her. “Shall we mam?” I asked and nodded for the portal room, earning a sigh and Evans storming past me. “Do they still look the same?”

  “No, they scrapped most of the birds aside from the main framing and completely rebuilt them. I swear I can’t decide whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that The Order started adopting people into it. I have no idea what group to curse anymore for engineering.” She casually ranted as we walked down the hall and came into the rooms my son had turned into one large space. The landing pool was one room over from here.

  “Yeah, I just came from an over three click long land train with more guns than anyone back on Earth would’ve put on something. Not a human or bunny idea, just one of the many adopted in and bam…giant war machine.” I grumbled as she punched in the codes for the testing area, which was on the other side of the military training area from the Yangtze.

  “Vehicular Manslaughter…I heard they got the name from one of them asking you something.” She said and pressed the button to open the portal.

  I just sighed and walked through. “Yes, Sergeant Gore was asking me something and I told him the term was Vehicular Manslaughter or something like that.” I shrugged…and then started looking around as I heard booms.

  “I can hear that they’ve already taken off…please don’t let them belly flop the damned things into the ground…or black out.” She grumbled and slipped on goggles she pulled from her pocket.

  I started to count as I saw the two specks far in the distance, and then blinked as I counted booms. “Five…six…seven…eight…nine…ten…are they fucking banking!?” That might of come out in a screech as I watched the two new fighters bank straight the hell up. “The hell are they using for engines!?”“Scramjets and fission powered turbines.” Came from my shoulder and I looked over to see Isaac watching the testing. “We’ve not been able to produce enough of the parts we would have needed to make them fusion powered, though they will still be limited on extra atmospheric flight.” He was wearing a lab coat and goggles. “I also win the betting pool, Uncle Fluffy sent berserkers to do the testing.” The last wasn’t to Evans or I.

  “I told you they were the best for testing, just not to let my human do any of it. He cannot fly and I do not even like it when he drives.” Rasped a voice from near my feet and I looked down to see Stanley. They’d apparently worked out translations for his speech. “The salvaged inertial systems are working as well, look at how tight that bank is. I thought the asian bear was some sort of job manager and farmer.”

  I didn’t spend more than a second looking down at Stanley, who was of course smoking. “He did smuggling as well, was a stick jock and managed to get around the Chinese air force. Price did a ton of halo drops and can pilot as well…”

  “They’re both insane…” Came from Evans. “Are those things armed?”

  “Yes.” Came from Isaac and Stanley at the same time…about five seconds before the two craft dove for the deck. “Do not go higher than thirty nine G’s, twenty is what we’re setting as max for standard pilots.” He was speaking aloud, but I know Isaac was using his implant.

  -Copy that, salvaged parts.- Came through as text in my implant, which it allowed. It was just voices that got the other voices talking. I watched as rounds started flashing up from the ground and the twin craft jinked and juked through neck breaking maneuvers dodging fire. The return fire was apparently small dumb-fire rockets fired out of a launcher that vomited them at at least four hundred rpm. The launchers also apparently magnetically fired them I guessed, because the craft didn’t outrun the rockets.

  “Holy shit…” Was all I could say as the weapons fire stopped coming from the ground targets and I could hear the rippling explosions from a few miles off. And then I heard the greatest sound a Marine can hear from supporting craft…Brrrrrrrrrrrrt! Gatling cannons ripped up armor targets as the twin craft banked up and off from their dives.

  “Very good…readings are showing well.” Isaac said cheerily.

  “I told you, tanks could handle the G load. We both knew the launchers and cannons would work after the tests.” Stanley ground out in his language of hate, then he touched his temple. “Move to the secondary target and drop the Yamaguchi specials.”

  “What are those?” Evans asked with just a dash of worry in her voice. “And are we talking Hiroshima or his clan?”

  “Mel and Tom designed these bombs, and Hiroshima was so proud that he cried.” Isaac said casually.

  I personally was kneeling down and looking for cover while keeping an eye on the twin craft that arc’d toward an already scarred mountain top in sight. After a long moment and getting handed goggles by Stanley, the craft banked away hard. Then blurs filled my vision from two points straight down into the top of the mountain, which started vanishing in blasts. After three seconds the launchers exploded in mid air with bright flashes. I completely forgot about the others for a long moment before Stanley spoke. “Eighty five percent launch before failure, those were the best numbers yet…”

  “The bloody hell were those!?” Evans said as she, like myself, was staring at the topless mountain. There was very obviously a crater bored down into it now.

  “Yamaguchi specials, the dwarf portable launchers that Hiroshima made for us Blurs.” Isaac said with a grin. “We can’t use them very close to allies, so the twins worked out how to work a bunch of them into one system and drop it. Plenty of shed fur to use and work into the systems, but they take a day a piece for the coating and charge lines to be worked through them by a mimic. About four days total for each weapon system.”

  “I’m heading to the landing field to check over the craft.” Stanley said in an oddly calm tone.

  “Quit hiding from your wife…the more you hide, the more she’s going to nag you…” Isaac retorted.

  “Our females handle the pups at first, I am not changing that because she spent time with the blowhole having water breathers!” Stanley snarled and I got to watch a smoke be shoved into his mouth by Isaac, who promptly went climbing onto Stanley’s back.

  “Share the duty ya hateful fuck. Me and mine stopped at two kids for now…you do have implants that can make you shoot blanks…” Isaac lectured and I like Evans just watched and stared as Stanley toted Isaac toward the landing field.

  It took us a moment to be able to talk properly, we’d both dealt with Stanley quite a bit before and it was just odd. He was being hospitable to another being, and letting himself be ridden, it was just…weird. “Is it better or worse with being able to understand his snarling?” I asked softly as I looked over at Evans.

  She shrugged. “The creepy part was watching Isaac just hop on and ride him like a bitching horse. The hell has marriage done to Stanley…and kids. I didn’t know there were baby honey badgers…” She shook her head. “That thought is almost as unsettling as remembering Honey is going to be a father…”

  I nodded. “And the one that hasn’t gotten pregnant is as just as much of a psychopath and sociopath as he is. I use the threat of having her help Albert’s personal team as a way to keep her from being too violent…but the fighters.” I sighed. “Feel free to take a pick of the stick jocks, other than Kreig that is. See about getting them treatments if they agree, but you can’t have him. He’s the only stick jock other than Andy that I trust to do the job and live…”

  “And not get his crew killed. Did he really fight for over half of the last engagement nailed to his seat?” She asked with a raised brow.

  I couldn’t help but shrug softly. “Yeah, and made himself along with his entire crew puke their guts out from only using one of the foot controls. That group had AA, but I’ve heard they traded some of their grown units for other things recently.”

  She made a face and motioned for me to walk with her toward the training grounds, which were peaceful currently. “The fact that the crabs grow their machines and weapons is horrifying, even their craft are organically produced from what we’ve gotten from the Manti. I refuse to look at any of the images on the organic machines and the growing vats. It’s just too creepy and alien to me for now.”

  I nodded, even though she couldn’t see it since she was ahead of me. “I know the feeling, the mimics are sentient living factories. Except they’re not organic, they’re some sort of liquid crystal or something like that. The crabs just use an organic version of that, I personally hope they’re not sentient. I also never want to be outside my suit by a crab technician cast…they’re like some creepy Lovecraft Giger lovechild.”

  “I also hear that two of your staff officers were somewhat traumatized at the sight of them, and then someone had Japanese porn piped into their rooms…” She almost said that as a question.

  “I have no idea about any sorts of traumatic incidents for the violent asian women who work for me, or that it was tentacle porn. They’re calmer now, so it was good training…” I said and took a step back and to the side, which took me out of range of the sudden roundhouse kick Evans tried to land on my chin. “Trying to strike a superior officer is a no no, even in the alliance…”

  “Says the man who’s shot annoying and nosey diplomatic personnel from two races with twelve gauge bean bag rounds…and bludgeoning people with traumatic reactions with more trauma isn’t a good thing…” She huffed. “Even if it worked on me.”

  “It worked in other ways, and having the teams do pt in the snow without clothes a few times did the trick. You stopped twitching as often, and I didn’t have to worry about people trying to be touchy fucky anymore.” I said and looked over to see the two fighters coming down to land vertically.

  “And bondage is a really good way to get over rape ptsd…if the rapee is the one tying the other person up at least.” She let out a laugh as she heard me groan. “Oh shush, you enjoyed it and it helped me get over some of my issues.” She looked back at me. “You also never told me what happened to that jackass Colonel either…”

  I was silent for a long moment as I thought. “I turned him into a permanent cripple and he was medically retired.” She stopped and stared at me. “I try to be a good person Hellena, I’m much better at being a murdering monster. I tore his major tendons and broke certain sets of bones in several ways…he also was a unic…”

  “That…that’s why you didn’t even blink and Andy didn’t even question it when Honey publicly murdered one of his people.” I heard the sniff and curled my arm around her as I moved to her side. “Thank you…” Came out in a small voice.

  “The prick drugged you, and you were one of mine. Even with the memory blocks in, I take care of my own Evans. Besides I was right about you, you ended up earning your place as my second in command. Hell the only reason I took the spot as General of the Alliance military was that you would be taking over things with the colony.” I kissed the top of her head and paused, hugging her to me. It was a very long moment before I spoke. “Hellena…you’re pregnant…”

  “WHAT!?” She screeched, losing her composure completely for the first time in…maybe a decade…