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Hi everybody. The saga of the Fist of the Nascent Dawn, her brave crew, and a few others continues. Please let me know what you think of the story, the writing style, and so on :) Thanks!

And thanks for reading!

Chapter 25

Chaos reigned in the undercity, as combat rolled through hallway and cavern, bullets flying like hordes of wasps, felling soldiers and resistance fighters in a sweeping tide of death. Ambushed soldiery retreated, strong-pointed up where they could, dealing death and carnage to their attackers, only to have walls brought down, to have enemies stream out of un-discovered tunnels, hurling every bit of vicious violence at their disposal in the desperate attempt to win back their homes.

When they counter-attacked, the soldiers smashed through weakly-built defensive lines, only to have their attackers melt away, hide, and come at them again when their courage had rebuilt itself.

Derry growled, as he and the other Dragonslayers crawled at painfully slow speeds through a tunnel so small that thick-chested Derkin had needed to join Olliver and Black Jack in finding some other way around. For his own part, the claustrophobic wolf had been fighting panic for the last thirty minutes, struggling not to piss himself or start flailing and screaming whenever the walls seemed to be closing down on him.

Finally, his paw found the grate he was looking for, and pushed up at a painfully awkward angle, as he tried to ignore the growing agony from his wounded right glute, and how much more it would hurt when he tried to stand up again.

He held a paw back, and felt Waters slip her fiber-optic camera into it. With painful, awkward motions, he contorted himself in such a way as to raise the thing, his ocular implant recording and playing back what it saw.

Above him, the auto shop was a blood bath. Corpses lay in hamburgered heaps, strewn with a layer of bullet casings, and he could feel the roar of ongoing combat rumbling through his back via the floor. His fiber-optic imagery told him the soldiers had fortressed up in the room's center, and were pouring out every bit of ammunition at paw, trying just to stave the swarming locals off.

So much, he thought, for Tenh's secret fallback. He was about to feed the fiber-optic back to Candace when he saw something that wrenched his heart in his chest. Sitting on the side of a pile of rubble, rent ragged by bullet holes, a tiny camouflage-patterned backpack sized for a young woman lay half-open, scavenged machine parts spilled partway from it.

He knew that backpack. He'd given it to Trisha just before leaving to Boot camp, along with survival gear and some MRE's he'd managed to steal off the back of a transport truck. Clues to their target's location were up there in the middle of that mess, and they had no time to wait for the fighting to stop. He didn't let himself think about the possibility that Tenh and Trisha had been caught in this. The old man was too canny by half.

Then, as if on some choreographed signal, the shooting stopped. Heaps of dead locals, barely any uglier or dirtier for having been perforated and blown apart, festooned the base of the rusting steel walls. A few still groaned and twitched, but the flow of reinforcements had petered out to nothing, perhaps withdrawn by some charismatic local leader from the meat-grinder battle area.

He counted, through the fiber-optic, trying to get some sense for the enemy's numbers. Then he handed the fiberoptic back, and with painstaking slowness pulled himself up through the awkwardly-angled floor vent, praying his active camouflage wouldn't glitch out and leave him a sitting duck. The fire in his ass felt as if he'd already been shot again, and he was fairly sure the only thing keeping him going was the painkiller Derkin had injected him with just before parting ways.

Derry spoke, as Nivea patted his leg to remind him to communicate.

"At least fifteen enemy soldiers, looks like a mix of the 107th and 334th infantry. I see evidence that precious cargo was here not long ago. Once we're all out of the hole, spread to the north and western walls. I'll signal Olliver to come in from the north, and we'll mop these bastards up before they can get reinforced. After that, quick sweep for clues, then we keep moving. We've got one more spot to check."

"Understood, Lead," the response came back, each voice loud and clear, though none outside their system of lashes and masks could hear a peep. Olliver's voice sounded boisterous.

"How furious do I get to be, Lead?"

"Sorry, Four, not very. They might have...Prisoners or clues we don't want to destroy."

"Understood." Which sounded more like 'damnit.'

As the communication ended, Derry found his back against the rusting steel wall, not ten feet from the hole Olliver would come through. Nivea Gordon came next, splitting off to the western wall, with Waters following her. The Sergeant was joined a few seconds later by the lithe human Kerr, whose invisible form showed up on Derry's ocular as eyeing the rubble heap their enemies were behind, using the roughly circular formation as a fortification of sorts.

Corpses lay strewn across the still-smoking battlefield, intermixed with a few furs too wounded to move. The soldiers fortified up inside didn't bother coming out to check them, likely tending to their wounded and checking their ammo, expecting another attack. In an ideal situation, Derry would have waited for them to relax, but he knew time wasn't on their side and another assault could come any second.

Nivea spoke up, an amplified whisper through the comm. link, as she and Waters double-checked their weaponry.

"Lead, want to start this off with flash-bangs? Our faceplates and ear-gear are rated to dampen it for us. We shouldn't be affected at all, really."

Derry grinned, and drew the spoken-of device from his utility belt. Meanwhile, he felt the slight judders of the floor plates, as Black Jack reached his designated spot. Derry's ocular outlined the hulking mech in green, showing him as the invisible predator lowered its left arm and selected one of the sidearms that was magnetically holstered on its upper leg.

He handed the flash-bang off to Derkin, and signaled Waters, who snapped a second one off her belt.

"On the count of three, throw the flash-bangs. Four, you move in as soon as they blow and start ripping these fuckers up. Seven and I will move up to your flanks and keep them off you. Eight and Six will move up from the west. Five, do your thing."

Derkin grinned, though Derry couldn't see it, and double-checked his rifle, giving an invisible green-outlined thumbs-up from behind Black Jack's left leg.

"Alright. One. Two. Three, go go go!"

Commander Forza stood to one side, back to the wall, with Marines to his left and more to his right, as the demolitions specialist gave a thumbs-up and shifted to stack up with the opposite side. As soon as he'd motivated their Lieutenant, the Marines had stopped needing his leadership. Now all they needed was every paw on a rifle, even those that were effectively un-armored, like his own.

The explosives ceased to exist, obliterating the bulkhead door with a thunderous one-note percussive blast that hurt the wolf's ears and signaled their attack. He was swept up in the stream of fast-moving, hard-hitting, battle ready bodies, straight through the door as Marines roared out wordless cries of battle rage and opened fire on the furs within.

A Naval flag officer, Galen was no stranger to endless hours of combat training and simulation, life fire exercises, and the like. However, he was a Naval flag officer, and his version of combat training mostly involved millions of tons of fast-moving ships, blasting away at each other with weaponry that put their tiny rifles to shame.

Still, he knew to keep his head down, which saved his life as somebody returned fire and slapped a high-caliber pistol round into his borrowed helmet just below the crown of his head, jerking the wolf to one side as he roared and opened up. The heavyset Junta Marine took two bone-shattering impacts from the carbine and went down like a poleaxed mannequin.

"Clear! Clear!"

The fight to take Hydraulics was already over. It had taken less than ten seconds. Galen was hustled out of the doorway by the Marines, then, and managed to get hold of himself and head straight for the hydraulic system controls. He grabbed a corpse that occupied the operations chair, and heaved, powerful muscles lifting the whole fur and tossing it aside to take its place, ignoring the blood that had already dribbled down into its seat.

Two quick taps, and he opened a speaker line.

"Chief Karnen, do you read me? This is Commander Forza. I've retaken the target area, and am awaiting instruction, over."

The wired communications set crackled, and Forza waited calmly, fiddling with what few dials he actually understood and trying to remember what his father had long ago taught him about electronics while he waited. Finally, Karnen's ebullient voice came back.

"Good! Fuck, it's about time! Okay, I need you to find the arming switches. They should be about the width of your paw, right around head height on your right side. When you find them, switch them from 'off' to 'on.' Then I want you to grenade that control panel and get outta there."

Galen raised an eyebrow, but immediately started looking, locating the four unlabeled switches, all in a neat little row of brass. His big paw reached up, and pushed all four.

"Grenade it? Are you sure, Chief?"

"Yeah. Once those are turned on, they can't be turned back off without those switches...At least not quick or easily. In about thirty seconds, the whole ship's going to rock as the hydraulics come fully online, and the badguys are gonna follow the vibration right to you if you don't move. Slag that fuckin' chamber, Commander, or it'll be your grave."

"Understood. Lieutenant, you heard the man! Let's blow this and go!"

"Where to next, sir?"

Galen looked up, and frowned, potent mind working through the possibilities.

"Engineering is too far, we won't make it through with this small a number. We're heading back to the bridge. Once we get there, we fort up and wait for the hurricane to reach us."

Void Shadow banked hard left, pulling into a screaming pin-point turn that had space swirling around him, a nightmare of flashing lances of deadly plasma, hurtling bolts of molten metal, and a million other ways to die. As he came out of the turn, his mental link with the ship let him send the command, and a pair of solid-fuel rockets dumped from his underside, corkscrewing into the fuselage of an enemy landing ship, blasting twin holes straight through its already-damaged armoring.

Unable to spare a second to confirm the kill, he jerked back on the stick as a dozen fighters came right at him, spraying rounds blindly into the abyss in the hopes of hitting his fighter. If he hadn't moved, they would have. Past them, he watched as Read Admiral Vernier's task force engaged in a tornado of violence, swirling and firing, diving and rising, clawing at the enemy with every ounce of their wrath.

The enemy responded in kind, all sense of stratagem gone as capital ships slugged it out, two armadas of implacable foes throwing their all straight into one another's teeth. The launching of torpedoes was constant now, fighters shoaling like piranhas in their hundreds, plasma streams slagging through heaps of debris before being able to reach targets, so many ships had been destroyed or rendered helpless.

He'd flown straight into the worst of it, and the squirrel wasn't regretting that for a moment. With his stealth fighter and superior skills, on top of the neural link that made his reactions near-instantaneous, he'd downed more than a dozen enemies already. Enough so that he was running low on solid ammunition, and would soon have to start using plasma bolts that would reveal his location.

"Void, I've got a view of what's going on up here. The Fist is locked up with the enemy flagship...She can't last against that kind of boarding action. Vernier's fleet is cut off from the Fist, and won't be able to help her anytime soon."

Void Shadow nodded, in his virtual reality, and banked hard again, spinning his fighter around in the gravity-free void. There, in the distance, the Fist of the Nascent Dawn lay stricken, her skin torn up only superficially, but her engines completely dark.

"Solo, that battleship's going to have a hell of a point defense system. Looks like her fighter screen is chasing the Fist's fighters, though...We'll get one solid pass, then we have to back off."

Solomon Sign, Randy Kerrick, snorted into the communications link.

"What the hell? Since when are you the voice of reason? Wait a minute, what the..? I'm getting huge spikes all over my sensors."

Void Shadow's self looked around, in his 360-degree display of space, hunting as Solo sent him bright orange textual messages, directly into his heads-up system. When his electronic eyes fixed on the coordinates sent to him, Void could almost hear his unconscious body suck in breath.

Bright flares and a swarm of dozens of black balls told him what had just happened, even as his HUD lit up with dozens of new ships, less than half of them smaller than a cruiser. Fully four of the fifty new signatures read as battleships, great behemoths of death and destruction, born in the dark womb of space. Moments later, every main frequency lit up with a vast broad-band communication.

"Rear Admiral Vernier of the Sword of Sol, this is Fleet Admiral Roland Armrin aboard the battleship Titan Smasher. You have fought bravely, but are now severely outclassed. Order your fleet to stand down and you will be treated fairly. I will give you thirty minutes to comply. If you do not, we will destroy you."

Void stared, pilot's swift mind calculating the odds as others simply froze to stare. So far as they had known, the Junta's fleets were all engaged, in battles across the galaxy. Evidently, an entire task force had somehow been missed.

Centauri was a trap.

Vernier's response was equally broad-band, though his fleet had yet to disengage, still trading blistering barrages with their initial foe.

"It will take me that long just to get my captains to cease fire. Give me an hour, and I'll meet you at a neutral position to discuss terms."

"Thirty minutes, Rear Admiral. My helmsman will transmit the coordinates for in-person parlay. You'll come in a shuttle."

"Thirty minutes then." Vernier's voice was uninflected, neutral, a gentleman agreeing to parlay and nothing more.

Void Shadow, Bill Verman, considered for less than a second before coming to a decision. He knew damn well what Solomon Sign was thinking.

"Thirty minutes to decide...And twenty minutes for that fleet to boost into combat position. We have just under an hour, Solo."

Solomon Sign, Randy Kerrick, nodded his head and began calculation.

"Bill, take your shot at the Star of Aden. See if you can knock out some of its docking tunnels to even things up. I'm going back for the Dragonslayers."

"Yeah...You got it. Be careful, Randy. I love you."

For a while, everything had been dark. The sort of dark things got when there was just nothing more to see, and the mind had given up trying to fill nothingness with something-ness. Then, after a while had passed, there was pain. The pain was a strange sort of light sensation, of heat and wrongness, suffusing her body, but giving her none of the fear and adrenaline that jolted through her heart with lesser injuries.

Her eyes barely moved, when her sleepy will tried to force them. Everything was screaming at her to just sleep, to let the pain go, to fade into the warm, comfortable blanket of nothingness from which she'd just emerged. Something else, far quieter but more stubborn came from deep inside the girl, shoved the opposite way, yelling and fighting and kicking, thrashing and biting, the feral wolf telling her to get up, to open her eyes, to fight.

Dizzy nausea hit her like a ten pound sledge, as her eyelids slid back, weak and slowly over dry eyes, and she perceived distantly that she was cold, hot only in the center of her chest, and that her body was curled up on the ground. She felt sticky, her fur matted down with what she distantly realized was her own blood. The wolf tried to inhale, tried to move, and found her body flatly refused, instead rewarding her effort to breathe with a hot lance of suffering that would have made her sob if there were any air to give up.

She felt light-headed, ethereal, the pain perceived but not truly understood. Trisha felt strangely lucid, aware that she was dying, that her curled-up body was bleeding from a deep stab wound. The stickiness was blood, far too much of it, and the furs around her had ignored what they presumed was a corpse, hurrying about trying to bind one another's wounds, fear in their faces, ears flicking to and fro expecting another attack.

Trisha tried to crawl, hoping they would fail to notice her amidst the carnage, but her arms wouldn't uncoil. Her back refused to move, and she couldn't even feel her legs except as a distant sense of chilly pins and needles. Something about her must have twitched though, because one of the soldiers turned, squinting at her, and raising his rifle in a morbid slow-motion, until she could count the rifling lines in its carbon-scored barrel.

"We got a live one, sir!"

"Yeah well, tell it to cut that shit out!"

He's going to shoot me...I'm going to die here...

The rat behind that looming, ominous rifle stared down at her, one eye squinted shut, bleeding in a slow dribble from his eyebrow under a helmet that was a size too large for his head. His one open eye was wide, the iris all surrounded by bloodshot white, and she saw his paws tremble as he hesitated. Something about that made her want to cry, though she couldn't have said what it was.

"D'you hear me private?! Shoot the bastard!"

"S-sir it's a girl...J-just a kid..." the rat responded, his voice trembling on the verge between a whisper and a shout. Then the rifle barrel was gone, shoved to the side, as a snarling bear stormed into her blurrying sight.

With a choked, weak suck of breath that made her chest feel so overfull it hurt all on its own, she realized it was the same bear who had stabbed her, flung his knife into her chest and wrenched it free with all the finality of the Reaper and his scythe. He had a big, bulky pistol grasped in his paw, and was shouting at that young private, who had hesitated to shoot her. She wanted to get up, to hit the bear, to yell at him for being an asshole to a nice young male.

All she could do was lie still and try not to breathe, try not to bleed.

Then the bear shoved his rodent subordinate aside, and she was staring into a rifled barrel again, imagining she could see a laughing skull down in that pit of blackness, waiting to welcome her.

Something moved, in the swirling, darkening light behind him. Something distant in the back of her mind said it was 'anoxia', lack of air to the brain causing hallucination. Then, everything was far too bright, far too loud, her slitted eyes squeezing shut as faerie lights exploded across them.

Flash-bangs flew, and exploded with thunderous crack-CRACK noises, setting soldiers to incoherent and utterly surprised screaming.

Then Olliver and Black Jack stormed across the debris-heaped corpse factory, chewing up distance in a half-dozen powerful strides that shook floor plates and set the walls to rattling. As panicked soldiers, still mostly blind, popped their heads up, he opened fire, a rain of cannon blasts from his right paw lancing through armor and flesh in a rain of flat-trajectory murder that placed his exiting rounds on the far wall.

At the same time, his left paw came up, carrying the auxiliary armament he'd detached from the mag strips along his leg. The boxy thing looked like a massively oversized hand gun, and if it weren't covered in active camouflage would have been strewn with glittering gemstone-like energy displays.

His first shot sent a focused ray of heat blasting over the flash-banged pit, further light-searing the eyes of already-blinded furs. Then he was atop the heap, ignoring the shifting rubble as his weapons and teammates came to bear on the thrashing, yelling, wild-firing foe.

Rounds splattered off his Walker's front, even the plasma bolts unable to penetrate armor equivalent to a light tank's frontal plating. The same couldn't be said for the Junta soldiers' older-generation flak and nano-fiber armoring, as his right arm belched well-aimed cannon fire into target after target, shredding the furs to pieces and sending them spinning to the ground.

He noticed, peripherally, as Derry froze up for a moment, but without being able to see his face, couldn't trace his line of sight. Luckily, the fighting was already dying down, Dragonslayer's superior equipment and tactical positioning having torn the enemy unit apart in moments, where a prolonged attack by hundreds of resistance fighters had been unable to do much more than feed carnage to their guns and whittle down their numbers.

As Gordon, Waters, and Kerr strode in to begin rounding up those that had surrendered, Derry broke into a run, yelling out in a voice something nearer to panic than Olliver believed he was capable of. It startled the otter, and left him staring at the crumpled heap of grease-smeared, filthy wolf his leader had sprinted to, only to kneel in the mess and reach for haltingly, as if afraid he'd injure what seemed so clearly a corpse.

"Corpsman! Corpsman get over here!"

From behind and to Olliver's left, the burly armadillo medic came running, not bothering to scan with his rifle before rushing down the rubble slope, skidding to a stop at its base before trotting over and dropping into a crouch. He didn't miss a moment, checking for vitals even as he was dragging the medical kit around front with his off paw.

The Corpsman's voice was all business, a strong, calming counterpoint to the Sergeant's emotional yell.

"She's alive, but barely. Nano-surgeons aren't going to do anything until I can stabilize her. Sergeant, I need you to get a flat spot cleared, and secure the area so I can operate."

Derry's head nodded, and Olliver could see the worry vanish from his team leader like smoke in a tornado as the featureless camo-swaddled body straightened, stood, and started barking out orders.

"Waters, Gordon, cover the door entrance. Kerr, help me clear a spot for the Corpsman. Tense, I want you guarding the blasted-open wall. I'll cover the prisoners once we've got Trisha moved. We have half of our precious cargo as of this moment, people."

Nobody hesitated to accept the orders, quickly taking positions. Niece did look back towards Derry, blessing the fact that they were wearing featureless face masks, as hers covered the look of pain she showed in sympathy for her boss and best friend. At least the girl was alive, for the moment.

Olliver knew Derkin just barely well enough to know things weren't good, just by the 'dillo's posture, as Kerr and Derry started shoving rubble aside, herding the few surviving soldiers out of the way with shoves of their rifle butts, never having left optical camouflage. So far as the terrified, surrendered trio of soldiers knew, they had just been attacked by invisible specters, horrible ephemeral predators that were now silently pushing them about, as if arranging the lambs for slaughter.

Olly took striding steps toward the best spot he could locate, a short hillock of debris that looked to be made of engine block parts, useful as cover against light anti-tank munitions. He squatted behind it, leaving Black Jack's torso and arms free above its top, where he could rest its deadly heavy weaponry in a ready position to rain death on any foolish enough to emerge from that tunnel.

Captain Leith only grunted when the medic snapped the two halves of her broken clavicle back into place, though the pain wanted her to give a galaxy-class scream. It wasn't the first time she'd been injured, even seriously so, but she nonetheless tried to stay focused on the tasks at hand rather than on the inferno of agony burning out from her upper right side.

The medic, a feline ship's surgeon by the name of Dr. Veck, gave her good shoulder a pat, before affixing a sling across it to hold her arm in place.

"No moving that arm, or you'll need to be re-set again."

The Captain growled, eyes stubbornly held open against the swirling sparkles of agony that shimmered across them. She knew they would go away soon, and wouldn't let herself risk losing consciousness by letting her eyes close.

"Doctor, what's the condition of my officers?"

The cat looked away, towards where Major Thaurun of the Marines and her own Lieutenant Commander Adeling were strapped to the floor. Adeling's head was almost entirely covered with gauze bandages and packed with ice to keep the swelling down, and his neck was in a hard plastic brace. Thaurun wasn't bandaged at all, and in fact had no evident injuries, though his right side did twitch disconcertingly every few seconds.

"I'm afraid Mr. Adeling's skull is broken in at least three places and his neck took compression fractures from the impact. We won't know how bad the damage to his brain and spine are until we can re-take Medical. At the very least, he won't be back to duty for weeks...Maybe never."

She nodded, and glared angrily at her blanked-out front screen, feeling helpless to do anything for her stricken ship.

"As for Major Thaurun...All signs point toward a stroke. Some of his generation of Marines received intra-cortical cybernetic implants as treatment for brain injuries. It's possible the EMP shorted them out, causing them to heat up and...Well...Long story short, I think it caused a stroke to occur."

Adriana didn't let the grimace show, though she felt a spike of pain in sympathy to the stolid old Marine.

"Prognosis?"

"Not good. It's like being struck by lightning from the inside. We won't know for sure until I can get him to medical, but I give him a fifty fifty at best...And about a five percent of surviving without permanent disability."

The orange lights died, so suddenly that Captain Leith grabbed her sidearm pistol on reflex, wrapping a sweaty palm around its mother-of-pearl grips.

"What the hell?"

A few other voices spoke up in confusion. Then the lights surged, and like a rising orchestra, the speakers on her chair buzzed to life just as the frontal screen lit white and began to fade into a starry, beautiful tapestry, half-filled with the glittering bulk of the great battleship moored to their side.

The first voice that spoke was Sati Anwar, the burns-crippled otter who had saved her entire vessel from destruction so shortly ago. She sounded worried, angry, likely feeling even more impotent than Adriana herself, being that she couldn't even stand on her own.

"Captain! Systems just came back online! I have control over the grav rings!"

"Very good, Ms. Anwar! All bridge stations, status report! You!"

She pointed to a security seaman, her encyclopedic mind whirling through the skill and training rosters for her crew.

"Man the gunnery station, you've got the training, put it to use!"

He saluted, as reports began.

"Captain, our sensors are still booting up, estimated time to full readiness...Six minutes."

"Captain, in-ship electronic communications are still mostly down, but we have the hard wire. We've got contact with engineering, the main armory, and...Medical deck?"

The surgeon perked, ears flagging upward. Lt. Cross sounded surprised, Captain Leith noted.

"Helm is...Well, we have two engines that I can control by hydraulics, but maneuvering thrusters aren't responding, Captain. No information on when we'll have them back, but I'm guessing we'll need to get the grav-moors off us first."

The seaman fiddling with the Fist's gunnery station stammered, overwhelmed and unfamiliar with the electronics, but quickly seeming to get them down as his fingers flew over the consoles.

"St-starboard systems are all down, some kind of ECM interference from the Star of Aden probably...Uh...Port systems...We've got three torpedo tubes and...Uh...Four main rail cannon batteries?"

Adriana's mind flew through the calculations. With less than a sixth of her full armament, she would be no match for the Star of Aden, especially trapped and locked into a close-quarters slug fest. The odds were even worse if they tried to win the boarding fight; for all of her crew's superior equipment and combat experience, they were simply outnumbered six to one in boarding Marine numbers.

If she were to find a way to break free, they might have a chance.

Then the screen started lighting up with red, green, blue, and orange outlines, re-writing the entire overall tactical map of the battlefield in instants. Adriana Leith stared at the suddenly reversed fortunes of their battlefield, her blood running cold as she sat up straight in the command chair.

"Good gods..." Adeling muttered, staring in shock at the massive battle-fleet that had just popped out of nowhere, umbral and menacing as the fighting seemed to be dying down. The computer had outlined them in red; enemy, out of range.

The calculations took only moments.

"Helm, be ready for acceleration to full speed."

"Ma'am?"

She continued without explanation.

"Ms. Anwar. Do you think you can re-create a planetary-style gravitosphere with the rings?"

Anwar was silent for a few seconds, computing no doubt, in her agile little brain.

"I think so, Captain. No, check that...Yes, I can do it."

"Transmit the necessary calculations to the gunnery station for sling-shotting our heaviest rail cannon rounds."

The otter was silent for a second, then snorted hard into the speaker, laughing as she responded.

"Understood, Captain."

"Sailor, what's your name?"

"Security Mate 1st Class John Gunner, ma'am."

"Hah! Okay, Mr. Gunner. Be prepared to do what your ancestors were named for. I want you to direct all torpedo tubes to hit the Star of Aden's gravity moor generators. They're those big grey things on the display."

She pointed, at the image of the Star of Aden that half-filled their screen. The Sailor started madly tapping at the controls.

"I also want you to fire the rail guns at her docking gantries. Show that old battleship why a modern navy should use shuttles for boarding actions. Use Ms. Anwar's trajectory calculations."

"Yes, ma'am!"

"Alright, here's what is going to happen. They don't know we have any power back, or they would have already started firing on our engines and weapons systems. We'll get one shot to break free, and we need to coordinate it to go off all at once. Mr Gunner, you'll start us off with a sudden barrage. Helm, the second those shots hit home, I want you to pour every bit of power we can get into the engines and push us away from that thing. Then I want you to plot a fast jump, short-hop towards the clear."

She gestured toward a starry zone of the endless night in space, where no blips were registering.

"Then I want a change of course and another hop the second we can get enough power to initiate it. She'll chase us at least that far, probably farther."

Lt. Cross interrupted at this point, as her switch board was lighting up like Christmas.

"Ma'am, we're getting wired communications from all over the Fist. Chief Karnen must have gotten some systems back online. Priority call from the Rec Area."

"Put it through to my chair, and pause the plan for now."

Fingers flew over consoles, as she sat back down, wincing as her shoulder suddenly gave a rather impolite reminder of its condition.

"Ngh...This is Captain Leith. To whom am I speaking?"

"Staff Sar'nt Herrin, 17th Marine Infantry. Captain, the main boarding action and coordination is going on here on the Rec Deck. I count about six hundred enemy Marines here, and they're actively offloading more through three breached holes in our hull."

Leith grimaced, and consulted her memorized map of the Fist. What Herrin was reporting seemed common sense, but without the electronic communications necessary to coordinate her defenders, the knowledge was pretty well useless.

"Staff Sergeant, I need you to get out of there. We're about to break those docking gantries, and that will decompress the Rec Deck."

"Captain, I can see the Star of Aden through the portholes. Don't know if your sensors are reading this, but she's got enough guns pointed at us to turn the Fist into a fast-moving debris field. Let me go through the boarding gantries and scare them into hesitating before you go. Star of Aden's an older class, got a few design flaws I can monkey-wrench with a bit of composite explosive."

"Absolutely not, Staff Sergeant! I won't let anyone under my command commit suicide like that!"

"Heh. What? Interference. Hold one."

The click of an old copper-line phone hanging up left Adriana staring at the receiver, stupefied.

"What the fuck...?!"

Clicks had the instincts of a predator, simmering just beneath the carefully-cultivated friendly and clueless façade trained into her since birth. She'd been hatched for the express purpose of interfacing with the humans and their sub-species, built from the genes up to serve that priceless alliance upon which Ix'kat peace and prosperity was built.

Her people, contrary to popular perception, were not bloodthirsty or heartless. The great insect queens of the Ix'kat hives believed, above all else, in harmonious cooperation. Their great empire floated through space, massive catacombs of rock and flesh carrying the Ix'kat legacy wherever they traveled, almost entirely self-sufficient and internally peaceful.

What popular perception was most enamored with, of course, was the Ix'kat's ability to do great and horrifying violence upon their enemies. Once the queens decided a foe would not be able to exist in harmony with the Hive, they unleashed their deepest, most vicious and atavistic instincts upon the enemy. Their moral qualms simply vanished, replaced with a genetically-coded purposeful sort of program, something close to a set of 'rules of engagement' that went, simply, thus.

Kill any enemy that can potentially harm the Ix'kat. All allies of the Hive are of the Hive. Spare enemies that present no threat. Waste nothing, devour the dead. Survive unless your destruction will benefit the Hive. When the killing is done, revert to previous behavior.

So far, she hadn't found allies to defend, or at least not allies that were still alive. She was quite efficiently performing the first rule, as a trail of broken, slashed, ripped corpses attested across three major chambers of the Fist. She had little time for devouring, but had stopped to do so, replenishing her chemical energy supplies as she went. So far, there had been no break in the killing. She had survived by using the squishy-creatures' lack of night sight against them, crawling through ducting with her impossibly flexible body, or under floor plates where necessary.

Screeching out an ululating cry, she dropped from the ventilation system, planting both hand-claws through the rib cage of another victim. He gurgled and choked, ignored, as she ripped one claw out his side, spinning around to hurl his corpse into a heavy gunner. Calculations built of genetics and experience sent her charging forward into a reeling male who was struggling with a long tube object, which she snatched from him and ripped in half before slamming her forehead into the male and ripping his throat out with her gnashing, blood-soaked mandibles.

Someone made a noise behind her, and the chitin on her back took several hits of hot wetness, somewhere registering in her mind as plasma. Her back cricket-like leg lashed out, slashing the enemy's leg off at the knee with its backward-facing razor-bladed spines.

A third enemy stabbed at her wildly, firing his rifle at point-blank range as he tried to gut her with a bayonet. The bullets stung, indicating her carapace had stopped them but some force had gotten through. Her counter-attack tore the rifle from his paws, before she slammed a claw through his throat, slicing his head neatly off in a spray of blood.

Then the bug queen threw her head back and issued a chittering, gnashing roar, like a billion cicadas enraged, spitting tornadoes and lava in their wrath. Somewhere nearby, voices called out to her, a screeching counter-chitter of lesser Ix'kat. Her mandibles, greasy with the viscera of her victims, who she crouched to eat from, shifted upward into the sinister grin of her people.

Her servants had finally arrived, a dozen male Ix'kat, each a perfect and unique example of insectoid gene-craft. Where she was long and graceful, like a slender if terrible and bladed cricket, they were squat scarab beetle or roach-like creatures, ugly and horrifying and covered in claws and spines. Fleeing in front of them, unharmed but terrified, a swarm of the Fist's own crewmen ran to stay ahead of the things they feared might at any moment decide to rip them limb from limb.

Clicks laughed, a chittering squealing noise that hurt the ears of those too close to her. They skidded to a stop, the six of them, one of whim let out a cry and threw himself to the floor, curling up as small as he could get. She tilted her head at them, some instinct reminding her to speak. Likely the same instinct that told her these were friendly, 'of the Hive,' because the tracking beacons in their clothes squeaked out the Fist of the Nascent Dawn's beautiful Song of Identity.

She reached down, gently touching the cowering coyote, as the creature cried out like a frightened larva. Her voice was a churring sound, chattering low in her throat as her warriors nimbly hopped straight over the cowering terrified food-makers. Chefs, she remembered, a term Nivea had taught her.

"Where...Are enemy? You not need...Fear me, squishy-friend."

Language was hard, the human words so alien to begin with that her instinct-fueled war mind had trouble forcing itself to process them. One of the furs, a male fox she internally labeled 'brave guy' managed to speak, though his legs were shaking and his white uniform was spattered with blood.

"B-behind us...Recreation Deck's full of them! We m-managed to escape the guards, right before your w-w-warriors c-caught them chasing us..."

He was stammering, which she remembered was a human-species sign of terror, and kept looking behind himself down the hall. She clicked a quick query to her warriors. Their response, brief and not needing grammar, told her the enemy were regrouping, frightened of engaging Ix'kat in close-quarters battle.

Clicks recalled the tactical information she had been born with - that Ix'kat carapaces could stop almost any human weapon that wasn't mounted on a tank or Walker unit. In the close-quarters of a ship, her people would be virtually unstoppable, unless the enemy were desperate enough to use explosives on themselves to kill her.

She nodded her insectoid head, and extended a claw, pointing straight back behind her toward a still-closed bulkhead door and the locking wheel.

"Go. That way is safe place for larvae. Big clank-place with horsie! Many squishy-warrior! He protect, yes!"

The chef stared, uncomprehending. She gently wrapped her three eight-inch-clawed fingers around his shoulder, and ushered the shaking creature past her. The others followed him, and she nodded in satisfaction. 'Brave One's' lesser food-makers had faith in their unofficial leader, which was as it ought to be, to her inherently hierarchical mind.

Once they were past and through the bulkhead, she twisted it to fully lock. Then she tore the locking wheel off the door entirely, with a groaning shriek of metal.

There were no instructions needed. She dumped out pheromones, stopped to grab another maw-ful of twitching corpse, swallowed it, and then exploded into a noisy, charging sprint toward the Rec Deck as her warriors buzzed and chattered and screeched and rushed ahead of her as shields.

Herrin had used the barber shops and entertainment rooms of the Fist as cover, moving through back rooms and storage areas the enemy had already cleared. Taking a communication device was out of the question at this point, even if it would let him know what the enemy were thinking. They would notice a missing soldier, and he couldn't exactly ask one nicely for his earpiece.

He belly-crawled through the last enclosed area between himself and the docking gantries, rank with the stink of melting ice cream in a thousand flavors, and used the mirror-polished front of the display cooler to watch his enemies. Patience, in this case, was his best ally. Two minutes after he made his call from that shop's back room, the aging lion saw the opening he needed.

While the dozen Marines who guarded this side of the boarding tube talked into their headsets, their backs to him, he fast-stepped out of the ice cream parlor and into the boarding tube, praying like hell that they didn't turn around. He doubted the heavy service pistol in his right paw would do much more than scare the shit out of them, in the thick boarding-duty armor they were wearing.

The tube, like many of its type, was constructed of opaque plastics and carbon fibrous fabrics inside regular dense rings of hardened nano-infused steel, giving the whole thing the look of a massive ribbed-for-her-pleasure condom. Bent at the center to a right angle by the stresses of maintaining lock between two massive gravity-producing vessels, he knew he wouldn't have long. Captain Leith wouldn't like it, but she had no choice - She'd give him a few minutes to try his suicidal plan, before blowing the gantry to kingdom come.

Thus, waiting, even though he knew it was necessary, felt as if someone were dragging a knife over his spine. If standard procedure were being followed, and he believed it was after his observation period, a supply cart would be entering the tube at any moment. When it did, the air locks would cycle shut for safety, until the fur pushing the cart and the armed guard escorting him made it to the far end. He would have but moments to make his move.

After a minute, he heard a soft squeaking, rhythmic and regular, a cart with a damaged wheel moving into the tube. A gentle sensation of fullness in his ears indicated that the Star's airlock had just shut. He waited for the squeaking to approach, as he slid his pistol back into its holster. A single missed shot, and he'd be dead of explosive decompression. His combat knife, that old friend he'd carried since Basic Training some twenty years before, slid into his paw as if made for his fingers alone.

As the cart reached the L-shaped curve, Herrin leapt into action, surging around the bend with a battle roar that warped his face into a mask of sheer aggression designed to frighten and stun inexperienced opponents.

Two wolves greeted him around the bend, eyes wide with surprise at being attacked in between two armed checkpoints that had, until that moment, been assumed to be entirely secure. The cart-pusher, shorter by half a foot than the other and clearly a new Sailor, froze entirely. The Marine, crisp crew-cut so new Herrin imagined he could rest a plate on it like a table, fumbled his carbine trying to raise it.

The big lion bulled right into him, aggression and strength blasting through his body at the tip of his knife, which plunged into the opposing Marine's solar plexus to the helt. As the hissing Marine fell away, gurgling, rifle falling from nerveless paws, Herrin planted a booted foot and spun, flipping the knife around in his paw so the blade was along his wrist. His move brought it directly into line with the cart-pusher's throat, slashing him ear to ear as the lion's guarding paw grabbed him and turned him away and down, to prevent the spray getting all over him.

As the two wolves lay on the ground, twitching and grabbing at their throats, he looked down at the cart, and realized a flaw to his plan. There was nowhere to hide the corpses, and he had to get through half a dozen or more security troops on the other side.

Somewhere behind him, the airlock his enemies had placed over their cut hole into the Fist began cycling open. Herrin grabbed the carbine, and steeled himself. When that door in front of him opened, he was going to die. At least, he hoped, he'd take a few enemies with him.

Then he heard screams from behind, and the horrible echoing shrieks of enraged Ix'kat warriors.