For Blood Or Ash - Chapter 2

Combat engineers slammed seismic probes into rock to sound the asteroid, clamped acoustic and electrical sensors to frayed steel to map the mechanical infrastructure, and set gravimetric sensors sniffing for artificial curvature. Yhzmal did not wait for the data, however, before setting his cutters to breaching blast doors. Wherever they were going afterword, first, they were going in. Firefights erupted immediately in multiple corridors.

The centurio sent the bulk of his units into the fiercest resistance. That would prove incorrect, he knew; but the enemy could take false comfort in his error. That should buy time to find pod hatches. Escape routes would confirm the target. Yhzmal selected a squad of assault strikers. Much more compact than the gargantuan centurio, their bodies resembled cubical amalgamations of sinew, polymer, and steel. Laced with artificially cooled nervous systems, they were boxed lightning. “Jumping” down to the entrance of a freight corridor, the small force held back as a front of MTACs and marines advanced on processing areas. Yhzmal’s intuition had warmed to this direction, but he would wait on Other Rabbit – a twitchy Caldari tube boy who was not the famous pirate – before making a final decision.

Beneath a brassy mop, behind glazed green eyes, Other Rabbit “listened” to every signal that reached him: telemetry of advancing units, engineers reporting, a downlink from the Drake, even the enemy’s encrypted transmissions. He didn’t need to understand, only perceive. When his wide eyes finally blinked clear, the centurio received an impression of a “significant chamber.” From it, three chutes – just this side of not quite imperceptible amid the noise – led to the asteroid’s surface. Yhzmal nodded to Other Rabbit’s twin kameiras. Little demon securely clamped between, they blasted for space. The Lady did not like her cherished prodigy in harm’s way long.

Demolitionists raced to each camouflaged exit. Certainly, agile pods could have slipped people out already. But some layer of command remained to direct defenses, and those would not escape. Taking position cautiously, the combat engineers scanned for signs of use. Two reported negative; thermal maps suggested the third had either been used, or misfired. The Drake’s crew identified no pods in scanner logs, but asteroids could conceivably have provided cover long enough to orient and warp. Yhzmal ordered the hatches mined with bursters. If a pod tried to get out now, its electronics would fry into uselessness: no drive, no soul flash. The kameira did consider charging in the out doors. Leaving some hope alive, however, could keep the enemy from ritual suicide before EMPs blanked nervous systems.

Rapidly, Yhzmal planned his route through the structure. It started with the freight corridor. Firing boosters, the assault squad closed on the nearest fray, crashing into a factory’s artificial gravity and rolling to cover. The fight here was not large: scattered defenders pinned amid heavy equipment by two infantry fronts. The heavy fighting raged far above, amid warrens of catwalks and tunnels. Yhzmal directed his squad’s personal rail guns into the windows of an elevated supervisory deck. The thick glass did not shatter easily, but the guns could penetrate. Once irregularities existed, rockets did the rest. On powered leaps, the squad crashed over control panels, smashed through doors, and barreled into an access corridor; gunfire, grenades, quick duck to the side – charge.

Yhzmal exulted in close combat.

He swung an impossibly thick, broad single-edge blade with inhuman strength, stabbing, slicing - crushing armor and bone. Feeling his opposition through a web of sensory feeds, processing impossibly fast, the giant knew exactly where to move. Men with guns usually tried to aim, and rarely had the time they imagined. Nearly teleporting around a corner, Yhzmal’s hand crushed a throat, slammed the corpse down, dropped on top of it as shots hissed through empty air. Slashing up, the centurio’s blow threw his next opponent against the steel lattice ceiling. A hurled “knife,” detatched from a pseudo-magnetic sub-dermal mount, pinned the body up. Spinning a slash to make others leap back, the kameira smashed into an adjacent chamber through its wall. As defenders rushed to keep him in sight, they forgot the rest of his squad. Rail guns cut them to ribbons.

So it went around a circle of functional constructs, storage chambers, and processing facilities. Most of the enemy had been drawn to the intense fighting – falling for their own trap by baiting it. A series of short, vertical spines flickered through Yhzmal’s mind. Those enabled rapid movement between decks. The centurio raced to cut down reinforcements in a torrent of piercing rounds. End game: shift down, fight; hustle to center, slash around a staging area – fire through catwalks. Down, in, around again. Rush to a bulkhead door, two defenders – one decapitated, the other’s chest crushed through by a giant palm.

“Cutters!”

The centurio didn’t need to say it. Beams smoked, flickering through frequencies to find greatest effect. Within moments, Yhzmal pulled the heavy door into the corridor to reveal a shaft. Rungs ran into darkness above and below. Behind, kameiras ripped more doors from sockets, tore out panels, built a pile of trash. Most, they hurled down the chute. Down, down artificial gravity pulled it. Lower turret, neutralized; the upper would hurt.

Yhzmal wrapped a chestplate from one of his men to his own neck and hefted the remaining debris onto his back. One arm forward to clasp a rung, he rushed the chute. Heavy fire pounded down. Two men ducked under him and scrambled halfway to the bottom. Squeezing into position, they began cutting. A third entered the chute with a large case in grasp. The rest of the squad ran like hell. Shots from above cut deeper and deeper into the centurio’s shell. Yes, ut, cut! They didn’t need to open the door, just breach the pillbox’s insulation. Molten metal seeped into Yhzmal’s back. He disabled pain throughputs: no longer “need-to-know.”

At last, the door gave, a little, a little more… Now!

The cutters dropped as the third man slammed his case into the small breach and released. Although the centurio’s nervous system was extremely well shielded, such a powerful device overwhelmed even that. Blinded instantly, his massive body sagged between corridor floor and rung. Only staggering will kept strength in his hands. Losing that grip meant plunging head first into darkness, heated scrap chasing after – not good, and the burst was already bad enough. At least the fire from above had stopped.

Feebly, Yhzmal moved his free arm toward the wall, taking as much care as he could not to disturb the debris on his back. He did not feel the wall so much determine that his arm could move no further. Shaking, he slid his thumb up the wall toward the next rung. Eventually, “something” stopped his motion again and he closed his grip. As he pulled into a more vertical position, the metal on his back scraped down into the corridor and away from the men below. Pain circuits he never realized existed lit up. The giant wanted to slide away, too, but all he could do was hang in place, blind and nearly paralyzed. If those who ran put enough distance and crap between themselves and the blast, they would return soon enough. Those below, suffocating without pulses, would die soon without attention. Everyone knew what to do.

The centurio had faith they would do it.

Apostasy

In my youth, I refused to acknowledge the utility of anything beyond my own world. The boundaries of that were nothing so grand as the abstract contours of culture, but rather a glacial lake surrounding the island on which my family's monastery stood for uncounted centuries. We were a martial order, devout in our belief that mastery of the spirit came through mastery of the body. Noble families from across Athra (as we call it to this day, for having been a part of Amarr, we disdained the dilution of that name through its extension to the entire planet) sent children to train in our techniques. An anachronism even in ancient times, by the advent of warp drives and jump gates, we were all but forgotten. The children stopped coming, and this suited us, for the interference of others diluted our ascetic traditions.

However, shortly after Amarr enslaved the Minmatar and, more importantly, the Human Endurance Program began, we saw children again: some of the kameira. Control through martial artistry suited these young soldiers, and all junior subigos who trained with us advanced to their final potential. Over time, we began training slaver pups as well, turning the lethal predators into fiercely loyal companions paired with our youths. Though we maintained the facade of isolated purity, and the young among us - such as myself - continued to see no further than our glassy horizon, the kameira had changed us.

We did not abandon our belief in the mastery of body or spirit.

However, rather than look ever more inward for the mysteries of our souls, we began to look outward for the mysteries of all things. The adults would not bring me into contact with this new understanding until my affinity for neurological implants became apparent. I at first refused to consider any such transformation. Some pale joke of "immortality" meant nothing to me, for existing in perpetuity as a sequence of empty husks, tools plugged into nothing more significant than machines (however "mighty" a juvenile soul might perceive such machines to be) surely represented the antithesis of self mastery.

Slowly, my great grandmother inverted this perception of holiness. The very notion of self was a prison. Certainly, to become nothing more than a tool, a circuit between objectives of no lasting significance, represented a pathetic fate. But where might the labyrinth lead, if walked with awareness? Her words did not reach me, then, and I refused to stomach any contention perfection tolerated an external crutch. As each self reflects all, to become all, become one's true self.

It was my observation of the kameira hound masters which changed this belief. The ferocious slavers did not devolve into tools, obediently waiting to leap into the execution of banal instructions, thoughtlessly, time and again - a pitiful existence, unworthy of the true soul. No, at their most effective, master and hound became a new entity. The hound had transformed its master as surely as it had been transformed. So my path through the labyrinth emerged from mist: I would not be a tool of the machine, nor would the machine be a tool of mine.

We would find our common soul, together.

For Blood Or Ash - Chapter 1

Yhzmal pressed a palm against one of the injection bay bulkheads. The kameira’s skin had lost any ability to feel on its own years ago, but a complex weave of polymers and ceramic metals filled his mind’s eye with expanding designs – the bulkhead, the walls it supported, the chambers they enclosed. He longed for an impression of the battle without; however, the ship may as well have been resting in a hangar. Combat telemetry mixed with the calm recitation of statistics by station heads told him what he needed to know, true enough, but a warrior sharpened his edge on shattering armor, afterburners, and that frenetic clamor of nanite bees. Covered in sacred scars, Yhzmal Gaim did not think highly of “shields.”

“Damn Caldari,” smirked a young commando. “Forgot the espresso bar.”

Everyone chuckled.

“We need only ask,” Yhzmal observed. “Prepare for deployment.”

They were prepared already, of course, just a matter of dropping visors into place and clamping on gauntlets. Although their cybernetic bodies could handle harsh environments well, more than freezing vacuum waited “below.” Wolf spiders whirred to life: giant exoskeletons resembling the arachnids, plated in Amarr fashion. Light combat strikers loaded into the abdomens. Carapace plates closed over those, and heavier MTACs clamped onto the skin. The totem completed: huntress and voracious young. Yhzmal smiled grimly. Seven golden spiders crouched in a cavern of dark silver and pale light. The ashen goliath – an MTAC unto himself – clamped onto the lead bug and pounded his fist against its carapace, twice. In unison, each monster “tapped” a forward leg twice in answer.

The kameiras were ready.

“Target space is secure,” the Lady’s soft technological voice finally whispered. “Enter the structure, kill resistance until you reach control. There, incapacitate and prepare prisoners for retrieval.”

“As the Lady commands,” replied Yhzmal solemnly.

Gravity dropped away, then the floor. A reverse tractor nudged them into space; thrusters engaged. Above and around, the Drake’s wings folded protectively. Below, space dropped ten kilometers through a tangle of asteroids and construction. As they pulled away from the battle cruiser, the carnage beyond it seeped into view. Husks drifted hopelessly, fires through their decks fading to ghostly embers. The vivid giant that sheltered this dead space stared at them with one of its great storms, hungering. Yhzmal nodded a small prayer to the beast. These planets were his gods; the Lady indulged her centurio prior this.

Architectural renderings of the colony flickered through Yhzmal’s interfaces. The huge construction followed no cohesive paradigm, having expanded organically with population and function. He sent his force diving recklessly into it. Turrets engaged immediately with light kinetics and small pulses. The defenders were cognizant of risk they might damage their own colony. As spiders wove the gauntlet, plates expanded and contracted to shield the MTACs. Impacts streaked through steel; spot reppers clamored to respond.

Now, Yhzmal felt.

The centurio hurled his men into jeopardy to give the enemy a chance to explain what mattered most. The colony was too large to fight through in its entirety, while the design gave no clue of hierarchy. A large central asteroid drew attention, but certainly served primarily as a chapel. Though it could indicate commanders lurked near, more likely, it played on such suspicions – a death trap.

Yhzmal’s men harassed the turrets with rockets to stir the pot, but explosions also filled space with debris dangerous to fast-moving attackers. They sustained injuries. The centurio could not press this stratagem for too long. He sent alternating spiders close to “ground” for cover. As vehicles rotated back into the fray, some turrets responded faster than others. Faster response meant nearer control. These patterns accumulated over time, until schematics blurred to a convergence in Yhzmal’s layered vision. Target acquired.

The fanatics situated their command bunker well: one of many bland asteroids attached to a large structural artery, neutral with respect to the distribution of the colony. Now, of course, it could be said to stand out for not having stood out. Yhzmal sent his spiders scurrying into the crevices of larger asteroids throughout the colony, careful not to call attention to any specific region. Defensive fire could not reach them easily, and what did could be sustained by armor. Position secure, the centurio called snipers from the belly of his spider.

“Paint me dots here, here, and here.”

He beamed diagrams to the small force. They rappelled without gravity across the pocked rock. With well-regulated thermal armor covered in optic sheets, they were ghosts in the night. They were also instant kills should defenders pick them up, and consequently stuck to natural cover wherever possible. A booster misfire, an overly aggressive jump or striking rock too hard – any mistake would alert the colony to this new tactic. By half steps and floating crawls, at last they reached points from which to take aim. One by one, they pulled their triggers.

Missiles streaked down from the cruiser. “Go!” Exploding from their nooks, spiders converged on the bunker as missiles hit dots. Tributary connectors collapsed; there would be no escape. The spiders clamped to the main artery on either side of the asteroid, as near to rock as possible, spreading plates from raised legs to cover units beneath. MTACs disengaged. Some turned modified mining cutters on the structure, breaking down the metals. Down, down, scattered outbursts of decompression signaled they were through. More MTACs smashed in, some met resistance and liquidated it quickly; others found clear passages. Light units poured in after and took covering positions.

Thrusting forward, lead MTACs eviscerated the structure with cannons and beams, leaving only shattered webs anchored to the thickest struts. The bunker was isolated. Multiple corridors tunneled into the asteroid, some for heavy supplies, others for personnel - all sealed by blast doors. Though hopelessly trapped, Yhzmal knew these defenders would neither collapse in amateurish panic, nor concede defeat with professional resignation. They would die. Unfortunately, the Lady wanted them alive.

Speed mattered.

Apollonian and Dionysian

Truth lives neither at extremes, nor in a blended compromise, but that space between light and dark which is neither. Good or evil, light or dark, Apollo or Dionysus distract the unwary with abstraction. Perceived as such, however, they point to Truth.

Though continual rebirth falls among the Dionysian by inherent nature, through faith I rise. Neither good nor evil, neither light nor dark, bound not to Apollo nor twice-born brother, I cross between. With each trespass, I necessarily tread upon the Truth. It is only the slightest distance, neither light nor dark; crossed in barely a moment.

However, crossed time and again, barely becomes enough.