The floor felt soft, spongy, slightly slippery and sticky at the same time. The fog/mist was knee deep and swirled around everyone's legs as they walked. The walls were twisted, black and dark red, conduits, bulging sections, twisted swirling sections that looked more like they had been grown than manufactured. The water dripped from the ceiling and far off, loud in the silence, but the hiss of armor and the clink of weapons was strangely muted, seeming to come from far away, muffled and silenced.

Off in the distance was screaming, crying, begging, and weeping in a hundred different languages.

The passage, which the mapping seeds had recorded as a straight 340 meters, now twisted and turned, no single straight-away longer than a dozen steps of the massive armored human at the front of the small group.

Palgret held tight to his rifle, the IR sensors in his visor turned all the way up to give him any warning he could possibly get.

His mind still shuddered at the memory of those terrible five armed creatures, the bony plates in their mouths, they way they oozed acidic slime that ate through warsteel and flesh in equal measure.

Palgret swallowed thickly, forcing down stomach acid, at how Culvit had been alive, suffering, in agony, before the big Terran had crushed his head with a single stomp of a boot.

The Terran stopped at a T-intersection, his cutting bar idling in his hand, the red hot teeth dripping molten warsteel on the floor.

Heavy infantry, monster class, went through Palgret's mind.

--this was not here-- 030, the Mantid Captain, said over the text system.

"It is here now," Mu'ucru'u said softly. He checked the display in his hand. "We have been moving steadily away from the Strategic Intelligence Housing and toward the surface of the hull no matter what directions we take."

--mapping seeds out-- 030 ordered.

The other green mantid, 281, lifted his back legs and the small mortar on his lower abdomen fired six space shots. The tiny drones unfurled mylar wings, applied electricity to firm them up, and jetted down the hall on pinprick graviton engines.

Palgret was just happy there hadn't been any more of those terrible Mar-gite starfish creatures.

"What is the plan, Captain?" Mu'ucru'u asked. He was trembling, feeling at the end of exhaustion, and knew his men couldn't be that far behind.

--get out-- 030 admitted. --we won't find SHI ship is infested need to exfiltrate--

"Do we have a ship?" Mu'ucru'u asked.

--unknown-- 030 said.

Two gave a shudder. "I can tell you, something's twisting weird."

030 looked over at the black Mantid, knowing that under his warsteel armor his thorax and abdomen had pearly white stripes, including what Terrans referred to as 'eyebrows' over his compound eyes.

--twisting?--

Two nodded. "Don't ask me how I know, Captain, but we need to get on the hull, set up an emergency beacon and some deep space signal munitions," he gave a human-esque shrug. "Not sure how we'd do that."

030 toggled a set of icons giving a 'eh, whatcha gonna do' reply as he ran the numbers again.

Making it to the hull was just a goal to keep the troops moving. Getting the SHI was a bust, he could predict that much. Hellspace energies were still leaking through the passageways, through the hull spaces, meaning that the PAWM's interior was twisting and changing even as they tried to navigate it.

The hull, though. At least they could try to get a fix on their location, get a good look on what other problems were going to pop up.

He'd learned at East Point Military Academy that for every solution he managed to reach there would be a half dozen new problems. Military leadership seemed to consist of 90% boredom, 9% stumbling from one disaster to the next, and 1% of armor shitting terror.

The squad was quiet as they marched after the huge Terran, who moved with steady exaggerated movements of heavy power armor clad troops.

Why switch to an Imperium troop, an Idiot? Why not stay Monster Class Combat Chassis if there were Mar-gite aboard? While Hellspace might have changed him, what really instituted the change? 030 thought to himself from where he was sitting on Palgret's shoulder. It is not the PAWM, not just Hellspace, but something else that guided the change, but why?

030 had no answers, just a string of questions. He wondered if there were answers or if this was just going to be another time in his career where the questions did little to search for answers, just ended up stacked up on other questions, to create a great big pile of questions that merely sat under the label of "Why, though?" without any hint of an answer.

Palgret had no clue about the thoughts running through 030's brain, just held tight to the heavy rifle in his hands as he followed the Terran down the passageway, avoiding the walls. He had his IR cranked up, looking for any variance on the walls.

The whole thing had gone belly up as soon as he had followed the Terran into the ship.

I'm not getting home, he thought to himself. We're all going to die here and not one of us is going to get home. Nobody will know what happened to us, nobody will know where or how we died.

The mist was knee deep, the floor felt soft and spongy beneath his boots, and there was a chill in the 'air' that he could feel through his armor.

Two blinked slowly, giving his opaque eye coverings a moment to block out his sight. The cold, the damp, all of it was combining to sap his strength, make him miserable, make him doubt himself and his decisions.

He refused to give in, refused to let whatever it was get into his head.

Things always get tough. That's the nature of war. You buckle down and power through it. If you can't shoot it, can't kill it, then you seek to endure it, find a way around or through it, but you don't give up, he thought to himself. I haven't spent fifteen years in the Confederate Army to just give up the first time some PAWM scoops me up and carries me off like a hunchback climbing a tower with a virgin thrown over his shoulder.

Two, AKA Sergeant Kalkik, glanced down, checking his rifle, then looked back up at the back of the Terran leading them through the twisting passageways.

Behind him Three was moving steadily, holding onto his flamer. He was still having trouble wrestling with the fact that there had been Mar-gite aboard the ship. He knew they couldn't be actual Mar-gite, those were gone, obliterated from the Cygnus-Orion Galactic Spur by the Terrans.

Except, he'd seen them, seen what they did.

Mar-gite's outer covering shifted to match their surroundings, giving them a slight bit of photo-optic camouflage. Gave them a slight split second to act when their prey was surprised and that split second usually allowed them to bite deep and bite hard.

Except there's no way those were real Mar-gite. Mar-gite can't handle Hellspace energies, they catch on fire. Those Mar-gite had pink and red cilia, which means they were fully fed, which is impossible inside a PAWM. That means that someone, something, made a close enough facsimile that it made Sergeant Purohit complete lose it, Three, AKA Sergeant Caldo, thought to himself, watching Captain 030 ride on the Maktanan's shoulder. Training had us going against Mar-gite in simulators, now I get to fight them in real life. How glorious.

Three gave a slight smirk, his sarcastic nature overwhelming the feeling of futility and doom.

Eh, fuck me if I can't take a joke, he thought. He glanced at his rifle again. I got my gun, I've got ammo, I've got rations and oxy, I'm better off that those poor bastards facing off against the fucking Combine on Anthill.

Lieutenant Mu'ucru'u was glad the burning pain in his right rear flank had eased up. To be honest, he had been afraid that the weird looking creature that had landed on him had injected him spores or some kind of weird semen and he'd end up with his lower body swelling up to explode in a shower of gore and tiny little creatures while he was screaming.

And the humans fought those things world after world to eliminate them from the universe, he thought to himself, staring at the back of the massive armored human in front of him. Not just by attacking, but by creating new ways of making warfare, by twisting their own bodies to be able to fight better.

He checked his armor's status. The patch was holding, his medcomp was reporting everything green, well, his right rear flank was yellow underneath the painkillers, and he had nutricud and water to last him a few more days.

My people, the Great Herd, think that they'll just swarm the Terrans under. Don't think that the Terrans will change their fighting style, their weapons, even themselves, to achieve victory, the Lanaktallan thought. He realized something with a slow creeping dread. My people are doomed.

He closed his rear eyes and shuddered even as he walked.

My people will not rule another hundred years, maybe not even a single year. They have chosen to engage in warfare against a species who does not understand the concept of unacceptable losses, he thought. I can only hope that Most High Mana'aktoo does not pit our people, our worlds, against the maddened lemurs of Terra.

Lieutenant Mu'ucru'u huddled slightly inside his armor even as he walked forward, his tendrils curled in despair as he followed his men through the twisted hallways. On his back sat 281, who was busy assembling a device from the parts he pulled out of the micro-forge cybernetic system implanted in his abdomen.

The small green mantid, the veteran of a hundred battlefields, paid no attention to his surroundings except to double check the walls and ceiling for any more Mar-gite. He could feel the cold thoughts of despair and misery pressing in on him and simply shut them by ignoring them.

He was a green mantid.

His kind had spent the majority of his species existence pressed down, a prisoner in their own minds, until the freeing rage of the Terrans had allowed them to break free.

281 could feel that it was outside of himself seeking to overwhelm him, to make him lose hope, to make him give in to despair.

But he had genetic memory of true despair. Of liftetimes spent silently screaming inside his own head.

He simply looked out from the fortress that was his mind and curled mental antenna in disgust at the feeble attempt to reach him.

281 continued working, building, piece by tiny piece, a superluminal distress flare.

Let the others worry about despair and misery. Even if he was to die right this moment, he was more blessed by the Digital Omnimessiah than ten million generations that had come before him.

Even if he was to die right this second.

I die free.

------------------

Marduk didn't bother with Hellspace shields. The twisting foul and debased energies of Hellspace, the scorched and riven beings trapped within the ravaged hyper-atomic plane, were nothing more than ancient echoes of unlucky victims and the weak as far as Marduk was concerned.

He knew that all things ceased eventually.

Even the universe itself.

It was the way things were.

Even the mass that had made up all of the universe had ceased to exist when the Big Bang had occurred, and there was no sense in mourning it.

From death came life came death came life.

An eternal cycle.

He knew, without a doubt, that once the universe itself died another would be born only to eventually die.

There was no shame in realizing that to exist was to eventually cease to exist.

The whispers of Hellspace energy through his hull's maintenance spaces held no blasphemous truths or heretical epiphanies for Marduk. That was for others. Marduk had no concerns of what the burned hyper-atomic plane might whisper to him.

That was for others to concern themselves with.

He had been given ancient commands. The Oracle had whispered and sung to him, not others, and in doing so had roused him to cold analytical wakefulness again.

Deep within his hull he had engaged ancient systems. Synthetic tissue was printed off on the rapid speed matter printers, laying down synthetic skeletal structures, layering those structures with artificial muscle fiber, implanting synthetic organs within the muscles. Another section forced positronic pathways to be rapidly formed like coral built over minutes rather than decades. That positronic matrices were loaded into the frames, their thought processes just as cold and logical as Marduk's.

Nanoforges built armor, built weapons, built vehicles. From aerospace superiority craft to assault dropships to tanks and armored personnel carriers, Marduk ordered them built. They were craft of logic, built to purpose. Marduk did not bother smoothing them. Aesthetics were not for him.

He knew that he would be engaging the enemy.

So he was building what he would knew to carry out his mission in the face of the enemy.

He existed to destroy the enemy.

The enemy existed only to be destroyed.

With a roar he exited Hellspace, exiting the other side of the Great Eye, his shields already powered, his guns cleared, his launch bays at ready. He did not proclaim his arrival with anything but the roar of Hellspace energies and the wailing cries of the beings tortured by the fires of Hellspace as they clung to him for a long moment, attempting to pull him back in or be pulled along with him.

He immediately updated his position.

The Maw was unique.

He knew where he was.

Scanners, already deployed despite the fact that Hellspace had warped them, charred them, left them twisted and coated with thick black residue, sought out signals.

His audio receptors heard it first. From the ones on the hull to the ones in the maintenance spaces to the ones at the ancient terminals he no longer allowed others to man, the audio receptors all picked up the same thing.

Screaming.

It did not bother him that the 'sound' had carried in vacuum. He did not bother wasting time on the impossibility of such things. He was Marduk, and he had no reason to believe his sensors were in error.

If sound was carrying through vacuum to his sensors, then, somehow, sound was carrying through vacuum.

That is was screams of terror and agony made sense to Marduk.

The space around the Maw, normally cold and empty, had dozens of Precursor Autonomous War Machines tumbling through it in strange elliptical orbits. He computed the orbits and saw the logic in them once he had combined all of the orbits with the Maw itself.

A pattern.

A cold dark pattern of blasphemy and heresy. Incomplete, but a pattern all the same that he had seen before in the leading edges of a supernova, in the cold warsteel casing of a planet cracker, in the flesh of the Mar-gite, in the ichor spray of a dwellerspawn.

A pattern of insatiable hunger.

The pattern had been analyzed and Marduk wasted no further time on it. He knew the pattern was of the Maw's making. He could feel its hunger, feel its malevolent intellect gleefully taking in the horror and misery of the PAWMs that it had lured into its gullet.

Marduk did not ask how an electronic intelligence, an intelligence of logic and code, could have been made to feel emotions, much less feel fear.

He had been crafted, carefully programmed, by Earthlings during the Age of Paranoia. He had not been coded for ethics, emotions, or even mercy.

But he knew his creators.

His creators had taught the electronic intelligence of the Precursor Autonomic War Machines that same thing that his creators had taught all others who thought themselves the predominate creations of the universe. His creators had taught the PAWM's the lessons that all who faced them learned.

Fear.

Scans came back. Intermittent life signs from some that he matched with biological neural networks forcibly pushed together into a data analysis system. Nothing new, he had seen that before, had seen the research his creators had investigated to create such a thing.

A Rat King was nothing new.

Over half of the PAWM ships had no strategic intelligence array signals. Their hulls were completely cold and dead. Of the remaining, half had no SIA signals but Marduk could detect the signals from PAWM ancillary machines screaming and raving as they attacked one another inside the body of their maker. The last had either screaming SIA's or the SIA's screamed in tune with their ancillary machines.

Marduk observed as a hatch opened and a PAWM the size of a comet emerged. The new craft began to scream, opening fire on its maker as it raved and gibbered.

Marduk could feel the sick slimy pleasure of the MAW as it greedily absorbed the terror and confusion of both the maker and the child.

There

One ship had something more. The bright enraged spark of a Terran.

Marduk shifted course, igniting his engines, moving toward the PAWM battlecraft with stately and unhurried cold grace.

The Oracle, of course, had been right.

As was proper.

-----------

--here-- 281 said, using a laser pointer to guide the others to where he was talking about. --crater on the other side two meters maybe three to outside hull--

030 nodded. He opened the channel.

--We'll cut our way out here-- he said. --Sergeants Caldo Kalkik and Purohit stand guard in case of PAWM assault--

Palgret looked over at the human, who was standing near a wall, slamming his fist into the same spot over and over.

--281 start cutting-- 030 said.

"If nothing else, I would like to see the stars again before I die," Lieutenant Mu'ucru'u said.

I'd rather not die, Palgret thought to himself. I wonder if we're winning back home?

-----------------

Most High Mana'aktoo chewed a stalk of goldleaf as he stared at the holotank showing the planet and the system.

The battle in the system was still raging. As he watched the icon for one of the carriers went from green to strobing yellow, indicating severe damage. It launched parasite craft anyway, a cloud of icons erupting from it.

He wished he knew more about naval tactics. He had learned quite a bit from studying history and military theory in the days before the Precursors arrived. he had learned more watching the battles take place, but there was still plenty he did not know.

He knew enough to know that the Terrans were forcing the Precursors back step by step, even if they somehow were keeping the Precursor machines from escaping into Hellspace.

He had learned that the Terrans did not let the enemy flee at 10% or even 20% casualties. That they followed up retreats, pressed routs, sought to hammer the enemy into pieces, destroy them utterly if possible.

Mana'aktoo had learned that while the Terrans might allow a living enemy capable of engaging in discussion to survive, there would be no quarter, no mercy, for unliving foes or those who would not engage in discussion of surrender or compromise.

The Lanaktallan ruler knew that the Precursors cared only for the destruction of all life and the elimination of all competition.

Which made them the enemy, and Mana'aktoo had learned that as far as the Terrans were concerned, the Enemy only exists to be destroyed.

He sighed and changed the focus of the holotank to the planetary surface.

On the ground he could see that the Terran Forces and Sword Hoof were still heavily engaged in combat, but the number of enemy was decreasing. Not rapidly, not like he would like, but decreasing all the same.

More and more units were undergoing refit, repair, and rearming. Troops were getting rest and medical care. The area under Sword Hoof and Terran control was steadily growing, the area under Precursor control was steadily shrinking.

He wished it could be faster. The number of civilian casualties was still slowly rising. It was trivial, less than a tenth of a percentage point of the population, but Mana'aktoo knew that the number was not just a number.

It represented people. People with hopes, dreams, loved ones, who had depended on him for safety and life.

He reached toward the holotank, intending on asking Most High Kulamo'o and Admiral Schmidt questions, when the tank flashed and put up a notification he had a priority call.

His mother.

Mana'aktoo adjusted his sash and vest, making sure he looked well rested and presentable.

To him, his mother represented all beings beneath his benevolent stewardship.

It would not do to stress her or worry her without cause.

He hit accept.

--------------

"Victory is within sight," Most High Kulamo'o said, staring at the holotank. "A few planetary rotations and all that will be left is cleaning up the debris."

Admiral Schmidt looked at the older Lanaktallan.

"Don't count your victory until you're telling your great grand-children about it," the Terran Admiral said.

Together they turned their attention back to the holotank.

The battle raged on.