Palgret barely yanked down his squad leader as the first round cracked right through where his squad leader's head would have been. The round, leaving behind a reddish-gold incandescent line, impacted behind Palgret and blew a hole the size of a melon out of the ferrocrete wall. The armored green mantid at Palgret's foot scrambled around to behind Palgret's heel.

"CONTACT! MULTIPLE CONTACTS!" the Terran yelled.

The black Mantid next to where the wall was suddenly crumbling performed a complex roll that got him around the rubble to the other side in a weird U-turn. The greenie next to him threw a handful of pumpkin-seed looking black objects up as it deployed the wings on its back. It hit a rocket thruster and jetted ten feet down the hall, weaving between Maktanan who were all scrambling and trying to find cover.

The two big Precursor machines revealed by the crumbling wall flinched back as the pumpkin seeds erupted into directed penetrators that blew off limbs, shattered weapons. One screamed past the two clankers, whistling loudly as it vanished into the tunnel.

Palgret noticed his squad leader's helmet had an upraised bubble of stressed battlesteel laminate streaking across the entire top.

"GET SOME!" the Terran yelled, turning from where he was working and leveling the digging machine. High-vee rounds bounced off the Terran's armor, scattering sparks from the black warsteel, smashing into the ferrocrete and blowing craters out of the manufactured stone. Lasers hit and just vanished into the black armor as the human played the beam around the tunnel.

For a moment Palgret wondered if the Terran forgot he was holding a digging tool and not a rifle as he triggered, ripping the ferrocrete into fog around the machines.

"FIRE IN THE HOLE!" the Terran yelled as Palgret's squad leader tried to roll away from Palgret.

--oh shit-- one of the Mantids said. The one by Palgret's foot scrambled up Palgret's back.

The Terran did something, Palgret wasn't sure what, and the entire tunnel filled with bluish white lightning, the bolts as thick as Palgret's leg. The bolts ripped apart the robots, shattering them.

Then the fog caught fire.

The tunnel exploded out with a roar of plasma.

The Terran stood right in the path of it, laughing madly as he kept waving the beam back and forth. Palgret expected to see the human torn apart or incinerated even as he brought his arms up to protect his face shield, feeling his rifle's sling system pull it around behind his back.

The flames puffed out instead of roared out, just barely wrapping around the Terran, who was stepping into the flames.

"GET SOME! GET SOME!" the human yelled. The beam snarled rather than hummed as he kept ripping at the walls of the Precursor tunnel and triggering the beams to fire at the same time rather than the hundreds of alternating pulses a second.

--get perimeter up-- 030 printed on the face shields of every Maktanan and Lanaktallan soldier. --damn you Sargeant fall back--

Palgret noticed his squad leader didn't object, just set to calling out names, making sure nobody had gotten killed by the wild firing in the beginning.

030 stood up on Palgret's shoulder, pointing at the tunnel. --one squad dig in there-- he pointed at where the human had torn a passage into the Precursor. --one squad dig in there-- he pointed the ground. --seismics get em planted--

The black mantid that had rolled behind the chunk of ferrocrete stood up, opening his helmet, spitting the broken and crumpled cigarette out, and closing his helmet again. The Terran was back down the tunnel, back into the maintenance hallway.

--officers gather up-- the greenie said, tapping the side of Palgret's helmet. --we rid to victory--

"Send a greenie to officer's school and suddenly he thinks he's a hive queen," one of the black mantids joked.

The answer was a complex equation that took a second for Palgret's data query from his armor to reveal was something rather crude: the equation was the point of collapse of muscular constricting strength of an anal sphincter after having a large round object pushed through it with the object roughly the size of the black mantid's head.

For some reason, the realization of what exactly the greenie had said made Palgret laugh.

Palgret's squad leader touched him on the arm. When Palgret looked at him he tapped the top of his helmet. "Thanks."

"No problem," Palgret said.

Palgret stood still, bringing his rifle back around as the LT and the greenie, who was apparently a Captain, conferred. Another human came jogging up as the LT assigned the two squads to dig in, the Captain told the Terran with the drones to secure the entry points, and the new human joined Palgret's squad.

Palgret swallowed around a lump when he realized two things.

One: He would be following the Precursor made tunnel.

Two: Captain 030 would be riding on his shoulder.

"Might I ask why, sir?" the LT asked, looking at Palgret somewhat suspiciously.

--double plus good instincts squared-- 030 transmitted. --C reflexes + 0sR2T3--

"Fast reflexes when the ambush went down," the black Mantid translated.

--yes--

"Do I hang back or something?" Palgret asked as he followed the human, who had strapped on his heavy armor, into the passage he'd created that led into the downed Precursor.

--no-- 030 said.

--ride that maktanan to victory-- 528 said from where he was standing on the back of one of the Terrans.

--yes-- 030 waved.

Palgret kind of felt like a riding animal or something for a moment.

The rubble kept shifting as he climbed up it, third in line. The battlesteel armor was ripped away in a rippled pattern, making it so the thick armor was easily to climb up. For a moment Palgret was jealous of how the black mantid that was with his squad had such an easy time climbing up.

Then he saw the Terran, who moved with a weird fluid grace, using his hands and arms to help pull him along up a sheer section of the armor, a rope trailing out behind him. Within thirty seconds he vanished over the lip.

--annoying yes-- 030 said with an emoji rolling its eyes.

"Are they always like that?" Palgret asked.

--yes-- 030 said. Accompanying the printed statement was an image of a human woman in dress in a grassy green field beneath a blue sky twirling in place firing fully automatic weapons in each hand with the caption "The Dakka Dakka Dakka of Music" at the top.

It was kind of lost of Palgret, but he got the idea.

Climbing up the rope wasn't easy, and 030 made Palgret go last, but it beat climbing the sheer slab of armor without the rope. He was grateful that 030 called for a break while 281 popped out his wings and streaked off to run recon.

The squad was sitting in the twisted and wrecked loading mechanism for the 'snub nosed' near C velocity cannon. The shells were the size of ground cars, two of them jammed up, on half eaten away. At Palgret's squad leader's insistence he took a couple swallows of the G8OR8 fluid that the Terrans had insisted when into everyone's armor instead of water (once it was adjusted by the medics for varying physiology) and once again was happy with the taste of hulgark berry juice.

After about five minutes 281 came back, cutting his jet thruster and angling sharply up so he just dropped a handspan down onto the floor in what looked to Palgret to be a long practiced maneuver.

030 and the LT got together with the Terran, the two black mantids, and Palgret's squad leader, all looking at the holographic map that 281 had built on his recon.

When they called time Palgret got up with a groan, doublechecking to make sure 030 was on his shoulder, and followed Culvit who was following ten paces behind the Terran. The Terran had found a maintenance hatch and opened it so that 281 could scout.

Palgret felt nervous, moving through the dark maintenance passage. There was no vibration, no lights lit, no sparks, nothing. The pipes were cold according to his visor, which added thermals if anything was too hot or too cold or if something had power applied. Everyone was using IR lamps, there was no ambient light to increase.

The assault came suddenly, a single mechanical defender swinging a sparking fusion torch at the Terran, the clanker lunging out of a side passage.

Palgret's eyes opened wide and he opened his mouth to yell when the Terran grabbed the extended manipulator, broke it with a weird looking movement, then smashed the torso of the clanker with a single elbow strike that caved in its chest plate. It shot sparks and started to slump but the Terran grabbed it. He lowered the clanker down and peered down the hallway.

"Think I startled him," the Terran said.

--rude-- 281 transmitted.

--maintain noise discipline-- 030 said.

They went back to moving quietly through the dark. Twice Culvit thumped his rifle against the wall when they were going around a sharp corner. The second time Palgret had to resist and urge to slap the other trooper across the back of the head.

The group moved into a vast open space, filled with twisted wreckage. There were half completed treaded vehicles scattered about, all of the equipment on the right hand side of the space. The floor and ceiling were buckled where the conveyors had torn free and some equipment sparked and flashed in the jun pile.

--take 5-- 030 ordered. --281 scout--

The other greenie deployed his wings, the thruster popped into position, and it sped away with little more than the whine of the jet turbine to give it away.

This time Palgret's squad leader and the LT came over to him, the Terran climbing on the wreckage, moving around to look at everything.

"Where are we going?" the Lanaktallan platoon leader asked.

--head toward center-- 030 said. --strategic intelligence array housing should be there most heavy armor area-- what followed next is a probability chain that the green mantid quickly stopped.

"Perhaps it is dead?" the squad leader asked.

"From crashing into the ground? I think not," Lieutenant Mu'ucru'u said. He opened his faceplate and lowered his jaw guard to spit shredded plastic cud on the ground. "Even if it is, we must ensure."

--not dead till scrape off boot-- 030 flashed.

Lieutenant Mu'ucru'u nodded. He suddenly gave out a wheezing laugh. "Our ancestors would fall upon the ground and convulse in shame, Captain, at the sight of us working with one another at the guidance of a maddened primate."

030 just flashed an emoji of a red face grinding its teeth with steam shooting out of its ears.

281 came streaking back, cutting off the turbine and slowing down by spiraling down to land at a the speed of a light jog. He transmitted a quick burst of code that unfolded into a map that 030 projected between everyone.

--shit-- 030 flashed. --mission update-- 030 motioned for the black mantids to join them, then got the human's attention from where he was kneeling down looking at the front of tracked vehicle.

Palgret stood silently as the visual footage rolled up. What he saw chilled him.

There were bubbling globes and tanks scattered throughout a room the size of a sports arena playing field. Some of the tanks had partially dismembered figures inside weakly and slowly thrashing around in the bubbling liquid. Others had only heads or obvious cerebral tissue, maybe with a few inches of spinal cord attached.

--shrieking array-- 030 said. He highlight some of them. --lanaktallan maktanan carikan--

Drones moved through, one carrying a weakly struggling Carikan female. It dropped her into the bubbling liquid in one of the tanks and closed the top. As it moved away metal tentacles lifted up from the bottom.

Palgret retched as the woman was torn apart, leaving behind only part of the torso and the head, the blood all swirling to the bottom.

--stimgum-- 030 sent on a private channel. --helps--

Palgret nodded, tabbing up a piece and starting to chew on it.

The human's eyes went from cold amber to bright burning red and Lieutenant Mu'ucru'u gave a low sound of pain before reaching up and tapping his helmet. The Lanaktallan sighed.

"Psychic shielding took a minute to deploy," the Lanaktallan said.

--all elements go to 75% psychic shielding-- 030 ordered.

It made Palgret's back teeth tingle when it got above 65%.

"We gonna bring mercy to those people, Captain?" the human asked, his voice cold and grating, belying the red of his eyes.

--must before online-- 030 said. --shrieking array double plus ungood--

Palgret listened as the mantid officer ordered everyone into lines.

He noted that the diminutive officer put the human straight up front and reaffirmed to Culvit that the Maktanan give the Terran at least ten paces of a lead.

--contact = terran go boom-- 030 joked.

Culvit gulped and nodded.

As they headed out of the wrecked assembly factory Palgret noticed someone had drawn a crude approximation of human male genitalia on the wall with fluorescent blue paint-stick.

The same color as the paint-stick that Palgret had seen Lieutenant Mu'ucru'u put in his right flank satchel when he'd come walking up.

The squad was quiet, making Palgret nervous, as they headed deeper into the hull of the massive Precursor. Twice they passed side corridors and Palgret saw the black mantids slap an object on each side of the entryway.

"What's that?" Palgret asked.

"Laser tripwire, it'll let us know if and how many move through the entryway," the Mantid said over the suit radio. "Don't want them sneaking up behind us."

"Oh," Palgret suddenly felt foolish.

"I asked the same thing first time I saw it, back before I went to Ranger School on Smokey Cone," the black Mantid said. "Felt like 'hurr durr' when they told me."

Palgret felt a little better.

He saw the human look around a corner then duck back.

CONTACT appeared on Palgret's visor.

"No, please, please don't," came a female maktanan's voice. "Please, you're hurting me," she sobbed.

HOLD POSITION floated up on Palgret's visor.

Before he could protest he saw the two black mantids and the human suddenly move forward. The human had made an odd motion with his arm and a long blade that became wrapped with a purplish nimbus slid out of the forearm housing. The two mantids both drew blades.

"Hold position, men," Lieutenant Mu'ucru'u's voice came through the command channel.

There was the thumping of metal, a Maktanan female voice screamed, then more thumping of metal. The human backed around the corner, holding the Maktanan female up off the ground, his hand holding her muzzle shut, his arm pinning her arms to her waist.

"I'm not going to hurt you," the human said, his helmet's faceplate splitting down the middle and retracting into his helmet. "Terran Army," he whispered.

The female went limp and let the human drag her back to where Lieutenant Mu'ucru'u, Captain 030, and Sergeant Santhik were. She flinched back slightly from the armed soldiers until Sergeant Santhik cleared his visor. She began crying quietly.

"Where did they grab you?" Sergeant Santhik asked.

"Shelter 8831278," she sobbed. "They broke in. The humans are fighting them but they grabbed me."

Lieutenant Mu'ucru'u nodded sagely. "All right," he said. Palgret knew he was relaying from Captain 030. "We can't send you back yet, but we're going to call in some backup."

"They've got other people," the female sobbed.

Palgret felt the urge to hurry up and run out and do something, anything but sneak around in the dark.

The two black mantids came back, both of them crouched low.

"Are we going to save them?" Private Kliptek asked.

"We can't just sit here, we gotta push them out of the shelter," Private Nanuft added.

"We've gotta save the civilians," Private Jagler put in.

A harsh snarl of high pitched static ripped through the helmet's internal speakers.

--SILENCE-- 030 flashed in bright red letters. --be still maintain noise discipline--

"You plan on carrying her two miles through wreckage of a live Precursor on your back, trooper?" Lieutenant Mu'ucru'u snapped over the command channel. "Now be silent."

After a moment Captain 030 shifted on Palgret's shoulder as Lieutenant Mu'ucru'u spoke over the command channel. Palgret saw 281 deploy his wings, lean forward, and go streaking off back the way they had came right as the command channel went life.

"I need four volunteers to go with the human and the two black mantids," he said.

"I'll go, sir," Palgret said.

--good man-- 030 said.

Jagler, Nanuft, and Culvit volunteered to go. They moved over to the human and the two black mantids, waiting a moment, then following the human as they headed the direction they'd retrieved the woman from.

"Where are we going?" Jagler asked.

--smash shrieking array-- 030 said. --pull clankers away from shelter away from rest of team--

To Palgret that sounded like a great way to have every clanker in the Precursor's shell head straight for them with a serious attitude.

"What about the shelter?" Nanuft asked.

There was quiet for a moment.

"Pray to the Digital Omnimessiah that the forces inside can hold them off," the black mantid said.