A reactor and heatsink sat on its back like a large beetle with its wings open, the wings gleaming semicircles of reflective black, heat shimmer spreading behind them. They were, like much of the rest of her, coated in layers of ablative plating, laserdamp, and heatdispensing weaves, for a coherent protection against ballistic, plasma, and light weaponry. its helm continued the beetle motif, with large black eye domes bugging out from her face, and its breather and airtubes covered by stylized duralloy mandibles.
The suit itself contrasted sharply from the beetle head and back, accentuating the female form in swoops and curves, packing motors and extensors, pressure equipment into regions rather than spreading them out, giving the appearance of an eight foot tall, beetle headed goddess, accentuating a wide bust and waspishly hourglass waist, hiding all the legs but the soles of heavy combat boots behind the veil of a tight armour skirt...just loose enough for the battlesuit to jog in. For any real speed, it would use jetboosters.
Its weapon was half shotgun, half sword, smoothed to a razor's edge inches above and below the barrel, gleaming from the same heatshimmer as the wings. It was belt-feed at the base, from a looped chain of what looked like pearls.
Behind the helm, the battle was slow, as processes were sped up by the suit, the mind bathed in amphetamines and nutrients, vision overlayed with maps, layouts, gun descriptions...The world was green, vectors and directions, the computer laying out the clearest path, a thick green line which bounced in places, curved...was written with meanings fed to the brain by senses other than vision. The body knew it would jump there, tumble here. That a curl was required, that next, its arms would swing out, its back curved toward the floor, its palms touch, its gun reach just so, squeeze...and then there was gore, all around it..
A man lay on the ground, dead, with a handprint through his chest. Another, his entire head blackened like a burnt roast, three more with limbs flayed to the bone...plasma burns cratered the deck in long streaks, and behind it, there was a roar.
The suit had only just stepped out of the landing craft. The fight had been three point four two seconds long, and the alaurms hadn't yet gone off. The LNS-Overlord was boarded, and the bears roared again as their cables came loose, and they charged out into the bay, gleaming with nerve toxin alerts in the suit's vision.
Corporal Anderson had smelled something foul as he ran toward the alert center. Something was going on, and he'd report in..if he could shake the grogginess. Usually, he was far better at waking up, even without his coffee. He ran on, rubbing his eyes.
Finally, fed up with the bleary slowness of his reactions, he shook his head violently, trying to free himself from the murk, and was overcome with vertigo. Corporal Anderson swayed, and collapsed to his knees, pressing his palms against his thighs. Still dizzy, he bent his head down to the floor, resting his forhead on the soothing cool surface, and coughed violently. As he curled over, his spine pressed against the fabric of his coat, pushing out against a well muscled frame. He shivered, he gasped. His whole body shook, tears welled out, and streamed through his eyebrows to meet the plate. Blood hung on his lips, rippling back and forth as he gasped. Again he contracted, red spittle splattering his hand.
Men and women ate, digging in with fervor, toasting one another and taunting their comrades, celebrating, until the loud crash of breaking glass echoed through the hall. It quieted, to a degree, as a few stretched to look around their comrades, to see whom had dropped a tray. There was a shout, and a few marines drew their sidearms, trying to see through the crowd. A roar, and then a scream, and then a whimper. More screams.
The bears had followed their noses, as the alaurms started to ring. They'd pawed their way down hallways, through one glass window, into an occupied and active mess, where the main dish was a large batter-baked salmon, a celebration of the upcoming leave.
Monkeys screamed, jumped, hooted. Loud explosions went off, the bears were stung. Gnats and horseflies...but there was a fish. They could smell it, such a delicious fish. Why wouldn't these monkeys get out of the way? Move! Roar again. Tell these monkeys that you're bigger, that the fish is yours. They're little monkeys. No! Move! Don't sit down! Move!
Well, we can still eat that fish with the monkeys asleep.
There were, on public record, four hundred years of declassified Liberty Battle Records, even hardcopies and black boxes. This had been considered a great blow for public awareness, and a coup of the information secrecy administration, releasing the history of four hundred relatively peaceful years and thus stagnant and in some cases, idiotic tactics.
Also on the public record were eight hundred years of military drama, a far more dense collection of orders, official sounding commands, and ship-wide alerts.
Pair the two, run them through a voice synthesis command with the readily available voice of one Admiral Sarah Willows, gleaned through black market deals, public broadcasts, or even comms leakage from legitimate and recent space battles, and deliver them properly, and you have a believable set of orders that the admiral would issue only in the most extreme..or bizarre, circumstances.
Forty marines slipped forty gas-masks over their heads, released their breath, and pulled air deep into their burning lungs. Nerve toxins, aboard ship, and apparently...bears? Willows, the real Willows, had contacted them over secure comms...actually a civilian network, rather than ship comms. Told them to get to a specific docking bay, and take out what appeared to be a boarding craft packed with shock troops...
Breathing deep, the Marines started running down halls. They'd been told to avoid lifts, which were apparently acting up. They'd been told to disregard any commands over ship comms, all of them were false.
At first, it was a simple rawness in the cheeks...the squad hadn't run in gas-masks for a while, and many of them put it off to the difficulty they had breathing through the filters, but it grew worse, so that every time they breathed, as the air flew in and out, as their lungs filled and their cheeks sucked, pulling air over the filters, raw, wet flesh smacked down over the teeth and bones of their jaws, they swallowed the spittle, and the blood, for a time, as the foam bubbled from their cheeks. After a minute, a marine flicked his comm unit on, and gasped "sir, I'm...sir, there's something wrong here.." The men glanced around, and noticed that they weren't the only ones in pain, saw the determined set of shoulders, above and beyond a simple run, the tightness in the jaw from clenched teeth...They looked around, and the first man started coughing, as the foam of dissolving lipids, livid lines of fat dissolved in his throat and lungs, swimming in the water of millions of ruptured cells began to fill his bronchial sacks.
With every breath, the powder had poured into the marines, laying into the soft tissues inside the mouths, throats, and lungs of forty marines, settling onto the fatty deposits and the lipid cell membranes, and tearing molecule after molecule off, a simple ionic binding far stronger than the covalent connections that held a cell together. One soldier, and then another collapsed, chocking on their own cellular fluids. The commander ordered the masks off, and a few managed to claw them off their heads, dieing. In minutes, the hallway was empty, nothing but bodies littering the floor. Pinkish liquid poured from the mouths of those who'd gotten their masks off, and blood dripped from the filters of those who had not.
