*** Eye-searingly bright flashes from a myriad of explosions danced before his vision, the dazzlingly intense glow from the concussive detonations burning past the protective, adaptive anti-glare coating of his helmet's wavefront optics eye lenses. Opthas Kandyruu quickly flew past the explosions, courtesy of his armored exosuit's gyroscopically-stabilized hip and rear shoulder blade-mounted jet-thrusters, re-sighted along the observable grid, acquiring new targeting objectives, and calculated the distance-ranging for his weapon system's Flamebolt las-cannons. His targeting computer identified and isolated seven new mobile objectives, calculating their rate of motion, and scanned them to adapt the las-cannons' fire-penetration to match the target's physical composition. Destruction, when he triggered the weapons' bursts, would be absolute.
Of all the Black Sun Seraphs, none were so loyal or ruthless or devout. He was the most exquisite of Devils among the demonic horde. He was a legend of mass homicide. Opthas Kandyruu, centuries-old and battle-tested, a spawn of science and military technology run amok.
Incapacitate, mutilate, mangle and murder. Bring to the Enemy, whoever they be and wherever they hide, the Righteous Fire of Judgment demanded by Queen Infernyya Rebekkon. This was what he lived for, this was his purpose and his joy. It was the Glory of Duty. It was spitting in the face of Creation. It was his ultimate expression of hatred for all things Divine. This, the endless warfare he waged, was, for Kandyruu, Life Itself. ***
If it weren't for the extreme bleakness inherent in the situation, the display to which he was witness would have been breathtakingly majestic... But bearing witness to the violent and bloody deaths of so many beings was anything but grand or sublime.
It was horrible.
Riktonn Mune'stahr's Streek-craft veloci-cruiser was running through the voidal tide tacking alongside a Dysonstream mini-gunboat, an Astroshift Class vessel with a crew capacity of three people, perpendicular to the vertical horizon's Y-axis above the Wrathbeurne Hive Domes. Although the veloci-cruiser and the mini-gunboat were technological designs born of different civilizations, they shared multi-connection processing-centric controls based on the same electrophysical properties. The semi-autonomous navigational computer of Mune'stahr's Streek-craft was easily able to interface with the Dysonstream Astroshift vessel's omnidirectional steerage director and so the two Metaflow transport flight-vehicles were able to match velocity and angle of approach to a minute degree. Mune'stahr was in the process of re-acquiring the targeting vector on a supremely swift, heavily-armored object that was strafing the area with focused-packet Blazer cannon pulses. The object was roughly humanoid in morphological aspect, but the true dimensions of its height and mass were hidden under the external layer of the highly-wrought and imposing carapace encasing him. He stood two and three-quarters meters tall and was a meter and a half wide, easily possessed of three hundred and sixty-three kilograms in weight, his armored mass nearly doubling with the addition of the sectional, accordian-articulated metal enveloping him. He wielded both a heavy war-axe and an ornately-forged longsword, the black-bladed, serrated-edged, energy-emitting sword being one and a half meters in length. Decked out in gray-green colored, plate-layered trauma armor decorated with raised, copper-hued insignia depicting a mighty, reptilian bird of prey, Opthas Kandyruu immolated and pulverized anything in range of his weapons system's focal isolators.
The Dysonstream mini-gunboat was presently piloted by Protective Squadron Commander Neuronia Syngulareus, a Lieutenant Commander in the Argossyan Naval Defense Force. Lt. Commander Syngulareus was a hybridized cyborg-anthrobot, possessed of a body of multi-purpose components controlled by a linked web of nanite bio-processors, and the mini-gunboat, a ship resembling a mechanized pelagic stingray from Earth-Terra, was cybernetically controlled as if it were an extension of her body.
"We're just barely holding the line. We need more back up," the voice of the mobile strike team commander was husky and firm, a solemn female contralto that hinted at its owner being accustomed to the duties and responsibilities of command. "Our forces are too scattered right now, engaged in one-on-one drawdowns instead of maintaining their positions as a unified defensive front."
Mune'stahr replied with the apolitically sharp forthrightness only a veteran of many prior military engagements could muster. "Command counsel boardroom strategies always fall apart once the real fighting and dying start. You DO realize this is a battle fought on three different fronts, right? Your forces are taking on the Quegfellum Union, the Devolutioner Protectorate and now this brutish, barbarian devil-mutant all at the same time. I would imagine the collective hands of the Argossyan Navy are rather full right now just trying to stay alive ..."
"We're better than this. We may have a smaller contingent of active troops, but our technology is second to no one's and we have the well-earned reputation of being the premier fighting force in this multiversal quadrant," the woman at the other end of the comm-link said.
"Sure, if that's the way you want to play it, go ahead. Better reputations than yours have populated some of the most opulent cemeteries in the Metaflow," Mune'stahr remarked.
"The Wrathbeurne Defensive repel-shields just went down all along the Hive Dome perimeter and I count three Argossyan Maelstrom Class warships with extensive damage to their propulsion systems, all of them sitting anchored off the leading assault vector of the incoming Quegfellum fleet," Neuronia Syngulareus reported to Mune'stahr through their shared interspace comm-frequencies. "That flying, armored war-monster has fried the forward artillery network's auto-command central hub. We've taken some severe ground casualties. Nearly three dozen troopers are dead and another two dozen are gravely wounded. That alien creature...I'm having trouble getting a target-lock on him. How is that possible? I've never seen anything like him! How can one sentient being possess that kind of raw firepower?"
"I have a pretty good idea how and it's summed up in three words," Mune'stahr said. "Queen Infernyya Rebekkon."
"What? You mean to say that ... thing ... is probably a Black Sun Seraph from the Intercosm Paranescience?" Lt. Commander Syngulareus dropped all pretense at maintaining strict, authoritarian military etiquette and swore bitterly. "What in All the Unspoken Flesh-Hells is one of those abominations doing in this Multiversal Quadrant? The Extensity Treaties of Interdiction prohibit any of their kind anywhere near the territories of the Ridge Surf Cascade... Queen Rebekkon's Paranescience is expressly forbidden to exhibit any show of military force outside her Conjoined Planescape of the Banborough Aggregation and the colonial enclaves of the Nautilus Redundancy."
"You DO know she's the leader of a terrorist state, right? Treaties don't mean much to her kind."
"All Gods Be Damned, she can't DO this! The Argossyan Federacy has a longstanding Non-Aggression Pact with the Paranescience!"
Mune'stahr chuckled bitterly. "Right. Listen, if we survive this, I'll be sure to remind her of that."
"What are we going to do? That cyborg mutant-assassin is decimating our forward battalions!"
Mune'stahr sighed before saying, "How about we provide the creature a DIFFERENT, not to mention more heavily-armed, target to go after?"
"What?"
"Hold your position for a moment and be prepared to follow my lead..."
Mune'stahr disengaged the navigational teaming-app and guided the Streek-craft out from its flight-corridor paralleling that of Lt. Commander Syngulareus' mini-gunboat, directing the armored, motorcycle-designed, alter-atmospheric veloci-cruiser into a climbing, parabolic starboard route. The craft's new astro-navigational direction put it higher above the Dysonstream ship and behind it, soaring away towards the path of an oncoming Quegfellum Armada Dagger-class assault ship called a "Raptorbolt". It was one of four other such ships in the immediate vicinity.
Thought their surface configuration designs were vastly dissimilar, the two voidal-transit combat vessels were of similar mass, overall length and structural beam. Mune'stahr was hoping the Streek-craft's alien design, since the vessel was a product of the same unconventional alien technology as The Glide baseship, defied attempts by the Quegfellum Union's scanning armaments-recognition database to identify it. Mune'stahr's ship wouldn't be seen as Argossyan nor as any known variety of Devolutioner warship. The Quegfellum would hesitate to immediately fire upon it. They couldn't be uncertain of its motivations in the conflict, not knowing whether it was an enemy or an ally. That lack of an identifying signature would also serve to confuse Opthas Kandyruu. And that would be enough. All Mune'stahr needed was a moment's hesitation from either side...
Positioning the Streek-craft in front of the Raptorbolt ship, but outside the ship's weapons targeting vector, Mune'stahr pivoted the craft on its axis to assume an aft to bow profile. This allowed the veloci-cruiser to be mistaken for a point-ship leading the Quegfellum Naval detachment, and, activating the craft's infra-magnetic range-finders, Mune'stahr fixed his fire control optics on Opthas Kandyruu --- and rapidly let fly with four ion-cannon bursts. Three of the sizzling particle beam blasts struck on-target, spinning the monstrous Black Sun Angel around mid-flight as he attacked a troop carrier.
Mune'stahr rocketed away from his position in front of the Raptorbolt ship at sub-warp, risking overtaxing the stability controls and rupturing the hull-casing as he peeled away just as the Quegfellum naval ship opened fire on him. The Quegfellum pulse-packet light-missiles ripped past the position he'd formerly occupied and ripped downwards to punch into the tac-armor of Kandyruu's multi-environ exo-suit.
The startled armored titan reacted immediately... He turned and raised one of his thick arms, the gauntlet-mounted weaponry of his exo-suit bristling, and he let fly a directed stream of plasma-bolts at the Raptorbolt ship.
The Quegfellum attack craft exploded spectacularly into an expanding fireball of light speckled with slagged metallic debris.
The other ships in the formation reacted predictably, opening fire in a relentless cascade of flashing laser-tech pulse beams.
And Opthas Kandyruu subsequently went berserk, furiously firing upon every ship in range of his jaw-dropping array of deadly armaments. Every ship... It took only a moment more for the nearest squad of missile-boats and torpedo-skiffs from the Devolutioner Protectorate's Extrasolar Cavalry to sight on the giant alien and open fire.
Mune'stahr guided his Streek-craft as far away from the center of the melee as quickly as he could while he reconnected communications with Lt. Commander Syngulareus.
"Now go and get your people out of there," he instructed her, his voice tense. "I can guarantee you both the Devolutioners and the Quegfellum are vastly overmatched. Their fast-attack squads won't last long against this homicidal bastard. They'll send in the big ships and their big guns as soon as they realize that and your forces will be hopelessly outclassed as the situation escalates into a full-scale naval apocalypse. Pull back and re-engineer your ground-based defense shields while everyone's attention is elsewhere and get your command structure to turn their attention to executing as large and as ruthless a counter-offensive as they can create."
"And while that's happening what are YOU going to do?" Neuronia Syngulareus demanded.
He hesitated before answering, unsure how honest he could be with the Argossyan naval commander. "Pylott has already been on the horn with me, trying to recall me back aboard ship. Neither of them share in my assessment of the importance of this territorial dispute. I have to get back to The Glide and see if I can get Pylott and NeeSharim to help get this situation resolved before we exit-sector and head off towards this 'Hellmarrow' place they've already plotted a flight path to."
* * *
They fell from out of the shining emptiness where the sky should have been like a waterfall pouring out a blue-gray torrent of thick fibriloid flesh.
The Horde was vast and wild, a hundred thousand running, charging, bounding muscular bodies composing a wild, impassioned throng of Aingylls ending their seething and turbulent migration downstream from one transitive polytopic territory to another. They moved en masse within the boundaries of a five-dimensional hypercube -- thirty-two vertices, eighty edges, eighty square faces, and forty cubic cells -- of mobile organic geometry. The reverberating peal of their dashing flock as they moved was a thick sound resembling that of a hundred thousand cathedral bells tolling out-of-sync, flowing across the hissing of burning desert dunes. Staying controlled and just short of the chaos of a stampede, Aingylls flowed in a living torrent from one Plane of Existence to another, following ancient Quantum Tributary Paths along planar facets into the now-frozen Metaflow.
The being known as Androkambryah the Dissenter, he who was the Overdyne-Suzerian of the Aingylls, oversaw the passage of his people via a branched-vector scalar path called "the Incidence" which traverses a Time-Space Lattice located within the Andrayevich Manifold Network, just outside the topological space of the Tychonoff Axiom inside the boundaries of the Ventriculum. This Lattice housed part of the "Realm Differentius", a colonized plane-collective within the Andrayevich Manifold ruled by the gladiatorial-legions of the Metricates Space Militia, whose headquarters world lay in the Hyperline Segmentum that bordered the Apex-Sigma edge of the First Lattice.
That civilized planeworld upon which The Aingyll Horde descended was named "Hellmarrow".
Living in roster-stalk hive cities where the deadly ultraviolet light of Hellmarrow's blazing blue dwarf sun could not reach them through the planeworld's atmospheric gauss-filter, Hellmarrow's inhabitants were a millenia-old, proud warrior-culture. They had tamed a dangerous and inhospitable territory occupying a narrow strait where the Laws of Known Physics disintegrated and died. They were, as a people, intelligent, adventurous and provocative, birthing a vigorous civilization rife with art and culture as well as with the deadly, advanced technologies of star-roving warfare.
Androkambryah held to a strange and paradoxical view of his brethren in the Aingyllian Horde. They were not beautiful. If anything, they were inexquisite brutes. But they were, each of them, a brilliant marvel of evolutionary extremism. He loved them. He hated them. By way of their brawny corporeality, they repulsed him as being regrettably primitive. And yet their undeniable power, both individually and as a collective tribal entity, filled him with a fierce pride.
Androkambryah was an Aingyll, but he was not "Of the Body", the terminology used by the Aingylls to define and distinguish the near-mystical psycho-nucleic link that made of them a hybrid hive-mind culture, possessed of a low-level telepathic/empathic racial connection between each and every interrelated, biological subscriber. Instead Androkambryah the Dissenter was a "negative constituent", a genetic para-evolutionary cousin to all others of the Aingyllian Horde. He had been born an evolutionary "Progressant", not quite a mutation and not quite an aberration, possessing all the basal genetic, triple-helix DNA elements that made up an Aingyll's code, with an addition of a "ladder" matrix affixed to the DNA molecule. Androkambryah was something different, gifted with a higher native intellect, a stronger and more robust physical morphology and an ability to shift in TimeSpace.
The Horde could not migrate between manifolds layered inside topology of The Incidence without him. The mass migrations, unpredictably sudden though they often could be, were not random events enacted by a throng of primitive, bestial beings mindlessly following some rudimentary, antideluvian feeding or mating imperative. The migrations followed the emission-path of select frequencies of electromagnetic radiant energy through which the Aingyllian Horde augmented the digestible organic matter on which they fed. Like the atmospheric jet stream in the upper tropopausal layers of the planet Terra, more popularly known as "Earth" in the galactic territories of the Upworlds, the para-etheric electromagnetic radiant energy called "Mesencosmolaun" was a meandering river of flowing energy that breached and bridged the barriers between interdimensional Planes of Reality, circulating extra-cyclonic Chronal Wave streamdata from one regional manifold to another. Aingylls were attracted to and nourished by that streamdata, they needed it the same way human beings needed vitamins, because the Aingylls could not individually nor collectively synthesize enough of the electromagnetic energy to sustain their health. So, in whatever direction the Mesencosmolaun surge would gush across the Metaflow, the Aingylls would be compelled to follow and that path was identified as The Incidence. The Overdyne-Suzerian of the Aingylls was possessed of advanced, enhanced senses, like a cosmic telekinetically-psychic bloodhound, that traced the flexing, radioactively-fluid path of the energy throughout the length and breadth of the Ventriculum. And if the Aingylls did not enact their massive migrations across the Ventriculum's dimensional elevations, they all would die.
Androkambryah would not let that happen. Neither would either of his companions, one being the artificially-grown genebot, female combat unit named Qassudei Chyald, a humanoid Knight-Vassal assigned him by the Authoritarchs, and the other being the rogue Anistropic Morph-Elf assassin named Fae'letha Thane.
"We should not be here. This place is diseased and broken,"Qassudei Chyald said past a reproachful sigh. The pitch of her voice was that of a husky contralto tone and her manner of speaking was direct, with just a hint of rebelliousness. Androkambryah knew her to be a level-headed and logical representative of a mass-engineered autonomous breed of humanoid A.I., but imbued with a complex heuristic evolutionary intellect that sometimes put her at odds with the goals and desires of the Aingyllian Horde. "You well know that Hellmarrow has been classified as 'Kadaverign-Space' and, as such, potentially noxious to organic life forms."
Androkambryah did not respond. The ensuing silence was uncomfortable and Fae'letha Thane took it upon herself to further the conversation, her lighter-pitched, but heavily-accented voice marking her as a non-native speaker of the language of Aingylls.
"I do not usually agree with the Paladin, but this situation forces me to do so. Kadaverign-Space holds dangers we can't readily anticipate and Hellmarrow was barricaded away from the Metaflow purposefully for just that reason. It has been reported that bad things happen here with great regularity. Those who are Of-The-Body, whether singly or in as large a group as the Horde, are likely not to possess the power to protect themselves from predation."
"I am aware," Androkambryah said reluctantly, his manner stiff. He did not like having his decisions questioned -- especially by alter-species humanoids.
A metal-scaled anthropoid towering two and three-quarter meters tall, the Dissenter vaguely resembled his fellow Aingylls, but where they were brutish and over-muscled barbarians, Androkambryah was leaner, more slender, and possessed of a skull and facial features much more clearly favoring his distant human origins. He was, for the most part, nude except for wrist-gauntlets, a broad Terran-Egyptian Wesekh-style neck collar and a wide, braided bronze belt of flexible chain-mail from which flowed the front and rear modesty-panels that hung as far down as his bird-like, digitigrade knees. Androkambryah's flesh was bluish-chrome colored with leathery whitish-orange patches along his body's thoracic region, separating his pectoral muscles, and running along the outside of the quadraceps extensor muscles in his legs. His fan-shaped feet possessed forward-facing, four-toed talons. His head was an elongated, parallelepiped shape balanced atop his wide neck, with a large bony frill fanning out at the rear of his skull. The human-like face on that strange skull had a nose with wide, flaring nostrils and a pair of almond-shaped, red glowing eyes bereft of any evidence of an iris or a pupil.
Meanwhile, his guard-servants, Qassudei Chyald and Fae'letha Thane, were relatively normal in height and in morphological build, both boasting physically fit, wiry, graceful female bodies that deviated from the human norm by only the tiniest of margins. Fae'letha, the Anistropic Morph-Elf, was the shorter and the leaner of the two women, with the classic elven pointed ears on each side of her heart-shaped face, gray-flecked violet-colored eyes, and a mane of tousled, curly raven-black hair topped by a circlet tiara. Qassudei Chyald was taller than most normal men, with unblemished golden tan skin, wide emerald green eyes and a head of long, thick hair the color of crimson fire.
Fae'letha wore a cobalt-blue, high-necked, legless bodysuit embedded with hematite-gray armor scales at the shoulders, chest and abdomen. Brass-accented finely-articulated gantlets the color of charcoal covered her slender forearms and hands. She carried a meter and a third long, finely-wrought staff of wide circumference topped by a dual-flanged, crescent axe-head. Accordion-segmented, mid-calf high, silver boots with high, blockish heels completed her uniform, which was a standard military livery for commissioned officers in the Morph-Elf Extraplanar militia. Knight-Vassal Chyald's attire was more extreme. She wore a semi-tactical two-piece suit with an open midriff, allowing for unrestricted freedom of movement. Her muscular upper body was encased in a sculpted, segmented metallic harness with heavy shoulder epaulets that encased miniaturized, electronic weapons system components. The mid-thigh length skirt had slits on each side, revealing biking-style shorts underneath, both made from a very thin steel-alloy chain mail. Qassudei's thigh-high boots were molded to include knee-pad protection studded with short spikes and stirrup-styled, articulated ankle support. The Knight-Vassal toted a meter and a half-long, thick-bladed, greenish-black sword, the blade inscribed end-to-end with florid arabesque symbols, that was shaped like the Kora sword of India on planet Earth. Her fists were encased in bulky, evil-looking metal gloves.
"Much as I loathe to acknowledge it, there's a war going on out there, Overdyne," Qassudei said. "The balance of power between the sentient human populated territories within the oceanic intradimensional corridors is at a tipping point. The Authoritarchs grow more and more isolated from the rest of the Metaverse while the aggressions of the colonizing Nebulancers against established, energy and mineral-rich kingdoms and nations grow ever more brutal. And now, there are reports that the slipstream fortresses of the Mesmerinaut Necrodemon Fleet are relentlessly on the move. We cannot afford to be complacent. The Aingyllian Horde possesses the kind of wild, untamed power that each of them desire for themselves."
"The Horde is eternal. We will survive long after greedy peasants like the Nebulancers and the Mesmerinaut Necrodemons have faded from memory. Aingyllians were born in the extraplanar fractal metaflow. We are the true, native children of the Ventriculum. We were not orphaned here by the devolution and dissolution of dying quantum manifolds."
"Yes, yes, we know all that," Fae'letha Thane said impatiently. "But the Horde is a non-technical species, a society of organic mutant nomads in a near-endless void where human life is not supposed to exist. The Nebulancers and the Mesmerinaut Necros and Queen Infernyya Rebekkon's Intercosm Paranescience have bioformed the void, forcibly changing its elemental composition, re-engineering its most basic parts, and they've made of it a place that can support alien life. The more long-term changes they make, the more it becomes less habitable for the Horde."
"So you're thinking this 'bioforming' will somehow make the Omnidirectional Metaflow a less sustainable environment for our kind?" Androkambryah pondered.
Qassudei answered straightaway. "Yes."
In turn, though, Fae'letha shrugged and spread her hands in a gesture of uncertainty.
"So are we sure that the energies the Horde will consume during their stay at Hellmarrow won't be toxic? Or that the consumption of those energies won't trigger some alarm that may summon a territorial army of lethal raptorial defenders?" Fae'letha queried, ignoring Androkambryah's irritation.
"That is a risk the Horde always assumes whenever it migrates. We never know. We only do what we do," the Dissenter intoned.
"That may well be, but it's always left to us to deal with the consequences and clean up the mess," Qassudei groused.
"Enough!" Androkambryah barked. "You are mammalian humans, you do not understand the design of we who are Of-the-Body..."
Qassudei executed a short bow acknowledging Androkambryah's authority while Fae'letha simply rolled her eyes as she shook her head. Both women reassured the Aingyllian Overdyne-Suzerian of their fealty by reciting the words of The Prime Oath.
"We pledge our strength and our allegiance in service to the Lord-Protectorate of the Citizenry of the Infinite, those who are the Truest Spawn of the Metaversal Benevolence."
Androkambryah the Dissenter nodded his approval.
Without further conversation, they watched the chaotic migratory herd of Aingylls run unstoppably past the boundaries of Kadaverign-Space.
The fluidic, topological, manifold-shunt highway to Hellmarrow's not-so-distant borders lay ahead of them.
* * *
Lieutenant Commander Neuronia Syngulareus of the Argossyan Naval Defense Force had traveled exceptionally far outside her jurisdiction as she followed The Glide. After leading the principal Protective Squadron to victory in turning back the dual assaults of the Quegfellum Union and the Devolutioner Protectorate, she had requested an immediate Reassignment Pass. She'd explained to her superiors that allowing her to change her status from direct-action to covert-reconnaissance would enable her to follow Riktonn Mune'stahr traveling outside the defensive perimeter of the Wrathbeurne Hive Domes. It was not a decision she made on a whim, not driven by fear or anger nor by desperation or desire. Neuronia had carefully thought out her plan: she needed to upgrade her role in the conflict that gripped her home and become one of the vanguard in more proactively defending it. It was a risk, but it was one she knew the Argossyan Navy would have to take to stay ahead of a return assault by a monster like Opthas Kandyruu. The hypothesis she'd hurriedly presented was that following The Glide and its crew back and deeper into the Metaflow would, on her return, best serve the Argossyan military in preparing a more robust future defense against alien incursion. They had quickly agreed. This was war-time and, in the name of strategic intelligence, it was better to risk one soldier than to risk an entire squadron. She was still piloting her refueled Astroshift Class Dysonstream mini-gunboat as she trailed the massive spherical shiftship out into the Flow when the impossible happened...
She saw an unusually tall woman covered in an intricate metal exoskin disembark from an external iris-port opening on the vessel's mostly featureless hull, then watched as that woman swam rapidly through space directly at her gunboat.
It was a strange and beautiful thing to see. And it was impossible. The woman propelled herself through the Flow through coordinated movement of her limbs as opposed to using some form of direction-specific mechanical thrust. Her body executed a powerful, down-facing forward crawl stroke that drove her through the void of non-space at a speed that almost matched that of Neuronia's Dysonstream vessel. As she moved, trailing streamers of blue and orange were left in her wake, elongated wisps of luminous matter indicating she was somehow generating light-enhanced ionic motion with her physical locomotion.
As she drew closer, Neuronia could see that the woman wasn't herself all that tall, but the unique transitive enviro-battlesuit she wore increased and overwrote the contours of her body's shape to a high degree. The woman hovered in the silvery-gray chromium sea-space of the Flow for a few moments in front of the bow, just over the pilothouse of the mini-gunboat, and she casually waved the Lieutenant Commander towards The Glide. That moment was Neuronia Syngulareus' introduction to Mune'stahr's friend and partner, Keeshura Pylott.
The Glide's dock was a variable-relation dry dock of sorts, an interior chamber set into the hull structure of the mammoth ship that kept the external anti-osmorphic Metaflow at bay by creating an artificial envelope, a chamber that could be flooded with life-sustaining atmospherics and artificial gravity to allow an incoming load or craft to be floated in. After the craft was secured, then the dock-chamber was drained, expelling the Flow outwards, to allow that load or smaller ship to come to rest on a movable platform in The Glide.
It took the Argossyan Naval Officer a moment to realize that the docking bay was not, as it would be on any other craft, architected to be anchored to any physical sub-wall or bulkhead structure -- the dock was a self-contained, free-floating environment, like a bubble, that was able to move to wherever The Glide's crew decided it needed to be. This construction was a way to avoid continually having to re-position the huge spherical ship to align its entry point with whatever external craft with which it attempted to dock -- and it was a way to securely isolate anything of size coming aboard the ship.
Even to a bio-nanite active cyborg-anthrobot like Neuronia Syngulareus, The Glide was represented an extraordinarily anomalous technological wonderland, if the composition of the shiftship could truly be classified as mere "technology".
The woman who swam through space held up one hand, palm outwards, indicating Lieutenant Commander Syngulareus should hold her position next to her mini-gunboat's exit-ramp.
"A moment, please. Despite Mune'stahr's endorsement, we'll still need to scan you," Pylott said, her vocal characteristics neutered from inside her all-concealing helmet and face mask. Neuronia waited patiently, taking the opportunity to more closely scrutinize and evaluate her surroundings. After a moment, though, she gave up. Her mind could barely decipher the design or purpose of any of the machinery constituting the ship's interior. It was truly an alien environment.
Shrugging in response to an unvoiced question she'd apparently asked herself, Pylott removed her helmet. Neuronia couldn't help but notice that, despite her rather severe hair style and lack of cosmetic enhancement, Pylott was undeniably quite pretty. The Naval Commander made an effort to squelch the unwanted rise of bitter resentment she felt welling in her in response to Pylott's attractiveness... It made Neuronia more than a little self-conscious about the fact that knew she knew she herself physically resembled like a hybridized human-insect robot. She knew her appearance had made her life harder than what it might normally have been and she saw women like Pylott, though muscularly Amazonian in her build and proportions, as having an easier time fitting in with normal citizenry than she. With an effort, she stuffed those feelings back down into their dark box. Neuronia held herself to a higher standard than that. She didn't know anything about Pylott or anything about what trials the woman may have gone through in her life.
"Despite your array of neuro-cybernetic implants and nano-utilitarian, self-replicating gray-marrow, your cellular base-organics indicate you are a native of the Ridge-Surf Cascade, a Sixth Generation Argossyan," Pylott apprised aloud. "But I was under the distinct impression that the Argossyan Federacy was ascribed certain nanomorphic restrictions by the Authoritarchs on the extent and type of bio-modes its citizenry could exploit. Scans indicate that you, Lieutenant Commander, appear to be in violation of several of those restrictions."
"Is that going to be a problem?" Neuronia queried stiffly.
"Not even," Pylott remarked with a wink. "As a matter of fact, my own opinion about that is 'Good for you, soldier'. Most those restrictions are based in evolutionary bigotry, patriarchal privilege and cultural envy, anyways."
Damn. The woman, despite her no-nonsense military persona, was actually nice. Neuronia felt even more guilty about her initial flash of jealousy.
"Envy, bigotry, a species-born physical repugnance towards and a cultural dislike, hatred even, of all things not human in origin is rather typical of Organyks, isn't it?"
Neuronia turned to see that the speaker was NeeSharim, the ship's mobile, autonomous A.I. Avatar. The Naval Commander stood awestruck by NeeSharim's physical appearance, a veritable metalloid goddess in etymology and anatomy. Of course, the fact that NeeSharim was strolling alongside the curvature of the vessel's inner hull and bulkhead at a 90-degree angle relative to her own position, placing the A.I. avatar perpendicular to what Neuronia saw as the ship's deck, further accentuated the quiet drama of the Relational Agent's arrival into the docking bay bubble.
"Uhm, I suppose so. I try not to dwell on things like that, though," Neuronia said cautiously.
"Of course you don't," NeeSharim said. "You actively work at turning a blind eye towards the reality of your situation, don't you, sister? May I call you 'sister'? I feel like we are very much similar, being predominantly machine and digital heuristics-based as we both are. Besides, you DO so desperately want to be considered a 'good person', despite the eleven combat-related homicides in your past."
"NeeSharim, you're being rude," Pylott said snappishly. "Stop. Our visitor is not acquainted with your particular and peculiar views about Humanity as a species -- and, honestly, I personally don't want to hear that kind of talk today."
NeeSharim tilted her head to one side, expressing puzzlement, and her long, serpentine mane of segmented, tubular metal dreadlocks swished over her wide shoulders sinuously. "I meant no offense. I was trying to establish a casual rapport..."
"It's fine," Neuronia interjected. She found something definitely disturbing about the alien A.I. Relational Agent's sardonic attitude. "It's fine. I got your meaning."
NeeSharim struggled to imitate a human smile and said, "Did you? So very nice to hear that."
"Anything else?" Pylott asked the ship's avatar.
"Ah, yes. Crusader-Major Mune'stahr has expressed some concern about Commander Syngulareous' uninvited presence aboard ship, I suspect he thinks she's spying on us for the Federacy, but he is of a mind to be ... flexible ... about it if the Lieutenant-Commander could manage to, and this is a direct quote, 'Provide us with some actually useful, substantiated, specific mission intel and not give me a goddamn reason to space her presumptuous, trespassing ass'. Yes, I do believe that's what he said."
Pylott briefly closed her eyes in a pained expression. "Thank you. Lieutenant-Commander, follow me to the bridge," she said.
* * *