The Common Lector, more commonly referred to as the "Second Speaker", slowly tore his gaze away from the computational hologram projection hovering over top the strategy table as he experienced a uniquely rare moment of pique that he shared with the Bridge-Command Rhetorician. The Rhetorician returned his look with a guarded look of their own, hesitating to reveal as much of their internal turmoil in return. Neither of the two Nebulancers wanted to admit the dismay they felt at the last set of orders given by the Principal Overseer, who was frequently referred to as "the First Speaker". Being Third Generation Bernoulianite Ascendent Integernarians, they tended to, in their political and professional interactions, adhere rather strictly to their social code of self-restraint, forbearance and acquiescence. One accepted One's place and rank in The Multitude, and molded their behavior to best benefit the goals of whatever Directive the Overseers enacted. But this, to behave in this manner, THIS was madness... The First Speaker was behaving recklessly, conducting themselves as if they had been personally wronged by the unfortunate outcome from the latest set of events.
They were being vengeful. And vengefulness, along with any expression of impassioned retaliatory action during the course of pursuing a Directive in service to The Multitude, was an act of Heresy.
The Second Speaker of the Nebulancers could see from the way the Rhetorician dropped his gaze that the Bridge-Command officer agreed with him. The realization put the two Nebulancers in an incredibly stressful and uncomfortable position.
The First Speaker was going to get a lot of his fellow Nebulancers, to whom he owed the duty of protection, killed.
The Principal Overseer was obstinately adamant about going back after the Paranescience's Black Sun Seraph named Kandyruu and re-engaging him in battle. Madness and futility. There was precious little to be accomplished by doing that, except to risk further, more permanent damage their squad of Void-Transit Infradimensional Flowships --- and send their crews into harm's way for no reason other than restoring the pride of a bruised ego.
How short-sighted. How dismally small. How lamentably human.
They'd lost thirty-eight members of their flagship's crew. Another fifty were grievously wounded and incapacitated. There was a wide hull-breech on the port side exposing seventy square meters of the inner bulkheads of decks eleven through nineteen, but magna-screen dampener fields prevented atmospheric leakage out from the vessel. Overall structural integrity was still actively trying to recover, effecting repairs via nano-torrent robotic-reweave construction. The ship's OmniFlow Capacitance Dynamo was operating at only sixty percent efficiency. Defensive shields were down by twenty-four percent. Life Support systems and Propulsion remained mostly unaffected, even though Propulsion's internal comm-system was still offline. And, miraculously, their Particle-Fire Weapons system was fully operational.
All Gods Be Damned... They shouldn't have ever left the western quadrant of the Quaternillion Port Layer. Hagaishenn Breach was their last safe haven. Moreover, they should never have abducted and caged that fanged, bluish-gray herd-beast in the ship's Hold, never captured that Aingyll they discovered was named "Zahmmael".
So the question had now become: how far were they willing to allow this insanity to spread? Unlike arrogance and cruelty, courage was not predominant among the prevailing character traits of the Nebulancer disposition.
However, self-preservation was such a trait.
The Second Speaker of the Nebulancers swiftly began developing his plan to assassinate and supplant the First Speaker, thereby getting them out of their current calamity, without alienating the remainder of the flagship's battle-weary crew.
***
"How long has it been since we lost contact with the team?' Mune'stahr demanded. He wasn't disguising how very much recent events had put him on-edge.
"A fifth of a solar cycle," came the quick response. "Has your armor's communications neuro-link scanner been able to reconnect with Pylott?"
He shook his head. "So far as I can tell she's either inside a heavily shielded fortification or her suit's proximity telemetry data linkage neuro-system is offline."
Mune'stahr watched anxiously as NeeSharim, physically plugged into the dual terminal-ports of the shiftship's guidance system console, struggled to maintain gyroscopic balance and stabilization of The Glide while the vessel was caught in the giants' flyby slipstream. Their swift passing created a tornadic backdraft mighty enough to buffet the shiftship, shaking and spinning The Glide like an errant stone caught in a colossal cement mixer.
Mune'stahr still could not quite grasp what it was he had just seen... Two mammoth humanoid figures, each easily twenty-four to twenty-six meters in height and possessing a body mass likely exceeding eighteen thousand kilograms were enclosed in and astride what he could only theorize were wingless Zerorider extra-vehicular flow-harnesses. The metallic personal propulsion harnesses were worn around the giants' waists and shoulders, with stirrups that slipped over the front of their booted feet. One giant, the more warlike-looking of the pair, wore black onyx armor with bright violet and green linear piping tracing the contours along the outside of his legs, arms and sides. The other giant was encased in armor of a more abstract design, made from some duller, grainy material that possessed a wet sheen to its surfaces and was the orange-red color of burning charcoal. What little of their flesh Mune'stahr could see from cut-outs and translucent shells in various places on their climature-suits looked parchment dry and old, almost petrified, yet the giants moved with a slow and assured fluidity. The huge creatures, their overlarge heads encased in ornate helmets that did not conform to standard human skull shapes, soared past the cloaked Glide apparently unaware of the craft's presence as they patrolled the sky over Lobarth Ceryndum in what had to be some kind of pre-arranged search pattern. They were silent and aloof. Alien. They were looking for something, ... or someone ... , utilizing some kind of scanning device built into the forward-facing handle bars of the Zerorider harnesses. He didn't specifically know what they were doing, but he knew what they were, even though he'd never before encountered them. He'd only seen and read of them on encyclopedic historical data holovids...
Arkyngale Sentinels. They were creatures of distant pre-colonization legendry, beings of a time before the Ventriculum had been settled by its embryonic humanoid inhabitants. Coldly calculating, emotionless beings of vast intellect and enigmatic purpose who observed, surveyed and surveilled the physical boundaries of the Metaflow. Quantum cartographers and trailblazers scouting and recording spatial territories in service to the Arkyngales' cosmodynastic Monarchical BioPresence. They weren't supposed to exist anymore.
Truth be known, very little that had to do with the Arkyngales was theorized to still exist.
What worried Mune'stahr was that they were reputedly forerunners of violent catastrophe. Moreover, the Sentinels were thralls, bondservants to the greater Arkyngale aristocracy.
They were working for a very powerful someone who'd decided to takeinterest in what was happening in Lobarth Ceryndum.
"Is that for real? What ARE those things? In all the Raging Hells there be, WHAT am I LOOKING at?" Klauvane Tregg blurted from behind Mune'stahr. The rising panic in the Temporal Chronadigitator's voice was barely contained.
"Trouble," the former Star Legion SpecOps soldier contractor snapped. "External Defense Field envelope activated. Internal anti-probe jamming web activated. NeeSharim, talk to me!"
"Searching. Arkyngale cyber-automatons...? Hybrid mutations grown into servitude...," NeeSharim spoke aloud while accessing her voluminous, encyclopedic database of historical Metaflow information as her body immediately sprouted an additional set of animatedly waving, snake-like cable connections she inserted into other nearby stationary-console computer stations. She was like a metal octopus in human female form, like a many-armed hydra, and there was a frenzied worry about her movements that disturbed Mune'stahr.
"...Us ...," NeeSharim said flatly, "They 're looking for us. They know we're here, but they can't find us. They can't get a lock on our physical location because of the non-periodic shifting frequencies of our cloaking field."
"Are they armed?" Mune'stahr said, expressing his primary worry.
"Yes, absolutely they are," NeeSharim replied. "Massively." Something strange in NeeSharim's vocal delivery caught Mune'stahr's attention and persuaded him to tear his eyes away from the external optics monitor to turn and look at her.
Something wasn't right. She was trembling, physically unsteady, and the normally rigid and hard cast of her exoskeletal armor's outer layer looked somehow softer, as if she were having problems maintaining solid consistency. If he didn't know that it wasn't possible, he'd have said NeeSharim actually looked sick.
But it was when she looked into his eyes that Mune'stahr felt the first stirrings of fearful alarm. Her normally self-possessed, coolly calculating gaze had been replaced by a questioning, bewildered look that implored her human crewmate to somehow help her.
She looked like someone or something was close to shutting her down.
"NeeSharim?" Mune'stahr said as he stretched towards her, holding out his hand.
"He's, he's nearly here. He's close... and he's angry with us..." she said through a soft stammer, "He doesn't want us here and he's coming for us, to drive us away or erase us from existence. He's so strong ... so very strong. I never imagined... Mune'stahr, you need, you need to go. Get out. Get away from the ship... Now! He's almost here!"
The appealingly attractive lips in her perfectly sculpted face opened wide and an ear-shredding electronic squeal flooded the air. Mune'stahr had never before heard her make a sound like that. The Glide was then abruptly rocked by an eruption of intense tremors that nearly tossed all three of them off their feet.
Klauvane Tregg decided he'd had enough. Moving in an unexpectedly quick, lunging motion he grabbed hold of the armor encasing Mune'stahr's bicep and rapidly muttered a patterned series of gutterral fricative sounds, his voice pitched low. Mune'stahr felt a sudden flash of polar iciness suffuse his entire body and his vision broke up his optical reception into a hundred thousand prismatic fragments that swiftly faded to whiteness, blinding him...
The two men vanished from off The Glide.
***
Everything was a blur of motion. Scenery, somewhat recognizable or vaguely familiar, rushed past their eyes in a procession of fleeting, barely discernible images, like memories tossed in a whirlwind. They traveled a track through rolling, wind-tossed storm clouds stretched thin across a parabolic atmosphere. They were passengers inside an aerial, capsule-vehicle called a "thread-needle" that swept across the upper interior of the humongous saucer craft. The saucer blocked the diffuse light above the city, casting its colossal shadow over the city astride a wine red sea. The thread-needle flew its preprogrammed path between the earthen flooring of the horizon and the gusty, airy apex of a massive interior arc in the discoid saucer.
And inside the thread-needle capsule, a vehicle whose size and volume matched that of a ferry hovercraft, was a monstrous, ageless demigod attended by a small coterie of inhuman servants. They were the proprietors of the titanic saucer.
It had a diameter the size of seven Terran-Earth aircraft carriers laid end-to-end and it was one hundred twenty-four stories tall...
... but, paradoxically, it was comparatively light for its size, possessing a gravitational mass only equivalent to that of five of planet Earth's Boeing 747 wide-body jet airliners.
The enormous saucer wasn't a ship or any other kind of vehicular transport. It was a mobile, low-mass, frequency-shift radiation cage. It was a shell for holding a piece of the Ventriculum inside it, allowing the topological physicality of that isolated Planescape to extend itself into another manifold zone without encountering resistance from quantum delimiters. It didn't fly or sail, it para-migrated via electro-chronometric slidestream. On closer examination, the external shell of the saucer possessed an insectoid, scarab beetle-like configuration, clearly sectioned into a bulbous forward capsule riding the center connection to a wide thoracic region and an expansive, semi-circular, hyperbolic half-moon comprising the abdominal aft-section. A large horseshoe-shaped protuberance sat under the near-spherical forward bulb. A set of five, comma-shaped lights sat affixed to either side of the saucer's tremendous hull. Wild, fiery illumination and rolling clouds of what looked to be frost rolled off the surfaces of the scorpion's tail-shaped lights. The huge construct was, in effect, a piloted covered bowl that put a very separate "There" inside of a very separate "Here" for a limited period without compromising, or contaminating, the integrity of either, and then extruded that topography into another area. The mass, the awful staggering tonnage inimical to an abbreviated piece of tangible Planescape, was distributed along divisional stress-lines, making the gigantic saucer and its contents mostly unobtrusive gravitationally. Inside that saucer shell was a bathymetric seamount, a piece of Kadaverign-Space extruding into the Undefined Provinces of the Aggregotham Incendia's Far Frontier. It was a topological replication of the manifold zone that was home and foundation to Taekonus Helmstrype's sprawling siege-helm, the Castellum Maleficanus.
Under the brightness of the curved atmospherics above the surface tundra, five Kahmuleon Armsmen stood attending the Qaan'Rai's floating computational consoles, monitoring the mega-shell's internal environment and its orbital path above Lobarth Ceryndum. Though their bodies were reinforced with visible implanted exoskeletal trauma armor, they were predominantly creatures of flesh. The Kahmuleon Armsmen were artificially-grown alterhumans, biomech synthetic soldiers highly resistant to atmospheric conditions harmful to mammalian human organisms and imbued with enhanced physical strength, neuromuscular speed, and exodermal ruggedness. They served at Helmstrype's pleasure, often being replaced for physical upgrades as the Qaan'Rai developed structural and weaponized upgrades, and they augmented his computer network as semi-autonomous mobile endpoints through which Helmstrype could observe various circumstances and conditions and retrieve situational intelligence. . Physically,though they were built on herculean dimensions, they were much smaller than Helmstrype, coming to stand only as high as the towering Qaan'Rai'sclavicle.
They were not his personal guard. He didn't need protection. They acted as his eyes and ears and, frequently, as his attack dogs. The synthetic life-forms were interchangeable, nearly identical in appearance, but, as active artificial intelligences, each had developed its own embryonic personality and dispositional world view. The Arkyngale Warlord called the most senior among the quintet "Aleph" while the rest of the unit simply bore the numerical designations "Oh-One", "Oh-Two" and so on.
"Look you, look at that, at how much it has grown ... despite the intercession and disruption caused by that uninspired, pedestrian-minded, criminal psychotic. The exotic grandeur of its unorthodox architecture, its topographic expansiveness, the dark miracles enwrapped within its mystical oceanic panoramas... this city held so much in the way of potential. It could have been a kingdom at the edge of the Great Abyss. A magical point of egress into the nucleus of the Multiverse. And yet look at what that impulsive, small-minded fool has done with it --- a slave to his bestial appetites, he's made of it a slaughterhouse, an abattoir, and he's allowed it to fall into ruin," Helmstrype said, standing with his huge fists clasped together behind his broad back, "It is entirely my fault. I taught him, I raised him up from his filthy animal origins and assumed he had evolved beyond the swinish destiny of his polluted DNA. I credited him with more vision that he possessed. I was a prideful master overcome with my own cleverness. I knew better. I should have interceded far sooner than this."
The Kahmuleon Armsmen said nothing, remaining content to focus their attention on the data streaming across the monitors of their gravity-defying telemetry equipment.
"Aleph," the Qaan'Rai said.
The senior synthetic alterhuman looked up and over towards Helmstrype. "Aye, m'lord?"
"How many anomalous, non-native life forms do we register below?"
"Three, Great Qaan'Rai, only three, all organic mammalian females, but one of the trio, one with a Macroversal Extant frequency signature, appears to have imprinted with a heretofore unknown variety of heuristic nanotech," Aleph said.
Helmstrype shuddered in disgust, allowing himself a measure of theatricality. "Outsiders, Offworlders. Cyborg mutant abominations... there are far too many aliens abroad the Ventriculum these days and I blame the Authoritarchs for that. Their laxity towards sentient bio-form migration and their willful disregard of native tradition has released a disease of unwanted diversity throughout the societies of the Metaflow. Their presence makes us weaker. I will not have Kadaverign-Space infested with their kind."
Aleph had no visible reaction to Helmstrype's words. "As you say, Most Majestic Protector, as you say."
"Where is The Glide?"
"There is no optical evidence of its presence, so we know the shiftship is somehow cloaked along the visible spectrum nor does it appear on infrared or thermographic settings. Auditory resonance readings are inadequate because its physical position above the city is changing at random intermittent intervals. It appears in one location and then vanishes to appear at another even as our equipment registers its presence at the place where it once was. We can't read the energy output signature of its engines or propulsion systems. Our probes cannot get an exact fix on it."
"It's probably encapsulated inside a transitive baffling sheath," Helmstrype muttered after a heavy sigh. "And if that is so, then I definitely need to locate that vessel. Transitive baffling is Arkyngale technology, an ancient, supposedly lost industrial science and methodology. The Authoritarchs have yet to figure out how to reverse engineer it. So that would likely indicate The Glide may have been built before the Authoritarchs formalized their empire. Now wouldn't THAT be interesting? The Glide a product of outlawed Arkyngale technology..."
Again, the bio-android Aleph responded minimally to the Qaan'Rai's verbal ponderings, repeating the phrase he'd used only moments earlier. "As you say, Most Majestic Protector, as you say."
The diffidence implicit in Aleph's coolly unfeeling and borderline listless response irritated Helmstrype. "And that is all you have to say?"
The lead Kahmuleon Armsman looked up from his aerial console's suspended monitor and, facing Helmstrype, raised an eyebrow. "What is there to say? There was no question posed..."
"If it were up to you, and up to you alone, what would you do to locate, isolate and capture a semi-sentient, alien-construct shiftship like The Glide?"
"I wouldn't do it," Aleph said. "I would worry more about what lasting damage Mondrum Fellmanghul has done to the population of Lobarth Ceryndum and how that could be both arrested or reversed."
"What?"
The Kahmuleon bio-android did not back down in the face of the intensity of the Qaan'Rai's sudden and unexpressed outrage. "The city and its populace have, for nearly eleven mammalian humanoid birth-cycle generations, acted as the first line of defense against unauthorized incursion, whether science exploratory or militarily aggressive, into Kadaverign-Space by Authoritarch loyalists, Devolutioners, Quegfellum and Nebulancer Colonizers --- all inveterate and powerful enemies of the Arkyngales," Alpeh explained. "They have maintained a general partnership with us. But they also know that it was you who forcibly installed Fellmanghul into position as Hellmarrow's Regent in their city. Fellmanghul's extrasensory telepathic manipulations, his sadism and his unchecked physical predation, meaning the countless murders he's committed, have blemished and spoiled the diplomatic relationship Hellmarrow has enjoyed with Lobarth Ceryndum. The potential problem posed by the intervention of The Glide and her vigilante crew is not only secondary to that, it is a direct result of that."
"I see..., and what do you propose?"
"Relieve Fellmanghul of his post as Regent, try him in a court of jurisprudence and publicly execute him as a criminal. Then install one or more of the Kahmuleon Armsmen as Regent. Give them back their city. Allow yourself to again be seen as the benevolent immortal sultan who annexed their territory. This would perhaps serve to dissuade the crew of The Glide from coming into violent conflict with you... a conflict which could very well lead them into the borders of Hellmarrow itself."
Helmstrype allowed a crooked smile to play across his bizarrely tattooed face. "I am impressed. Obviously you have never much approved of our association with Fellmanghul."
"This is a true statement. I have not."
The Qaan'Rai nodded. Then he speedily lashed out and decapitated Aleph with a punch that had force enough to destroy the lead Kahmuleon's face and skull on contact. The body fell heavily, with a hollow clang upon the inner deck. An uncontrolled spasm shook the creature's remains as scarlet liquid pumed out from the neck stump. Carbon-based artificial blood and metal plate-reinforced skull fragments lay pooling upon the expansive compartment's smooth, metallic floor.
"Oh-One," Helmstrype intoned. The creature walked slowly closer to the formidably mighty Warlord, his usually emotionless gaze cast to the floor submissively even as his shoulders and tightly clenched fists betrayed his apprehension.
"You are my new Aleph. Choose a new Oh-One from among you and rename the others of your unit accordingly," Helmstrype said.
"As you command. What is our mission, My Master?" Aleph 2.0 asked meekly.
"Locate, isolate and capture The Glide and its crew."
Aleph 2.0 half-bowed and nodded even as he replied, "We postulated the alien shiftship's artificial intelligence may have taken on humanoid form, physically separating itself from the vessel's Master Analytics Matrix as a mobile, roaming network node. The A.I. likely may do this to better bond and interact with its humanoid occupants. We took it on our own authority to devise a way to immobilize it, if such a thing exists, through the projection of a blanketing multiplex frame-jammer, a link-control virus, if you will. Even though we don't have the ship's location, if it is anywhere within range of our emitters, the frame-jammer carrier wave will penetrate its exterior hull and inner bulkhead. If the A.I. did indeed create itself as a synthetic entity, the jammer may shut it down. All we need is for you to approve..."
"The word is given. Do it," Helmstyrype interrupted. "And Aleph?"
"Yes, m'lord?"
"Get one of the others to clean up this mess staining my deck."
***
"He's gone now. Occupied elsewhere. Good. I think we've tolerated his company while entertaining his scheming and silly threats long enough... Time's a'wasting."
Poli'Artta Ranzireth stared disbelieving over towards Keeshura Pylott, her expression clearly communicating she thought the soldier had lost control over her faculties.
"I'm sorry, you said what? We're prisoners, shackled and chained inside some peculiar and outlandish battle cruiser. There are a small handful of Manifold Predators outside the compartment's bulkhead door keeping guard over us. Even were we to free ourselves, we'd still have to battle past them. Not at all an easy task. Things aren't all that good for us right now...," the Hexabreed warrior-woman remarked hotly.
"Calm yourself. The situation is, was, and will continue to be under control," Pylott said. "We were captured because we allowed ourselves to be captured. It was the only logical way to get any deeper intelligence on what's going on here inside a relatively short timeframe."
Neuronia Syngulareus couldn't believe what she was hearing.
Her mind was racing. There had to be some kind of way out of this situation. "Situation"? Was that the word she'd used? Describing being a prisoner of a homicidal Cyonik Vamfyrr as a mere "situation" was being far too gentile. This qualified as something far more raw and primal. A MESS. That was closer to the truth... She was in a MESS of trouble. It was obvious Fellmanghul was going to torture her and her comrades before finally surrendering to his bloodlust and killing them. It was Pylott's fault. The former Star Legion soldier hadn't allowed time to collect enough detailed intelligence during the electronic recon for the mission. She had relied too much on the shiftship's alien A.I. to have done the work for her. But experience as a battle-tested naval commander had taught Syngulareus there were no shortcuts in warfare. Lieutenant Commander Syngulareus had handed over her fate to strangers. Her instincts had told her that the strange Outworld-Otherverse woman called "Pylott" wasn't entirely someone she could place her trust in. Pylott was too rigid-thinking, too bound by archaic rules and regulations, a spurious "code of conduct", drilled into her while she'd been in service to a world she no longer inhabited. She was too cautious, yet at the same time, Pylott was foolhardy and obstinate, believing that others with whom she shared existence would react along structured predictable lines. It was not so. Pylott still believed there was such a thing as an ultimate "Right" and an ultimate "Wrong". There wasn't. Life in the Ventriculum had taught Syngulareus otherwise. Right and Wrong were flip sides of the same coin, and not mutually exclusive, dependent on the circumstances. The amount of power a person wielded determined if they were on the side of Right or the side of Wrong. A person did whatever it was they had to do to WHOMEVER they needed to do it to in order to survive. Neuronia Syngulareus understood how that kind of a world worked. Pylott wasn't like Mune'stahr. Mune'stahr was just naturally dangerous, a rogue and a killer. Pylott apparently imagined herself to be some kind of crusader, shielded and empowered by her "honor" -- honor was for fools. Lt. Commander Syngulareus could see that Pylott's partner and companion understood that. Mune'stahr was different. And it was that difference that had irresistably attracted the Argossyan Naval Commander to the Outworld-Otherverse mercenary contractor back at the Wrathbeurne Hive Domes in the outer territory of the Ridge-Surf Cascade.
"We allowed ourselves to be captured?" Syngulareus said. "Really? Because I recall being punched, kicked and thrown around by savage creatures who seemed pretty intent on maiming and crippling me while I was doing my very best, which turned out to be woefully inadequate, as I attempted to kill them."
"I needed more intel."
"We could have been killed," Poli'Artta said.
"There was a chance that could happen," Pylott said off-handedly.
"Bitch," the winged Hexabreed woman spat. Despite her best effort, there wasn't much in the way of venom in the rejoinder. If anything, the Lieutenant Commander noticed more than a hint of admiration in the response.
For her own part, Syngulareus was regretting quite a few of the assumptions she'd mistakenly made about Keeshura Pylott. It was dawning on the naval veteran that Pylott could be every bit as ruthless as Mune'stahr.
"By the Iron God's Blood-speckled Beard, the two of you wouldn't have lasted even a heliar in the World-Father's Territorial Expanse SpecOps Extraplanetary Fleet...," Pylott muttered. "Typical for humanoids born in the Ventriculum. You two whine too much. It's self-defeating, a sign of deep inner weakness. The Star Legion would have rejected you both as unfit."
"When we get out of this and this is over, remind me to beat you to death," the Lieutenant Commander said. She was only partly joking.
Pylott smiled dazzlingly, her eyes sparkling. There was no trace of humor in that smile and the joy in those sparkling eyes was a dark one. She'd become a she-wolf who was looking forward to a fight.
Poli'Artta and the Lieutenant Commander watched as Pylott bent at the waist hunched over, hyper-extending her shoulders and arms, keeping her upper body loose, and, folding her legs under her while stepping backwards, began to gradually walk up the walls of her floating cell until her body was suddenly parallel to the cell floor. Her legs stayed bent and her back bowed downwards while her arms were stretched out behind her as far they could go, nearly wrenching from out her shoulder sockets. Her breath hissed through her clenched teeth in controlled bursts.
"You see, the secret is in our armor. The assumption most people make is that our battle armor is a standardized exoskeletal sheathe. Like clothing. Something worn over our flesh," Pylott said, her voice straining as she spoke. "But the truth is that, when we first boarded The Glide, NeeSharim intuitively saw the shortcomings and inefficiencies in armor of that type and made changes, lots and lots of changes... starting with the fact that the tactical battle armor should be generated by force of will through autonomic neurological response. We don't put the armor on, we become the armor. We armor up whenever we are threatened, almost a reflex reaction, and we can completely armor up or simply apply the armor exo-shielding over whatever part of our body needs extra protection or augmented strength. Flesh becomes metal. We do it with a thought."
"That sounds painful." Syngulareus felt a sudden chill seeping into her conscious mind as she thought about the ramifications of that. It meant that the complex, hyper-sensitive analysis telemetry inimical to most types of battle armor was always there, augmenting Mune'stahr and Pylott's own bio-sensory abilities. It also meant they always had access to their suit's expensive array of deadly weaponry.
"Painful? Yes, I suppose it is," Pylott answered.
"Okay," the Argossyan Naval Commander said. "What does that have to do with this contorted acrobatic thing you're doing to yourself now?"
"The armor makes us physically larger, increasing not only our body mass, but our actual physical dimensional contours. So if you chain me up while I am in my armored form..."
"Then you're chaining up a much bigger person," Poli'Artta finished. "And if you mentally command yourself to retract the armor, you're smaller and can slip your bonds."
Inside her floating cage-capsule, Pylott fell to the floor when her wrists slid out from the energy shackles. On first meeting the woman, both Poli'Artta and Neuronia Syngulareus had been slightly taken back by her hyper-muscularity and bulk, but now that Pylott was unarmored, they could see that, though she was still a thick and very athletic woman, she possessed a smaller, leaner physical frame than they'd first thought. Although it was a tight and confining space, she was able to nimbly roll to her feet. She stood up and twisted, adjusting her posture, working out the kinks. She then took a deep breath and bent over again, keeping her feet flat and her hamstrings and bottom against the cage wall, until the palms of both her hands were flat on the floor. She blinked slowly and then grimaced...
Her metallic gloves and forearm gauntlets reappeared and she fired a searing particle ray blast from her palms, blowing out the bottom of the cage in a flurry of melted slag and metal splinters.
She fell out the capsule and awkwardly landed on the chamber-deck of Fellmanghul's cruiser, she staggered a moment as she regained her balance. Then she wrenched herself fully erect, drew in a deep breath that she held, and fully re-activated her tactical armored exo-shell, including her visored helmet and face-covering. She exhaled long and slow...
It was the feral, threatening kind of a noise that an angry beast of prey would make.
"Give me a moment and I'll be right with you, but I think our guards have probably heard the blast wave," she said, facing the hatchway. She took a step forward.
Even as she moved, a pair of enraged Manifold Predators charged into the chamber, howling.
As it turned out, they never stood a chance.