Viridian Nova

by Dragon Cobolt

  Sarah, her nerves on fire, slammed into Tasha as hard as she could.

  Well.

  Not that hard.

  As hard as she could with a human .

  Tasha moaned wantonly, her head rolling back as her full breasts heaved with every thrust, Sarah ducking her head forward to lick and nuzzle at her neck. She held Tasha close, and marveled at the feeling of this from the other side. She’d been fucked . But holy shit. Holy shit . The feeling of Tasha, her hot, wet little cunny, tight and clenching around her cock, it felt better than anything she could have imagined. She was so slippery, so eager, so willing. So warm . Tasha’s voice had started to shift from words like ‘yes’ and ‘more’ and ‘oh god’ to mewling, wordless bliss. Her eyes had rolled back into her head and Sarah could barely tell the differences between one climax and the next. Her hot, slick juices dripped down the mingling of their thighs. Pattered onto the floor. Dripped into a fucking puddle.

  Tasha whined out a single word: “Filll!”

  And Sarah couldn’t say no to that delicious, delicious note of desperate eagerness. She thrust once more and threw her head back, her head spines flaring out as she hissed in pleasure, her cock throbbing as hot splashes of cum spurted into her eager human womb. Tasha quivered and mewled in worldless happiness. Sarah managed to keep her in her arms long enough to stagger back to bed and collapse into the cot. The mattress squeaked under them and Tasha sprawled herself over Sarah, kissing at her face, her neck, then sucking hungrily on her nipples, moaning as Sarah’s cock slid from her well fucked cunt. The two of them lay in happy, blissed out dazes – until Synth joined them, crawling up and out from her hiding spot. Tasha made barely a squeak of confused mewing before Synth was kissing her hungrily and caressing her. The three girls sprawled there.

  Sarah wasn’t quite sure if she slept exactly. It was more like she floated in a cushion of happy thoughts, her head spinning with delight and the feeling of warm bodies mashed up against her. She wallowed in that feel. Treasured it.

  Then the door hissed open and diffuse sunlight bounced into the room, past Aiden. He stood there, looking down at them – and then said: “Uh...the Excalibur stopped decelerating.”

  “TM,” Tasha mumbled, sleepily, before curling against Sarah.

  Then she sat straight up and gasped in shock.

  Sarah was already out the door.

  Chapter Ten: Sarah versus Texas Dallas

  Sarah emerged into her base to see her bombardiers firing their plasma into suborbit in staggered volleys. They were situated to the eastern edge of her base, far from the center, so that the magnetic shields that let their plasma orbs sustain shape and velocity wouldn’t trouble what little metal was left in the base. She could already see where the orbs were detonating overhead – pinprick flashes of blue-white light as radiant heat dumped into the upper atmosphere. But she could also see streaks, lines of white contrails that her eyes narrowed at. The comtrees showed her a quick map of the objects and she hissed.

  “Those are orbital drop pods,” she whispered. “Like the kind that they use for terraforming. But, uh, these prolly have tanks. So, you know. Deathforming. Get to the bunkers!” She shouted that last to Aiden and Tasha and Synth and the trio of them tore themselves from the view.

  Which, to be fair...was majestic.

  Spheres of roiling plasma, each one the size of a small house, rising into the air as they were expelled from the bombardier beetles. Trails of smoke and fire from the heavens – slamming down over the edge of the horizon. The comtrees cracked in Sarah’s ears and she heard a radio signal, piped to her by the planetary network. “This is Texas Dallas to any NovaDyne employees on the surface,” the rough, grizzled sound of Commander Dallas’ voice made Sarah want to run and hide. “You have one chance to surrender – after that, I will assume you’re working with the alien freak.”

  “Uh, the alien freak has a name , you know,” Sarah said, faintly hysterical as she tried to triangulate where the voice was coming from. “Sarah. Sarah Kappel.”

  There was no response. But she was able to get a rough idea of where he had been transmitting from: A valley about fifty kilometers away that was within easy striking distance of the secondary radioactive deposits. Sarah chewed her lip, then figured. Hey. She had the stick, right? It took her a few moments to focus and call up her connection with her ‘lings and her spitters – the early connections, the early commands, had been easy. But that had been when she had had, in total, three critters plus the constructors. Now, she had been breeding baldelings by the dozen every minute, and spitters in batches of six. There had been bottlenecks here and there, when reserves of carbon and radioactives had been tapped out – but on the whole, the population growth had been…

  Well. It had been linear, since ‘lings couldn’t mate with ‘lings, and spitters couldn’t mate with spitters. She’d have to fix that, since a proper, exponential curve seemed like it was a better strategy when it came to armies and battles. Right? Still, a linear growth was better than no growth at all. Sarah realized she was mentally stalling and clenched her hands. She felt the connection ping into her mind. Thousands of chittering bladelings. Hundreds of hissing spitters. All of them thrumming through her, like holding onto a thousand leashes to a million murderous puppies.

  Sarah shivered, from her toes to her head spines.

  That power was…

  Intoxicating.

  She opened her eyes and saw, through her connection to the comtrees, an overhead view of the bladelings – their bony scythe blade glinting in reflected sunlight. They looked like an ocean – a dark, brown ocean. Sarah spread her fingers and the bladelings tensed under her vision. Sarah made a pushing motion with her arms and barely managed to repress a cackle as the front lines of the bladelings bust into motion. They sprang forward, leaping over stumps and around trees, flowing under underbrush like cats. They chittered as they moved, and yipped, and yowled, with an almost musical sound to their chorus. By the time the first line of the ‘lings had gotten about a kilometer away, the last of the rear rows had started to move as well.

  The spitters came after – slithering forward in knots and clumps, their mouths opening and closing in anticipation. And the bombardier beetles started to slowly, ponderously swing their butts around to aim down range. Sarah cackled . The sound shocked her out of the overhead view – she coughed a few times, then tried for a laugh that sounded a tiny bit less evil. But it was hard to not just... adore the feeling, the raw visceral thrill of several thousand biomechanical killing machines doing what you wanted. When you wanted it! Sarah grinned as the beetles finished their swinging. But her ears perked up and her head spines drew back against her head at the high screech that started to fill the air.

  “What’s that-”

  “Get down!”

  Aiden slammed into her from the side, arrowing out of cover like a bolt of green, sexy lightning. The two of them tumbled to the ground as a flight of ten, blade shaped fighters shot by overhead, screaming like dying angels. They arced up into the air, leaving behind a spreading waterfall of missile contrails. Those missiles slammed into bombardier beetles, puncturing their armor with splintering cracks . The detonations that came from within caused the beetles to cry out, mournful howling sounds as blue and black blood went spraying in every direction. Sarah, her arms clapped over her head, looked up. “O-Oh...” Her eyes widened.

  Her entire artillery brigade had been reduced to one – and that one had survived because the missile had hit the lower half of its body, not the softer blasting butt part. That meant that it was dragging itself forward, moaning like those recordings of whales they played in Xtreme Xtinction Museums, and spraying blood onto the ground. Sarah scrambled herself out of Aiden’s arms and ran to the beetle. “Oh no no no no!” She said. “Uh, Aiden, what do I do?”

  Before he could even answer, the first of the bladelings reached Commander Dallas’ base.

  And they reached the five laser obelisks he had built and hooked to
a fusion power generator that he had just finished nanolatheing into existence. The obelisks whirred and the lasers they fired were invisible. But the bladelings burst into flames all the same. They burned and died and burned and died, screeching. “Meep!” Sarah snapped her head to the side, watching through her linkage to the ‘lings. She could feel the faint pings of their deaths – so fast that they were barely shocked. But it was still dying. Deaths. She felt it like punches to the gut. “No!” she whimpered.

  Commander Dallas stepped up to the line of laser obelisks.

  He was clad in the classic Commander Suit: Ten feet tall, made of gleaming chrome and hard silver, with oversized forearms, making him look as if he was wearing boxing gloves. There was the helmeted head, with the gleaming optic lenses and the two fins that looked a little like a crown – radio transmitters were worked into those fins. The left forearm still shimmered with a heat-haze, the reflected light of a billion construction nanorobots coming back to recharge. The right, though, was aimed at the bladelings that were still charging into laserfire.

  And now Sarah learned why it was called a boom gun.

  The orb that it fired was bright red and multifaceted, like a crystal star. It struck the ground right before the increasingly large pile of ashes. It struck...and then it roared . The sound, even from miles away, even transmitted to her through the comtrees, was like the end of the world mixed with a buzz-saw mixed with a siren. And the light was nearly as bad: A brilliant flare of light that left Sarah blinking and pawing at her eyes, even if it was transmitted through her comnet. The end result was a glassy trench, about fifty meters long and ten meters wide, burned into the ground. Surrounding that trench was a wasteland of blasted, shredded flesh. Smoking. Smoldering. As if a whip made of starfire had lashed out and burnt everything straight up. Sarah’s brain scrabbled, trying to place a name on it – and she had one.

  He had just fired a tiny chunk of antimatter at them.

  “Jesus,” she whispered.

  The bladelings were down to a bare fraction of their numbers. And the spitters were being hit as well – she saw that the airplanes had swept around and were strafing the spitters with their nose mounted cannons – ripping into them with slugs and flechettes. The spitters, having been ordered to just...go and attack Dallas...were just taking the pounding. Sarah, her stomach knotting, shouted. “Kill them! Kill the fuckers!”

  The spitters took her meaning. The survivors stopped and mounted themselves, their ruffs mantling. The flight of planes screamed back overhead. And the spitters...spat. Flechettes filled the air, glistening and dripping with acid. One of the planes exploded instantly – another tumbled out of the air, its engines smoking and roiling. One corkscrewed through the air before it detonated. The last two waved off and zoomed around, shooting away from the spitters. But then the surviving spitters were facing down Dallas and his boomgun. They had barely turned before another blast of antimatter had smeared them out of existence.

  In maybe two minutes, those laser obelisks and Dallas’ gun had turned Sarah’s whole army into so much mulch. Twitching, wriggling, screaming mulch. Mulch she had personally petted. On their snoots. Most of the time.

  And the two planes were coming right for her – a fact that only filled her head when the screaming reached a fever pitch, drowning out Aiden’s shouted warning. Sarah jerked her vision back to her body and screamed back – screamed in fury. She leaped upwards at one of the planes as it dove on her, nose gun flaring with death, winking at her hatefully. She cleared the ground, the bullets, and slammed into what would have been the cockpit of the plane, had it had a pilot. But it just had a gleaming disk over the computer that commanded it.

  Sarah punched through the metal, grabbed onto the computer core, then ripped it out and flung it like a Frisbee. The computer core slammed into the wing of the other fighter and tore it off with a spray of sparks. Both fighters crashed behind her base as she landed with a grunt beside Aiden.

  “Wow,” he said.

  Sarah stood. Her eyes gleamed and Aiden blurred before her – splintering into a thousand Aidens.

  “Well,” Dallas’ voice crackled over the radar. “I’ll say this. You’re putting up more of a fight than those blue fucks on Proxima did. But at the end of the day, alien...sticks and stones won’t break my bones if I got a gun and a mech to use em...heh.” He chuckled gravelly.

  “As my grandma used to say,” Sarah wiped some tears from her eyes. “ Foda-se, colonizador.”

  “...what?” Dallas asked.

  But Sarah didn’t give him the satisfaction of telling him that she had no idea what it meant either. Because the scant few moments of conversation had set her mind whirling. She could see that the laser towers had a certain amount of output – they could burn up her ‘lings at a terrible rate. Fine. There was only one solution that came to her mind. More lings. She focused and several drones whirred off – vanishing into the underbrush while she set the orders to the larva within her hatcheries. Soon, new ‘lings were bursting out of the hatcheries, wriggling and shaking themselves out – they were oddly familiar to her. One of them even bounded up and bumped its snout against her butt, the exact same way that one of her first ‘lings had. Sarah blinked a few times, kneeling down and grabbing the ‘ling’s face. She looked into its eyes and connected her mind with its – and felt a familiar echoing sound.

  “Are...you one of the bladelings I made before?” she asked.

  The bladeling chirruped and licked her face. “Ack!” Sarah stood, rubbing the slime from her cheek – which gave more bladelings a chance to cluster around her, brushing against her thighs and back, licking at her. “Stop!” Sarah laughed – then snapped her head up.

  Treads were crunching through trees. The first of Dallas’ tanks emerged with a roaring crackling sound, not unlike gunfire. It was a light tank, in so far as such things went – and it was flanked by half a dozen infantry combots, their boxy heads swiveling around, their arm-mounted phased plasma guns roaring as they blasted the base with a spread of plasma fire. Aiden, who was still not in the bunker, dove for cover as the orbs of orange-white light shot overhead. Sarah pointed at the tank as it swung the barrel around to face her and fired. Sarah yelped – and then blinked as she saw the bright shell of contained energy the tank had fired at her floating in the air before her left palm. It rippled a few times as she felt her own mind sagging a bit with the effort.

  “What?” she whispered.

  The shell exploded.

  Sarah went flipping backwards. She crashed into a hatchery and slid down its rubbery side like it was a slide at an amusement park. When she got her feet under her and noticed her skin was cracked and bleeding, she saw her ‘lings had started to engage. Combots were blasting at ‘lings, but lings could dart around them, leap onto their backs and claw them to pieces. The tank itself was firing the coaxial PPG it had mounted on the turret at several spitters that had emerged from the hatchery. But it’s main gun had already been dissolved into pitted slag by a spray of flechettes, and as she watched, ‘lings crawled up its back. The tank vanished under a writhing swarm of insectoid bodies – just in time for three more tanks to emerge from the jungles, driving along the path made by the first.

  Dallas had built a factory. That factory was now building tanks. And he was going to be expanding more. Sarah cracked her knuckles, then grabbed a dead ‘ling on the ground. She still felt the ping of their deaths – but she tried to ignore it as she snapped the bone scythe off its back and swung it around her body, feeling its weight. She found her body moving naturally – the scythe whistling through the air as she brought it to bear. One of the tanks was already down, its entire body pincushioned with spitter flechettes. But the other two, protected by a ring of combots laying down a spray of plasma fire, were lobbing round after round at one of the hierarchies. Even now, blood spurted into the air from gaping wounds blasted in the sides of the buildings.

  Sarah charged forward and leaped. The scythe flashed as she shot
past one of the tanks and its barrel went flying. The other, she grabbed onto bodily and flipped, her muscles straining. Then, with a single pointing finger, she sent a wave of bladelings charging into the jungles, evading the combots and rushing for the tanks. Roars of plasma guns going off and screeching bladelings filled the underbrush and Sarah glanced at her hatcheries. The construction drones had already begun to patch the wounds shut with their spittle, the same way they collected up carbon and radioactives.

  Sarah walked with her bladelings – and cut her way through tank after tank, dodging plasma fire and leaping away from explosions as tanks tried to pin her down. She felt…

  Alive. Thrumming with a crackling power, a sense that she was something less than a god, but far more than human. And for once, she wasn’t scared of it. She stepped over a pile of combot bodies and saw that the five laser obelisks were now joined by a heavy plasma turret, and behind them, Dallas was working feverishly. Nanites sprayed from his arm mounted maker, shrouding green lattice works of half-finished buildings. She saw factories where the combots marched out, freshly lathed into existence by swarms of specialized nanorobots, while tanks emerged from another. He was halfway done through building what looked like an air factory – and he saw her.

  Sarah stood, the scythe she held resting on the ground like a staff. She waved. “Hey Dallas,” she said. “Looks like I’m out producing you.”

  “Heh.” Dallas’ voice chuckled in her ear. “You’ve also made two big mistakes, alien bitch.”

  “Oh? What’s that?” Sarah asked. “Those? I mean, what are those mistakes. Words.”

  “You let me turtle,” Dallas said, the plasma gun coming online. Bladelings charging towards the laser obelisks didn’t even get into range now as spheres of roaring energy consumed them, leaving the jungle floor cratered and smoldering. “You’re throwing your entire economy at me every few seconds, and I’m blowing it to chunks...” He chuckled. “But the big mistake? You led from the front. Never. Ever. Ever. Ever lead from the front.”