Morgan’s conscious mind sent chemical thought-commands through the nest of cables that had been grafted to her back, arching outwards as if they were like the wings of some futuristic angel. Throughout Chicago her war hives hammered the city with artillery fire from their mounted guns even as they disgorged hundreds of foot soldiers. Her legions were a mix of creatures, and in that variety she had come to know the strength of both Izrid and Human. There were platoons of half-breeds, the offspring of Morgan and the warriors she had chosen to breed with her. The offspring yielded from such crossbreeding had emerged with many features of both the parents. When Morgan bred with a warrior her children hatched as humanoid infants and within a matter of months grew to adult maturity, having inherited the life spans of their Izrid fathers, in addition to much of their hard bodies and warrior physiques, despite only having two arms and more human faces. From their mother came their ability to use their vocal chords, and an ability to reason with the Hive Mind that extended forth from Morgan’s subconscious. They were not simple battle drones, but soldiers capable of making judgments in the field, true individuals capable of their own hopes and dreams. Morgan had been a loving mother, even if such had been counter-intuitive to the growing Izrid part of her physiology and emerging psychology.
After five years of building her brood she had left entire villages of half-breeds in the deserts of New Mexico. They had chosen to live apart from the hive, and had wanted no part of Morgan’s war with the Izrid invaders. Such was their choice, she had told herself, even if the Izrid side of her raged and demanded the extermination of all tainted spawn. In the time that they had been in the deep caves of the Grand Canyon, she had taken the seed of warriors into her, but also she had bred with captured builders and pilots. None, no matter the caste, were born with the control nodules that the true-blood Izrid possessed, and for this Morgan had been glad. Had her children come into the world with the nodules she might have been tempted to control them, to dominate their destinies from birth to death. She did not want to be that kind of brood mother, and she did not wish to sire that kind of hive.
Joining the half-breeds who comprised the bulk of her army were the true-blood Izrid. The hulking four armed warriors were scattered amidst her army in twos and fours, and were attached to larger half-breed units as shock troops. After Her Warrior had accepted the imprint of her Hive Mind, he was able to share its promise with other warriors that they had encountered on their journey south. She knew not what she was being pulled towards, but Morgan had felt it deep within her very molecules. There was a door waiting to be unlocked, and within her hybrid flesh laid the key.
Morgan watched with careful detachment as one of her war hives shuddered with the impact of an artillery counter-strike. The Complex was not inclined to give up the city easily, and was putting up a resilient defense. Despite the brood’s early victories as they burned through the outskirts of the city the Complex forces were well dug-in within the city proper. Morgan processed dozens of data streams simultaneously and she could sense that the momentum of her attack was slowing. While the troops on the ground were carving a bloody path through Complex territory the heavy gun emplacements that protected the city proper were pounding away at her war hives and preventing the mobile fortresses from giving fire support. Every second those guns continued to hold the war hives at bay the assault force would be drawn further and further into the city without proper fire support, and could easily be flanked by the defenders. Morgan had been reluctant to bring her hive temple into the fight at such an early stage, hoping to keep the vessel’s firepower in check for use against her true target, though it seemed she had little choice. A shout of pain from Lysa shot through her awareness like a lightning bolt, and she focused her senses on the hybrid warrior.
Lysa and Her Warrior stood back to back as they fought off wave after wave of Complex soldiers. The flanking counter-assault had already begun to envelop those units that had penetrated the deepest into enemy territory. Dozens of humans soldiers and half-dragons had appeared in the east and pushed hard west, guns before them, and had slammed into the flanks of the assault force.
Lysa screamed as a round tore into her right thigh and her body shuddered as the elite armor’s servos whined with the struggle of holding her upright without the aide of her muscles. As her suit compensated for the wound Lysa returned fire and sent a half-dragon pitching backwards as a fine red mist hung in the air where he’d been standing a moment before. The warrior woman sense movement to her left and spun on her good leg to face a charging half-dragon. The enemy was wielding a large bayonet on the end of his shotgun, which he fired twice into Lysa’s chest as he sprang towards her. The blasts were turned aside by Lysa’s armor as she lunged forward to cleave the enemy in half with a devastating swipe from her Morrighan blade. Her wounded leg gave out as she tried to recover and she fell forward to the dirt. Lysa coughed up dark blood as she became aware that some of the shot from the blast had found its mark, and her lungs felt as if they were filling with blood.
Morgan watched through Her Warrior’s eyes as he gunned down two more enemies before rushing to Lysa’s side. The brood mother felt a deep welling up of alien intelligence blossoming within her as she watched Her Warrior prop Lysa upright so that the hybrid woman could still re-load and shoot even as she gradually drowned on her own blood. Through his eyes she could see how her ribcage was shattered and the armor rent to pieces. From within his mind and body Morgan could feel Her Warrior’s growing rage and crushing sorrow of the knowledge of Lysa’s pending demise. She could taste his memories of Lysa’s flesh, the heat of a passion that while being alien to him he felt and embraced nonetheless. If there were any Izrid who lived as proof of individual agency after removal of the control-nodule, Her Warrior was that proof. Izrid warriors did not mate, beyond depositing seed within warrior caste brood bearers, and yet this warrior, lone among legions, had broken with that biological programming. Morgan’s mind and body trembled with the memory of their brutal sexual encounter in Cava-Rek’s compound. He had bred with her four times since their discovery of the hive temple hidden deep within the cave networks of the Grand Canyon, though each of those couplings had borne little passion beyond the base mechanics of sex. His orgasms had thundered inside her, and their encounters had not been without pleasure, though she could sense acutely that his passion belonged only to Lysa. Morgan had long considered it her first lesson as a brood mother, than while she could command his body and his seed, his being was his own, and he had given that to another. Lysa had grown apart from Morgan as well, even as their relationship as warrior and brood mother had deepened.
It was with this newfound emotional detachment combined with a more genetic intimacy that Morgan observed the last moments of the two beings she held most dear. The brood mother ordered her hive temple to ascend from its position behind a small mountain range and to approach the city. The hive temple was a sturdy ship, though ponderous in its movement, and as Morgan watched her two warriors fight on she knew they would be overrun before she could achieve a firing solution on the gun emplacements that were preventing the war hives from supporting the ground troops. Her Warrior had already suffered several wounds despite his elite armor, and as he exhausted the remainder of his ammunition he took another hard hit in the left arm, and was driven against the low wall that he’d propped Lysa against. The hybrid woman handed him a pistol with her last magazine as she used her other to take potshots at any enemies who came into her field of fire. Morgan could see that her aim wavered, and she watched as Lysa’s pistol finally clicked empty. The warrior woman lowered her pistol and with her other hand reached over to grasp Her Warrior’s hand, which gripped her back as he looked away from the battle and brought his eyes to her face. The Izrid were a hard race, thought Morgan, though as she looked at Lysa through Her Warrior’s eyes and at him through hers, she knew that there was more to these aliens than their caste system allowed. By the time the half-dragon skirmishers leapt over the ditch and
began firing full-auto on the couple Lysa had already drifted away from life. Her Warrior had simply continued to look upon the dead face of the hybrid warrior, and Morgan could feel the palpable sense of peace that flooded his system just before dozens of rounds tore him to pieces. Their long war was finally at an end.
Rockets began screaming out of broken windows and alleyways towards the Complex defenses, and to Morgan’s surprise she saw what she could only assume were human resistance fighters begin to emerge from the decayed ruins of the city to engage the Complex defenders.
The hive temple came into range and Morgan turned her attention from the slain warriors to the task at hand, and called up firing solutions from her pilots. Like her own, Cava-Rek’s hive temple was gargantuan, and contained enough space to hold several dozen war hives in its belly, in addition to the myriad facilities that kept the temple running. In addition, the hive temple was encrusted with mounted gun decks, many of which were now training upon her hive temple even as her pilots began to report target locks of their own. Morgan had specifically avoided targeting the massive pylons that generated the gravity tether, which was keeping the hive temple afloat roughly half a mile above the top of the Complex temple that served as the base of power for the Serpent King’s human government. She knew from the schematics of her own hive temple that once the unlocking sequence was initiated it would take upwards of twenty minutes for the gravity tether to be properly released, and any attempt to move the temple away from the tether before that would cause serious ruptures in the temple’s hull. She had gambled that Cava-Rek would not flee from this fight, betting on his pride to push him to personally oversee the defense of the city. Where other rulers might have fled, Morgan knew that the Izrid were not such leaders, especially not when possessed of such hubris as Cava-Rek. He would want to see with his own eyes the destruction of Morgan’s brood, and the success of her plan hinged upon that desire. If she could defeat the Serpent King here, in the Capitol City of his empire, the fires of revolution could be re-kindled and a second Izrid war would begin. As the first battery of weapons started blazing away at the enemy temple Morgan found herself thinking of Fiona, wondering if the battle-hardened resistance leader was still alive. For the insurgents, recalled Morgan, the first Izrid was has yet to end, even if the Complex insists that the Serpent King has ruled over five years of tenuous peace.
Return fire from Cava-Rek’s hive temple hammered the outside of Morgan’s temple and her subconscious registered the deaths of several dozen hybrid crew members. They had taken minor surface damage across numerous points on the temple, and most of the dead were among the gun teams. The Izrid component of Morgan’s mind could not help but to coldly calculate the estimated time and intercourse requirements for her to breed replacements for the hybrids lost. The crew of the hive ship was comprised of a small number of pilots, with the bulk of the crew, from engine works to gun teams to general maintenance were of the builder caste. They were simple lovers, she mused as she ordered for additional barrages to ravage the Complex strong-points that were repelling the assaults of her ground forces, and unlike the savagely passionate warriors the builders had a more pragmatic approach to sex. Which was just as well, as the builders were the most populace of the Izrid caste, though that fact was relatively unknown to any human who had not spent time inside a war hive, as such she estimated that to replace the casualties already inflicted upon her temple would take fourteen couplings. Crewing the hive ship had taken time, especially given that she was also building an army of hybrid warriors. In the last five years she had lost count, nor cared enough to recall, how many hundreds of breeding sessions she had engaged in. The breeding process seemed to emerge from the deeper parts of her Izrid nature, and she seemed to already know from breeder to breeder which Izrid she would bed and which she would avoid. It was as if her body accepted or rejected them through a primal awareness of what they would bring to the hive genetically. It had been a struggle, especially in the beginning, to find pure blood Izrid to join her burgeoning hive, though she had discovered that many Izrid, once freed from the control nodule, were eager to return to a hive, even if one of more intrinsic freedom.
The global war had left plenty of Izrid who had been separated from this brood or that and who wandered the wilderness. Without the guidance of a magister they were listless, barely surviving, and once captured were usually quite eager to be welcomed into a new brood.
As Morgan’s hive temple closed in on Cava-Rek’s temple the firefight intensified between the two colossal war machines, and several buildings were pulverized in the crossfire. Morgan’s war hives careened through the gaps the temple had blasted in the enemy land defense and launched all of their low-flying skiffs and gun pods in addition to the remainder of the shock troops waiting in their holds.
The hybrid suddenly began to receive data-streams from units in the field, both mounted and ground troops, that small groups of well-armed humans were beginning to engage the Complex defense forces. Morgan’s mind soared over the battlefield through the eyes of her brood and witnessed what she recognized as squads of resistance fighters harrowing the human and Izrid troops behind the Complex lines. A thrill of questioning thrummed through her awareness and she shifted her perspective to a heavy gunner aboard one of the skiffs who was taking aim at two groups of half-dragons engaged in a brutal firefight, with each other. They had identical uniforms, though one group of half-dragons had donned a light green sash. Once Morgan noticed the sash she shifted her awareness as she ordered the gunner to ignore the conflict and pursue clearer targets. Her mind swept across the battlefield and she realized that nearly twenty percent of the Complex forces had donned the green sash and turned their guns upon their comrades. All across the frontline she could see instance after instance of Complex fratricide combining with an apparent resistance full show of force, and she sent the chemical commands throughout the brood not to engage the green-sash wearers or any human fighter not wearing a Complex uniform.
After the prejudice and violence Morgan and the other hybrid suffered at the hands of Jana Cruz and Fiona MacArthur, she was not about to consider anyone in Chicago an ally. Though if these new green-sashes and the emerging resistance fighters wanted to help her ground offensive, she would allow it. Over the next fifteen minutes the tide of furious combat turned in favor of Morgan’s brood, and with the help of the green-sashes and the resistance the Complex lines were broken. Artillery fire from the Serpent King’s temple had abated dramatically, and Morgan could not fathom why that might be, until she saw several internal explosions rock the enemy temple even as two of the guns turned their might against Complex batteries that protected the Complex central temple. The green-sashes must have launched an attack from inside the magister’s own temple, Morgan determined, which meant a boarding action would have a much higher chance of success than she had anticipated.
With the Complex routed Morgan ordered her war hives and troops to consolidate and create a hasty defense against the counter-attack that she knew would be inevitable. It would still take at least an hour before the Izrid war hives and their legions of hardened warriors would reach the city. Her forces had suffered a tremendous amount of casualties in the push to take the city, though now that they had control of downtown they would be able to mount an acceptable defense for at least a short time. The green-sashes and resistance fighters had broken away from her brood and had pursued the routed Complex legions as they haphazardly fled and spread out across the city. Within minutes it seemed as if the entire city was caught up in the storm of street to street combat as the Complex regime fought a raw battle of survival against the rampaging green-sashes and human resistance fighters. Morgan could see through the eyes of her scouts that more and more humans had joined the veteran resistance fighters, some wielding simple rocks and kitchen knives until they could look corpses for more effective weapons.
As her attendants strapped armor and weapons to her body Morgan watched as the green-sashes and the humans
of Chicago tore the Complex to pieces. What few security forces still guarded the interior of the Complex central temple were being engaged by her own elite warriors and that building would soon fall under her control. Morgan was unsettled to discover that as she watched the multitude of data-streams that she was weeping. The Izrid part of her had pushed her consciousness into a battle-hardened state as she had driven her hybrid children and adopted Izrid warriors into the meat-grinder of an all-out assault against a dug-in superior force. Her brood’s population had dwindled by at least sixty-five percent in the last several hours, and though they had delivered, by her estimations, a nearly ninety percent casualty rate against a force easily five times their size, it would be a hollow victory if she could not make good on her boarding action. While the green-sashes and the resistance would surely wipe out the remaining Complex security forces, as well as most of the social elites of Complex high society, within the next several hours, when forces loyal to the Complex and the Serpent King arrived the day would turn against them. There would be no allies left within the city to give the counter-attack any reason not to level the city with massive artillery strikes. While her war hives and hive temple could in turn knock out most of the enemy artillery, they would be destroyed in the doing of it. That would leave only her ground forces left to repel the countless waves of loyalists that were sure to descend upon the Complex central temple. As the battle played out in her mind she again noticed that she was weeping, and paused to acknowledge her human side. War was a terrible thing, and atrocity was vile regardless of affiliation.
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