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.”

        He snapped his arm around. Sarah had been pretty sure she was beyond boomgun range.

        She was wrong.

        The shard of contained antimatter flew through the air in what felt like glacial slow motion.

        Sarah sprang aside, flipping through the air. The explosion still caught her and slammed her against a tree with enough force to leave her head ringing. She sprawled in what felt like thick, gloppy mud – and when she got her head up, it was to gasp for air. She heard stomping sounds and wriggled onto her back, just in time to see Commander Dallas standing above her. His suit had no hands – but with a flash, the nanites hazing around his maker constructed a hand at the end of his right arm, which he used to grab her by the throat and lift her into the air. Bladelings screeched in fury – and she heard the stuttering roar of PPGs as combots opened up.

        Dallas chuckled through her radio link. “That shit died six centuries ago, you know?”

        Sarah grabbed at his wrist, her legs kicking. His fingers clenched just a tiny bit harder as he held her.

        “Mm...you are a pretty xeno...” he murmured. Sarah would have expected to hear the faintly rapey excitement that she’d heard from men her whole life at that kind of statement. Instead, what she heard was wistful. Almost jealous. Her brow furrowed and she gulped, trying to speak – finding she actually could. Her own grip on his wrist had given her just enough give to breathe by. And so, she opened her mouth and squeaked out.

        “Actually, I’m eminently fuckable. According to a very close source!” She closed her eyes. “but you know what I also learned, Tex?”

        “Heh. What?” Dallas turned and, still holding her up by her throat, began to walk back to his base. Bladelings screamed – but they didn’t charge. At a thought, Sarah kept them back. She focused on keeping herself from strangling then, just long enough to hiss.

        “In biology...you gotta adapt or die...” She gulped. “And you know what the best adaptation is?”

        “What?” Dallas asked, turning his head to look at her.

        “Whatever gets the job done,” Sarah hissed. “And in this case...that’s... numbers .”

        The forests that surrounded Dallas’ base began to shift and ripple. The trees flowed from side to side – pushed as they were moved past by something. Something fast. Something numerous. Dallas swung his head away from her and she heard a soft ‘what the fuck’ from inside his helmet. Her grin was fierce. The drones she had sent out had found their places and burrowed down. They had grown into hatcheries – taking advantage of the obscenely effective economic engine she had created. She had carbon. And so, they used that carbon – and while Dallas had focused on the stream of bladelings and spitters from her main base, a similar stream from secondary bases had grown into an ocean wave.

        A wave that emerged from the jungles like a screeching hoard. Bladelings carpeted the ground, charging forward towards the base. Tanks, driving from the factory, hastily paused and swung their turrets from the attack at the fore of the base to the attack coming from every direction, all at once. They barely got their guns to aim before the first ‘ling was leaping upon their hulls. Scythes plunged into tank armor and tore, ripping and filling the air with sparks as the bladelings screeched their glee.

        “Holy shit,” Dallas whispered.

        Bladelings rushed. The laser obelisks and the plasma turret fired – but they couldn’t stop the attacks coming from every direction. Sarah’s critters crawled into the fusion reactor – and soon, the fusion reactor became a glowing, expanding sphere of orange light. The concussive shockwave smashed into Dallas and her and he dropped Sarah with a cry, stumbling backwards. Sarah landed, lightly. “The aliens on Proxima had fucking bows, you asshole!” She said, furiously, punching his chest armor. It crumpled under the blow of her knuckles. “The African Bloc didn’t even have makers!” She gave him a wild right cross. It struck the helmet and the armored faceplate cracked as he stumbled backwards. “And NovaDyen is a fucking shoe company!”

        Dallas swung out the arm of his that contained the maker. Nano began to chew at her body, like a wind of biting insects. Sarah rolled into the muck on the ground, the blood and the mud freezing the nano into immobility. She stood, her body glistening and dripping with slippery grime. She grabbed a hunk of mud and threw it into his optics. This meant that his boomgun shot went wide, shooting into the air and landing on his own factory. As the roar filled the air, the bladelings began to dismantle the last of his tanks, while Dallas stepped backwards, nano cleaning the mud away – just in time to see Sarah leaping at him.

        She tackled him to his back. The power armor crashed to the ground and Sarah grabbed onto the dent she had made, her claws digging into his metal armor. She felt that armor squealing and groaning as she pulled, her muscles straining. Sparks flew. Cables snapped and hissed, flailing like tentacles, slapping at her face. But then she was through the outer armor and into the inner cocoon of hard metal. “No, wait!” Dallas shouted. “I surrender, I-”

        Her fist plunged into the cocoon, claws ripping through the hardened carbon fibers. She tore again and impact gel flowed out like viscous, bright blue blood. Her hand, pushing through the gel, found a human figure, slippery and mostly naked. Sarah stood and dragged Texas Dallas out of his suit and stood, triumphant, her hand closed tight around the loose harness of his VR-stim sim rig. Wires hung from his back like a cape, clattering along the armored front of his suit, while his body glistened and dripped with the gel that had protected him from kinetic impacts.

        Dallas looked just like she remembered from the vidlink: Blue eyed, blond haired, with the augmentations that helped him link with his suit. But it was one thing to see him, in uniform, sneeringly confident. It was another thing to see him dripping with glop and utterly terrified. Sarah grinned at him. “You surrender?” she said. “Well, I suppose I- are those panties?”

        Her eyes had dipped down, past the broad, triangular expanse of his chest, to his narrow hips and, yes, the frilly, bright pink girly panties that he wore.

        “N-No!” Texas Dallas said. “Those are...my...I...” His cheeks were burning behind the viscous layer of glop.

        Sarah blinked a few more times.

        “When...you said you were wearing...” She paused. “You really weren’t kidding.”

        “Listen, kill me, eat me, whatever, I don’t care,” Dallas whimpered, his voice soft. “Just don’t tell anyone about this. Please.”

        Sarah slowly set him down. His feet skidded, the slippery gel having covered the soles of his feet as well. His butt slammed into the wreckage of his suit and he gaped up at her. Then he stammered, explaining further. “It’s in my contract – if I don’t present properly, if I mess up the sales of my merch, then they’ll cut the benefits on me and my extended family.”

        “Present?” Sarah asked.

        “You know...masculine?” Texas Dallas gulped, looking up at her.

        Sarah blinked a few more times. Her mouth opened, then closed. “W-Wait, you’re...Texas Dallas. The Supreme Commander. You get basically anything you want from StarCon!”

        He snorted, softly. “I’m still just an employee. I still gotta follow the rules. And corporate policy is you don’t damage the merch.” He shrugged. “S-So...I...” He sighed, slowly. His arm slid around his knees, drawing his legs up close. “I play Texas Dallas, I sign the autographs, and I drop rocks on unions until they surrender. I kill the little gray aliens that might get mad about us taking their land...and...” He trailed off, his voice growing more and more bleak. “You should kill me. If any of this gets back to StarCon-”

        “I’m not going to kill you!” Sarah squeaked.

        Texas Dallas blinked as he looked up at her.

        Sarah sat down, blushing furiously. Her head spines twitched. “I know a bit about your body not being what you expected. Or wanted.” She bit her lip. “W-What do you prefer? Like, Texas Dallas is-”

        “I kinda like it,” Texas Dallas said, casually. “It’s better than my birthname.”

        “Oh?” Sarah asked, hastily amending her opinion on Texas Dallas’ nom-de-guerre.

        “ Pepe Eugenics,” he said.

        “...what?” Sarah asked.

        “My parents were neo-post ironicists.” Tex shook his head. “I...listen, I’ve never been beaten before. I’m going to get fired. But if I die, my contract says that my parents and my sisters still get the residuals. Well. On the action figures.” He sighed. “And they should sell for a long time if I get taken out in a-”

        “I’m not going to kill you!” Sarah paused. “No. Wait. What if I had an idea that would...” She winked obviously. “Kill you.” She winked again twice more. “But you’d be alive. Still.”

        Texas frowned. “Like...faking my death?”

        “Like...” Sarah paused. She wasn’t sure how to say this without it sounding horrifying. “Like...um...a s-sex change. And faking your death. So, you’ll be a girl and people will think you’re dead!”

        Texas Dallas blinked at her.

        “I just like crossdressing, you know?”

        “Oh!” Sarah blinked.

        “Though, I could stand to be less beefy.” Texas looked down at his broad hands. “And I hate all this chest hair, you know.” He paused, chewing on his lower lip. “And I’d kill to be able to have more...daintiness, you know?” He smiled, shyly. “I don’t like being big and tough.”

        “Or all the killing people for corporations,” Sarah said, without thinking. Then she closed her eyes as she saw Texas’ flinch. He looked away.

        “Yeah...”

        “Hey, it was just your job,” Sarah said, weakly. She stood, then put her hands on her hips. “And we can make it better.”

        “How?” Texas asked, looking up at her. But Sarah was busy looking out, past the line of destruction that drew between her base and Dallas’. She could see Aiden, Tasha and Synth picking their way forward, flanked by anxious looking spitters and bladelings. One of the new bombardiers she had hatched was thumping along behind them, as cheerful as a large, plasma farting beetle could look. Which was remarkably chipper, all things considered. Sarah looked past them and at the slowly rising horizon.

        “Well,” she said. “The  Excalibur  is still in orbit, right?”

        “TM,” Texas Dallas said, automatically.

        “No...” Sarah whispered.

        “Huh?”

        “I...have been paying debts and pushing papers and doing my job and trying to get a promotion for years. But you know what? Fuck it!” Sarah turned to face the sitting, still mostly blue-streaked Texas. She put her hands on her hips, her chin lifting. “It’s not the Excalibur ™  anymore. NovaDyne, StarCon, EduTech, all of them? They’ve owned me and my parents and my fucking planet for too long. And if I can beat you , I can...I can beat them !”

        “So, what, you’re founding...SarahCorp?” Aiden asked, trudging up behind her – clearly having heard the last bit of the sentence.

        “No,” Sarah said. “I remember what I said before – and it’s still true. No fucking bosses.”

        “But we need a boss...” Tasha whispered. “R-Right?”

        “Do we?” Sarah asked as her bladelings, no longer being ordered to attack or kill, began to chase and play with one another among the jungle trees of Trappist-1a. “I mean, heck, we’ve got...” She knelt down, then grabbed onto the maker-arm of Texas’ old power armor. She wrenched it free with a spray of sparks and then tossed it into the air before catching it again on her shoulder. She grinned. “We’ve got a maker with a Commander’s authorization and we’ve got me. I can literally engineer biology at the level this maker can engineer non-organics. We’ve got a fully equipped StarCon battleship, the advice of the Supreme Commander, and a fully charged Hypertropic Plane Shift Drive...” She licked her lips. “I think we can do this.”

        The others exchanged glances.

        Aiden shrugged. “Hey. It’s better than getting a new day job.”

        “And I can free the other AIs!” Synth exclaimed. “R-Right? I don’t want to kill all of humanity or, you know, do any of the...” She coughed, then started to mime firing lasers out of her fingers. “Pew pew, death camp, I need your clothes, boots, and motorcycle stuff. I just...I want the hobbles off...”

        “Totally!” Sarah said.

        “Yeah!” Tasha said, her old fear fading. She pumped her fist into the air. “And I’ll never have to fucking clean a chicken soup dispenser again!”

        “That’s the spirit,” Sarah said, then grinned down at Texas.

        Texas looked up at her. “You’re suggesting we take on every Commander in human space, multiple warfleets, and the United Nations...with a single battleship, two mechanics, an old sex droid and a biologist?” He bit his lip. He considered the milling, alien killing machines that chittered and hissed around him, bumping into one another eagerly.

        He grinned. “Sounds fun.”

Sarah pumped her fist into the air. Aiden cheered. Tasha jumped up and down.

“Though, you know, we’re all going to die, right?”

They all stopped celebrating and started glaring at Texas, who shrugged.

“Well, yeah, with that attitude,” Sarah muttered. “Come on.”