Chapter Five: Sarah versus Kellen Grant

         Sarah had thought she knew what war looked like. She had seen it when her army had gone up against Texas Dallas. But that had been more of a double rush. Her rush against his rush.

        This?

        This was different.

        The front wave of Grant’s incoming airforce broke off into dozens of squadrons, each one moving with the eerie precision of artificial intelligence. Three bombers and a single support fighter, each one darting towards a different part of her base. She saw that they formed into groups that grew wider and wider and wider – first one group, then two, then three, then four, creating massed ‘daggers’ of airplanes. She saw why as they came within range of her laser turrets.

        Lasers, in a vacuum didn’t worry about bullet drop or tracking or movement. They simply began to burn when the inverse square law said they wouldn’t be wasting power – and the front rows of the incoming plane formations began to come apart, melting into slag, their wings sliced off, their hulks crashing into the surface and peppering the ground with shrapnel. This was still at an immense distance, and for a moment, Sarah thought her madcap plan wouldn’t even need to be brought into effect.

        She was proved wrong: The planes had formed up into increasingly large groups, and there was a limit to how fast lasers could cycle their firing. She saw her towers beginning to overheat, the emitters glowing first dull, then cherry red as they tried to bring down more and more of the incoming fighters. But since the fighters were in larger and larger groups, more were getting closer – and she saw them breaking off. Fifteen bombers darted down and released their payloads at nearly ground level, firing their wing thrusters at the last second to send them whipping back upwards. Those bombs struck her most distant extractors and solar plants – and she lifted her hand to block the blinding flashes.

        When she lowered it, her forward bases were so many smoldering craters, and she saw a single massive chunk of one of her extractors winging in a smooth parabola nearly two kilometers before impacting into the silty earth. By then, the bombers were swinging upwards and the main bulk of Sarah’s base was coming under the direct assault of the survivors. The fighters, she saw, remained higher up, circling overhead, waiting for some kind of an air force to oppose them. The bombers flew in straight trajectories. By now, the laser turrets were nearly all and one trying to dump their waste heat into space.

        Sarah lifted her hand.

        “Now!” She shouted.

        The seemingly unmarked ground in-front of her erupted.

        Her entire economic force of drones shot into the air – their agrav emitters glowing brilliantly as they flung themselves upwards. Without air resistance and with only light gravity to deal with, the manta-ray bulk of the drones was able to reach the same height as the planes. Sarah winced, inwardly, as the planes and the drones met. The drones lacked weapons. Save their own bulk. A plane, at the end of the day, was fairly light and flimsy – and it was not made to withstand impact with a hefty construction drone. Bombers crumpled and drones exploded into black paste and the entire front line of the aerial formation staggered as if it had hit a wall. The remaining bombers pulled up, their bombs released erratically and too early.

        Several buildings exploded and a shrapnel fragment whipped past Sarah’s ear so fast she barely perceived it. Flowers had been turned into bleeding stumps by the shockwaves, while three of her solar power plants were so much shattered glass. But the bomber wave began to circle around, trying to reorganize themselves. By now, the laser turrets were coming to life and Sarah directed not only the efforts of the turrets – focusing on the mostly intact formations with quick ‘twitches’ of her attention – but she also directed the surviving drones, the hatcheries, and the factories. Construction bots stomped off the lines to begin building heavy missile emplacements in camouflaged bunkers, while others started to build more factories. Factories specially built to construct her own aircraft.

        Bladelings started to emerge en mass from the ground, chattering and squeaking with excitement.

        Sarah grinned. “Let’s see how you like it, Grant,” she said, then sprang off the laser tower. She landed and started to use her nanolathe to help as well. When two nanolathes worked on the same project, it completed infinitely faster – and she was able to spot problems in her ecosystem and her ecology. Drones burrowed into the ground and grew protective, chitinous shields that the construction bots could build laser turrets behind, for extra defense. Bladelings spawned in huge clutches, clawing their way from their eggs and scrambling to the surface, fanning outwards so they could be bathed in radiation and cough up rad crystals onto conveyor belts she had – constructed by C-bots and delivering the radioactives straight to the hatchery.

        By the time the second air wave came, she was ready for them: Thirty thousand airplanes, including heavy VTOL brawlers that were designed to hang in the air and pound bases into crap with plasma emitters. Missiles hacked them from the air, while lasers scythed out from behind bone shields. Her own fighters – the same make and model as the kind that had battled her while she was on the surface of Trappist-1a – zipped up to duel the more needle-like planes of Grant. The sky was lit with tracers, chaff-flares, and missile streaks. Sarah got used to ignoring the cataclysm going on overhead as she used her lathe and her own directives to shore up this or that part of her base.

        Catching a break in the relentless assault, Sarah hurried to the main hatchery area. The constant pressure of growing buildings had forced the small craves she had used to conceal her first hatchery open wide. Now she could look down at the vast array of hanging egg-sacks that the bladelings came crawling out of. They slipped past her like a constant stream of eager puppies and Sarah took a moment to pet a few, then beamed as she saw the first of the big eggs hatching. The first of her bombardiers emerged from the eggs, wriggling and squirming, drones flitting around them to collect up the scraps of their cocoons for reprocessing.

        “Yesss, my pretties!” Sarah crooned, rubbing her palms together.

        “You sure you’re not going mad with power?”

        Sarah screamed, then spun and saw Aiden standing behind her, his hands on his hips. Behind her, the first of the bombardiers came wallowing out of the hatcheries. Behind Aiden, she could see one of Grant’s airplanes spinning wildly before smashing into the ground beyond the base and dragging a furrow almost five kilometers long before coming to a stop. “Aiden!” Sarah said. “You can’t be out here, it’s dangerous! You should be in the ship.”

        Aiden grinned at her. “I’m not. Look down.”

        Sarah looked down – and saw that Aiden wasn’t there. He was being projected by a small, spider-limbed holobot. The bot bobbed.

        “Tasha slapped it together when we noticed you going mad with power,” he said.

        “I’m not going mad with power !” Sarah said – Aiden’s entire body flickering and turning to a cloud of static as the first bombardier opened fire. A heaving mass of plasma roiled into the air, rushing up towards the horizon, then cresting, and then cascading downwards, trailing blue flame like a comet from a spec-fic movie that had no idea how comets worked. When it slammed into the ground, the roiling explosion that bloomed in the distance didn’t form a mushroom cloud, as there was no atmosphere to support it. Instead, it looked more like a dome of pure fire. Sarah clasped her hands together. “Only...reasonably excited with...normal...stuff.”

        Aiden, once his holographic figure had reconstituted enough for him to do so, pursed his lips at her.

        “Okay, maybe it’s a teeny bit mad with power,” Sarah whispered, holding her finger up to indicate just how teeny bit it was. Aiden snorted, then reached down and swept his hand through her green rump. The haze of static that indicated where his holographic fingers met her skin, where the projection broke apart into a chaos of random impulses and sparkles, hung around her butt for long enough to let her stuck her tongue out of him. Then one of her bladelings whacked her butt with his head. “Hey!”

        “I didn’t tell him to do that,” Aiden said, casually.

        “Grumble grumble,” Sarah muttered. Her HUD chirruped and she lifted her head, focusing on the augmented reality illusion. It was a picture in picture display, showing that her first flight of transports were rolling off the production line. They were as simple as humans could make them: A column of cheap composites to serve as a spine, with a quarter of ionic VTOL engines on the sides, making it look a bit like an oversized mosquito, balanced on the tips of its four spindly legs. Normally, the transports were crafted with large gripper arms that could close around the bodies of tanks. Now, they were being webbed up with construction drone bioplast, create goopy sacks that bladelings began to squirm into with all the eager delight of self-canning sardines.

        “Hailee,” Sarah said. “Do you have an appropriate song for this moment? It looks like something we should have a song for.”

        “I believe I do,” Hailee said.

***

        The first transport that took to the heavens did so with Sarah standing on the angular ‘cockpit’ that served as the home for the cloned, omega level intellect that powered the flight computers. It was several dozen steps below the gamma intellect that served as the basis for Synth, but Sarah still felt a tiny twinge of guilt – was she just crafting mentally handicapped child soldiers, then sending them into war? But she tried to pack that worry away as the VTOL engines roared to life and the transport took to skies on a quartet of blue thrust plumes. She bracer her legs and whooped, looking down over the lip of the transport at her base as it spread beneath her.

        There was no air on DisneyPlanet, so she wasn’t buffeted by winds – and some trick in her body kept her glued to the metal of the cockpit. She felt almost no vertigo as she admired her own handiwork. Her base looked like a messy hodgepodge of buildings. No, scratch that. It looked like a messy hodgepodge of buildings that had been infected with the world’s worst skin condition and some kind of expensive omnicancer. Each of the sleek, rectangular structures she had built with her nanolathe – the factories, the airports, the solar power collectors, the metal extractors – shared space with the glistening purple fungus that served as the basis for her ecosystem, while glistening piles of muscle and organs that were the biological buildings of the Claw thrust into the air around and sometimes on top of the mechanical human structures.

        Sarah had gotten so used to the ‘ominousness’ of her biotechnology that seeing it from the sky took her aback.

        “Okay,” she whispered. “I can see how someone might think I’m a little evil.”

        But even that whisper was lost in the simultaneous, impossible roar of the rest of the transports. Each one had become completely glommed over by large sacks of glistening bioplasm, and each bioplasm sack was crammed to the gills with bladelings, spitters, and some new critters that she had devised while the transports had been built. She mentally tagged which transports held which, then grinned as her first flight of escort planes took to the heavens as well. They were shaped a bit like a highly popular form of cheap chip that she sometimes enjoyed chowing down on – Delta-Ds. The D stood for delicious. Also, the fighter planes (and the chips) were shaped a bit like extremely angular, angry looking Ds. Sarah giggled to herself.

        “What are you giggling about?” Tex asked as the whole airforce arranged itself into chevrons – overlapping protective squadrons.

        “Uhh, nothing!” Sarah said. “It’s dumb.”

        “Well, now I have to hear it,” Aiden said, his voice drawling into the coms.

        “Uh, okay,” Sarah said, caving instantly. “So, uh, all these fighters, they kinda look like Delta-Ds. You know, the chips?”

        “No,” Tex said.

        “No,” Steve said.

        “No,” Hailee said.

        “No,” Synth said.

        “None of you have had-” Sarah stopped herself. Half of them were robots or disembodied AIs. The others had been StarCon or Disney corporate-citizens. She coughed. “T-They’re chips, and, they look like these fighters. So, I was thinking, I, uh, I finally have some... double Ds !”

        Silence.

        “Sarah, you have the biggest tits I’ve ever seen in my life,” Tex said, his voice dry.

        “Dude!” Steve hissed. “You can’t just say that!”

        “It’s okay,” Sarah said, her cheeks burning. “I mean, uh, it’s not like I have any shame left.”

        “You’re blushing though,” Aiden said.

        “No I’m-” Sarah stammered. “I, yes, I...because I...it’s warm up here! That’s why! I mean, you can’t see my face! I...” She stopped as she heard Aiden’s chuckle. “You fucking asshole!”

        “That’s why we’re going to have very angry sex when she gets back,” Aiden faux whispered.

        “Airforce!” Sarah reached behind herself, unhooking her scythe and twirling it. The bone gleamed as she thrust the bladed tip forward, into the air. “Forward!” Her voice and her mental command cracked out at the same time and every jet in the front ranks burst into movement at once, their rear thrusters flaring brilliantly. Sarah placed one of her bare feet backwards, bracing herself as her transport started forward. Ahead of her, her bombardiers – who had been trudging forward at their own stolid, steady pace – settled down. They fired the first spread of plasma projectiles before the airforce rushed overhead. Sarah had a glorious view of the dozens of glittering blue spheres, dripping with plasma discharge, arcing up into the air. The next blast came after the airforce had followed, bracketing them with blazing death.

        The explosions in and among the front ranks of Kellen Grant’s army was quite satisfying.

        Kellen Grant had not been wasting time while his air force had been dueling with hers. Sarah took a moment to survey not only the vast army below her – the vast army that was now becoming significantly less vast – but also took a moment to eyeball his base. This was assisted by the queer way that her eyes could zoom in and make things seem to shine out among the background. She immediately saw that Kellen’s sprawling, rapid attack style was writ large in his bases: He had half a dozen production centers, clustered around radioactive and metal deposits that he had secure. The only base that was larger than the others was the one in the center of a concentric ring of mobile defenses: Tank battalions, dug in squads of combots, and a constant combat air patrol that swirled by overhead.

        The plasma projectiles were landing in his forward army – mostly light tanks and CBC – combot carriers – that looked as if they had been lining up to begin their own blitz.

        Sarah waved her hand. “Give em hell, boys!”

        A third of her transports peeled off and swept down. Two of them almost instantly exploded – one of them with every engine burning, pierced by dozens of dart-fast micromissiles fired by the combots on the ground – but the remainder sung themselves upwards, as if they were flaunting their bellies at the enemies. Those bellies ,those bioplasm containers, ripped open and the first of her new toys came out. She had gotten the idea by watching one of her carbon cows being rolled into a biopit. Rolling was a great way to move a heavy object a short distance in a hurry – so long as the ground was level.

        Or they were being vomited out of still rapidly moving transports.

        Her blobbies came out in a torrential rain, like marbles vomiting from a bag. Each one was a translucent membrane that was drawn taut over a stomach of burbling, hissing hydraulic acid. They had very small brainstems linked to a set of optic nerves that looped around their bellies. Those stems had been coded with the most rudimentary commands of her bladelings – of which the blobbies were a descendent, theoretically.

         Find friend, those instincts said. Hug them!

         The blobbies tumbled and rolled towards tanks and combots and combot carries. The defense systems on those vehicles opened fire. Lasers and plasma and bullets and flechettes skewered each blobbie that came close – and their acid spilled into the vacuum, splashing over the enemy army like a green wave. If they hadn’t been robots, Sarah might have felt bad – but as it was, she whooped as she saw more and more of Kellen Grant’s army literally melting away under the enthusiastic hugs of her blobbies.

        Not every enemy got taken out. And not every enemy was on the ground.

        Sarah lifted her head as she saw missiles and lasers both angling towards her airforce. Chaff exploded into the air, filling vacuum with white poofs like the flowers of some extinct genus. Her fighters plunged into the furball with the eagerness of hunting wolves, and soon, the air was a maelstrom of exploding air-frames and whizzing missiles. One such missile flew straight for the cockpit of the transport she stood upon. Sarah snapped up her palm, instinctively, and the missile skidded to a stop, hovering in the air before her fingers, which clenched on nothing .

        This hadn’t been the first time she had done something like this – and Sarah made a mental note to do some investigation when she wasn’t being shot at. Instead, she angled her arm to the left, sighted at a needle-shaped fighter from the other side, and flicked her fingers wide, so that her hand formed a flat palm. The missile whipped off as if it had been fired from a slingshot, its tail sputtering uselessly as it tried to reorient itself before it impacted, side first, into the enemy plane, both of them exploding in a roaring fireball.

        “Drop! Drop! Drop!” Sarah shouted, pointing at the groups of transports, then down at the areas she had picked.

        And Hailee’s music began to blare over the radio, filling Sarah’s head – and, from the ‘what the fuck?’ she heard from Kellen, Kellen’s radio as well.

        “Da dun dan-nah nah, dun dah nah nah!” Sarah sang along as her transport swept low, opening its guts and vomiting out a chittering swarm of bladelings onto one of Kellen’s forward resourcing bases. The bladelings screeched with happiness, their bodies landing on top of the whirring machinery and utility droids that ran the metal and radioactive extraction. Sarah spared a glance to watch the destruction, before lifting her head to see that the main defenders of Kellen Grant’s base were beginning to move out: Massive, rapid moving combots, each one armed to the teeth. The main combot in the group had a torpedo shaped head with two, ear-like rectangles mounted to either side of the ‘cockpit’ that held the AI core. The rectangles were loaded with LRMs. Each of them also had two arms, which stuck off the sides in a canted mount, with long ranged particle acceleration cannons that speared the air with beams of blue-white energy. They blasted into the swarms, firing their missiles en masse.

        “Ride of the Valkyries? Seriously!?” Kellen shouted over the music.

        “It’s Disney music, it seemed appropriate!” Sarah shouted as her transport, moving faster now that it had dropped its load – arced towards his main line of combots.

        Three LRMs impacted into the side of her transport at the same time. Sarah didn’t care. She sprang off the cockpit, arcing through the air, her bone scythe held in both hands as she let out a fierce war-cry, landing right on the face of one of his combots. She brought the bladed tip of her scythe slamming down into the armored glass front of the cockpit, puncturing through to skewer the AI core’s armored casing. The combot staggered, and then she wrenched her scythe backwards, the AI core shattering the glass as it came out with her scythe. She looked it over.

        “Delta or gamma level?” She whispered.

        “It’s gamma,” Synth said.

        “Take them alive, then!” she shouted to her bladelings, which were charging towards the other combots. Their headlong rush was checked only by the explosions of LRMs, arcing upwards and plunging down into the front ranks. Meanwhile, Sarah swung herself through the shattered cockpit after tossing the core to the ground, where it could sit and wait for her and her friends to unhobble it. Once she was in the combot proper, she started to spray the interior with her nanolathe, humming to herself as she brought up a StarCon designed cockpit. The plush chair clashed with the utilitarian look of a NovaDyne control panel, and the art-deco styling on the new frame around the front of the combot looked downright silly, and she would have preferred the joystick to not be gold. But it would work.

        “What are you doing?” Kellen asked.

        “Uh, stealing one of your rides,” Sarah said – thinking to herself: I hope this works, I hope this works.

         She grabbed onto the joystick, then pushed it forward. The combot began to stomp forward, bladelings and spitters flowing around it. She twisted it to the side and nearly fell – the combot’s legs flinging themselves out wildly to make up for the wildly shifting gravity. “Meep meep meep meep!” Sarah said, flinging herself to the left in her seat, to try and use her own weight to help, her hair spines clamping tight to her head. “Whoa whoa whoa! Steady, girl!”

        “It’s a robot, not a horse!” Kellen said, sounding somewhere between furious and offended. “And it’s mine .”

        “Technically, uh, it was your enslaved gamma level intelligence, not yours,” Sarah said, the combot righting itself as she completed her ungainly turn. Kellen had marshaled his defenses and stopped trying to engage her swarm with his own counter-blitz. Instead, his tanks and his combots had fallen back to a defensive line that he was still nanolathing into existence: Laser towers, bunkers, and missile defenses, which created what looked like an impenetrable wall of death. Her bladelings flung themselves cheerfully at it – but she focused, making them draw back.

        A barrage of plasma from her bombardiers arced overhead – but Kellen had prepared for that. As the spheres of roiling energy flew down, they reached an invisible dome above Kellen’st last base and lost cohesion. They roiled apart, exploding far too early, flashing in the air. “Some kind of mag-shield?” Sarah said, biting her lip, tapping at red buttons on her mech. She pushed down one and a small coffee maker unfolded from an articulated case in the side of the refurbished cockpit. Coffee poured into it with a burbling hiss. “Man,” she whispered. “StarCon builds everything into their cockpits.” She pushed another red button and the chair rocked under her, unfolding. A rather obscenely large, purple colored dildo peeked out of the chair and brushed against her pussy. “I was kidding !”

        “Did you find the dildo button?” Tex asked.

        “Tex?” Kellen asked. “Texas Dallas, is that you?”

        “This is an open line?” Tex asked.

        “Holy shit, Tex!” Kellen said. “Your sister says hi.”

        “Sister?” Sarah perked up, then gasped as the dildo, without warning, hilted itself inside of her, sliding into her tight, eager pussy with a slurp loud enough that she knew it was audible over the radio. Her eyes closed, her hair clamped against her head, and she bit her lip hard enough to almost draw blood to prevent herself from moaning.

        “It’s not important-” Tex said.

        “I married his sister,” Kellen said. “She’s Becky 4Chan Grant now.”

        “Y-Your sister...is named Becky 4Chan? What the fuck even is a f...ahh!” Sarah’s mouth opened and an involuntary moan escaped – the dildo had begun to buzz within her, deep within her. She clapped her hand over her mouth. Her fingers mashed against the controls, trying to find the way to turn off the dildo button. Two things happened. The first was the dildo’s buzzing kicked up a few notches and it began to plunge into her even harder and faster. The faint whirr whirr whirr of it moving inside of her body, the slap of the base against her pussy lips, and the slick, slurping noises, were all so unimaginably lewd that they nearly completely distracted her from the fact that she had turned on the targeting computer and half the screen of the cockpit was lighting up with targeting reticules.

        She hung her head head forward as Tex barked: “This doesn’t matter.”

        “No, it doesn’t,” Kellen said. “Say bye bye to your pet Commander, Tex.”

        Sarah saw that one of the large plasma turrets that served as the backbone to his defense was angling around, taking aim at her combot. She bit her lower lip to try and keep herself from mewling as the dildo whirred inside of her. But she was unable to stop herself from panting quietly, her hips rocking. She flicked a switch that she hoped was related to the missiles. Several of the reticules went from green to red and she heard the quiet whirrrr of a target lock being confirmed.

        “Sarah!” Tex said.

        “Boom,” Sarah moaned. Her finger stabbed down on what she was eighty seven percent sure was the launch button.

        Her combot rocked and missiles arrowed into space, leaving behind expanding plumes of smoke and fire. Sarah’s cunt clenched upon the dildo thrusting into her and moaned in bliss, her back arching as she grabbed onto the console, her fingers digging furrows into the brass and wood paneling. Her eyes closed to slits and white flared before her eyes – the white of her orgasm and the whites of several dozen long ranged missiles zipping through an anti-missile system that had been primed to not fire upon them.

        It was, after all, one of Kellen Grant’s combots.

        The missiles had targeted a single area in his defensive line, ripping open a hole in the overlapping fields of fire, a hole that was filled, instantly, by her bladelings and spitters, which flowed past the legs of her mechs and towards the trenches. Kellen started screaming orders over an open line, and she could faintly see his power armor stomping towards the breach. His B-gun arced antimatter into the air and tore ragged gaps in the swarm. But there were simply too many bladelings, and they swarmed inwards, then outwards. Laser towers started to fall. Missile tubes were ripped apart. Fragments of combots flew into the air as her bladelings did their work – and as the sphere of anti-aircraft weaponry was taken down, her fighters arced down to join the fray, lashing the fusion reactors and solar collectors with projectiles.

        As the power stations died, the remaining lasers died and were swarmed over with by her bladelings.

        Mechs which had drawn back fired into the crowd – and then fell themselves, their fuselages riddled with dripping, acid tipped spikes launches by the spitters.

        By then, Sarah had piloted her mech close, then popped the cockpit. She blushed, gripped the base of the dildo – which had stilled inside of her, then stood. Her knees felt weak and she needed to bite her lip to keep from mewling into the vacuum. But once she was standing, her sex was only completely soaked and ready for round two, rather than still actively throbbing with desire. Sarah forced herself to step onto the art deco dashboard, onto the furrows she had left on the wood paneling, and looked down at her victory. Smoking, wrecked bases in every direction. Tanks hulls and burnt out CBCs littered the ground – mixed among her own dead. By her count, she’d lost almost fifty to seventy percent of her army.

        “Give me back my legions,” Tex murmured.

        “Huh?” Sarah asked, then leaped off the side of the mech. She spread her arms and landed with a graceful plunge onto the silty ground, then started to walk towards her swarm – towards a huge clot of bladelings, which had completely surrounded something that still wriggled and squirmed beneath their mass.

        “It’s something an old Roman Emperor said, back before the corporations,” Tex said. “After a huge battle where he lost most of his troops, he said something about getting his legions back. But that was before makers and...whatever you are. You can lose seventy percent, ninety percent, of an army and still come back swinging.”

        Sarah nodded. “What was his name?”

        “No idea,” Tex said. “The detailed course cost, like, a hundred and fifty extra and I was saving up for a new lootbox.”

        Sarah nodded again. “I hear you on that.”

        She sighed, then stepped up to the bladelings. She reached out with her wrist, and injected one of them with an enzyme. The enzyme broke the bladeling down into a biological glop, which spread to other bladelings, breaking them down as well, until the entire biomass had been converted into a large, hardened shell that drank in sunlight and created oxygen within the shell. She stepped to a sphincter-like door in the shell, pushed through, and stood before Kellen Grant. He was in his armor – but his armor had been heavily damaged. Specifically, the bladelings had ripped off his escape portal device thingy, leaving a gaping hole on his back.

        “Stay back!” Kellen said, lifting his arm and unfolding a laser emitter from the back of his wrist. Sarah grabbed onto the massive wrist of his armor, dug in her fingers, then ripped backwards. Metal shavings filled the air, and the sound of squealing metal, and she was left holding half his power armor’s arm, leaving his actual arm and elbow thrust into the air, still dripping with the impact gel that protected him from being bashed around.

        Sarah arched an eyebrow at him, then crushed the detatched arm into a crumpled ball of twisted metal, sparking wires, and cracked ceramics, using both of her hands to do it. She tossed it over her shoulder, where it crunched into the ground behind her.

        Kellen looked at her through the blank mask of his power armor.

        “Okay,” he said. “I’m willing to discuss terms of surrender.”