This warrior could barely tolerate the presence of the human female fighter, though she was clearly an ally of the two hybrid females. The other hybrid female was not pregnant, though she smelled, moved, and as his tongue sampled the air around her, tasted like she was part Izrid. She even carried a holy weapon, one of the flechette casters from the elite warrior ranks, and no life form but an Izrid could activate its power source. The weapon had an internal genetic scanner that prevented its fearsome capabilities from falling into enemy hands. In the old days of the internecine warfare that had shaped much of Izrid culture the weapons would be programmed down to the specific brood, sometimes even individual warriors. Since the Reconciliation Accords all Izrid weapons were coded simply to shut out other species, and by holding it in its active state any doubts this warrior had about her brood status were banished. This warrior swiftly stripped several key pieces of armor from his fallen brethren, and then with three axes in hand he joined the women as they left the apartment.
ACT V
Morgan was more and more suspicious of her own body, as only minutes before she had been beaten and exhausted nearly to the point of collapse, not to mention at least one broken rib. Yet here she was, executing tactical maneuvers through the hallways and stairwells of the apartment complex as if none of the abuses of the last twenty-four hours had been nearly as damaging as she knew they had been. She was still not in peak condition, though her recovery was clearly unnatural, and must be part of the side effects of Cava-Rek's twisted experiments. She looked ahead and watched as Lysa and the Izrid warrior worked together to clear rooms and check corners, working in a silent tandem that displayed an efficiently and familiarity impossible for two soldiers who met only minutes before.
At one point another Izrid warrior had rushed the group from inside one of the apartments, sliding under the hail of fire from Lysa's flechette weapon and making a slash at her abdomen. Morgan's warrior parried the strike with one axe and then engaged in a furious duel with the enemy warrior as the two of them unleashed strikes from their multiple axes in a tempest of steel and sparks. After a moment Morgan's warrior landed a solid blow on one of the warrior's left arm, which created an opening for Morgan's warrior to stomp kick the enemy warrior through the air and onto his back. By the time the enemy warrior crouched to rejoin the fight Morgan's warrior hurled an axe into its neck even as Lysa peppered it with flechette rounds that shredded its armor and flesh alike.
Cruz increasingly kept her distance, falling further and further behind as the group made their way to the bottom floor of the complex. At first Morgan thought nothing of it, until they reached the atrium and she looked behind her only to see that Cruz had disappeared entirely. Before Morgan could call out to her a hard round smacked into the stone wall near the stairwell they'd emerged from and she crouched for cover. Lysa and Morgan's warrior leapt into battle against the first wave of the Izrid counter-attack, buying Morgan a few seconds to assess the tactical situation.
Approximately sixteen women held the lobby, all dressed in evening finery that stood out against the makeshift defenses. They had transformed the architecture of the lobby into a semi-effective defensive position, though there were two riddled bodies at the front of the lobby, evidence of the violent struggle to secure their position. There was a stone fountain that was nearly four feet deep, with a ring of stone around the central spout that made a decent foxhole for a handful of resistance fighters. Other fighters had used blades, rope, and strips of their own dresses to lash the armored bodies of Izrid elite warriors to overturned tables, desks, and chairs to create individual hard points from which to fight. Both stairwells had been fortified with doors, furniture, and more bodies, so that the only way for the Izrid counter-attacks to approach in superior numbers was the main entrance. Sentries were posted at the stairwells to prevent any Izrid still in the complex from catching them in a crossfire. The resistance fighters had been in the process of building the defenses for this stairwell when Morgan and her people had emerged.
Lysa and Morgan's warrior had slammed into the flank of a squad of Izrid warriors who had charged through the hail of resistance gunfire in an attempt to rush their position. While several had died in the charge there were a handful of warriors carrying riot shields that were roughly the size of doors, which had protected them and their comrades from the majority of the human firepower. Morgan could see that at least half of the women defending the lobby were carrying Izrid weapons, marking them as newly made hybrids like Lysa and Morgan herself. Some of the Izrid weapons seemed able to pound through the riot shields, but not in great enough numbers or speed to stall the charge. Had the warriors reached hand-to-hand combat distance the women would have been slaughtered, though as Lysa and Morgan's warrior attacked the charge collapsed. Lysa was screaming as she poured a hail of flechette rounds onto the tightly packed Izrid formations, none of whom were protected by the front-facing shields, and the shredded corpses of enemy warriors began to litter the ground. Morgan's warrior plowed into the survivors wielding four battle-axes like a whirlwind, mowing down warriors who seemed shocked and unprepared to do battle with one of their own. Within moments the Izrid squad had been wiped out.
Morgan ducked low and sprinted across the open ground between the stairwell and the central fountain and hurled herself into cover. As she recovered she looked around her heart began to swell with pride. Even though the recent charge had cost them the life of one of their comrades, a beautiful young woman in a blue silk dress whose once delicate features had been shattered by several hard rounds, they had weathered the first of the coming storms. The alien conquerors had kidnapped them, abused them, and all for the sake of pleasure and wicked science. Better to have died on the battlefield, thought Morgan, than live and die as a slave. It seemed that they would get their chance, she thought, as she grimly took note of another Izrid force mustering outside the complex.
Lysa and Morgan's warrior rejoined the ranks, both having taken more Izrid firearms and ammunition from the bodies of the slain, in addition to the warrior hauling over two of the discarded riot shields for cover. Lysa tossed several strange looking magazines to two other women who had the same sorts of gun that Morgan's warrior now carried, which looked to be the standard Izrid assault rifle. The hybrid resistance fighter slapped home a fresh cylinder of flechette rounds and gestured to the dead woman in the blue dress, "Morgan! Looks like you get to be a sniper again!"
Morgan took a second look at the woman and noticed that she had been carrying a small pistol on her hip and a large caliber sniper rifle. The resistance fighter could not help but to grin wickedly as she recovered the weapons and draped the ammunition bandolier around her shoulders.
"We're lucky the Izrid have been keeping a cache of captured resistance weapons in their armory," said a redheaded woman who crouched behind an armored Izrid corpse nearby, "or else half of us would be fighting with teeth and fingernails. I don't know what they've done to us."
"Here they come!" shouted another fighter as a second wave of Izrid warriors attempted to muscle their way into the lobby.
Morgan peeked out from the fountain through her sniper's scope and gasped at what she saw. Cava-Rek stood behind several ranks of warriors, guiding the force attacking the lobby and seeming to set a rearguard to engage the resistance fighters who were pouring into the compound. Both of the magister's left arms were crudely bound in what looked to be the Izrid equivalent of adhesive athletic tape, and his jaw was moving oddly when he spoke, giving the impression of being broken. Morgan had hoped the fall would have killed him, but no matter, now she was armed and ready to make amends. As she brought the crosshairs over Cava-Rek's chest he turned towards the lobby and seemed to freeze for a moment as his eyes rolled into the back of his head.
Next to Morgan the rogue warrior suddenly made a noise unlike any she'd heard, halfway between a hiss and a groan, and his entire body began to shake. He began to raise his weapon in her direction, and with all of the other women
focused on the battle at hand there were none who noticed. In horror Morgan scooted backwards and pointed her rifle at his chest, ready to squeeze the trigger if he did not stop, and despite her lack of a tongue did her best to scream at him. Just before Morgan pulled the trigger the warrior dropped the firearm and fell to his knees. He managed to crawl to the body of the woman in the blue dress and pull a small knife from her belt.
Rounds chewed at the wall of the fountain, forcing both the warrior and Morgan to lay prone to avoid being shot. The body of the redheaded fighter collapsed backwards onto the fountain floor with several smoking holes punched through her. The rogue warrior held out the knife, handle first to Morgan, and after she took it directed her to touch a small nodule on the back of his neck. At first she did not understand what he wanted, until his eyes dilated again and his body began shaking. His hand shot up and locked Morgan's throat in a crushing grip, cutting off her air and in a split second she was already seeing stars. She knew, somewhere in the back of her mind, that this warrior was strong enough that it could have easily crushed her windpipe instantly, and yet it seemed it was struggling with itself not to do so. In that moment Morgan made the connection, and realize that this must have been some kind of control mechanism embedded in the warrior so that the magister could influence the warrior. Though the warrior was fighting that influence, and it looked like that fight would be lost very soon if she did not act. The resistance fighter blinked and tried to steady herself even as the warrior choked her, and brought the knife around behind him. She used one hand to find the nodule and another to guide the point into his flesh. She let the blade sink in, hoping that she would not drive it so far that he would die, and then she felt the blade hit something hard and metal.
This warrior was struggling mightily to resist the overwhelming influence of the magister's will. All Izrid warriors were implanted with the control nodule, which amplified their genetic pre-disposition to serve the magister caste. If the circumstances dictated the necessity of it, a magister could focus his will on a single warrior and take near total control of that warrior's body. In fact "riding" a warrior into battle had become something of a sport amongst the ruling elite, though this warrior had never known life to be any different, so thought little of it. However, in this moment the magister was attempting to force the warrior to slay both the breeder and his own offspring, and that was a biological imperative that even the will of the magister not overpower without time and difficulty. This warrior's mind was naked before the will of the magister, from his thoughts to his memories to his innermost, even if simple, desires.
Cava-Rek could see that the warrior knew of the human hybrid's pregnancy, which made the magister want her dead even more. He would be the first to breed a human, he screamed into the mind of the warrior, not one of the faceless warrior caste! The betrayal of the warrior and his subsequent slaying of other warriors, including the attempted killing of the magister himself, was unprecedented since the Reconciliation Accords. Cava-Rek had intended to make much of himself in Izrid history, though being the first magister betrayed by his own warriors was not how he intended to make his mark. The magister pressed harder into the warrior's mind, enraged that a simple quirk of biology had turned this warrior against him, and then he recalled that this warrior was the first to witness human intercourse and to engage in non-breeding sexual activity. This warrior was already too independent for his own good, and Cava-Rek should have had him incinerated long before now. A mistake he would rectify once these women were dead and the magister fought his way back to the warhive so that he could end this pitiful assault. Suddenly, just as he could feel the life begin to slip away from the human female, she plunged a knife into the nodule and his connection was severed. Cava-Rek fell to his knees with the shock of it, and the cacophony of battle assaulted his senses.
The warrior fell to the ground and lay still for a moment, then stirred. It lifted itself up on its arms and took up its weapons again, its eyes meeting Morgan's for a brief moment. Then its tongue whipped out to lick his eyeball and the warrior turned back to the fight at hand. The sniper took up her own rifle and joined her sisters in repelling the Izrid attack, which had thankfully been slowed by the stalwart defenders.
They were still outnumbered, outgunned, but they remained defiant, and fought with the relentlessness that had kept the human race clinging to survival. The lobby was an island in a sea of violence, as MacArthur's forces rampaged across the compound. Almost all of the able-bodied fighters in the local resistance had massed for this coordinated attack MacArthur had implored that they had to risk everything to let the enemy know that this war was far from over. The rocket teams had initiated the attack by destroying most of the skiffs and gunships while several specialist gun-teams had used the last of the precious devastator ammunition to cripple the warhive. Smoke and secondary explosions racked the mobile fortress, though the gunners had not been lucky enough to hit the power core. While rifle packing grunts used bombs to knock open the gates and storm the grounds the snipers and rocket teams had taken up positions encircling the compound. As the grunts waged a stand-up fight against the Izrid, matching them shot for shot and blow for blow, the snipers worked to pick out the armored elite warriors to prevent them from turning the tide.
Morgan sent a round shrieking into the skull of a warrior that had been bracketing one of the stairwells with fire. She chambered another round and started sighting in on a second one, determined to repay them for the loss of the two women who had been riddled with fire and now lay dead at their post. Morgan breathed out and watched with satisfaction as a bright blood mist hung in the air over the body of the second Izrid warrior as she chambered yet another round and began searching for a target. After a few moments she realized that there were none, and her scope was filled with the corpses of dead Izrid, though sadly Cava-Rek was not among the slain.
The sniper lowered her rifle and looked around the lobby. She was sad to see that only five women had survived the prolonged firefight, though was pleased to see that Lysa was among them. Of those who had survived all were carrying the Izrid weapons that marked them as hybrids. Lysa climbed onto the fountain spigot and let out a shout and held her weapon high, exalting in her victory. Just as Lysa turned and smiled at Morgan a hard round slammed into her side and sent her toppling to the floor.
Morgan, the rogue warrior, and the rest of the hybrid women turned their weapons towards the front of the lobby and found themselves staring down the barrels of over two dozen assorted firearms, all in the hands of human resistance fighters. The looks on the faces of the resistance fighters were mixed. Some clearly regretted turning their guns on their former comrades, while others were filled with loathing and seemed happy to be drawing down. Out from behind the firing line stepped Fiona MacArthur herself, with a smirking Cruz following a few steps behind.
"Lay down arms and surrender peacefully!" shouted MacArthur as she menacingly thumbed off the safety of her own assault rifle, "Or we will kill every last one of you, right here, right now."
OUTCASTS
Episode 3
ACT I
The bullet had punctured her side, though as she filled her lungs with air Lysa confirmed that the projectile had not torn through her lungs. That at least, she thought to herself, was a small blessing. The Izrid flechette caster was heavy in her arms, which trembled with exertion, and yet she found herself able to push through the fatigue. She tapped into reserves of energy and strength that she was positive had not existed within her before her brutal, even if titillating, experiences as a captive of Magister Cava-Rek. There was a power in her now, something alien, and it was growing at a rapid rate. Already Lysa had noticed the expanded awareness of her senses, and she had become so much more attuned to her body. Even while fleeing and fighting she could simultaneously be intensely aware of the blood pumping through her veins, the brush of cloth against her skin, and the acrid smell of battle and death hanging heavy in the air.
Sweat poured
from Lysa’s skin as she ran through the vine-choked alleyway, narrowly avoiding a hail of fire from behind. Her shredded evening gown clung wetly to her body, leaving little to the imagination for any onlookers. Though none who sought her had interest in her physique beyond the intent to shatter it will hard rounds and explosives. A grenade round detonated against the opposite wall of the alleyway and the force of the blast hurled Lysa off of her feet and slammed her into the near wall. She collapsed to the ground as debris and pieces of wall pelted her like concrete hail. The hybrid warrior should have broken nearly every bone in her body, though found that she could stand within moments of the blast. She was still reeling from the hit, though was able to maintain her balance enough to turn the barrel of her weapon down the alley behind her. When Lysa pulled the trigger a cloud of high velocity projectiles, millimeter thick titanium blades, screamed from the muzzle of her weapon and filled the narrow corridor. Two Izrid warriors who had been attempting to close distance and engage in hand to hand combat were caught in the storm and reduced to quivering piles of meat instantly. A third, the shooter, managed to leap into cover behind a metal dumpster. The flechette rounds punched through the first side of the dumpster, though did not have the momentum to break through the other side, so created a cacophony of noise as they ricocheted inside the metal container.
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