A new chapter of The Serpent’s Garden is here. The Meer-Ulson hive vessel has been discovered and it’s started to power up. The Calnians have a plan to destroy it before it can emerge from the ocean, but it will launch before they’re ready.
In the snippet below, we see their last ditch attempt to cripple the vessel before it can surface but for the whole story, check out the link above and enjoy!
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The machines’ presence had caught them by surprise, and turned what would have been a rout of the invading forces into a bloody but successful push to the vessel’s core. The Trespassers, as his men had taken to calling them, had kept them going. They’d fought with ruthless precision, dropping soldiers with shots through helmet lenses, gorgets and other weak points. They felt no pain, continuing on with missing limbs and heads, holes shot through their bodies and even in death, they would overload their fuel cores in the midst of enemy formations or near vital systems. Six-limbed machines carried back-mounted arsenals. Four-legged trapdoor hunters burst from vents while the two-legged units would shimmer and fade from sight, only revealed by the geysers of black, oily blood as insectoid limbs flew from bodies.
It wasn’t just the Trespassers’ martial capabilities that had allowed the strike force to make it this far; the machines had infiltrated the Meer-Ulson computer system; opening doors, disabling gravity traps and compromising other defences, alerting the strike force to hostile forces as well as damaging onboard systems to keep the defenders off-balance.
The vessel had a synth of its own; it was fighting the Trespassers’ attempts to circumvent its systems every step of the way, but it couldn’t stop them entirely. They clung to the periphery of its network like ticks, sapping vitality and forcing it to scratch at them rather than devote its full attention to the rest of the strike force.
“What is it?” Ekkir said. His head ached. There was a piece of shrapnel stuck just behind his left eye. It had penetrated his skull, but hadn’t reached his brain. The suit’s sealant systems had closed around it, holding it place on the optimistic expectation that medical personnel would be able to remove it without causing severe bleeding or further damage to his face. He didn’t think that that was likely. There were no medics left alive and the nearest doctor was three eight-thousands of kilometers above.
“Additional hostile firewalls have been breached. I do not have access to this vessel’s reactor controls, but I have accessed their schematics. Please advise.” The engineers had shut down the computers in this section to prevent any soft sabotage of the reactor or the vessel’s power systems.
A cold, ugly lump crystallized inside Ekkir’s stomach as he looked at the data the Trespasser showed him. He wasn’t an engineer, but he had spent almost five eight-years serving aboard Pride units and he’d fought within Meer-Ulson vessels as well. There were aspects of Calnian and Meer-Ulson design that he’d become familiar with, if not fully understand.
He knew what the alien vessels looked like inside, what their engineering sections were like. That experience was why he was here. It was why, the deeper they’d fought into the sleeper hive’s engineering decks, the more uneasy he’d become. This wasn’t a standard layout. He’d never been aboard a hive vessel before, but it shouldn’t have been this different. The technology and architecture were all undeniably Meer-Ulson, but the arrangement of it, the layouts all triggered a sense of familiarity in him. Now he knew why that was, and that realization turned his flesh to ice.
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