Chapter 1
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
Actually wrote this ages ago but I rarely post what I've written, I think I did throw the introduction up. Pretty much intended to be the most crack crossover I could imagine, played completely straight.
Bear Ribs (Wyvern): Trying to herd these idiots.
Pants (Succubus): Int 3, Cha 18/00
Friday (Cyclops): Only sane woman.
Blammo (Drow Elf): Mechwarrior, Obsessed with autocannons
Lanky (Wukong): Engineer, despairs of ever getting asked to do something reasonable.
Grizzly (Mermaid): Has never finished a sentence without profanity.
Waffles (Wukong): Ship Gunner, life is either very boring or way too exciting.
Sharpie (Golem): Flies a DropShip, wishes it was an ASF.
Slag (Wyvern): Ship Gunner, Egyptophile
Nails (Gargoyle): Does not know what facial expressions are.
Pickles (Wukong): Chief Engineer of the Canned Peaches
Pharaoh (Elf): Overachieving 'Mech, Vehicle, and Aerospace Technician
Screamer (Succubus): Aerospace Pilot in Training, hates loud noises.
Mild Child (Wyvern): Captains a DropShip, wishes the idiots didn't name it the Sweet Potato.
Robber (Gargoyle): Mechwarrior in training, notorious kill-stealer in sims.
Breaker (Wood Elf, Deceased): Loved artillery most of all.
Doctor Wow (Wukong): Head Surgeon, easily impressed.
Queen Baal (Succubus): Moral Officer, not treated like a queen.
Clam (Succubus): Has never been happy in her life.
Stampy (Gargoyle): Surprisingly clumsy.
Rabbit (Aquatic Elf): Why is every planet's water toxic?
Flexy (Mermaid): Chief Engineer of the Sweet Potato
Salsa (Wukong): Speaks Fluent Esperanto but not Spanish.
Dr. Moon (Mermaid, Deceased): EMT Specializing in underwater rescue.
Locust (Golem): (Rider of Famine) Constantly brags about not needing to eat.
Leper (Succubus): (Rider of Plague) Colors her skin to look like she's rotting.
Khopesh (Golem): (Rider of War) Notorious Egyptophile, sword collector
Harvest (Wukong): (Rider of Death) Least Chunni, goes along with her sisters' theme anyway.
Fish (Wyvern): Mechwarrior, possessed of a staggering alcohol capacity.
Wax On (Succubus): Huge fan of 80s Kung-Fu movies.
Reata (Wood Elf): Mech Tech, likes rope a little too much if you know what I mean.
Grass (Gargoyle): Seventy years of urban combat experience in a sixteen-year-old body.
Dr. Coolhands (Golem): Combat Medic, Zero Bedside Manner
BUGS (Cyclops): Improbably Busty Aerospace Pilot
Free Ride (Goblin): Aspiring Novelist, infamous for explicit Kerensky/Amaris crackfics.
Riptide (Wukong): Incredibly good swimmer, can keep up with an aquatic elf.
Nachos Nancy (Drow Elf): Has never actually eaten Nachos, aspires to try them someday.
Snowdrift (Goblin): Painter of minis.
Swan Song (Wyvern): Keeper of the antique Estevez.
Dr. Witch (Succubus): Creepy Genetic Engineering Specialist.
Atomic Lotus (Wood Elf): Forced everybody else to use that name through sheer stubborness.
Satin (Succubus): Unrepentant nudist, fakes wearing clothes with her ink.
Zippo (Wukong): Artillery specialist, advocates inferno gel first, last, and middle.
Strips (Wyvern): Never found without duct tape.
Pants (Succubus): Int 3, Cha 18/00
Friday (Cyclops): Only sane woman.
Blammo (Drow Elf): Mechwarrior, Obsessed with autocannons
Lanky (Wukong): Engineer, despairs of ever getting asked to do something reasonable.
Grizzly (Mermaid): Has never finished a sentence without profanity.
Waffles (Wukong): Ship Gunner, life is either very boring or way too exciting.
Sharpie (Golem): Flies a DropShip, wishes it was an ASF.
Slag (Wyvern): Ship Gunner, Egyptophile
Nails (Gargoyle): Does not know what facial expressions are.
Pickles (Wukong): Chief Engineer of the Canned Peaches
Pharaoh (Elf): Overachieving 'Mech, Vehicle, and Aerospace Technician
Screamer (Succubus): Aerospace Pilot in Training, hates loud noises.
Mild Child (Wyvern): Captains a DropShip, wishes the idiots didn't name it the Sweet Potato.
Robber (Gargoyle): Mechwarrior in training, notorious kill-stealer in sims.
Breaker (Wood Elf, Deceased): Loved artillery most of all.
Doctor Wow (Wukong): Head Surgeon, easily impressed.
Queen Baal (Succubus): Moral Officer, not treated like a queen.
Clam (Succubus): Has never been happy in her life.
Stampy (Gargoyle): Surprisingly clumsy.
Rabbit (Aquatic Elf): Why is every planet's water toxic?
Flexy (Mermaid): Chief Engineer of the Sweet Potato
Salsa (Wukong): Speaks Fluent Esperanto but not Spanish.
Dr. Moon (Mermaid, Deceased): EMT Specializing in underwater rescue.
Locust (Golem): (Rider of Famine) Constantly brags about not needing to eat.
Leper (Succubus): (Rider of Plague) Colors her skin to look like she's rotting.
Khopesh (Golem): (Rider of War) Notorious Egyptophile, sword collector
Harvest (Wukong): (Rider of Death) Least Chunni, goes along with her sisters' theme anyway.
Fish (Wyvern): Mechwarrior, possessed of a staggering alcohol capacity.
Wax On (Succubus): Huge fan of 80s Kung-Fu movies.
Reata (Wood Elf): Mech Tech, likes rope a little too much if you know what I mean.
Grass (Gargoyle): Seventy years of urban combat experience in a sixteen-year-old body.
Dr. Coolhands (Golem): Combat Medic, Zero Bedside Manner
BUGS (Cyclops): Improbably Busty Aerospace Pilot
Free Ride (Goblin): Aspiring Novelist, infamous for explicit Kerensky/Amaris crackfics.
Riptide (Wukong): Incredibly good swimmer, can keep up with an aquatic elf.
Nachos Nancy (Drow Elf): Has never actually eaten Nachos, aspires to try them someday.
Snowdrift (Goblin): Painter of minis.
Swan Song (Wyvern): Keeper of the antique Estevez.
Dr. Witch (Succubus): Creepy Genetic Engineering Specialist.
Atomic Lotus (Wood Elf): Forced everybody else to use that name through sheer stubborness.
Satin (Succubus): Unrepentant nudist, fakes wearing clothes with her ink.
Zippo (Wukong): Artillery specialist, advocates inferno gel first, last, and middle.
Strips (Wyvern): Never found without duct tape.
Prologue
Earth
The hospital room was clammy cold, smelled like disinfectant, and had all the other discomforts common to all medical establishments. I didn't like burying my nose in my phone, and the magazines on the end tables were months-old gossip rags I wasn't interested in even when they were new. After about two minutes looking at the boring beige walls and stale painting of a tree got old so I decided to people watch the other patients because nothing else was going on, you know?
And we did have a motley assortment of people in there. The most striking person was a little girl with porcelain white skin in an amazingly elegant gown. I had once taken care of an old woman who collected rare dolls and this girl reminded me of her collections. It was a frilly outfit with layers upon layers of velvet and a hat decked in lace and feathers that would fit right in at a fancy party in 1920, but I couldn't see how she could even breath in it, much less move or walk without spoiling it.
The other sour note was her aforementioned skin, which had so much makeup on it it looked like clown face to me. I mean, it was expertly done no doubt, but it was just so thick, and I've always hated makeup anyway and use the absolute minimum to get by. She noticed me looking at her and smiled at me. I smiled back.
The makeup around her mouth actually cracked a little. The older woman next to her frowned.
“Not so wide Grizelda,” she scolded, “You are not some common person acting like a tourist, keep your expressions elegant and refined, reserved. Remember, dignity at all times.”
“Yes mother,” the living doll answered, suddenly downcast and blank-faced. I tried to catch her eye again but she never looked up.
With that line of interest gone I looked at the others. There was a swarthy man, a shade darker than myself, with a whacking scar. Not a hot-looking anime scar but a clearly horrible wound that started on top of his head (a white streak of hair amidst the gray marked it's progress) and bisected his ear before continuing to the neck. It was jagged and curved, and I suspect caused by a broken bottle. He had a ramrod straight poster that screamed “ex military” to me. Ex because the guy was probably already in his seventies at the least, though he had the incredibly healthy well-preserved look of a man who'd stayed active, kind of the Sean Connery look. He'd taken up a position in the corner and watched the room calmly without reacting much, though I got his eye and he nodded gravely to me before looking away.
A college-age kid in a shirt with a logo I didn't recognize was immersed in his phone, lost to the world. I pitied him a bit, so lodged in electronics he missed his fellow humans.
A bit of an altercation arose when another little girl, this one black with short fluffy hair, tried to get Grizelda's attention and play with her but the living doll's mother harshly rebuked her, leading the other girl's mother to nearly intervene followed by a venomous glaring match until well after Grizelda was called away to the back. I wished I'd had popcorn.
A few minutes later my own turn came up and I followed the nurse into the rear of the clinic. If you're wondering, we were all here for an experimental trial, an attempt to use a new and improved micro-MRI machine to scan our brains and get the most accurate examination of human thought patterns to date. Even better it was a head-only unit so the titanium rods in my leg wouldn't prevent me from taking part in the experiment. Now granted, despite BS in the flier I'd responded to, I wasn't going to get a position in the history books. The Doctors involved might well but I was just one of a couple hundred patients, probably not even a footnote, just a statistic. I would, however, get paid about twice as much for a couple of hours as I normally got for a full day's work so I was totally good with that.
They strapped on the helmet after laying me down on a table, and began their scans, all while monitoring my various vital signs. A sort-of virtual reality helmet let them plug images in which I responded to as they monitored how I reacted to each image. They started with simple patterns, then with crude images of people and objects, them more complex images and then finished with a weird one where I was seeing some kind of monster like a Xenomorph/human hybrid through a foggy glass jar of yellowish water while a tube was stuck in my mouth, and this one was animated as the monster peered at me through the glass and then it began to drain, and I realized I was tiny and the monster was huge, and I struggled slightly as it pulled a cable from the back of my head and held me up, and it was cold and miserable and I couldn't stop myself from crying out. The giant monster wrapped me up in a blanket and I wrapped my tail around her wrist, and I probably should have been more worried about that part but I was suddenly just so tired I couldn't really do anything but drift off as she rocked me gently.
Chapter 1
16 Years Later. . .
Planet Mongkut 3.5, Anti-Spinward and Coreward of Clan Space
Pink foam roiled around us and flowed off the viewing bubble as our bathyscaphe surfaced. The oceans around me were pink. It was night, and would be for another couple of months, so the sky was half yellowish purple and half black with stars only on the black half. The Caliban Nebula colored a vast area of space and we were right on the edge of it, far from home.
I coiled my tail under me into a noodle ball and enjoyed the view as the boat trundled along. Exoplanets were weird places. Beautiful indeed, but weird. This particular one was Mongkut 3.5, our current resting place, a world devoid of life with so much heavy metal, especially cobalt, in it's makeup that the dirt was purplish blue and the water was pink. Oceans covered 62% of the planet but which 62% depended on the hour. They were shallow, and the planet had a twin, Mongkut 3.0, which was 128% of this planet's size and closer than the moon was to Earth. Due to the immense tidal forces this generated, when low tide came the entire ocean drained away and left the seafloor a bare muddy mire. As a result, the ocean technically was this mobile blob that orbited along with the twin planet and rotated around the surface covering 62% at a time and leaving the rest a wide plain of mud the color of an eggplant. Only a few high blue mountains stuck up through the high tide and a handful of deep crevices held their water at low tide.
Currently it was ebb tide, the sea steadily lowering and in a day or so the surface would be revealed again at our location. That's why our little flotilla of tiny ships were on the move again, trying to solve a major problem before our seabed mining operation got beached.
A small volcano had up-welled a lava flow rich with valuable rare elements we needed. Cobalt in such absurd amounts we could practically use it to pave roads at this point, significant amounts of zinc we needed for industrial and health supplement purposes, copper in smaller amounts, trace but usable amounts of nickle, cadmium, and antimony. . . and significant amounts of germanium. The magic metal, germanium was what KF drives were made of and in this day and age, it was to gold what gold was to iron. By itself, the germanium was valuable enough to fund this entire operation. Oddly enough it wasn't what we were after because we really needed the zinc more than trade goods, but we were hardly going to pass up on a small fortune that happened to land in our laps. There would always be somebody to trade with eventually.
The problem was the extremely inevitable one that was so tiresome throughout human history. There are two ways to get a valuable resources, gather it yourself, or steal it from somebody who already did the work for you. We'd done the first, three guesses what happened as soon as we got supplies laid in, and the first two don't count.
There was a plume of fire high in the black sky, as a pirate DropShip came down to land on one of the few pieces of solid ground, a rocky mountaintop exposed only days earlier as the tide receded. We had a landing pad built there for our own use, along with a small fusion plant and storage tanks, it continuously took in seawater and extracted hydrogen to refuel our own DropShips.
I knew we could expect a second enemy dropship not far behind. One militarized ship to carry weapons and soldiers, a second hauler type to carry the stolen cargo away. We hadn't heard anything from our space forces in days, maybe jammed, maybe dead. I hoped they were jammed, and still alive. In the meantime we could only deal as best we could.
“Deploy a spotter drone,” I ordered and there was a thump and click as the ship launched a small camera rotodrone. “Pants, any chatter on their systems?”
My sister glanced back over her shoulder, wide eyed and innocent looking under her messy bangs, “Nothing doing, they're just, like, not talking right now,” she reported back.
I looked through the canopy bubble again into the distance. This was my first shot at command, a chance to show I could be a capable and responsible leader. It twisted my stomach in knots.
I'd been a manager in my previous life and I'd like to think I was good at it. But I knew now that some of my people were going to die. Maybe some of my sisters, maybe even me. If things went all wrong, maybe all of us. It was ever so much harder than knowing that if I screwed up, sales would be lower than expected this quarter. I swallowed down my own gizzard that kept trying to crawl up my throat, and looked again at the sensor scans. I didn't have enough information yet, but they weren't landed yet either.
I did a couple of calcs on the command console. We could be at the landing site about forty minutes before the enemy DropShip was able to do so.
“Move the transports in to close range and deploy Grizzly's Sappers,” I ordered finally, “Tell them to start planting minefields around the island, and deploy a spotter drone,” I decided aloud, and felt a thump as the hatch opened and a small rotodrone took off towards the descending plume of fire.
“Message sent,” Rabbit reported from the crew section of the sub. She sounded a little irritated and her ears were twitching. I didn't blame her. Rabbit was an elf, aquatic elf to be specific. Blue-Grey skin, webbed hands and feet, and a dorsal fin on her tailbone that lay flat when she wasn't using it made her a superb swimmer. Her hair was yellow and in a tight braid held together with some scrap wire threaded through her hair roach.
Seeing so much water and not being able to swim for so many weeks had to be hell for her. Grizzly and her crew would be swimming, but even they were going to have some nasty chelation therapy to get the hideous amounts of heavy metals they were going absorb out of their bodies. That was too expensive to use more than we had to and, well, Rabbit's crew knew how to drive a submarine.
“F*^#in' A!” came Grizzly's enthusiastic response, “We'll have so many F$%&in' mines around that S&#@ island they won't be able to F@^#in' P&%# without blowing their C&@#s off.”
I resisted the urge to “thank” Grizzly for that colorful image. I don't know where she got the idea that soldiers couldn't get through a single sentence without swearing, probably her previous life, but once she'd made LT of an irregular amphibious demolition team she'd never said another sentence without peppering it with profanity. The fact that nobody else talked that way, including the other soldiers, apparently eluded her.
“And stay under the surface,” I added quickly, “We've only got a limited window and they'll be able to see you if you hit the top.”
“Granny said thanks for the F*^#in' advice about the G#@$%!*& eggs,” Grizzly sent back acerbically before signing off.
“Rabbit,” I called to our pilot, “Move a couple of your ships closer and place sensors at these coordinates, not too close to the mines but I want to get some telemetry if we can.”
Rabbit twitched again but silently sent the order and on screen, I watched our forces close in.
Our assets were meager but I thought we had a decent chance. We'd built our own submarines, albeit on a tiny scale because our ancient oft-patched and repaired factory couldn't build anything at the usual scale of combat craft, we were limited to about ten tons and usually built lighter to save materials.
We had a dozen Sea Spider construction vehicles, if you ever watched SeaQuest DSV you probably have a decent idea what they looked like, a spherical pressure hull with five manipulator arms hanging underneath. They were unarmed and really couldn't mount weapons on them but each carried sensor equipment of various types for surveying potential build sites.
We also had six of Sea Pony class subs, more conventionally shaped than the Sea Spiders. Each weighed twenty tons. While we meant them for construction purposes, our engineers had wisely designed the craft to be easily up armed, it carried a small cargo bay that could be swapped in easily to hold a mine dispenser, sensor dispenser, or mount a few torpedo launchers.
I had Pants patch me through to our sister on one of the Sea Ponies. Friday was my rock. My particular family was called the Odd Quad, four different monster girl species from one iron womb, all four implanted with memories of a distant Earth before we'd been born. I was the manager and organizer, Pants was the pretty one, Blammo was the angry rebel girl; but Friday, ah she was the stable one. The reliable one. The only one with actual combat experience from the Old World, she led our space commando forces. Which would have to be underwater commando forces for now.
“Go ahead,” Friday told me calmly.
“Yeah, I want you to be our ace in the hole,” I told her. “Move your commandos to this position here, and wait for a good opportunity. I've marked the minefields on your map to avoid.”
She examined the track a moment. I think. Since she was wearing her armor, her face was basically a big mirrored blank space, kind of similar to old-school Cobra Commander's outfit. As a cyclops, she needed a wide field of vision.
“Better to position us here instead,” she finally told me, “This heavy outcropping will shield us from view and we should be hard to spot on their sensors.”
“'Kay, do that,” I agreed. I wasn't dumb enough to disagree with her on her own turf.
“Bear Ribs. . . what's your plan?” she asked softly before I could sign off.
It pained me to tell her the truth but I wasn't going to lie, “I haven't got much of one,” I admitted, “It's going to depend on what's in that DropShip. Hell, if I think we have a reasonable shot at it I'll give them our metals to make them go away. We don't have enough juice in the Sub's batteries for more than a week, we never planned them for a siege situation.”
Friday thought this over calmly for a moment, “Good,” she finally told me, “Don't over plan on too little information. And quit stressing, you've got bags under your eyes like Fester Addams,” she added.
I sputtered a little and Pants laughed at me. “I'm not-” I started but Pants interrupted.
“Oh you so are,” she countered, “You keep looking over the same map over and over again hoping for new information to appear and help you. It's the same reason you lose at poker so hard, when you have a bad hand you keep staring at your cards hoping the suits will change or something.”
I filed that tidbit away in hopes of fleecing Pants next time. I was actually halfway decent at poker, though I hated gambling for more than pennies. The problem was that Friday could see so well she'd pick up individual muscle twitches and gauge your heartbeat by the expansion of your blood vessels from twenty yards away, it was impossible to bluff her. Pants on the other hand was somehow so good at muscle control (not to mention using her ink and shape-shifting to change the way her face looked) that she could bluff Friday. The only way to actually play with those two monsters was a strictly mathematical style that ignored everything but the odds.
At least I usually beat Blammo. She couldn't bluff them and she wasn't good enough at math to play the odds.
I hoped Blammo was okay. My other sister was nominally in charge of our 'mech forces, nominally because we had one actual working 'mech, an ancient Spider, so she was in charge of. . . herself and a couple of understudies who would sub in if she was unavailable for some reason. She was somewhere in space along with our DropShips. I hadn't gotten any signal in days.
As the enemy dropship cleared the pale wispy cloud cover a couple of kilometers up, four of the Sea Spiders began to place mines at key locations while Grizzly's mermaids deployed from a pair of Sea Ponies and began placing their own charges, concentrating on the ramps we'd installed for easier deployment.
“Signal! We've totes got unencrypted message traffic!” Pants suddenly interrupted, very excited.
“What's the message?” I asked quickly, before Pants could start getting carried away.
“Patching it through!” Pants told me agreeably, and there was a brief burst of static.
A holographic image replaced my map, of a cold-looking man with iron-gray hair, cropped close to the skin. Veins protruded from his temples and his eyes were icy blue and bored into my own. His eyes dipped down a moment, and he smirked at me slightly. I felt dirt realizing he'd undoubtedly undressed me with his eyes. I could almost feel amused if I wasn't weirded out, the camera would only show me from the chest up so he didn't realize he was perving on somebody with wings and a fifteen-foot tail.
“I am Warlord Bryce of the Blood March Warriors,” He told me in a dull, gravelly voice, “We have come for our tribute. If you surrender now and turn over your cargo, I give you my personal guarantee none of you will be killed.”
Yeah, of course none of us would be skilled. Slaves were a valuable commodity, miners and sex slaves alike.
“Has anyone, ever, fallen for such a stupid offer?” I asked him, and his eyes narrowed at me, “We've been here for years, we know this planet and we know it's oceans. You're taking on a school of sharks in their own territory. Go away.”
“So be it,” He answered coldly, after taking a brief moment to control himself. I'd been hoping his overly Chuuni name and style meant he was a drama queen and I could make him angry enough to do something stupid but it looked like he had good self-discipline. Such men were dangerous. “Before a day's gone past, I'll have you on your knees before me and you will eat those boastful words.”
Pants chuckled as she cut the signal, “Joke's on him,” she chirped, “You don't have knees.”
“Yeah. . . that's the important thing,” I agreed as I pulled the map back up.
“Drone data incoming,” Rabbit sent back from her front console, “We've got ID on the dropship, it's a Lion class. Can't tell if it's Clan or not, moving the drone in closer-” Rabbit suddenly swore. “Drone lost, they're entering extreme weapons range,” she informed us, “Took them a couple of shots but that was still pretty impressive, these guys know what they're doing.”
“Alright, pull Grizzly out of there, we don't need them picking up the Sea Spiders at this point,” I ordered, scanning over the map one last time. I sent a few commands and the groups began to pull back, forming a skirmish line far enough away from the front to avoid easy hits.
The Lion came down on our landing pad on plumes of plasma, not quite centered and with a thump as it basically just fell the last meter. Steam rose off the waters and a few puddles boiled dry in an instant. The doors opened and I got a look at our enemy.
He deployed his 'mechs first. I wasn't quite sure why, when most of them wouldn't do much underwater. There was a Hunchback, looking menacing with it's gigantic cannon sweeping over the waves, and next to it was a Catapult. That was a bad combination, the Hunchback was murder at close range and the Catapult was murder at long range, they neatly covered each other's weaknesses. A smaller Clint emerged next. The rest were lightweights and mostly bugmechs, a Thorn, two Wasps, and a Flea.
Behind this line I saw a row of techs emerge and hook up to our hydrogen tanks, stealing our fuel supply for his dropship. Bastards.
Then the vehicles began to emerge and I felt my mouth go dry. Two heavy trucks pulled out a pair of Mantis attack subs. Each one weighing fifty tons, a single Mantis had more firepower than our entire fleet together.
I'd vainly hoped they'd not have any submarines, very few of the warlords bothered because most of the time what they wanted to attack was on the surface. Hovercraft were much more common. That would have given us a fighting chance to use our 3D mobility. Now? I was wondering if that surrender option was still on the table.
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