He was going to say something, remembered the room above, and shut up.

“When she gets close, we’re going to blow the explosives on her until she’s dead. I’ll count down the kill numbers, if you can voc-code set three, set two, and Eight through One, and Fourteen, I’d be obliged.”

Bee-beep, beep beep. “Done,” the quietly impressed demo guy said.

I put Chalice on his launcher, tightened my grip. “Say when.”

His shiny black helmet nodded slightly. “Go.”

The first Nimbus flashed up, covered his gun as the barrels began to spin and spit six-inch burning rockets into the distance.

I wasn’t worried about him hitting. The third rocket going out had a crackling charge of psychic energy attached, I snapped a new Nimbus into place, discharged it and the Corona, and the second one Flared out.

Explosive rounds danced over the bulging abdomen of the massive Great Empress Shadow Spideroid, sending her turning around and moving in shock at the sudden surges of psychic light punching through the gloam here. The ones flaring with psychic banefire and golden Coronas going off were especially noticeable amid the standard red-yellow eruptions.

First, readied standard action. Second, move action. Third, swift action. Fourth, free action. Fifth, from Grim.

Gkk. I had a nosebleed for a second, and psychic lights were going off inside my eyeballs. That was a lot of Corona and Nimbus to be Flaring out onto a weapon. But I retrieved Chalice as the Juris trooper held down his trigger, drew Paten as I spun around his back to his other side, giving him a full field of fire. Lightning crackled from my hand, fed into the fully recharged power cell on Paten, and I busied myself spraying 1/20th of a second hard light pulses across the uncounted thousands of spideroids between us and her.

She shrieked as armor-penetrating rounds blew against the massive phrenic reinforcement that gave her such size and strength. I could see she was leaking from several holes, and the shooter was keeping a good lock on her as she scuttled and was suddenly out of sight over the lip of the walkway down there.

Being an opportunist, and probably not having the opportunity to waste tens of thousands of credits worth of ammo like this very often, he expertly played his shots into the hordes of spiders coming my way, walking them between the big ones in explosive fashion and really chewing up the black mass of the scuttling horde. The gloam lit up with flying spider bits, fire, and shrapnel.

“She’s coming! Run!”

He swung up his launcher as I spoke, took two great bounding steps, and I simply told the Disk to rise straight up in the air and get him out of danger.

A wall of black bodies was blowing apart in front of me as pulsed HHL burned into them, and banefire did its thing messily. They weren’t making it to me, but more were just crawling madly over the bodies of their dead to reach me. Chalice ignited in a length of golden force, clearly visible in their gloam, and giving them something to be even more focused on and madder about.

With a shriek that rattled the very walls and would have knocked an unshielded human out cold, the Empress, dripping a lot of dark, vaporous stuff from her side, heaved over the side of the plascrete lip not forty feet away, the claw-points on her legs crunching down into it right through the bodies of some of her descendants, surged forwards-

“Set Three!”

The explosives on the ground five meters outside the entry went off in fireballs as I stepped to the side, and bits and pieces of burning spideroid blew past me and off the wall behind me, rising right up towards the roof as the trio enveloped the Great Empress.

Massive legs thrust in past where I’d been standing a heartbeat later as Great Gramma surged in-

“Set two!”

The sets aiming down at the entrance and on the wall behind the door went off as I backtracked, and shredding flechette rounds with concussion chasers hammered into her.

Still didn’t kill her, although she had stuff sticking out of her all over now, looked kinda bristly. Those nine eyes of hers fixed on me as I kicked back and up, catching up to the Juris who hadn’t reached the top yet, and was probably starting to panic as he looked down at the spider filling the whole heavy lift shaft below us.

Her rather ragged front legs flailed out, punched into durasteel, and she moved up and forwards after us, while behind her, her army of children swarmed through every opening after her.

“Eight! Seven! Sixfivefour! Three! Two!” I heaved the Juris up out of the shaft above me as the fireballs blew up and past me with superheated air, and concussions deafened everything while Great Gramma had a bad day, and her kids went tumbling in pyroclastic joy.

A leg drove past me, the Disk and gyro-guy were sent flying as it thrust through the opening and dragged her bulk up-

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Well, I wasn’t going out that way.

I dove down, kicking off two kiddies riding her back, going right over her many-eyed head as I did, and as I put Paten in my teeth, I drew out Explosive Fourteen and jammed it into the gaping cut Chalice was opening up through her carapace into her abdomen. I kept falling down, getting her bulk between me and “One!”

The directed plasma charge on the slip cover filled the hole with ten thousand degrees of fun and molten metal, right in Great Grandmother’s face. The fire cooked everything inside the shaft, washed out to greet the new spideroids coming in, and left a nice wall of heat behind, too.

“Fourteen!” I called out, to the utter shock of the guys above, while I rolled out of the way of what was coming down.

The last charge went off inside her, and true to form, cooked her inside out. Superheated innards blew in all directions, a carapace harder than steel swelled and shattered, and lots of spider guts and really, really hot steam went jetting in all directions.

Okay, she was tough, but enough’s enough. She lost pressure on her legs, they ripped out of the durasteel walls, which were now rather soft and glowy red, and down she fell heavily, crunching to the ground and smashing a lot of ashen spideroids beneath her.

I looked back at her burning there, and around at the stunned spideroids who were trying to push against the heat spilling out of the doorway past me, blowing my hair out like a blast furnace as it vented out past me.

I took Paten in hand, teeth crackling with voltage where I’d been recharging him (hey, I can multi-task), and started shooting as I backed up into the inferno behind me.

From the vibrations in the ground, I could feel a lot more confusion and disunity of movements. The psychic shock of losing Great Grandma was permeating the spideroids, who would now be reshuffling decision-making across the much less intelligent next generation.

Mindlessly raging spideroids charged into the shaft, and actually ignited as they did. The smaller ones couldn’t even reach me, and the big ones I cut down smoothly, while sending out volleys from Paten when I could get around the obstructing dead bugs. Before too long, I had a ten-foot high mound of burning spideroids in front of me blocking a lot of those behind, forming a new blazing pyre to match that of Great Gramma behind me.

“You, uh, need some help down there?” Sergeant Charlz asked in some awe from up above.

“If you want to send that trooper with the mini-las down, I bet he’s gonna run out of power before he runs out of targets.”

There was a quick discussion, and twenty seconds later they’d put my Disk back in place, mini-las guy was atop it, and it descended quickly.

Ten seconds after that, he bounced-swung into place next to me, aimed around the heap of spideroids there, and held down the whirling barrels of his mini-las as it roared to life at a hundred pulses of much harder and hotter light than the base of Paten per second, and began to chew up the scenery.

He swept it across the flat of the working dock here, mowing bugs down in swathes, and there were plenty of them in all directions for him to spray down. Hard light echoed off of durasteel and made a lot of craters in plascrete as he painted the mini-las around with the appreciation of an artist who finally got to do some real work. He reaped a terrific harvest in all directions, walking endless shots towards the larger spiders, advancing from one to the next, washing down dense clusters of little ones, and really designing a scene of carnage here with computer-aided oh-joy shooty-shoot time.

I busied myself killing anything that got close so he could concentrate on mass slaughter and the sheer joy of being able to hold down the trigger that long. The scuttlers trying to come from above were the most entertaining, as I had no trouble telling where they were in my Tremblesense and picking them off as they hit the lip of the door just in front of us.

The barrels of his mini-las were turning cherry red as he swept it across a final wave in front of us, punching shafts of angry red light through multiple outraged spideroids unhappy that their Gloam had been shattered. “Ten percent!” he called out.

“Gentlemen, it’s going to be your turn in a second, maybe.” After all, it was still a freaking furnace in here. “Let’s go.”

He swung mechanically yet lightly over to the Disk, watched as I bounced off the red-hot walls and we went up much faster than he’d come down. There was a three-second delay before spideroids started coming in below us, and started to burn and curl up even as they tried to climb after us, because it was still a goddamn furnace down there.

Again, I shoved the Juris above me through first, but this time came right after him, lifting him up above me as I emerged into the center of a circle of gun-toting Juris eager to discharge some ammunition and spend some power cells. I pushed the Disk up higher, simply hopped over the squad, and they closed on the now ten-foot hole wrenched further open by the Great Empress. Five of them set up lines of fire on the walls and entry below, watching as the black tide flooded in, started coming up the walls, burned, and was clambered over by those behind, their crispy bodies forming new insulated walls for those behind.

Gyro man had already pulled back to the escape corridor, and I set the Disk down near the exit stairwell so mini-las could step off. The Disk folded up and returned to my Masspack, and the Juris behind me began to open up with short, controlled bursts down into the dark mass below.

“Fill it with enough bodies, and they won’t be able to get in once it all starts burning,” I mused aloud, while my hum of a valiant defense kept going in the background. They were bringers of doom, and this was the time to bring it! They probably didn’t notice that they were shooting to the beat of the song...

The shooting was professional, but constant, ammo feeders clicking as they cycled in new rounds from the magazines on their backs, and numbers began to add up. I stayed on back-up while they had their fun, and the men began to switch out smoothly, both to conserve their own ammo and to let the others have some fun. Sharing Karma, so noble...

I watched the shooting slow down as the shaft was choked and filled with burning spideroid corpses, the dark ash billowing up and through, the airflow only feeding the fires more... and those I’d killed burning vivic to really add to the fun.

I nudged my way past their armored suits and took a peek down at the burning hell of mutant bugs.

Damn, good thing I’d grabbed the queen’s nexal after I backed into the place. Sucker was big, too. Hee hee hee!...

“Step aside, lads.” To their amazement, I swung right over the lip, ignoring the still incredibly hot metal, and the fumes and flames of burning bug from below.

My Trembling Domain was a little off with the heat, but I could still feel the bugs just outside and below, wanting to get in, but held at bay by the heat and flames.

And if my hair was slithering through the mass of the burning bugs and fetching out a lot of nexals, well, there was a lot of smoke and ash in the way...

My Claws anchored on the walls, hanging upside down, my hair defying gravity, I looked out under the top of the garage door, right among a lot of burning bugs.