When using alien biomass to formulate a human being one would think that the overall shape would have some input on the creature’s mind or at least temper the end product’s mutation; resulting in something recognizable. Maybe they would have some odd ears or spikey arms, maybe even a tail like Kerrigan’s.

What I did not expect were the creatures in front of me. First and foremost stands the most gorgeous man I’ve ever seen. Chiseled features and a jaw so defined that the Eiffel tower would bend over and call it daddy. I have no chance to appreciate him as he drops to hands and knees then starts crawling across the bunker floor sniffing dirt.

Hygieia, what the fuck did you do to Fabio?

“Uhm, you alright down there?”

He turns, mouth hanging open and barks. BARKS! Not a normal woof woof, but yappy, like a soy infused chihuahua hopped up on gooseballs and set free from purse prison.

“Arf arf arf,” he stops to sniff another marine’s crotch armor then shakes his lower half before yapping away. “Arf arf arf-”.

“NOPE!” I shout, struggling to form words.

“Nope! You! Uh- oh god- BARKER! Shut your helmet and stand on your own two feet!” I snap.

Obedient to a fault his helmet seals. Though figuring out how to be bipedal is a whole different question. At least the faceplate dampens his inane yapping. We can all still hear him, yapping away inside the fishbowl like a reality TV star. Pain fresh in my eyes, I look to the next ‘marine’ who salutes me in crisp Singularity fashion. A gesture of greeting and recognition of a superior. All honored ideals of the Holiest Singularity.

“Reporting for duty sir.” Says the second marine.

“Oh thank god! Here I was thinking you would all be dog soldiers like Barker.”

“No sir. Our base strains were expedited by Hygieia’s request. So each warrior was made from the most expedient biomass and carries a unique genotype sir.” Says the second marine over coms.

My eyes narrow. Not liking the implications of 'most expedient biomass'.

>Terran Thena: I know you said defective, but this is absurd!

>Matriarch Hygieia: we can melt them back down into their base components whenever but you wanted quick!

>Matriarch Hygieia: i made twelve and only four passed the sanity check

>Matriarch Hygieia: results will improve

>Matriarch Hygieia: when I land

The sanity check…?

I stare at those words for a painful second.

“Shit, chat we’re doing this live. Helmets open.”

It’s hard to say just how instantly my regret landed and not because Barker followed the order first. The second marine wasn’t remotely human. I’m ten feet away and can see dozens of worms woven together into a collective facsimile. Looking at him is like looking at a man made of vines. Except vines don’t squirm. Or writhe like these worms do. I nearly throw up my rations, narrowly managing to keep them down by shutting my eyes and counting to ten. His ‘head’ haunts my mind the entire time, multilayered like a flowerbud yet perpetually moving in illogical angles with a few detaching into stalks like chin-eyeballs to peer around.

I've never wished for a Drakken Laser drill more than I did right in that second. Yet the power of a star pales when faced with that head.

“Private Barker and Sergeant Wormface. Great way to start a war…” I mumble, already fearing what comes next.

Wormface recieves the promotion on ability, as Hygiea made him to be the most cognitively capable. Something about having ten thousand brains really helps with memory retention.

The third soldier is surprisingly normal yet completely wrong all at once. Dark hair, two eyes, a recognizable nose and mouth are all things that should reassure me and should’ve set my mind at ease. Should have.

“Are… Are you an Emu?”

His head is that of a duck’s, but darker and a bit weedier with thicker feathers, a dark bill and huge eyes. I recognize it, but am in no way happy to see the familiarities. At my question his feathers flare into a mohawk. Anime eyes blinking in my direction.

"Private Emu reporting sir. I've been tasked with your security detail ready to crack on, if you’ll have me." Says the bird man.

>Terran Thena: You sent me worm, birdman, and a sexy chihuahua… What the ever loving fuck Hygieia!?!?!?!?!?

I know she won’t respond. There is nothing to say–

>Matriarch Hygieia: You’re upset about the dog?

>Matriarch Hygieia: hehehehehehehehe

>Matriarch Hygieia: AHAHAHAHAHA

>Matriarch Hygieia: sorry

>Matriarch Hygieia: I asked Zazathur for help

My bowels freeze. If she is laughing about Barker then there are only a handful of awful monstrosities that can be under the fourth helmet. Probably some kind of winged cockroach that speaks in hisses and clicks. For some reason that marine sought out darkness, sitting down in the shadows of several crates. Which only serves to unnerve Kerrigan and I. At the sight of fourth she ducks into her armor, half eaten chocolate bar sticking out of her mouth, and raises the plasma rifle. Deep inside my soul I wish she would just pull the trigger.

Eight glowing red eyes are peering out of the darkness. Internal suit lights dialed to minimum in the EMP enforced darkness of our bunker. Where a human head should be sits two slanted lines of four pupil-less eyes. Six external fangs glisten, giving the appearance of a spider protecting its body with a wall of legs. Most disgusting of all, the spider isn’t covered in chitin as I expect. No, for some unthinkable reason Zazathur decided to give this particular abomination hot pink hairs. Like a razzledazzle tarantula.

I’m grateful my helmet visor is shut. Cause I start gagging at the sight of him.

“HELMETS ON!”

Four visors cinch shut. Sealing a second later. I tap Kerrigan’s oversized shoulder with my armored hands.

“I know he’s kinda- uhm… Unusual. But these are my-” I choke on the word, unable to call them my friends. “They are my acquaintances. My friend’s friends.”

“They’re mutants. We should exterminate them all.” Says Kerrigan, no hint of her former lisp.

Whatever physiological changes are occurring to her faster than I can think.

“No. They have obeyed my orders. We can't abandon loyalty.”

Her finger tightens on the trigger and for a full minute I believe she is going to blast spider-man right in his creepy face. Truth be told, it's not the worst thing that could happen. I’m not proud to admit it, but more than half of me is hoping she deletes him. When the trigger breaks I’m not surprised. Until I see the orb of energy fly past Spiderman. Out the bunker and into the trench where it seems to collide with air. Blue plasma swirls around invisible shielding.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Light flares, a smaller sphere sprouting from nothing as a larger sphere crackles with rippling energy. Like a pond trying to restore opacity.

Kerrigan fires again, her shot connecting with an opposing orb of white plasma, smaller and harder, as if the ball of superheated particles is more tightly covalent. Matter obliterates its opposite, blinding all targeting sensors in a dazzling array of sparklers greater than a hundred Fourth of July finales. My rifle moves adding a second plasma rifle to the firefight. Wormface and Emu spin, firing while Barker sprints for the door, a shovel in hand.

Five plasma rifles crack the shielding, shorting out whatever field kept this particular ambusher invisible. From my angle, obscured by rifle and red dot the creature appears metallic. Some sort of quadruped with what appears to be a jetpack. It rolls. Evading Kerrigan’s shot then twists, too many legs bunching as it prepares to leap away. At least six limbs are curled beneath this thing.

Indecision strikes hard. I want to kill it, but oh baby! A cloaking device is just what momma needs! How can I obliterate my dream of cosplaying as a ghost, not the friendly Casper kind but the invisible assassins who cannot be seen!

A personal shield and cloak would have saved me a dozen times over. Plus it's been hardened to survive an EMP that shut down Juggernauts. As the ancient saying goes, in a world of blind men the one eyed man is king. Excitement jerks my shot.

An emotional failing that my minions -especially Spiderman- seem immune to. His shot pierces the machine’s neck. Kerrigan alternates shots with Spiderman, shooting until head rolls free.

“Quick, drag the body inside!”

Barker lunges using the full power of his suit to flatten the shovel against the predator’s spine. His radio yips as the shovel explodes in his hand, obliterated by the force of his power armor against a construct's reinforced body. But he complies faster than expected, dragging the thing into our bunker. Obedient, although a bit foolhardy, if he wants to fight in melee like a barking zealot we’ll have to find some energy blades for him. I crack a few messages off about that, while Wormface issues basic orders spreading the squad out so our firing positions overlap, giving Barker and I a chance to appraise the wreckage.

Close up it looks like a Chinese temple dog, carved from silver jade. Stylized mane with sweeping curls that intertwine in a seamlessly infinite spiral of fur, enormous claws and a mouth meant to tear off limbs all decorate this moving statue while yellow light leaks out the neckhole and the cannon’s muzzle. Back mounted nacels seem to indicate a functional jetpack but I have no idea where to start dissecting a sculpted alien dog-lion thing. And part of me doesn’t want to, from an aesthetic standpoint the thing is gorgeous. More finely carved than any Roman sculptor could dream of. There are holes and empty spaces within the statue, as if sculpted then overlaid with a lattice of marble.

How it was manufactured is beyond my engineering mind, and possibly beyond human understanding.

>Terran Thena: Hey, 1337 H3X0R, got a… a something for you. It’s like a Starcraft predator but with a photon cannon and a jetpack except really pretty too, like way past 4k. Gotta be at least 16k.

>Executrix Alaea: Do you know how insane you sound right now? Should I be calling a shrink to tease apart the secrets of your ramblings? Dangit. Now I'm curious! Tag it.

I do more than mark the thing, I teleport it straight to Alaea’s closet.

>Executrix Alaea: ooooohhhh snap! I’ve heard of these! Well, my body has... Anyways! It’s an Azhurai Conglomerate SCOUT. Wow, they psionically sculpt these things while dreaming, its one of the techniques I came here to learn. Each one must take weeks or months to produce and then I have no idea how you hollow them out and stuff a solarium generator in there. Or animate it. They’re great individually but really shine because they can fold up into tiny crates and you can ship ten thousand of them to a backwater world and leave em in deep storage to deploy a few thousand years later.

Her words fill me with dread. They sculpt them with their minds? So all they would need is solarium, plenty of that on Syrak, especially considering that only EXPORTS are regulated. Companies can and do mine all they can hold, leaving warehouses full of the stuff as incentives to negotiate, as conquering a faction means excess solarium enters administrative holds, where only the Syrakian's can profit. They in turn do a mass sell off, flooding the market with solarium and tanking prices for months or even years. An economic Damocles to avenge their martial failing.

Yet I doubt that is the Conglomerate's purpose as they could take the solarium and have psychic artisans to do the sculpting, a process that only costs time, which for an immortal is bountiful, add a bit of machinery to make the raw substrates and reactors and viola. A shielded, cloaked, and armed scout golem. More concerning, the Azhurai haven’t attacked in six hundred years. Six centuries of sculpting. Even a toddler armed with nothing more than two sporks and some play doh will have churned out a sculpture every month or two, so there are going to be thousands of these scouts.

For each sculptor.

Monthly reinforcements too... Of all the races present the Azhurai are most advanced. Other factions take pot shots but are almost never successful in denying one of their resupply runs. Besides, any successfully destroyed dropship would only earn their ire, and retaliation from a fortress older than your eightfold great grandma, denying any and all landings for potentially hundreds of years.

I swallow, trying to work spit into my dry mouth.

“Nice catch Kerrigan, more of those are incoming, looks like the EMP was only the prelude.”

Across Syrak-9 invisible hunters move into action. Thousands of SCOUTs and other -more impressive- constructs march from the Azhurai fortress, heading north into the mountains. Four factions exist beyond, another conglomerate of vastly unequal races, some corpocracy, a cephalopod species, and a true technate alliance of worlds. All four hail from different spiral arms so Jim’s download is light on details, heavy on speculation. No time for bullshitting guestimates right now.

>Executrix Alaea: Hey, those SCOUTs are heading everywhere except for you.

>Terran Thena: Guess I smell that bad. Or the abomination that is Spiderman chased them away.

>Matriarch Hygieia: LOL spiderman.

>Matriarch Hygieia: get rekt

>Matriarch Hygieia: say that to his face

>Matriarch Hygieia: he freaked me out too

>Matriarch Hygieia: but that was mostly cause spiderman is aesexual aka capable of self replication.

>Matriarch Hygieia: If you see him weave an eggsack I recommend burning with nuclear fire.

>Terran Thena: You motherfucker. Do you have any idea the nightmares I’m about to have? Of all the things in the universe why did you pick RAINBOW SPIDERS?

>Matriarch Hygieia: he is fabulous

>Matriarch Hygieia: okay it was an accident, soooooo disgusting

>Matriarch Hygieia: genetics are messy, you can follow a recipe and get different results

>Matriarch Hygieia: the collective uses biomass collected from all worlds to build our warriors so it kinda mixes together in a big buggy -pun intended- vat of simmering DNA

>Matriarch Hygieia: don’t yell at me about a rush job

>Matriarch Hygieia: landing orders just came in

>Matriarch Hygieia: radio silence from here on

My warp HUD tells a clear story of Azhurai dominance. Evac orders broadcast on every Singularity channel, public and encrypted, while the Novans abandon all offenses; recalling their Juggernauts with bands of technicians, chains, rope, and maybe some bubblegum. I monitor the coms channels and troop movements, waiting. Singularity forces withdraw into their most defensible trench networks while the Technocracy repeats recall orders on loop, unattended and unanswered by deployed technicians. There’s even a Tulverian distress call broadcast on an unsecured channel. Sloppy operational security, as anyone with an antennae could eavesdrop.

Moments pass, the unsecured channels repeating until one last panicked message is sent out. Always screaming of golden eyed golems.

"This is why you use tight beams and passive sensors." I whisper, listening to the Tulverians die. “Bummer, I was hoping to get more plasma rifles from those guys. Too late now." I raise my voice so all present can hear. "The plan hasn’t changed. Knock out the Technocracy and take Syrak.”

“Righty ho commander sir. We’ll hold our lines. Not one step backwards an wot not.” Says Private Emu, dropping a crate full of dirt near the bunker entrance.

My four marines have not remained idle during my conversation with Hygieia, no, they are busy filling empty crates with dirt and stacking them like legos to build a multilayered defensive buzzsaw. A series of interlocking blocks that will inhibit movement. Similar to building supply depot walls except we are leaving gaps, only attempting to slow the enemy, not halt them completely. Both lings dig, one in the front entrance while one tunnels out the back. Creating an escape route in case things manage to fall even further apart.

I take a seat, the day’s events catching up to me in a wave of exhaustion. My eyes close, needing this catnap after losing both legs, forcefully injected with genetic soup, losing an arm, regenerating those wounds only to end up getting shot in the lungs. The last of which has not healed.

Shit.

Dying in my sleep would be about right for today. Downright peaceful. At least now I have soldiers to protect me, and a real bunker. Not too shabby for an honest day's warfare.

No matter, the Technocracy is out of gear, their Juggernauts destroyed and war effort crippled. They’ve lost the surface war of Syrak-9. I should wait here until Singularity forces arrive, that will give the Matriarch and Executrix time to get their resources sorted out. Then we can take down the Tulverians. One step closer to taking the planet. An idle thought occurs to me, what new faction came down with my reinforcement wave? The -nameless- caste always lets one ship land…

That is my last thought before consciousness fades, my old wounds finally demanding rest. Wormface drags me, gently, to the rear where Kerrigan joins me, intertwining our hands before dozing off herself.

Bioforms -/- aka, biomass used vs biomass available; unavailable while biopool is restricted.

Powered Armor 5 / 13 aka occupied human equipment vs total equipment

Artefacts 1/1 aka functional protochronian technology vs total protochronian artefacts; stasis chamber warping module.