The Withered Land, THE EMPIRE FALLS: HELL'S AVATAR

HELL'S AVATAR -- PART THIRTEEN

Something alien and predatory was alive in the flames, walking out into the early evening's smoke-filled air, bulling its way through the wreckage and ruin. It was followed by its equally massive, raptorial twin.

Neither creature was native to Teshiwahur. More, neither Mune'stahr and Pylott had never seen anything like them in their offworld travels among the far-flung worlds of the Emperium's galactic realm.

The beasts possessed an amalgamated morphology that defied logic. They were massive, each easily twice the girth and mass of a pair of elephants from planet Earth. They looked to be mostly organic, possessing both areas of exposed, charcoal-gray hued flesh and a segmented insect-like carapace covering their back and sides. They were predominantly insectivorid, having a bulb-shaped head with cruel-looking mandibles, multiple ruby-red faceted compound eyes and antennae. A cluster of feeler-like barbels were clustered under the area where a chin whould have been on an animal skull. They conversely displayed some mammalian characteristics like a woolly neck mane and shoulder hair and cloven-hooved feet, but were also partially reptilian with their torpedo-like bodies ending in a long, plated muscular tail with dorsal ridges and squat powerful lizard's legs covered in overlapping bony plates. Even more macabre, though, were the segmented, tentacle-like umbilical cables running high along their sides. The stretchy, independently mobile umbilicals were connected to strange arthropod creatures, each the size of a mastiff hound, that resembled oversized armored fleas.

But as alien as the creatures were, though, the most frightening thing about them were their riders. Standing in stirrups attached to special vertical saddles, each beast was ridden by a sylphlike, androgynous being that appeared to be entirely composed from molten, glowing metal. Each of the beings looked to be half-again as tall as a normal sized human, placing their height somewhere past eight feet. The strange slender figures moved with an exaggerated grace, like dancers under water. It was impossible to make out graphic details, like the specific attributes and component parts of their faces or the detailed facets of their clothing, if indeed they were even wearing any, past the dazzling golden-white glare that infused them. But there was one thing that almost anyone who beheld the creatures could see...

They were laughing. As the elephantine beasts they rode crushed both inorganic and living organic matter beneath their wide hooves, the riders were laughing.

Mune'stahr and Pylott looked away from the eerie invaders and locked eyes with one another, their expressions solemn. They telepathically triggered the organic interface on their combat armor and their outerwear expanded and morphed into the familiar exoskeletal sheath common to soldiers of the Star Legion. They both reached over to the torso-mounted computer console on their armor and flicked a small toggle.

"Activate weapons systems and control applications. Visual targeting computers on individual acquisition mode. Response Systems telemetry load, invoke full assault capability," Mune'stahr recited, his manner grim and his voice coldly free of inflection. "Ready operations."

Knife-proof, bulletproof, high-density impact resistant and electrically-grounded and overload resistant, the powered tactical combat exo-armor worn primarily by High Frontier Territorial Expanse SpecOps troopers possessed a full suite of Hostile Environ life-support functions. Each suit contained an interactive, heuristic biotelemetry system of benevolent liquidic nanites to provide immediate medical aid, when needed, to each suit's Operating Host. The combat exo-armor was not, in and of itself, a cybernetic enhancement frame. The suits were more like pre-programmed, individualistic collections of regionalized molecular nanotech clusters that were symbiotic. The symbiotic relationship was mutually beneficial to both the armor's Operating Host and to the nanites pool running through the suit's internal sub-structure. When not in situations with combat potential or in atmospheric climature that threatened the Operating Host, the armor was mostly invisible, appearing as little more than a form-fitting tunic. But when activated, the armor initialized into a mobile humanoid cocoon of interconnected and overlapping shaped-plate surfaces inlaid with minute, ruggedized supracircuits that continuously fed information to the suit's twin control computers. One computer took care to monitor and protect the health of the SpecOps trooper while the other computer operated the exo-armor's tactical targeting and threat analysis system and its deadly neuro-encephalic weapons systems.