Another thick, squelching sound announced the latest assault against Valkyrie Second Class Celine Morrison's power armor. She reached down wearily and brushed the small, gelatinous creature away from the metal surface, but not before it managed to lash out with its telepathic sting. It didn't hurt, thankfully; even so, she could feel the psychic venom cluttering her brain with distraction and making it increasingly difficult to concentrate. Her cybernetic response times had already degraded by .07 seconds, a lifetime in combat. She was grateful to be down in the tunnels and not up on surface assault duty--Celine wasn't sure if she could deal with anything stronger than a Burster nest right now.

That was a thought the Valkyrie wouldn't even have been able to imagine having before they touched down on Perdition; despite the doom-laden briefings from the squad's sergeant, the elite warriors of the New Cleopatran Empire knew that their superior training and technology made them more than a match for any opponent. Certainly they were more than a match for a bunch of native flora and fauna that the Imperial survey expedition rated as semi-sentient at best. Even if they couldn't bring their full military might to bear--they were here to exploit Perdition's unique biological resources, not turn it into a smoldering ball of dead rock--what could a bunch of ugly slimy beasts do to the finest soldiers in the history of the human race?

Celine staggered sideways into the tunnel wall, scraping a deep furrow into the rock as she struggled to get her balance back. She knew the answer to that question now, knew it through bitter experience and hard-fought lessons that left almost half her squad dead or missing. Jenna and Eileen hadn't been seen since they got separated and wound up right in the middle of a whole hive of Slinkers, and the sergeant had disappeared not long after they set up base camp. They found Maura's armor but not her, and Celine had been forced to personally put down Rose and Leah when they ran into a pack of Vamps and wound up with their loyalties suborned. And Zoe and the others... it wasn't fair. Perdition didn't fight fair. And it was Celine's friends who were paying the price.

She heard another splat against her armor, this time from behind, and she scraped off the Burster just a little bit too late to prevent it from detonating the tiny neural cluster that passed for a brain in the little creature's peculiar anatomy. That made... sixteen? Seventeen? Celine was having trouble keeping track. Every time one of them imploded itself, its final mental impulse sent a little psychic shockwave into Celine's head; and even though none of them did much on their own, the cumulative impact was definitely beginning to scramble the Valkyrie's circuits a little. She needed to find some way to stop their suicide assaults before they went from mildly annoying to genuinely threatening.

But what was she going to use? Plasma cannons? Micro-missiles? Railguns? Celine was loaded to take on an army, not a thin disc of gelatin the size of her fingernail that was so light and thin that it could actually float on the Brownian motion of the air currents that blew through the tunnels. Most of her weapons would have been overkill on the dingo-sized Vamps that found Rose and Leah, let alone the insignificant little blobs that kept thudding up against her and discharging their psychic energies in one fatal burst after another. It was... it was unfair, Celine thought, unable to keep herself from coming back to that same petulant sentiment. It was absolutely, positively unfair.

But she was going to find the nest soon. It was down here somewhere in this maze of tunnels, and her radar pings had mapped out almost half the space inside the mountain already. Celine was going to find the stupid, stinking midden where these things bred, she was going to fucking unload on it with high-explosive missiles that would reduce it to charred ash, and then she was going to communicate back to base that the area was secure and they could set up a headquarters down here where it was defensible. After that, she could sleep off the effects of the psychic venom for a goddamn week if she had to.

She slapped three more Bursters out of the air, hoping that if she could just get to them before they managed to close in then she might get a smaller dose of the brain-numbing telepathic pulse, but it was no good. All three of them squeezed inward on themselves as her open palm made contact, sending out the spray of brain tissue from both the top and bottom of their disc-shaped bodies that gave them their nickname. And Celine felt three simultaneous waves of befuddlement assault her mind. She stumbled forward, not even feeling the impact of her power armor against the tunnel floor. It felt like being drunk, but Celine handled her liquor a lot better than she handled this.

Staggering back to her feet, the Valkyrie raked the air with a series of blasts from her laser cannons in the faint hope of incinerating at least a few of the pesky little blobs, then continued down the tunnel. In a way, she thought, it was probably a good sign that she was running into more Bursters. The more she found, the closer she had to be to the nest. She realized that the obvious corollary to that statement was that the closer she got to the nest, the more Bursters she was going to find, but she put that out of her head and kept going. It was disturbingly easy.

This time she registered five impacts, two on her left shoulder and three running up her right thigh. Celine turned the gain up on her cybernetic feedback sensors, hoping that she might at least get enough warning to brace herself against the psychic venom that pumped itself directly into her consciousness and turned her thoughts into a confused, distracted mess. She stumbled forward, or at least what she thought was forward, but almost immediately the downside of increased touch sensitivity made itself known as she slammed sideways into the wall. It didn't do any damage, of course, even with the levels at max, but she felt it in a way that she hadn't before.

Celine let loose with a short-range flamethrower burst down the tunnel, and the mistake that turned out to be made itself obvious almost instantly when almost a dozen waves of giddy confusion assaulted her simultaneously and made her slump to the ground in slack-jawed vacuity for almost a full minute. Whatever the range on these little bastards was, it was too far for just about anything in her arsenal that stood a chance of taking them out en masse. At least, anything that would take them out without collapsing the whole damn mountain on top of her. Celine was here to capture the objective, not destroy it.

She stumbled to her feet again, took two tottering steps, then sank back to her knees in helpless bemusement. It felt good, that was the worst part--Celine could stand pain, she could resist torture, but the fog inside her head was warm and welcoming and almost sexually pleasant. She blushed, even though there was no one to notice her body's instinctive responses to the telepathic intrusion but her biometrics. One of the few downsides to the Valkyrie armor that nobody had ever been able to get around was that it was impossible to masturbate in. Celine never knew how truly frustrating that could be until now.

She lost track of time for a few minutes--that shouldn't have been possible, not with an atomic clock cybernetically synced to her brain, but seconds fell away with every groggy blink and every squirming effort to find something in the form-fitted Valkyrie armor to grind against. By the time Celine came back to herself even a little, she was dripping with sweat and musk and her whole body felt as if she'd just finished doing windsprints. She forced herself to rise, but the psychic contamination was bleeding into her suit's systems and the robotic limbs twitched and spasmed awkwardly with every step. Celine's vision swam as the suit tried to track her eye movements, the resulting feedback causing rapid cycling through her heads-up displays that made her almost blind.

Still, she pressed on. It would all be fine once she found the nest, she told herself. The Imperial scientists had deduced that Bursters didn't have the brainpower to sustain their tiny little lives without a networked link back to the queen's central consciousness. Once Celine blew up the hill, or heap, or whatever it was the queen made her home in, she'd be safe. She'd probably flatline her own brain in the process, but it would be fine. She'd recover. The Imperial scientists had worked it all out.

The Imperial scientists also said that Slinkers were territorial predators who wouldn't burrow within a few miles of each other, Celine reminded herself. That mistake had probably cost Jenna and Eileen their free wills.

But this was... this was going to be different. Celine knew it was going to be different, because she was an Imperial Valkyrie and she was going to make it different. She was going to ignore the tiny little impacts against her armor that came almost three, four a minute now and keep pushing on, because the faster she got to the nest the sooner this would end. And the sooner this ended, the sooner Celine could crawl out of the suit and masturbate herself stupid. She needed it bad now--with the gain turned up this high on the touch sensitivity, every single splat and squelch registered on her own skin. And of course the stupid little fuckers had a slippery consistency that felt almost exactly like Celine's whole body was being covered in lube.

The response times had gone well past .1 seconds now, lending a drunken lurch to the power armor's gait that finally made it easier to crawl. It was embarrassing, but between the lack of coordination and the spontaneous switchovers from night vision to heat vision to an utterly useless sniper scope that locked Celine's display onto a five millimeter wide target at the end of the tunnel, she was mostly feeling her way along anyway. She kept crushing the older, weaker Bursters under her hands and knees where they lay after several unsuccessful attempts to get back aloft. They still had a sting to them, though. Celine's whole body throbbed with blank, animal lust after mere moments.

But she had to get to the nest. She absolutely had to, she craved it with the same instinct that drove a plant's roots deeper into the soil in search of water. It slowly, sluggishly occurred to her that she wasn't responding to any mission objectives anymore, only a mindless urge to propel her body forward, but the thought was quickly swallowed up in the fog that gripped Celine's brain. The individual impacts of the Bursters against her armor no longer registered. It was nothing but the soft patter of warm summer rain against her skin now, and she welcomed it.

Celine fell prone again, her armored hand reaching not forward but down between her thighs as she forgot herself and tried to masturbate inside the Valkyrie suit. The weight of the heavy metal crushed dozens of the Bursters, and her whole world went white with blank, blissful euphoria that crashed her suit's chronometers and turned time off altogether. The tiny psychic stings piled onto her brain in overwhelming quantities, drowning her in ecstasy until she couldn't think of anything at all. She lay on the tunnel floor, drooling inside her power armor and waiting for her brain to recover.

She genuinely believed for a little while that it finally did. When she opened up her armor, clamping her jaws around the manual release and pulling back as hard as she could to unlock the seals that kept her protected in her metal shell, Celine really thought that she was solving the problem of the degraded cybernetics the only way she possibly could. When she trudged down the tunnel, her feet moving mechanically one after the other like an automaton and somehow instinctively knowing just when to turn, Celine assumed she was remembering the radar maps that were leading her to the nest. And when she felt slick, slippery goo coating her naked body as Burster after Burster slammed into her bare flesh, she convinced herself that she'd finally developed an immunity to their psychic stings.

And then Celine came face to face with the nest. She felt the presence of the queen settling into her hollowed-out mind and easily, effortlessly dominating her feeble will. She gave up the pretense of thought, accepting her earlier illusion of consciousness as just one more way that the telepathic network of the Bursters smoothed away her resistance and brought her subjugated body into their presence. She collapsed to her knees, smiling blankly as her fingers dipped down between her legs to finally reward her for her descent into compliance. It wasn't fair to enslave her with her own urges like this. But Perdition never fought fair.

Celine's eyes glazed over. And the beings that had held the planet in their grip for aeons took another pawn in their latest game of dominance.

THE END