A/N: We're coming back to that story. Moving in a new apartment and getting my student's loans cut did not help my publishing regularity, but I'm back on track, hopefully.

The drop pod bloomed like an iridescent orchid and Jackson found himself faces with a situation not unlike his previous deployment; hostile forces, namely Infested Terrans spawned by a row of twelve giant slugs, slowly wiggling themselves down the volcanic slopes.

The Dominion line still held, however; six bunkers joined together by a network of trenches, three siege tanks and a cluster of freshly deployed Widow mines, plus Henry's Eradicator, all stood between Warfield's HQ and the Zerg stragglers trying to get to it.

The infested Marines had the high ground, because some brain pan at HQ figured setting up a trench at the bottom of a volcano was tactically sound, meaning they could pelt any resupply attempt with 8mm rounds and keep the Marines in the bunkers from moving around at all.

This analysis took Henry five seconds at most, yet that was enough for his left thread to be blasted off by an RPG, stranding him on the wrong side of the trench. There was no fear this time, nothing crippling at any rate; the worst that could happen here would be a harsh reprimand and maybe a lower pay rate.

Jackson coldly grasped the controls for his warbot and used his remaining thread to turn his armoured front towards the nearest hostiles. With his other hand, he spun the beast's twin 105mm guns and loosened a first volley, his accuracy aided by the machine's targeting computer.

An Infestor lost its entire rear end to the dual explosions sandwiching it between two very near miss. Letting go of the threads' controls, he typed in on the blackscreen Help True Off_Hrdwr. The thing displayed a progress bar, giving Henry plenty of time to bag another Infestor and soak up another RPG.

The list was simple;

105mike rghtA

105mike lftA

NapalBrn frntC

8mike imp rghtA

8mike imp leftA

So he had a pair of coaxial 8mm gauss rifles built alongside the main guns and a forward facing flamethrower jammed into the robot's crotch. The flame thrower would come in handy, but the 8mm guns were very stupidly placed, forcing him to take his big guns off big targets whenever he wanted to thin out crowds of squishy bastards.

Still, he switched to the Impalers and held down the trigger as the bot swivelled to lock another giant slug, shredding enough armoured Zerg along the way to make it worth his trouble.

It took him a second to put the big guns back online and half as long to obliterate another grub.

Proximity alarms nearly caused him to throw off his headset, but he quickly regained his composure and lowered the bot's head. Two infested Marines, having thrown aside their rifles, were hauling ass towards him, ripping off pieces of their already ruined CMC suits to let out pulsating bags of green slime. Acid, or maybe an explosive substance, in either case letting them get close would be a bad idea, but he could not bring his guns low enough to get a shot at them.

Instead, he pulsed the flamethrower twice, twin fireballs washing over the Marines and taking up 3% of his napalm reserve. The blazing hulks of flesh and metal still tried to drag themselves towards their target, molten flesh and grotesque limbs falling off at every step.

With another tap of his trigger, Henry sacrificed another percent of his fuel reserves, but ended the Zergs for good.

Panning his camera up, he was surprised to find the Marines, the Dominion ones, that is, with help from the Widow mines and Crucio tanks, had pretty much completely swept the volcano's slope of hostiles. He also noticed his bot's outline was now red across the board, not a single inch of neosteel plating left undamaged. One of his Impalers fell off at that moment, the dull ring of metal hitting the ground emphasing how close he'd been to losing his job.

The chat window with Wall-E remained open and indicated five unread messages.

Wall-E: What, we done yet?

Wall-E: Dude, you are driving a giant killer robot, KILL SHIT!

Wall-E: And there goes the left fekking thread, attaboy -_-'

Wall-E: Catching missiles with your face is NOT the way to get a haircut, kid! XD

Wall-E: Baby, you are on fire! No, seriously, the bot's burning, turn on the extinguishers.

He punched in the commands and the ER-1's outlines grew orange, with yellow in places. Internal repair subsystems were hard at work, but would require an SCV for outside repairs. Instead of putting in a request, Wall-E merely diverted one of his M.U. to do the job, patching up damaged bunkers along the way.

Wall-E: This bot's worth more than your education, lifetime salary and most likely that of both your parents put together, try not to fekk this up, will you?

Hero: u know, I can just get up of this desk, walk acros the room and punch u, right?

Wall-E: Why, yes, that would be most excellent for your career, you totally should do that D:

Once again, Henry closed the chat window and checked in with the Lieutenant in charge of the trenches, who had him drive into the gutted wrecks of a deserted bunker from which Henry diverted all processing power to detection systems, from ultrasounds to X-ray, the bot lazily swivelling from side to side in search of spies or stragglers.

The next shift came in four hours later and Jackson, his eyes swollen from looking at a computer screen for six hours straight, would have headed straight to bed had the admiral not waved him over to the CIC's holographic display the moment he walked out.

"Yes ma'am?" Spoke the exhausted crewman, saluting nowhere near as sharply as an Admiral's presence would have required.

Dupont did not seem to notice his sluggishness and returned a saluted so half assed it was almost comical. "Heller, your dropship pilot, she was infested?"

The gruesome end met by that pile of purple ooze still churned Jackson's stomach. "She was Zerg, bled like one." He'd seen infested terrans get pasted multiple times that day and they bled red, or yellow, depending on how much bile their tumours contained.

The Admiral did not like that answer, "Intelligence just got done scrubbing every second of helmet cam from that incident. We saw her tinkering with the guns through Coldmann's rear view camera, but that's it."

Henry shrugged, "Well, we knew it was her already, why…"

The Admiral sighed, rubbed her eyes, then clarified, detaching her words carefully, "We never saw her get infested, if the woman was really Zerg, then they got to her before drop."

He wanted to tell her that was a ridiculous notion, that the pilot had flown in from the same Battlecruiser they had and were, at no point, exposed to the Zerg prior to deployment, but another question popped up in his mind before he could express his skepticism "The ship we came in from, where was its last deployment?"

Dupont told him that this was classified information, but nodded at the same time to signify his fears were correct.

"And how much staff from that ship is now serving on the Rubicon?"

"Way too fucking much, a quarter of my intel staff and a third of my Military Police." At that point of their conversation, Jackson realized there were two Ghosts guarding the door, both looked utterly worn out and a tad bit terrified. All stations on the bridge were now manned by low-grade adjudants, mobile ones with faces like porcelain masks and about as much processing capacity as a Spider mine.

"Why tell me?"

The Admiral shrugged, "Can't trust anyone else, can't trust you either, but if you're compromised, most of your actions don't really make sense… And I need someone to confirm I'm not going insane."

When an Admiral questions their sanity, the wise thing to do is call shotgun on the nearest escape boat. Jackson was never especially wise.

"So, you felt like getting this off your chest and I just happened to walk by?"

She shrugged again, "Something like that. Any advice?"

Half seriously, he replied "Seal every deck, allow only individuals escorted by a telepath to wander around, shoot anyone that breaks quarantine… Huddle under your desk, suck your thumb and wait for the situation to sort itself out."

That got a soft giggle out of the tired Admiral, "Bonus points for pragmatism, but…" She nodded towards the two Ghosts, "These two are the only Teeps we've got."

He shrugged, "Hey, I just work here. Am I dismissed?"

The Admiral seemed to ponder the question, then nodded, reminding the rookie that "What I just told you is confidential, of course, not a word to anyone." Despite the worrying news and even more worrying state of his commanding officer, all the sailor could think about was his bed and that's exactly where he headed.

Bunks on board the Rubicon used the UED concept; cryo pods build into the walls of a labyrinth of tunnels, three pods high with each pod barely large enough for a man to sit in it. These doubled as bunks and personal items storage with an opaque plate of plexiglass acting as the only barrier between the sleepers and the outside world.

Knowing there was someone aboard that might not be what they pretended to be, he pulled a set of wooden matches from his rucksack and pulled free the small smoke detector located above his head, taping the matches to the lower frame of his door, so it would light itself against the mattress' fabric should someone try to get in. He also taped the smoke detector just above the match, where it would immediately wail into his ears the moment it caught a whiff of smoke.

These detectors were not standard issue on Dominion warships, they were really just Dupont's mean of enforcing her no smoking policy. Tomorrow, Henry decided he would get himself a firearm and a personal bot who would act as a guard dog; he was going on half a year of unspent salary, surely he'd be able to afford a rudimentary model...

Finally at ease, the boy rolled on his back, arms propped behind his head, and watched as hypnotic figures danced across the ceiling, implanted into his brain by the computer screens during the day, as part of his Navy Commission preparation. He fell asleep still seeing algebra problems floating inside his eyelids.