Chapter 108: Something in the Blood.
Missiles tore overhead as Vessa and her pride drifted their MK5s across the rolling sands as projectiles impacted in their wakes causing the sand to kick up like splashes of golden water.
The Gipka were shelling one of the anti-air emplacements they'd discovered along their route and both the Raptorian Star Stalker prides were leading the charge while also calling in the targets for the Gipkas to hit from their positions.
"Whoo, I think we stirred these fuckers royally up anyone swear we poured a pot of boiling piss in their hive!" Tezz yelled from the pilot's seat of the next Surface Skimmer over to Vessa's left.
Tezz was the youngest of Alpha Pride and while she was not as outspoken as Jex she seemed to have taken on the role of the agitator who would annoy Cemmil endlessly in their fallen sister's wake.
Her energy was rather infectious, to say the least, and seemed to be perking up all of Alpha pride which Vessa was very grateful for in this troubled time.
"Watch your left side Alpha pride you have fast movers incoming!" the voice of their pride male Thomas came through their comms and Vessa swivelled her gun around just in time to see some of the new insect species that they'd begun encountering towards the outer edges of the Sand Home territory.
These bugs were essentially high-speed flying assault fliers, they reminded Vessa of wasps only much larger and with four wings rather than the normal two, they also seemed to have a plasma cannon grafted into their abdomen to replace their stinger and that gave them a far nastier sting in the tail, to say the least.
A small squadron of these creatures had taken off from one of the mobile hives they'd now encountered towards the edge of the desert.
These things seemed to have been deployed away from the bases located within the desert itself to protect the border between Sand Home and the Blood Plains, but now with the Clan and its ally's rapid progress towards driving the insects out of the deserts, the insects seemed to be bringing them to bare.
The attack wasps banked hard to try and target the rapidly moving Sand Skimmers of both Alpha and Beta prides as they led the formation's attack on the anti-air sites in the area.
They seemed to realise that the prides were the ones calling in the missile strikes and artillery from the rear of the column and that by taking them out first they would cripple the column's long-range abilities.
"Alpha and Beta prides scatter! Launch countermeasures and switch to air-burst," Vessa ordered via the comms.
Immediately Cemmil who was piloting their MK5 pulled a power slide across the sand kicking up a cloud of it in their wake as Vessa pressed buttons in the rear turret to fire off both chaff and smoke grenades in all directions.
The others were doing the same and pretty soon the entire area was blanketed with thick white smoke from the multitude of grenades that were laid in the sands spewing their contents into the air around them.
Vessa switched her visual systems over to thermal imaging which thankfully cut clean through the smoke with ease and allowed her to pick out the highspeed glowing shapes of the attack wasps that were bearing down on them.
The squadron of assault wasps opened fire into the smoke, their targeting being sent haywire by the loss of visuals and the chaff cooking their radar.
The high-yield plasma cannons they were equipped with sent high-speed balls of glowing green plasma ripping through the air and into the smoke causing bursts of sand to melt into glass where they impacted the desert sands all around the evading Star Stalkers.
The sand that the plasma hit melted into glass and formed little splash shapes like watching a pond having a skipping stone thrown over it and the water freezing in the stone's wake.
Vessa brought her turret around and lined her guns up on the nearest wasp, her suit's targeting system now synced with the weapon system of the MK5 displaying both the weapon's current ammo load out, the amount remaining and the estimated trajectory of the rounds once fired.
She flipped a couple of switches and the system switched over from the rotary guns to a series of missile launchers that were mounted on the rear of the turret area, causing them to raise on gimbal arms that would swivel to track targets.
The missiles it fired used a sophisticated laser targeting system that was unaffected by either the smoke or the chaff, but unlike normal laser targeting systems which required the user to maintain a lock during flight time this targeting system painted the target with a unique radioactive signature by hitting it with a series of pulses from the emitter array mounted above Vessa's head.
Once painted the missile would chase the target wherever they went and they were seriously manoeuvrable.
Vessa locked in the nearest wasp which was firing into the massive smoke cloud and pinged it with her laser targeting system, no sooner had the laser tagged the wasp than it began to pull some evasive manoeuvres of its own, obviously equipped with a warning system that let it know that it had been pinged.
From behind its wing struts, it fired off a series of bright burning flares which arced outwards like giant angel wings in the sky behind it but that wasn't going to help it now.
As she pulled the trigger there were two whooshes from above her and two of the small missiles left their tubes screaming into the smoke and towards their target.
Now these missiles didn't try to impact the target itself, they simply flew at it until they were close enough then they detonated sending a cloud of hyper-velocity shrapnel directly at the target, making it almost impossible to evade once it exploded.
It was basically a very high-tech version of the Flak-style shells that humans used during the Second World War to bring down warplanes.
But the really clever part was why you fired two of these missiles at once.
They had a smart pack hunter system that recognised that there was another friendly missile hunting the same target, so the two missiles would essentially talk to one another and split up to approach from two different angles essentially ensuring that even if one missed the other would hit, or best case scenario the target would be trapped between the two when they detonated trapping it in a giant cloud of deadly shrapnel hitting it from two sides at once.
The missiles burst out of the smoke, screaming straight at the massive wasp which as soon as it saw them pulled a high near vertical climb to get out of their way.
Both missiles split up and screamed skywards after it and as it banked left one of them circled it while the other chased it directly.
The wasp was so focused on the one on its tail that it seemed to miss the second one closing in on it from the side almost entirely, that was until it was too late.
Both missiles detonated with a bang that sent a huge cloud of metal ball bearings and shrapnel screaming into the air like a flying pair of Claymore mines.
The shrapnel tore into the armour of the wasp peppering it with holes but while these didn't take it down the fact that its wings were torn off definitely did, sending it crashing down head-first into the dunes from quite a height.
"Nice shot sister!" Cemmil yelled over her shoulder as she took them through a particularly tight turn to avoid a series of plasma shots that had been fired by the wasp's still-flying comrades as they tried to predict where the shooter was going to be.
From the smoke around them, more missiles took to the air as the rest of both Alpha and Beta prides fired off at their airborne attackers.
In literal seconds later all of the wasps were down and only their twitching and smoking remains were left, some of them were still mobile having crashed from only a few feet above the ground so they were now attempting to give chase on foot.
The wasps when on the ground raised themselves up on six spindly little legs and arched their tails up over their backs to shoot over their heads.
The Star Stalkers responded in kind with many of them switching back over to their rotary cannons and opening up on the walking wasps peppering them with both projectile and plasma shots of their own.
Some of the MK5s took some glancing blows from the shots being fired at them, Vessa and Cemmil's included.
The shot burst on their shields directly behind Vessa's head making her instinctively duck down into the armour of the turret.
"Fuck me that was a close one!" she yelled and Cemmil responded with a growl as she fought with the controls to correct their trajectory as the impact of the plasma had thrown them off course.
"I'm detecting a hit on your shielding is everything ok? Are you ok?" Thomas's voice cut through the private pride channel which he had now been added to as their pride male.
"We're good, just a lucky hit is all, we're good I promise," Vessa said as she turned her gun towards the walking wasp which had struck it lucky on them.
She spun it up and the cannon began spraying high-velocity plasma shot at the yellow and red insect's large bulbous head, trying to either blind it or take it out of the fight entirely.
As she was peppering the wasp's head with glowing blue plasma Vessa noticed something in the distance on her thermals, there was a heat bloom in the sand and she saw wasps taking off from it, that's when it hit her, the mobile hive had buried itself in the ground to avoid detection, like a fucking bouncing betty mine that popped wasps into the air whenever anyone got near it.
She instantly primed her feed over to their pride male in his Silk Spider.
"Are you seeing this our love?" she said and there was a brief pause before he came back.
"Is that what I fucking think it is?" he exclaimed.
"It's one of these fucking mobile hives that have been plaguing us!" Vessa yelled in triumph.
"Awesome work my little love, don't get close I'm gonna bring some fucking pain down on them, stand by," Thomas said.
"Viper one-two to GMF control over?" Thomas's voice cut through the primary comms system.
There was another brief pause before the sing-song voice of what was blatantly a Raptorian male came back to him.
"This is GMF control go ahead Viper one-two," he said.
"Requesting orbital fire mission, location of a high-value target has been identified by our scouts at the following co-ordinates," Thomas said listing off the co-ordinates that were embedded into Vessa's feed, he would also be piping the feed to both the command Titan and the GMF to justify the strike.
"Roger that Viper one two hold for confirmation," the calm little Raptorian said.
There was a brief pause that felt like a fucking eternity to Vessa and her pride as they continued to dodge fire.
"Target confirmed Viper one two GMF is on en route to get a firing solution, clear the area, I repeat clear the area, this is going to get pauking loud, GMF control over and out," the little Raptorian said and Vessa could positively feel his feathers ruffling through his voice from here.
"Alpha and Beta prides bug out, get back to the column we have orbital fire coming down," Thomas yelled into the comms and both prides broke formation and screamed back towards the relative safety of the armoured vehicles which were now finding a very big dune to park behind.
The comms suddenly sprung to life once again as Vessa and the two prides pulled into the gulley along aside the rest of the vehicles and quickly abandoned their MK5s to make a run for the Silk Spiders which had their ramps lowered waiting for them, in Vessa and her pride's case with their beloved pride male on it beckoning to them to hurry up.
"Heads down Viper team the Grand Matriarch herself is on the guns and wants to deliver a golden boot right up their collective tail hole direct from orbit," the controller said and moments later there was a series of dull booms from high above them.
The sound of the shells behind fired reached them a lot later than the massive railgun slugs reached their target on the ground that was for sure.
The massive slugs hit with such force that they turned the entire area of desert they impacted into molten glass that once again reminded Vessa of a pond freezing, only this time after someone lobbed a fucking depth charge into it.
The sand and the hive it was hiding at the impact point were completely vaporised by the massive Tungsten shells, these things hit with the force of a very high-yield nuclear weapon so they turned everything at the flash point instantly to vapour, though thankfully without any of the residual fallout and radiation that came with such weapons, though it did kick a column of sand up into the atmosphere in the shape of a giant golden mushroom cloud.
It was much like watching either a large asteroid strike or a nuclear weapon going off, it was both beautiful and haunting all at once, but upon seeing this kind of level of destruction first hand there could be no doubt in even the most dubious of minds of what kind of power Clan Mason and its allies could bring to bear if needed.
The wash of the heat and the blastwave following in its wake flowed over the vehicles leaving them unscathed thanks to the dune they were hiding behind but even in the periscope cameras that were peeking up above the dune, Vessa could see the intense heat rising off the sands.
"Do you think we got them?" Tezz asked with a note of excitement in her voice.
"Well if we didn't something tells me they are going to be a bit beyond any kind of headache medicine they might have," Thomas said turning to his pride with a grin plastered on his face.
The command Titan sent recon drones to quickly scout the area and ascertain the effectiveness of the fire and what they saw on the feed was truly incredible.
The impact point of the massive slugs was like a sea of crystal or glass, a massive bowl shape had been dug in the desert sands and simply melted into place as the intense heat had melted the sand that was being forced out of its way by the impact.
The sheer amount of kinetic energy that the slug had dumped into both the ground and the hive that had been buried under it was astronomical and these weren't even the biggest guns that the GMF had on it, these were only the mid-tier rail guns designed for either close range ship to ship combat or well this.
As her eyes took in the sight Vessa tried to imagine what it would look like from the perspective of someone on the ground witnessing some of their larger guns being deployed, like for instance the main gun of the GMF, the planet killer.
The main gun of that mighty Dreadnaught was said to be able to actually blow part of a planet's crust clean off before splitting it cleanly in two with a follow-up shot.
Vessa had seen pictures of the slugs the thing fired during her Star Stalker training where they were learning about their ally's capabilities that they could call on in times of dire need, these things were the size of an inter-city train engine.
Something that size made of pure tungsten must weigh tons in weight and for it to hit a planet travelling at the speeds that these guns were capable of was truly unthinkable.
"Viper one to GMF control, clean hit I say again clean hit, pass along our thanks to the Grand Matriarch and tell her we said good shooting, also say that I'd grab her a trophy from her hunt here but I don't think anything is left unless she wants a piece of glass or a handful of sand," the commander's voice came over the comms.
The GMF comms operator chuckled and then spoke.
"Yeah Roger that Viper one, she heard you and I don't think she's interested in taking sand as a trophy, call us if you need us and good hunting out there, GMF control over and out," the Raptorian male said before the comms line switched to the inter-vehicle line again obvious by an audible shift in the frequency quality.
"Viper one to all call signs looks like we're clear, time to move on, looks like we have our hole so let's punch through it shall we?" the commander said.
"Well looks like it's time for us to get back on the road again," Vessa said turning to look up at Thomas who had lowered his helmet.
"I wish you guys could ride with us for a bit, you know give us some time together but duty calls as it always does," he said softly as he reached out to gently stoke Vessa's scaly face.
She leaned into his touch as her pride sisters moved to surround their male at the centre of their little pride, all of them embraced him together and he did his best to embrace them all as one, little tricky when you only have one set of arms but he did his best.
"Don't worry our beautiful male, when our ride is done for the day we will have plenty of time to spend together and we will devote all of it to you," Vessa said.
"And besides after all day in the saddle we're definitely going to want something more comfortable to sit on so make sure that lap of yours is warmed up and ready to receive some saddle sore tail ends," Tezz said teasingly giving Thomas a light flick with her long tail and making him laugh.
"Now that's a promise that will be easy to keep," he said grinning at her.
"I too may wish to indulge in this lap sitting, so make sure there is room for me," Cemmil said with obvious embarrassment in her voice that made all of her pride sisters grin at their normally very surly sister.
"Well well, I never thought I'd see the day when a boy managed to get stoic Cemmi's feathers in a flutter, looks like Jex really does know how to pick em," Tezz said with a grin aimed at Cemmil who simply activated her helmet's tint function to hide her face.
Thomas planted his large human hand on Cemmil's shoulder causing her to look up at him as he smiled down at his new Raptorian wife.
"There will always be a place for you on my lap Cemmi and you won't even have to ask to take it because the permission is already given, all you need to do is plant that incredibly cute tail end in its rightful place," he said and Vessa could positively hear her sister's scales and feather vibrating in embarrassment through her armour.
"T-T-Thank you, Thomas, t-t-this offer honours me," she said her voice positively dripping with embarrassment.
"Oh now it's on sister, our pride male cannot get away with singling out your tail end for a cuteness score without grading all of his pride as well, just you wait our beautiful human, tonight you will be scoring Raptorian rears until you are sick of seeing them, and we expect on the very best and in-depth analysis in how you achieved each score!" Tezz said with a playful and defiant note to her voice making Thomas laugh.
"I'll be sure to get my scorecards ready though as to your second point about being sick of seeing them I doubt that's ever going to happen, but be warned, I'm a very harsh and very thorough judge and it may require some very deep analysis," he shot back giving Tezz a playful pat on the rump that made her tail shoot out ramrod straight before curling and swishing about like she'd stuck it in an electrical main.
"So bold!" she exclaimed before being dragged away by the rest of her pride down the ramp towards the MK5s with her tail still swishing about like it was trying to break free of her ass and make a break for their pride male who was simply chuckling at the sight.
Vessa jumped into her turret while Cemmil clambered onto the saddle and closed the armour panels around herself, then she glanced back at Vessa before looking around as it was to make sure none of the rest of their sisters was watching or listening.
"I'm glad that Jex chose him, he fit our pride so well, he is beautiful inside and out and I do believe he will lift us in a way that we have been very much lacking," she said seemingly forgetting that she was using their private pride comms channel.
"You're just hoping he lifts your tail first well game on Cemmi, game on," Tezz suddenly said and Vessa saw Cemmil stiffen in the pilot's seat as she realized her mistake.
"Now now ladies, no trying to queue jump like I said the scorecards will be nice and warmed up by the time we park up for the night," Thomas said with an obvious note of amusement in his voice as he watched Cemmil sink lower into her seat from the ramp of the Slik Spider.
"I want more than those cards warm human boy, make sure those silky smooth hands of yours are as well, I swear to the Great Tree if your hands are cold I'll warm them up between my thighs before I let them anywhere near my tail end!" Tezz shot back.
"You Raptorian girls really don't seem to grasp the concept of threatening a guy with a good time now do you?" Thomas said before waving them off as they all pulled out from between the dunes and sped off into the desert, or rather what was left of it after the Grand Matriarch had unleashed hell from above on it.
It looked like the commander was spot on, with the destruction of the mobile hive in their path Viper squadron had punched clean through the ring of defences that the insects had set up to prevent the Clan and its allies from breaching the Blood Plains.
The difference in the terrain was truly startling and it took Vessa a hot minute to realise why the place was named so.
When she'd heard the name she'd always kinda imagined a place that had big slimy tendrils everywhere and grey ground, with red rivers that looked like blood flowing through it.
But now as she saw the place it finally clicked home, Velon blood was purple, not red.
The place was lush and filled with plant life and animal life of every different size imaginable, but everything had a very distinct purple tinge to it which was thanks to the bright purple of the Velon blood that seemingly all the creatures of this world shared in common.
it was also present in all the plant life as well though purple was not the only colour present here, there were vivid shades of reds, yellows and blues but oddly no greens.
there didn't seem to be a single speck of green in any direction and Vessa wondered if that was because the Velon sun used a very different light frequency to feed its little botanical worshipers.
However she really didn't have too much time to admire the scenery as with this new terrain came a whole new set of obstacles for them to overcome, namely trees, lots and lots of them.
"Ok guys there is no way in hell that the Silk Spiders are gonna fit between these things let alone the Titans and I'd rather not carve a massive battle scar in the landscape by bulldozing our way through it, so let's split up and find a path that our guys can drive those fucking behemoths through shall we, anybody find something shout it out and we'll relay it back to the column, dismissed," Vessa said over the Star Stalkers private channel.
Instantly the vehicles split up and began weaving their way through the trees sending their little drones up to do some high-level recognisance to find a way through the massive forest.
As she drove Vessa also remembered that this was where they were due to link up with Spectre, so hopefully they were already on the ground and situated, it would be nice not to have a running battle over every inch of this place for once.
It took them a few hours to both locate and plot out a route through the densely forested area for the large vehicles following in their wake but as soon as they saw the first of the Titans manoeuvring its large bulky mass between the large trees they knew it had been worth it.
Vessa knew that there was no way in hell that the massive vehicles would be able to move through the much narrower gaps in the trees without bulldozing their way across the landscape without careful course-plotting here.
But she also realised that if she knew this then there was a damn good chance that the insects did too as they were pretty far from stupid, so being on the lookout for ambushes was going to be high on their priority list as this landscape there were plenty of places to fucking hide.
Which unfortunately was a prediction that came true all too early.
As Vessa and her people had formed up into a much narrower V-shaped group to navigate the fire break they'd found running through the forest that the column was now using to move through there was a sudden bright flare from the shields right next to Cemmil's head.
"Holy shit we're under fire!' Vessa yelled as another impact hit the shield right next to her own head less than a second later.
It seemed that the ambushers were using guerrilla tactics and had timed their shots to take out both the driver and gunner of their vehicle at the same time but hadn't counted on the MK5 having energy shielding protecting its occupants.
There were similar flares from the shields of the other Surface Skimmers as they too received fire from their unseen assailants causing the vehicles to split up and their gunners to attempt to locate their assailants.
Visual sweeps of both the trees and the bushes revealed fuck all as Vessa rotated her turret in search of where the sniper fire was coming from so she switched to thermals which to her dismay revealed the exact same amount of fuck all.
But that's when she caught a stroke of luck as a shot slammed into a tree as Cemmil pulled an evasive manoeuvre in order to attempt to throw off the sniper's aim.
As the glowing plasma shot hit the tree next to them sending an explosion of burning splinters into the air Vessa was able to track the dissipating heat trail of the searing hot plasma shot right back to the vague area where it was fired from.
It came from the branches of the tree about three hundred meters ahead of them and Vessa swivelled her guns around to line up on the tree to her surprise she saw no thermal signature in the tree until the hidden bug fired again.
"They've got thermal shielding! track the shots and fire!" she yelled into the comms as the sniper's high-velocity shot hit their shielding causing it to sparkle and flare bright blue and green as the plasma burst on it.
Vessa opened fire with the MK5's rotary cannon sending a torrent of red hot lead into the tree where the shot came from and thanks to the sheer amount of lead in the air she managed to score a lucky hit though it didn't appear to be a lethal one.
There was a burst of heat on her thermals where her shot connected with the hidden sniper bug sending a splash of hot blood onto the bark of the tree behind it but other than the blood itself and the hole she had made in its carapace she could not see it, it was like it simply blended in with the ambient temperature of the surroundings.
Remembering something she had picked up during her training with the advanced Clan Mason armour systems Vessa switched her visual systems over to a mode designed to pick up electro-static discharges.
This was the mode that the Guardian of Males had used to identify and locate the Mimic he had slain to protect the males and male children that had earned him his title among her people.
No sooner had the mode kicked in and flicked the world into a golden-tinged representation of itself than the bugs lit up in the trees.
They were spread out but there didn't seem to be that many of them but from what she could see of them they were moving near constantly, they were firing a single shot and then moving to another firing spot in order to confuse their targets so she had been very lucky to catch the one she'd clipped with her bullet.
"Switch to electro-static vision!" Vessa ordered through the pride command channel and no sooner had the gunners done so than their firing patterns instantly changed as the hidden sniper bugs became visible between the trees in which they hid.
As soon as they seemed to realise that they had been rumbled the bugs tried to disengage and flee into the forest and while two of them made it two were not too lucky.
One of which was the one that Vessa had clipped, she had been tracking it as it moved between branches in the trees and she'd noticed that it was missing one of its four arms which was obviously the result of her high velocity shot clipping it.
As soon as it jumped to a large branch in order to take a final parting shot at the MK5s below it Vessa gave it the good news with her rotary cannon.
The burst of high-velocity slugs tore the branch it was standing on to splinters and the bug along with it.
its body tumbled from the height and hit nearly every branch on the way down before coming to a rest at the base of the tree where Vessa kept her gun trained on it just in case.
The second kill came from Wyvermina who was a member of Beta Pride, the bug had leapt right into her line of fire as she was rotating her gun to track one of its sisters and she had instinctively pulled the triggers sending a burst of high-velocity fire clean through it while it was still in the air.
The bullets had punched the bug clean out of the air and killed its forward momentum sending it crashing down to the ground far below where it spazed out like it was being hit with a constant shock of high-voltage electricity as its nervous system tried to make sense of being fucking dead.
The other two were a lost cause they were long gone into the dense foliage of the forest canopy.
"Shall we pursue boss?' one of Beta pride chirped into the comms.
"Negative, let's secure these two bodies that we've got here, both the commander and the alliance are gonna need to know about this before anyone else walks into an ambush by these things, is everyone ok is anyone hurt?" Vessa said looking around herself as the other Surface Skimmers pulled up next to hers.
"No injuries but they got through our shields a couple of times," one of Beta Pride said hopping off her MK5 to inspect some damage to the vehicle's light armour plating.
She pulled what looked like a rather large spike of some kind out of the armour and held it up.
"Check this out boss looks like they've learned that plasma doesn't cut it against our shields and have gotten wise," she said tossing the oddly shaped slug up to Vessa who caught it and held it up to inspect it.
The thing looked like a cross between a thorn and an insect stinger but was far heavier than its slender form would be indicating that it was filled with something rather hefty like lead or possibly tungstan.
The outer skin of the thorn was made from what looked to be a rather dense version of their resin composite but that sent a shiver down Vessa's back as if that was the case then they could produce these things en masse incredibly quickly and from what she'd just seen these things seemed to ignore their shielding all together, which could mean some serious casualties.
As the column pulled up to the group of Star Stalkers all of the commanders dismounted and headed up to meet with Vessa as she stood next to the two bodies they'd now retrieved and placed into the road between their vehicles.
"So these are the sniper bugs you called about," Misty said leaning down to look at the insects which were far more slender than the standard warriors they'd seen so far.
The creatures actually looked rather stick-like with their elongated bodies and limbs, so even if their camouflage failed them their natural shape and carapace colours would keep them hidden from all but the sharpest of eyes.
They had four arms with incredibly thin hands that looked like twigs on the ends of them.
Next to them on the ground were the weapons that they had been using which themselves looked almost wooden with the amount of camouflage that had been applied to them.
"They don't show up on thermal at all unless you breach their carapace, so either their outer carapace is designed to hide thermal signatures or they've got an incredible cooling system that lowers their temperature to blend in, and check this shit out," Vessa said tossing the thorn-like bullet that had been pulled from one of Beta pride's MK5s.
"What's this?' Misty asked as she caught it holding it up to inspect as the other commanders leaned in to look at it.
"That is the projectiles those rifles fire when they are not using plasma shot, they punch clean through our shields like they are not even there, if they had opened with the fucking things rather than plasma both me and Cemmi would in a world of shit right about now as they had us both bang to rights," Vessa said feeling another shiver pass down her spine.
Thomas moved to put his arm resuringly around her shoulders and he pulled her into his side causing her to wrap her arms around her pride male's waist seeking the reassuring feel of his large human body.
It unsettled her and rattled her to her core that his newly formed pride so very nearly had two fewer members to it and images of him crying over two more small coffins with her remaining sisters flooded her mind.
It seemed Thomas sensed her fears and he gently reassuringly squeezed her shoulders.
The commander looked up from the slug and Vessa could feel the grimness to her expression despite her visor hiding her face.
"The alliance is going to need to hear about this, I'll contact the GMF for a transport ship for these bodies and weapons so that they can be analysed by both the science and medical hives, but from this moment onwards everyone works in pairs, no exceptions I'll start a battle buddy program, these snipers are a very real risk," she said and with that she turned and headed back to the command Tiant, it seemed things were really ramping up now.