A resistance warship flies into battle against the Conglomerate, a mecha-company conquering planets for minerals and slave labor. When the ship crashes above the plains, the five people on board battle for survival across their world, pursued by th...
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A screaming cry of a Conglomerate Shrike breaks the glass of the night's peacefulness.
The Gunner is up immediately, hands checking the safety on her rifle, already sighting across the sky for the monstrous shadow. The Recruit is groggily helped up by the Mechanic, the Double hastily putting out their fire with a smothering or loose dirt. Without the firelight, four pairs of wide eyes adjust to the starlight looking for that telltale dooming shadow of the Conglomerate's most deadly behemoth creation.
All of them have heard the stories, and unfortunately two of them have encountered Shrike's before. Similar to the warbeast made for field battle, Shrike's are aerial combat amalgamations of the leathery avian species that used to fly the skies of the Conglomerate's homeworld of Thethe. Shrike's are aerial predators, bred to hunt both in day and night, with claws capable of rending almost any material, taking starships out of the lower atmosphere with vicious delight. They are also trackers, imbued with unnaturally keen vision, sharp hearing and an ability to track movement using a subvisual wave detection sensory organ.
The four of them crouch, not saying a word, each knowing that sudden movement or sound could attract the Shrike to their location.
"Can we hide from them?" The Recruit asks querulously.
"Not sure there is much point in that now," the Gunner says, gesturing with her chin to the edge of the clearing. The Recruit unconsciously grabs the Double's wrist tightly, eyes widening to the size of full moons.
Conglomerate berserkers are walking towards them through the tall grasses, fanned out in a semi-circle that is slowly closing.
Berserkers are the epitome of the lengths to which the Conglomerate genetic manipulation has sunk in the pursuit of even more feral methods of planetary subjugation. Some are barely recognizable as humanoid any longer. There are soldiers, mad things in their regiments, that have chosen augmentation at its most grotesque. There are fins and spines, extended digits and truncated limbs, claws and talons. Whatever used to be human no longer is.
The Double is gentle as she pulls the Recruit behind her, moving slowly and never taking her eyes off what is stalking towards them. The Shrikes overhead are screaming at a subsonic wavelength that vibrates the eardrums with air currents. It grates on the inner ear fluid, unbalancing a homeostatic mechanism, making it harder to concentrate. The Mechanics has his pistol out, the Gunner standing at his side with narrowed eyes, both hands on her rifle.
"Oh me dear, what do we have here?"
The four of them whip around to see a bald, reed thin man push past his patchwork, monsters of men to stand in front of the fugitives, a leering smile on that pale face of him that reminds the Recruit of a deep-sea predator. His crisp uniform and pins identify him as a Conglomerate captain, a regimental leader of the compound amalgamations of man and monster at his back. His hairlessness compared to the finned and furred mutants he commands makes him seem slick and sinister, a blade amongst weeds.
