Mila's Loss - The officers 4

Chapter 10 - The Queen

A/N: This is unedited other than grammar and spelling.  Tomorrow I'm leaving town for personal reasons.  I'll be back Wednesday evening.  Feel free to comment and I'll try and reply when I get a chance.

~~~ The queen responds

Since she knew how she was going to respond she sent her warrior bugs to go and take care of her wishes. She was presuming tomorrow they'd do a foray much like they did the last two days. Hopefully it'd remove some of the bots and she could recover them. Even if damaged it would provide a look inside the tech. If she could get several of the bots the more secrets, she could gather from them. It would definitely give her abilities other queens didn't have. Most queens kept a number of secrets from the others. They might have taken over a fair portion of this arm of the galaxy over, but it didn't mean they played well together.

There was a meeting of senior queens every ten years in a system which'd been classified as neutral. Any queen who tried something would have her ship blown out of space and her territory divided up amongst the nearest. It'd happened a few times centuries ago and then it pretty much stopped happening. It was going to be close to time for her to leave soon. At the rate her ship was being damaged she wasn't going to make it. The assumption was her territory and slave races were up for grabs. She had to stop the bots before then. At the rate they were causing more severe damage repairs were going to take a long time.

Chances were good they were going to keep running around and causing damage. She'd have to see how her response was going to work. If it did, she'd consider doing more. She definitely didn't want to have heavier weapons designed and issued. They'd be able to damage or kill her warrior bugs and get to her. The heaviest ones issued to the troops wouldn't injure them unless very lucky. If absolutely needed she'd send the warrior bugs with their weapons. She didn't want to do that unless absolutely necessary. Even they might not be able to take a bot out unless there was a massive number.

What she'd seen yesterday was definitely shocking. One shot and one bot took the entire team out. It was much like the other party only with heavier armor and weapons. That bladed weapon went through even the heaviest armor with out a problem. Just how strong were the bots and what was the blade made of. It looked like a dark metal though she wasn't positive what it could be. It could simply be a treatment to make it darker. Some of the lizards had a darkened blade. Now time to wait. She had a great deal of patience.

~~~ Holcum and the team

He was updating Lt. Cmdr. Wild about what had happened the day before, "As you know Ma'am, we found some food. It's being tested but so far is appearing as safe. We ran into a different type of alien and he, she, it maybe. Took one look and ran screaming away from us. Not sure why. Maybe it has never seen armor like ours before. I'd guess she'd never seen anything like us based on what the lizards have. Has anyone been trying to communicate with the lizard?"

She made a face, "Yes, but I have a feeling everything we're gathering is mostly swear words. They keep repeating though there are some variations. When we gave him the food and water, he did say something different but for all we know it was his swearing at the food." She shrugged, "All the various chemicals have been dumped down the toilet as you suggested. We took our time to keep from damaging the plumbing to much. We need somewhere to flush our septic tanks once dehydrated." There was a definite sound of disgust in her voice.

He and his cat were forced to yowl at the idea of the recycled water. They knew it was clean and pure with traces of minerals, but it was where it came from was distasteful, "I hadn't thought about that. Something which was brought to my attention was the need for a private section for encounters. Not knowing how long we're going to be here I'm not going to require everyone remains celibate. It just wouldn't be right. I won't be and Jace and Danal should be able to since they are mates."