"There are many races that have physical adaptability. From the ability to thicken their skin to adapt to high gravity to even being able to adapt as a living organism to their environment within days, months, weeks, years. The ability to adapt to their environment via tool use and protective equipment creation is a standard with most races.

"Then what, you may ask, gives the Terran Descent Human the reputation for being one of the most, if not the premiere, adaptive sentient organism we know of?

"No, looking to your anatomy and biology textbooks won't help you. True, they have a three layer epidermis measured in millimeters with the ability to thicken rapidly. Yes, they have excellent heat retention and dispersal biological systems.

"No, it isn't their cybernetics, symbiotes, or genetic engineering.

"Ah, now you're looking at your psychology textbook.

"Yes, there it is.

"You see, the Terran Descent Human advantage for environmental adaptation is psychological. Properly motivated, a TDH can endure almost any suffering up to the point that other species would die of traumatic physiological damage.

"Terran Descent Humanity has two sayings that are applicable to this study module.

"Life is pain.

"Something gain without suffering is worthless.

"Now, turn the page to "Terran Descent Humanity, cultural and group self-delusion". - Introduction to Intermediate Terran Descent Humanity Studies, New Rigel University of Applied Knowledge.

Commander Jane Marcus Prastini strode across the battlefield in her Mobile Armored Fabrication Combat Unit, the footsteps of the massive two hundred and fifty meter mechanized combat robot making the ground shudder.

Square cubed died screaming with the invention of graviton systems, she thought to herself.

Before her there were multiple Atrekna mobile command globes fleeing from her forces.

One took a missile to the bottom and there was the snap of phasic energy as the crystal anti-grav system gave out.

The command globe fell to the ground and Commander Jane popped it twice with a munition she'd come up with during the fight.

A suspension gel that converted to thick hazy vapor upon exposure to atmosphere. That was a standard, but it had required a little bit of template tweaking and going through the new updates before she found it.

A crystal developed on Smokey Cone itself.

She had empowered it with a standard particle generator once the crystal was fabricated and ground into microscopic grains.

The globe was hit by two of the munitions and suddenly vanished in a cloud of smoke laced with suspension fluid. The cloud twinkled and glowed gold as the chronotrons embedded in the crystal suspended in the mist popped in and out of existence.

The Atrekna in the globe screamed. Two grabbed onto each other as the massive fingers of the lemur warmek grabbed the globe and lifted it up.

TOTAL WAR AUTHORIZATION flashed in Commander Jane Marcus Prastini's vision block, in the upper right corner, just past her peripheral vision.

She aimed the scanner/deconstructor on the back of her mek's massive hand at the globe, ignoring the screaming Atrekna.

She tore apart the globe, scanning it at a submolecular level, scanning the particles that made up the parts of the atoms. Cateloguing and scanning the energy flows and atomic particle spins.

The Atrekna screamed as they were torn apart over the course of several seconds.

Jane didn't care much. The suffering of the Atrekna didn't bother her at all.

The whole time she kept moving forward, following the Atrekna that were fleeing what was left of the field of battle.

She knew they'd made a mistake.

They had given her 154 hours to prepare and her battlefield control had grown exponentially after hour 38 when she had managed to get her Master System Control Unit repaired.

By the time they had landed the only temporally unsecure areas were the ones she had chosen and either mined or surrounded with autonomous weapon systems armed with temporal reflex triggers and temporal lensing targeting systems.

Her systems beeped as it corrected a minor flaw in the last few scannings.

If she wanted to, she could build a cloned Atrekna and load it with Born Whole memories now.

She smiled as she typed with one hand, the other hand jamming a Countess Crew Strawberry and Mantis Shrimp fruit pie into her mouth, letting the robot's automatic systems follow the Atrekna.

She brought up some of the older templates, moving a few things around.

Remove the A4-N0-LD biological camouflage system, replace it with Atrekna biological systems, use the last fifty or so Atrekna she'd ripped apart while scanning them to randomize features. There wasn't much difference between them that was easily noticeable, but phasically there were a lot of differences and the computer had identified nearly thirty thousand variables in their appearance, sweat and pheromone signal systems, and phasic aura.

She looked it over and smiled, moving it to a tissue press system as she tossed the paper wrapper into the disposal and grabbed a can of Bingo Cola out of the fridge without looking.

She'd use the basic hyperalloy endoskeleton chassis.

Rather than use the front of the Atrekna skull she modified the tissue press and the machine fabrication unit to put something else hidden behind fat deposits to conceal it.

She'd upload it to the Autonomous Combat Unit master system as soon as she set up a hyperlink so she could log her reports.

That made her sigh and sag. She knew she forgot something.

She tabbed up a micro-ansible as well as the rocket systems to lift it out of orbit on countergrav and graviton drive systems. It wouldn't have great reach, but it would be able to hit the hypercom wave if it had reached this deep into Lanky territory.

She kept stomping forward, the mechs and supporting units behind her slaughtering the Dwellerspawn that the Atrekna threw at her. She could sense their panic, their knowledge that they were on the receiving end of the ass kicking for a change was throwing them into confusion.

Their attempts at defense were sporadic at best.

There was only a single t-shift area left and every Atrekna on the planet was heading straight toward it.

She checked her sat-recon, the micro-sats delivering crystal clear images. She shifted through the phasic scans, the chrono scans, and every other type of scan she had been able to tab up.

Dropping the empty can and grabbing another one, enjoying the buzzing feel across her teeth from the Bingo Cola, she silently thanked the researchers on Smokey Cone for their efforts.

It made the Atrekna stand out like a zit on a joygirl's ass.

Jane grinned as another combat globe caught a missile in the underside, shattering the crystals that provided levitation and propulsion. She double-tapped it with chrono-maskers and took three long steps forward, her mek's footsteps shaking the ground.

She made sure booming laughter echoed from the speakers as she bent down and grabbed the globe.

"FEE FI FO FUM!" she roared as she lifted it up.

The six Atrekna inside were obviously doing their version of screaming as she lifted up her fist and popped open the iris for the deconstructor/scanner/reclaimator.

"I SMELL THE BLOOD OF A PURPLE DUM-DUM!" the speakers boomed as she tore apart the globe and its occupants even as she kept walking forward. She made sure the slight physical, phasic, and appearance differences were entered into the database.

Up ahead was some kind of intricate phasic and chronotron construction. A drone got a good look at it and she sent scanning drones at it in a cloud, all flashing lights and making horrific buzzing noises.

Just to be a bitch, Commander Jane had the drone swarm organize itself so the cloud would look like a giant dick from the point of view of the Atrekna at the t-shift point.

She loved this part, where she was so dominating she could mock and belittle her opponent.

There's no lobby or game code of conduct out here to protect your little feelings, scrubs, she thought to herself, grinning. It's just me and you and the Digital Omnimessiah isn't watching this fight, she thought as the Atrekna point defense started ripping apart her drone cloud.

It didn't matter, her drones swept onto the t-shift field and through it, coming back around for another look again and again until the point defense systems wiped them out.

The scans came back and she frowned, tabbing up another drone swarm, adjusting their sensors, and sending them out to get her another look at the construct. She wiped her mouth and grabbed a Liquid Hate, cracking open the can as she stared at the results.

It was some kind of gate, not a temporal shifting facility like she had originally tagged it. She could see the vast sections that were warped and twisted, other sections that were fading as they were denied energy.

You repurposed it quickly, but where do you go? she wondered.

As she got within ten miles of the t-shift field her long range scanners trilled, yanking her attention to them.

The other planet, on the other side of the stellar mass, was ripping itself to pieces as tens of thousands of crude shuttles made the shift to jumpspace.

Jane nodded. The Atrekna must have managed to overwhelm the defenders and they'd chosen to break the planet rather than let the Atrekna have it.

She had intended on going to help them once she wiped out the forces opposing her, but now, according to her long range sat systems, there wasn't any use.

She doublechecked her timers. They all had over two centuries to go and there was a few devices in the Oort Cloud that had instructions to watch for any Space Force vessels and transmit the data about the devices she'd buried in the crust and mantle of the planet so that they could be disarmed or triggered, depending on what Space Force found.

Commander Jane stared at the gateway as a half-dozen combat globes swooped into it, two of them smashing against one another in their haste to get away. She frowned as she took another swig of Liquid Hate and wiped her mouth.

Working quickly as the distance dropped she fabbed up additional protection for her warmek and gave instructions to the autonomous warfare facility. When she went through the gate it would run off another copy of her to control the systems.

She leaned back and let the two minute deep level scan take place, hating the feeling of little claws on her brainstem and the weird tickle she always got at the top of the crack of her ass every time she had a deep scan done.

When it was done, the Atrekna facility was less than a mile off.

Commander Jane could see the facility, see the open gate.

It was less than a hundred meters tall. Two-thirds of a ring.

The Atrekna started putting up heavy fire to try to drive her back.

"Jane-One, I'm online," her own voice said as the window opened up. She wasn't surprised to see that her copy was naked.

"Jane-Two, everything running good on your end?" she asked.

"Looks good. Clone bank ran me off with armpit hair and it itches like the devil," Jane-Two said. "You ready?"

"Ready," she said. She winked and held up the Liquid Hate. "See you in the recombination lobby."

Her copy nodded. "I'll hold down the fort here. I'll get an elven court to the other planet."

"Wish me luck. Jane-One, out," she said.

Her copy nodded and Jane closed the window. She grabbed her plastic mouth guard and put it in, then reached out and put her hands and feet on the controls for the first time in hours.

The Atrekna stared at the giant plodding robot that had swept everything aside. The paint was scuffed here and there, a few armor plates were pocked and cratered, but so far not even the massive Ohm Class slavespawn had been able to so much as slow down the massive war machine.

Still, they could keep damaging it while it walked forward.

Except...

The massive mech, in defiance of physics and everything else, broke into a lumbering charge that quickly went from the ten mile an hour walk to ninety-miles an hour dead run that should have broken its feet off at the ankle or caused the legs to sheer apart.

**STOP DOING THAT YOU LEMUR** one of the Ancient Ones shrieked.

The giant mech jumped over the Atrekna, landing on one foot on the other side of the defenses.

The Atrekna stared in shock as the massive warmek didn't bother getting its balance, didn't bother with standing up.

Instead, it did the impossible.

It threw itself forward, arms over its head, hands pressed together.

And dove through the shift gate.

And vanished.

For a second the Atrekna hoped that with the disappearance of the massive mek, which had obviously been controlling the battles, the defense would stop.

Except a drone swarm was coming in, broadcasting a hologram of a female lemur's face.

"YOU THOUGHT THE PLANET WAS UNDEFENDED!" the laughing lemur's voice boomed across the battlefield even as the point defense started lashing the drones of the swarm.

"BUT IT WAS DEFENDED BY ME, COMMANDER JANE MARCUS PRASTINI!" the voice laughed.

The Atrekna had a moment to feel despair.

The charges buried under the ground of the t-shift zone at the depth of two hundred meters detonated.

"Confederate Heavy Atomic Demolition Mine - 1.5 Megaton Range - One Each"

-----

Everything contracted and expanded at the same time.

Everything turned inside out and upside down.

Dozens, scores, hundreds of herself spanned out in every direction, all of them different based on choices made in their lives, in history, in the actions of others.

Commander Jane Marcus Prastini grabbed the 'oh-shit' bars on either side of her command cradle and gritted her teeth on the soft plastic of the mouth guard.

She lived her life a thousand times, each time with different decisions leading to wildly different outcomes.

Finally it was over and the warmek exited the gate.

She got its arms up, landing on her hands, elbows, and knees. Struts screamed and alarms howled, but the heavy skeletal structure held.

The graviton systems spun up and the screens cleared as Jane moved the mech, and her own body, to the recovery position. Jane sliding out of the couch and onto the decking in front of her.

Knee down, fist down, one fist up, head bowed. Breath deep to the count of ten.

There wasn't any incoming fire.

She stood up, sitting back down in the command couch, and activated the systems, the controls popping out of the surfaces they'd recessed into.

Survey, she thought.

Reddish-purple sun, terminal giant phase.

Clear sky, light the night sky.

O2 levels a point low. Nitrogen three points up. CO2 high. CO low. More argon than normal.

Cool outside.

Thick psuedo-fungal growth preferred by the Atrekna.

She ordered the warmek's master computer to run a physics check as she slowly turned and looked at everything.

She could see the gate off in the distance. There was an energy bridge, or perhaps a temporal-energy conduit line. It was shattered above her but the two ends were rapidly reaching for each other.

Mountains. Check.

The physics check came back good and the computer ID'd where she was as the primary dimension with an accuracy of 80%.

There was a large Ohm Class Dwellerspawn nearby, idly munching on the thick green and purple mat of fungus that covered the ground that was shot through with green and red veins.

Jane walked slowly over to it, watching her computers running error checks and template CRC checks.

The Ohm Class just stood there as Jane moved next to it, the back of the massive creature coming up to her chest.

She patted the top of it even as she brought up the technical data she'd shared with the Farm Yard Guard. A pheromone dusting that would calm it down when combined with flashbangs.

It showed no interest in anything besides munching on the moss and plants.

The computer beeped, telling her that it had ID'd where she was.

High 'up' in the galactic arm spur, Confederate end (aka anti-coreward) of the Long Dark, roughly twenty light years from the edge of the Long Dark.

She looked around slowly again, then started launching stealth drones even as she knelt down next to the big Ohm Class Dwellerspawn.

Her fabricator beeped and Jane activated the system, covering her mech with a firm light hologram.

Now there were two Ohm Class Dwellerspawn contently munching on the thick moss. The moss where she had landed after the conduit had shattered/failed was already regrowing, covering the furrows she dug in the sand.

Let's see what kind of fight this is going to be, she thought to herself as she reached for the freezer, watching the conduit overhead.

Her smile grew wide as she saw a half-dozen combat globes, all of them damaged slightly, whip by overhead inside the conduit. She estimated their speed at Mach-12. The globes of the ones she had faced had all been transparent with a slight gold sheen and a bluish tint at the top. These were silver with an orange tint at the top.

They passed right over her.

Her smile grew even wider.

Improvise.

Adapt.

Overcome.

Lucy, I'm home... she thought.