From our helicopter it was easy to see the entirety of the Corundum Plateau stretching out below us. To our south there was a major mountain range, while the northeast was a series of cliffs leading down to the lowlands, and the west gradually disintegrated into the foothills. As for the plateau itself, it was largely grassland fading into forest towards the southern half. The sensor package almost immediately picked out flocks of wild laser sheep, several varieties of airborne predator, prolific exploding trees, and plenty of other horrendously dangerous lifeforms.

Despite the immense beauty and danger of the nature deserve below us, we still had a job to do. M1 quickly loaded up the first set of coordinates on the expedition helicopter’s navigation computer, and groaned when she saw where exactly it was saying we needed to go. Honestly, I was rather inclined to agree, given that the first site was a major nesting site for Brose’s Wyvern, Revision 58.

That little bit of information was a stark reminder that for all his amiability, Doctor Brose was still a reckless bio-engineer who enthusiastically took part in Bark’s national pastime of concocting horrendously dangerous lifeforms and releasing them onto Blackwood’s surface. Case in point, the Wyverns; they were horrendously territorial, flew in flocks of several hundred organisms, and Doctor Brose had somehow managed to cram a fully functional electron beam weapon into them. There was no way we could fly our helicopter in there, it would get shot down almost instantly. Similarly, going in loud was a good way to get ourselves killed.

After conferring for a few moments, we agreed that probably the best option would be to park the helicopter a kilometer or so to the south and draw off the wyverns in groups to kill them off until we could take out the rest without too many issues.

The landing of the helicopter went very smoothly all things considered, with no serious issues whatsoever. We found a decently clear area, lasered it clean of flora, and left M1 and M7 to guard our vehicle while the rest of us checked our gear and started making our way to the east, so that we wouldn’t accidentally lead the wyverns right back to our landing site.

We’d barely gotten half a kilometer before M2 raised a hand to halt and gestured towards what seemed to be a large pile of laser sheep dung as she noted over our internal radio transceivers “That pile of poop seems suspiciously large and also doesn’t smell right. Going to lase it on suppressive fire mode in case it’s a shocker.”

True to her word, M2 snapped up her battle laser and sent a pulse train right into the apparent pile of feces. Said object obligingly exploded, and the scraps abruptly started changing colors and twitching rapidly as the bits of tissue from the ambush predator M2 detected went through their death throes. I commented “Nice catch M2. Getting electrocuted by that thing would have sucked.”

That diversion over, we continued circling around the Brose’s Wyvern nesting grounds – taking care to avoid a passing flock of laser sheep on the way – and soon got close enough to start planning how we wanted to do this. It was M5 who noted as she hefted her mag rifle and leaned against a particularly large boulder “Those Wyverns take time to aim and their range with those particle beams is pretty short compared to our weapons; in addition, the lumpy terrain they’ve turned their nesting grounds into means they can’t all fire on us at once, and we’ve got some nice cover thanks to these rocks. If we just open fire from here we can probably kill a significant number of them before they can respond.”

I blinked, before I asked “We’ll be pinned down if we do this and probably need to keep an eye out for flanking. Are you sure this is a good idea M5?”

M5 shrugged, noting “We sure can’t sneak in, going in hot is suicide, and the terrain didn’t work out for our original plan of ambushes. I’m having a hard time figuring out a practical alternative here. Plus all our weapons fire is as close to silent and invisible as such things can get, meaning that they might not even figure out where we’re shooting from right away.”

M4 and M6 nodded slowly, clearly agreeing with M5’s logic. I sighed, noting “Guess we’re doing this, then.”

And so we carefully propped our weaponry over the tops of the boulders we’d found. I zoomed in on the pack of Wyverns using the smart scope of my battle laser and marked the targets I’d be hitting first on our tactical mesh. Soon we’d all agreed on which Wyverns each of us would shoot in our opening strike, and with perfectly coordinated timing we opened fire.

M5 and M6 actually shot slightly before M2, M4 and I. Mag gun shots had a noticeable time of travel, unlike laser pulses at this range, and we wanted our shots to hit simultaneously rather than being fired simultaneously. So we only opened up with our battle lasers when the first mag gun rounds impacted.

Our laser beams flickered rapidly across the mob of Brose’s Wyverns, auto-targeting optics zigzagging between Wyverns with lightning speed to engage the next target the instant the previous ones went down, needing only a fraction of a second to mission-kill each wyvern. Even as we lased away, the mag rifle fire from M5 and M6 was outright exploding any wyverns it hit, sending fragments of bone splintering outwards to injure any other organisms that happened to be standing nearby.

Within seconds it was done and we lowered our weapons; enough of the wyverns had been killed that we now had some breathing room. Then we heard the buzzing. We all whirled around only to see a swarm containing hundreds of thousands of flying insects flying straight towards us. I recognized them instantly as Madame Passy’s Psychowasps. Fuck.

Immediately I went into full combat-think, time seeming to slow as my brain ran at maximum speed. It took a mere fraction of a second for all of us to agree on a course of action. The psychowasps were just too small, fast, and numerous for individual targeting, even with raster blaster mode. If we tried to shoot them down individually, we were going to get stung to death in extremely short order. Fortunately our lasers weren’t limited to individual targeting.

A very quick adjustment to the laser optics defocused the beams from their normal tight beam to an angular cone nearly thirty degrees wide, with the pulsed mode switching off in favor of continuous wave operation. As expected, massive plumes of coolant erupted from the vents of our lasers even as the cones of infrared death quickly started incinerating whole swathes of the psychowasp swarm. M5 and M6 had drawn their sidearm lasers so they could contribute too, but those were passively cooled; they’d only be able to fire off bursts about a second long at a time, and they only had a quarter of the beam output of our battle lasers. So they were wisely holding fire as a last-ditch save.

Then the swarm split, forcing us to cover multiple angles at once instead of only needing to deal with a single massive swarm from one direction. Fuck, this was the intelligent flanking behavior that made Madame Passy’s magnum opus so dangerous.

I immediately called out over internal radio “I’ll take the center, M2 and M4 take left and right!” as we all hurried to keep the swarm of insanely aggressive wasps at bay. It was difficult not to panic and fall to wildly flailing my laser around, but it was also critical; in unfocused continuous mode it took noticeable dwell time for our battle lasers to fry a wasp, and to make matters worse the wasps were smart enough to try and dodge out of the beam before they burned to death. The dwell time required dropped off massively as the wasps got closer, but by the same token that just meant we were in even more danger.

There were a few moments where a bit of the swarm got past the cones of death from our battle lasers and M5 and M6 needed to save our hides with their carbines. In one notable case a few dozen psychowasps actually landed on my leg and started biting and stinging before M6 burned them off, leaving some notable scorch marks on my armor. Still, at the end of thirty five incredibly stressful seconds we’d managed to kill enough of the swarm that the remaining few thousand psychowasps retreated, doubtless off to find some other prey item to tear apart and replenish their numbers.

We all took a deep breath to calm down, before one of the remaining Brose’s Wyverns poked its head around our cover with its mouth open to blast us with its electron beam. Fortunately M2 was even quicker on the draw with her battle laser then the Wyvern was with its electron beam, and managed to put a pulse train right between its eyes before it could shoot us.

Of course just getting its head blown off wasn’t going to be enough to stop a Brose’s Wyvern, and it immediately charged at us with the razor-sharp claws on the leading edge of its wings extended. Not to put too fine a point on it, but we panicked and opened fire with everything we had. We only barely managed to take it down before it could finish prying off M5’s armor to eviscerate her.

As soon as we verified that M5 was uninjured and her armor was still good, I noted “Alright, let’s get this over with. Into the nest.”

And so we advanced towards the Brose’s Wyvern nesting grounds, finding a deserted collection of nesting mounds, any and all eggs conspicuously absent. Judging by rock scatter and other factors, the nesting grounds had been abandoned in a hurry after we opened fire. I quickly called over radio to M1 and M7 back at the helicopter “Keep an eye out for Brose’s Wyverns. They’ve evacuated their nesting site and are probably looking around for trouble.”

We got a reply back from the helicopter almost immediately, M1 saying “Thanks for the heads up M3. We’ll keep a watch out for Wyverns.”

Still, before going any further into the nesting site, we popped our support drones. They weren’t much more than a quadcopter with a laser pistol and a standard sensor package, but better to lose a few drones to an ambush than to take actual casualties.

The feeds from the drones quickly revealed that there were only a few remaining Brose’s Wyverns lurking about the nesting ground, and with such accurate knowledge of their location it was trivial for M5 and M6 to snipe them with their mag rifles before they could react.

With the Wyvern nesting grounds now clear, we could start looking around for that archival tape. What followed was an agonizing several kiloseconds of digging through the nesting site in search of a rock that wasn’t in fact a rock. We looked high, low, in the actual nests, beneath corpses, and every other nook and cranny we could think of. Then we found it, still perfectly sealed in its protective casing. There was some kind of disgusting slime growing on it that we really didn’t want to catch anything from, but we didn’t have a good way to clean it off without risking damaging the archival tape inside.

I sighed, and suggested “I’ll hatch a hermetically sealed carry bag for that thing. M2, you want to make a pair of tongs? M4, M5, M6. Disinfectant soap. ALL the disinfectant soap.” even as I cued my morph’s internal 3d printer to start manufacturing an airtight polymer bag full of anti-nanoweapon defenses. Judging by how the rest of my team was looking, they also weren’t too pleased by the state the tape was in, but they couldn’t think of a better alternative either.

Grudgingly everyone agreed with this course of action, and we waited for our internal printers to do their job. This took a few minutes for each of us, but soon enough my biofeedback informed me that I had an egg ready. Getting that egg out was a minor inconvenience on account of needing to lower the groin plate on my armor and unseal that part of the body glove, but soon I had my vulva exposed to the world and with a bit of a push I ejected the oblong spheroid I’d had cooking up inside me. I quickly re-sealed my armor, then with a bit of tapping I broke open the eggshell to reveal the bag I’d queued up from my internal fabricators.

Looking around, it seemed like everyone else was ready; M2 had her tongs, while M4 through M6 were holding a few unbroken eggs each, presumably full of the disinfectant soap I’d asked for. I held the bag open, while M2 used the Tongs to carefully drop the archival tape in. I sealed the bag shut, then called “Soap, NOW!”

M4 and M5 immediately provided by throwing their eggs at me and M2, splattering us with goo. I quickly smeared it all over the outside of the sealed bag and all the parts of me that had been in contact with it, making sure to scrub under my armor plates and inside the bodyglove, accepting the stinging chemical burns that resulted without complaint. I was taking absolutely no chances with a possible nanoweapon infection, and neither was M2.

We’d just finished up buttoning up our armor after that scrub-down session when we received some bad news from over the radio. M1’s voice came crackling over the channel “Bad news, at least fifty wyverns are closing on the landing site for the helicopter, we’ve got to relocate!”

That was a good reminder for us, and M4 replied “Understood. We’ve secured what looks to be an intact archival tape, and we’ll meet up with you as soon as possible.”

There was a brief moment of silence, before M1 sent again “Got it, our vector is West-South-West. We’ll try and loop around to pick you up if we get a clear line of travel, but there’s no telling when that will happen. Signing off.”

We all shared a glance at what we’d just heard, before M5 shrugged and said “I guess that means we’re going west, then.”

I nodded and said “Seems that way. Come on, let’s get clear of this nesting ground. The Wyverns will probably come back to investigate eventually.” and with that we started walking towards the hills bordering the plateau.

Shockingly we managed to avoid any more serious incidents for nearly two kilometers of travel after leaving the Wyvern nesting grounds. Yes we nearly got trampled by a herd of Stahlbeest, we had to incinerate a particularly toxic bramble thicket to clear a path, and several other minor annoyances, but none of us really got particularly injured.

Then I noticed a shadow moving across the ground in my peripheral vision. I looked up just in time to see a quartet of Brose’s Wyverns flying towards us and had just enough time to shout “WYVERN!” before they all opened up with their electron beam weapons, hitting all of us except M6.

Willpower didn’t fucking matter when you had a high-current electron beam penetrating your central nervous system. It directly fucked with the signals used to transmit commands to the motor system, even as it cooked you from the inside out with its radiation load. Yes there were redundant backups that could hypothetically take up the slack, but those were getting zapped too. All I could do was writhe in agony for what felt like forever until it suddenly stopped. I idly noticed a series of loud repeated cracking sounds as the torture ceased, but I wasn’t quite sure what it was until I got up to look.

As I agonizingly hauled myself to my feet sporting a shiny new set of internal radiation burns that my self-repair routines informed me would eventually be terminal without treatment, I looked up to see M6 lowering her mag rifle and changing the magazine. I couldn’t help but remark “We need to get off this planet.”

M6 nodded sadly, even as she started helping the rest of our party to their feet. She replied “Come on, while you were busy getting fried M7 called and told me that they’ve landed again; she also provided coordinates. We’re about three klicks away, if you think you can make it.”

I shook my head no, as I said “M6, you’re the only member of our group fit to fight right now; the rest of us are in terminal condition without treatment. Call the helicopter over and see if they can pick us up. We only need to transmit the data on the tape and Mindcast out, then we’re done with this planet completely.”

M6 nodded, before telling me “M1 and M7 are on their way. Just hang in there.”

I laughed bitterly, noting “I’m dying, but not that fast. As long as the helicopter gets here sometime in the next hour I’ll be fine.”

As if to spite me for tempting fate like that, that’s the exact moment my biofeedback informed me “Systemic nanoweapon infection detected. Soft tissue countermeasures ineffective. Blackbox guardians holding. Fabricator system compromised. Estimated time until nervous system completely compromised: four minutes.”

I immediately panicked and shouted “Scratch that scratch that! Nanowea-” and then I couldn’t talk anymore, as control of my vocal chords was seized from me.

M6 immediately grabbed one of the battle lasers off M4 and shouted “M3, are your blackboxes clean?”

I tried to nod, but my neck wouldn’t move. Hurriedly I pinged the only organic brain in my body to check if my cranium had been compromised. No response. Before the nanoweapon infesting my system could figure out what I was about to do, I drew my carbine and blew my head off, temporarily regaining total motor control for long enough to flash a “YES” handsign.

M6’s expression went grim, and she nodded in the affirmative even as she set the battle laser to that same unfocused mode we’d used against the psychowasps and opened fire.

When we later synchronized our memories, I found myself most identifying with the perspective of M6 for the next part of the whole ordeal. I’d just seen one of me blow her own head off in order to deal with a nanoweapon sabotaging her communications, barely managing to confirm that her blackboxes were clean. Immediately, I opened fire with the battle laser at maximum power on unfocused mode. RSU military-issue black box implants were made to be extremely heat resistant, specifically so that if someone got hit with an incurable nanoweapon all their infected soft tissue could simply be incinerated without compromising the integrity of the stored mind states.

That’s what I was doing now, stoically keeping my laser on M3, despite the gruesome scene of her flesh being carbonized and ablated away with frightening speed. Soon I spotted one of her black boxes in the mess, and I quickly checked that its temperature was in the correct range to have killed every single possible nanite before grabbing it. A quick ping verified that M3 was still alive and well in there, and I went back to incinerating the rest of her morph, grabbing a couple more black boxes as I found them.

I’d just finished reducing M3 to a carbon silhouette when the helicopter landed and M1 asked “M6, what happened?”

I simply replied “Nanoweapon infection. Managed to get M3 despite her doing a full scrub down when handling the drive, so we can absolutely guarantee that whoever handles the tape is going to get infected. All of us are probably infected already, so hurry up and transmit the data so we can get off this fucking horrible planet.” as I handed the bag containing the archival tape to M1.

M1 nodded in a panicking fashion, and we quickly got down to business cracking open its casing and slotting it into the tape reader. The spindle whirled around in an imperceptible blur even as our helicopter’s communication laser array used every last scrap of bandwidth available to send the data directly to our ship.

The wait was agonizingly long. Yes it only took a minute or so for the tape reader to run through the entire length of the archival tape, but with a dangerous nanoweapon in our systems that we had no way of knowing when it would take over, every second of delay was nerve-wracking.

Still, eventually it was done. M1 nodded, before saying “Alright let’s Mindcast out of here. Most injured goes first, and delete on exit.”

That was fairly obviously M3, and I slotted her black boxes into the data transfer slots without further delay. The indicator blinked to the transmitting position for a few seconds before returning to the idle state. M2, M4, and M5 went next, each sticking the scanning probe to their spines for a brief moment, then slumping over as their sending-selves were deleted. We shoved each empty morph out of the helicopter as we did this; we didn’t want to risk them getting back up and trying to kill us because of whatever horrible disease we’d all contracted.

That left just me, M1, and M7. The two of them looked right at me, before saying “You’ve been infected longest. You go next.”

I didn’t argue. I just grabbed the scanning probe and moved it into position. The next thing I knew I was back in a Mindcast bay along with the other six of me. The presence of Bud in one of her favorite mini-morphs meant we were almost certainly back in the Red Star Union, and Shen was curled up in the corner waiting for us to finish printing.

I’m not sure why in the world that particular thought popped up, but the first thing that came to mind to ask was “Excuse me Shen, but why haven’t we been reintegrated yet?”

Shen bluntly answered “You are all under psychological observation due to concerns about both possible mental contamination from the nanoweapon you contracted on Blackwood, and good old-fashioned trauma. Consider yourselves benched for the foreseeable future; reintegration is strictly forbidden until you all have a clean bill of mental health.” There was a brief pause before the spider continued “That said, I do have some good news.”

M3 shuddered slightly at the reminder of having that horrific thing in her body subverting systems one by one. Meanwhile M1 gestured for Shen to continue, even as she cuddled M3 closer for mutual comfort.

Shen’s carapace shifted colors to a gentle cream orange as he nodded, then he said “First, that archival tape you retrieved did in fact contain a usable copy of Captain Alex Fuller’s divination equation; we’ve got analyst teams using it now to narrow down the possible locations of Bark’s Finest. Good job getting that for us, even if we wish you didn’t have to go through that particular ordeal.”

I nodded solemnly, and Shen continued “In additional good news, we took the opportunity to buy all of Bark’s considerable immunology expertise while we were there, since it was incredibly clear they massively outclassed us in that regard. We now know exactly what it was that infected you, and rest assured that your new morphs are fully immune to it.”

M3 shuddered again, and asked “Our mission-”

Uncharacteristically, Shen chose that moment to interrupt “Madeline Zargosty 3. You are to consider yourself off-duty for the foreseeable future, and that is an order. Your mission is being continued by an instance of you from immediately before you diverged. M8 has already been fully briefed on the situation and will come visit you once her role in this operation is completed. Until then, your mission is simply to relax and recover from the events you went through, is that clear?”

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