
Sama Saa, Priest of the 2nd Order, Commander of Fleets so
vast they could, and frequently did, blot out the stars,
stood like a mountain in his 18 meter tall ceremonial 
battle mech. It's armor was a bright gold rather than the
dull gray of proper battlesteel, but it still made him an
avatar of destruction. He waited impassively as the huge
doors to the sanctum swung open on smooth joints. Hor Hoss
had forged the doors from the bodies of the iron giants
after he slew them in battle, and they were far stronger
than even the toughest of modern materials. The science
that Hor Hoss had bequeathed to his followers could not
hope to match the war god's own divine power. No power
in the universe could budge the doors of Hor Hoss without
access to the inner sanctum. If Terra was swallowed by
a black hole tomorrow, Sama Saa was confidant that the
doors would still be whole at the end of days.

Even in his mech, it took Sama Saa a long time to walk
down the long empty hall of the sanctum. The wall was
lined with trophies from cultures and peoples that had
fallen to the church of Hor Hoss. Sama Saa had put many
of them there himself. He was the greatest strategist of
his generation, though Priestess of the 3rd order Mina Mas was
considered a better tactician. If Sama Saa felt any fear,
it was impossible to tell from the bounding gait of his
mech or the serenity on his face.

"War Father, I come before you with my blade broken and
my neck bare. I am not worthy to wear your vestments.
I place my life in your hands with my eyes open in the
knowledge that whatever you decide will be just." As he
spoke Sama Saa drew the great energy sword at his side
and broke it over his knee. He dropped his shields, then
retracted his helmet. The mech was so large that the helmet
was more of an upper hatch, but it was the best he could
do to honor the spirit of the old words.

Hor Hoss looked at his priest and made a fist. The energy
sword on the ground crumbled to dust. "You will spend the
next three years working up a new fleet based off of Morray
5. Admiral Bana Bin has been working on a series of new
designs, and he has just laid down berths for 100 thousand new
capital ships. When those ships go on their maiden voyage
in a year and a half you are to have assembled the spacers
to fly them.

Sama Sah was stunned. He deserved to die for his failure,
and his god was not just giving him a second chance, but
the largest fleet ever created. "Lord, I don't understand."

Hor Hoss flickered, and for a moment Sama Sah was looking
at the barbarian lord he had been in his mortal life, a
wild man brimming with physical power, naked from the waist
up with a massive ax clenched in his fist. It was only
for a moment, and then the war god once again assumed the
regal aspect of an aristocratic naval commander which he
normally choose to wear. "It is not given to you to understand
this thing. Not yet. All will be revealed in due time. For
now you need only know that the young queen of Fen is
perhaps more than she appears. It is no shame to have been
bested by her. Go now."

Feeling cheated of the chance to regain his honor,
Sama Sah walked back down the long hall with an empty
scabbard and fear in his heart. He had no fear for himself.
He had not felt personal fear since he was 9 and his mother
told him that it was time to become a man. No, he felt fear
for his god. What could have Hor Hoss so worried that he
would deny his own priest the opportunity to be redeemed.

In that moment Sama Sah realized that he had finally found
purpose. He had believed himself a man of purpose for his
whole life. He served his god better than any man or woman.
He was a born warrior in service of a conquering god, and
he was at peace with his place in the world. He now realized
that he had merely been doing to the correct, honor-preserving
thing. Now that he no longer had any honor to preserve he
could become the man his god needed. There was no longer
anything that could stop Sama Sah from ending a threat to
his god.

================================================================================

Lieutenant Krana Kerns always felt claustrophobic when she sat
in her launch tube waiting for the Old Man to fling her out
of the belly of HMS Heresy and into the black. She took long
steady breaths as her instructors in flight school had taught
her, but it wasn't doing much good. She had seen combat once
before, when the Heresy had returned from deep space patrol
just in time to help mop up the surviving followers of Hor Hoss
after the first battle of Fen. This was different though.
A full wall of capitol ships was closing in on Tella, the
newest and weakest of the growing circle of Fennish allies.
Krana could not understand why The Queen wanted this backwater
defended. Fen could ill afford to spend its precious resources
defending an ally who would not be able to contribute to the
war effort meaningfully for at least a decade. Even if she did
not understand it, the young navy pilot would give her life to
follow the Queen's orders. Queen Karen had done the impossible
in breaking the first attack, and Krana would follow her to
the gates of Terra itself if her Queen demanded it. Krana had
absolute faith in few things, but Karen was one of them.

After the first half hour of waiting, Krana's nervous pounding
pulse calmed. It would be hours yet before her squadron got
any sort of combat orders, and her body could not maintain
her initial nervousness for long. She settled in to wait.

The Heresy hung in space behind the Fennish wall of battle.
She was no Battlestar to soak up the crucible of the wall, so
she hung back waiting to find an opportunity to dump her fighters
where they were needed most. Krana's squadron was held in reserve
while clouds of fighters poured out from the carriers to cloud
around the ships-of-the-wall, ready to strike down any incoming
missiles.

If waiting through the approach had been hard, it was even harder
to wait while the two great masses of ships clashed before her,
lashing out with waves of energy so powerful it seemed to blister
the fabric of reality itself. The enemy had almost twice as many
capital ships, and triple the number of fighters. The Fennish
navy had never fought an even battle, and had yet to loose.
Even so, the followers of Hor Hoss were gaining the upper hand.
As Krana watched, the men and women she had trained with were swatted
out of the sky like flies.

Then a lucky shot damaged the hyperspace tap of HMS Defiance. Lightning
fast cybernetic systems tried desperately to control the meltdown,
reacting before the lazer blast which had caused the damage had
completed its energy cycle. The safety systems were fast, but not
fast enough. The Battlestar was torn apart in a flash-rift, and
the shock wave which rippled out over space-time shredded HMS
Folly, leaving a gaping wound in the line of the defenders.
The shock wave did not destroy the Jona Jex or the Counterpoint,
but the two Battlestars shuddered under the stress. Half of
the Jona Jex's port shield generators overloaded and burnt out,
and the Counterpoint's whole shield went down along with most
of her radar, ladar, and hypertrim arrays. The blast took out
dozens of fighters from both sides, as well as three Fennish
destroyers and a Fennish cruiser.

By the time that Krana realized what had happened, the Heresy
was already rolling hard to bring her launch tubes into
position. A moment later Krana was screaming through space
alongside every other reserve fighter in the fleet. The next
half hour could break them.

She slammed herself forward at maximum acceleration, red-lining
her small inertial dampener, and pulling close to 8 gees over
and above what the device could wipe out. It was strictly against
protocol, but that was the last thing on Krana's mind at the
moment. Her efforts meant that she was one of the first defenders
to arrive at the hole in the wall.

Thousands of enemy fighters were converging on her position, and
for a fraction of a moment Krana froze. Then her training kicked
in and she started arcing towards her station behind her squad leader.
She had gotten a little out of position in her mad dash to get there
in time. It was a mistake that she hoped would not matter. Halfway
though her trajectory, an enemy fighter locked on to her. She was
dead, and without killing a single enemy fighter. It would only
be another couple of seconds. Krana's hand seemed to decide what
to do on its own. She rapidly flicked off the spin safety limits
and disabled her auto-targeting. Her memory skipped a track,
and when she next opened her eyes her vision was swimming.
Her display told her that the fighter behind her was just
drifting debris. If she was not in immediate danger she
would have marveled at the fact that she had just actually
pulled off a spin kill. It was a move that the movies loved,
but never really worked out. No one could stay conscious
though the acceleration, and the target acquisition systems
were not fast enough. To pull it off, you had to find your
target manually, which was impossible at the distances that
real space battles were fought. Nevertheless, Krana had done
it.

She joined her squad in its defensive holding pattern for a
few long seconds while everyone formed up, then she urged
her mechanical steed into an attack run with the rest of
her squad. They tumbled through space in a chaotic tangle
of dogfights and roaring high-speed carnage. One moment
they were weaving though dense clouds of enemy fighters,
and the next they had retreated behind the ad-hoc line of
battle that had formed. Nothing was stable. Krana killed
and killed, and watched her squad mates die around her.
She had never flown so well in her life. With each kill,
she felt rejuvenated, fueled by adrenaline. Her reflexes
had never been so fast, and she had always been one of
the best pilots on the Heresy.

Her squad became so tattered that it dissolved. Her squad
leader was long dead, and she heard no orders to join
another squad. Fighting alone should have been a death
sentence, but for Krana it felt freeing. She dealt death
even faster than before, hardly going half a minute without
striking down a worshiper of Hor Hoss. She was consistently
pulling more than 20 gees over and above what her inertial
dampener could provide, and she hardly even felt it. She
noted with surprise that the ship in her sights had been
flagged by her onboard database as a probable War Priest.
A moment later the Priest was dead. He had been no harder
to kill than any other. War Priests were those favored by
Hor Hoss, and they were extremely formidable opponents.
Their reactions were far faster than a normal human's,
and they could withstand significantly higher acceleration.
Some were even rumored to be able to manually target their
weapons better than a computer. In the time it had taken
Krana to consider this, she had killed three more fighters.

The rolling dogfight went on for three quarters of an hour,
before what remained of the attackers withdrew. The Fennish
fighters had paid brutally heavy price. Only 20% of those who had
joined the battle would leave it, but they had held the line.

Krana spent the rest of the battle knocking down missiles to screen
the ships-of-the-wall, and going on one-woman tears of destruction
through the enemy screen. It seemed nothing could touch her.

4 long hours after the battle had begun, the enemy turned around
and started accelerating towards deep space. Not all of the defenders
could move, but the ones that could harried the attackers as they
withdrew, pounding lagging ships into vapor.


When it was over Krana returned to the Heresy. She was one of four
pilots from the Heresy's reserve contingent to survive. With the chaos
of battle fading from her mind, she was able to focus on herself
for the first time. How had she withstood the insane acceleration
she had been pulling? By the end of the battle she had been performing
spin-kills without blinking. She suddenly realized that her new resilience
was not the only thing that had changed about her. Her combat suit was
painfully tight around her chest and hips. Her suit normally fit loosely
around her pert B-cups, but there seemed to be a lot more of her now.
Once she was aware of the sensation, the pinching pain was too much to
bear. She ripped her helmet off, letting her lustrous brown hair
tumbled over her shoulders, and yanked the zipper of her suit down hard.
Wait, her hair had always been short and dull. Now it gleamed, and hung
in a mass of thick curls around her, pooling in her deep cleavage. That
was another thing that was new. Her breasts were huge, definitely bigger
than a DD. At some point during the battle her sports bra had torn down
the front, and now it just hung limply off her like the worlds flimsiest
gun holster. The pinching sensation around her hips was still there, so
she tugged the zipper further down, and shrugged out of the top of the
suit. It was a struggled to pull the suit down over her ass, which there
seemed to be a lot more of. Finally, she forced it down in frustration
and the highly reinforced suit tore in her hands. Which was crazy. She
shouldn't anywhere near strong enough to tear the fabric.

She unclasped her harness and pulled her legs all the way out of her suit and
sat on top of it in nothing but her panties. She shrugged out of her broken
bra and tucked it under her ass, instinctively keeping everything glued to the
deck in case of a gravity failure. "Bay 3, this is Lieutenant Kerns. I've got
a compromised suit. You still have atmo back there, right?"

"That we do. I can get a boarding tube ready for hookup."

She smiled at the easy drawl that tricked back to her over the radio. Mike,
her squad's crew chief, was from Bastion Station, and he spoke with a
charmingly parochial twang. It sounded like home. "Thanks, Mike. I could
also use a jump suit."

"You got it. See you in ten." He replied.

A few minutes later she was swinging through the boarding tube in a thin
gray jump suit which clung to her breasts and ass and hung loose around
her waist. When she settled into the artificial gravity of the Heresy
the whole support crew was waiting for her. "That was some pretty amazing
flying Lieutenant."

================================================================================


