The Taskmaster's glassy black eyes went wide as the horde of maddened miners surged toward the Mawites. At last he understood what it felt like to receive a charge by the infamous Moon Children, who had terrorized so many battlefields throughout the Unknown Regions and beyond... except that the Moon Children had been
designed to be mad, speed-cloned beings whose brains had deliberately been left only half-developed, while these poor wretches had been dragged down to that half-sentient state by the ravages of some unknown environmental contaminant. It was a far more horrific fate.
Oddly, the Ebruchi's first thought was simple
disappointment.
The Brotherhood was going to have to bring in external labor to replace the madmen.
Then the horde was upon them, swarming from above and ahead, clambering over each other in their mad rush to inflict violence. They were hardly cohesive, their frenzied, disjointed motions proving that no single will guided them. Some even broke off to fight
each other, biting and clawing and slamming one another against the bulkheads. But something about the Brotherhood intruders had drawn them, given them some semblance of focus. Engine vibrations as they'd entered? A rush of fresh atmosphere from the shuttle? The sound of voices in a place that had been left all but silent? Who could say.
There was no time for deliberation anyway. That could come later, if the Mawites survived. Thankfully, they had powerful tools with which to fight back. Ptolemis lashed out first, and without even touching the lightsaber at his belt. Instead a fatal light burst from his eyes, a terrifying flash of power that ruptured contaminated flesh like over-microwaved sausage. Wet, steaming chunks of dead miner rained down over the hangar... and the madmen charged through that rain, frenzied faces painted crimson by the remains of their coworkers. And that was to say nothing of the hulking droid emerging behind them.
The addition of that last opponent might have been the end of them, trapped as they were in such a confined space. Tu'teggacha could not imagine why the towering loadlifter had joined the battle; it was a labor droid, not a military model, though the distinction wouldn't matter much to anyone its colossal arms squashed into paste. Perhaps its pre-programmed loyalty to the contaminated workers prompted it to join them when it saw them attack intruders. It certainly seemed to have had
some defensive programming, for as the startled Taskmaster watched, makeshift guns unfolded from its chassis.
Thankfully, as the towering machine stomped into the fray, so too did Mawite reinforcements. Tu'teggacha had not been expecting any other Brotherhood personnel here; they must have entered through the mines, finding a different route than direct entry through the hangars. Regardless, he was glad to see them, for
The Runt
and his warriors evened the odds a little. Attacking from behind the frenzied miners, they began to hack a path through their ranks, trying to join up with the little ring of warriors around Ptolemis and the Taskmaster. If they could combine forces, they might just survive.
At the same time, Tyra led her warriors by example, cleaving through contaminated flesh with sword and axe and sorcerous blue flame. Seeing the droid tromping into the fray, the witch-warrior used her magic even further, tracing strange patterns with her hands. Glowing runes sliced through the floor like blades at her command, rising up as if from the core of Oriam Ras itself. They formed a sort of cage, or perhaps a series of fetters, and the droid suddenly strained as its forward motion was halted. And then, with a few more runes traced in midair, the flow of power through the mining facility suddenly
changed.
Yellow warning klaxons and overhead lights flickered...
... and then concentrated into a great bolt of lightning that struck from above.
The modified labor droid glowed like a tiny sun as an overwhelming electrical charge passed through it, frying its systems and burning out its wiring. It collapsed an instant later, smoke pouring from every opening, its heavy limbs splayed out around it like a squashed insect. All around it, however, the tide of madmen flowed unabated. Despite the piles of dead, the utter carnage that the Mawites had unleashed upon these poor, twisted victims of tainted air, they just kept coming. A thousand personnel had crewed this mining station, and something was drawing them
all here, in fits and spurts and little crowds.
Their numbers were beginning to tell. Several Mawite warriors were already down, throats ripped out or heads crushed or holes blown through them by the droid's brief but dramatic hail of blasterfire, and many others nursed a variety of wounds. Each and every open cut filled the Taskmaster with fear, for he still did not know how this madness was spread. Could it infect an open cut, or was it exclusively airborne? And yet despite his fear, he also felt a certain morbid fascination... and a dark
enthusiasm. Whatever had caused this here could cause it again. It could cause it in the middle of a
battlefield.
"Bring me one alive!" the Ebruchi shouted.
He needed a specimen for study, no matter how many lives it cost.
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