The Dead Dove Locker -- "I don't know what I expected."

[Jinx999]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/538299.../194024971

Gushing Succubus: In The Shadow Of Her Wings (Gushing over Magical Girls). School and Worldbuilding.

[Mamorien]

Princess of the Void.

https://www.scribblehub.com/read/1419041...r/1988851/
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/120617...tle-hearts

[Mamorien]

The Greenfield Family.

Here we see Raven taking the first steps toward putting her plan in motion, planting the seeds of ideas in Zander, Paula and Bobbi's minds. And also leading Paula and Heather to look at each other in a new kind of way.

https://storiesonline.net/n/52852/the-gr...d-family/5

Plus Princess of the Void.

In the massive mechanical bowels of the Black Pike, the tree-sized rail cannons rotate with gear-grinding roars to the port side of the battlefield, leaving the silent ruin of its cleared flank for the lightning storm of its foes’ fusillade.

Its cannons reverberate their rhythmic death outward, reducing vast fields of killer robot to steaming vapor and scattering shards. Waian’s ensigns watch with quiet disbelief as the chief engineer painstakingly turns a spanner, centimeters at a time, that she’s stuck into an unscrewed panel.

Sykora leans over the balustrade. “Surely there’s some kind of console option you could use for this.”

“This is fine motor skill shit, Majesty,” Waian says. “You do your thing, I do my thing.”

https://www.scribblehub.com/read/1419041...r/1993091/
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/120617...sykora-pov

[Mamorien]

Princess of the Void.

“I was just thinking. A couple years ago I had a ceiling tile in my bathroom fall out. Leak in the apartment upstairs. That building had a terrible landlord, a real slumlord type, and—”

A ship the size of a cruiseliner plows into the Pike and rebounds from it, tumbling end-over-end. Its metal skin peels outward from the heat and impact, bleeding great rivers of shining fuel.

“Sixty-eight, Majesty,” Waian calls. “Running out of camouflage.”

“Acknowledged, chief engineer,” Sykora calls. “Your landlord, dove?”

“Right. We were arguing over comms about getting someone out to fix it. And I remember thinking…” Grant follows a wing of interceptors tearing past the main monitor, widening from a speartip to a chevron as they strafe a beetle-shelled drone carrier. “I remember asking myself why is every day such a battle?”

A scoffing laugh from Hyax at the tactical bank. Vora’s silvery giggle sounds from the command deck. Sykora joins in. “Why is every day such a battle?”

https://www.scribblehub.com/read/1419041...r/1999658/
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/120617...were-in-it

[Mamorien]

On a very special Princess of the Void, the rains of Oshanta intensify for a Drone.

Waian elbows Ipqen’s hip and keys her communicator on. “Indus Blue. Your squadron just dragged an active drone into my hangar bay.”

“We EMP’d it, chief,” comes the reply. “Triple-confirmed. It was entirely inactive.”

“How’s an EMP not stop that? Fuck’s sake.” Waian makes a frustrated noise in her throat. “Get away from it, mek-Taqa. Before it pulls a self-destruct out of its ass. Put the isolator on, Maz.”

“One second.” Ipqen sniffs the drone. “Uh. Chief. Think I know how the thing didn’t shut down.”

This is a fucking tooth.

“What’s that?” Waian smells the air. Grant follows suit. Charred meat.

Ipqen hangs the drone back into its harness. Her ink-festooned muscles bulge beneath their sleeves as she mantles it in place. “Can you get this thing flipped on its tail after we isolate it, Specialist?”

“Er. Right.” Mazek stabs a few buttons on her workstation and the modular harness hums into motion, clinging tight to the alien drone and turning it round. “Isolator engaged.”

Ipqen gets her cutter back out and slices the drone along its central fuselage. She tugs armor plating away and shifts internal plates and components. A watermelon-sized lump of burnt and bleeding flesh is tucked into the central bubble.

“This thing isn’t all-the-way robot,” she says.

“Shitfire.” Waian approaches the dented line drawn in gunfire across the hangar and pries something from the wall’s puckered metal. She holds it up.

“This,” she says, “is a fucking tooth.”

Mazek has that about to faint look to her again.

Waian keys her communicator back on. “Majesty, these things have organic component failsafes integrated into their systems.”

Sykora’s incredulous voice crackles through: “You’re saying these are living aliens?”

“Living? I dunno. Depends on your definition. I think they’re still manufactured. What I’m looking at isn’t… I mean, it’s clearly built for purpose. They’re machines. They’re just machines made partially out of meat.”

(...)

“This is another adaptation. Gotta be.” Waian slips a knife along the vein and digs it out of the metal housing. “Either lab-grown, or they turned their originators into this… goop. Kept working on themselves with the corpses of their progenitors.”

Grant’s eyes are dry from staring. He forces a blink. “When Sykora originally told me about the Empire’s technological sumptuary laws, I was skeptical.”

“Oh yeah?” Waian wiggles the gridded net of veins on the tip of her knife. “How about now?”

“Now I have no comment,” Grant says.

Waian titters. “Their dead creators tried hard as hell to rub them out. Like a penicillin-proof disease. Must have been a real fucking nightmare of an uprising.” Her knife tip points like a lecturer’s baton. “You can see it’s already got fresh mechanical augmentations in place to counter us. The seams on this camera cluster here to track our ships through the digital chaff we put out, the enlarged bore on the guns when their old calibers weren’t getting through the membrane. They’ve been shooting at us less than an hour and already they’re morphing themselves to get better at it. Fuckin’ freak stuff. No choice but to be impressed.”

“And horrified,” Grant offers.

“No. I mean, yes, but no, this is good. This is our vector. If it’s meat and machine working in concert, what we do is attack the handshake.”

https://www.scribblehub.com/read/1419041...r/2003611/
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/120617.../514-drone

[Mamorien]

Time once again for The Greenfield Family, the continuing sto~ry of one Sacramento household's journey to trading dysfunction for fun.

Keiko is back at work and back in the news chair, about to repeat her reckless stunt from the day before. Only on purpose this time. And with Barry fully aware the whole time, leading her into it.

And Rick might want to learn to check twice to make sure no one is eavesdropping the next time he talks getaway plans with his secret lover on the phone.

https://storiesonline.net/n/52852/the-gr...d-family/6

And more Princess of the Void.

“I’ve got your solution, Majesty.” Waian practically dances to her console. Her tail thwacks Sykora’s tricorne askew with her passage. “Handshake disruption.”

“Fantastic.” Sykora straightens her face and hat out again. “What’s it mean?”

“It means we transmit a signal that’ll force a reboot and reconfiguration of their enemy-targeting systems. These things—“ Waian punches into her console and her consciousness saddles into the Pike, turning her words from physical to digital mid-sentence. “—were designed to massacre organic life, with their own systems off the menu. All we have to do is an unobtrusive little tweak to their programming to put it back on. And they’ll rip themselves apart. See, Majesty? Not cancer. Just suicidal dementia...”

Symphony of Blasphemy

---

Waian’s arm shivers then ejects from her console, and a big smug grin slaps across her face. “Handshake disruption, gals. Told ya.” She leans into the bridge pit. “Get that flagship of theirs in scope.”

The main monitor acquires and magnifies one of the derelicts that float in the new stillness, as it releases a haze of…

That’s blood. It’s pumping blood into space, crystalizing a crimson blizzard around itself.

“Eqt’s tits,” Ipqen says.

“Jesus Christ,” Grant says.

“Gods of the fucking Firmament,” Sykora says.

“A symphony of blasphemy.” Waian kicks her feet onto the banister. “That’s multiculturalism.”

https://www.scribblehub.com/read/1419041...r/2008666/
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/120617...-blasphemy

[classicdrogn]

To be entirely honest, I'm not sure this doesn't belong in the normal recs/updates thread, but given it took until ch20 to reach what I'd call the payoff for sticking with it, the "dead dove" warning seems appropriate.

All That Is Gold Does Not Glitter (AO3 link) is a Youjo Senki/Halo fic, wherein the once-salaryman has found themself (as a her again) in a third life, and this time managed to get into a safe, comfortable, academic career track... only to be blindsided by the discovery that the joke paper she and three housemates wrote in a drunken fantasy of how to waste the absolute greatest amount of research grant money on the stupidest and most impossible goals somehow found its way to the highest levels of the Office of Naval Intelligence, and rather than the improved FTL and AI research her entire actual career has focused on, she, Dr. Catherine Halsey, is now in charge of the blackest of black programs to somehow turn seventy five kidnapped children screened from all of humanity's billions into super-soldiers using a combination of a dozen cybernetic augmentations that don't exist, to connect to a powered armor that doesn't exist, using a mind-to-machine interface that doesn't exist and a power supply that doesn't exist, so they can be paired up with AI partners that, yes, exist, but each cost as much as a small warship and only last an average of seven years before falling into digital insanity and having to be erased, with the initial projected survival rate for the whole process being less than five percent.

It takes a lot of chapters of false fronts and misunderstanding before getting to the point where it's understood that everyone running the program loathes it from the basic concept on up except (possibly) the offscreen bigwigs who greenlit it in the first place and the distant ONI security watchdogs, and even then the requirement that nothing be said openly leads to a heavy helping of doublethink and less-than-accurate conclusions in the typical YS vein.

It bears mentioning that the general quality and positive trending tone after reaching that tipping point did leave me adding to my list of things to check for updates despite all of the above and generally not giving a fig about anything to do with Halo, but like I said it was a slow burn to that point and on another day I might easily have closed the tab long before and moved on.

On screen violence is limited to paintball training, reprimands for off screen incidents, and obliquely described medical procedures, to be clear, but it is a story about an intensive, relatively hard-SF military training program for child soldiers, so be advised.