This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/EV-187 on 2025-07-02 05:43:24+00:00.
Mar-gite have basically two modes of behavior. A dormant mode where the mar-gite will primarily move via their tube-feet like a starfish until they find something tasty to feed upon or an ambush position, or ideally both. There the mar-gite will camouflage itself to better blend in as it slowly digests whatever it is attached to. Despite being blind in the standard 350-800 nanometer extended visible spectrum, the mar-gite are still able to use shade, texture and simply covering themselves in the surface materials to provide themselves with excellent camouflage most of the time.
In the dormant mode the mar-gite just focuses on digesting and reproducing asexually in an energy efficient way.
In their active or hunting mode mar-gite far prefer to use their more energy-expensive gravimetric abilities to rapidly fly at anything they deem a threat. People, animals, military machines, overly obnoxious advertisements. This makes the mar-gite effectively a biological self-seeking missile. In their active mode, the mar-gite are also able to reproduce far more rapidly, relying on energy inefficient means to produce more and more.
Either way the mar-gite become an infestation that has to be dealt with. An undiscovered mar-gite can slowly grow into an expanding colony under an unsuspecting population’s nose until finally riled while any actively hunting mar-gite will seek to reproduce faster than the defenders can kill them.
Excerpt: Training primer on mar-gite recovered by Confederate Military Intelligence digital archaeologists. Dated approximately 80 years pre-TXE
“MOVE! MOVE! MOVE!”
Diana didn’t have to be told twice as she ran down the hallway as it slowly curved upwards. She was running in vacuum and following the warborg ahead of her as it ducked through the blast doors between sections. Every single one of them from here to the hull had been opened to speed their way, there was no airlock to slow the marines down. The Bronze Cog was so big that replacement atmosphere was cheap. They had simply told everyone to hold on and opened the hallway to space.
Around the next corner brought the marines close enough that Az’aht’s company could see the flashes from the guns firing on the hull.
“Rex, take point!”
“Yes, Lieutenant!”
The massive shepherd dropped his gun which automatically secured itself to his back as he dropped to all fours. It was one of the many tricks humanity had programmed into the later generation of feline and canine uplifts before the friend plague: they were just as comfortable on both four and two legs.
The warborg ahead of them yelped as Rex nimbly squeezed past her despite the size.
“Hey, you’re supposed to follow me!”
“Sorry, E-Captain! You’re only an advisor!” Captain Az’aht called out.
“And you’re all only in shade armor!”
“We have orders to go out there, which means we’ll be on that hull in nothing but a mask and skivvies if we have to!” Az’aht shouted.
Diana snickered as she took a moment to check her hud. With her implants the data from her suit, weapons, the ship, and the mildly erotic (only mildly, she was on duty after all) gotchya idle game she’d been playing to keep herself sane. Combat was approaching so she silenced everything besides her suit and immediate proximity alerts, and growled silently as the display for her oxygen meter that just reported an error.
She knew it was good, she had been testing them yesterday and knew all the new nanoforge tanks that the Cog provided weren’t just good but good, terrifyingly good! The primary system was a trick as old as time: using a specially tailored biological converter, in this case an algae mat, to purify and balance the suit’s atmosphere at an amplified rate when excited by a laser that force-fed the biological component the exact spectrum it was most efficient at absorbing. The rebreather tank the Cog had provided were over twice as effective and less than twice the volume: Instead of two hours, Diana’s test had lasted five hours before her suit had started to notice an increase of carbon dioxide, and probably would have kept her alive another hour or two in a truly desperate situation.
And that wasn’t even counting the backup system: the Eternal Captains had all that spare volume to fill to make the tank actually fit, so they put a nanoforge powered oxygenator that had several kilos of density collapsed quicklime that it could rip oxygen atoms off of and dump excess carbon dioxide into to balance the suit’s atmosphere for hours. It made the tanks heavier, but the power assist barely noticed.
It was a disgusting display of technological might, and Diana was immediately in love. The armorers still hadn’t figured out how to make the suits actually interface with the new tanks though so Diana just grumbled and deleted the readout and replaced it with the one directly from the tank itself since the direct interface worked just fine.
“Coming through!” She called out as she dropped to all fours and followed Rex past the warborg. She knew it was Alex partly because the head and hands had been done up in dobie black and brown markings, and partly from the voice. Khan was bringing up the rear making sure the doors closed properly so that each section could be refilled with atmosphere once the marines were past.
Suddenly the hallway leveled out and Diana could see the airlock open to space. She could see a nearby turret leaving streams of tracers in the sky, and she could already see mar-gite landing on the hull. Rex could clearly see them as well as he picked up speed and caught a smaller mar-gite in his suit’s mouth like a murderous frisbee.
Many species would put ferocious grins on their armor’s helmets, using paints and shapes in the armor to put a fearsome visage. Friends, being terrans of their own right, took it a step beyond. Ever since their return from the dead after humanity’s loss, Friend armor always had actual, functional jaws and teeth. In the ancient days they would have been a variation of the Confederate fallback of warsteel toothed chainblades before a lack of warsteel, nanoforges and regression in miniaturization technology made such weaponry unfeasible.
The vibrablade teeth in Rex’s mouth did the job well enough against the soft, juvenile mar-gite as he shook his head violently while his paw-hands gripped two of the arms and simply ripped the murderous beast in two. Rex tossed the dead mar-gite aside as he stood up and pulled out his rifle, pulling it against his shoulder as he started to track and shoot the smaller starfish.
Diana felt her helmet alter itself at the pull of muscle that was entirely in her mind: her tongue was trapped under a flexible cover as she activated her own fangs while she stood up and drew her own weaponry: a vibrablade sword in one hand and her officer’s SMG in the other, letting her start adding her own fire to Rex’s.
A moment later Alex’s warborg body thundered by and Diana had to suppress a flinch as her brain finally registered that she didn’t even come up to the shoulder of Alex’s new body.
“STICK CLOSE TO ONE ANOTHER AND COVER EACH OTHER!” Alex’s voice boomed over the com even as the warborg’s heavy magacc blew holes through the slowly falling mar-gite. “DON’T WORRY ABOUT THE SHIP, THE NPCS CAN HANDLE IT! GET YOUR ASS TO THE DROP POD BAY!”
Diana wondered if it was just her imagination or if the suit made Alex’s voice deeper. A moment later she fired a long burst at a too-close mar-gite: she still had salt and iron shade rounds in her magazine but her smart-link put the burst almost entirely into the starfish’s weak mouth where they bounced off the inside of the mar-gite’s strong, rubbery flesh and pulped its organs.
The question about Alex’s voice was forgotten as simply not important at this moment, much like the rushed explanation about having to run across the outer hull to get to the drop pods. She understood why they had to get the pods: the mar-gite had slipped out of control and were going to reach one of the colonies. The explanation of why they had to take this route had gone over her head and Diana had just accepted “Ship busy, can’t run L-gates or rail transit.”
In the meantime she quickly changed out her weapon’s amblock for a proper battlesteel one and hoped no one noticed as the company assembled. As soon as they were halfway organized the company started to move out together, providing covering fire for each other as they ran. The telkan ran on two legs, the goodbois alternated between two and four as needed, and the two warborgs just ran and ran and ran circles around the company.
“Fuck, I thought keeping up with a dogboi unit pushed me to the limit…” Captain Az’aht messaged on a private channel. “These two just do not stop.”
“That’s the thing, sir. You have to realize that these two are the closest thing to my ancestors' creators that anyone’s seen in thousands of years as far as I know. They were the species that would have driven all of the goodbois and purrbois to extinction even before they finished figuring out fire. Only one thing really saved us, sir.”
“And what was that?”
“They were lonely and wanted to hug us and pet us and give us silly little hats and vests to wear.”
Az’aht chuckled while Diana watched Khan ...
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/1lpo09a/the_factory_must_grow_18_a_nova_wars_fan_work/