The hivemind is conquering for me?

"Is that a Deimos?" Kathrine said as though she was seeing a myth. "What's a Deimos?" Caleb asked, acting proxy for Mindy and myself also.

"I never thought they were real." Kathrine said as colour started returning to her face. "My Daddy used to read me bedtime stories from the families library when I was a girl. One of them was a cautionary tale about one of the Spartari founders, Ares, and his army of Deimos and Phobos warriors."

"It was said that during the time of the founding, Ares was in charge of waging war in the northern sector of the galactic map. Our Spartari at the time was housed to a myriad of treacherous alien species and their populations were much greater than ours.

Ares was obsessed with waging war against these species, but his brothers and sisters on the founding Olympus council would not send him additional soldiers, as they all were in an internal power struggle while he simply wished to fight."

"It was then, Ares found a unique species among his conquests. They were not even a species, but a group of robots with consciousness. Ares, despite being fascinated with them, still culled them as any good member of Spartari should. However, Ares still found their technology fascinating as with the limited resources the robots had, they had made themselves extremely formidable.

Giving the task to his scientists, They reverse engineered the alien robots and created the first Deimos. Ares was thrilled with the results his loyal robot slaves though this was to the point that he was growing displeased with his brave Spartari soldiers and their room for human error."

"As he continued to grow impressed by his new soulless soldiers, Ares even grew displeased with himself. He was strong, stronger than any Spartari who served alongside him. Yet he was still human He needed sleep, he needed food and water. He needed necessities that took away precious space on his ship that could have stored more munitions and Deimos soldiers.

"It was not shortly afterwards that Ares became on of the first humans to begin experimenting with metal augmentations. He replaced whose body parts at a time and grew obsessed with the strength he received from them. Unlike todays augmentations, the ones back then affected your mind with a psychosis if you changed to much.

The men under Ares, worshipped the man and wanted to follow in his footsteps and began augmenting themselves as well."

"The issue was, they were not as strong willed as Ares was and once they began changing too much flesh, the Psychosis took them and they attacked friend and foe alike. Ares was proud of his men for taking the next step in what he now considered Humanities evolution, but he felt saddened that his men could feel the pain of insanity."

"It also saddened him that his very emotions were hindering what he needed to do for his men and to counteract this weakness, Ares replaced almost all of his brain with metal augments. With his Emotions no longer hindering him, he ordered his men to undergo the full conversion so they may bring fear and panic to all those who would stand against Spartari.

And it was then, the first Phobos were created."

I was hooked listening to Kathrine's story, so were the other two. I felt I was more so as once more, familiar names from my past life had popped up in this universe. It had to mean something, but I doubted I would get any answers.

"After creating his abominations, Ares controlled a large swathe of solar systems, and stripped uninhabitable planets for the creation of more Deimos and Phobos warriors. It took 1 very lucky fresh recruit who managed to escape from a now rare reinforcement shuttle to bring the news of what Ares had done back to the council of Olympus and what followed was all out civil war."

"Ares had gone too far and was branded an outright traitor to Spartari. From what my books told me, Ares fought back against his brother and sister council for nearly 3 centuries before our glorious Spartari was able to get rid of his disease. The books however, never told us how Ares was defeated or when he died.

Seeing if I am correct, and these are his Deimos warriors and they are still functioning Hundreds of thousands of years later, It is entirely possible he did not die at all."

Kathrine's face turned white at the notion, while Caleb looked on with a face that said. "What the fuck is this bullshit?" He decided to verbalise his expression. "Now Kathrine, you are a smart lady, you can't believe in bogeyman stories right?"

Mindy also looked at Kathrine questioningly. The Spartari population are brought up to believe in Spartari and its logic only society. So its pretty normal that they are sceptical. "Ok guys lets look at the facts. We are looking for an ancient artifact. We have found a place with Robot's no one has ever seen before and something Kat could identify by the description in her stories.

Lets not jump to conclusions and lets not shrug of facts. These robots whether they are or not, we should Identify as Deimos going forward."

We left the excavation site shorty after to meet up with the other leaders to discus our next course of action. Before that though, I instructed the nearby men to keep the plasma AA guns centred on the breach below in case any more Deimos show up.

On the way to Kathrine's Tent, Mindy Asked. "Apollo?" "Hmm?" "How did you yell so loudly in the middle of that firefight? I was still in the centre of my ship when you did and I could hear you as though you were next to me."

I turned to look at her a moment confused before realisation took hold of me. "Oh, YOU MEAN THIS?" My voice became louder yet held the same frequency. "I applied Psionic energy to my throat to amplify my voice. Still I only expected it to reach the nearby men, not to the ships... Maybe while I was in the middle of combat I elevated it without realising."

"I wish I had your gift." Mindy said. "the Psionic energy can seemingly do anything." I then thought for a moment to a lesson with a particularly touchy agitator when Mindy said that. "You know, I could check if you have the gift later if you want? It takes a little probing around with my telepathy, but I could find out for you."

"Wait you're a telepath!" Mindy took a step away from me in nervousness. I sighed as I pinched my brow. "Not again... I cant read minds unless I want too, I have no need to read minds as you are all boring. Kathrine." "Its true dear, He showed me how it works, he gave me a massage on my Mindspace defences to show how his telepathy feels and I almost came it was so nice.

"GAH!" Caleb screamed as he covered his ears and ran forward.

"Spartari gives the wrong impression of telepaths because of the enemies they have, trust me. Your secrets are safe in your head." I said as Mindy closed the distance less afraid now. "Lets say I'm interested, What would you do? "Its a little invasive, but you wont feel anything. I essentially enter into your mind with my telepathy and look to see if you have a Mindspace.

If you do I probe your defences to try and activate you power If that does not work, I try to make you feel intense emotions as that could cause an awakening of power as well."

"Oh I've heard about that." Kathrine butted in. "My nieces erm... house guard had something similar happen. She was just a normal Spartari soldier then she lost a kid or something to the swarm and something inside of her snapped and she became super powerful. Even with my strength, she could wipe the floor with me."

"Yea thats a good example." I replied. "Though anyone could kick your arse with how little you train." Kathrine mocked being offended, but She knew it was true. "I'll. Let me give it some thought. I never planned on having a space wizard go prodding in my head and I need to prepare myself in case I say yes."

I nodded my head as her logical response. We had just arrived at Kathrine's tent and Jacob was already there. We only had to wait a couple more minutes before Dolan arrived covered in blood. "Sorry 'bout the wait. Was helping one of the docs attach a metal spinal disk into one of my lad's back. Tough bastard survived a laser cutting right through him."

"Wow." I muttered genuinely impressed.

"No problem Dolan. Now judging from the extreme defences inside this coordinate location, I am going to assume this is the location the artefact is located." Kathrine stated.

"Now, we will need to discuss strategy in case any more of what we are calling the Deimos are inside the subterranean structure."