Enemy of the gods, p.25
Enemy of the Gods, page 25
Silent beams passed over Dean’s shoulder, cutting down alien things that were beginning to bear little resemblance to what he’d encountered in the past. Superficially they were still a mass of teeth and blades intent on ripping him apart. But their shapes were changing. More limbs and a torso that suggested they were being altered for combat in the tunnels and narrow corridors Dean and his crew had been facing them in for several days.
And now, they were throwing explosives. Their weapons and firearms were getting better. A fact that was made painfully obvious in a moment of panic when Dean’s armor had been pierced by the tip of a xenos blade. The self-healing nano-coating of the fiber alloy had sealed the breach in a fraction of a second, but he’d been frozen with the thought of what might happen if the nano-coating was damaged beyond the ability to self-repair.
He’d been lucky though. One of the Coalition marines from The Moment of Truth had not been. In an ambush, the man’s combat suit had been overwhelmed by massed xenos laser fire and badly damaged. In the ensuing grand melee, he’d lost a hand. Medical nanobots in his blood had stopped the bleeding, but he’d been severely wounded by the sudden decompression. There had been a lull in the fighting as the other men had tended to him. Stabilizing him. But it had become apparent that The Eaters had only pulled back to allow Dean and his crew to expend their resources and efforts on the man before they had swarmed back. This time making certain that they’d finished the man off and taking his head.
The first man to die on this expedition. Also the last, Dean had hoped. Though that possibility seemed unlikely.
“Moving,” a hard voice sounded in his head. Men relaying their actions and positions to one another as they fought through the abandoned compound. Abandoned at least until The Eaters had found it.
At some point in its past, this compound had been a research and observation post for Veldt civilian scientists. Positioned on a moon in the outer system, it gave access to the gas giant that it circled. Until Coalition forces had taken over and begun using it as a resupply depot during their clash with the UN and Veldt planetary defense forces.
Somehow The Eaters had found it before Dean and his crew had. And somehow, they’d refrained from simply chewing the entire place to pieces. Some intelligence was guiding them here, he realized. Driving them to learn what they could before they ate everything and added it to themselves.
A storm of beams only visible to Dean through his optical sensors lit a hallway brightly as one of the combat exoskeletons fired its heavy weapon, shearing down some twenty or so foes blocking the path. Dean scrambled from cover to cover, moving to the heavy unit’s side and firing a single round that pierced a ventilation duct and exploded inside. A satisfying shower of alien gore showed that the xenos warrior trying to flank them had been dealt with.
The synthetic muscles in the arms of his combat suit moved to keep the barrel of his rifle steady as he took aim at another figure far down the hall. Firing a single round that took it in the chest and dropped it like a sack of bricks. He’d learned the hard way that headshots didn’t necessarily put the monsters down. Center of mass, behind the armor of their biological steels. That was where their vitals appeared to be.
“Advance,” Dean relayed to his crew. Eight marines carrying as much Coalition issued gear as they could without hindering their ability to fight, moved. They formed around a central object, intent on defending it until it could be extracted.
Along with a horde of medical supplies and ammunition for Coalition issue weapons, Dean and his crew had found exactly what they’d been sent here to find. A small stockpile of nuclear weapons originally intended to pulverize the cities of Veldt and what ground forces the UN could land there as well. Preserved perfectly in Veldt manufactured stasis units that had survived the Coalition takeover.
Now, like virtually everything else in the system, they were being repurposed. Torsten had plans for these weapons. His instructions had been vague, intentionally nonspecific just in case the xenos had been listening. That had struck Dean as an unnecessary precaution at first, but if they could grow lasers out of their arms and change their basic unit design so quickly, then maybe they could pick up a new language without much trouble as well.
Pulled along on an anti-grav barge, a stack of dense plastic crates rested. Stacked shoulder high and three meters long. The weapons formed the center of the unit’s movements. They’d come to find them, and they weren’t about to leave without them.
Locating them had been surprisingly easy. Captain Black aboard The Spear of Destiny had found them easy enough while scanning through munitions databases loaded before the warship had left its home port for deployment. A faint signal from a tracking device implanted in each weapon had been enough to pinpoint their position within the complex. That they still remained seemed a minor miracle, but Dean wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Then again, gifts weren’t usually guarded by an unexpected army of hostile aliens intent on killing and eating everyone they crossed paths with. Whatever they had been here for, their presence had been unpredicted. They’d been nice enough to show themselves almost immediately after Dean’s crew landed. Waiting until the stealth shuttle they had arrived in had pulled back to near orbit around the moon.
Since that moment, their entire time in the research installation had been spent in one non-stop firefight. A running battle that had been allowed by a surprise re-arming and restocking operation sent by men from Fort Kasper through the universal gateway. The use of the same had even allowed the stealth shuttle to cover a distance that otherwise would have taken several weeks in a matter of seconds. Fresh food, water, breathable air, and weapons and ammunition had arrived along with a small data crystal detailing the new mission to be undertaken by Dean and his crew.
And so there they were. Covering one another as they moved and staying in between the combat exoskeleton units while protecting their cargo. The two heavy infantry units took point and rear guard of the unit, laying down heavy fire that punished anything that dared show its face.
Dean thought about the last place they’d left behind in this situation. A ball of sunfire consuming the place and the entirety of The Eater army that had swarmed it just moments after his escape. With a quick head check, he looked back to the weapons being transported. It was tempting to attempt the same here. But he had been specifically forbidden from doing so.
Three weapons had been found and three weapons were required. Any less, he had been told, and the mission was a failure. He’d attempted to request reinforcement after receiving his orders, but Dean had been denied. The situation on the surface of Veldt was bad and getting worse by the minute. Every hand capable of carrying a weapon was being put to use there. Until they could get some breathing room, he and his crew were on their own.
Despite the re-arming and resupply, they’d still managed to expend almost all of their ammunition during the course of their mission. If it hadn’t been for Coalition stores of weapons and ammunition left in the installation, the marines in Dean’s crew would have ran dry hours ago. Instead, hard round weapons had had plenty of magazines to spare and beam weapons hadn’t been forced to rely on suit reactors for power as external power cells were uncovered. The going had been relatively easy, as long as they’d stayed on point.
That had changed when they’d found their cargo exactly where they’d been told it would be. Fighting their way back out had been a completely different battle. As if the aliens knew what it was that was being carried. Their attacks had grown in size and intensity until every step of Dean’s crew was contested. The cornucopia of ammunition had been depleted and they found themselves back in conservation mode.
On a few frantic occasions the battle had come to hand-to-hand. Blades slashing through flesh and weapons firing at point blank. A chaos that was oddly far more comforting to Dean than laying down suppressing fire and picking off targets at long range in the darkened tunnels.
Enemy ambushes had been the order of the day as Dean’s crew attempted their egress with their prize in tow. Crumbling ceilings and collapsing floors had forced the men to reroute their journey several times after dealing with the flood of xenos warriors that had closely followed those events.
Now, with the end in sight, The Eaters seemed to be throwing everything they had left at Dean and his crew. Data streams from the combat exoskeletons showed scores of enemy warriors going down in ruin, but no end to their numbers showed itself. Dean fired again into the ductwork at several points, sensors confirming that he had killed xenos warriors attempting to ambush or flank his crew.
Strange vibrations came from the floor and up through the soles of his feet. A sure sign that they were going to try to collapse the floor from underneath them again. If he gave them the chance.
“Advance,” he called again, moving from one spot of cover to another without ever really stopping. The barrel of his rifle danced through the air in constant motion of its own. Firing once every few seconds at targets that showed themselves. By his side the floor shook with each step of the large combat exoskeleton. The heavy weapon held at its hip remained steady as well, but moved less quickly than the rifle in Dean’s hands.
A blue streak flew from the heavy weapon’s underslung barrel, moving down the hallway too fast to follow with the naked eye, and exploded in midair. The explosion pounded the intersection ahead with a storm of shrapnel that would punch through just about anything. Eerily beautiful in the silence, Dean thought as he felt the floor rumble beneath him again. Already pools of vital fluids purged from Eater infantry in the explosion were beginning to flow into the corridor. Moving in slow motion as they froze on the cold ground.
Dean stayed near the heavy infantry unit, both clearing the intersection at the same time. The heavy weapon already firing as the combat exoskeleton strafed around the corner. White hot patches were left in the wall by the path of the heavy beam weapon before it cleared into the hallway beyond and cut a grisly swathe through more of the enemy.
“Pick up the pace,” Dean intoned. “We’re almost there.”
And that worried him. What surprises would be waiting for him and his crew once they reached the landing pad? The shuttle descending to the pad just as surely as Dean advanced on it, reported nothing on the surface. A burst of incoming heavy rounds drew his thoughts away from the surface as he moved to avoid the impact.
“There’s a fuckload of them in the tunnel behind us,” a voice reported. Dean’s halo identified the speaker as the man in the heavy unit bringing up the rear of the advance. “Request supporting fire.”
Dean ordered one man back from the cargo detail to augment the rearguard, falling back himself to take the marine’s place. Light strobed through the corridor as the two men in the back fired at the advancing foe on full automatic. The telltale vibrations of explosions hummed at Dean’s feet as he pushed the anti-grav barge with one hand, rifle held at the ready in the other.
“They’re making a real push here,” the same voice called. “Request additional support.” The sound of impacts on the speaker’s armor came through the communications channel along with his voice. Like poorly made bells ringing in the distance.
The barge cleared another intersection with men firing at targets down each hallway. One man fell away from his firing position to provide additional support to the rearguard. The bright effect of their weapons being discharged in the narrow space lit the tunnels with a constant glow.
The lead unit increased its intensity of fire and Dean watched through the heavy unit’s eyes as another score of Eaters met their end, peppering the combat exoskeleton with heavy beams as they did so. The unit shrugged off the damage though it reported distress. Its self-repair functions flared to life across Dean’s vision as he watched the unit advance.
Another intersection filled with foes in every direction and then, beyond hope, they were at the exit. Dean moved to a good firing position as the airlock door was opened. With vacuum on both sides, it moved easily. And there beyond, hovering a meter or so above the landing pad was the shuttle. Already dropping the ramp to allow the soldiers to board.
Men pushed through out onto the dark surface of the lifeless moon, dragging the barge with them. The heavy infantry unit in the lead paused by the shuttle, took a knee and nervously scanned back and forth for targets. The rearguard rounded the final turn and Dean waited for them to catch up to the rest, all four men firing as fast as they could at the unbelievable number of targets now presenting themselves in the narrow corridors.
Dean backed out onto the landing pad, reloading his rifle as he moved. A barrage of grenades landed just inside the airlock door as it slid shut. Dents sprang up across the surface of the door, showing where shrapnel had hit the inside. Anything on the other side in less heavy armor would have been totally shredded by the explosion. With that, the men of the rearguard turned and ran to the shuttle. Cargo and others already safely aboard. As his feet locked onto the ramp, the shuttle began to ascend.
A man was dead down there, Dean thought. But against the odds, they’d retrieved their prize. Three nuclear weapons of high yield. Each enough to smash the better part of a very large city. His thoughts raced with anticipation of where they would be used, always returning to the same grim proposition.
I really hope this isn’t the first step of a suicide bombing.
WHY hadn’t The Kingdom allowed women to serve in the armies of His Majesty? Eric pondered the question, knowing full well what the answer was. They made terrible soldiers. But despite the qualities that made good soldiers being borderline absent in the overwhelming majority of women, he was beginning to be swayed by the arguments that Marissa made.
None were made along the lines of logical thought or reasoning. Her argument, unknown to her that she’d even been making an argument to be entered into Eric’s internal debate, was made with her presence. A beautiful woman in his quarters, doing the things that men and women did together. That was enough to sway his opinion for the moment.
Enough to provide a reminder of exactly what it was he was fighting for. Why he was spending so much time in deep space, death only one small mistake away for the past weeks. If he wasn’t out here doing what he could to kill every last alien thing that passed through his crosshairs, or at least those of the warship he nominally commanded, then beautiful women would be in extremely short supply all across Veldt in the very near future. Along with everyone else for that matter.
He rose from his bed. They’d been sharing it for a while despite it being barely large enough for just him. Just another sacrifice to be made he thought as he looked down at her naked figure. Sleeping with the ease of a woman who’d just been thoroughly worked over in the best possible way. He envied her for a moment. To be free of the workings of his brain would be a momentary blessing.
His mind was a storm of thoughts, all demanding his attention. Sleep eluded him. To calm himself he crossed the small room and reached for his rifle. He sat at his desk and stripped the weapon down to its individual components. Inspecting each to ensure that it was clean and functional.
Eric knew on some level that it was totally unnecessary. The chemical propellant that accelerated the hard rounds fired by the rifle onto the electromagnetic acceleration coils burned clean. There was no fouling produced in the process. During the dark days of war on Veldt, the desperate time when Veldt had been in full collapse and the UN and Coalition only a breath away, there had been a large quantity of inferior ammunition produced. In desperation to keep the fight going, they’d lowered their standards. The chemical propellant there, well that did not burn clean. It did foul weapons. But the heat of the weapons operation combined with the catalyst like activity of the surface treatments of the individual components conspired to keep the weapon clean regardless.
So taking it apart and checking to ensure it was clean was just a small distraction. Intended to take his mind to other places. Places lighter than his lingering confusion that women would be allowed to serve by Coalition forces, though he was still and probably always would be glad for their backwards ways. But those easy things, those joyful things that passed through his thoughts before sleep eluded him.
Instead his mind strayed to darker places. His own future. The future of mankind. The whole of humanity broken and scattered amongst the stars. Falling prey to who knew what else might be out there beyond The Eaters. And how many worlds now faced that same threat, unable to defend themselves? Locked in primitive states by the still rampaging Modi virus.
How many had The Eaters already taken? Andre had said that the empire he served had numbered ten million citizens at its peak. Before The Eaters arrived on its borders. And now all but a handful were dead. How many more had died globally on Grama, and how many more had been taken on other planets?
Torsten had spoken of walking on other worlds, formerly teeming with human life, and finding nothing there. Had The Eaters taken them as well or had some other twist of fate doomed them?
Marissa sighed in her sleep, drawing Eric’s attention. She turned and pulled at the sheets on the bed, exposing her back to him. Slender. Feminine. Despite the muscle placed there by her regular PT drills. ‘Girl muscles’ he’d called them the first time he’d seen her without a shirt on. Like what farm girls had sported back at Fort Pleasant when he’d been enlisted. A little manual labor tended to have that effect. Even the whores had retained some of it, despite having been out of the fields for some years in most cases.
All of that had been in stark contrast to the soft, doughy bodies he’d seen on the women in the cities where he’d grown. Stealing glances through windows and taking what he could get as he lived the life of a petty criminal. A lifetime ago it seemed, but not more than a handful of years.
