by S. H. Jucha
Lizzie was right behind Jess, but her focus was internal. “Two insectoids about thirty meters out, Captain,” she said. “They’re between two buildings, which are close together. Citizens on the ground.”
Jess nodded, and Lizzie signaled the hatch to drop. Jess jumped out, and Lizzie let two squads precede her before she followed.
The squad leaders chose not to be part of the circle that formed. Instead, they stayed a step inward, where they could monitor the perimeter. It served to tighten the circle.
Jess approved. He caught Lizzie’s attention and tapped his temple. She nodded and relayed the tactic.
The command advanced toward the buildings. The trail of civilian bodies led there. Only one insectoid was among the bodies. It had been hacked in several places by crude instruments.
Dying Norsitchians beseeched the troops, as they stepped around or over the citizens. The squad leaders growled to force the troops to maintain focus on the perimeter.
“Twelve meters to the insectoids,” Lizzie said to Jess. She monitored the view from the traveler. The ship had lifted and hovered over the command.
“Black space,” Lizzie hissed. “The pilot’s lost sight of them.”
Jess warned the command to be vigilant, as they approached the space between the buildings. As expected, there were no insectoids in sight. He eyed the open windows on the single-floor buildings, which he didn’t like. A scream emanating from inside one of the buildings confirmed his suspicion that the insectoids had disappeared into the buildings.
“Alpha and beta squads enter the building on the right,” Jess said, pointing. “The other two squads take the left. Don’t let the citizens’ cries make you move too hastily. You’re no good to them if you’re dead.”
“And me?” Lizzie asked.
“You’re with me,” Jess replied.
As the squads retreated to enter the buildings via the front doors, Jess crept up to the first open window on the left. It was shattered. He could see a citizen on the floor. The head had been removed, and blood pooled on the floor around the neck.
Jess stretched his fingers to prevent tensing them on his launcher. His stomach roiled, as memories of the Sylian dome plagued his mind.
A crash inside the building caused Jess to flatten against the wall. He swung his arm to move Lizzie back, but against her mass, it was useless. Nonetheless, she took the hint and did the best she could to create a low profile against the wall.
Jess could hear the squads. They were giving chase to an insectoid, which seemed odd to him.
Faster than Lizzie could track, a giant, multilegged creature shot through the broken window. It hit the ground with a chunk of its body missing. Instantly, its head disappeared.
The insectoid was three meters long and gray. The head had carried two wicked-looking pincers before it disintegrated.
After Sylia, Lizzie had judged that she was quick with her launcher. But she was surprised that she’d barely brought the launcher into firing position before Jess had dispatched the insectoid with two shots.
Jess looked over his shoulder and saw Lizzie’s frown. “Problem?” he queried, pointing skyward and suspecting communications with the traveler network.
Lizzie shook her head in the negative, and said, “I need to get quicker.”
“That’s the challenge,” Jess warned. “Either you get fast, or you get dead.” He snapped up his launcher as a head appeared in the window.
A squad leader eyed the carcass on the ground. “Well-done, Captain,” he said approvingly. Then he ducked back inside.
Jess resumed his position against the wall. Lizzie did too, but this time she held her launcher at the ready and firmly gripped it. It dawned on her why the Omnian leaders and the Sylian defenders thought of Jess as the assault commander. It had more to do with his presence of mind than any physical attribute.
Lizzie and Jess watched the Norsitchian squads appear at the other end of the buildings. Several troops were covered in insectoid blood, implying close-up exterminations.
“How many?” Jess asked.
“Three,” a squad leader replied. “Yours makes four, Captain.”
“Any losses?” Jess asked.
“None. We watched every angle,” the leader replied, displaying a broad smile.
“Species?” Jess asked.
“Three grays and one red. The red had no weapon,” the first leader replied.
“Many rescues,” the second leader added. He beamed with pride, and the brassard was a wall of blunt teeth and straight backs.
“Well-done,” Jess commended them.
“Thank you, Assault Commander,” the brassard chorused.
“Lizzie, next target,” Jess requested.
Bortoth’s command might have suffered many more casualties than it did, if it wasn’t for his presence.
The command had chased two grays and a red into an agricultural field. Harvest was due. The crops’ stalks were taller than Bortoth, and broad dark green leaves obscured visibility.
Bortoth thought it was odd that they were chasing insectoids. It wasn’t like them to run, and he was right to worry.
Two more grays lay in ambush, with the three Colony members who had joined them. They lay low between the rows, staying close to the ground.
The four grays struck at the sides of the command, when the troops entered the trap. The insectoids fastened their pincers deep into the lower limbs of the troopers, injecting their venom into flesh.
The red rose up in front of Bortoth to strike. Had he been a Norsitchian, he would have been swiftly decapitated, and the red would have been free to continue its attack on the remainder of the command.
Bortoth’s size and strength enabled him to swat the red’s descending head aside with the butt of his launcher. The red hissed in anger and twisted its body to attack again. Backhanding the massive pincers brought Bortoth the opening he needed. He swung his launcher and pulled the trigger simultaneously. The dart left the barrel just as it came to bear on the red, and the head was separated from its body.
The three surviving squad leaders hurried to Bortoth’s side. They eyed the Crocians’ blood-splattered chest, and the huge red dead at his great clawed feet.
“Five of theirs, four of ours,” a squad leader muttered despondently. “We must do better.”
Bortoth rumbled in assent.
“Here, Commander,” a squad leader said, offering Bortoth a dead trooper’s launcher.
It was then that Bortoth noted that he’d broken the stock of his weapon against the red’s formidable head. And all I did was make it angry, Bortoth thought, as he dropped his launcher and gratefully accepted the replacement held out to him. Immediately, he checked the breech.
Lucia’s command encountered their targets in a multistory residential building. It was the site of numerous reports, many still coming into PD, which indicated survivors.
The front doors were barred with furniture, but they could see dead residents on the lobby’s floor.
“Split up and circle the building,” Lucia ordered. “We’ve got to find the way inside that the insectoids took.”
The three squads, the remains of her command, met around the back of the building, and an oncoming squad leader shrugged his shoulders at Lucia.
“We missed something,” Lucia remarked to no one in particular. She gazed at the building, eyeing its architecture, the windows, which didn’t begin until four meters up, and the wall’s material. Then she spotted the ornate trellises. They were solid, covered in beautiful flowering vines, and led from the ground to the top of the building. More important, they bisected every floor’s windows.
“That was their way inside,” Lucia announced to the command, pointing at the trellises. She delegated a squad to climb a trellis to the first window on the second floor, which was broken.
“Your objective is to reach the ground floor and unblock the entrance,” Lucia told the squad leader. “Don’t hunt the insectoids.”
The s
quad leader nodded briskly, slung his launcher, and climbed first. His four troopers were right behind him. At the window, the leader unslung his launcher with one hand and stuck it through the window before he poked his head inside.
As the squad made its entry, Lucia led the rest of the command to the building’s front door.
The squad was significantly delayed in reaching the lobby. Lucia noticed that the squad was missing a trooper, when it arrived, which explained why.
The reduced squad hauled on desks, chairs, couches, and cabinets until they cleared the doors.
“There are bodies everywhere,” the squad leader reported anxiously. “We killed the gray that got one of us, but we could hear others. The sound of their legs on hard floors is distinct.”
Lucia studied the building’s layout. She ordered two troopers to exit the building and guard the trellises. Then she turned to her command, and said, “We clear this building floor by floor. One squad remains in the foyer of each floor, while the other two split up and follow the circle of offices, apartments, or whatever.”
The squad that had made entry and was down two troopers, one by insectoid bite and another by assignment to the trellises, was delegated to guard the lobby.
The squads met again a few minutes later. No bodies or insectoids were found.
“It’s all shops on this floor,” a squad leader reported. “I think the citizens abandoned this floor for higher ground.”
“Except for these,” Lucia said, pointing at the bodies on the floor. “They stayed to guard the doors.”
“Courageous,” another squad leader murmured.
The command took shifts in a lift to reach the next floor. Lucia’s squad went to the left of the foyer. She halted when she heard the telltale scuttling.
Lucia discovered the Norsitchians had acute auditory senses. While she was unsure of where the multiple leg strikes had originated, the squad leader pointed at an open doorway farther on the right.
Lucia sent two troopers to guard that doorway, and she and others checked the nearby door. She and a female trooper entered an office. Two Norsitchians lay dead on the floor.
Scuttling was heard, and the trooper pointed down a hallway to the left. Lucia signaled the female to remain in place, and she went in search of their enemy.
Lucia kept her launcher tucked tightly to her side. It prevented her from banging the long barrel into a doorway or wall, if she had to swing it quickly. The scuttling remained, but it was augmented by the sound of banging on metal. She followed it.
In a storage room, a gray stood on its lower body. Its upper segment stretched over a cabinet, and its pincers struck the narrow gap between the cabinet and the wall. It was trying to get at something. Swiftly, Lucia darted the gray.
“Anyone here?” Lucia called out, as the halves of the insectoid slipped to the floor.
“Yes,” a small voice replied. Then a child crawled from behind the cabinet.
“Stay with me,” Lucia said, which wasn’t necessary. The child had a firm grip on her satchel strap.
When Lucia returned to the front vestibule, she found the trooper had dispatched another gray. Searching the remainder of the offices, Lucia and the trooper rescued two adults and dispatched a red, which was attempting to break down the door, which the adults had barricaded.
By the time the command reformed, they’d lost another trooper, killed five insectoids, and collected nine survivors. Lucia sent the survivors to the building’s lobby.
There were six more floors to search, and the ratios stayed about the same for kills and rescues.
When Lucia led her dwindling command out of the building, more than sixty survivors followed them.
“Will you stay with us?” the survivors beseeched Lucia. She explained that wasn’t possible, and the survivors scattered to arm themselves with materials to use as weapons.
Lucia used the traveler to signal the two troopers at the rear of the building.
“Smart move, Commodore,” one of the troopers said, with a broad grin. “We killed two grays trying to escape on the trellises from the upper floors.”
While Lucia’s traveler descended to recover the command, she considered the anomalies she’d witnessed. They bothered her, and she sent a request to speak to Jess.
Jess’s command was relocating. It enabled him to talk directly to Lucia through the copilot’s position.
“Good to hear your voice,” were the first words Lucia heard Jess say. She was warmed by the sincere relief she detected.
“We’ve lost a few troopers, but we’ve eliminated more insectoids than we did the first night,” Jess said. “How about you?”
“Sorry to hear about your losses, but well-done on the kills and rescues,” Jess replied.
“They aren’t, are they?” Jess responded. “The reds are still aggressive, but the grays seem unsure. Some attack, and some run from us.”
“It’s been the same for us. Few reds and many grays,” Jess said. “I’d presumed the other commands were encountering many more reds.”
“The question is: Are they dead or are they hiding and planning something else?” Jess replied.
“If the majority of those were reds, it would just about balance the ratios,” Jess offered. “Lucia, we’ve landed again. I’ll have to talk to you later.”
Sam had a unique encounter. His command had made two drops. They’d done well and only lost two troopers. Over his link with the pilot, he received notice of three grays crossing a fallow agricultural field.
The pilot counted down to Sam, as they neared the objective, and Sam lay on the deck next to the hatch.
Sam poked his launcher through the open hatch. Four darts quickly dispatched the three grays. Sam sent to the pilot. His mind flashed on the troopers he’d lost and the dying and dead citizens they’d encountered.
The hunt continued for another cycle, but the contacts were significantly less than the first hours of operation. Soon, citizen reports of attacks dwindled to zero.
The commands slept aboard their travelers, while they waited for the next directives to deploy. The SADEs monitored PD reports, but the only calls were of encounters with juveniles. In those cases, citizens killed them and communicated the contacts.
Olawale recalled the travelers, and the commands returned to the Rêveur to eat, clean up, and sleep.
“Either our estimates of the total adult insectoids who landed are in error, or approximately sixty adults are
unaccounted,” Esteban said, in an after-action conference.
When Lucia last spoke with Jess, there were eighty adults thought to be roaming the planet, but the commands had eliminated another twenty before contacts with the insectoids ceased. “What about the strange ratios?”’ she asked.
“Those sixty missing insectoids would need to be reds for the ratios to hold true to our previous encounter in the Sylian dome,” Juliette replied.
“Menous, what are the conditions of the brassards?” Jess asked.
“I’ll reform them, Jess,” Menous replied. “We’ll have about six.”
“Down eighty troopers to eliminate two hundred ten insectoids,” Sam summarized.
“Did we do well?” Menous asked. He was staring at Sam, and his eyes were sad. The bravado he’d first displayed was gone.
“Yes, your brassards did well,” Jess replied gently. “Don’t think about the numbers, Menous. Focus on this. Your troopers stopped the slaughter of your citizens.”
“Yes, they did,” Menous replied gratefully.
“What about the sixty remaining insectoids?” Ophelia asked.
“We can’t do anything until we receive citizen reports of contact,” Tacnock said. “Either the insectoids are hiding, or they’re dead.”
“Why are you suggesting they’re dead?” Aputi asked.
“At Sylia, we captured a damaged shuttle,” Lucia explained. “It was several cycles before we landed it aboard a station. When we investigated it, we found grays still alive, the reds dead, and some grays partially eaten.”
“You think the grays in that shuttle revolted,” Ophelia declared, leaping to a conclusion.
“Yes, and it might have happened here,” Tacnock replied.
“Extreme stress,” Daktora volunteered. “Under great duress, the social order breaks down. Reds imposed requirements too onerous for the grays to accept, and they chose to fight back against their masters.”
“Olawale, I’d like to leave a Trident and its travelers over the planet,” Jess said. “Two brassards, forty troopers, would remain on planet with two shuttles. If the reds show themselves, they can respond quickly.”
