The circling scramjets came nearer and nearer, protecting the engineering drones, unseen in the forest below. They were firing less and less often. What had been the constant thunder of strafing runs became intermittent flurries of suppressing fire.
Then an engineering drone burst through the tree line. Keen looked to see how many others would be following it, but there were none. Only one engineering drone had made it to their new position. Keen didn’t care too much about that loss. They were going to be picked up in a matter of hours and there wasn't much she could use the engineering drones for, but it did point to the potency of their enemy that they could pick off so many under the watchful eye of the circling scramjets. It was very quiet, Keen suddenly noticed, because there hadn't been any firing for three or four minutes.
"I don't think they like the look of our new position," Punter said, his voice hushed.
"It's a whole new ball game for them, much more difficult to creep up on things with no tree cover."
The scramjets were patrolling the treeline now, in big circles that took them all the way round the base of Cursed Rock and back again, circling endlessly, their mechanical eyes never losing concentration. Five minutes passed, then ten, then twenty.
"With any luck the bad guys will go away for a good think and won't bother us till pick up," Punter said.
As if on cue, they heard firing, scramjets, firing into the woods. The firing was coming from in front, from the left, from the right and from behind them. Keen stared at the woods but couldn’t see anything. Whatever had attracted the drone's attention was set back from the treeline. Then the drones started firing from the ground too, first one to the left, then one to their rear. The drones went instantly from virtual statues to living things spitting a hail of destruction into the woodland, and Keen then saw her first hostile. She had been expecting something like the one she had seen in the video, but it had a green hide, the same shade as the jungle itself. She opened up with her mass driver, but the thing moved fast, found some cover behind a rock, her mass driver rounds just uprooted a small tree trying to find a foothold among the rocks and threw it in the air.
"Blast you," she muttered.
Then there were five more hostiles, then another ten. Most were picked off by the scramjets and drones, and Punter bagged his first, neatly slicing it in two with traversing fire, but some were finding cover among the rocks.
"It's good we have air support," Punter said, "With the scramjets on our side we can deny them cover."
The scramjets were now dropping behind the hostiles, picking off the ones that were hidden from the guns on the hilltop, but Keen knew there would inevitably be some who found cover that hid them from both the hilltop and the scramjets. It wasn't quite as simple as Punter imagined.
"They have some kind of chameleon thing going on," Keen warned, "A lot of them were green as they came out of the trees. They'll be gray as this rock by now."
More and more were pouring out of the woodland. It was worrying, and the number of hostiles was impressive, but they were a modern military force. They could keep up their fire for weeks if necessary. The mass drivers, their most fearsome weapons would run dry in about twenty minutes at this sustained high rate of fire, but they had some mass cubes, enough to reload half the drones, and the blasters would never run out of ammo. They didn't have the stopping power of a mass driver but they were plenty deadly enough to tear apart one of the humanoid alien hostiles, even though their skin was hardened.
"Bring 'em on," Punter yelled.
The hostiles seemed to be inching forward, but then a concerted effort by the scramjets destroyed any advances they had made, withering their advance till it was once again back at the tree line.
"There are hundreds of them," Keen said, "How did they manage to mass at the treeline without us noticing?"
"They can match their temperature to the ambient and move slowly enough not to trip the motion detectors, makes them damn near invisible in the forest," Punter said.
He was guessing of course, but Keen judged them to be good guesses. A terrible thought suddenly occurred to Keen.
"They know this frontal assault will never work, so why-"
Her words were cut off as a hostile appeared directly in front of her, rearing up from the ground. If she hadn't suddenly guessed their plan, hadn't stopped firing and adjusted her aim, she would have been dead. Instinct. She had always had good instincts. The creature's mouth was open, and she saw, as she ducked, that the weapon wasn't invisible, as it appeared on the video, there was a bunch of technology within the creature's insectile mouth and a muzzle where its tongue should be. The muzzle was spitting a horrible twisting energy, all the colors of the rainbow but red-shifted to hues of blood. Even though she had ducked, it touched the armor on her back, spreading it in sheets like a hot knife falling on butter. All the creature would have to do would he nod its head downward, and that terrible beam of warping energy would mess her up, of that she was absolutely sure. Luckily her mass driver had gotten between the two of them. She shifted it and pulled the trigger, getting the muzzle below the creature's chin blowing its head off. The creature's carcass toppled backwards and she had a second to catch her breath, to realize how close she had just come to being killed. Luckily she had way too much adrenalin coursing through her system to really let it bother her.
To her left another creature appeared underneath a drone. The creature fired its mouth weapon, sending the drone's thin underside armor flying in warped streaks. The drone scanned left and right, confused, looking for the attacker. It was taking the machine precious seconds to work out what had happened. A fellow drone transmitted the vital information that the attacker was below it and the drone took a step back, tilting its body downward to try and get a visual, but it was too late, it had lost too much armor, the destructive beams of energy unleashed from the creature's mouth had penetrated into its body cavity. It slowed and stopped. Its status lights went dark.
The hostile was killed by mass driver fire from a nearby drone, mass driver fire that was perilously close to their own units. One round ricocheted and tore off the left leg of another nearby drone.
Their position would be torn apart if this kept up. How had the hostiles penetrated among them, Keen asked herself, and, more importantly, how could she stop them.
"If they're camouflaged and the same temperature as the rock, and they move so slowly," Punter was yelling, obviously desperately wrestling with the same problem as her, "How do we detect them?"
"Topography!" she growled triumphantly.
Another hostile had appeared among them, this time taking out three drones before being killed, but she left Punter to deal with it, and to try to keep the drones from shooting each other in the confusion. The hostiles at the tree line had taken advantage of the confusion to encroach further and further up the hill, but she ignored this too. She had to deal with the problem of the hostiles penetrating among their positions. If she dealt with that, they could hold out for weeks. She immediately contacted the scramjets, told them about her idea.
"Compare topography," she told them, "Reload old maps of Cursed Rock, compare them with what you can see, and destroy rocks younger than one day," she yelled.
It was a difficult problem for the scramjets, really exposing the limits of their non-AI intelligence. Their topographical analysis systems were designed for picking landing places and for avoiding smacking into mountains, not for targeting aliens who were pretending to be rocks. They had to reorganize the pathways within their firmware on the fly, and it took time. It also distracted them from their job of suppressing the hostiles at the treeline, who took advantage of their discomfort to advance up the hill, the fastest of them engaging with drones positioned on the lower slopes of Cursed Rock.
"Come on, come on," Keen was muttering, "Recalibrate."
Another creature burst out of hiding, right behind Punter, but Keen had been scanning the most exposed areas of their position, watching their asses, and
she was ready for it. She blasted it with multiple rounds from her mass driver, even as it was hitting Punter squarely in the back with a blast from its strange but powerful weapon. At such close range, Punter's armor deformed explosively, throwing him forward, propelled by a cloud of debris formed from his own warped armor.
"Punter," Keen yelled, "You okay?"
"Yes, yes," he said, climbing quickly back to his feet, "My armor held. Good stuff. I'll never criticize it again."
Another fraction of a second, as they both knew, and his flesh would have been warping into spaghetti just like his armor, but neither mentioned it.
Then, finally, the scramjets started shooting, seemingly at random, among their ranks. The drones instinctively drew away.
"Hold your positions, you rats," Keen yelled at them, "The raptors ain't shooting at you. Concentrate on your targets."
The scramjets found interloper after interloper, destroying them before they got right in among the drones. It was only then that exactly how precarious their position had been became clear to them. There were another twenty or thirty hostiles almost within their perimeter, worming their way to appear later behind their backs. It would have been enough to doom them in only a few minutes more. The hostiles couldn't hide from the scramjets any more though. They knew what the hillside of Cursed Rock was supposed to look like, and they were firing on any deviation from that, destroying hidden hostile after hidden hostile.
Without support from the scramjets however, things were deteriorating on the slopes of the rock. The hostiles had overwhelmed the drones further down the rocky outcrop and were now on the upper slopes, within range to shoot at the defenders on the very summit of Cursed Rock. That's when mass driver ammo started to run out. How long had they been fighting, Keen suddenly wondered, every second seemed infinite but the minutes had started to run away from her. Keen had been parsimonious with her driver and had enough for ten minutes more, but the drones in good firing positions were stuttering to a halt with their main weapons. There was no way to sugar coat it. They were being slowly and surely overrun, what had looked like a pretty good position was gradually turning to crap.
"Where is that dropship?" Punter yelled.
"They won't pick us up if we don't keep a landing zone clear for them," Keen yelled, "Leave the drones to fight it out with the hostiles and fall back to the landing pad I painted for the raptors.”
Keen and Punter hightailed it up to the landing pad and crouched down among the rocks. Keen took a good look at their situation. They were surrounded by a ring of drones, a very slender ring in places, all firing outward at the encroaching hostiles. Now that the scramjets had finished clearing the hilltop, they had turned their attention back to the hostiles, to devastating effect. the situation seemed to have reached a state of equilibrium, except for the fact that more and more drones were running out of mass driver ammo, and the scramjets were being reduced to using blasters too.
The hostiles had also come up with a new tactic. They built up forces, unseen among the trees, and burst forth to charge the line of drones at the weakest parts. Most of these charges were doomed, chewed apart by mass driver fire from an observant raptor, or driven back by massed fire from the drones. But, one or two of the charges had found their mark, leaving a warped and busted drone or two before being repulsed. Each time this happened the line of drones had to contract a little or get a little thinner, or both.
"It's only a matter of time before they break through," Punter said.
"Agreed," was Keen's only response.
"But how long," Punter pressed, "I think we have to know."
Keen summoned up a tactical program into her armor suit's memory and ran it. She fed in the variables as she saw them, picking and choosing from the data she had available, and watched as the outcome was computed. The answer came back in seconds.
"Looks like we've got about four hours," Keen said, rounding up generously.
"Four hours?" the disbelief was plain in Punter's voice, "That tactical simulator of yours needs an upgrade or something."
Twenty minutes went by with the loss of only one drone, but then two were lost in the next five minutes, before a relatively peaceful half hour with no friendly casualties, multitudes of hostiles were chopped down, but no friendly casualties. Punter and Keen had both been glancing up at the sky the whole time, willing a dropship, a grav barge, an atmospheric transport, anything, to appear. There was nothing, just the windless, featureless blue sky with the dark shadows of their own scramjets flitting around.
The scramjets were now all out of mass driver ammo, all looping down to tear at the hostiles with blaster fire. As one of the scramjets came round for another strafing run, the hostiles did something strange. they stopped pressing onward up the hill and seemed to huddle together. The scramjet flew on, unworried by the change in behavior, but as the blaster impacts started to tell, started to tear the hostiles apart, the whole group twitched.
"Huh?" Keen said.
Both her and Punter were now watching.
The twitching group of hostiles suddenly grew upwards, shooting upwards as hostiles jumped to the shoulders of other hostiles, like acrobats at a circus. One hostile was left at the top of the pyramid to jump as high as it could, bringing its mouth weapon in range of the scramjet.
"What the...?" Punter said.
The hostile hunched its shoulders, hisses like a cat, the beam it projected seeming thicker and more torturous than usual and it had just enough range to lick gently at the scramjet. The scramjet's right wing twisted into an unnatural shape, sending the stricken thing plowing into the side of Cursed Rock, right on top of two drones, resulting in a giant detonation and showers of scrap metal and rock debris.
The hostiles were running for the gap in the circle of drones before the smaller of the rocks and metal parts had finished raining out of the air.
Keen and Punter both immediately brought their mass drivers to their shoulders and started sustained firing, plugging the hole in their lines with rounds from the mass drivers.
"Not good, not good," Punter said.
"Keep firing," Keen said, "Give the drones time to reposition and plug the gap."
"What drones?" Punter muttered, "That's it. We've spread them as thinly as they'll go."
"So just keep firing," Keen said.
Just then a shadow fell across Punter's armor.
"Grav transport," he yelled, his voice exultant.
"Well what are you waiting for?" Keen screamed at him, "Climb in."
She didn't dare take her eyes off the oncoming hostiles, now pouring through the gap in their lines, until Punter yelled for her to follow. She dropped her aim, turned and ran for the transport. She saw it immediately, just a little distance away, but the time it took to run, with her exposed back towards the enemy was excruciating. She saw an armored door gunner pensively surveying the scene behind her, a scene she couldn't see. A male voice came over her communicator.
"Keep your head down as you run. I'm gonna have to deter your followers a little."
The gun at the grav transport's door exploded into life, the mass driver rounds arcing over her head as she ducked and ran. The deadly little rods of metal were uncomfortably close, which meant the hostiles were right behind her. How had they managed that, Keen wondered, how fast could they run. The grav transport was hovering on its grav engines about two meters above the ground, with the assistance of the massive legs of her suit, it was an easy jump. She landed half in and half out of the large side door. She grabbed onto the floor panels and hauled the bottom half of her body in. It was only then that she was able to turn round and look the way she had come. The circle of drones had completely collapsed and the hostiles were running unhindered for the landing pad. The pilot was juicing the grav engines so that they had already risen a few more meters and were rapidly accelerating upwards, but the hostiles were still running, undeterred. Then they seemed to fall, a whole row of them, and then another row falling on top. Keen instan
tly realized what was happening. They were building another structure.
They were rapidly building some kind of ramp, or mound, using their own bodies as building blocks to create a smooth path upward for their kin. It was living architecture in which each hostile was a brick. It possessed surprising strength and flexibility, reaching a height of tens of meters and involving hundreds of hostiles.
Soon there was a giant ramp, with hostile after hostile jumping from the top, screaming out their warping energy at the apex of their flight and falling to earth. The door gunner slid shut the armored door, which warped and buckled in his hands, refusing to close the whole way. There was the screeching, grinding noise of tortured metal and then silence. They had escaped. Nobody spoke, only the grav engines could be heard humming gently, powering them into orbit.
Chapter 13
––––––––
"Why didn't you shoot the alien scientist?" Altia asked, "I think a lot of other ground troopers in your situation would have shot first and asked questions later."
"You're right," Knave said, pensively, "It was the body language I guess. At some level I realized he, or she, was trying to protect his or her stuff. He wasn't attacking me in any way."
"Take a seat will you please," Altia said.
She was indicating a normal looking chair, but there was a column of technology beside it, draped in cables like an old tree draped in vines. Knave hesitated a moment, but then sat.
Altia moved behind him and started attaching electrodes and other probes to his forehead, wrist and chest. She had to undo the two fasteners of his shirt to get at his chest. She didn't show the slightest hint of shyness or hesitation about it.
"Is this some kind of lie detector?" Knave asked.
"No," Altia said, then after a pause, "Why? Have you been less than truthful with me?"
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