Extinction Wars: 02 - Planet Strike

by Vaughn Heppner

  Once they engaged in a fight, the Kargs didn’t know how to retreat, just charge harder than Lokhars would have done. That helped. I’ve spoken about suicidal troops before. They bled too hard compared to soldiers who wanted to live for another day. With high-tech weaponry, caution usually saved lives.

  It might have helped that we had heavier personal weaponry. I saw a Karg infantry-creature soon enough. So maybe I ought to let you know what they were like. I don’t know that I’d call them robots. I didn’t know enough to make the call. These things seemed built and grown, though.

  A Karg—or a Karg soldier—had a barrel body with a horny shell like a beetle. He had a triangular head with the same tough substance and complex eyes like a common Earth housefly. He had a wet orifice for a mouth with chitin teeth. Then, if you can believe it, he had two metallic tentacles with metal pincers on the end. We’d seen such a tentacle before holding a knife that had sliced a strapped-down Lokhar. A Karg had three shorter tentacles on the bottom for mobility, scuttling from place to place. He spoke in clicks. So I had no idea how the Abaddon character had spoken to us. That made me wonder if these were designed cannon-fodder types. I guess they could breathe in this atmosphere.

  The Kargs didn’t have graviton-ray infantry weaponry. That was encouraging for our side. They had rifles with odds shapes, sizes and big calibers like riot guns. In the beginning, I didn’t see what made the weapons fire. I’m taking about hammers striking pins, as you’d find on Earth bullets. The Karg rifles launched big exploding rounds. They had knife blades for hand-to-pincer combat and they had sonic grenades that proved useless against us, although they made our ears ring as if we’d been standing beside speakers at a heavy metal concert.

  Maybe these Kargs were the workers. Maybe these things were specialty bozos. There were enough of them, and they went banzai against us, selling themselves to get to Demetrius’s mingan.

  We completed the tactical maneuvering just in time. Demetrius’s troopers switched to grenades because their Bahnkouvs began overheating and shutting down.

  Surrounded, the last Kargs hesitated. What did they say to each other? After ten seconds of deliberation, the aliens attacked in all directions, and we finished the first battle in short order.

  “Go, go, go,” I said. “And keep looking for hatches leading down. Oh, and grab some Karg weaponry. Don’t overload yourselves. But it’s a good idea for us to save our lasers for the toughest fights.”

  “You do not believe this was it?” Dmitri radioed.

  “Do you?” I asked.

  “I would like to think so.”

  “No. It’s going to get a million times worse,” I said. “This is as easy as it’s going to get. Now start moving.”

  Those were grim words, but one small victory in this dome hadn’t won us much. We needed to descend at least several hundred meters. I expected more Karg moth-ships to reach orbital station any minute.

  We hit the main chamber shortly thereafter. Squat creatures with rough, scaly skin and stunned heads without necks ran the computer systems. The tentacle-weaving Kargs had been half the size of a human. These things were built on a Lokhar scale. They didn’t communicate with clicks and whistles, but spoke with mouths and lumpy tongues.

  Were these the true Kargs? I had no idea of knowing. We kept no captives. We slaughtered every freak. We gutted the planetary cannon dome, silencing the thing, likely letting the Kargs upstairs know we’d made it in here.

  That’s when Demetrius found a great big hatch going down. He radioed me.

  “Speed,” I told my mingan leaders. “This is all about speed.”

  “We need to coordinate the entire landing,” Demetrius said. “We have to use localized advantages to beat the Kargs in detail.”

  I could see the former SAS soldier had big ideas. I’d reached different conclusions, and I’d been the one who had fought aliens before. Everything struck me differently than we’d planned, due to having gone through the Karg universe. The sheer scale of enemy numbers, the super-supermassive black hole—I couldn’t get that out of my mind.

  “Demetrius,” I radioed, “listen to me. Get down. Go as many levels toward the center as you can. Time is running out for us. Time’s running out on our universe.”

  “You can’t expect to walk all the way to the center,” Demetrius radioed. “It would take weeks.”

  He was right, but now wasn’t the moment to worry about it. Escaping the graviton rays about to come mattered more than plans and high ideals. I knew the beams were coming because it was obvious. It’s what I would do.

  Nor was I wrong. We fought another battle, this time with twice the number of tentacle-waving Kargs. Just like the first fight, we stood in place to pin them down and maneuvered to flank them from up, down and all around. The slaughter had barely finished when the first graviton ray burrowed into one of the flanking mingans, destroying three hundred troopers in puffs of vapor.

  Panic might have finished us if there had been any Karg soldiers left. Fortunately, they lay smoking on the floors, leaking blood. I shouted at troopers. I raved at my commanders, and Demetrius found another hatch down.

  We fled into it, causing jams at times. Demetrius used his big body, crashing into troopers, hurling them out of the way. Finally, I reached the spot. Did my voice help? Troopers were used to obeying me. I brought a semblance of order to the traffic jam, and we soon all plunged deeper into the portal planet.

  We fled down circular corridors a giant snake might have used. We passed sewage, steam, computers, I think, lights, walked across thin arches with a bottomless pit below.

  “If we could fly down…” N7 said.

  “Do you have a flyer?” I asked.

  We tiptoed across the narrow walkways, joining the others. In a word, several words, we outraced the depth of the graviton rays. That’s what I’d been hoping for. The Kargs needed the portal planet. That meant they had to be careful how powerful of a beam they shot down at us.

  Still, how many Earth troopers had survived the rays sweeping the surface? At this point, I had no idea. As far as I knew, we were the last ones left. My group had already been whittled down to a little more than three thousand men and women. Waiting Karg soldiers, planetary cannons and rays likely meant they had already slaughtered millions of us; well, millions of Lokhars, at least.

  “This is hopeless,” Rollo said a few minutes later, as he jogged down a pleochroic corridor of intense colors. Masses of troopers ran all around him.

  “No,” I told him. “We have hope.”

  He shook his head. “You’re hopeless, Creed. You don’t know when you’re beaten. What chance do we have? Soon, the planet will be swarming with Kargs chasing us, and we have to get to the center of a world?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s why we need to find a spot to rest.”

  “Rest and do what?” Rollo asked.

  I turned, starting at Ella. She still clutched the small Forerunner artifact in her ammo bag. It reminded me of a female chimpanzee and her baby. Is that what the relic had become to Ella?

  “We need to figure out how to communicate with that thing,” I whispered. “It might know stuff about this planet that no one else does.”

  “Do you think so?” Rollo asked, with hope tingeing his voice.

  “I most certainly do,” I said.

  -25-

  Our four bleeding mingans loped through subterranean corridors fit for giant snakes a block in diameter. Sometimes, brilliant lighting from embedded ceiling fixtures polarized our visors. Sometimes, darkness held sway and we switched on our helmet lamps.

  I imagine that high above the planet the Karg Imperium shuddered with dread and horror. The impossible had happened. Alien life forms—us—had reached the surface and burrowed into it. The planet powered the portal. If we could reach the center, we could turn it off, and trillions of Kargs would forever remain stuck in their shrinking space-time continuum to die by supermassive black hole.

  Abaddon had told u
s we couldn’t even reach this far. By their numbers and the odds, we shouldn’t have been able to do it. Now the Kargs would have to attack with fierce desperation to make good on their leader’s failed boast.

  Static blanketed all but the nearest communications. I had no idea if Lokhar legionaries still lived. Certainly, any land tanks would be smoldering wrecks by now. Could less than four thousand assault troopers be the extent of our numbers? I didn’t want to dwell on that.

  The fact was this was a death march without mercy or pity. You had to keep up or die. At times, a wounded trooper collapsed onto his butt to rest or an exhausted soldier slumped against a metal wall. Most of those we never saw again. At other times, distant, echoing battle sounds penetrated to us, and we’d hear snatches of radio chatter.

  “There are others of us that are still alive,” Rollo told me.

  This was good to know.

  By this time, we’d made it a half a kilometer underground. That was a long way already, but just a fraction of how far we needed to go. It should have gotten hotter, at least by Earth physics. The deeper one went in the Earth, the hotter it became. Did giant gravity plates change the equation in this place? I imagined so, or some similar technological reason.

  “Commander,” Demetrius radioed me. He was point man. “My people are badly fatigued. We need to rest before everyone collapses.”

  My throat burned and my sides ached. I wanted to stop as badly as the next person did. The idea of avenging Kargs following us had kept me going. But the SAS man knew his stuff.

  “All right,” I radioed my mingan leaders. “We’re going to take five and try to recoup some strength.”

  In our curving, downward-slanting corridor, Rollo gave the order to his people. We practically all fell down as if knockout gas had hit us. Everyone wore symbiotic suits and air-converters and bulky ammo-packs. Black forms lay on metal floors. It felt glorious to rest, and I closed my eyes.

  Maybe Ella should have used this time to try to communicate with the artifact. She was too fatigued just like the rest of us. It could have been she went to sleep as many of us did.

  “Commander!” Dmitri shouted into my headphones.

  I snapped up to a sitting position. There must have been three hundred troopers in sight of my helmet lamp. I was about to ask what the problem was—

  A stabbing red light appeared on my HUD. It was a graviton ray as thick as a giant stanchion poking nail-like into metal and through layers upon layers of planetary decking. This was video-fed from a nearby trooper several levels above me. I immediately realized what I saw.

  The graviton ray quit beaming as glowing hot globs of dripping metal cooled. Our scout must have maneuvered a drone eye above the slags of metal to look up the hole created by the giant drill. The drone showed space, and then space darkened as a tube or pod plunged into the hole. The pod slammed down like a shotgun shell into a chamber. It clanged against the end corridor where the scout had set up his post.

  Seconds later, the pod’s sides exploded, and out boiled a squad of Karg infantry with their metallic tentacles. The scout had time to lift his rifle into firing position before exploding bullets tore holes in his bio-suit. His flesh rained, and the scout died. Seconds later, so did his camera.

  The battle had just entered phase two of our Armageddon. The nightmare was truly beginning for us.

  In a thrice, the mingans rose, and we ran away from the attacking Kargs. While at full strength, we learned, a human could outrun a Karg fighting-creature. They had the stamina, though, and it was clear they would eventually run us down. Therefore, I planned as I sprinted. Soon, I coordinated our flight, and we set up a now classic Karg-killing ambush: one group stayed in place, fixing the enemy. The rest maneuvered to hit the flanks and hit the bottom and sometimes the top of the enemy formation.

  The firefight fatigued us again, but afterward, we kept descending into the planet.

  We passed through cube-shaped chambers bigger than a Macy’s store. There, strange lights played along the walls and titanic equipment shined as if it was a vast jewelry display. The worst were eerie voices that turned into heavenly song. Once, as I scaled down pieces of brilliant equipment in order to get to the next floor, a ghostly apparition appeared—a hologram, I’d like to think. But the thing looked at me with yellow eyes that raged like a sun. It seemed to know what we were doing, yet it appeared indifferent to our actions. What was its shape? I seemed to know for a moment—snakelike with hundreds of centipede legs—but there was confusion in my brain and I couldn’t be sure. The ghostly holoimage terrified me. I wanted to get away from it and its knowing eyes. So I did something stupid. I pushed off and plunged thirty meters to the bottom.

  The floor rushed up. I saw a Karg rifle lying there in my way. I tried to shift. Then I landed with a crash, rolling, and heard other thudding troopers alighting beside me. Several people busted legs. That didn’t happen to me, but the soles of my feet hurt worse than the time I’d kicked a tree. Yeah, I did that as a kid. A branch had broken and I’d fallen out of it. Getting up, I’d kicked the damned trunk as hard as I could. I think I’d been ten years old at the time. I learned right there it was stupid to try to hurt inanimate objects, and I’d limped for days.

  I got up and limped away now. A few troopers helped those with broken legs as the symbiotic suits adjusted. We weren’t going to willingly leave anyone behind.

  We fought, we fled, and at strategic intervals, we turned at bay to kill our fastest pursuers. How long did that go on? I’d say for five hours, solid. As I’ve said before, we used Karg weaponry against our enemies. We saved our Bahnkouvs for later. I got used to firing the Karg rifles and hosing enemy down with Karg machine guns. We used their sonic grenades against them and watched flesh melt from metal frames.

  What were these things? Were they robots, cyborgs or some new invention from a different universe? The answer was I didn’t know.

  Our numbers kept dwindling, though. We must have been down to two thousand by then. The enemy’s attrition tactics would have finished us in another few hours, until two things changed the dynamics of the situation.

  First, a mixed band of Lokhars and humans with Doctor Sant stumbled into us. That brought our numbers back up to four thousand troopers and maybe five hundred Lokhar legionaries.

  We didn’t have time or the strength to slap backs and congratulate each other. Another pod-drop of Kargs pushed against our rear ranks.

  “This isn’t working,” Demetrius told me via radio. “We can’t gain any separation from them.”

  He was right. We’d been at this for hours. I reeled from exhaustion. It had become hotter down here. We’d made it a kilometer and a half or so underground, maybe a little more. We’d never reach the center of the planet this way.

  I knew the Kargs had an endless supply of the tentacle freaks to throw at us. It would just be a matter of wearing us down long enough. I was surprised they weren’t ahead of us. Maybe Abaddon hadn’t trusted his soldier-creatures in the planet before this, just on its surface. Maybe this place was holy to them in ways we couldn’t understand. The Kargs should have already been down here, but they weren’t, and that’s what gave us a chance.

  “What do you suggest?” I asked the SAS man.

  “I never did like running much,” Demetrius said. “It always was the worst part of the training. Sometimes, I wanted to strangle the sergeants leading us up hill and down. You’d better believe this. I’m not going to end my life puking my guts out with sweat dripping down my eyes. I’ve had enough of this. I don’t know how it happened, but my mingan is facing the Kargs right now.”

  We’d maneuvered, run and turned at bay so many times, that our point mingan had become our rear-guard mingan.

  “We can set up another ambush,” I said.

  “I’m telling you to forget about that,” Demetrius said angrily. “You know, Creed, I always wanted to kick your ass. Now that I have these fibers in me, I know I could knock you up one side and down anothe
r. But I’m never going to get the chance.”

  “Listen—” I said.

  “No,” Demetrius said. “You listen to me…sir. We’re going to stay right here. We’re loaded up on their weaponry, and we’re going to kill Kargs until we die in place. You ever heard of the Spartans?”

  I felt a constriction in my throat. I understood his idea, and it was the right one. We needed separation from the enemy, and we needed time for Ella to communicate with her relic. Still, to let Demetrius do this for us…

  “I’m going to stay with—” I said.

  “Belay that, Creed,” Demetrius said, sounding angrier by the moment. Then his voice softened. “You tell Diana what happened to me. She’ll want to know.”

  I wanted to tell him all kinds of things. Greater love has no man than this: that he lays down his life for his friends. What Demetrius was doing…

  “Yeah,” I whispered. “I’ll tell her.”

  “You’d better,” Demetrius said. “Now I have to go. The Kargs are coming. I can hear the echo of their metal legs clicking against the floors. I’m going to be busy for the rest of my life.”

  I squeezed my eyes together, shook my head, and I bellowed at my troopers to run. We needed to get separation, and then it was time to see if we still had a chance to do this.

  We ran, we endured and cramps hit over half the troops. Finally, in one of the giant cube areas—this one made of a shimmering mirrored surface—my zagun and I, together with Ella, collapsed in exhaustion.

  Others camped around us in various corridors and substructures. It daunted me to think of the entire metal planet honeycombed like this. There had to be engine areas, fuel depots and who knew what else. I sipped concentrated fluids, gulped vitamins and allowed the suit to stim me. Even then, I almost found it impossible to keep my eyes open. To lay on my side and rest would be glorious.