Fear the Alien

by Christian Dunn - (ebook by Undead)

“Commissar? I’m Lieutenant Jepthad.” The young officer saluted crisply.

  Catmos stepped backwards, gesturing to Mathein to do likewise. He made a mental note to adjust the patient’s medication after the tranquillium the orderly had administered.

  “Let me show you our dispositions, sir, and review the tyranids’ last attack,” Jepthad said with a hint of entreaty.

  Catmos busied himself redressing the casualty’s wounds.

  “Vox-sergeant, let Headquarters know we’re here.” Thirzat was clearly unimpressed. “I’ll make my full report later.”

  “At once, commissar,” Biniam said promptly.

  On his way to the stairs, Thirzat paused to look at the heavy-set man. “Your reputation goes before you, vox-sergeant.”

  Biniam looked the commissar straight in the eye. “Argene Prime, sir?”

  Thirzat didn’t blink. “That and other things.” He held Biniam’s gaze for a moment before turning to Lieutenant Jepthad. “Show me your defence lasers’ field of fire and the terrain.”

  Kicking aside an acid-etched flak-armour breastplate, he strode towards the stairs. The lieutenant and the cadets all followed.

  Catmos checked his patient was sleeping soundly. Biniam strolled over to join him rather than heading for the vox-caster in the corner.

  “Do you think he considers himself a Stone Bear?” he mused.

  “I don’t imagine he’s much for nicknames.” Catmos said, though he imagined the cadets had some choice names for Thirzat behind his back.

  “You were at Argene Prime?” Mathein asked, awestruck.

  “He only wears his Honorifica Imperialis stud when he’s in trouble with regimental command.” Catmos checked the coloured telltales on the sensor-blanket’s corner. The wounded man’s heart rate, blood-oxygen and pressure were satisfactory.

  “We were both there. Not much to tell,” Biniam said repressively.

  Catmos could see Mathein was still desperate to ask. Thankfully he didn’t. Catmos had no wish to relive that campaign against the orks. Not when he and Biniam were the only two survivors from their entire company. The Alba Marmorea always boasted Alnavik gave far more than it accepted from the Imperium. They certainly had in the Argene System.

  “How’s the lieutenant?” Catmos asked in low tones. Jepthad had been expecting to learn from Captain Slaithe, not to replace him within three days of planetfall.

  But the universe isn’t fair and doesn’t care. Every Alnavik child knew that.

  Biniam shrugged again. “He’s doing well enough, for a valley whelp.” Like Catmos, he’d been raised in the Marble Mountain quarries. “As long as his nerve holds.” He looked searchingly at Catmos. “What about these lads you’re patching up and sending out?”

  The field surgeon knew what he meant. They couldn’t afford to lose men to battle shock, not here, not now. Never mind Commissar Thirzat executing men he accused of cowardice. To have any chance of withstanding the tyranids, every man must hold his ground or die trying, for the sake of all the rest. Thirzat had only spoken the brutal truth. But what good was the truth if it only dismayed already-dispirited men? Fear could be as contagious as blister-pox. If it took hold, it would destroy them as surely and swiftly as any tyranid swarm.

  Catmos had been thinking about that. “Bin, the engineers refitting this place dumped every vox, pict and data-slate they broke down here. Can you scrounge what you need to make a starchaser?”

  “A starchaser?” Biniam cocked his head. “Where’s your helmet? What hit your head and how hard?”

  Catmos smiled. “Just do an old comrade a favour.”

  Biniam pursed his lips. “All right, I’ll bite, just to see what you want it for. As soon as I’ve reported in.” He headed for the vox-set, light on his feet for a big man.

  “A starchaser?” Mathein was bemused.

  “I have an idea. It may not work, even if Biniam can make the thing,” Catmos said evasively. “Now, let’s see who can be holding a lasgun by morning.”

  He didn’t need to tell Mathein they would need every mattress for casualties from the next tyranid attack.

  The field surgeon was wrapping the last of the night’s dead in his sleepsac when dawn light spilled down the stairs to the basement.

  “Ailure?” Biniam tugged at the fold over the man’s face. “He promised his marble bear pelt to Tremarc.” The shoulders of Biniam’s own uniform were striped with bear fur.

  “Tremarc is over there.” Catmos nodded towards another shrouded corpse. “Help me get them upstairs.”

  “Can’t those puking cadets do some work?” Biniam took the dead man’s feet nonetheless.

  Emerging into the Planetary Defence compound, Catmos blinked in the strengthening sunshine. “Where to?”

  “Over there.” Biniam nodded to a hastily dug trench, paving slabs stacked beside it. The dead were being dumped, stripped of their weapons and gear. A Guardsman sprayed promethium over the corpses and ignited it with a flamer burst.

  Catmos’ throat tightened, but it was the only way to stay free of insidious tyranid organisms. He looked at more pits covered with habitents pegged flat. “This can’t help morale.”

  Biniam scowled. “Would letting the lads watch their dead pals twitching, splitting open to spill poison-maggots into the soil?”

  Catmos looked towards the outer wall. Those lightly wounded the day before, whom he and Mathein had discharged, were arming to rejoin their comrades. Guardsmen unscathed in the first assault stood ready on the rampart. Lieutenant Jepthad was consulting the sentries.

  “Still no foe in sight?” Catmos wondered how long it would be.

  Biniam nodded northwards. “Vox-chatter says their main assault hit Yota City. Whatever stink tells them their hivemates are in trouble here is blowing out to sea.”

  “How are the other emplacements faring?” This was one of eighteen forts ringing this continent’s only city. Catmos didn’t imagine the companies sent to hold them were laughing and passing round lho-sticks.

  Biniam shook his head. “Some have dropped off the vox-net—”

  Shouts from the rampart interrupted him. Catmos saw Lieutenant Jepthad raise a hand to his ear, intent on his micro-bead.

  “Here they come,” breathed the vox-sergeant.

  Guardsmen on the walls clustered around their heavy bolters. The weapons’ racking cough sent deadly explosive rounds ripping into the tyranids. Oxy-phosphor flares indicated at least one heavy bolter loaded with Inferno ammunition.

  In the paved hollow of the compound, mortar squads deployed in unhurried routine. One man dropped a shell in the gaping weapon. The other yanked the firing lanyard and the stubby barrel spat explosives high over the wall. Catmos saw the crews swiftly adjusting azimuth and bearing as spotters on the ramparts relayed details of each detonation. Every round must extract the maximum death toll from the tyranid multitude. Guardsmen resupplying the ramparts with ammo dodged around the mortars.

  Retreating to the top of the steps, Catmos was about to go back down to the basement. He changed his mind. His first duty in a battle was assessing the wounded who needed skills and time the medics couldn’t spare. He could do that as well if not better up here.

  Despite all the heavy-weapon crews’ efforts, the first wave of tyranids reached the walls. They leaped into the gaps between the heavy bolters, propelled by powerful hind legs that were bent and angled like a dog’s, ending in a bony excrescence that was part hoof, part claw. Talons on their middle limbs hooked securely onto the rampart. They heaved themselves up, hissing and spitting, their forelimbs brandishing bony scythes as long as a man’s arm.

  One skewered a Guardsman under the chin, his face disappearing in a wash of blood. The creature lifted him off his feet, shaking him to free its claw. Neck snapping, the man’s body fell away, limp in death.

  The creatures’ carapaces were segmented like some giant, loathsome insect. Overlapping plates jutted upwards from their backs, the colour of old rust and dried blood. Beneath, t
heir skeletal limbs and thorax were the sickly white of leprous skin. Grotesquely swollen, red chitin-plated heads roved from side to side. Slime dripped from thrusting jaws, myriad teeth like a needle-shark’s. Catmos locked gazes with one of the repellent creatures. Its cat-slit eyes were fever-bright, intent only on mindless murder.

  How could they possibly survive? His chest was an empty hollow. Bolter rounds were falling like winter hail and they still could not prevail. Their lasgun power packs would fail before this onslaught faltered. If they killed these vermin till the corpses were piled as high as the rampart, that only gave the tyranids an easier way into the compound.

  Catmos’ heart raced with panic but his limbs were frozen with fear. He couldn’t run. He couldn’t reach his laspistol. What was the point? Even the men on the walls were huddling behind their heavy bolters. Seductive despair beckoned, a black blanket to hide beneath.

  The lascannons ringing the tower’s upper levels burst into life. The alien exploded in a reeking shower of bony fragments and cauterised gobbets of flesh. The same laser blast blew apart the handful following the trailblazer. The air rang with deafening shrieks as beam after beam of brilliant death cut a swathe through the chittering hordes.

  The close-packed Guardsmen on the battlements were firing their lasguns. Pinpoint beams severed limbs and gouged deep into those swollen heads. They blinded noxious eyes and slashed flickering tongues clean through. Lieutenant Jepthad stepped out of a heavy bolter’s shadow and calmly focussed his fire on one murderously flailing tyranid after another.

  Catmos drew a shuddering breath. He felt like some fool turning his back on a winter blizzard to huddle over a petrosene stove, not caring that blocking winter’s draughts through his house was starving the heater of fresh air. Not knowing the glowing element would burn all the oxygen, condemning everyone to sleep-sick death. Now he felt as if someone had kicked open the door and dragged him out, letting the biting wind scour the toxins from his blood.

  Squad medics were patching up wounded men and sending them back. No one expected different. Back on Alnavik, if a marble bear chased you, you climbed a razor pine and didn’t complain about your cuts. You were alive, weren’t you? Catmos ripped his laspistol from its holster, ready to offer covering fire to a pair of medics carrying a casualty down from the rampart. The man clutched at his broken breastplate, blood oozing over his fingers. “The gates! The gates!”

  Men on the walls were yelling. Lieutenant Jepthad slid down a ladder and raced across the compound. Something hit the outer face of the gates, fifteen metres in front of the tower. The impact was deafening. The layered plasteel buckled but didn’t break. Catmos’ relief was short-lived. As the gates twisted, a narrow gap opened by one hinge. A massive barbed claw carefully explored the weakness.

  There was a second explosion; something detonated right against the entrance. The plasteel held but gaps were opening all around the gates. Bubbling black acid oozed, weakening the ceramite plating.

  The lascannons on the tower would defend the entrance if the gates gave way. Catmos looked around, shielding his eyes from the blinding beams. But the lascannons were aiming higher, not lower.

  Bat-like shadows blighted the sunshine. These tyranids flew on leathery wings, membranes spread between the splayed bones of their mutated middle limbs. Their evil gaze searched for targets, their fore-limbs clutching weapon-symbiotes. Catmos tensed as the monstrosities flew high above the ramparts, their viciously barbed tails lashing between their atrophied hind legs. Would they hover and fire or stoop like a hawk for the kill? Either way, the Guardsmen on the walls couldn’t take their eyes off the tyranid ground assault, not if they wished to live.

  Lascannons burned through the warm air. The flying tyranids caught in their crosshairs disintegrated. Any of the vermin too close to those initial casualties fell too, wings shredded by razor shards of shattered chitin. But as they tumbled from the sky, their weapon-symbiotes still spat borer worms at the mortar crews. Crashing onto the paving, their twisting tails cut Guardsmen’s legs from under them. Contorted spines embedded in men’s thighs as the flying tyranids flailed in their death throes.

  Those monstrosities still aloft vomited lurid gobs of bio-plasma. Catmos saw one spatter a grey-haired Guardsman. Clinging green fire ignited his flak-armour, his hair. Snarling with agony and hatred, the man kept firing, bringing down the alien who killed him. The merciful ignition of his lasgun’s powerpack freed him from his torment, an instant before Catmos’ finger tightened on his laspistol trigger.

  The twisted gate screeched. Massive russet claws slid through the foaming black acid. Barbs dug deep as whatever was outside pulled harder, inexorably widening the gap. Ceramite began to rupture.

  “With me!”

  Commissar Thirzat charged out of the central tower, flak-armour over his tunic, his plasma pistol in one hand, a power sword in the other. Cadets followed carrying flakboard. Others hauled rockcrete beams. Rallying to Lieutenant Jepthad, the Guardsmen in the compound began forcing a path to the entrance, despatching wounded tyranids fallen from the sky, stamping on ravenous borer beetles scuttling round their boots. Mortar crews dragged their weapons aside, sacrificing range and aim. Undeterred, they resumed firing blindly.

  Catmos and every soldier on the tower’s platforms concentrated their fire on the scything tyranids still scrambling over the wall. Up on the ramparts, men fought and bled. If those vermin attacked the Guardsmen and cadets, their attempt to reinforce the entrance was doomed.

  Guardsmen and cadets formed a solid wedge, Thirzat at its tip. Step by dogged step, the commissar led them forwards. Catmos could see the shimmer of heat from weapons rising above the cadets in the centre, still grimly dragging forwards materials to repair the breach. Lieutenant Jepthad was walking backwards, resolute in command of the rear.

  Too late. With a mighty heave, those monstrous claws ripped the left-hand gate in half. Unlike the creatures scuttling over the compound paving, this creature stood upright: a repellent parody of a man with its fingered hands clutching a weapon-symbiote. It was twice the size of the tallest Alba Marmorean, even standing on its bent legs. Its massive carapace and the chitinous plates jutting from its head were the putrid brown of rotten fruit. Its uppermost pallid limbs bore massive talons brandished high above its broad shoulders.

  Catmos recalled an Officio Medicae briefing, longer ago than he could guess. This was a tyranid warrior. One of the most deadly creatures the Hive Mind spawned, dominating lesser progeny and driving them to do its will.

  Smaller tyranids were fighting to get through the gap behind it. Scurrying across the compound paving, they reared up on mid- and hind-claws, forelimbs clutching fleshborers and devourers.

  For an instant that seemed half a lifetime, the tyranid warrior surveyed the carnage. As the closest Guardsman levelled his lasgun, a new horror sprang out from behind it, so fast Catmos took a moment to realise what had happened.

  This was a different monster, more slightly built with twice-jointed uppermost limbs studded with fang-like claws to pierce and crush. It wasn’t using those, flinging out its clawed hand instead. For an instant, Catmos allowed himself to hope. It had no hope of reaching the Guardsman. Then he saw that didn’t matter. Bony hooks shot out from the tyranid’s skeletal flanks, embedding in the Guardsman’s arms and face. The creature raised its clawed limbs again. Sinews linking the hooks to its narrow body contracted. Despite his frantic struggles, the hapless Guardsman was drawn into the tyranid’s grotesque embrace.

  The hooks were already tearing him to pieces. Dripping tentacles hanging from the alien’s maw caressed his head. Their tips slithered into his ears, his mouth. As the man writhed, the creature’s grip tightened. Now the tendrils thrust into his eyes, his nostrils. Blood and mucus gushed as spasms wracked the dying man.

  The vile tyranid shivered with obscene satisfaction, throwing its victim aside. Its gory tentacles gently licked each other clean of brain tissue. Jaundiced gold, its luminous eyes fast
ened on a new target. Another abrupt gesture flung its flesh hooks to snare the soldier.

  Commissar Thirzat was charging towards it. His power sword cut through the sinews. A plasma pistol shot took it straight in the face and its seared tentacles shrivelled. The monster staggered backwards to collapse in a thrashing heap.

  The massive tyranid warrior rounded on Thirzat with a roar, as soldiers, mortar crews and medicae were all turning their lasguns on the tyranids in the compound. The alien vermin shrieked and died as their armoured exoskeletons fractured under ceaseless las-fire. The heavy bolters on the ramparts were still mowing down the swarms attacking the outside of the walls.

  No one could help Commissar Thirzat fighting the tyranid warrior. His plasma shots targeted its mouth, its eyes, the underside of its joints every time it swiped with a murderous claw. His power sword cut deep in its forelimbs as he ducked and weaved. Catmos hadn’t ever seen a fighting man so quick on his feet.

  With an ear-piercing shriek of fury, the monstrosity took an unexpected step back. The lesser tyranids behind it wavered. The warrior slipped on some fallen flyer’s wing membrane, giving Thirzat the chance to break away. Jepthad and the rearguard fired a concentrated volley at it. Ichor glistening on its carapace, the massive creature retreated, lashing out indiscriminately at the milling cohorts outside the gate. As it vanished, the assault slackened, not much but just enough.

  “Secure that breach!” Thirzat bellowed, near-breathless.

  The cadets were already busy with their flakboard and rockcrete as Jepthad’s men blasted the lesser spawn to bloody ruin. While the rest of the Guardsmen killed those tyranids trapped inside, Catmos assessed the most grievously wounded. A cut to the thigh, bright with arterial blood. He pressed a suction-dressing down hard. A hand half-cut, half-tom from its wrist. A styptic-bandage and some tranquillium and that could wait. A grey-faced Guardsman with bloody froth on his bluish lips. Priority Red: his first patient. Etrick and Tind were responsible for the wounded who could be returned to the battle. Catmos fought to save the worst injured for medevac.