by Geoff Brown
A loud boom resounded outside the door, followed by another and then a third. The alien looked to the right and screeched an unearthly scream just before the fourth boom obliterated its skull and half its torso.
A deathly silence settled over the room as all inside froze in confusion. Sergeant Lancell concentrated so hard on the door that he forgot the challenge word the mysterious ‘Beast’ had given him.
“Frisky! Frisky!” His voice cracked under the anxiety, but he kept calling out the challenge, simultaneously hopeful and fearful of hearing the return password.
“Dingo.”
Sergeant Lancell reached out and grabbed Private Holiday before he hit the ground and nearly dropped his weapon. Someone was outside the door; someone who had given them an old military verification technique they knew the aliens could not compromise and who had just cut through four alien creatures that hours ago had seemed invincible. It seemed almost too much for the boy to handle.
“Pull the barricade back, Sergeant, and rally your men. We’re moving out.” The voice came from around the corner, but no one peered through the hole the aliens had cut into the door.
Sergeant Lancell gave the order and every able-bodied soldier in the room scrambled to pull the makeshift barricade from the door. Once the exit was clear, the door opened and Sergeant Lancell stepped out into the hall, weapon raised.
Gore coated the ground and hall. Something had torn into the aliens with such force it splattered them like warm paintballs. The next thing he saw took him completely off guard.
Leaning against the wall, just to the left of the doorway, stood the tallest woman he had ever seen. She wore a skin-tight, grey and green suit with heavy-looking web-gear. Her short hair was blood red and her cold blue eyes reminded him of Neptunian glaciers as they cut into him. In her right hand she gripped a weapon straight out of a history program.
The colonel pushed past him. “Is that a Milkor? Wait, no, it has too many barrels on the cylinder.” She stared right at the bulky, old-world weapon the soldier had slung to her front. “That’s a shotgun… with 30mm slugs. You’ve also got shrapnel and incendiary rounds. It must be a prototype. A weapon that big is too impractical for regular troops.”
“Are you in command here, ma’am?” The soldier ignored the Colonel’s peculiar interest in her firearm and studied the hall as she addressed the officer.
Sergeant Lancell winced at the breach of decorum then grimaced when the colonel deferred to him. “I am in operational command at the moment, soldier.”
She continued scanning the hall as she spoke. “What is the status of your men, Sergeant? How many can move in five minutes?”
Sergeant Lancell glanced back in to the room. “I have twelve who can move now, but three are wounded and need help getting along. One of my privates is shredded below her left knee. Two of my men are badly wounded and need immediate EVAC if they’re to make it.”
The soldier leaned close enough to whisper, which scared him. “We are moving to the hangar bay in five and we will be moving at double time the entire way. Anyone who cannot hobble on a shoulder or be carried stays.”
“Stays?” Sergeant Lancell eked out a nervous laugh. “They cannot stay here; they’ll die. We need to evacuate them to the med bay and stabilize them—”
“We’re not going to the med bay, Sergeant.” Her blue eyes were tiny icicles as they bore into him, freezing him to the bone. “A molecular induction device has been activated on level 3 with a medium fuse. It will sink this base into the planet and anything still inside. My mission is to get as many survivors as possible off world before detonation. If you stay here or if you slow down the group… I will leave you. Four minutes, Sergeant.”
* * *
Sergeant Lancell stared at the ground as he carried Private Fialto on his back. He could not believe what he had just done. Not only had he left behind two dying men, but his conscience had also deprived the group of two carbines and a grenade. It was the least he could do for them after the choice he had to make.
Fourteen survivors followed the impossibly-tall female soldier through the halls. Every few minutes they would come to a stop and the soldier would stare to the side, as if listening to something, then she would nod slightly and press on, confident in her direction. He wondered where she’d come from and whether she had arrived after the attack or had always been here. He could not remember ever noting someone like her in the logs.
A scream pulled his head up and Sergeant Lancell noticed a dark, metallic shadow down the hall.
They were discovered.
More shadows appeared and charged. He cursed the soldier for insisting the last two carbines be kept at the back. That was the most foolish thing he had ever heard. He commanded his two armed men to assist the soldier, but they both froze. Private Fialto screamed at him to turn and run, but he passed her off to the man next to him and grabbed a weapon, pushing to the front as the shotgun boomed.
The Beast pushed forward into the charging monsters, her weapon spitting fire and obliterating everything it hit. Grey torsos blasted into chunks, helmet-like heads fragmented and the bio-goo inside the creatures painted the once-sanitized walls. In seconds she’d downed six aliens, but on the seventh shot, her mighty shotgun clicked. A misfire.
She dropped the gun without hesitation and pulled the mammoth pistol from her thigh, slamming two rounds into a creature inches from the end of her barrel. The pistol reports rivalled the shotgun in sound, but the loads did not pack as mighty of a punch.
“Clear the jam on that weapon,” the soldier yelled as she closed with the wounded creature and rammed a combat knife up through its jaw and into the brain.
The Sergeant raised his carbine at the three remaining aliens. “I’ll cover you.”
Beast yanked the carbine from his grip and shoved him behind her. “Clear my weapon, dammit!”
His carbine’s fire sounded meek compared to her other weapons, but by the time he reached her shotgun, she had already unloaded the clip into the first invader. The shotgun had to have weighed fifty pounds and he just stared in confusion at it in his hands.
The colonel was beside him, pointing and yelling. “Pull back the hammer and rotate the cylinder. The hammer… that thing on the back.”
He cocked the lever on the weapon and rotated the cylinder in the middle of the gun until it clicked over to the next barrel. He looked up and yelped, seeing the soldier backpedaling right at him as she unloaded her pistol into the last two attackers.
“Here! Here! Here!” he cried, holding out the gun and wishing she would stop before the creatures reached him.
Beast slammed a round into the second alien’s head and dropped her pistol as the last one lunged for her. She spun on the ball of her foot and kicked backward into the alien’s chest, stopping it mid-lunge and snatching the gun from Sergeant Lancell in one motion. She completed the spin and swung the shotgun barrel right into the enemy’s face, pulling the trigger at the moment of impact. The last round fired and blew bits of the alien everywhere.
The soldier swung the cylinder of the shotgun out, dumped the spent rounds and slipped eight new shells into the barrels. With a flick of her wrist, she spun the cylinder and then slammed it home. Swapping out the magazine on her pistol took her a second and then they were moving.
She dropped the magazine out of the discarded carbine and gave it back to Sergeant Lancell. “Reload and keep this thing at the rear. You fire only at anything coming behind us. Leave the front to me.”
Sergeant Lancell stood there, stunned. He nodded slowly. “Yeah… understood.”
Beast pushed forward and Sergeant Lancell waited where he was for the rear to catch up to him. Most of the men stared at the back of the soldier in similar states of awe.
Private Holiday had a grin on his face as he passed. “I think I’m in love.”
* * *
The colonel audibly yelped when she saw what waited for them in the elevator. “That’s an M-2. And you found am
munition! It’s operational?”
Nikki ignored the exuberant officer and waved the survivors inside. She closed the gate and sent the carrier up to the top floor.
“How many of them are up there?” The NCO in charge, Sergeant Lancell, hid his fear poorly in front of the others, but he acted under fire instead of freezing or fleeing, and that was more useful than a brave face.
“Unknown.” Nikki didn’t like conversation and feared any conservative speculation on her part would panic the others. She knew what would be waiting on the other side of the doors when they opened. As the carrier reached the floor, she racked the slide and hugged the butterfly grips to her chest.
“Plug your ears and take cover.”
A flurry of chrome claws and gun-metal teeth lashed out as soon as the doors parted. Nikki opened fire and turned the beasts to pulp. She barely noticed the expanding pressure inside the elevator carrier, but the others likely thought they had been transported to the bottom of the ocean. In seconds she had cleared the first wave of the attackers at the door. She looked around at the others. Those that still stood wobbled on legs of jelly, but most hunkered in the corners. Blood trickled from a few ear canals. Nikki had not been ordered to deliver them in perfect health; simply alive.
She kicked on the hover drive and pushed the cart and 50-caliber machine gun down the ramp and out into the hangar. The two ships to the left appeared in good condition. By divine fortune the aliens seemed uninterested in destroying technology as demonstrated by all the still-active drones circling above the carnage.
The path to the closest ship was clear of enemies, but as Nikki gave the command for the survivors to move, an alien exploded from cover to her right. She tried to swing the barrel of the M-2 around, but the beast cleared the short distance too swiftly.
The cart, the gun, the ammunition and Nikki flew in different directions. Nikki got her right forearm in front of her throat and the metallic talon skewered it instead. The bay spun around her as she tumbled across the concrete with the creature. She heard the survivors screaming and hoped their fright did not indicate more aliens.
The shotgun still clung to the strap on her harness and she found the grip while ignoring the dozen razor appendages digging into her flesh. She swept the barrel up and bisected the alien with a loud blast. The top half of it lashed out in a frantic death throe, catching the weapon with a claw and flinging it. She shoved the thing off in time to see a second tango looming over an injured soldier.
It lifted the impaled man off his feet with its spear-like tail and chomped down on his head and the top half of his torso in one bite. The others sprinted for the ship, but the alien discarded the dead soldier and quickly turned its attention to the fleeing humans.
Nikki noticed the spasm in her stomach more than the pain when she put her feet under her, and the amount of blood already soaking her suit foreshadowed the information Shogun fed her.
Beast, you’re mangled inside. Mobility is at sixty-three percent and dropping. You won’t regenerate quickly enough in combat. Proceed to the second ship immediately!
“The survivors are boarding the first ship already; it’s too late to switch ships.” Nikki gave chase, drawing her pistol, but she could not unleash and sprint without hitting those in her line of fire; not with being fifteen years out of practice.
Leave them, Beast, or you won’t make it and they’ll be dead either way. We need that drone data. We need you alive, soldier!
Nikki had no room to stop and hesitate. Her mind comprehended the order and worked through the logic of it, but her body did not react quickly enough. She slammed into the alien from behind as it slowed to pick off a straggling soldier and the injured man hanging on his shoulder.
There was no backing out now; no Plan B. Nikki rammed the barrel of her 50-caliber pistol into its side and fired off two rounds. She wounded it, but the pistol rounds did not create the same magnitude of damage as the shotgun.
The alien turned on her.
The claw cut across her chest, from the side of her neck to her deltoids and nearly cleaved her right breast clean off. Dark blood sprayed the creature and Shogun screamed obscenities in her head. She cried out inside her mind, commanding him to tell her how long she had before expiration with that wound.
His voice came soft and from a distance, drowned out by the sound of an inferno somewhere deep within her. Her vision blurred and heat flooded her body. She heard a scream, but it may have come from her. She felt armored skin in her grasp and she yanked upward, lifting the monster over her head and then brought it down hard, slamming it into the solid concrete. A swift kick sent the beast spiraling into a stack of crates and her vision returned in a red hue.
The creature rose to its feet, but it moved slower. Everything moved slower.
There’s no room to reach the ship now, Beast. You have to kill it or it will not allow any of you to leave.
“Understood.”
Nikki rushed forward, closing the gap between her and the creature in an instant. Her firearms were gone, but her synthetic muscle tissue generated more than ten times the capabilities of a normal human. Her right cross was like a hydraulic piston firing into the side of the creature’s skull. She followed with her left while reaching for her combat knife with the right.
She never saw the tail darting out from under its right arm. It shot through her chest, just to the right of her left shoulder and stopped her attack. The monster lifted her off the ground to take away her leverage. Shogun’s voice tore through her mind.
You have no reserve, Beast! It’s you or it! Right now!
Nikki had nothing left. Wounded and unarmed, she braced herself for the cold embrace of defeat. The alien lifted its left claw for the swipe, its line of glowing, LED green eyes forming a robotic grin.
Sword!
Nikki’s eyes snapped open and she reached over her right shoulder as the monster swiped. Her hand closed around the hilt and she twisted, breaking the blade away from the magnetic clip that held it in place. Her arm responded automatically and the alien waved a bloody stump past her face as its massive paw thudded against the concrete.
The creature glanced at its amputated limb and Nikki swung again. The forged steel blade stabbed through the alien’s neck with a crunch and its head turned slightly to look her in the eyes.
Nikki roared in its insectoid face, a primal scream uttered only by those few who had stolen victory in mortal combat by a razor’s-edge margin. With a jerk of her shoulder, Nikki wrenched the blade aside and the monster’s head flopped to the floor.
She hit the ground as the alien crumpled and the darkness threatened to take her. Shogun was in her head, begging her to get up and get to the ship. She was bleeding out faster than she could heal and by his estimate she was at less than fifteen percent mobility, but she pushed against the cold ground.
She looked up to see a dozen more aliens pour out of a hall at the other end of the bay.
She could hear the sergeant yelling for her back at the ship. Could she reach the ship in time? Those foolish technicians had not even fired the engines, yet. How long would it take for the ship to boot up?
“Move out, Sergeant! I’ve got you covered.” Nikki got to her knee, gripping the hilt of her sword in one hand and looping her index finger through the ‘last resort’ grenade on her harness.
Fifteen percent mobility.
* * *
Sergeant Lancell stood on the loading ramp of the EVAC ship. Inside, several of the techs scrambled to get the ship’s AI booted up. Private Fialto prayed aloud, strapped into the corner seat along the wall.
The colonel leaned on his shoulder to peer out with him. “She’s telling us to go, Sergeant.”
“She means to stay here and hold all of them off by herself?” Sergeant Lancell groaned with frustration. “She can’t even stand.”
“She will give us enough of a window to lift off and head for orbit,” the colonel replied. “I believe she can pull it off, but if we do not
go now her sacrifice will be meaningless.”
The ship shook as the plasma engines fired up and raged. Inside a few shouts from the crew signaled success. “We’re up and running, Sergeant!”
He stood and looked onward as the aliens got closer to the soldier that had come out of nowhere and saved them from a grisly death. Not an hour before he had left two men behind with two carbines and a grenade to allow them to go out on their own terms instead of in the razor-lined maw of a monster. He had abandoned them because there was no choice; because he was not powerful enough to stand against the attackers like the Beast. He did not have her bravery. He did not have her weaponry.
Sergeant Lancell jerked away from the railing on the ramp as if burned by it. He hopped down from the ship and looked toward the elevator ramp.
“Sergeant?” the colonel yelled over the engines.
“I’m not leaving anyone else behind!” Sergeant Lancell sprinted across the hangar pad, back the way they’d come.
He scooped up the ammo can on the fly and skidded to a halt over the downed 50-cal. With a grunt, he heaved the weapon turret upright and slapped the first, enormous round of the old-school ammunition belt into the cradle. It took him a moment to align it correctly and he slammed the top down and traversed the barrel to where the enemy advanced on Beast.
Remembering how she had tucked the grips to her chest, he mimicked her and sighted in his first target. “Not today, assholes!”
Click.
The sergeant jerked in anticipation of the recoil from the powerful weapon, but there was nothing; only the hollow, soul-shattering click of a misfire. Sergeant Lancell pushed the thumb trigger harder and when that did not work, he frantically pounded on the top of the gun and pressed the trigger over and over. He had no idea how to clear a jam on something so ancient.
