by A. D. Bloom
Cozen called out, "Second wave!"
"Aye aye!"
"Go, Go! GO!" The second wave went over the hill with D'Ambrosse and her mech-suit in front, carrying the massive, improvised breaching charge. It would make the jump in a single bound. As it took off, Dana ran behind the 4-meter mech, screaming the foreign battle cry Ram heard from her before. She held her pig-sticker up above her head as she jumped with the others and flew out of sight and into silence.
"Third wave!"
Ram and Biko shouted, "Aye aye!"
"Go, Go! GO!" Cozen charged up over the top, and Ram and Biko followed, carrying the same pig-stickers as everyone else. Ram did his best to yell out the most terrifying cry he could make. The ETs couldn't hear him, but the battle cry wasn't for them.
Just like Mickey said, the ship's tower rose up out of the crest of the hill when Ram was halfway up. At the top, he could see it was only fifty meters to the long, wing-like section of the alien hull. The vertical tower went straight through the 'wing' and protruded out the bottom along with three sets of what could only be landing gear. From hundreds of meters up it hadn't looked so big, but the vertical tower section of the alien ship looked more menacing now, like they were charging a fortress instead of a ship. That's all Ram could take in before he took the first, long, bounding jump from the top of the hill. It took so long to come down that he felt like nothing but a target hanging meters up in the air, just waiting to be ripped apart by some kind of alien projectiles or burned to a crisp by an unimagined ET weapon.
Mickey and the 1st wave crossed the distance and made the bounding jump up to the wing-shaped section of the hull, almost 10 meters above them. When they landed, 2nd wave wasn't far behind.
3rd wave touched down and bounded forward, skipping across the open rock as the first wave completed their clean landing by decelerating against the side of the tower. Mickey led her team a little further around the base of it while the second wave with the knuckledragger and the breaching charge made their ascent jump. Once they were up, Mickey pointed to tell D'Ambrosse where she wanted the charge.
By the time Ram and the 3rd wave did the last high jump that brought them up on the wing, D'Ambrosse was already standing in front of the spot Mickey had picked, her knuckledragger towering over the rest of the team and flashing blue lightning as she held the breaching charge to the alien hull with one mechanical arm and began to weld it on with the integrated welder in the other.
D'Ambrosse was a pilot and usually maintained a degree of calm in her voice even if her junk was making an uncontrolled descent into the sun. That calm was all gone now. She breathed hard and fast as she spoke. "Composition of the alien hull is unknown. But it's a metal. Whatever it's made of has a high melting temp, but I can do this. This is going to work."
As Ram got his back against the tower, he saw the movement. "Above!"
The flashes from the welder lit the aliens blue, but they were reddish when his helmet lights hit them. The three of them wore some kind of mechanized suits, but not open-framed, blocky mechs like the knuckledraggers. The alien suits were sleek, sealed and armored, five-meters-tall. Ram didn't know if what he saw of the suits' anatomy matched that of the alien things inside it, but they way they came down vertically with one gangle of armored alien appendages pointed at the hull suggested they intended to land on them like legs. Another set of five just like them protruded from the top of a central body mass. In the middle of it, an armored nub with a porthole visor like a helmet suggested a head underneath.
He didn't even realize they'd fired until D'Ambrosse lit up inside her knuckledragger. She burned in an aura of clinging flame. Her screams filled comms as the falling attackers each extended an 'arm' at D'Ambrosse. The skeleton of the knuckledragger sparked around her and arced with charge as she burned up inside her suit. Flame filled her helmet as they landed silently.
Dana was the first to shout, "Kill them!"
Mickey pushed her out of her way and discharged her sidearm into the center body mass of the alien battle suit that had landed closest. Ram saw the weapon's x-rays vaporize the dust they'd kicked up and draw a ruby line like a spear that stabbed at the alien armor. Scattering rays and whiffs of smoke came off. The beam cut the surface, but it didn't punch through. Without even looking in her direction, a pair of armored fire hose limbs knocked her against the tower so hard she bounced off it and didn't move.
"Mickey!" Ram had nothing but a pig-sticker and when he stabbed at the nubby thing in the center of its body, at the thing that might have been a helmet, it swept one of those limbs into his belly and sent him flying backwards into the tower like Mickey.
There was nothing Ram could see in D'Ambrosse's helmet but flame and he thought she was already dead, but the knuckledragger turned and lit its integrated cutter. A 12,000 degree, magnetically shaped plasma blade extended a meter from the knuckledragger's left arm. D'Ambrosse reached out from hell and drove it into the alien battle suit, right into the nubby helmet in the center. Whatever that thing was made of sparked and spat bits of molten armor as the plasma cutter plunged in deep. It emerged glowing bright as it came out the back. Blue and yellow flames and pressurized gas and boiling fluids jetted fog and snow out the wound on both sides. D'Ambrosse's visor blew outwards, and then, the knuckledragger was still as the holed, alien battle suit fell to the hull.
Oboto caught fire in his suit and burned inside it until he vented flame like D'Ambrosse. Ram saw the weapons clearly that time. The aliens had mounted them at the terminus of the 'arms' of the suit, like pieces of pipe over an armored hose.
Lapuis managed to get his bulky, meter-long, plasma cutter lit up so he could use it as a weapon, but he only cut off one of those armored appendages before others snaked behind the 50cm blade and knocked him against the tower so hard he vented atmo. The cutter went flying.
A wide-bore shaft of ruby light so solid and bright he could have climbed it bisected the melee, and Ram knew Mickey was back in the fight. She demonstrated why guns with an adjustable rate of discharge like her H&V Itar had been banned on earth. She must have gone to full power and let out half the battery. That beam would have pierced a hull. Ruby light flared and burning green flame erupted, and Mickey's gun vaporized a hole ringed with molten metal in the middle of the alien's twisting body mass. She held the trigger down and with a flick of her wrist, she almost cut it in half. It erupted with venting gas and what Ram guessed was some kind of bluish blood that made a fountain of off-color snow as it boiled then froze.
Mickey leveled the Honma & Voss at the third armored alien, but nothing happened. "Overheated!"
"Yaaaaaaa!" Hollis threw himself at the last one in desperation and stabbed it between the main body mass and the lower appendages. The alien ignored him as he stabbed it again and again hoping to find a weak spot. The alien looked each one of them over more carefully, probably trying to find the heavy weapon that was the only real threat.
It stood directly in front of the crippled knuckledragger and the breaching charge D'Ambrosse had welded to the hull. "Blow it!" Ram shouted. "Blow the charge!" Harry Cozen already had the bright orange detonator in his hand, but all of them were in the blast zone.
"Get clear!" Cozen shouted. "Three!"
Mickey pulled Dana backwards and then threw her around the curve of the tower.
"Two!"
Biko pulled Hollis away from the alien suit, but it didn't care about them. It had found the heavy weapon and it only had eyes for Mickey Wells now. "One!" It pointed its gun arm at her and she gave it the finger in the same instant Cozen blew the charge.
In the first ten-thousandths of a second, the explosives welded between the alien ship's hull and the piece of Gold Coast's hull generated enormous heat and pressure that had nowhere to go. The piece of hull-plate D'Ambrosse welded on would blow off, but not before the heat and pressure turned both the plate and the alien hull to molten metal moving 3000 meters per second in opposite directions.
It hit the alien mec
h-suit along with a shower of molten metal and wiped it away in a burning blur just before the geyser erupted. Whatever the aliens had for atmo in there was humid. It came out under pressure and it came out of the hole they blew in the hull like a boiling liquid. It jetted for almost a full, five seconds, impossibly silent. Some of it froze on the ship's wing-shaped hull section in slender, fifty-meter horizontal icicles and the rest of it turned to a snow.
When the geyser had weakened to a billowing fog, Cozen shouted, "Go, Go! GO!"
Mickey went in first. Ram tried to get in front of Dana and knock her out of the way, but she disappeared through the hole after Biko. All he could do was chase her through the fog, into the alien ship.
Once Ram got through the hole, the floor fell away and his legs kicked under him. They'd breached the hull halfway up a bulkhead, meters off the deck, so as they ran inside, they fell, but so slowly that they flew across the chamber, barely dropping at all. Ram tried to keep the pig-sticker pointed up, away from Dana and Biko who were less than a couple of meters in front of him and about to make contact with a bulkhead.
Mickey had already pushed off it and sent herself down to the deck of the two-story compartment. When Ram hit the bulkhead just after Dana and Biko cleared it, he tried to do the same, but the patch he hit was covered in a yellowish ice and he slid down into the fog. What he landed on was as tall as a person and it took him a couple of seconds to figure out it was a console of some kind, mounted on a thin pedestal. It was icy, too, and as his booted feet scrambled to find purchase, he saw what lay below it, through the fog where he'd fall. It looked like a pile of old hoses and a rubber blanket all covered in something slimy and frozen from the bottom of a pond.
Yellow ice clung to it and laying there in a pile like that it was hard to imagine it as the same towering thing inside the battle suits. It was all skinny all over and tall if you'd stretched it out. Three meters. More. It looked boneless. He guessed it fell face up. If it had a face, it was the thing set in the middle of the body mass. Where that nubby helmet had been on the alien battle suit there was a swelling protrusion on the body and more, smaller appendages with an orifice at their center. What it had that looked like eyes were set around the oral appendages on all sides and they'd burst in the pressure change. Only five concavities remained.
It twitched, cracking the yellowish ice that clung to it. It was still alive. The orifice on the front side of the nubby head opened and exhaled pale blue droplets in a fine spray. That's where Ram stabbed it. He didn't even consciously know he'd begun to drive the point of his weapon forward until his eye caught the motion happening. It was like a reflex, as if seeing that thing alive offended him on some primal level and his body's atavistic, programed survival response was to kill it.
The pig-sticker went in and kept going. Ram thought he felt something firm in there, but it wasn't bone. It was softer and more flexible and Ram only knew he'd pushed the point of the pig-sticker completely through the alien when the blade hit the waxy deck.
"Dead! They're all dead in here!" Biko shouted.
Mickey said, "Clear! Clear! This compartment is clear!" There were three consoles and three boiling, freezing, ruptured, spindle-limbed ETs in that first compartment, all of them impossibly skinny and folded over themselves like they were inflatable and someone had let out their air or water or whatever held them up.
Everything was rounded, the corners where bulkheads met, the consoles, everything. The bulkheads had a waxy yellowish coating over them and the compartment itself was shaped like a split cylinder. Five unarmored, woven-looking exosuits made to fit alien bodies hung from the wall with neckless, nub helmets and tiny, cycloptic porthole visors set in the center. The suits looked like they were in some kind of charging slots. There were ten slots, but only five alien exosuits there. Ram said, "A least five of them got into suits before they died."
Tse's voice came from 'round the bulkhead's curve. "There's something I swear is an airlock over here. The hatches look like metal butt holes."
"Five of them are still alive, people," Mickey said. "We will find them and we will kill them."
"You think they got out?"
"Not a chance," Mickey said.
"This is a hatch!" Cozen shouted from the opposite side. It was oval-shaped with a fine, irregular seam down the center and even though it was metal, it looked like it was supposed to expand to open like some kind of sphincter. There was no porthole or a wheel to turn or any other obvious method of opening it.
Biko said, "There's got to be some kind of interface panel."
"We don't need it," said Cozen. "Get that plasma cutter on this hatch double-time!"
Mickey called out, "Ram, Biko, Dana! I've got an open hatch and a tube going up to other decks over here! I'm going up there and you three are with me."
It was a vertical tube going straight up into the compartment's icy ceiling. There were no mechanical conveyors, only foreign protrusions. "Must not operate in heavy-gees very much." She peeked up it and pulled her head back fast before doing it again and taking a longer look. "It's over 2 meters wide the whole way up. I saw two of those open sphincter hatches. Looks like it extends two levels above this one. I'm going to fly past the first to recon and then, I'll hold the tube and cover you three as you ascend and enter that compartment."
Mickey didn't wait for anyone to argue. She pointed her gun up the tube, stepped under it, bent her knees, aimed with her eyes, and jumped. Ram watched her ascend and fire the H&V just once into the hole in the bulkhead as she passed it. "One more down," she said inside Ram's helmet. "Get in there! I've got you covered."
This time, Ram went before Dana. His jump up the tube put him across from the open hatch, and just inside it he saw the one Mickey shot. It was on the deck wearing an unarmored alien exosuit. Mickey's laser had drilled it dead center through the helmet it wore over what it had for a head. The fog venting out spread across the floor so Ram waded knee-deep in pale blue clouds.
Shapes Ram had never imagined protruded from the walls and consoles set in them. If these were controls, he couldn't fathom their logic, but in the middle of the compartment stood stubby mushroom-shaped tanks of some kind. That's what they looked like. They were only a meter high. The rest of the compartment looked empty from the tube, but when Ram jumped up high over the alien's body to get a better view from on top of a console, he saw around the tanks in the middle of the room. That's where they hid, curled and half coiled up, making themselves small.
No matter how alien they were, Ram felt the presence behind their cycloptic visors as they stared back. He felt their alien gaze looking back at him as clearly as if he'd been staring down a human. They watched him as he clung to alien control panels and conduits set high on the bulkhead. "There's two of them in here with me! Get in here!" The closer one uncoiled and sprung at Ram with all its rubber hose arms extended and something like a stubby, glowing knife held in the small appendages set at the terminus of one of its 'arms'. From the way the tip flickered and sparked, he knew it was some kind of plasma-based cutting tool.
With one hand, Ram grabbed for the alien limb that held the blade. Its appendages wrapped around his arm and then his legs. He stabbed at the body part of it and he didn't breach the alien exosuit, but he must have hurt it, because it threw him against the bulkhead. Then it was on him again, and Ram couldn't find the blade, because of three-fingered 'hands' all over his helmet, tugging and bending the release latches, trying to figure out how to open the suit so the human inside it would die.
Dana stuck it in the side. She didn't pierce the suit either, but it let go of him. Biko got his whole body behind the point of his blade and when he thrust forward hard with that pig-sticker, he caught the ET against the bulkhead. It bent over him like it was trying to wrap around him. After the impact, Biko pulled the weapon out and stabbed again into the cloud of fog venting out the new hole in the alien's suit. All of its impossibly thin limbs flailed as the gas jetted out. It went slack once, then ca
me back until he stabbed it twice more. Then, it stayed crumpled in a gangly pile where he threw it.
The other one was frozen there by the stubby tank. In the low-gees, its boneless arms seemed to drift like they were waving in an underwater current. Ram didn't know if it felt fear, but those grotesquely fingered, palmless 'hands' seemed to reach out to him. If a human had made the same gesture, then it would have been begging. Ram was sure of it, but Dana didn't see it like that or if she did, she didn't care. Dana Sellis had picked up the weapon or tool the dead ET had dropped and she was already in motion.
She advanced without hesitation, slashing at all the skinny, waving, rubber hose arms that came up to protect its grotesque excuse for a face. The sound that came over comms then - the sound that came out of Dana wasn't a battle cry, but it was primitive and pre-verbal and all the more terrifying to hear because that sound came from her - because it was an expression of something in her that Ram didn't know was there.
The little, alien plasma tool and its 10cm stub-blade sliced through the forearms of the thing's suit with ease. The gas and boiling blood that came out the ends of the repeatedly cut limbs shot in Dana's face and covered the visor of her helmet, but she kept slashing and slashing at it until those long arms it had tried to use to protect itself hung more than half detached, clinging by threads of suit and stringy alien flesh. She cut it across the torso and belly over and over until it dropped and twitched. Then, Dana fell on it and stabbed the plasma blade through the visor of its helmet until it melted through.
"Ho-lee hell," Mickey said as she appeared in the hatchway.
"Dead Squidy," Dana said as she stood up, "It's dead."
Mickey was unfazed. "Top deck is clear. The one up there had a sidearm. Here," she said as she tossed it into the compartment and Ram caught it. "It's a hand-held energy weapon. Some kind of maser. It had one of its... limbs inside there and it tried to point that thing at me. Be careful. If it has anything like a safety, you can bet it's already off."
