There was more at work in his thoughts than the struggle to remember the more intimate details of his life, as the psychic pressure of the garm Hive Mind was ever-present for Ajax. The alien cells in his brain may have given him a significant advantage when it came to hunting down the more psychically active garm organisms, but it took a significant amount of energy and focus for the marine to keep it in check. He might have impressions of the enemy, but it, too, had some sense of him, and it was only through the intense meditation techniques taught to him by the skalds that he was able to manage the swirling chaos that had become his consciousness. It struck Ajax as rather interesting that when he looked into the watery expanse he found the pressure eased, the psychic burden lessened somehow.
Ajax was not the only marine taken with the sight of so much open water, and he noticed that Sharif stared into the deep blue with just as much intensity as he had a moment ago.
The other marine was strapped into a seat across from Ajax, the low-flying troop transport, with its open bay doors was a welcome change from the cramped APCs that were the standard deployment vehicle. Wind whipped sharply around them. Sharif saw Ajax looking at him and the marine activated his comms, his voice clear in the other marine's earpiece.
"Ajax, have you ever seen an ocean before?" asked Sharif as he turned his head back to look out at the open water, his pulse rifle cradled against his armored chest. "I think maybe I have, back when I was a kid, but the details are kind of fuzzy."
"I'm sure I have, the sound of the waves is really familiar, but nothing clear," shrugged Ajax as the internal warning lights began to strobe in a dull red, indicating that they were one minute away from the drop zone.
"That's how it goes," stated Yao from his seat next to Ajax as the transport began to speed up, "Fill our minds with guns and garm, there just isn't room for much else."
"You guys are bumming me out," interrupted Rama from his seat at the bay door on the other side of the transport as he gestured towards the glittering sea rushing beneath them. "This beats every miserable place we've visited since this whole thing started. Maybe we can't remember who we were before, and probably this too will go away eventually, but we're here now and its gorgeous. Shut up and enjoy it."
"Yeah, for another twenty seconds," Ford snorted from his seat as he ejected the carbon magazine from his pulse rifle and slapped it against his armored thigh before slotting it back into the rifle. "The skalds said the whole island is hostile ground, I think we're about to get all the wild nature we can handle."
"Hydra Company, we hit the drop zone in ten seconds!" boomed the voice of Jarl Mahora over the company channel, aboard one of the other transports that streaked across the sky. "Make ‘em hurt, marines!"
Ajax flexed his armored fingers around the grip of his own pulse rifle and took a deep breath, held it for a moment, and then began to let it out slowly. It had been months since the nightmarish events on Heorot, and the marines were eager to get back into the fight. The Bright Lance and its legion of Einherjar warriors had been seconded to the newly formed 'Task Force Grendel' under the leadership of Skald Wallace and his special forces operators.
The mission of the task force was simple, to root out and eliminate any garm activity outside of the prime battlefront. The conflict on Heorot had been categorized as a garm weapons test, and though it had been thwarted by the marines, they all knew it was only the beginning of a new and gruesome phase in the war against the extinction fleet.
Ajax jostled in his seat as the transport banked hard to the right, and he considered the current deployment. The marines aboard the Bright Lance had been informed that during the final battle for Heorot, the garm had swarmed the prime battlefront in a titanic expenditure of strength. The Einherjar blockade had been penetrated in several places across the galaxy, and alien vessels entered human space. Those few vessels were relentlessly engaged and destroyed by both Einherjar warships and the conventional security frigates of the mere decade's old UHC government, the United Humanity Coalition.
The fighting at the blockade had been hideous, but the marines held firm despite heavy losses. The cost of all-out assault had been catastrophic for the alien invaders, and it was only the significant casualties inflicted upon the army of the All-Father that prevented an Einherjar counter-attack. The extinction fleet had broken itself upon the ramparts of humanity and across the multitude of systems that comprised the prime battlefront, the enemy lost its hold on vast swathes of territory as a result.
The coastline rushed up to meet the transport. Ajax felt the pilot throw on the reverse thrusters and knew battle would soon be joined. Ajax had worked with the skalds to help them determine where the newest monsters would rise, operating under the assumption, more like the crystal-clear certainty, that the enemy had more such experimental deployments in store.
At first the presence of the Hive Mind in the consciousness of Ajax had all but faded, as if the alien intellect itself had been spent in the vicious fighting, but as the days turned to weeks after the galaxy-wide battle, Ajax had begun to feel the psychic pressure again. Whatever rage the Hive Mind had spent upon the attack of the blockade had brought the marine's awareness of the enemy down to little more than a whisper, barely an impression of the alien intelligence's presence in his mind. However, the psychic burden began to grow once more, and away from the prime battle front, emanating from within human space.
At the insistence of a growing number of skalds, including Omar, part of the daily intelligence and strategy meetings were devoted to the study of old Norse myths and stories. It was at the intersection of one such story and a star chart of Kai Prime that the enemy was revealed.
The transport shuddered as its momentum was temporarily held in suspension by the reverse thrusters. The warning lights ceased strobing and went solid. As the transport halted, the co-pilot hit the release on the seat restraints, unleashing the marines to do their bloody work.
Ajax and Sharif leapt out of the transport and as their boots splashed down in the shallow water of the rocky beachhead, they had their rifles up and were peering down their iron sights. Ajax moved forward to make more room for the marines disembarking behind him. The air in front of him was cloaked in roiling steam from the thrusters as they vaporized the salty coastal waters and remained hanging there thanks to the near oppressive levels of humidity.
It was a work of spontaneous brilliance on the part of Jarl Mahora that the marines deployed just off the coast, disembarking into waist deep water instead of the hard, dry ground further ahead. Two hundred and fifty marines stormed the beach under cover of a wall of steam, and as Ajax advanced he was thankful for it.
As the shriekers that defended this modest rocky island fired blindly into the encroaching mass of steam, salvos of corrosive liquid sputtered in the churning waters since the vast majority of them missed their targets.
A marine who strode beside Ajax shouted in pain as one of the shriekers scored a lucky hit. The instant the caustic ordinance sprayed his ceramic combat armor, the man beneath it dissolved into a sickly greenish-red soup. The ruined corpse of the marine collapsed in the shallow surf and the only clue that he'd been charging through it only moments before was the clouding of the churning blue waters where he'd fallen.
It would have cost fewer resources and marine lives to simply punish the island with orbital bombardment and allow it to sink beneath the waves, but Ajax knew this needed to be a different sort of battle. They weren't here just to slaughter garm swarms, they were here for answers to a riddle they all hoped to unravel before the enemy could perfect its own answer.
The psychic presence of the garm surged within Ajax, and had he not spent months learning to control his relationship with it, he might have been overcome and splashed to knees. As it was, he controlled his breath and narrowed his awareness through the tiny groove in his iron sights. He might be able to track the more advanced garm breeds, like the Wargarm, or in theory, other prototype creatures like the horror named Grend
el he'd killed on Heorot, but none of that would matter if he died on the beachhead. Now was the time to shoot and advance.
As Ajax emerged from the wall of steam his sights were filled with alien bodies. The island was only a few square miles large, and with the entire Hydra Company on the attack, they were coming at the objective from all sides.
Ajax squeezed the trigger of his pulse rifle and sent a super-heated bolt of plasma through the thorax of a shrieker. He could not help but smile wickedly as the beast exploded in midair, showering the ground with smoking viscera. It felt good to kill these wretched abominations, and suddenly it was the only thing that mattered to him.
Ajax was flanked by more rifles as the marine force crossed the last few meters of open ground before they reached the modest cover provided by the jagged boulder field. He continued to fire while a low growl built in his throat, his adrenaline surging as his aim tore through another of the garm fliers. When he reached the cover of the first boulder, crouching to avoid the corrosive return fire, Ajax focused again on his breathing.
These thoughts of mindless carnage did not serve him any better than the fruitless effort of delving into his obscured memories, and he knew he had to get control of himself. Losing oneself to the bloodlust was how a marine blacked out, and when that happened there was no coming back. Men were not created to exist in this endless cycle of violent death and swift resurrection, and those who could not maintain their psychological equilibrium were doomed to become berserkers.
The Einherjar war machine had been built to be a self-sustaining endeavor, with everything from their bullets to their very flesh being a somewhat renewable resource. Sadly, it had become more and more apparent over time that their minds were not so interchangeable as their bodies or their equipment.
Ajax shook his head as he let out another breath, and tucked the stock of his rifle into his shoulder once more.
"You good, brother?" asked Ford as he took cover near Ajax after snapping off several shots.
"Had to shake off the black," said Ajax as he stood, suddenly keenly aware of the loss of his friend Boone, the grenadier, who had succumbed to the psychological trauma during their bloody struggle with Grendel. "I'm online."
"Ripper drones in the boulder field!" came the voice of Mahora, and Ajax shared a nod with Ford before the two of them scrambled out from behind their boulders and moved forward.
The boulder field might provide them with a modicum of cover from the shriekers who roosted near and upon the stone pillar at the center of the island, but the close confines of the rugged terrain would favor the claws and scything blades of the rippers.
Ajax held his rifle in middle guard, ready to fire more by instinct than true aim in the close quarters fighting he expected to erupt any second now. As if on cue, a ripper drone emerged from behind a nearby pillar and charged the two marines. Bolts from both Ajax and Ford splattered the beast across the boulders, but no sooner had they slain that one, two more leapt into the fray.
Ford took a knee as he fired at the furthest of the two drones, the swift decision saving his life as the scything blade of the drone nearest swept through the empty air where his head was a second prior.
The ripper drones were simple creatures, with little in the way of critical thinking, and once they locked onto a prey target it was difficult to shift their attention away until the prey was eliminated. This reality made them devastating shock troopers, and many an Einherjar position had been overwhelmed by the sheer ferocity of the drone rush that was often the swarm's opening move in any conflict. However, in this case, a more advanced garm organism might have carried the momentum of their attack towards Ajax and given up on Ford, but the drone had locked onto the kneeling marine. The ripper pivoted on its double-jointed feet and brought its other claws and blades around in a wide arc in an attempt to impale its prey.
Ajax and Ford had fought the garm side by side many times over the years, and while the kneeling marine focused on killing the drone he fired upon, there was complete trust that Ajax would keep him covered. Ajax held steady and squeezed the trigger of his pulse rifle, the first bolt punching through the shoulder of the drone and spinning it back around to face him, while the second and third shattered the chitin plates covering its chest and protecting the vital systems within.
The drone staggered backwards, still perilously close to Ford, who was already firing upon a third drone that rushed the pair from the same direction. Ajax fired once more, this time his bolt pounded into the drone's exposed chest, the heat and pressure of the round causing the drone to explode from the inside out.
Sharif appeared on the marine's right flank, his rifle aimed upwards as he gunned down a shrieker. Yao, Silas, and Rama sped past the shooters and plunged deeper into the boulder field. Ford rose to his feet and joined Sharif and Ajax as they followed the other marines.
These five marines had become a circle of friends over the years, observed Ajax as he ran behind the group and watched them raise rifle to battle another wave of drones, though he could not recall exactly why they had gravitated towards each other. So little remained of the men they had once been, before the war, before the blessing and curse of the torcs they wore that captured their experiences and enabled them to resurrect in the body forge. What would make one marine feel that kinship with another, out of an entire legion of warriors, much less a group of them, if not some scrap of their former identity? Such loose knit groups of comrades were common throughout the Einherjar ranks, though none could say what forged their bond, for none among them could recall the sorts of details that formed the basis of friendship amongst civilians and conventional military men.
Ajax laughed to himself as he added his firepower to Rama's to bring down a ripper that attempted to sweep up on their left flank. To fight the garm they had to become similar to them, disposable combatants without the cluttered distraction of vibrant three-dimensional humanity. The marines had only the basest levels of personality, himself included, and yet in the furious press of combat it was those base traits that held these thinly defined men true to each other.
We’ve made ourselves like them in order to win, thought Ajax as he ejected his spent carbon magazine and slapped a fresh one in the slot with the sort of mechanical discipline that took years to achieve, but we’re still men. We feel the heat of victory, the sting of defeat, and the pain of loss when the warriors who stand with us fall to tooth and claw.
Indeed, he had no idea what sports teams he preferred, what it had been like growing up on whatever planet he'd once called home, or that he could not recall the last words he'd exchanged with his long dead wife. Such things had been sacrificed for his keen understanding of garm anatomy, roared Ajax in his mind as he shattered the knee of a sprinting drone, causing it to stumble and giving Silas a clean shot at its head. In place of a clear picture of his parents Ajax had the knowledge required to field strip his armor and equipment for cleaning and repairs, along with seemingly infinite tactical responses to the oncoming enemy.
Lost were the memories of happier times and gained was the intimate understanding of how to press the fight even after sustaining grievous wounds that would have sent any other soldier into a state of shock.
Ajax saw Ford go down, the man's left leg sheared off just above the knee. Sharif blasted the ripper drone into smoking pieces a moment later.
A caustic stream splattered into the boulder just next to Ajax, and he was forced to rip off his shoulder pauldron as the vile fluids rapidly ate through much of the armored plating. As fast as he could Ajax raised his rifle and returned fire, and as the corpse of the shrieker plummeted to the ground the marine saw that much of the sky had been emptied of the creatures. He took aim on another that was strafing a distant part of the boulder field, and cursed as his bolts flew wide. The pulse rifles were devastating at mid to close range, yet lost much of their effectiveness at distance.
Ajax fired again, more out of frustration than anything, and missed once more. Just as he
started to lower his rifle and turn it back upon opponents nearer to his position a loud cracking sound cut through the cacophony of battle, and the distant shrieker shuddered from the impact of a heavy round.
Ajax spun on his heels and returned his attention to the boulder strewn field ahead of him, freshly reminded that Hart, one of the Einherjar snipers and the sixth man in their modest band of brothers, was out there dealing death at a distance. The marine saw that the boulders were beginning to thin out, which made it a blessing that the shrieker swarm had been significantly thinned. His comrades had established a firing line and were being pressed hard by waves of ripper drones.
As Ajax rushed to join them, he saw Silas pause in his shooting and move to reload. In the brief reprieve from punishing fire, one of the ripper drones skirted across their line, using a low boulder to soak up a few bolts, and managed to reach the marine. Just as Ajax got his rifle up, the beast tore into Silas, its blades and claws rending the armored marine into several bloody pieces as the ripper made good on its name. Sharif turned and tried to bring his rifle around, but just as he did, another drone emerged from behind a taller boulder and leapt off of it, sailing through the air towards the distracted marine.
Ajax switched to full-auto and cut loose on the beast as it descended towards Sharif as the other marine annihilated the gore-covered ripper that had murdered Silas. Ajax held tightly onto his pulse rifle as it kicked hard against him, spitting round after round wildly as he kept it pointed at the leaping drone. The creature's body was heavy enough that even though it was torn asunder as it was struck multiple times by bolts from Ajax it managed to strike Sharif. The marine was knocked off his feet by the broken corpse of the drone, though Ajax was relatively sure he'd not been injured by it.
Space Marine Loki (Extinction Fleet Book 2) Page 4
