Ajax struggled to his feet as the other marines fought their way to him. He could see that the humanoid garm had lost their initial advantage in numbers, as most of their brood had now been slain. He picked up his pulse rifle, slapped in a fresh magazine, joining his comrades in methodically pulping Hel's seemingly fragile body. They vented the heat from their rifles and then began slaughtering the humanoids as they hatched. It was a cold kind of fury, and what had begun as a battle had become an execution. The marines were fine with that, and did their work with precision and gusto.
Silas was suddenly thrown backwards as a shot rang out from above them. More shots followed as Silas stumbled, and in seconds his body was riddled with bullets.
Ajax, Hart, and Jorah swept their guns upwards and gasped as they saw a gigantic armored figure leaping down from a hatch far above.
Ajax recognized much of the armor as that of a skald but it had been heavily modified and he could see seven glowing red oculars in the creature's helmet. The enemy's weapon had been modified as well, impossibly toggling between the tiny projectiles of conventional ammunition and the caseless bolts of carbon used in the pulse rifles.
The skald that wasn't a skald at all, ran horizontally across the wall, digging a clawed hand into the concrete to slow its descent, carving great gouts into the wall itself.
"The trophy taker," observed Hart, the tone of his voice giving the impression that he was speaking to himself more than to the others. He raised his rifle and returned fire, tracking the descending hostile with bolts that got closer and closer to hitting the mark.
The marines scrambled for cover as they fired, the armored hostile moving impossibly fast as it continued downwards. The enemy unleashed a salvo of rounds that forced Ajax to hurl himself behind a clutch of hatched eggs. The spray of conventional small arms fire chewed through the thick hide of the eggs and showered Ajax with the ichor of garm afterbirth. The marine stayed low and scampered around in a wide circle to bring himself adjacent to Hel's bulbous corpse.
As Jorah and Hart continued the shootout with the armored hostile, Ajax looked to his left, just beyond the body of Hel. Even in death, her body was ejecting eggs onto the slick floor of the disgusting chamber.
He was awestruck at the sheer relentlessness of the garm organisms. It seemed that no matter what nightmares he experienced, there was always a fresh and terrible example of the swarm's might. Though dead, the alpha garm yet brought forth life, and Ajax found himself chilled to the core by the sight of it.
The shooting intensified and Ajax shook himself into action, knowing he had to get back into the fight. He raised himself to a crouching position and pulled the stock of his pulse rifle tight into his shoulder. Ajax looked down his iron sights and saw that the armored hostile had reached the ground. He snapped off a shot at the enemy, but it was moving too quickly and his bolt went wide. Ajax rushed to meet the hostile, trying to put himself in the creature's path as it sprinted nimbly through the shattered remains of the humanoid garm and the hatched eggs.
Hart and Jorah, the latter of which was using only his pistol, as his right arm had been blown off at the elbow, saw Ajax make his play and lent their firepower to driving the armored hostile into his field of fire.
At first it seemed like it would work, as the fiend exchanged salvos with the two marines counter-attacking him. Just as Ajax sighted in on the armored monster it leapt low and streaked underneath his burst of deadly fire. The beast's double-jointed legs had been gathered beneath it and he'd not realized it could pounce from a sprint, and before Ajax could react the creature's shoulder drove into his mid-section.
The beast was large and powerful, and Ajax felt his breath leave him as he lost the grip on his rifle and soared backwards to slam wetly into a clutch of eggs. He'd fallen on his back, and witnessed the armored creature twist its arm around and fire upon the marines trying to flank it. Jorah grunted and was picked up off his feet by a solid bolt to the chest in a spray of blood and broken armor as the hostile suddenly dug its feet into the ground and halted its own momentum.
Ajax pushed himself to his feet and drew his pistol, only to have the monster lash out with it the claws of its armored foot and slice through his hand and the pistol. The marine cursed in frustration and pain as his pistol clattered to the ground in pieces, followed by three of his own severed fingers. Before he could recover, the beast smashed an elbow into the side of his helmet and sent him crashing to the ground once more.
The marine's vision swam from the impact, though he could partially make out Hart, fearless as ever, appear from the shadows and attack the creature. The skald sniper fired a round straight into the beast's helmeted face, and two of the seven oculars went dark. The creature reeled from the hit and Hart pumped more rounds at it. They were deflected by the elevated shoulder pieces that protected its head, but the sniper had an opening. He leapt towards the beast, his trench spike flashing, and buried it in the hole already scored in the creature's armored chest. It must have fought other marines before attacking them, Ajax realized as he struggled to rise to his knees.
The beast screamed in pain and rage, and dropped its rifle so that it could deflect Hart's pistol. In a blur of motion, the creature lashed out at the warrior with clawed hands. Hart did his best to defend himself with the trench spike, but the creature was far too fast for him. The armored attacker rent Hart to bloody ribbons with a furious tempest of blows, and by the time Ajax got to his feet with his own trench spike at the ready, his comrade was very dead.
Ajax attempted to backstab the creature as it concentrated on tearing the last bit of life from Hart's body. It must have felt him coming, as it easily deflected his blow and grasped him by the throat, squeezing so hard he heard the armor around his neck crack beneath its alien hands. With its other clawed hand it wrenched the helmet from Ajax's head, and its remaining five oculars transfixed him with their burning gaze.
"Ajax," rasped a voice from beneath the helmet, the words reaching the marine's ears a moment after they registered in his mind.
The marine said nothing as he flailed with arms and legs against the nightmare before him, his fists doing little to break the armored thing's grip upon him. It held him aloft with ease, and though he attempted to kick the thing he could not reach it. His oxygen was running out, and only a few seconds into the ordeal, he was already seeing stars begin to sparkle in his vision, a sure sign that he would soon be unconscious.
Something about the thing was familiar, and though he knew with certainty that this was the other presence he'd felt in the tunnels, Ajax could not place who or what this thing might be. It had Einherjar armor and weapons, though all modified beyond anything within regulation. Also it had the stink of the garm upon it, and the psychic waves buffeted against him with tremendous force.
It felt to Ajax as if a hurricane held him in its grasp, such was the sheer power of the mind that bore down on him.
"The Angrboda bore me three children, marine. Beautiful as they were terrible before they met with your blades and your guns. Indeed they were titans of the swarm, and the Einherjar have more than earned a place in Valhalla by the slaying of them," hissed the armored creature as it squeezed Ajax even harder.
Ajax watched in horror as with its other hand the beast unfastened the clamps on its helmet, and as the seals broke it lifted the visor to reveal a hideously twisted visage beneath. Indeed, the garm abomination had seven eyes, and wide hinged jaws that appeared to be folded together so that the face could fit inside the confines of the helmet. Past all of the garm traits, it was the sickening realization of who he looked upon that made Ajax's blood freeze.
"Skald Thatcher," gasped Ajax, using what little strength he had left to spit the words out like a curse.
"Something more. Something worse." said Loki, in a voice that sounded like stale meat scraped against sandpaper, "And nothing at all."
The creature throttled Ajax a moment longer in silence, and once the marine's struggle had all but left him
, the beast held him close to its hideous face.
"Humanity has lost its way, so too, has the extinction fleet. Two houses, both alike in dignity, and neither deserving of a throne," whispered Loki, his vocal chords warping the words to make them sound all the more alien. "This war must end, Ajax. It is time you forget what you've seen here. Goodbye, marine."
"I thought you were a hero," spoke Ajax, his voice a ragged whisper as he fought to stay conscious.
"Hero is another word for a dead man," growled Loki, before opening his jaws wide and snapping them shut across the marine's face.
The powerful mandibles drove the rows of wicked teeth through the marine's skull, and the last thing Ajax experienced before total darkness was the putrid breath of the monster that slew him.
SCORCHED EARTH
Jarl Mahora knelt down and ran his finger over the close up shot of the ashen sludge that coated the inside of the massive chamber. The combat footage played on a small tablet he held in his rough hands as he sat alone in the briefing room. He watched as several fire teams swept through the chamber, their armor protecting them from the ambient heat that lingered.
The hardened veteran looked at the twisted remains of a multitude of bodies, each of them burned down to little more than clumps of carbon slag. There would be no telling what was marine and what was garm in this mess, the fire having burned so hot that the concrete itself had run in rivulets only to reharden, giving the entire room the appearance of having been made of melted and cooled wax.
"M3 incendiary canisters," said Skald Wallace as he strode into the room carrying a small plastic case, with Idris, the medicae, entering a few steps behind him. "Every Prax gunship has a standard load-out of eight. I suspect no less than four were deployed here, given the blast points."
"We should have seen this coming," growled Mahora as he tossed the tablet onto the table at the center of the room and stood to his full height to show respect to the skald with a curt nod, while at attention. "It was only going to be a matter of time before the garm turned us against our own."
"We have known about the rogue skald element for some time now, and given that they escaped with Grendel's remains, we have suspected their involvement in the various alpha garm run to ground by your man, Ajax," admitted Skald Wallace as he nodded back and then held up a hand to silence Mahora's predicable angry response. "Save it. We took a calculated risk by not making infantry forces aware. It seemed a pointless morale risk."
"And now?" spat Mahora as he sat back down and rubbed his temples, the veteran marine was feeling the years suddenly and more powerfully than ever before. "The marines look up to your skalds, because most of them are living legends. To see your battle brothers slain by your idols, to fill your iron sights with the bodies of other Einherjar who seem to fight on the side of the garm, that is a heavy thing, Wallace."
"There is a deep madness at work here, Jarl," observed Wallace as he set the case onto the table and opened it to produce a warped and melted torc. "I suspect those incendiaries had a two-fold purpose. One to wipe out all evidence of whatever foul deeds were afoot here, the second to forever destroy the memory of what your marines encountered there."
Idris took the torc from Wallace and walked it over to Jarl Mahora. The veteran turned the torc over and over in his hands, as if he could not believe the malevolence and cunning it represented on the part of the enemy. He recognized the torc, and it had belonged to marine Ajax.
They had salvaged the torc of Ajax when he'd fought Jormungandr and died shortly after, and so the memories of that life lived were saved and laid into the new body they'd grown for the marine's mind. Since then Ajax had survived against Fenrir and fought his way into this pit of darkness. With the torc destroyed now, not only would Ajax resurrect without the memory of his time on the forest moon, but he would not be able to give any intelligence on whatever it was he'd experienced down here. The same went for Silas, of Hydra Company, Jorah and Tamsen, of Gorgon Company, and even the nearly impossible to kill Hart, of the skalds. Whatever these men had seen down here was forever lost, and each man would return to life with memories only up to the last time his torc was uploaded.
"The traitors knew how to negate the torcs and cover their tracks with a single blow," breathed Jarl Mahora as the full gravity of what happened finally crashed down upon him.
"There's more," announced Idris, his own expression grave.
"Spit it out, man," snapped Mahora as he continued to look at the torc, as if the harder he stared at it the more he would understand the full extent of what had happened.
"The men who died in that room have all emerged from the body forge, without the memories of their encounter, though otherwise whole," said Idris before pausing, he looked back at Wallace, who nodded, and then back to Mahora, "Except for Ajax."
"What?" asked Mahora as he let the torc drop onto the table. "Is there a problem?"
"Physically, he has resurrected and is in the green," stated Idris, clearly uncomfortable as he delivered the news, "Though he remains in a vegetative state. Not quite like the victims of Grendel, nothing so violent, as he remains alive."
"For all intents and purposes, he has been taken off the board," said Skald Wallace, his voice hard.
"Have you euthanized him and attempted a second resurrection?" asked Jarl Mahora, his usual gruff demeanor seeming more beaten down as the conversation progressed. "Perhaps there was an error in the body forge itself."
"We have made this attempt three times, jarl. Something happened to him down there, and I have not been able to facilitate a full recovery," said Idris as he stood and put his hand on Mahora's shoulder. "I am sorry sir. The Bloodhound is gone."
"Many among us would say Beowulf is gone," said Skald Wallace as he stood once more and made to leave, "Even as the dragon returns to these lands. Bifrost is reporting swarms on the approach, and without our tracker it is time the task force returns to the front."
Skald Wallace exited the briefing room and let the door close behind him. Idris stayed a few moments longer, sitting in silence with the grizzled jarl before standing to leave.
"Ajax is gone," breathed Jarl Mahora as he looked down once more at the warped torc on the table before him, "They've found yet another way to rob us of our best."
"The garm adapt, do they not?" asked Idris, a grim smile playing across his face.
Upon hearing the familiar colloquialism, Mahora's melancholy was swept away by a grieving fury, and he stood up to activate the three-dimensional display at the center of the table. He toggled the images until he brought up the Bifrost, and then zoomed out until he was able to see the star fortress set against a looming mass of unidentified objects moving with speed towards it. They were weeks away, though time would seem short when it came to preparing for the sort of war that a garm swarm would bring with it.
"Marines overcome," snarled Mahora as he began his preparations for the coming battle.
Idris watched the man for a short time, and then left the room. He walked down several passageways and eventually entered the body forge.
While multitudes of other marines were in the process of being resurrected, attended by several of the lower ranking specialists, Idris walked over to stand next to the still body of Ajax. He gently leaned in and removed the brand new torc affixed to the marine's neck. Idris looked down at the man, this long-suffering marine, and typed a series of commands into the display next to the marine's forge.
Idris turned and walked to a small shelf, removing a hard, black case. Inside there were multitude of torcs. He held up the one that had belonged to Skald Thatcher, or more accurately the counterfeit he'd left in its place. He let the torc fall back onto the pile and then added the one he'd removed from Ajax. It made a clanking sound as it fell onto the pile.
Idris closed the case and returned it to the shelf as the console next to Ajax to begin executing its euthanasia protocols.
THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD
Loki stood in his own briefing roo
m aboard the Angrboda and looked at a model of the vast expanse of human civilization. Each planet, moon, colony, and space station was present in the display before him. There were so many it looked as if there was a swarm of fireflies buzzing in front of the traitor's monstrous face.
The taste of Ajax was still in his mouth, though the brains of the marine he'd devoured had long been digested. The memories bubbled in a thick stew just beneath Loki's conscious awareness. One, in particular, continued to rise, despite his best efforts at keeping it down, the crisp recollection of Rowan, the long dead wife of the marine whose life he had ingested. It was difficult to push her away, as her presence always triggered yet more memories of his own Ariana, and it was all Loki could do to keep such things from overwhelming him.
He took a deep breath and focused his mind, for a time casting away the thoughts of lost love, and set himself to the task at hand. He moved his clawed finger up and zoomed in on a specific quadrant of the universe, then zoomed deeper still to bring up the view of a single human world. It was heavily populated, containing several mega-cities, and served as a trade hub for several massive systems.
It was perfect for the work ahead. Loki keyed in the coordinates and the crew of the Angrboda set a course. Loki deactivated the display and walked the short distance down a passageway from the briefing room to the command bridge. There he was met by Unferth, who stood just above and behind the pilot and gunnery crew.
"Common men are tossed into mass graves or left on the field for crows. Better to be a foe so hated your corpse is paraded like a trophy and hung high enough for the gods themselves to take notice," rasped Loki as he came to stand beside Unferth, the twisted being towering over the skald thanks to the garm cells that had long since made him into something less than human and more than garm.
"The mission, sir?" asked Unferth.
Space Marine Loki (Extinction Fleet Book 2) Page 15
