by Doug Goodman
“Maybe the ridgebacks ate something that didn’t agree with them,” Ajax added with a hollow laugh. “Could be that the Watchman saw a muzzle flash.”
The marines shared a brief laugh, but were soon interrupted by the familiar whistling sound of incoming spores.
“Brace!” shouted the voices of several marines across the watch channel, and a moment later the first of the spores reached the trench.
There were LED stakes embedded in the ground and on the reinforced walls of the trench, giving enough ambient light for the marines to occupy their position without spotlighting any targets for the enemy that lurked in the darkness at the edges of the perimeter.
In the low light of the stakes, Ajax could see the semi-solid spore streak down from the sky and strike the trench wall opposite the marine.
The Garm ordinance was more like a hardened sack that was ejected with tremendous force from a barrel-like orifice that jutted up from the spine of the ridgebacks. When the sack struck the wall, it burst apart, spewing its contents in all directions.
The spores reminded Ajax of the heavy mists he had experienced in his youth, in some far away country on distant Earth. The spore cloud filled the trench but the marines had enough warning to crank their filters so the spores could only cling to the armor of the marines in hopes of a breach.
More landed around them and Ajax took note of how heavily the enemy bombarded them. It was as if the enemy knew that the marines had prepared for the onslaught and were attempting to make up for that fact by doubling the sheer volume of artillery fire.
The thought of artillery made Ajax cast his gaze across the hill behind the trench. The Watch Tower was a menacing gun battery that rested inside an armored bunker that had been half-buried in the loamy soil. Rising from just behind the quad-barreled artillery piece was the observation post, an elevated capsule that allowed the Watchman to see the full field, even if he was doing so at some risk, given his exposure.
In the low light, it was difficult to make out exactly what was happening at the Tower, but Ajax could tell that the bulk of the spores were smashing into the ground behind the trench.
“Seems like they’re more worried about the battery than us,” pointed out Ajax as Rama and Boone followed his gaze. “Could be that a shrieker swarm is on the way.”
“If that’s true, then the Garm would have had to learn the difference between anti-armor and anti-air weapons, not to mention have a forward observer in position to make the distinction,” growled Boone before turning back to face the other direction.
“Not even they have a way of piercing this gloom. Why humanity settled any of the brackenworlds in this sector I’ll never understand.”
Ajax was inclined to agree with Boone, and as more spores pounded the trench and the battery, he strained his eyes in vain to see through the palpable darkness ahead of him.
Brackenworlds were second-rate planets that only warranted partial terra-forming and most of them had similar atmospheric conditions to what the marines were even now experiencing. Marginal light from a distant star that was mostly dissipated by the particle clogged atmosphere, unforgiving landscapes, and only sparse pockets of organic life that rose from the brackish and often fetid water that gave such planets their name.
The modest outpost city of Heorot was the only real sign of civilization on the planet that shared its name, home to only forty thousand souls. They farmed energy, using large windmills to take advantage of the fetid winds the constantly scoured the planet’s surface.
It was a testament, really, thought Ajax, that humanity could find something of use even on this backwater world. The planet had little tactical significance, being on the edge of charted space and well removed from the bulk of the besieged human star systems.
A single hive ship had broken off from the main thrust of the extinction fleet and come to terrorize Heorot. The modest city was still a human settlement, carved out of the wilderness by courageous pioneers, so it was worth defending.
A single warship, the Bright Lance, had been sent by Command to counter the enemy, bearing in its hold a legion of Einherjar. A brief star fight had delayed the hive ship’s arrival, giving the Einherjar a chance to make planetfall first and prepare their defenses.
There were now twenty gun batteries that defended the city, each with their own trench networks, meaning that just over five thousand marines had put themselves in the path of the enemy.
The Watch Tower, positioned at a vantage point over the whole of the battlefield, was meant to harass any enemy flier formations that attempted to flank the main Einherjar forces that defended the city.
Hydra Company was in place to protect the Tower from any ground swarms that might appear, though Command expected most of the enemy to take the bait and march right into the teeth of Armor One.
The long war against the Garm had left the forces of humanity with limited battle tanks in operation. There were only a few dozen mechanized war machines that comprised the fighting unit.
Ajax hoped they would be enough to combat the ultra-Garm, horrific creatures that served as the battle tank equivalent for the swarm.
The Garm were known, as a fighting force, to attack the strongest point of any defensive position. It was behavior quite unlike the average predator organisms known to humanity, which tended to attack the sick, weak, old, and alone first. However, as the war with the swarm ground onwards, the forces of humanity began to understand the Garm strategy, and it was a troubling discovery indeed.
It was a psychological ploy, one meant to rob the morale of humanity’s warriors by destroying their best forces at the outset of any battle. In many ways, by killing the strongest prey first, these nightmare predators made it all the easier to mop up the rest of their prey, who were often at a loss tactically without their leader and demoralized by the destruction of their mightiest champions.
The flash of plasma discharges shone from in and around the battery, and Ajax felt his heart skip a beat, as he realized that it could only mean one thing. At least some of the spores had hit their mark, and even now ragmen were causing havoc for the battery crews. He hoped that his comrades could fend them off, else the guns would be deafeningly silent when the swarm broke against the trench.
“First wave!” boomed the voice of the Watchman, a welcome sound that indicated that he had not been overcome. “Flares up!”
Rama pulled a flare tube from his belt and pressed the ignition as he pointed it at the sky. The brilliant round streaked upwards, illuminating much of the area around the marines. Dozens of others joined it as soldiers up and down the line fired their own flares.
At first, the rounds rose as expected, though instead of reaching their apex and arcing across the battlefield to illuminate the killing ground in front of the trench, many of them were stopped in midair by hundreds of alien bodies.
Focused artillery fire against an anti-air battery, in advance of an aerial assault, it was simply too complex a maneuver for the Garm, and for a moment Ajax refused to believe what he was seeing.
The shriekers, like the rest of the myriad lifeforms that comprised the Garm swarms, looked like a cross between the lizards and cockroaches of distant Earth, if each had been the most nightmarish of its kind. They had the bleak countenance and powerfully muscled bodies of reptiles, but were covered in mucus lubricated sections of chitonous exoskeleton. In their clawed hands most of them carried weapons reminiscent of firearms, though each of them was attached to umbilical cords that connected to pulsing glands under their leathery wings.
There were so many hundreds of them that when the flares struck them, it turned the night sky into a burning tapestry of carnage. Shriekers fell screaming from the sky as holes were burned through their wings. Those slain by the searing hot flares simply plummeting to the ground in silence.
In the glare of the light, Ajax could see their dull black eyes, each one a seeming abyss of hive intelligence and relentless biological automation. To witness such a primal
hunger in so many deadly and nightmarish creatures would surely have sent any other group of soldiers to their knees, yet the marines of Hydra Company stood their ground.
Many times, each man among them had faced such horror. The days of collapsing and retching in fear were far behind them. Instead, they raised their rifles and began to fire as the swarm descended upon them, each of the Garm weapons spitting death as they dove at the marines.
Ajax wanting nothing more than to select auto-fire and cut loose with his rifle, spraying plasma projectiles indiscriminately at the horde, yet he knew better than to give into that urge.
Early in the war with the Garm, most soldiers had done just that, and while it made for a brilliant display of carnage and firepower, the marine would be left with an empty weapon and yet more enemies upon him. It was better to lean on one’s training and maintain fire discipline, selecting individual targets for confirmed elimination, and only then moving to the next opponent.
The Garm, like the cockroaches of Earth, were notorious for persisting in battle despite being inflicted with grievous wounds. The only Garm you could ignore was a dead Garm. And sometimes not even then.
The marine used his iron sights to draw a bead on a shrieker and squeezed the trigger. The weapon bucked in his hands and spat a super-heated bolt of plasma at the shrieker.
The bolt, despite its tremendously high temperature, held just enough of its solid form to impact against the chiton of the beast. The plasma burned its way through the body armor and as it burrowed into the creature’s flesh, it melted into a thick super-heated liquid that rapidly spread throughout the shrieker’s body. The shrieker exploded in midair as all the fluids and gases inside it expanded because of the plasma, raining smoldering pieces of flesh down upon the trench floor.
Ajax did not pause to revel in his first kill of the day, and instead selected his next target and fired. His aim was true, and another shrieker died in flight.
The pulse rifles had been designed specifically for combat against the Garm swarms and their deadly efficiency was apparent. Traditional projectile weapons, propelled by ignited powder, might have been much more effective at long ranges, but they were a heavy drain on the already strained human military complex. The sheer scale of the conflict against the swarm made it impossible to keep up with production, so a compact and robust plasma-pulse rifle had been created. What it lost in range it made up for in power, not to mention the fact that ammunition could be made from carbon base blocks, so nearly any substance could be forged into ammunition to feed the Einherjar war machine.
The shriekers reached their firing range and unleashed streaks of viscous fluid from the wicked muzzles of their stubby weapons.
Ajax shouted as he caught sight of a shrieker firing upon a marine several meters from his position.
Yao was a rifle and had been rushing along the bottom of the trench, presumably to help another marine who seemed to have been hit by one of the spore globules. Yao was pumping plasma rounds into two wounded shriekers that had landed near his fallen comrade. The shrieker from above missed the first time, and a jet of foul liquid cut a rivulet through the reinforced wall of the trench behind Yao. The rifle took notice and both he and Ajax drilled the shrieker with bolts.
“On your left!” shouted Rama, and Ajax turned to fire just in time, as several shriekers were swooping down to make a strafing run of the entire parallel.
“I see them,” came the gravelly voice of Boone as he too swung left. He used his thumb to select the shortest fuse mod on his launcher before lending his fire to the other marines.
Ajax squeezed the trigger and marveled at the devastating maneuver the shriekers were attempting. While most of the Garm fliers were coming over the trench and diving directly down to attack the marines, a clutch of them had flown in a wide arc that allowed them to strafe the trench lengthwise.
Ajax saw a marine’s melting corpse falling backwards off a firing step. The man had been slain from behind without even realizing the attack was coming.
The marine was only one man, but Hydra Company would feel the sting of his loss, as they would the others who had already died and the many more who were yet to do so on this grim evening.
For the swarm, however, life was cheap. As individuals, Garm casualties were just bodies to be recycled. The embodiment of the end justifying the means.
Ajax and Rama harassed the clutch, each of them firing bolts as fast as they could while maintaining a careful aim, as they were firing back down the trench in the direction of their comrades.
The light of the disrupted flare salvo had begun to die down, so when Boone cut loose with his launcher, the trench lit up brilliantly. The grenadier had selected a fuse mod that effectively turned his incendiary rounds into air-bursts. As he pumped shot after shot at the clutch, they exploded among the creatures to create a hurricane of shrapnel that wiped them out.
Yao screamed wetly.
Ajax whipped his head and rifle around to see that the fallen marine Yao had attempted to assist was now on his feet attacking Yao.
Each marine had their name etched into the breastplate of their combat armor, though the ichor of the spores had obscured the man’s name. Ajax realized he must have either been struck by one of the spore artillery rounds or been standing nearby when one impacted. Nearly half of the marine’s body was covered in the slimy spore mass.
From this distance Ajax couldn’t see how the spores had breached the marine’s armor or respirator but they clearly had.
The spores had transformed the unknown marine into the murderous psychopath commonly referred to as a ragman.
As Yao struggled against the babbling marine, a man who only moments before had been his comrade, his assailant managed to stab him in the throat with the titanium spike they all carried for close quarters fighting.
“Meat!” howled the ragman, trying to pull the spike from the wound in Yao’s throat. The fierce marine held the ragman’s wrist in place, causing the two of them to fall to the ground at the bottom of the trench.
Ajax did not hesitate and leapt from the firestep. His boots sank into the mud that had been created by the blood and spores that had been pouring from bodies and falling from the sky. The ragman looked up from his struggle and roared at Ajax as the marine strode toward the pair. Ajax raised his rifle and put a bolt through the armored visor of the marine’s helmet.
The plasma rifles had been designed for use against the Garm’s natural body armor, while the marine standard issue combat armor had been designed to protect them from the Garm’s own weaponry. The hardened ceramic armor of the marine’s visor shattered from the impact of the bolt, though the ragman within was shielded from the heat behind the plexi-glass faceplate underneath the visor.
“Meat!” cackled the ragman in a sickeningly jovial voice as he charged Ajax, who then began firing rapidly, each bolt tearing away another piece of the ragman’s hardened armor and pushing him back, yet failing to stop him.
Suddenly, the ragman howled in pain as Yao appeared behind him, having risen to one knee so that he could drive the point of his own trench spike deep between the ragman’s shoulder blades.
The attack gave Ajax a critical moment to aim his weapon at one of the exposed parts of the ragman’s body glove, where the armor had been blasted off. Now that there was no armor to save him the ragman’s body exploded just as messily and swiftly as the shriekers when Ajax’s bolt bit into him. Yao was thrown back to the ground by the wet explosion. He did not rise again, his life finally spent.
Ajax looked down as his fallen comrades for a moment, watching with transfixed curiosity as the polished steel torc around Yao’s neck crackled with an electrical discharge. It was by this discharge that he knew Yao had expired and it made Ajax involuntarily reach up to touch his own torc, suddenly keenly aware of its tightness around the base of his neck.
He was suddenly knocked to the ground as a body smashed into him. He thrashed in the mud beneath its weight until he was out fro
m under it.
A shrieker lay near him, half its body gone and its various entrails spilling out across the churning mud. The sight of it drew Ajax back into the battle at hand, and he raised his rifle to the sky once more.
There were few shriekers left now, only dozens streaking through the darkness where scant minutes before there had been hundreds. The unique chum- chum sound of the quad-barrel anti-air battery filled his ears and Ajax realized he’d been hearing it for a while now. The crew of the gun battery must have successfully eliminated the ragmen that had been transformed in their area by the ridgeback artillery spores.
Watch Tower was back in the fight and was in the process of clearing the skies with extreme prejudice. It was chilling to consider that had the spore barrage eliminated the battery with a combination of impact casualties and ragmen transformations, a portion of the shrieker swarm would likely have been able to pass over Hydra Company and assault the rest of the Einherjar forces with deadly effect. There wouldn’t have been enough of them to turn the tide on their own, but perhaps the enemy had something else in store, a diversion within a diversion.
Ajax shuddered at the prospect and did his best to take his mind off such musings as they were too terrible to consider.
Bodies continued to fall from the sky over Trench 16 as Ajax made his way back to the firing step. He saw up and down the parallel that while the marines had indeed suffered casualties from the shrieker swarm, they were recovering from the assault and reforming the defensive perimeter.
Ajax knew that had Watch Tower not gotten the battery into the fight there would be many more dead marines in the trench, possibly most of Hydra Company, as without the protection of the big gun their defenses were vulnerable to air assault.
“They’re learning, the bastards,” grumbled Boone as Ajax joined the grenadier and Rama once more on the firing step. “That move to strafe the parallel, pretty advanced trench warfare tactic for a bunch of space bugs.”
“They adapt,” intoned Ajax, almost absent-mindedly as he ejected his spent carbon magazine and slid another into place.
