"Time to see what new horrors they've bred for us to slay," growled Mahora as he chambered the first round of
his rifle and stood to lead his men deeper into the darkness, "Hydra Company on me!"
Mahora blasted a drone off its feet and as the ranks of the marines began to tighten up, the sheer firepower they were able to unleash began to turn the tide rather quickly. The defenders were a ragged lot, now that Mahora had a moment to truly observe them, and he was even more certain that these were the remnants of the swarms they'd destroyed at the trenches.
Retreat was not the garm way. It would take the psychic will of something like a Wargarm to pull the lower broods away from a fight, even a losing one; they were too simple-minded to understand anything but attacking and feeding.
Mahora was positive that down here somewhere, was the answer, some prize the garm been sent to protect, or to at the least distract the marines from while whatever it was made its escape.
Mahora reached one of the rents in the hull and carefully peered over into it, the muzzle of his weapon just ahead of him. Just then, a gorehound sprinted into range from one of the unearthed tunnels and fired its weapon. The jarl heard it, rather than saw it, and the sound was troublingly familiar. He'd been killed a number of times in this seemingly endless war by just such a weapon before. Being eaten to death by dozens of tiny grubs was beyond unpleasant, and truth be told, the jarl still took longer showers than he should, sometimes finding himself scrubbing his skin raw as if trying to get out the memories of those particularly horrible deaths.
A thick wad of voracious micro-grubs sailed through the air towards him, and the jarl did the only thing he could and hurled himself into the belly of the alien vessel.
Someone above him screamed and marines returned fire. That sound was overpowered by the sharp crack of his impact on the chitinous decking of the garm vessel. He landed on his left side, and even though the concussive force of the fall was mostly absorbed by his helmet and armor, the marine's vision still swam briefly.
He rolled onto his stomach and then pushed himself up, still disoriented. Before he could rise further, a marine body crunched loudly onto the deck beside him. The marine was dead, though his body still convulsed wildly as the micro-grubs from the gorehound's vile weapon continued to perform their grisly purpose. Most of the grubs had been pulped against the marine's body armor, but enough of them had gotten through that they'd been able to devour flesh from the man within. The grubs were biologically programmed to feed until they burst, then, while deep inside the enemy's body, it was these tissue-rending secondary explosions that made the corpse twitch so violently.
"Rama pull security on the crater and kill anything that moves!" shouted Mahora up through the hole, snapping his attention to the battle at hand to avoid vomiting inside his helmet. "And get me a squad of shooters with a grenadier, ASAP!" The marine above gave him a thumbs-up.
The jarl ignited his body lights and switched on his mounted rifle light. He was in a sloping corridor that opened up into what appeared to be a larger chamber ahead. He could see that the large weapons of the Einherjar warships had gouged great holes in the ship, though as he moved down the corridor he could see that thin membranes had grown over several parts of the hull. It made sense, now that he thought about it, that the ship would regrow such things in order to avoid rapid and devastating decompression as the ship was exposed to the hard vacuum of space. Yet another evolutionary advantage they have over us, thought the jarl, as he considered the fact that on human warships those decks were just sealed off and repaired later.
More marines leaped down to join him. He could still hear the sounds of fighting above him in the crater and estimated that Hydra Company now had a solid defensive position. Establishing a perimeter at the bottom of a hole, with so many enemy tunnels now exposed, would be a feat measured in minutes and gunfire, so he knew they had to move quickly. There was no telling how many attackers had been drawn away from the trench fight to defend this ship, so for all he knew entire swarms were en route and without comms he had no way of giving the Watchman anything.
Just like Heorot, they were just going to have to go in guns blazing and hope they found something worth the lives it would take to hold the ground. That suited Jarl Mahora just fine, as he'd always preferred a bloody brawl with the enemy over the more dynamic conflicts he'd endured from Heorot onwards. Leave all of that asymmetrical warfare to the skalds, he decided as he peered down his iron sights and made his way through a gaping hole in the wall to enter the central chamber. I'll take my fights straight up.
Six men fell in behind Mahora as the jarl swept his light across the chamber. As the marines moved into the area, multitudes of bioluminescent cells seemed to awaken, possibly reacting to the new lights that were shining across the room. In seconds, the whole chamber was bathed in an odd blue light and with the help of their own lights, the marines were able to see that the chamber was easily the size of a modest warehouse. Mahora had a moment to think to himself that this chamber must comprise nearly two-thirds of the ship's total length before a series of alien screams demanded his full attention.
"Arrow on me," ordered Mahora in a low voice. The marines snapped their rifles to their shoulders as they flanked him on either side, the men on the outer edges of the formation standing somewhat beside and behind the men before them so that there were three marines on either side, with Mahora acting as the tip of a 'v'.
The jarl moved his rifle in front of him, scanning ahead. From his vantage point, to his disgust, the chamber appeared to be filled with some kind of massive, living organs. Each of them was the size of a thirty-foot shipping container, stacked three deep and separated by thick gelatinous membranes that Mahora assumed must exist to absorb gravitational force and reduce friction. What purpose they served he couldn’t imagine. With a swift glance across what he could see of the chamber, he determined that there had to be at least fifty or sixty of them set out in a grid.
The screams continued, and the jarl moved his squad along one of the natural corridors created by the stacked organs. He wanted to reach an intersection as soon as he could so that they'd have the best range of fire depending on where the enemy came from. If the fight went poorly they could fall back along whichever corridor was the least infested with enemy beasts.
As they moved, Mahora began to get the impression that the bioluminescence of the organs was increasing. The light in the room had brightened to the point that the marines could have turned off all their own lights if they chose too and still see perfectly.
"Why don't they just charge, dammit," grumbled Mahora to himself as he and the marines reached an intersection. The jarl brought up his fist and then pointed at each marine individually before gesturing which corridor they should cover. In seconds, the squad had one rifle pointed down each corridor, with Mahora and the grenadier, a man with Poole stenciled across his chest, manning the center.
They stood silently, listening to the muffled sounds of battle raging above. The screams were sporadic and Mahora started to wonder if the enemy was circling them, which would be a fine tactic, though certainly not something the average ripper drone or gorehound would do. It was the garm way to charge in and rend. Mahora had not known the aliens to be what one might consider 'ambush predators'.
More screams filled the chamber. Before Mahora could pin down where he thought it was coming from, one of the brightly glowing organs at the bottom of a stack of three, went into violent spasms and ruptured.
As one, the marines gaped while a virtual flood of stinking organic sludge burst forth and swept over the deck in a wave.
"Contact! Contact!" shouted a marine to the jarl's left, freeing them from their momentary shock, and began firing single shots down his corridor. Mahora saw dark shapes moving through the stacks towards them.
The marine continued to fire, but most of his shots missed their intended targets because he was firing at movement rather than the actual enemy. The errant bolts tor
e into the glowing organs causing several of them to explode with sufficient force to cause others nearby to rupture and add to the putrid lake they were now standing in.
"Contact right!" shouted another marine as he fired, and soon the marines were shooting in all directions.
It felt to Mahora as if their inability to clearly see the enemy, despite the glow in the chamber, was no accident, just as the comms dead zone surrounding this ship could not have been a simple environmental anomaly.
He could see the bodies of alien creatures fly in different directions when one of the marines finally scored a hit. From the chaos of alien screams rising over the sporadic gunfire, Mahora knew that in seconds their position would be overrun. Even though the Einherjar weapons were potent, in close quarters battle the advantage was squarely with the garm.
The jarl was suddenly struck with an idea and grabbed the grenadier by the shoulder before sweeping his hand across the entirety of the chamber.
"Something in here is messing with our tech," said Mahora as he pointed Poole's attention to the organ stacks. "Knock out the stacks in a 360 from our position!"
Poole nodded his understanding and Mahora took a knee beside the man as the grenadier raised his weapon. Poole squeezed the trigger rapidly as he stepped in a swift circle, methodically emptying his grenade cylinder at the bottom organs of stacks all around the marines. When the grenadier knelt to reload, Mahora stood up, his rifle at the ready. He had just gotten the stock nestled into his shoulder the grenades began to detonate.
As the explosives ripped apart the base organs, the force of the blasts caused organs above and nearby to rupture, and in seconds the entire chamber was flooding with a tsunami of organic material.
"Fire on movement!" shouted Mahora as he peered through his iron sights at a thrashing shape struggling to rise from the sludge.
Mahora squeezed the trigger and let out a whoop of victory as he witnessed his bolt pound into...something. In an instant, whatever it was had been was reduced to chunks of meat and what appeared to be tentacles that flew in all directions. As the jarl had hoped, many of the alien monsters had been knocked down by the salvo of grenades and the resulting flood of rupturing organs and their flowing contents. He saw another creature pulling itself up from the now waist-deep sludge, and dropped it with two well-placed rounds.
More explosions rocked the chamber as Poole launched a second salvo. The assembled marines kept pouring on the fire whenever they caught sight of the beasts. A heavy splash to Mahora's left drew his weapon towards it. He couldn’t see the creature itself, but he absolutely could see the disturbance in the sludge as it rushed towards him. Three bolts later and the jarl's pulse rifle reduced the thing to a stinking mess.
More fire sounded from the rent in the chamber wall and another group of five marines entered. Mahora was about to shout a warning when one of the marines was picked up out of the sludge by one of the alien nightmares.
For a moment, the jarl thought he could make out the details of the beast, but he realized it was more that he was seeing what the monster was doing to the marine that helped his imagination fill in the gaps.
It was taller than a ripper drone and it had tentacles, but both marine and beast disappeared in a spray of super-heated gas and gore as the man's comrades fired on it at point-blank range.
Poole shouted at the new marines to fire on movement, just before the marine on Mahora's right was also hit by a creature. The jarl opened fire on full-auto, knowing that he would finish off his comrade, but determined not to allow the creature a kill without losing its own life. His pulse rifle bucked as he pumped round after round into the pair. He was rewarded with wet detonations of marine and beast and both sets of remains sank into the sludge.
The shooting had stopped, Mahora realized, though the screaming had not. The jarl turned and saw that Poole had dropped his grenade launcher and was grasping at something beneath the brown stew in which they stood.
At first, the jarl was confused, and then he felt something begin to burn his knees. The blood froze in his veins as he realized that the knee joint was one of the few weak points in standard Einherjar armor, where the plates covering the calf, knee, and thigh all met. There were many seams where a precise blade or bullet could shatter the extra thin armor that allowed the marines to articulate their movements.
He stole a glance at some of the few remaining organs as they too ruptured on their own and spilled their contents into the swiftly rising flood. Mahora scooped up a handful of the organic material and looked more closely. To his eyes it looked like wheat or oats, seeds of some kind at the very least, but as if they'd already been cooked. It was like a flood of disgusting porridge, bespeckled with the bioluminescent garm cells. Then it hit him, this was digestions of some kind. The organs were like stomachs, and now he and his men were standing mid-chest in corrosive digestive fluids.
"Abort! Get topside now!" shouted Mahora on the peer-to-peer, then he rushed towards Poole, who had now collapsed from the pain, his helmet just barely visible above the sludge. The jarl switched over to the company channel.
"Hydra Company, form up and fall back! Rama, get me a three-man extraction team in the hole, everyone else get back!"
To his surprise, the jarl got an affirmative from Rama, which he'd only half expected, given the difficulty with the comms in this area.
The angle of the crashed vessel, nose down into the earth, was causing the digestive sluice to drain into the rest of the ship.
The jarl was unfamiliar with this specific garm vessel and had little experience in the void battles fought by the All-Father's warships, though he'd seen what schematics command had for a number of the ships in the extinction fleet. Most of them followed similar designs, with each ship brood having a passing resemblance to the other, just like the infantry swarms he was intimately familiar with battling.
If his guess was correct, there would be pods or sacs that contained a cocktail of fluids and gasses that served as the garm's biological equivalent of fuel. Once the digestive slime poured its way through those, the whole ship had a significant chance of exploding. In fact, he mused as he waded towards where Poole went down, as useful as bursting the organs had been in helping the marines fight whatever the hell that swarm had been, the seemingly rapid-decomposition of the organs and resulting flood of caustic fluids would end up serving as a rather effective self-destruction method. The thought that such a thing could be by design was chilling indeed.
The jarl swallowed his disgust and knelt down in the sludge, submerging himself so that he could get Poole across his shoulders. When the jarl stood up the corrosive material ran off his armor, though from the pain that was beginning to course through his system he knew that much of it was biting through the seams in the armor. The Einherjar combat armor was a stout thing indeed, capable of sustaining integrity in both immersive aquatic and hard vacuum environments. What it was not designed for was being covered in alien stomach bile.
Mahora saw only one of his original six-man squad wallowing through the sludge ahead of him and assumed that the others had been killed in the tempest of battle or succumbed to the flood. Either way, they were lost, and it was highly likely that their torcs would be lost as well. So be it. If a marine lost his memory of a few battles that didn't matter it was a small thing in the grand scheme of the war.
Heorot, that cursed blight of a world, thought Mahora as he did everything he could not to think about the sizzling sound his cheek was making now that the stinking fluid had melted a hole in his faceplate.
The ghost of that bastard Grendel seemed to haunt them still. The alpha garm had become an icon representative of the new garm war effort. No longer were the garm the simple, if terrifying, force of aliens bent on simple consumption.
While that might be the Hive Mind's endgame, the enemy had become a most cunning one, testing and punishing the Einherjar at every turn for their complacency in tactics. Grendel was the start of it and every time the jarl lost a m
arine some part of his soul shuddered with a tiny fear that he might not be able to bring his marines back.
He was a grunt who had risen to the role of Jarl in the early days of the war. Mahora found himself remembering those times as he pushed himself against the pain, sloshing his way up to and through the artillery hole blasted through the chamber wall. The jarl emerged into a firefight that filled up both sides of the small access corridor, and he realized how lucky, or not, depending on one's perspective, he had been in choosing to enter the artillery hole as opposed to following the corridor.
It appeared, in the strobing glare of muzzle flashes and ambient glow of marine body lights, that the corridor sloped upwards, following the contours of the ship. Ripper drones had either slipped past Rama's firing line and come in behind Mahora's team, or had come from a different part of the ship, as the jarl saw the broken bodies of several littering the ground. He also saw the splattered remains of two marines spread across the corridor, while two more continued the fight. One marine had taken up a firing position so that he could direct his aim up the corridor, while another fired downwards into the darkness near the front of the ship.
Mahora glanced at Poole, hanging limply over Mahora’s shoulder and saw that the man had passed out from the pain of the corrosion. It was one thing to bear the pain, as Mahora was struggling to do, but another entirely for the jarl to see its effects on a body. He'd dared not investigate himself, or look too closely at Poole, who was unconscious across his shoulders, though it was impossible not to steal a sideways glance at his fallen comrade.
Space Marine Apocalypse (Extinction Fleet Book 3) Page 2
