Ford sprinted through the rain, his muscles burning with the effort in spite of his soldier's conditioning as he pushed himself to stay ahead of the hideous killer's pursuit. He had no clue how many, if any, were behind him, or on his flanks, and decided that the nickname stalker was vastly appropriate for this new brood. As he ran, he thumbed the fire selector and chose fully automatic, assuming that he'd have little chance to line up a clean shot if he wanted to maintain his retreat. Going full-auto was actively discouraged in battlefield ops, and certainly in training, though Ford knew plenty of marines who found themselves breaking that rule when they worried that they only had the one chance to fire back before dying a messy death.
As he ran his mind raced, as nothing about this encounter made any sense. Not only was there a new breed that fought with cunning unseen by the garm since the days of Grendel, but the feeders were never seen on worlds not yet pacified by the garm forces. They were support units as far as garm organism classifications were cataloged, for all intents and purposes, and to encounter them on a world that was as yet hotly contested was highly unusual.
Indeed, the Bright Lance had fought against a spine frigate, one of the garm warships, and while they were engaged, another garm vessel had entered the atmosphere. It was not a hive ship, nothing so huge, and yet it had been able to slip through during the fighting. Planets like this were not equipped with much in the way of defenses beyond the modest security forces dirtside and they were really just glorified crowd control officers who kept the peace amongst the ranch staff.
The presence of the feeders was telling and Ford was positive that the ship that had entered was one of the somewhat unknown vessels that appeared after the garm had conquered a world. Only engagements like the re-taking of Rakka yielded any intel about such things and considering the devastation left by war, there was little to learn. Whatever Mahora had found down there was still being analyzed by command, and if they had any intel to share it wasn't being disseminated down to grunts like him. Whatever bizarre developments were afoot, Ford thought as he rushed through the darkness, Jarl Mahora had certainly made sure that Hydra Company was at the bloody center of it.
Flares cast red across the sky as they burned in a gentle arc, and the marine rushed towards them. Perhaps, had his comrades not been wiped out so quickly he'd have thought to fire one of his own, though as he sprinted through the darkness he acknowledged that there would be little to find but corpses. He kept going, and several more flares lit up the sky. Soon he could hear the sounds of battle, and he roared as he pushed himself harder to reach his comrades in time.
He could have sworn that in the fleeting light of the flares he'd seen several feeders streaking across the landscape on his flank, moving at speeds he'd not thought them capable of as they rushed in what he thought was the same direction he was going. Perhaps a trick of the light or some lie from his imagination, though Ford had fought the garm long enough to know better. Something was drawing them to that conflict as much as the flares were drawing him.
Ford vaulted a low fence that he could not recall passing when they'd made their approach, and he realized that he had strayed from the familiar path. For all he knew, and it was likely, he was rushing deeper into the pasture lands and further away from the complex and the stout forces that had accompanied Jarl Mahora there. At least the flares meant that there was someone out there still alive, still in the fight, and he kept going.
Soon he crested a low hill and saw ahead of him many dark shapes sprawled out across the pasture, and as he neared the beam from his rifle revealed evidence of a furious conflict. There were bodies of marines and stalkers everywhere, and as he continued picking his way through the mess he understood from the number of corpses that this must have been Mahora's team. They must have encountered something in the complex, and from the pattern of the corpses and the churn of the ground, there had been a running battle roll right through here and continuing in the direction of where the flares had come from.
Ford slowed his pace and crept up the hill, something in the back of his mind, his hunter's instincts perhaps, insisting that he make his approach a cautious one. He wasn't sure exactly when it had started, but he noticed that his helmet comms system had become just static. His company channel hadn't been working since before they'd come upon the cows, but now he just had static and suspected that even his peer-to-peer would neither send nor receive. The marine sank low, the hairs on the back of his neck standing up, and he knew something was out there with him. Something worse than the stalkers and certainly more dangerous than the handful of feeders that soared past his position.
The marine crouched low and belly crawled through the wet grass until he reached the top of the hill. His ocular assist was straining to present the night landscape in the low light, but as the light of a fresh flare soared up from a low valley just over another rolling hilltop, he saw it.
There had been rumors going around the Bright Lance that Jarl Mahora had fought and killed another alpha garm, not a mutated monster experiment left behind by the treachery of the accursed Skald Thatcher, but a Grendel. It made Ford's skin crawl to think of Grendel as a brood and not an individual garm that they'd killed once before. He peered down his iron sights and blinked, but the sight of the beast did not go away.
It was indeed Grendel, or at least, a beast of the same sort. It looked like the monster that had killed him once, and the marine would never forget its hideous face, but upon closer inspection, he realized it could not be that same beast. However, the physical traits were undeniable, and Ford realized with a growing horror that whatever else this beast might be, it certainly was a Grendel. The serpentine body swayed gently as the beast remained stationary, and the marine recognized the barbed tail, the multiple appendages tipped with barbs and scything bio-blades, and all of it reminded him of Heorot's Grendel. This one, however, had an elongated head that was covered in a thick cascade of armor plates, giving him the distinct impression that there were more filling that skull than he wanted to know.
The monster appeared to be in a kind of trance, and impossibly the marine began to notice that the ebb and flow of the static in his headset was in time to the gentle back and forth sway of the beast.
Ford's mind was racing, and he felt as if he was losing it, so took control of himself in the only way he could think of, and he squeezed the trigger. His aim was true, and his round struck the beast somewhere between the upper chest and the thorax, though he could not tell exactly where. The beast screamed and thrashed with movement, kicking up grass and mud as it fled into the night.
He knew he'd hurt it, but considering how robust the monster from Heorot had been, he knew it was but a wound and unlikely to be fatal.
Ford was about to take a second shot at the beast when suddenly his headset blared to life. He'd turned up the volume in an attempt to fix it and had not cranked it back down. When the comms began to function again his ears were assaulted by a company channel that was a chaotic jumble of broadcasts. Apparently, it wasn't just Ford and his squad who had comms issues, and Ford was positive that the alpha garm was responsible, somehow.
The marine launched himself from his position and gave chase, though he knew in some distant, logical part of his brain that one marine was unlikely to give the beast much of a fight. He reached the spot on the opposite hill where the monster had been positioned, and he could see both the gore that splattered from the beast as a result of his shot and the muddy trail it had left behind. At least the panicked and wounded beast had not attempted to hide its trail, and Ford began jogging along the tracks in pursuit.
Several minutes later Ford rounded the base of yet another rolling hill and the ground shook as if from an earthquake. Or the ground launch of a starship, the marine thought as he heard the roar of alien engines filling the night. A vast dark shape blotted out several of the low falling flares as it rose from the ground. He could tell immediately that it was a garm vessel, as the stink of its bio-fuels igniting told
him that it was burning hard to launch itself into orbit. Tracer fire harassed it from the ground. As he came around the base and entered the valley he could see a few dozen marines locked in combat with a small swarm of the stalkers. The alpha garm was nowhere in sight, though as his headset continued to blare with radio chatter, Ford had the sinking suspicion that the beast had managed to board the ship before it took off.
There were dead feeders littering the shallow valley as well, and instantly Ford realized that the marines had caught the ship before it was fully loaded. They'd forced it to attempt escape, and the Hive Mind presumably had determined that leaving some feeders and stalkers behind was an acceptable loss.
Again, thought Ford as he leveled his rifle and took aim at a stalker in the distance, careful not to put any of his comrades downrange of his angle of fire, the garm were acting out of character.
They weren't fighting to control this planet, he realized as he gunned down an alien best, they were here to feed.
This was a supply raid.
The level of intellect and stratagem behind such a thing chilled his blood. The horrors he had witnessed on Heorot were supposed to have been an anomaly. The nightmares of the Task Force Grendel campaign had been designed by the fevered mind of a madman and his band of traitors. This however, was undoubtedly the work of the Hive Mind, and not at all a weapons test or experiment. The regional sized battle system, whatever it was, masked the hoard ship as its swarms ravaged the target area. The stalkers suppressed any resistance while the feeders harvested, and at the center of it was the alpha garm.
No this was not an experiment, but in fact, a highly evolved splinter operation, a tendril of the core extinction fleet that reminded Ford of the scavenger units sometimes fielded by the conventional militaries of humanity's violent history.
The stalkers were not prepared for the crossfire, and Ford grunted in satisfaction as three well-placed rounds burst apart the body of one of the beasts. The marine took a knee and sighted once more to drop a second monster with his remaining rounds before pausing to vent the heat from his rifle. He could see Jarl Mahora, returned to combat again by the body forge, leading the surviving marines in forming a punishing firing line, and in seconds their concentrated volleys wiped out the remaining stalkers.
As Ford racked the slide of his rifle and stood, the sky suddenly lit up with something far brighter than a flare. He looked up just as the sound of the explosion reached his ears.
His faceplate darkened so that he could see through the glare and he witnessed the death of the hoard ship. Ford could not see Bright Lance, as it was likely too far distant, even if it was hanging in a low orbit, but from the size of the blast, it was clear that the expert gunners aboard the warship had made good on their fearsome reputation.
The Bright Lance had likely fired bombardment ordinance and synced up the descent trajectory of the orbital projectiles with the ascending trajectory of the fleeing hoard ship. Perhaps, had the alien invaders not been so intent upon a hasty escape, whatever consciousness guided the living ship could have managed some kind of evasive maneuver, as bombardment ordinance was not a ship-to-ship weapon.
Ford and the other marines let out a cheer as the enemy ship died in midair, most of its flesh and fluids burning up in the explosion, and what was left falling like a smoldering rain upon the rolling hills.
Suddenly Ford's celebration was cut short. He lowered his head and looked behind him into the wet darkness. His thoughts traveled back to the piles of bovine carnage he'd witnessed, and the speed and efficiency at which the feeders had done their work and the stalkers had done theirs. How many other such supply raids had been conducted without any Einherjar or UHC awareness? It was possible that this was simply one of dozens, perhaps hundreds, such covert seizures of biomass.
Ford shivered, though his armor protected him from such things as cold and heat, as his mind raced to connect everything. Such was a skald's work, not a rifleman, and yet there, in the mud and dark, marine Ford could not shake the certainty of pending doom.
The Hive Mind had a plan that extended in complexity and scope far beyond the brute assaults of years past. The old bad days of Heorot had returned, and the specter of Grendel slithered across the battlefield once more.
RAVAGERS
"Eyes on! Hostiles below!" shouted the troop transport pilot over the craft channel as he banked hard left. The sudden change in course shook the assembled marines in their seats despite all of them having their safety harnesses engaged.
"Chains ready," stated the left gunner, Harlow, in a flat voice, his concentration already narrowing tightly down the sights of his mounted weapon, his words echoed by the right gunner, Yoshi.
"Chains ready."
In between the two gunners sat fifteen marines of Hydra Company. Sharif forced himself to keep his eyes open so he could monitor everyone despite the g-force of the hard turn. They were good men, hardened veterans all. Thanks to the burden of command, Sharif felt he couldn’t close his eyes and make the turn easier on himself. He had always been the sort of marine to take charge when the situation required it, being in possession of what Mahora insisted was natural leadership. While he did not disagree, his service record was proof of that, Sharif yet harbored doubts.
In the years of fighting before the nightmare events on Heorot, and for some time after, there had been warriors like Hart and Ajax around, men who the others would follow as if by instinct. When either of those two fell in behind Sharif's leadership, other marines would follow without hesitation.
Now Hart was part of the skald special forces and deployed on classified missions elsewhere along the besieged front lines of this endless war. Even Ajax, the man once thought by many to be the mythic Beowulf returned, had been all but permanently slain by traitors just over three standard years ago.
There had been others over the years like Boone and Yao, comrades who had fought and died with him many times, that were now madmen resurrected into the ranks of the homicidal blackout berserkers. Men that Sharif had served with since the beginning were in short supply these days, though he was thankful at least for the presence of Silas, Ford, and Rama, the last of the band of brothers left standing by his side.
"Contact," said Harlow crisply, a moment before squeezing the trigger of his chain-fire and sending a burst of deadly projectiles into the fields below. The weapon bucked against the mount as multitudes of bolts roared out of its wicked muzzle a second time. "Kill confirmed."
The craft leveled out as the pilot eased the stick back to center and in seconds both gunners were popping off bursts of fire as they hunted for targets and found them.
They were skilled at their duties, thought Sharif as the gunners tracked and fired sporadically, and after so long at their post it made perfect sense that they would have the prowess to use the powerful chain-fires with nearly as much precision as infantry used their pulse rifles. This environment was certainly testing the limits of their skill, however, as the ground below was thick with vegetation which gave the enemy much in the way of camouflage. Since the gunners could see the stalkers without any interference in their tech, Sharif presumed that the alpha garm that emitted the stealth field was too far off to hone it in on the marines. Likely it was too busy hiding the hoard ships from orbital bombardment and did not have the bandwidth to simultaneously narrow its focus down from planetary to a skirmish scale.
As the sound of the chain-fires filled his ears, Sharif was grateful for the small things, like the knowledge of garm dying below.
The experiences and reports of both Jarl Mahora and Ford, combined with the head recovered by the jarl, had yielded some interesting paths of scientific inquiry. It bothered Sharif greatly that the garm had found a way to baffle human sensor technology, especially since the way they did it appeared to be some kind of brain wave emission. That all sounded too much like psychic powers to Sharif, who despite his loyalty to Ajax, and harbored doubts about the narrative strategy and the supernatural implicat
ions of such a thing.
Triticum was an agri-planet, one of the so-called 'bread basket worlds' of the United Humanity Coalition. Several sectors and dozens of planets relied heavily upon Triticum's bounty, and had the Einherjar not halted the Extinction Fleet's advance when and where they did, a great many people would have gone hungry. Such planets were critical to the stability of the UHC, and without them, so he'd heard, there was a strong likelihood of anti-coalition movements gaining enough traction to become full-scale uprisings. There was every possibility that had the Einherjar lost this world in the early days of the garm conflict that entire sectors would have devolved into civil war.
Bottomless hunger, it seemed to Sharif, was just as much a human quality as it was a garm one. There was a purity in that, he felt, which made the alien swarms such a terrifying sort of opponent. There was no politics in their violence, only the raw needs of survival.
Sharif had to wonder though, given how successful the narrative strategy had been, at least for a time, if there was more to the garm than the simple onward march of feeding and procreation. Surely there was more to the enemy than what they had seen or had the marines, desperate to squeeze some sort of deeper meaning out of this monotonous and horrific conflict, merely crafted a story to make sense out of all this misery?
Below them, more garm bodies exploded as their insides were cooked by the super-heated rounds from the chain-fires, spreading gore and viscera in all directions.
"Feeders ahead, visual confirmation," announced the pilot, his voice cutting through Sharif's reverie and snapping him back into the action.
"These things are really going all-in on the grain supply," said Rama over the squad channel as he tapped his armored finger against his temple, "If it hadn't been cattle the first time, I'd start to think they'd gone vegetarian."
That got a few chuckles from the assembled marines, even the shoulders of the two chain operators bounced slightly with muted laughter as the transport sped onwards. It wasn't the best joke Rama had ever cracked, but it was something, and it broke the tension that had been building in the troop holding area ever since they'd taken off.
Space Marine Apocalypse (Extinction Fleet Book 3) Page 4
