Ajax fell to his knees as blood poured from his wound and seeped from his mouth. Hideous clawed fingers lifted his helmet from his head, and Ajax found that he did not have the strength to resist. His eyes were fixed on the two points of firelight that receded into the dark distance of the black ocean.
When the jaws closed he was already gone.
His eyes snapped open.
Ajax found himself staring into a bright white light. His muscles tensed, and the marine attempted to rise from his prone position, only to find that he'd been strapped down. As his eyes adjusted to the light, a firm hand gently pressed against his forehead.
"Easy now, marine, you are in a safe place," said a familiar voice. The sound of it gave him pause in his struggle, then the voice spoke again and the marine realized it was Idris. "You are in the body forge. Take a few deep breaths Ajax, and I will unfasten these restraints."
The marine did as he was bidden. He realized the lights weren’t so blinding after all as his eyes became used to them. He looked around the room and saw that he was, indeed, in the body forge, though he could not recall how he arrived there. It was common for marines to experience memory loss when first rising from the forge, and he considered that perhaps after being awake for a few hours things would start coming back to him.
The dream was there on the edge of his consciousness, his memory of that crystal clear, whereas much of what made him a marine felt fuzzy and distant. Resurrection dreams were often this way, though he'd not experienced them so powerfully since his conflict with Grendel on Heorot.
"There is much to discuss my friend, you have been gone a while," said Idris with a comforting tone as he helped Ajax to stand and then slip into a body glove. "Jarl Mahora has prepared a briefing packet for you as we speak, though I can delay for a few minutes, so you can get your bearings."
"I’m ready now, sir, it feels as if I've slept far too long already," responded Ajax as he began tightening and loosening his muscles, slowing bringing his body to full alertness. "What have I missed?"
"That is a much more in-depth conversation, and the packet will give you all the details as you are in transit down to the planet," assured Idris as he performed a swift physical on the marine, then nodded his head when his datapad showed all of Ajax's vitals to be in the green.
"Though I will say this, marine...the war is not going well, and we are sorely pressed on all sides. There will be those who shall insist that your awakening heralds a change in our fortunes, Beowulf returned and all that. Try not to let it go to your head."
"How long was I gone, Idris?" asked Ajax more firmly as he noticed the look of concern on the specialist's face.
"Several years, I'm afraid. You were slain on a planet called Tankrid, your torc destroyed, and despite our best efforts you remained in a vegetative state every time we attempted to resurrect you," responded Idris, his expression grim. "Your recovery at this moment is something I cannot explain with science, and many will equate that to the validity of the narrative stratagem. Perhaps they are right to have had faith in it. Now that the Bifrost is gone and the garm infest more of human space with every passing day, that confirmation of faith may be exactly what is needed."
"The Bifrost has fallen?" breathed Ajax as he reached an arm out to steady himself against the wall.
"Your brothers even now give battle on the planet below, and the sooner you attend your briefing the sooner you can don your war gear and return to this life, armed with the knowledge of what has come to pass," said Idris.
He gripped the marine's shoulder with a reassuring hand. "Fight well, marine."
AMONG THE RUINS
His head rang and his vision was blurred. There were screams, but he wasn't sure where they were coming from. He shook his head, and slowly his senses began to clear. That's right, I remember now, he found himself thinking, spores were incoming.
It had only been a few months since his first return to duty, and yet he'd already died so many times that there were significant gaps in his memory. Ajax could not even recall his first battle after so long in limbo, could only read about it afterward.
The garm were winning the war, and humanity was losing planet after planet, often being forced to abandon the corpses of the slain along with the torcs containing their memories up to that point. Briefings worked well enough to bring the men back up to speed, but the garm, with sheer forceful brutality, had pushed the resurrection capacities of the body forges to their absolute limit.
"Meat!" screeched a voice. Ajax shook off the trauma of the impact as he lifted his pulse rifle, awareness flooding back into his consciousness.
The ragman's body twisted away as the bolt slammed into its chest, then exploded in a wet cloud of steaming blood and viscera as the super-heated plasma did its gruesome work. Six more ragmen died similarly horrific deaths as the marines of Hydra Company stood their ground. The ragmen were boiling out of the city ruins and charging the marines without concern for their own survival. That was how it went with those humans unfortunate enough to become infected by the spore artillery that had fallen like rain only a few minutes before.
The ridgeback swarm was tremendous if the sheer volume of spore projectiles was any indication and the city streets were thick with the green clouds of alien bio-weaponry.
Ajax saw a marine go down under the weight of two ragmen who rushed at him from an alleyway, and by the time they had been put down the marine was bleeding from a knife wound in the side and already beginning to convulse from spore that had entered his system through the wound. Ajax turned to look back across the barricade where he was stationed as another marine executed the infected marine before he could rise as a ragman. The street ahead of Ajax was quiet, though he was sure that would not last much longer.
"Meat!" roared Ford suddenly, or at least, the ragman that had once been the stalwart marine, as he hurled himself over the large chunk of blasted concrete that separated him from Ajax, his arms outstretched and his face pulsing with the alien infection that had transformed him.
Ajax spun on his heels, for a split second giving the ragman a clear shot at his back, before completing the turn and smashing the stock of his pulse rifle through the already shattered faceplate of the ragman's helmet.
There was a sickening crunch as the combined momentum of the ragman's leap and the oncoming strike yielded enough force to drive shards of broken bone from Ford's face deep into his diseased brain. The ragman's feet flew forward as his head and torso went the other direction, the opposing movements causing his corpse to land flat on its back in a cloud of dust. Ajax risked a brief glance at what remained of his comrade.
The marine had put down his battle brothers plenty of times, as the spores launched from the hideous bodies of the garm ridgebacks were a common ordinance in the field. However, even having done it as much as he had, it never got any easier, each death weighing on him like stones stacked up on his very soul. There was a significant chance that he would see Ford again in the coming days, alive and as well as a marine could be, though the death was still heavy in his heart.
Ajax knew that it was possible, perhaps even likely, that he would die today as well, and that there was a chance his torc would not be recovered. If that was so, he'd resurrect without the memory of having slain his comrade, and yet he was positive that the burden would remain.
The sound of hooves thundering over paved streets reverberated in the war-torn buildings all around him and Ajax pushed himself back into the moment. Remaining present and lucid was getting harder with every hasty resurrection, especially now that the Bright Lance was scrambling so hard to defend world after world, exhausting the raw materials of the body forge and forcing Idris to recycle the marines with lower quality materials every time they perished. It was taking a toll on their bodies, their minds, and each time it got harder to return to full combat readiness.
He had died twice already upon this cursed world. The first time had been shortly after the Bright Lance arrived to defen
d the industrial world of Vulcan 9.
A garm hive ship had made planetfall after using its spine frigate escorts to bash through the planet's defense grid. The grid itself, made up of a series of orbital weapons platforms, had already been severely damaged in a hybrid uprising. It had been a common sort of death, torn apart while on initial recon duty by a ripper drone that had concealed itself beneath a pile of human and alien corpses left over from the first wave of the attack. While his torc had been recovered then, the second time he lost all his memories of that chapter in his soldier's life.
He had been told, during his briefing on the way from the body forge back to the front, that he and Rama both had been all but disintegrated by an improvised explosive device set by the hybrid insurgents.
"Hold fast, marines!" boomed the voice of Jarl Mahora as he strode across the battle line, his words cutting over the sound of the approaching swarm. "Make ten rifles feel like a hundred!"
Ajax slung his own rifle and snatched up Ford's, quickly thumbing the activator and grinning when the weapon snarled to life. He loved that sound, the growl of the war machine, making him feel as if he held a barely contained volcano in his armored fists. The sounds of fighting died down quickly, and he was thankful that only a few men had succumbed to the spore projectiles that inevitably preceded a sizable ground swarm.
The rest of Hydra Company, save for Jarl Mahora, Ajax, and eight other marines, were positioned throughout the ruined buildings of what he thought must have been a finance or some other sort of white-collar district. Perhaps a dozen marines had been finishing off the ragmen that had resulted from the artillery barrage, and now they too rushed into the once lavish buildings.
While the buildings were, to Ajax's mind, a waste of material, towers of steel, concrete, and glass, lined with precious metals, finished in granite tile, and opulent beyond utility, they did make for decent cover. Now that most of the glass had been blown out by weeks of conflict, from the initial hybrid uprising to the full-scale garm invasion, the once proud symbols of all-to-fleeting wealth had become stout ramparts for the marines.
It had been a bloody day already, as Hydra Company skirmished with shrieker swarms sporadically while the marines used captured heavy vehicles to erect barricades across several blocks of Vulcan 9's capital city, Forge Mons.
The hybrid uprising had all but burned itself out, and now the majority of fighters lay rotting in the streets, having sold their lives dearly in attacks meant to cripple the planet's infrastructure and civil defense capabilities. The UHC security forces had purged the uprising but had suffered such casualties that they were barely mission capable.
The Bright Lance had deployed five thousand marines in its berth planetside, then had destroyed one of the spine frigates and driven the other out of range. The warship had done some select orbital bombardment, though the sheer amount of pollution that swirled through the atmosphere of the industrial planet made precise targeting difficult.
As usual, thought Ajax, it had fallen on the marines to sort things out on the ground. He had given up on attempting to follow the progress of the greater conflict against the extinction fleet, as it had spread to nearly every corner of human space.
The entire universe was like a hornet's nest, buzzing with chaos and violence as opposing forces tore each other apart. There was no such thing as a front any longer, and all mapped space was now considered contested territory.
Ajax flexed his fingers on the grip of his rifle and steadied his breath, preparing himself for the ridgebacks. The UHC was in the process of pulling out and scrambling to evacuate as much of the surviving population as they could. That was difficult, considering that screening the refugees to weed out hybrid insurgents was taking up tremendous amounts of time.
That’s what we’re buying with our blood, thought Ajax, time. This world was already lost, but in the face of extinction, every human being that could be saved had to be saved. "And so we stand against the wolves," whispered Ajax to himself just as the ridgebacks rounded the corner.
Hydra Company had been ordered to deploy deep into no man's land, the wide swathe of abandoned mega-city controlled by neither alien nor human. The garm had been delayed in their initial expansion thanks to arriving at the height of the fighting between the hybrid insurgents and UHC security forces, which had given the marine legions a chance to establish a hasty network of trenches and barricades. Those battle lines served as the bulwark against the garm while refugees gathered on the outskirts of the city in camps where they were penned in with wire fencing and processed by the surviving UHC forces for evacuation. Even now the remnants of the hybrid uprising were harassing the evacuation efforts.
Several clicks to the east was Gorgon Company, and to the west was Manticore, while the rest of the marines serving upon the Bright Lance were manning the trenches at the edge of the city.
Three companies, seven hundred and fifty men, against the might of a hive ship and its hungry swarms. Ajax was skeptical as to how much time they could buy the evacuation efforts, but every moment counted.
The ridgebacks roared as they spotted the marines waiting for them at the four-way intersection. The beasts were coming from two directions, their swarm already having been split in two by the various barricades and the layout of the streets. Unlike the ripper drones or gorehounds, the ridgebacks were simply too large to move comfortably through the ruined buildings. Ajax raised his rifle to his shoulder as Silas cut loose with the company's chain-fire.
The first salvo from the chain-fire tore into the thickly packed ranks of the ridgebacks, and the steady rate of fire pounded bolts against the creatures. The chitinous armor that protected the ridgebacks cracked as multiple impacts overpowered their natural defenses.
Several of the beasts suddenly exploded wetly, as the superheated plasma projectiles cooked them from the inside, creating a gaseous expansion that tore them apart as if they'd swallowed a grenade. The monsters were so close together that as one died its corpse would trip another, and as the first line of creatures fell to the punishing chain-fire the second line crashed to the ground in confusion.
Ajax sighted in on a Ridgeback in the third line and squeezed the trigger of his pulse rifle, sending a painfully accurate bolt through the neck of his enemy.
No sooner had the beast crashed to the pavement another leaped over its corpse and continued the charge, only to be pulped by combined fire from two marines standing near Silas and the chain-fire.
"Ajax! Rama! Take the left flank!" snapped Jarl Mahora as he sprinted past the two marines, his hands filled with the grenade launcher he'd scavenged from the body of marine Poole who'd turned ragman after the bombardment, and they quickly scrambled to adjust their position.
Ajax knew that it would only be a few moments more before the swarm was upon them, as a mere ten marines, even with the aid of a chain-fire and a grenadier, weren't going to do much to stem the tide.
However, he thought, as he watched Mahora shoulder the grenade launcher and begin to rapidly squeeze the trigger, those few moments would be glorious indeed.
Mahora had toggled the detonation timer on the launcher so that the grenades would explode only milliseconds after being hurled at the enemy. It took skill to make such adjustments in the heat of battle, especially given that the enemy was coming in fast; even a small error in the calculation would change wherein the swarm or the empty space between them and the marines the grenades exploded. It reminded Ajax of his comrade, Boone, lost years ago to the blackout, joined more recently by Yao.
Mahora might not have been quite the grenade artist that Boone had once been, or even Poole, but in the tightly packed streets being serviceable was good enough. The jarl emptied the cylinder at the oncoming horde, and thanks to the timing adjustment the grenades appeared to the naked eye to function more like rockets.
The first line of ridgebacks that came at them from the left flank disappeared in a cloud of gore and shrapnel. The jarl took a knee and began swapping out cy
linders.
Ajax knew in an instant that Mahora wasn't going to have the time for a second salvo if he wasn't bought a few more precious seconds.
"Full auto! Now!" shouted Ajax as he thumbed the fire selector to fully automatic and squeezed the trigger of Ford's rifle.
The weapon kicked hard, and Ajax had to assume a wider stance with his feet to compensate. The pulse rifle roared with fury as it spat round after round into the wall of alien flesh that rushed towards them.
It occurred to Ajax that he should be thankful, despite Ford's death, that the ridgebacks had exhausted their spore sacs prior to the charge. He recalled what it was like facing down these beasts when they fired as they charged, and had that been the case this trap might have been far less effective. As it was, the men of Hydra had cranked up their micro-filters and waited out the storm.
It was a good move on the garm's part though, Ajax was forced to admit as Ford's rifle clicked dry just before seizing up from overheating. Having the ridgebacks bombard much of the city, hitting Gorgon and Manticore with artillery at the same time they went after Hydra, the spore clouds flushed out and turned the multitudes of people who had been hiding out in those areas.
Ajax dropped Ford's rifle and slid his own primed weapon over his shoulder and into position. He selected full auto and started firing again, pounding bolts into the aliens while Rama and several other marines did the same, though most of them were venting heat and reloading by now.
Ajax saw Mahora lock the fresh cylinder in place and rack the slide on the launcher just as the marine's pulse rifle hit empty.
"Vent and cover marines, this will be close!" snarled Mahora as he brought the launcher up to his shoulder.
Ajax and the others ducked behind the makeshift barricade, constructed from metal panels and concertina wire hastily welded to stacked civilian vehicles that had been laid across the street like so many bricks.
Space Marine Apocalypse (Extinction Fleet Book 3) Page 13
