The mobbers were late. Again Kalico checked the time, then turned her eyes to the sky. What if they didn’t come today? What if they came by surprise, say, tomorrow afternoon? When shifts were changing? When her people weren’t prepared?
As she had all morning, she carefully scanned the strategically parked vehicles and the large open space they’d created where the shuttle usually sat. A circle of packed clay, fifty meters in diameter. She, Ghosh, and Ituri stood right in the center of it. Three crates, hatches open, had been dug into the ground. Surrounding her, privates Finnegan, Miso, Anderssoni, and Michegan stood in their gleaming combat armor. Each carried a quickly fabricated eight-gauge shotgun. The twenty-pound pieces boasted rotary magazines filled with hastily constructed shot shells.
The cannons waited on elevated platforms around the compound peripheries; armored marines serviced each piece. The fields of fire had been carefully chosen to disperse the maximum amount of shot with the minimum potential of damage to vehicles and equipment.
But it all hinged on getting the entire flock in close. Concentrated in that open circle. The kill had to be fast, clean, with as little chance as possible for any of the flying fiends to escape.
“Come on.” Kalico took a deep breath.
“They haven’t made a kill since the first attack,” Ghosh reminded. “Maybe they’ve lost interest?”
“Think we should have sacrificed a victim? Oh, say, maybe Tom Dalway?”
“The young man who sweeps up the cafeteria and empties the trash?” Kalico asked.
“The guy’s about as lazy as they come.” Ituri frowned up at the sky. “You ask me, he’s a complete waste of skin.”
“This is patrol two.” Her implant told her. “We’ve spotted them. They just took a dive into the forest about three thousand meters to the south. We’re backing off. We’ll try and maintain visual. Hope to spot them when they emerge from the trees again.”
“Roger that,” the radio room responded. “On your toes, people!”
As per signal, Bill Jones detonated a blasting cap, the bang loud enough to alert everyone that the mobbers were coming. Normally they sounded the siren, but had decided not to, lest—thinking the humans alerted—the beasts might not press their attack.
“You ready?” Ghosh asked, dropping to a knee to once again test the door to his subterranean crate.
Kalico experienced an unsettling squirmy feeling in the pit of her stomach. “Bit nerve-wracking isn’t it?” she asked, and couldn’t stem the nervous laughter that followed.
Ituri, too, stooped to check his crate. That plastic door would be all that stood between him and the flying terror.
“Sure do envy those marines in their armor.” Ghosh had straightened and slapped Miso’s impervious carapace.
“Hey, we gotcha covered, Doc,” Miso told him, his servo-augmented arm swinging the shotgun as if it were a straw. “We clean up anything the cannons miss.”
“Yeah, don’t worry about us,” Michegan added, “Even if we catch part of the blast, at this distance lead pellets will just spatter on the armor. Biggest danger we face is from lead exposure when we clean the stuff off later.”
“Got them.” Kalico heard in her implant. “Two hundred fifty degrees, about a thousand meters and closing.”
“Shit,” Kalico whispered, dropping down to make sure her own door swung freely.
It did.
She stood, heart beginning to pound. Nervous energy pumped its jitters through every muscle.
“Rethinking this plan?” Ghosh asked dryly. “I sure am.”
“We’ve got to have bait,” Kalico told him. “Who else could we ask to do this?”
“Don’t dismiss our people so readily,” Ituri added, his gaze pinned on the southeast. “You didn’t have to do this, Supervisor.”
“Yeah”—she licked her suddenly dry lips—“I did.”
Images of the flapping horror lingered just behind her conscious mind. Memories of the pain and sickening terror of those slashing claws, the jaws ripping at her flesh. Something deep in her psyche shrieked in terror.
“They’re on the ascent. Seconds away, people. This is it.”
“Fuck,” Kalico whispered under her breath. Aloud, she said, “Make it good. We can’t go to ground too soon. Wait for my order.”
“Don’t wait too long.” Ghosh swallowed hard. The man’s face had blanched to an uncommon white.
The first of the mobbers appeared so quickly they might have squirted into the sky. Then came the rest, shooting in behind the first. A living column of intermingling hunters. Thousands of beating wings—the sound of them triggered a panic that froze Kalico in place.
In that instant she was back, in the darkness, flooded with fear, pain, and horror. She could feel the beasts as they beat against her body, fluttered off the insides of the crate. A crawling anticipation ran across her skin: tender, quivering in anticipation of the cuts and tearing jaws.
She blinked, couldn’t breathe. Conflicting images flashed in her vision: Here and now mixing with then and there. Confusion. The sure knowledge that she was about to die.
“Kalico!” Ghosh screamed as the column of flapping death—a silhouetted writhing and pulsing mass—filled the sky.
“What do we do?” Ituri almost squealed as the swarm began to split in two, as though to search in different directions.
Got to get them here.
Here.
“Here!” she put words to her terrified thoughts. “Here, damn you!”
Move. Got to move.
“Hey, you motherfuckers! Here!” She leaped, waving her arms, frantically, charging forward. “Come on, you pieces of shit! Come get me!”
Kalico’s desperately charged muscles lent her strength as she jumped high, screamed her fear and rage. She leaped up, leaped again, shrieking, cursing, kicking and darting, anything to draw their attention.
The splitting flock slowed, hesitated, and she could sense the sudden attention she’d drawn.
“You bastards!” she bellowed at them, voice tearing. “I’m going to kill you all! Shoot your carcasses from the sky! Come and get me you flying shits! Come try your luck!”
She leaped again, flailing her arms about, ran to one side, stopped, and ran back.
And, oh, yes, here they came. The tone of the chattering calls deepened, became a hollow hooting. She’d heard that sound before; knew what it meant. Like ice water dumped in her veins, she froze. Fought for breath, and watched the oncoming mass of screeching, flapping terrors. Colors were flashing in vibrant, almost glowing reds, blues, and yellows across their bodies.
“Kalico!” Ghosh’s screamed warning barely penetrated the magnitude of what she was seeing. The flock blotted Capella’s light. A vast movement of death. Centered on her. Devouring the very sky.
Run!
She might have been made of wood, so slowly did she turn. In her panic, she fixed on Ghosh and Ituri. It struck her that she’d never seen them look so horrified. How odd that their faces could contort so, that their eyes could express such soul-rending terror?
Her feet barely touched the earth, her arms pounding with each stride. She seemed stuck in time and space. A mote unnoticed by the universe.
The sensation lasted but an instant, and she flickered back to reality. The world snapped into sudden focus. Details clarified: the texture of the beaten clay beneath her feet; the glinting of light on the Marines’ armor; the black muzzles of the raised shotguns; the distant forest greens beyond the perimeter fence; even the rush of air past her ears and through her hair as she sprinted with all her might toward her buried crate and the protection it provided.
She was still a couple of meters away when Ghosh and Ituri dove for their boxes.
Bastards didn’t wait for my orders!
She barely had time to consider the implications when Miso, the closest Marine, fired his shotgun.
She heard the shot ripping air past her right ear, was slapped by the gun’s report, and half stumbled.
Not a heartbeat later, Michegan’s weapon discharged. Something flapped immediately behind her head. She felt her hair jerk as it was grabbed.
Oh, God no!
There, in the ground. Right before her!
Kalico threw herself headlong into the sunken crate. Hit hard. Yellow streaks of light flashed through her head at the impact. She couldn’t breathe, could only gasp.
I’m going to die.
She managed to turn her head, to stare up at the beating wings. Saw the sunlight glinting on those deadly claws. Met the eyes of the nearest three-eyed beast dropping from the sky . . .
And jerked as the lid was slammed shut from the outside.
An instant later, she heard and felt the impact as tens of bodies slammed against the duraplast. She clapped hands to her ears, whimpered as a hundred mobbers clawed at the thin sheet of graphite and plastic that separated her from death.
She flinched again when the first cannon fired. Air hissed as the shot ripped through it. Pellets tore through flesh: a surprising, wet, snapping sound.
Then came a series of concussions as the other cannons fired. The snappier bangs of the Marines’ shotguns followed in short order. Bodies were whacking into the ground, thumping hollowly off the crate door above her. Death literally falling from the sky as a fury of shot tore into the swarm.
Petrified, Kalico huddled against the smooth sides of her crate. Inexorably, her whimpers faded, and she began to sob.
She couldn’t stop the shaking, or the nausea that came rushing up from her gut.
I can’t stand this. God, just let it be over.