The great bonging alarms now alternated with a recorded voice telling everyone to evacuate the station. Trains froze where they were, and all the doors flew open. Even so, some people still milled about in confused panic. After all, the Cyrians had known both peace and stability for decades. Only when they saw the alien swarm did they try to flee. But by then it was too late.
The swirling enemy overwhelmed the station’s upper left quadrant, consuming all it came into contact with. The Praetorian Guard assaulted in a shock wave of fury. Carver led one contingent, Josef another. The Guards poured in now through numerous transit points. Instantly they were shouted into formation and sent on the attack.
The Guards fashioned a net of force that stretched over the entire alien mob, a wall between the humans and the enemy. The enemy attacked the net in a swirling mass of fury, like a poisonous stream seeking a conduit, an opening.
There was a subtle shift in the station’s atmosphere, a grim hesitation in the onslaught of death and destruction. The Guards’ barrier was being eaten away in a multitude of places. Each new hole was rimmed by the same green fire as the portal through which they continued to surge. Each grew into another flower of death. And through them flowed a new wave of attackers. Humans who were humans no more.
At their lead was a female in torn shreds of clothing, a slobbering beast that loped down the slanted wall on all fours. With each of her howls she released a gob of green fire, all of her projectiles aimed at the Guards. She duplicated as she ran, first two, then four, then an entire squad of howling mimics. Their fireballs struck the Guards’ shields and clung and ate and burned and finally worked through. When they did, the Guards within had time for one terrorized scream of their own. Then they faced the same choice as Tirian. Many of those assaulted were too close to their fellow Guards to blast away. Those who did not went rigid, they howled, and they went on the attack.
Hordes of the tormented and their duplicates spilled out, leaping, flaming, racing. The noise rose and rose. The station was a battle zone now. And still the enemy’s numbers grew.
But so did the Guards. They split and re-formed into tighter units, each squad small enough now to take personal responsibility for all the others in their group.
The battle flashed and flamed, while a new battalion formed by the far wall and began building a new power net, a barrier to hem in the swarming aliens and their replicates. The Guards flowed in through a dozen transit points now, hundreds of new troops arriving with each passing minute.
The fight was a close-run thing. When the turning came, Sean momentarily feared he was merely hoping for a shift. But within a few breaths he could see that the aliens were in retreat. Snarling, vicious, still inflicting casualties. But their surge had been stemmed. The battle was swaying now in favor of the human race.
Sean turned to the others. He saw that they knew, and they feared for him. He shouted it anyway. “It’s time.”
To their immense credit, they all nodded and transited with him.