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“Ruchek here,” the battalion commander broke in on Repeth’s channel – probably on all channels. “The enemy is three minutes out. Artemis says they took out a few on the way by, and are coming in higher than expected, but faster. Expect combat decel at the last minute, with their fusion drives providing cover. Disable your thermal targeting until they are all down. A missile entering a plasma envelope will just get fried. Use electromagnetic or polarized optics to avoid the drives and engage the vehicles themselves. Good luck, and good hunting.”
“You heard the man,” Captain Miller came on to the Bravo Company net. “If you can see it, shoot it. If you are getting overrun or get low on supplies, withdraw to the tunnels in accordance with the oplan. Watch your HUDs, listen to your leaders, and kick some ass. Semper Fidelis.”
One of the Aussies broke in. “By land, by sea, by space.”
“Who Dares, Wins,” came another voice, a Brit for sure.
“For those about to die, we salute you,” quoted Warrant Officer Massimo.
Well, what do you expect from a Roman. Repeth spoke on the company channel, “This is your first sergeant. Pipe down, ladies. Here’s a better one. ‘We are surrounded. That simplifies the problem.’ Now shut up and look to your guns.”
“One minute,” Massimo said on the heavy weapons section channel.
Dasko and his squad stood leaning against the wall, their weapons in the loopholes pointed toward the horizon. Despite her desire to join them, she was the company first sergeant, and couldn’t afford to get bogged down in shooting. Yet. Although when they took their first casualty, she would step up.
Instead she pulled her HUD view back and rotated it to high overhead. Twenty kilometers to the west she could see three green icons hovering just above the surface: the Aardvarks. Twenty klicks sounded like a long way, until she remembered that they sported masers and targeting systems made to reach out to a thousand. Maybe they would do some good after all.
Suddenly red blips blossomed as the base sensors picked up the enemy. “Incoming,” she said. “Fire free.”
“Light them up!” Massimo cried, and his heavy trinity began to spit death. A whoosh of vapor briefly filled the long room as the cold launch charge of the Hades anti-armor guided missile spurted, shoving the projectile out the firing port. A moment later its rocket engine ignited as it accelerated toward a target.
Beside it the railgun they had bolted to the floor rocked with each burst of magnetic discharge as it accelerated groups of ball bearings toward the enemy at ten thousand meters per second, while the heavy laser, with no recoil, flashed brightly as its coherent light vaporized dust motes and visible gases.
Repeth watched her HUD for a moment more as the Aardvarks maneuvered, spreading out and jinking low near the surface of Callisto, firing their centerline masers. While small for space combatants, the beam strength far exceeded the Marines’ ground weapons, though not nearly approaching that of the now-useless fixed weapons arrays. Note to self for the after action report, she thought. Make sure the big guns can depress to the horizon. And, do not assume the enemy is stupid.
The HUD common operating picture was not so detailed that she could tell the specific effects of the Aardvarks’ shots, but as she looked at the wave of hundreds of craft come over the horizon she saw several dozen wink out. Switching to an optical view from a remote camera, she observed plumes of dust and debris as some of the enemy augered in. Others, wounded, tumbled above the base, the low gravity insufficient to bring them down for kilometers.
Because she had no control of the camera feed, she could not focus well on one of the enemy craft to examine it, but in the flashes and glimpses she thought they looked like bugs, beetles perhaps, curved on top and flat on the bottom, with struts or legs all around. She wasn’t sure at this point whether they were organic or mechanical.
That question was answered when they began to land. Now and then one would crumple and die from some invisible source, presumably the Aardvark masers. Those were earning their keep, and Repeth wished now the base had kept a squadron back for close-in defense.
Another lesson learned, if we live through this.
Then that equation changed as five shark-like vehicles with stubby wings roared over the base at high speed and low altitude. As she watched, they launched tiny missiles that accelerated at incredible velocity, and a moment later the Aardvark icons winked out.
Damn.
Now her view blurred and filled with explosions, subliming ice vapor and dust. Her HUD showed about three hundred remaining beetles, and she brought her attention back to her surroundings. No casualties yet, though rock dust blew through the firing ports and the structure shook, showing some kind of fire incoming.
“Adjust laser for organics,” Massimo yelled, and the heavy beamer’s color reddened almost to invisibility. “Those beetles are alive, and they’re deploying something.”
Repeth belatedly switched her view to the section sensors they had emplaced. Now the flying beetles that had descended in a swarm turned into gigantic monsters, as if she herself had been shrunk to tininess, bringing a visceral terror that she had to force down. Unlike a natural insect, these had turrets that fired green plasma like focused flamethrowers.
A Marine anti-armor missile roared off the launcher and immediately slammed into a nearby beetle, blowing a hole in its head-shaped front portion. It halted, joints locking and swaying in an apparently automatic response to damage. The turret on top swung in their direction.
“Cover!” Dasko barked, and the line Marines dropped immediately to their knees, heads below the loopholes. The heavy weapons crews, with their gun shields filling their holes, didn’t bother, but kept firing.
Green plasma washed into their embrasures, filling the room with heat and igniting the ceiling panels, the light fixtures and, briefly, even the paint on the concrete walls before flaring out from lack of oxygen.
Another good reason to fight in vacuum.
“Son of a bitch!” Massimo spat. “Pull that laser back. Get a new barrel on it.” Repeth saw the emitter had warped from the heat, rendering it useless. “Target that turret!”
The heavy railgun, its snub nose made of tougher stuff, shifted fire and slammed a stream of steel into the plasma gun atop the beetle, shredding it and leaving it slewed sideways, smoking and popping.
“Back on the line,” Dasko said before Repeth had to, getting his people into their loopholes again. “They are deploying ground troops.”
“What the hell are those?” one of the Marines said as she let loose with her recoilless machinegun. Railguns had been miniaturized to the level of the crew-served heavy, but most line Marines still carried weapons descended from the assault rifles of terrestrial forces, firing caseless ammo.
Dropping from the bottom of the beetles from holes in their bellies, Repeth could see some kind of...creatures. Three meters tall, they moved ponderously, their skins or exoskeletons armored with plates that looked more organic than mechanical. Insectoid centaurs of a sort, with four legs on an abdomen below, an upright thorax with two arms, and a head with wide-set, glittering eyes, rather like mantises.
They also seemed to have no problem with vacuum, and each carried a firearm in its left hand, which discharged short-range energy pulses, perhaps particle beams. Each also had a meter-long metal blade in its right.
Swords?
“They are going to close,” Repeth called on the local channel and then switched to the company net. “Captain Miller, the enemy appears to be large insectoids armed with short-range energy weapons and blades. This makes me suspect they are willing to close and use their superior size and strength in hand to hand combat. The only sense that makes is if they are trying hard to take this base intact, and minimize damage.”
“Understood, Top. Will pass to Battalion. Break.” Miller’s voice dropped off.
Just then a blue crackling explosion blasted one of Dasko’s line Marines backward from his loophole. A moment later an insectoid leg reached through the hole and ripped at its edge, widening it like a miniature backhoe.
Repeth stepped up with her machinegun and fired one-handed into the hole, and the limb jerked back. Then she reached to her grenade dispenser and popped one into her hand, rolling it out the opening. “Use grenades if they get too close,” she barked, turning to check on the fallen Marine.
The man was unconscious but alive, his armor showing a rebooting sequence. “Those energy blasts will take down your armor and cyberware, people, so duck! I need live Marines, not dead heroes!” She manhandled him over to the door and tossed him into the corridor in hopes he would recover to fight, then turned back to the firing line.
Two more Marines were down, one still moving and one as immobile as the first. “Defensive grenades, people,” Repeth repeated, dropping her gun to its sling and pulling four grenades off the fallen man’s backrack. Activating them as she moved, she rolled them out the three empty firing ports and then past Dasko’s shoulder. “Sergeant, get your squad using their grenades. Pull them off the wounded. There are too many of these things out there to just stand and deliver.”
Dasko turned from his loophole just in time to dodge the brunt of a blue bolt, but it caught his arm and he stumbled back to the wall. A moment later Repeth had her hands full as one of those swords came probing through the opening.
Her steward-level cybernetics exceeded even the standard Marine package, otherwise she would not have been able to execute the technique that occurred to her as she grabbed the “wrist” of the giant limb in a bear hug. At the same time she lifted her right leg to brace against the loophole’s inner edge, her left on the floor, and torqued her body backward, levering the chitinous limb sideways in a direction it was clearly not designed to go.
Roaring with effort, Repeth forced the thing’s exoskeleton to flex like a lobster shell, and then it cracked. She felt rather than heard its squeal of pain as it let go of its sword and tried to withdraw. Finally it slipped out of her grasp. She had to fight the instinct to deploy her claws to tear into it, but unless she wanted to expose her naked hands to vacuum, that was a bad idea.
Instead she picked up the sword. With two hands, she had plenty of strength to use it, a bit awkwardly perhaps. Who would have thought a frickin’ sword would be useful in high-tech combat? But in this case...
The next limb to come through became the test – a leg with a shovel foot that sought to widen the hole. Repeth chopped at it, missing the first time and almost vibrating the awkward sword out of her hands. The second time her strike bit deeply, and her third chopped it off entirely.
The next few minutes turned into a haze of chopping, blue blasts, staccato orders and automatic weapons fire. Somewhere along the line the laser, with its more delicate mechanism, had been punched back through its larger firing hole and now a blizzard of incoming fire spewed through that opening. Half of the Marines were down.
“Fall back!” Repeth ordered, overriding everyone on the local net. “Fall back now, everyone. You too, chief. They’re getting in!” She wasn’t overstating the case, as one of the buggers forced its full upper body through the hole, sword swinging and energy cannon blasting.
Dasko came up next to her, emptying his machinegun into the creature, driving it back. “You too, Top! Get back, I’ll handle this.”
He was right, so Repeth bounded over, dropping the sword to grab Chief Massimo by the back-rack. “Come on, Chief. Fall back. Captain’s orders! We can’t lose your guns.”
The warrant officer snarled but echoed, “Weapons section, withdraw now. Leave the laser.” That mechanism lay broken on the floor, so the rest of the Marines unbolted the railgun and the missile launcher and withdrew, carrying their casualties as well.
Repeth was unable to tell who was dead, wounded, or just a victim of electronic overload, so she grabbed one of the fallen in each hand and dragged them easily out the door as other mantises began to force their way in. “Don’t leave anyone behind.”
Checking her time and oxygen levels, she was startled to see that they had only been fighting for sixteen minutes. It had seemed an eternity. “Leapfrog to the next redoubt,” Repeth ordered, dropping an icon onto a secondary position the HUD showed was unoccupied.
As the ragtag group hustled down the access corridor away from the edge of the base, a railgun burst slammed into the wall in front of her, causing her to drop to the ground. “Hold fire, hold fire,” she called after switching to Delta’s freq. “Use your goddamned HUDs, you morons. You’re shooting at friendlies!”
“Sorry, First Sergeant,” came a shaky voice, and she grabbed her two casualties again and bounded forward, pitching their armored bodies over the barricade she’d come upon.
“Make a hole, damn you. We have wounded and heavy weapons,” she snarled at the corporal and his fireteam manning the position. “We’ll set up at the next designated position. You hold as long as you can, then fall back on us. We won’t shoot at you.”
“Got it, First Sergeant. No excuse, First Sergeant.”
Repeth waved the rest through the opening in the barricade, with Massimo leading and Dasko on rear guard. She was tempted to put the railgun down here to stiffen Delta’s line Marines, but the position was already too crowded.
“Listen, Corp,” she said, grabbing the man by the shoulder. “They’re big bugs, and we killed a bunch of them. They die just fine. You’re in an excellent defensive position. Roll some grenades down there, set on command detonation, and be ready to throw some more. These things are tough, but they’re clumsy. Just keep pouring disciplined fire into them, and when they get too close, throw some more grenades and haul ass for our position. They have electromagnetic weapons that screw up the armor and cybernetics, so make sure you recover anyone that isn’t obviously dead. Got it?”
“Got it, First Sergeant,” the man replied in a much steadier voice.
“Here...” She stepped back to her two fallen, one of which was finally stirring, and emptied their backracks of grenades, coming up with seven. “These are coded two-four-two-Bravo. Punch it in.” While the corporal set his HUD for the command detonation function, Repeth pitched the spheres down the corridor toward the direction the enemy would come, where they scattered randomly. “Blow them when they get close.” She clapped him on his shoulder. “Good luck.”
While her warrior heart wanted to stay with them, that wasn’t her job, and they weren’t even in her company. The best thing she could do was get her wounded back, and set up the next redoubt so the Delta corporal and his Marines could fall back when they needed to, so she turned and grabbed her people. The one who seemed to be coming around she ended up ordering to just hold still; it was actually easier in the low gravity to carry him like baggage than try to help the man move under his own power.
Coming in sight of her troops’ position at a major intersection, she saw they had sorted themselves out and pushed a couple of utility trams into place as barriers, catercorner across. This gave them some cover and allowed everyone to fire in the two directions the enemy was likely to come, but also meant that they might get hit from both directions. It all depended on how organized the enemy was. Were these bugs just a bunch of killer drones, or did they have some kind of radio command and control system? She’d seen no technology on them other than the blaster and swords, but she knew the Meme used bio-radios, so that proved nothing.
Pointing toward the narrower of the two corridors, she told the task force, “The Delta troops will be falling back from there. Make sure you ID your targets and do not fire on friendlies. Watch your sectors and your HUDs. Someone take a look at these two.”
Checking the rear of the position, she identified the larger of the corridors as their route toward the down-ramp to the lower level. A barricade icon occupied the spot, so she pushed her comms through to its occupants, part of Charlie company. “Redoubt C-5, this is First Sergeant Repeth, Bravo Company. Stay alert to friendlies falling back into your lane. We have engaged the enemy and they are assaulting in battalion strength, but we have inflicted heavy casualties.”
“Roger,” came the laconic reply of the Charlie squad leader occupying the position. “We’ll try to shoot bugs only.”
Taking a deep breath, Repeth switched among HUD views, first checking the battalion-level synthesis. The originally circular base perimeter now looked like a giant letter D, with the enemy pushing in from the east. Hot spots showed combat at other locations, including one point deep behind the Marine lines. She zoomed into that area, and watched as an Alpha Company reaction force in platoon strength moved toward the incursion. It looked like the bugs had broken in from above and were trying to establish a beachhead, but the Old Man had it under control.
She glanced up at the overhead, wondering if they had to worry about other attacks from above, and she noticed several holes showing starfield behind them. Crap. If one of those bugs finds that hole and starts firing down on us, we’re going to be in a world of hurt. In fact, the thin layer of ceiling and dirt between them and the outside now looked like a distinct liability.
“Chief Massimo,” she said, “you see the overhead? Those holes? I’m concerned we could get flanked in three dimensions.”
“Damn, Top. You’re right.” The man stared at the offending opening. “Wish we had some claymores.”
“Engineers put all we had up on the surface already, on proximity. Probably why we haven’t had any more overhead assaults than we have. Any other ideas?”
“Command detonated grenades will clear the opening one time, if the enemy doesn’t realize what they are.”
Repeth nodded. “I think I can worm through there. If I can, I’ll plant some under the dirt. Do you have a remote sensor left?”
“Sorry, Top. We lost them all back there.”
“Anyone got a spy-eye? No? Crap.” Repeth waved at the Marines. “Collect me up a couple of dozen grenades off the casualties – anyone that can’t use them. Load them in my backrack. Dump the rations if you have to.” Once she had her utility compartments loaded with grenades, she carefully gauged the opening above and jumped, catching its edge with her hands and pulling herself slowly up through the hole.
Performing a careful three-sixty, she could see dozens of big beetles stalking the landscape, tearing all the surface facilities to shreds with their limbs or blasting them with their green-plasma guns. Many more, hundreds perhaps, stood frozen or had fallen broken onto the surface. It looked like half of the enemy personnel carriers were knocked out, but that still left at least a hundred. Above, several of those flying shark craft cruised with seeming impunity.
Yeah, some dedicated fighter craft would have been really useful, as well as some camouflaged anti-air missiles, she thought. But no one really expected this kind of serious ground assault. I mean, what the hell do they intend to gain out of it?
Repeth racked her brains, but couldn’t think of anything that justified the effort of trying to capture, rather than just hammer down, Grissom base. What could they want? Intelligence, maybe?
She could see several groups of insects digging at the soil, clearly trying to break in from above, but none of them were too near her. A short distance away, one bug exploded into pieces as a proximity mine went off.
Easing out low, she popped her backrack compartments, disgorged two dozen grenades onto the ground next to her and began to shove them under the dusty soil. Several of them she tossed ten to twenty meters away from herself, trying to spread the kill zone out while still staying next to her gopher hole and watching in all directions.
One of the bugs spotted her and raised its blaster in her direction, so she dove through the opening, grabbing the edge on the way and reversing as soon as the blue electrical discharge cleared. Her HUD fuzzed for a moment but recovered. Better shielding on the armor’s electronics, she added to her mental list of lessons to report.
Raising her helmet just enough to see several bugs hurrying her way, she dropped gently to the floor below. As soon as she saw movement against the starfield, she triggered half the grenades. Maybe some of the other half would survive the blast and remain for a second round.
Dust and debris fell slowly as she shot up to look out the gopher hole again. A quick survey showed all of the nearby bugs dismembered, but several more heading her way. Dropping down again, she turned to Massimo and Dasko. “More are coming, and they’re gonna get through. If not this time, then the next. We have to either lay heavy fire on that hole, or move.”
“Trying to hold them off when they have the high ground is a losing proposition,” Chief Massimo said.
Just then Repeth saw more movement so she triggered the second set of bombs. A much smaller blast blurred the hole with dust, and a blown-off bug leg fell through. “No more grenades,” she said.
“Heating up anyway,” the chief said, pointing down the corridor.
Four Marines carried another, led by the Delta corporal, hustling toward them while waving their weapons backwards and firing at nothing from time to time. “We got a bunch with the grenades,” the man said as he came up, “but there were too many.”
At that moment an avalanche of bugs rounded the far corner, and Massimo’s railgun opened up. The stream of steel ball bearings hosed into the mass, blowing the critters apart. A missile from the launcher followed, turning the mob into what looked like a tub of blue-gray crab pieces at a buffet.
“Corporal, cover that hole,” Repeth said, pointing upward. “Take positions in an inward-facing ring, and shoot at any movement.”
The Delta fireteam did, just in time, blasting at the edges as bugs showed themselves, and then hastily pulled back.
“Chief, we gotta go,” Repeth said.
“Wait, Top. We can take down a bunch more,” Massimo replied.
“Chief, this position is untenable. All the bugs have to do is roll some kind of grenades down on us and we’re dead. Chief.” She grabbed him and shook him. Technically he outranked her, but he was a gunnery specialist while she was the senior enlisted Marine in the company, which gave her a lot of pull.
Fortunately, pull carried the day. “All right, heavy section: let’s go. Fall back.” Massimo and the others grabbed their weapons and manhandled them toward the ramp.
“Dasko –” Repeth began, then saw something fall through the hole, a big egg-shaped package that looked for all the world like, well, an egg. “GRENADE!” she yelled, diving for cover.
One of the Delta fireteam’s Marines, luckier or a better shot than average, put a crackling electromagnetic burst directly into the egg and it spun off to bump against a wall, then roll down the corridor toward the withdrawing weapons Marines. One of those reacted immediately, grabbing the football-sized thing and launching it a hundred meters down the corridor in a damn fine throw, where it came to rest on the ground.
Nothing happened.
Maybe the EMP knocked it out. “Go go go!” Repeth yelled as Marines opened fire around her, aiming at the hole above. “Withdraw, withdraw!” She leaped to her feet and grabbed one, then another, shoving them toward the heavies. “Withdraw and cover the rear.”
Another egg dropped through the hole as the last of Dasko’s troops backed up firing. This one fell to the floor and detonated immediately in a burst of goo. The corridor filled with vile-looking smoky fumes, and the tail-end Marine’s entire front armor began to melt.
“Shit!” she heard the woman say as she dropped her weapon and began to claw herself, as if to wipe the stuff off. Then she began to scream and thrash.
Repeth keyed her HUD to shut the Marine down, sending a command override to the woman’s cybernetics. This immediately rendered her unconscious and put her into hibernation, a last-ditch response to extreme injury. Then Repeth grabbed her by the neck handle and hauled her backward with one hand, firing her machinegun with the other.
“I need some cover,” Repeth said as she retreated, and a moment later two more Marines joined her as rearguard, blasting away with their weapons as more and more bugs dropped down the hole. Those ignored the gunk on the floor and walls, seemingly unaffected.
Just in time, Repeth felt the floor tip under her and realized she had reached the top of the ramp. As she and the other two backed down it, they passed Massimo with his missile launcher.
Once they were clear, he slapped the gunner on the shoulder, who fired on that command. The missile leaped off the rails and shot down the corridor to explode against one of the utility vehicles they had been using as cover.
Immediately an unusually large explosion vaporized the group of bugs there. “Good shot,” Massimo said. Repeth realized he must have targeted the vehicle’s fuel cell, enhancing the blast.
Dust falling from overhead alerted her to the danger. “Massimo, get back! They’re coming in from the top again!”
The chief and his missile gunners grabbed the launcher and ran down the ramp just as another egg fell. The edge of the goo splashed their lower legs as they ran, and their armor immediately began to smoke.
Repeth pitched the unconscious casualty she carried over the barrier at the bottom of the ramp, the one occupied by Charlie company Marines, and turned to help those three. She could see the stuff eating holes in their leg armor, right in front of her eyes. “It’s acid! Strip it off!” she yelled, grabbing the missile launcher to allow the three to deal with their problem. Once she had handed the weapon off to those behind the barrier, she helped them pop off the leg plates and boots.
Horrible wounds awaited her gaze beneath the hard ferrocrystal-reinforced plastic armor. She could see the stuff keep eating into their bodies, and wondered when it would stop. They weren’t reacting to the pain; they all must have been aware enough to shut down all feeling in their legs. Well trained, they waited without panicking while their fellows figured out how to help them.
“You Marines, two each, grab these three,” Repeth ordered. “Set them down behind the barrier. The enemy is right behind us, and they’re using acid bombs that look like footballs. Shoot them with EMP cannon if you can. It might stop them from detonating.” She hopped over the barrier, following the six with the wounded Massimo and his two gunners.
“Fire extinguishers. Get all you can.” She pointed down the corridor, where she could see at least two on the walls. “Bring them here. And go get that alien sword.” One had fallen skittering down the ramp to land by the barrier.
As soon as they handed her one of the cylinders of compressed CO2, she blasted Massimo’s lower legs. In a moment she had frozen them up to the knee, about the extent of the corrosion, and the stuff stopped advancing. “Massimo, hibernate yourself now. I’ll wake you up if we need you.”
The chief looked at her through his faceplate and grimaced, then nodded. A moment later consciousness faded from his eyes.
“Both of you too,” she told the others. As soon as they were out, she froze their legs as well, using a second and then a third extinguisher to make sure the job was done well. Can’t let that stuff get into their bloodstream or we’ll lose them, she told herself.
Then she lopped their legs off with the alien sword.
She heard someone retching in her comm, but legs could be regrown by the Eden Plague. Whole Marines, especially brave and skilled heavy gunners, couldn’t. Coming up on the Bravo company push, she called, “Repeth here. I am at redoubt Charlie Five with the weapons section. We have taken heavy casualties. Request bearers and relief.”
“Roger, Top,” came Captain Miller’s calm voice. “How’s Massimo?”
“Lost his legs, but he should live, if any of us do,” she replied. “But he’s down.”
“Understood,” she said. A moment later the CO herself led a fireteam up and they began grabbing downed Marines.
“Getting thin, ma’am?” Repeth asked.
“You asked for the reserve. We’re it,” she responded with a smile in her voice. “We’re giving them hell, but we’re slowly getting our asses kicked,” she went on. “Tell your people to continue their delaying action, assist Charlie here, but don’t wait too long. We’ve lost the surface. Delta has taken seventy percent casualties and is combat ineffective. The Old Man and Alpha Company are keeping the penetrations contained, but Bravo and Charlie are both down about twenty percent and rising fast.”
Repeth nodded. “We’ll do our best.”
“As soon as you frog back from this position, head for shaft number one, get in and seal up tight. We’re going to execute the collapse protocols.” Then Miller was gone.
“All right, ladies, you heard the boss,” Repeth said to her little command grouped behind the Charlie firing line. “Gunners, get that railgun and the missile launcher set up to fire over their heads up that ramp. Dasko, you and yours have to cover us. We will be withdrawing down that corridor to the deep shaft. Captain Miller will be waiting there.”
As the heavy gunners emplaced their weapons, the Charlie squad opened up as targets appeared at the top of the ramp. Several footballs rolled wobbling down, and Repeth joined the others in shifting to blast them to bits with aimed fire from multiple weapons. This caused the acid inside to leak, but without the explosive spreader charge, all it did was smoke and fizzle in place.
“Good thing they don’t have acid hoses,” Dasko said.
“Bite your tongue, Sergeant,” Repeth said. “Damn, I’m getting low on ammo. Air, too.” Her O2 gauge read thirty-five minutes. They’d been fighting for just over an hour. The suits were supposed to be good for at least two, but exertion had cut that. Afterward they had ten minutes of oxygen in their internal cybernetics, stretchable to a lot longer if they went into hibernation.
“Why don’t we just pull back now, if we’re going to lose the base?” Dasko asked.
“When did you start thinking, you dumb grunt?” Repeth replied with cheerful sarcasm. “We hold because we are ordered to hold. Maybe we’re buying time to get more wounded out, or the squids that are in their weapons control rooms. I don’t know.”
“But –”
“Dasko, dammit, just shut up and soldier.” To a Marine, that was an effective insult. The man shut up.
Another cluster of acid footballs rolled down the ramp, this time followed by a rush of bugs. “Get the eggs,” Repeth ordered her remaining line Marines. The heavy gunners ripped into the insectoids with railgun rounds and a missile.
One egg made it through, to splatter the barrier and parts of the Charlie squad with goo. Several fell back writhing while others held the line. “Dasko, fill in,” Repeth ordered, and the sergeant and his remaining five Marines surged up to the barrier.
Blue bolts crashed into the barricade and two more Marines went down, and a bug reached far enough to smash his sword through the helmet of another, before suddenly the attack ran out of steam.
As the last enemy died twitching on the floor, Repeth began slapping Marines on their helmets rather than trying to sort out Charlie and Bravo comm channels. “Fall back,” she broadcast on maximum external speaker, hoping the tiny bit of atmosphere left would carry the sound. Her own Marines heard her just fine on the company channel, and quickly pulled up the heavy weapons to fall back again.
The Charlie Marines who were left saw what was happening and apparently decided they had better follow suit, so they grabbed their wounded and beat feet as Repeth’s people did the same.
As they passed Dasko’s original position, a head popped out of the weapons emplacement access corridor. Repeth almost shot it in reflex before she stopped herself. As the rest bounded past, she saw the ground force warrant and sergeant had left their railgun control center in their flimsy emergency suits. Without any idea of what comm channel they were on, she just blasted them with her external speaker and waved. “Follow us to the shaft!”
They did, but she had to grab them and propel them along, as their suits did not have stabilization jets and they didn’t have the enormous strength and speed of the Marines’ cybernetic augmentation. Repeth almost dropped the bug sword she still held, but at the last moment she tucked it under an arm and held onto it. It had proven useful so far, and at least would make a nice war trophy.
The tunnel shook and parts of the ceiling broke loose as they ran under it. “What the hell?” she mumbled.
“Looks like the bugs are getting impatient,” Miller’s voice came over her comm. “Before we lost all of them the sensors showed they brought in some kind of digging apparatus.”
“Seems a weird way to do business,” Repeth said as she finally reached the entrance to the deep shaft. “I’d have thought they would have brought in the digger first and made some holes, then rushed us through all the breaches. Instead, with clear numerical superiority, they charged us like...”
“Like bugs. Don’t try to figure it out. Just be happy. Alien minds are alien.”
“I’m not happy, ma’am,” she replied as she shoved the two grounders through the massive hatch and watched them descend the sloping tunnel. At that moment it appeared as if Miller and she were the only two remaining outside. “We lost a lot of good people. Sergeant Dasko asked me, ‘for what’? And I really didn’t have an answer to give him.”
In response, Miller pushed a display to her HUD. “For this, First Sergeant.”
Jerky video from a helmet-cam showed the inside of an Aardvark maintenance hangar, a long Pilum missile resting on a loader. One suited figure had the warhead hatch open while the owner of the camera assisted. No audio came through.
“Two of the ordnance techs are rigging a fusion warhead to detonate,” Miller explained. “We’ve been trying to buy them time.”
“Holy shit. But why didn’t anyone have this set up already?”
“I guess no one thought it was a good idea to have live fusion warheads inside the base, what with the problems we had with the criminal element.”
“Yeah, I know something about that. So where did they get that one?”
“These guys hopped it back from one of the ordnance loading stations into the maintenance hangar.”
Repeth’s eyes narrowed. “How are they going to get to a bunker?”
“They might not.”
“Shit.”
“Agreed.”
“Do we have any idea why the Meme are trying to take the base instead of just smashing it? I mean, the whole attack will be over within, what, a day maybe?”
Miller nodded. “Colonel Ruchek thinks they are so confident they are trying to preserve assets, but I have another theory.”
“I’m all ears.”
“What if they wipe out all human life on Earth? What’s left?”
Repeth’s blood ran cold. “Just what’s on bases here and there...like, thirty thousand civilians here in the bunkers.”
“And the Meme want slaves, and bodies to take. It’s what they live for.”
“Oh, crap. You see this?” Repeth’s video feed from the one bomb tech, looking over the other one’s suited shoulder, showed monsters charging up behind. Like an old horror movie, she wanted to scream at the victim, but exactly the same way, there was nothing she could do. Alien swords swung and cut one tech down, then the camera jerked and rolled over to show a piece of the floor and scurrying legs.
“Any chance they set the bomb?”
Repeth shook her head. “I don’t think so. They were concentrating on it to the end.”
“Shit. It was a good try.” Miller saluted in the general direction of the fallen techs. “I’m making sure that video gets retransmitted and saved. They deserve medals.”
“And more.” Repeth turned to Miller. “After you, ma’am.”
“Right.” Captain Miller strode through the opened tunnel door, watching as Repeth slammed it shut and then spun the dogging wheel.
Once the meter-thick door was tight, they bounded as fast as they could down the wide ramp, heading deep into the moon’s crust. When they reached the first dogleg, Miller yelled into the open channel, “Initiate collapse protocol!”
Behind her, charges in the ceiling exploded one by one in a carefully timed sequence to collapse the entrance shaft. The two Marines sped up, using their stabilization jets in zero-gravity mode to fly faster and faster down the tunnel as the blasts came closer and closer. Repeth told herself they should have no problems, as the explosives only reached to the dogleg. In fact, the whole point of the sharp corner was to limit any overspill from rockfall.
Her surprise was therefore all the greater when she felt the enormous shock. The last thing she remembered was the tunnel writhing like a snake, and the loudest gong she had ever heard bloodied her eardrums and blinded her eyeballs before she blacked out.
