––––––––
The next delivery of data arrived almost exactly an hour after the first, and both Keen and Punter were in control to see what it contained. Base North had reached the same conclusions as Keen And Punter, that there was no necessity to go looking for any more trouble because trouble was probably on the way for them. They had gone for an even more extreme solution, by slashing and burning back the forest and surrounding the base with drones. It put all their eggs in one basket, but when all your eggs consisted of only two slugs, a bunch of drones and a half a squadron of scramjets it didn't seem like too much of a concentration of assets.
They had brought their perimeter tightly in around the base. The first video was of dark shapes moving at the edge of the forest. Scramjets fired into the trees, drones unloaded blasters and mass drivers.
There was more footage of the attacking creatures, including footage of them attacking a drone.
They opened their mouths from a few meters away and it seemed like they were breathing.
The drone's surface warped and its legs buckled, but the legs held and it kept firing.
"Did you see that?" Keen asked, "They warped its structure, with something mounted in their mouths."
"It wasn't just bad breath."
"How many were there?"
"Looks like the drones outnumbered them two to one. Drove them off for the loss of five drones and one engineering drone that got caught out in the forest."
"That's heavy losses, for fighting what... bipedal ants with bad halitosis."
The video cut back to the avatar of the base commander speaking directly to them.
"Hi Keen'" she said, "I'm going to collect some dead hostiles and cut them up, so I can tell you what we're dealing with here. More news at the top of the hour in our next data packet."
But, the next data transmission didn't come. Instead they had two scramjets coming over the horizon and landing on their pad, the third scramjet from the relay was already well on the way to the outer limits of the atmosphere. All three of them had a copy of the same video taken by the scramjet at the end of the relay run at the Base North site. It was utter destruction. The fence was melted away in three places, the ground torn up and remaining vegetation warped and twisted around the gaps. The buildings were busted open like paper bags and the drones were scattered about like scrap metal. There were carcases of the bipedal hostiles strewn around, too. Lots of them.
"That's not good," Punter said at last, "Those things must have come back in greater numbers. There are hundreds of bodies here."
"Is this all we have?" Keen asked, "Just video of destruction, no other useful data."
***
Up on Skydancer, the command crew were watching the same video a short time later.
"We just lost an entire base," the captain said, "These creatures must be very sophisticated and well armed constructs, and well armored too, to take on so many drones and win."
Still images were appearing on monitors around the starship bridge, the best shots of downed hostiles and estimates of the amount of damage it had taken to kill each one. This was combined with images showing the estimated destructive power of their mouth weapon.
"The question is," Skydancer said, "Do we reinforce our positions now, or do we call it a day and go back home."
"We stay," the captain said.
"Do we repopulate Base North?" Skydancer asked.
"Yes," the captain said, "We give it everything we've got."
"And Base South?"
"They stay put for now," the captain said, "We need to know if this is a global threat."
"All right captain."
The captain left the bridge and went to her private quartets. She sat down and started to make a recording. After she had finished, she transmitted it to the scramjet, station keeping in the upper atmosphere, which then immediately dove back down towards Base South. Keen was watching the recording a short time later.
"We've now both seen the footage of the remains of Base North," the hologram of the captain said, "We are reinforcing with everything we have. You will be staying where you are until the situation becomes clearer. We both now know that concentrating your forces and awaiting the enemy is not a good strategy. I advise sending out small patrols as widely as possible and reporting any contact immediately. We will divert forces to retrieve you if, and only if, a hostile threat is detected in the southern hemisphere."
There was a short pause, time enough for Keen to wonder if she would ever get off this tangled forest rock of a planet. Then the captain said goodbye and good luck and the hologram dissolved out of existence.
Keen immediately contacted Punter. His hologram taking the exact same spot as the captain's had, but his face hidden by the visor of combat armor.
"No pick up, Punter," she said simply.
"Can't say I'm surprised." Punter said, "They have to know if the ass end of the planet is infected too. Which means they have to wait and see if we get attacked."
"That may be their plan but we're not staying here."
"No?'
"No. These things seem to have short-range weaponry. We are screwed if we stay in the forest. We are going in convoy to the tallest lump of rock with the best firing lines we can find."
"I like it," Punter said.
"The scramjets can stay up in the air till we get a chance to build them a new pad. I'll climb into my armor and we'll head out in twenty minutes."
"What about the buildings and fence?"
"They're useless against this type of hostile. Each one has one of those strange disruptor guns melded right into their face. Any one of them can just disrupt a path through our static defenses. We need a different kind of defensive perimeter."
Keen paused to pull up a map.
"This hill here," she said, highlighting it for Punter with a red circle, “That's gonna be our new home."
"Looks cozy," he said, "Protuberance K-lat5-7-90H. Hmmm. I'm going to have to give it a more evocative name. Something a human can remember."
"Permission granted to name that cursed little lump of rock."
"Cursed lump of rock, huh? I was going to call it after my mother but I think Cursed Rock has more of a ring to it."
The convoy left about twenty-five minutes later and Keen was happy with its shape. The scramjets were already covering the route to the objective. Fast moving units would be there in half a day, And the slow movers bringing up the rear would arrive the next morning.
On the swift march to the new location, Punter didn't even slow down for obstacles. He just powered through them in his armor. Unless they were too big and he had to go round, he just kept running, shoulder charging thick vegetation, and then he jumped a fallen tree. As he jumped, he let out a whoop, though he would have been hard pressed to put his finger on exactly what emotion had provoked it. There was the tension that the fast-moving convoy could he attacked at any moment, but it felt great to be running through the alien woods. There were twenty drones up ahead of him, twenty drones to either side and twenty behind. Keen was in another bubble of eighty drones up ahead. The most rearward of her drones were only a few steps ahead of his forward drones.
They were close enough that they could relay messages through the trees as the intervening drones made fleeting visual contact with each other to flash laser pulses of data. At least there was no way the aliens would he able to mess with that, even if they could knock out radio and satellite communications. The latest message came relaying down the chain of drones.
"I'm getting no contacts from hostiles, not from drones or scramjets."
"How are the engineering drones doing?"
"They've left the compound and are following in our tracks."
"That shouldn’t be too difficult. We're leaving quite a trail," Punter yelled, and waited the few seconds for the message to go up to his boss and then back.
"Cutting quite a swath," Keen replied.
Punter chuckled, but didn't bother transmitting this along to Keen. It did suddenly occur to him that if the engineering drones would have no problems following their trail, then neither would homicidal alien life forms with advanced weaponry built into their faces. He dismissed the thought. There was a boulder ahead, which he climbed with three quick kicks of his mighty armored legs and then jumped.
His hips were starting to ache, dealing with the constant load of the actuators. The armor suit was power assisted but that didn't mean you could ease up on exercise and training. Operating such a huge chunk of machinery took it out of you, and the plan was to be running, non stop, for the best part of an entire day. Punter let out another whoop as he jumped from the top of another rock into the primordial forest.
He heard some shooting ahead, and a few moments later Keen's voice was coming from his communications unit.
"Just frightening off some lashfaces," she said, "Some fireworks to let them know they should run from us instead of dig in their hooves and fight."
"No worries," Punter yelled, "Do they have hooves?"
"Not sure," Keen's voice again, "Figure of speech."
Then more shooting, this time from his left.
"What was that?" Keen's voice had a hint of concern.
Punter was already looking to his left. To be more precise, he had pivoted the top half of his suit to the left, his mass driver at his shoulder ready to fire. His hip flexor muscles were really starting to ache now as the suit contorted him into an unnatural position, his legs still pounding away at the ground without any drop in speed.
The foliage, strange interlocking leaves, more like feathers here than the type of leaves he was used to on his home world, were too dense to glimpse a drone and try to pick up a line-of-sight connection. He ran to his left and a drone loomed out of the forest, running at exactly the same pace in exactly the same direction. An inhumanly tricky military maneuver that only high technology and the tireless mechanical joints of their legs made possible. The drone's laser did a quick handshake and then dumped information. Punter put his suit on auto as he reviewed the data. It was a video, taken through the nose camera of a drone, way out on the left of the formation. It was crashing through the trees with the strange feather foliage. Suddenly a sensor warned of movement in the trees ahead. It was too late for the drone to slow. It burst through the trees, body slamming whatever had been inside. At high speed and the drone weighing the huge amounts that it did, if it had hit an ordinary animal it would have burst like a balloon. It was just impossible to tell from the data the drone had captured what it was that it had hit. At the drone's running speed the impact sensors within the drone's armor were hard pressed to come up with any useful estimate of what size the creature had been. Punter scrubbed backwards and forwards through the video at the moment of impact, but all he could see was leaves.
"Well?" Keen's voice relayed to him as the foliage thinned.
"Possible contact," Punter said, and sent her the data. It was a while before he got a reply.
"Yeah, I'd say that was one of our hostiles," her voice finally said, "But this video clip isn't going to be enough for Skydancer. They are going to need more before they decide it's worth their while to pull us out."
Punter edged back to the right until he was back in position, running hard again. He was no longer whooping.
A lot later the convoy broke through the treeline and out onto the rocky outcrop they had selected. It was perfect, better than they had hoped. They even had to slow down to hop from rock to rock as they approached the summit. When Punter got to the top he found Keen with a can of spray paint marking out a scramjet landing pad on an area of flat rock.
"You made it," she yelled, when she saw him.
"It was no problem. Just that one bad guy, might not even have been one of the hostiles."
"You really believe that?" Keen asked, "You think all the action is going to be up in the North hemisphere?"
"Don't know," he said, and took a look around, "But I fancy our chances a lot more now."
From the exposed position on top of Cursed Rock they could see across the treetops of the strange alien forest almost all the way back to the base they had just abandoned.
"Unless they have an air force," Punter suddenly added, "Then we're screwed."
Keen looked up at the sky. Then back at Punter, and shrugged. He started laughing.
"So how do you want to do this?" he asked when his chuckles had subsided.
"Nothing fancy," she said, "Just draw the wagons into a ring and hope our weapons really do have better range."
"Yes boss."
Punter turned to look after organizing the defenses while Keen turned to a scramjet that was descending to the improvised platform on its secondary gravitic thrusters. Its mighty scramjet engine, easily more than seventy percent of its weight, whining as it powered down. The beast reared up to expose its payload bays, supporting itself on wing hinges and undercarriage like some prehistoric raptor. It was the size of a troop transporter almost, though more graceful and it towered over Keen.
"Let's make sure you have the absolute deadliest payload of weapons we can put together,” she said.
The scramjet's drone mind liked the sound of that. It beeped in approval.
***
Nightfall came and so did news. The scramjets accompanying the engineering drones had spotted a disturbance in the woods near where the slow metal behemoths were. They had engaged with mass drivers and the disturbance had evaporated. Flying over the scene, they could not find any bodies.
"Do you think they know we need evidence and they're dragging their fallen away and hiding them?" Punter asked.
"No I think the mass drivers turned them to mist and a fine sprinkling of droplets in the trees," Keen replied.
It was just the first of a series of attacks, each one more determined than the last. By morning they had all the evidence they needed. Relayed up to orbit, and up to Skydancer by scramjet.
"We'll divert the very next dropship to your location to pick you up," the captain said, "just keep that hilltop you've found free of hostiles."
Keen stared into the morning sky, greener than any she remembered seeing in all the ground actions of her career. Punter had set up their drone defenses well, she saw, and nodded approvingly.
She could see circling scramjets in the distance. She increased magnification and saw the tops of the trees shaking and shuddering as mass driver rounds and blaster fire thudded into them.
"What do you think about how quick they are expending mass driver ammo?" Keen asked Punter.
"What are you gonna do?" was his response.
He was right too. The die had been cast, the position chosen. The scramjets knew what they were doing. They wouldn't be firing if there wasn't a good chance of inflicting casualties. They didn't just spray the canopy with fire on the off chance like a human pilot might be tempted to do.
The circling scramjets came nearer and nearer, protecting the engineering drones, unseen in the forest below. They were firing less and less often. What had been the constant thunder of strafing runs became intermittent flurries of suppressing fire.
Then an engineering drone burst through the tree line. Keen looked to see how many others would be following it, but there were none. Only one engineering drone had made it to their new position. Keen didn’t care too much about that loss. They were going to be picked up in a matter of hours and there wasn't much she could use the engineering drones for, but it did point to the potency of their enemy that they could pick off so many under the watchful eye of the circling scramjets. It was very quiet, Keen suddenly noticed, because there hadn't been any firing for three or four minutes.
"I don't think they like the look of our new position," Punter said, his voice hushed.
"It's a whole new ball game for them, much more difficult to creep up on things with no tree cover."
The scramjets were patrolling the treeline now, in big circles that took them all the way round the base of Cursed Rock and back again, circling endlessly, their mechanical eyes never losing concentration. Five minutes passed, then ten, then twenty.
"With any luck the bad guys will go away for a good think and won't bother us till pick up," Punter said.
As if on cue, they heard firing, scramjets, firing into the woods. The firing was coming from in front, from the left, from the right and from behind them. Keen stared at the woods but couldn’t see anything. Whatever had attracted the drone's attention was set back from the treeline. Then the drones started firing from the ground too, first one to the left, then one to their rear. The drones went instantly from virtual statues to living things spitting a hail of destruction into the woodland, and Keen then saw her first hostile. She had been expecting something like the one she had seen in the video, but it had a green hide, the same shade as the jungle itself. She opened up with her mass driver, but the thing moved fast, found some cover behind a rock, her mass driver rounds just uprooted a small tree trying to find a foothold among the rocks and threw it in the air.
"Blast you," she muttered.
Then there were five more hostiles, then another ten. Most were picked off by the scramjets and drones, and Punter bagged his first, neatly slicing it in two with traversing fire, but some were finding cover among the rocks.
"It's good we have air support," Punter said, "With the scramjets on our side we can deny them cover."
The scramjets were now dropping behind the hostiles, picking off the ones that were hidden from the guns on the hilltop, but Keen knew there would inevitably be some who found cover that hid them from both the hilltop and the scramjets. It wasn't quite as simple as Punter imagined.
"They have some kind of chameleon thing going on," Keen warned, "A lot of them were green as they came out of the trees. They'll be gray as this rock by now."
More and more were pouring out of the woodland. It was worrying, and the number of hostiles was impressive, but they were a modern military force. They could keep up their fire for weeks if necessary. The mass drivers, their most fearsome weapons would run dry in about twenty minutes at this sustained high rate of fire, but they had some mass cubes, enough to reload half the drones, and the blasters would never run out of ammo. They didn't have the stopping power of a mass driver but they were plenty deadly enough to tear apart one of the humanoid alien hostiles, even though their skin was hardened.
"Bring 'em on," Punter yelled.
The hostiles seemed to be inching forward, but then a concerted effort by the scramjets destroyed any advances they had made, withering their advance till it was once again back at the tree line.
"There are hundreds of them," Keen said, "How did they manage to mass at the treeline without us noticing?"
"They can match their temperature to the ambient and move slowly enough not to trip the motion detectors, makes them damn near invisible in the forest," Punter said.
He was guessing of course, but Keen judged them to be good guesses. A terrible thought suddenly occurred to Keen.
"They know this frontal assault will never work, so why-"
Her words were cut off as a hostile appeared directly in front of her, rearing up from the ground. If she hadn't suddenly guessed their plan, hadn't stopped firing and adjusted her aim, she would have been dead. Instinct. She had always had good instincts. The creature's mouth was open, and she saw, as she ducked, that the weapon wasn't invisible, as it appeared on the video, there was a bunch of technology within the creature's insectile mouth and a muzzle where its tongue should be. The muzzle was spitting a horrible twisting energy, all the colors of the rainbow but red-shifted to hues of blood. Even though she had ducked, it touched the armor on her back, spreading it in sheets like a hot knife falling on butter. All the creature would have to do would he nod its head downward, and that terrible beam of warping energy would mess her up, of that she was absolutely sure. Luckily her mass driver had gotten between the two of them. She shifted it and pulled the trigger, getting the muzzle below the creature's chin blowing its head off. The creature's carcass toppled backwards and she had a second to catch her breath, to realize how close she had just come to being killed. Luckily she had way too much adrenalin coursing through her system to really let it bother her.
To her left another creature appeared underneath a drone. The creature fired its mouth weapon, sending the drone's thin underside armor flying in warped streaks. The drone scanned left and right, confused, looking for the attacker. It was taking the machine precious seconds to work out what had happened. A fellow drone transmitted the vital information that the attacker was below it and the drone took a step back, tilting its body downward to try and get a visual, but it was too late, it had lost too much armor, the destructive beams of energy unleashed from the creature's mouth had penetrated into its body cavity. It slowed and stopped. Its status lights went dark.
The hostile was killed by mass driver fire from a nearby drone, mass driver fire that was perilously close to their own units. One round ricocheted and tore off the left leg of another nearby drone.
Their position would be torn apart if this kept up. How had the hostiles penetrated among them, Keen asked herself, and, more importantly, how could she stop them.
"If they're camouflaged and the same temperature as the rock, and they move so slowly," Punter was yelling, obviously desperately wrestling with the same problem as her, "How do we detect them?"
"Topography!" she growled triumphantly.
Another hostile had appeared among them, this time taking out three drones before being killed, but she left Punter to deal with it, and to try to keep the drones from shooting each other in the confusion. The hostiles at the tree line had taken advantage of the confusion to encroach further and further up the hill, but she ignored this too. She had to deal with the problem of the hostiles penetrating among their positions. If she dealt with that, they could hold out for weeks. She immediately contacted the scramjets, told them about her idea.
"Compare topography," she told them, "Reload old maps of Cursed Rock, compare them with what you can see, and destroy rocks younger than one day," she yelled.
It was a difficult problem for the scramjets, really exposing the limits of their non-AI intelligence. Their topographical analysis systems were designed for picking landing places and for avoiding smacking into mountains, not for targeting aliens who were pretending to be rocks. They had to reorganize the pathways within their firmware on the fly, and it took time. It also distracted them from their job of suppressing the hostiles at the treeline, who took advantage of their discomfort to advance up the hill, the fastest of them engaging with drones positioned on the lower slopes of Cursed Rock.
"Come on, come on," Keen was muttering, "Recalibrate."
Another creature burst out of hiding, right behind Punter, but Keen had been scanning the most exposed areas of their position, watching their asses, and she was ready for it. She blasted it with multiple rounds from her mass driver, even as it was hitting Punter squarely in the back with a blast from its strange but powerful weapon. At such close range, Punter's armor deformed explosively, throwing him forward, propelled by a cloud of debris formed from his own warped armor.
"Punter," Keen yelled, "You okay?"
"Yes, yes," he said, climbing quickly back to his feet, "My armor held. Good stuff. I'll never criticize it again."
Another fraction of a second, as they both knew, and his flesh would have been warping into spaghetti just like his armor, but neither mentioned it.
Then, finally, the scramjets started shooting, seemingly at random, among their ranks. The drones instinctively drew away.
"Hold your positions, you rats," Keen yelled at them, "The raptors ain't shooting at you. Concentrate on your targets."
The scramjets found interloper after interloper, destroying them before they got right in among the drones. It was only then that exactly how precarious their position had been became clear to them. There were another twenty or thirty hostiles almost within their perimeter, worming their way to appear later behind their backs. It would have been enough to doom them in only a few minutes more. The hostiles couldn't hide from the scramjets any more though. They knew what the hillside of Cursed Rock was supposed to look like, and they were firing on any deviation from that, destroying hidden hostile after hidden hostile.
Without support from the scramjets however, things were deteriorating on the slopes of the rock. The hostiles had overwhelmed the drones further down the rocky outcrop and were now on the upper slopes, within range to shoot at the defenders on the very summit of Cursed Rock. That's when mass driver ammo started to run out. How long had they been fighting, Keen suddenly wondered, every second seemed infinite but the minutes had started to run away from her. Keen had been parsimonious with her driver and had enough for ten minutes more, but the drones in good firing positions were stuttering to a halt with their main weapons. There was no way to sugar coat it. They were being slowly and surely overrun, what had looked like a pretty good position was gradually turning to crap.
"Where is that dropship?" Punter yelled.
"They won't pick us up if we don't keep a landing zone clear for them," Keen yelled, "Leave the drones to fight it out with the hostiles and fall back to the landing pad I painted for the raptors.”
Keen and Punter hightailed it up to the landing pad and crouched down among the rocks. Keen took a good look at their situation. They were surrounded by a ring of drones, a very slender ring in places, all firing outward at the encroaching hostiles. Now that the scramjets had finished clearing the hilltop, they had turned their attention back to the hostiles, to devastating effect. the situation seemed to have reached a state of equilibrium, except for the fact that more and more drones were running out of mass driver ammo, and the scramjets were being reduced to using blasters too.
The hostiles had also come up with a new tactic. They built up forces, unseen among the trees, and burst forth to charge the line of drones at the weakest parts. Most of these charges were doomed, chewed apart by mass driver fire from an observant raptor, or driven back by massed fire from the drones. But, one or two of the charges had found their mark, leaving a warped and busted drone or two before being repulsed. Each time this happened the line of drones had to contract a little or get a little thinner, or both.
"It's only a matter of time before they break through," Punter said.
"Agreed," was Keen's only response.
"But how long," Punter pressed, "I think we have to know."
Keen summoned up a tactical program into her armor suit's memory and ran it. She fed in the variables as she saw them, picking and choosing from the data she had available, and watched as the outcome was computed. The answer came back in seconds.
"Looks like we've got about four hours," Keen said, rounding up generously.
"Four hours?" the disbelief was plain in Punter's voice, "That tactical simulator of yours needs an upgrade or something."
Twenty minutes went by with the loss of only one drone, but then two were lost in the next five minutes, before a relatively peaceful half hour with no friendly casualties, multitudes of hostiles were chopped down, but no friendly casualties. Punter and Keen had both been glancing up at the sky the whole time, willing a dropship, a grav barge, an atmospheric transport, anything, to appear. There was nothing, just the windless, featureless blue sky with the dark shadows of their own scramjets flitting around.
The scramjets were now all out of mass driver ammo, all looping down to tear at the hostiles with blaster fire. As one of the scramjets came round for another strafing run, the hostiles did something strange. they stopped pressing onward up the hill and seemed to huddle together. The scramjet flew on, unworried by the change in behavior, but as the blaster impacts started to tell, started to tear the hostiles apart, the whole group twitched.
"Huh?" Keen said.
Both her and Punter were now watching.
The twitching group of hostiles suddenly grew upwards, shooting upwards as hostiles jumped to the shoulders of other hostiles, like acrobats at a circus. One hostile was left at the top of the pyramid to jump as high as it could, bringing its mouth weapon in range of the scramjet.
"What the...?" Punter said.
The hostile hunched its shoulders, hisses like a cat, the beam it projected seeming thicker and more torturous than usual and it had just enough range to lick gently at the scramjet. The scramjet's right wing twisted into an unnatural shape, sending the stricken thing plowing into the side of Cursed Rock, right on top of two drones, resulting in a giant detonation and showers of scrap metal and rock debris.
The hostiles were running for the gap in the circle of drones before the smaller of the rocks and metal parts had finished raining out of the air.
Keen and Punter both immediately brought their mass drivers to their shoulders and started sustained firing, plugging the hole in their lines with rounds from the mass drivers.
"Not good, not good," Punter said.
"Keep firing," Keen said, "Give the drones time to reposition and plug the gap."
"What drones?" Punter muttered, "That's it. We've spread them as thinly as they'll go."
"So just keep firing," Keen said.
Just then a shadow fell across Punter's armor.
"Grav transport," he yelled, his voice exultant.
"Well what are you waiting for?" Keen screamed at him, "Climb in."
She didn't dare take her eyes off the oncoming hostiles, now pouring through the gap in their lines, until Punter yelled for her to follow. She dropped her aim, turned and ran for the transport. She saw it immediately, just a little distance away, but the time it took to run, with her exposed back towards the enemy was excruciating. She saw an armored door gunner pensively surveying the scene behind her, a scene she couldn't see. A male voice came over her communicator.
"Keep your head down as you run. I'm gonna have to deter your followers a little."
The gun at the grav transport's door exploded into life, the mass driver rounds arcing over her head as she ducked and ran. The deadly little rods of metal were uncomfortably close, which meant the hostiles were right behind her. How had they managed that, Keen wondered, how fast could they run. The grav transport was hovering on its grav engines about two meters above the ground, with the assistance of the massive legs of her suit, it was an easy jump. She landed half in and half out of the large side door. She grabbed onto the floor panels and hauled the bottom half of her body in. It was only then that she was able to turn round and look the way she had come. The circle of drones had completely collapsed and the hostiles were running unhindered for the landing pad. The pilot was juicing the grav engines so that they had already risen a few more meters and were rapidly accelerating upwards, but the hostiles were still running, undeterred. Then they seemed to fall, a whole row of them, and then another row falling on top. Keen instantly realized what was happening. They were building another structure.
They were rapidly building some kind of ramp, or mound, using their own bodies as building blocks to create a smooth path upward for their kin. It was living architecture in which each hostile was a brick. It possessed surprising strength and flexibility, reaching a height of tens of meters and involving hundreds of hostiles.
Soon there was a giant ramp, with hostile after hostile jumping from the top, screaming out their warping energy at the apex of their flight and falling to earth. The door gunner slid shut the armored door, which warped and buckled in his hands, refusing to close the whole way. There was the screeching, grinding noise of tortured metal and then silence. They had escaped. Nobody spoke, only the grav engines could be heard humming gently, powering them into orbit.