The Maggot Colony

by Grave Blackened

  We stand at the center of a large crater, facing the low sweeping horizon ringed by the mountains of ash. Piled high in towering drifts that gently slope away from the epicenter of the explosion. This is by design. The Krag, like fire, spread faster and stronger when moving up. They are more dangerous when attacking from below.

  Mayhem broke loose all around. We hadn’t even cleared the lander before the Krag hit us. They came in hard, as always. The stream from the pelt, a massive wave of enthusiastic killers desperate for the blood of a marine.

  I kept firing.

  All hints of fatigue are long forgotten. Our pathogens dosing us with generous amounts of cowboy-the-fuck-up. I can’t feel my face. I might be smiling. I don’t know.

  If I am, it’s not because it’s funny but because an endless stream of kill-every-mother-fucker-that-gets-in-my-way is ripping through my bloodstream, interfering with the normal operation of my nervous system. Making me feel…

  I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like being let out of an unlocked cage at last… Time doesn’t slow down, my nervous system speeds up.

  The pathogen-holocauster weapons platform is a simple, yet elegant piece of engineering. Each stimulus on the battlefield–say the sight of a Krag shitlord in desperate need of a glory killing, is detected by sensors in my eyes. Sensory neurons take the message to my spinal cord, which routes the response not to my brain but back through my arm to my trigger finger, the response:

  A happy caress. Tok. The energy-to-mass equivalencer of my holocauster converts another percentage of the remaining energy in my gencel and it is propelled across the battlefield where something dies.

  Tok. Tok. Tok. A thing of beauty in my hands, Girls in White Dresses spits out tight spirals of death, insanely accurate. They go where I want, and I want them to kill.

  Without thought, my holocauster and I are already tracking the next target.

  The kernels who designed the system insist it must be this way.

  Under normal conditions, a full bandwidth signal can traverse my nervous system at two-hundred-and-sixty-eight miles per hour. This is thanks to the naturally occurring myelin sheath coating the axons that run throughout my body.

  However, wearing a pathogen, I am not under normal conditions. Instead, as the signal propagates down the axon in an ion cascade, the pathogen cheats–increasing the maximized discharge rate of motor neurons, amplifying the signal, insulating the pathway, removing redundant or irrelevant noise from the system, and ultimately increasing the potential conduction velocity of the nervous system.

  tok-tok-tok.

  The mind doesn’t shut off. It moves out of the way. The pathogen slowly ramps up the rate of fire until we reach reflex state. It’s not a place, it’s a condition.

  tok-tok-tok.

  If the kernels are right, and they always are, my mind is now out of the equation. My nervous system has been successfully hijacked.

  Despite the obvious advantages as anyone who knows the joys of being lost in the depravity a merciless killing spree can assure you, given the opportunity, then tendency is to push it. As far as you can.

  My pathogen is special equipped with an experimental super-weapon-module. A one-of-a-kind marvel of modern technology salvaged from the wreckage of an advanced research laboratory long ago.

  Peekaboo logic peers into the immediate future, then pokes the resultant calculations into multiple predicative speculative execution pipelines whose what-if logic pre-computes a response based on a quantum reading of the future.

  The effect, if you believe the rationalists, and no one ever does, is that my pathogen-holocauster platform can kill targets in the slightly near future. With an unspecified and always changing definition of the word slightly.

  Brainless shits who need a name to drop for everything call it neuromorphic wet-ware. I call it what it really is. My eyes. My fucking nervous system. My insidious fucking desire to kill everything.

  And a great fucking gun.

  Murder! Murder! Murder! Nothing is coming off this battlefield alive.

  The real truth is this. If it’s on the battlefield it’s going down and I’m the one who’s taking it.

  Hence my smile. It’s great.

  I am well aware that there is nothing special in what I do. Anyone wearing pathogen armor would do the same. by taking “me” out of the loop, I move faster. I react faster. I kill faster.

  There are, of course, trade offs.

  Severe ones.

  Let’s not kid ourselves, no one gives a shit about me. What everyone back on The Good Shepherd reading this wants to know is…

  What’s it like down there?

  Sadly, I’ll never know. I’m destined to die a virgin. Still I’ve always imagined it’s quite lovely down there. But down here, on this miserable little crapsack of a planet called Debron IV, the slow march of evil shit is creeping me the fuck out.

  The first twelve hours planetside are supposed to be calm. Until Thredfall, which under standard conditions, should happen 10-12 hours after the Trumpets go online, the only units on the battlefield are human.

  Once thred falls, the Krag begin to appear in userspace. Quickly turning the battlefield into a hellground.

  I have no clue what, but something has gone horribly wrong.

  Krag are everywhere, seconds after we land. The first rush were the kraggit. Skirmishers. They are small, thin, quick moving and quick biting. Roughly the size of a standard trash can tilted on its side. They have fourteen legs that make a scratching noise when they move and ten jagged spikes of varying size that they use to attack. Their bite is strong enough to pierce armor.

  The kraggit share the same general complexion as all Krags. I have read papers, written by idiots I don’t respect and don’t believe, who claim that because of the FTL nature of the Krag, when they are entrapped in the protective field of the Trumpets of Jericho they spend an eternity in horror and pain.

  Good.

  Apparently some eternities are longer than others as depending on the mass of the Krag they spend longer arriving on the battlefield. Kraggits are always the first units to arrive, and under standard conditions just after first threadfall. Other units, larger units, more powerful units, more intelligent and dangerous units begin to appear after the subsequent thread cycles.

  All Krag share one thing in common. Their texture. It’s hard to describe the texture of their–I wouldn’t call it skin–exterior. It’s an unnaturally hardened substance, closer to shale or rock or washed out bones. The closest thing I can think of is a stalagmite or stalactite the color of dead bones. Imagine if horror and pain was made real, then melted and slowly dripped over millions of years atop itself one drop after another. Piling the torment in hideous misshapen forms completely devoid of reason and symmetry.

  Waves of these alien killers come for us. The stuff of raging nightmare no man ever suffered. Only to destroy themselves in the end.

  Tok. Tok. Tok.

  Something primal burns inside each of us. Our dicks have been through the grinder. We are tired, fatigued. Confused. Out of our element. Uncertain of what is happening.

  Despite this, we silently do what must be done. Wordlessly. A whiny bitch is a weak element, and a weak element will drag the entire tribe down. The tribe will not tolerate a weak element.

  I keep my mouth shut and keep firing.

  But the truth is … I never cared about this. Being a part of the top rated fire team. I never wanted to be a part of something bigger than myself. This was never my fucking dream. No one lives forever. All my friends are dead.

  For me life was never about the climb. It’s not how high you aspire. It’s how many of the motherfuckers you take with you when you fall.

  And we all fall here.

  My mind is not right. I’m supposed to be thinking about the team, following orders, being a part of something bigger than myself.

  It’s surreal. I might be traumatized. I’m not sure.

  There are rankers on the
battlefield. Unseen observers lurking in the shadows of the pelt, commanding their kraggit units, directing the battle.

  Explosions, not of fire, surround me. Pieces of kraggit, like shrapnel shower us. The rankers are hurling the kraggit at us. They explode on impact, shards of whatever the fuck the alien bastards are made of. Sharp punctures that can kill a man. Bite through pathogen armor.

  We blast them in the air or dodge them on the ground.

  *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* The rankers have an unlimited supply of their own troops to throw at us.

  Hiding in the pelt, they appear for moments to hurl the next kraggit and then disappear into its thick cover.

  Good communication skills are not part of the job description. No marine alive can describe the horrors of the pelt properly. There are no words in a language understood by humans to capture its odious luster of foreboding wrongfulness.

  This is only so much bullshit. We have to root them out. Strike at the heart. Stalk them down in their hiding holes and spoor them where they live.

  Everything that has ever terrified me in my life. Compounded. Recursed. Overpowering. Overwhelming. Unspeakable. Indescribable. It washes over the battlefield, a nausea we can not flee.

  Everyone who has ever fought the Krag has commented on it. The stink of it. The most ungodly stink you could imagine. The sheer visceral unacceptableness of their closeness. The rotting meat stench of their being.

  Kernels and rationlists insist our pathogen armor are perfect hermetic seals, that we can not possibly be smelling anything. That anyone who has seen combat is suffering sort of battlefield delusion. A mass fear induced placebo, we smell it because we want to smell it.

  Clearly, they are fucking retarded.

  The time for divine intervention is passed. What should have been fear is replaced by a deep seated need to hurt, maim and destroy the enemy. The enemy has committed the gravest sin of them all. Here on this field, in this place of death, he has placed himself within my reach. Where marines go to kill and Krag go to die.

  They come, rushing over quick to their own doom.

  Time plays its subtle games. Between the tiny moments all is destruction and violence. Spooring the enemy. Ichor slung across the battlefield marking their deaths. The harsh scratching of their rent bodies as holocauster rounds tear through them, splattering the rocks and dust with the bile-like ichor of their innards.

  Thought bleeds into something else, truth and the ideal coalesce absolutely. Barrage after barrage from my holocauster. Screaming louder, more painful and more effective than any insult I could ever imagine. Murderous death and more. Calling down their death in a hailstorm of.

  Embrace the horror, embrace the madness. Embrace the destruction of the enemy.

  The evil part of my brain that I reserve for moments like these lights up.

  Here, in this place, stalks an angel of death. Most Vicious is home.

  We do not fall back. We do not hold the line. We take the fight and all of its remorseless pains to the enemy where he lies.

  Hangman devastates with the Ouroboros. Sodomy lock thrown clear, a thunder spewing cataclysm spreading well fucked krag-asses all across the battlefield.

  I swear he could punch a hole through the planet with that fucking thing.

  Omen is in his own world. He has transcended the field of battle. Now a spectre. Hunched over in a deadly slouch, holocauster barking fire in coordination with Hangman’s massive blasts.

  Instinctively listening for the blast cadence to guide my own… Contribution. Ripping massive holes into the enemy’s formation. The wet sound from the splashing of whatever unwholesomeness they are made of, the clicks and clacks of their dripped horror appendages grating upon the rush of their dead. The vocalized screeches and skree! of their dying. The crunch and squish of the near dead that come to close to our pontoon boots.

  Spoored in the footsteps of domination and violence.

  The limp and jittery segmented scratching in the dirt and the dust and the sound of scraping flagstones. Gargantuan swaths of payback thrown indiscriminately into their ranks.

  The blasting roars across the battlefield, like a braying animal several octaves lower and more desperate.

  The pace quickens. Hangman begins bursting volleys of rapid fire.

  No one takes cover. We advance in the open. Where the way forward is blocked we blast a path clear.

  The Trumpets and their twisted wails of dead children fill my ears and chill my soul. Somewhere in the background music of my mind girls in white dresses sing to me, urging me to match the haunting melodies of their dying voices with the thunder of my holocauster.

  We fight in the spaces between right and wrong. Filling the gaps with violence.

  Big Bro is lighting signal flares. Globes of red and pink float softly into the sky.

  The rankers are forced to retreat. Pulling back into the protective confines of the pelt. Seeking to change tactics. To hide, whether to await stronger units and reinforcements we do not know.

  Must have been knocked on my ass. Big Bro is shouting at me, his voice in my ear, shouting at me “Get up!”

  His face slick with sweat. Intensity holds his eyes.

  “Six-by. You’re up.” He points to Omen, already disappearing into the darkness of the Krag pelt.

  Holy shit. I’m not terrified. I’m petrified.

  I realize what he means.

  “We’re gonna hunt those mother fuckers down. We’re gonna rip those mother fuckers to pieces.”

  Wait no.

  Oh man, we’re gonna–

  Chapter Four

  Two Fools Who Laugh At Death

  call sign: Six-by

  unit type: space marine

  location : The Battlefield (Debron IV)

  * * *

  EVERY BATTLEFIELD IS DIFFERENT. This one is increasingly strange.

  Omen is firing in triplets.

  Tok. Tok. Tok.

  Bursts of three. I recognize what he is doing. Pruning back the largest of the obstructions in the pelt. Creating a path of sorts into their lines.

  Like I said, I might play dumb, but I’m not that dumb.

  Tok. Tok. I clear the other side, opening a narrow lane.

  BOOM!

  Hangman on the Ouroboros Cannon blasts a corridor the enemy, slagging everything in the field between our firing lanes.

  Now we are sprinting through the open lanes. Well. Omen is sprinting. I’m doing my peg leg limp dick hobbling act. It’s great fun. I missed my calling in life. I shoulda joined the circus.

  Big Bro is flashing a continuous stream of signals to us as he and Hangman move slowly up the middle.

  We’re hunting for the rankers.

  I have never seen one live before, but I am familiar enough with the concept. Rankers have two known, well studied actions on the battlefield. One, and probably the most dangerous, they can merge with other Krag units and create augmented super units. Two, they seem to shape the pelt itself, extending and guiding its expansion across the battlefield.

  If there has ever been a battle where the pelt was this far forward, this quickly into a drop I have never read of it. Big Bro wants to buy the vurkers back at the base time. To build. To prepare defenses.

  The more rankers we can destroy, the slower the Pelt expands, the longer they can build without being overrun by the Krag.

  We are looking for small, almost waist-high grayish, serpent like things. They move upright, balanced on their tails. They have no eyes, no ears, no mouths. But they do have one appendage, much like an arm without a hand that they insert into their brethren when they merge. Their grayish shells blend almost perfectly into the Pelt. They are more likely to hide than attack unless they merge with another unit. In which case they will strike without mercy.

  Taking advantage of these facts, our strategy is simple. Omen and I create firing lanes on either side of a swath of the Pelt. If there is a ranker between us, it should retreat into the space between us.

  Which H
angman will clear out with heavy blasts from the Ouroboros.

  Devastatingly effective.

  If not particularly safe for the two marines who are boxing in the rankers.

  Chapter Five

  A Peculiar Conversation Between Old Friends

  call sign: Leather Apron

  unit type: corpuscler

  location : The Good Shepherd (Medical Ward)

  * * *

  THE BOSS HAS A BIT OF A FETISH HE DOES. So after showering, I wash my hands real good. Two, three times. Using the extra strength soap. And I make sure to be wearing my surgical mask, it won’t do to breathe on The Boss.

  I quickly make way through the ship to the medical ward where he keeps his quarters.

  There are a handful of patients waiting to see him. All of them from the younger generation, probably none of them older than twenty five. I’ve worked for The Boss longer than most of these kids have been alive.

  They immediately recognize me.

  I seem to have made a name for myself, Leather Apron, corpuscler for Whitechapel. Of course they don’t call The Boss, the boss. They call him Whitechapel like everyone else does. Whitechapel is an elder of the ship. Chief Medical Officer. I’m of his generation.

  The temperature in the room drops several degrees. You can feel their discomfort at being around someone as old as me.

  The Boss was expecting me, so I didn’t have to wait long before he ushered me into his work area.

  His professional space looks like what you’d expect a traumist’s work area to look like. Tables mostly filled with the odd medical gear and the entire space is piled with medical bits and pieces of recycled humans stored in vessels of preservative. I’ve brought him more than my fair share of the recycled parts.