by Geoff Brown
One minute the screens were clear, then suddenly there was a wall of deebees headed his way. Hamfisted’s sensors counted what they saw, and Peters stood in shock for valuable seconds as the numbers registered, but it was too late for him to have done anything with those seconds.
He brought Hamfisted’s chainguns down, firing bursts on his maximum rate of fire, carving swaths through the creatures as they closed. High-speed tungsten carved through alien bodies, but still they came.
So swift was the deebee assault that he didn’t have time to get a shot off from any of his other weapons… the wall crashed over him, knocking Hamfisted to the ground, stunning him for a moment. Something in the swarm was strong enough to drive an armour-piercing claw all the way through his armoured glass canopy and into his chest, and he died without even a scream.
Or a chance to say goodbye to his wife, who watched the whole thing through Hamfisted’s video feed.
* * *
Donaldson Farmstead, Tau Ceti IV
‘Angry’ Andy Donaldson was the second to die. His exomech, Mariner, was an old combat droid his grandfather had bought and refitted fifty years ago, heavily built with military-grade weapons, it was the family pride and joy.
It was also expensive, and building it and keeping it running had almost bankrupted the family. The other farmsteaders had long forgotten where he’d picked up his nickname, but they all assumed he was still angry at his grandfather for lumbering him with a white elephant of exomechs.
The Donaldson farmstead was also south, much bigger than the adjacent Peters’ property, and he’d had two clusters to deal with. His primary weapon was a ridiculously expensive battle laser, firing 3” diameter beams that vaporised almost anything they struck. Designed to fight other heavily armoured units, it was a massive overkill against anything unarmoured, and Donaldson hated it.
The wave of deebees that swept over Peters now came for him, and he knew he’d never make it to anywhere safe. He planted himself on top of a low ridge, giving himself a good field of fire, readied his weapons and began firing.
His laser took time to recharge, and spat a beam of death every four seconds, with enough energy to punch right through the first deebee it struck and go on to the next. From his elevated position, a good shot could kill three or four of them before it dug into the ground. It was effective, but not against a swarm that size.
He wasn’t going to make it, and he knew it… time to call his wife.
“Sarah, you there?”
“Yes, Andy, I’m here,” Sarah replied.
“I need you to grab your things and get over the Graves’ place, get yourself into their bunker.”
“Okay,” she said, “swing by and pick me up.”
“Not this time, Sarah, not this time.”
He knew she could see his video feed, could see the wide wall of aliens bearing down on him rapidly, and knew that she knew how this was going to end.
“Andy?”
“Just go!”
“I can’t just leave you…”
“Yes you can! Don’t make me do this for nothing.” He lowered his secondary weapons now, a 4” cannon firing high-explosive rounds, and began targeting tight clumps of aliens with it. He could hardly miss.
Sarah was crying openly now.
“Sarah… say goodbye now, while we still can, then get out.”
“Andy… I love you.”
“And I love you too.” He had the luxury of the battle to keep his emotions in check, but it was all he could do to keep from crying himself.
“Goodbye, Sarah.”
He cut the video feed, knowing that she’d stay there as long as she could while he was alive. He knew he was going to die, but wanted her to have as much time as possible to get to the Graves’ bunker.
Both weapons were firing now, as fast as they could, and he cut the safety overrides on both to keep their rate up. He knew he was burning out his laser and would soon warp the cannon barrel, but didn’t expect it to be a problem for much longer.
At 100 meters, the laser stopped firing, overheated.
At 50 meters, the warped cannon barrel caused a misfeed and jammed.
At 20 meters, he managed to get his close range weapons into action, a pair of 10mm machine guns and a small flamethrower. The machine guns cut a handful down as they closed, but without the instant-kill of the bigger weapons, the ones he hit just provided mobile armour for the ones behind for a few seconds, which was all it took.
Something from his left struck Mariner and knocked him down, and then a swarm of deebees was over him, gouging his armour and looking to get at the human inside. His armour was solid, very solid in fact, but he knew it was a matter of time before something gave.
He had the machine guns on automatic now, but they weren’t protected by armour and lasted a few seconds before a deebee claw cut through the metal and put them out of action.
The flamethrower lasted longer, burning anything on his right side to a cinder. It was well protected, housed within Mariner’s left arm, but a deebee must have sliced deep enough to cut the fuel intake… the flame sputtered and then went out as flamer fuel gushed all around him.
Weaponless now, he could do nothing but thrash around with his armoured fists and feet. They took a toll as well, crushing alien bodies with each solid blow, but the press of creatures above him made it harder and harder to get a decent strike in.
Suddenly, a warning light flickered on. He barely had time to recognise it – something had carved deep into his right arm, striking the laser housing and shorting the small fusion pile – when a spark ignited the flamer fuel pooling around the prone exomech. The explosion was small, but that detonated the unspent high explosive rounds still in his ammunition drums, and that in turn breached the fusion containment cell.
The resulting explosion killed hundreds of deebees, scattering them around the farmstead in shattered chunks. But in a swarm of thousands, it mattered very little indeed.
* * *
Graves Farmstead, Tau Ceti IV
Graves stood on a low, wide hill, and looked around.
Brutiful was in the centre of a line of exomechs, with Carnigore on his right and Grampage on his left. It wasn’t much against a horde of killer aliens, but it was the best they could do.
“Hank, honey?” Beth said over the combined command net.
“Here, Beth.”
“The Singhs are on their way in, but they’ll be a while, and Jenkins is reporting suit damage, not sure when or even if he can get here.”
“Suit damage my arse,” Crazy Bill said. “He’s either chicken-shit lazy or chicken-shit scared.”
“Either way, we can’t rely on him, so it’s just the three of us for now,” Graves said. “If we can hold out until the Singhs get here, we might have a chance.”
“We could always hole up in your bunker,” Wright said. “Plenty of room down there for everyone.”
“We’d have to come out eventually,” Crazy Bill replied. “Our best chance for the colony is for the exomechs to deal with them now, while we’ve got them in a bunch.”
“I agree,” Graves said. “We kill what we can here then fight as we fall back to the Bunker. That should slow them down a little at least.”
“The command and control suite has some suggestions for fall-back routes, honey,” Beth said. “I’m sending data now for your autopilots.”
Brutiful beeped as the data came in, and Graves quickly looked over it before setting it up as his autopilot program.
“Got it, Beth, thanks,” he said, as both Wright and Crazy Bill acknowledged receipt of their information packets.
“I have all our drones fitted with cameras now, and Helen Wright has sent hers in as well,” Beth continued. “We should have plenty of real-time video coming in, and I’ll punch it through as you need it.”
“What’s the satellite showing?” Wright asked.
“Nothing good,” Beth replied. “There’s a wall of deebees coming your way, shoul
d be in sight in a few minutes, and there are some gates still yet to open.”
“Any sight of Peters or Donaldson?” Graves asked. There was a long pause before Beth replied.
“Nothing on the sensors, nothing on satellite, and I can’t raise anyone on the radio.”
“That’s not good.”
“No it’s not,” Beth continued. “And that swarm headed your way would have swept right over their farmsteads.”
There was silence as the three men made last minute preparations for the onslaught to come.
* * *
Singh Farmstead, Tau Ceti IV
Jaswant Singh stood atop a steep cliff, his Crescent Moon raining death into the valley below him. His exomech’s main armaments were a pair of long-range 3” cannon on the right arm and a heavy rocket launcher on the left. The cannons each spat out high-explosive shells every six seconds, giving him one round every three, and amidst the swarm of deebees headed his way the bursting charges and their tungsten shrapnel were leaving great gaps in the alien ranks.
The rocket launcher was a box-shaped, 6-tube weapon, capable of firing single rockets or volleys of six. It wasn’t as accurate as the cannon, but didn’t need to be – a volley of six rockets had enough scatter and burst to fill quite a large area with shrapnel, and close enough was good enough when it came to big explosions.
Its only problem was that it was slow to reload, and he was getting a volley away every five minutes.
Below him, midway up the hill, Eagle and Hawk waited, both pilots nervous as they watched the swarm approach. Their weapons lacked the long range of Crescent Moon, but were lethal at close range… how lethal, and how quickly they could kill swarming deebees in these numbers, was about to be tested.
The aliens were now 50 metres from the base of the hill, and Crescent Moon had time for one last volley of rockets before the creatures were too close for Jaswant to use his heavy weapons. All he could do now was pick off the creatures following behind, and hope the other exomechs could handle the rest.
As the deebees closed, Hawk and Eagle opened fire. Both arms mounted a pair of linked 15mm machines guns, capable of firing over 800 rounds per minute each and loaded with a mix of solid tungsten slugs and hollowpoint rounds. Each arm could fire independently, and the wall of tungsten that they spread before them stopped the first ranks of the swarm dead in their tracks.
The next waves met the same fate, but as each creature fell it created a small wall for the ones behind. Both exomechs walked slowly backwards up the hill as the wall grew, hoping to maintain some elevation so they could shoot at the creatures massing behind it.
From around both edges of the wall, however, more creatures swarmed, and Eagle and Hawk turned to face the new threat.
Hawk’s heavy weapon was a pair of semi-automatic mortars that fired over the exomech’s shoulder. They only had a range of 50 metres, but were able to empty their 5-round clips in a matter of seconds, generating enough firepower to devastate a large target almost instantly.
Agun Singh stomped the foot pedal for his mortars, emptying the clip at the approaching swarm. The mortars were set to target 40 metres away initially, then increase a few metres for each successive shot… the first three rounds from each mortar, all high-explosive, flattened the incoming wave, while the fourth rounds airburst and scattered shards of white phosphorous around.
The creatures beneath the white-hot halo burned as the hot phosphorous dug into the skin. Some collapsed instantly, the shards deep enough to cook them from the inside, but the rest kept coming, despite their horrible wounds.
The fifth rounds were napalm, splashing across the side of the hill and covering anything it touched with intense flame. Very few creatures made it through, and Agun dispatched those that did with tightly controlled burst from Eagle’s twin machine guns.
Behind him, Kubai deployed Eagle’s own heavy weapons, a pair of flamethrowers, one over each shoulder. Unlike the smaller flamethrowers on other exomechs, these were military grade, emitting white-hot jets of plasma that incinerated anything they touched. His approach was to let the creatures approach to within 20 metres and then spray them all with gouts of plasma.
They died by the dozens, the dead providing no cover at all as they turned to ash under the incredible heat. Eagle’s canopy darkened to protect him from the intense glare, which made Kubai blind to what was happening in front of him.
He toggled the camera feed, tapping into Crescent Moon’s video to get a third-party view of the battle, and adjusted his flame jets to deal with a group that were trying to flank him. They never made it, though the last of them was a charred corpse only a metre or so away.
Jaswant had reloaded his rocket pack now and looked for a target worth expending the high-explosive six-pack on…there was nothing as yet, so he used his time to fire cannon shells into small groups of deebees that were trying to push their way through or over the wall of corpses Hawk and Eagle had made with their machine guns.
Using his command suite, he checked the ammunition states of his small force. Everything was getting low, and he knew it was going to be close. Soon, the plasma jets would be out of fuel and the machine gun hoppers would be empty, and then they’d be in serious trouble.
Suddenly, it was over. The flank attacks proving futile, the remaining deebees swarmed directly up the hill, clumping together to push through the wall of their dead. It took Jaswant a second to align his rocket pack and fire, and the swarm disappeared as the volley of six rockets detonated amongst them.
The three men sat in their exomechs for a moment, happy to be still alive after the onslaught, and then it was back to the business at hand.
“Hawk, Eagle, report,” Jaswant said quietly.
“Hawk intact,” Agun replied. “Heavy weapons empty, gun ammunition at five percent.”
“Eagle intact,” Kubai added. “Plasma gone, gun ammunition at nine percent.”
“And Crescent Moon intact,” Jaswant said. “Rockets gone, six rounds of cannon left.”
“We’re in no state to fight, father,” Agun said. “We don’t have enough ammunition to fight through to the Graves’ farmstead.”
“I concur,” Jaswant replied. “Let’s head for home.”
* * *
Toolong River/Donaldson Farmstead, Tau Ceti IV
Sarah Donaldson was still in tears as she left the farmhouse she and her dead husband had turned into a home. She wanted to race to the battle, hoping beyond all hope that Andy was somehow still alive, but she knew it was less than futile…it would be suicide. Andy hadn’t been able to stay alive in Mariner, she’d have no chance in anything less than a fully-armed exomech.
Racing into the shed, she wheeled out a powerful motorcycle, one of the pair that was always kept fully charged for emergencies. Stuffing her overnight bags into the vehicle’s panniers, she climbed aboard and thumbed the starter switch, kicking the electric motor into life.
She had visited the Graves’ place regularly, and swung the rapidly accelerating bike onto the dirt road that ran towards the neighbouring farmstead, paralleling the Toolong River. She and Andy had always joked about the name, inherited from the initial survey report a century ago, and this time it really did seem ‘too long’.
Ahead was the concrete bridge that Andy’s grandfather had built, the old Donaldson crest on all four of the concrete support pillars. As she approached the bridge her eyes misted over again, thinking about grandchildren of her own that she and Andy would never have.
Lost in her thoughts, she didn’t notice the rippling surface of the water or the sparkling gleam of alien bodies as they rose from the depths.
Three deebees leapt out of the river just as she pulled onto the bridge, knocking her from the bike and sending her sprawling into one of the concrete pillars. Even if she’d been wearing a helmet, the impact would still have knocked her out and it would have done her no good at all as a swarm of deebees burst out of the river and tore her body to pieces.
She die
d not even knowing that she was pregnant with Andy’s child.
* * *
Graves Farmstead, Tau Ceti IV
The three exomechs held the line as best they could, using their long-range guns to slow down the advancing horde as they slowly retreated along the line of hills. Ammunition was quickly becoming an issue though, and they all knew they had fewer rounds than there were deebees.
“Hank, honey?” Beth cut in over the radio.
“Kinda busy, Beth,” Graves replied. “Unless you got news worth hearing, I don’t have much time to chat.”
“I got news, some good, some bad.”
“Start with the good,” Crazy Bill cut in, “I think we could all use some cheering up right now.”
“Okay,” Beth said. “Helen has re-routed some of her drones your way, carrying ammunition drums. “
“That is good news, honey,” Graves said. “I’ll be throwing rocks at them if this lasts much longer.”
“The drones can’t reload for you, only drop the drums close by.”
“That’s fine, honey, drop them close, we’ll do the rest.”
The three pilots switched to manual control and drew closer together as their sensors picked up the incoming drones. There were six, two each, and they were coming in slow and low… clearly, Helen had loaded them with as much as they could bear.
Which was good, they were going to need it all.
“Jake, how’s your ammo state?” Graves asked.
“Almost out of everything that matters,” Wright replied. “I got some close-in stuff left, but was really hoping not to need it.”
“Okay, you reload first, Crazy Bill and I will cover you.”
“Roger that!”
“And get the lead out,” Crazy Bill added. “I’m down to my last rounds as well.”
Carnigore fell out of the line, leaving Brutiful and Grampage to face the horde. Two drones passed over him, dropping heavy drum canisters into the soft ground within a few metres…one struck a rock and burst open, scattering autocannon ammunition everywhere, but the other canisters stayed intact.