by B. V. Larson
I zoomed in where she indicated, and I saw one of our ghosts. It had to be ours, as the soldier was crouching and firing for all he was worth. Panning right, I saw the target: A human-looking figure that advanced with methodical, unhurried steps.
The snap-rifle fire wasn’t knocking it down. The target jerked and twitched, but it kept approaching.
That was good enough for me. “Barton! Have your men switch their weapons to sniper-mode and knock out those slow-moving humanoids.”
“Roger that, sir.”
I contacted Leeson and Harris next, ordering them to advance to my position. They grumbled, but they did as they were told.
Then I reported the situation to Graves and moved closer with my troops. Our lights were in the front line, kneeling now and then to take careful shots at the odd enemy. Every so often, a target fell back, knocked off its feet.
But then, a few moments later, they usually got back up again.
-15-
Cooper made it back to our lines first. He was out of breath and out of bullets.
“It’s Hell back there, sir!” he puffed at me.
He joined our advancing lines. We were spread out and moving at a steady jog toward the colorful force field and the assault ships, which seemed to grow larger as we got closer.
“Report, scout,” I told him. “Make it good.”
Cooper resupplied from a pig drone that marched behind my team. He slammed a fresh magazine and battery into his snap-rifle before talking.
“I was out,” he explained.
That was alarming all by itself. Snap-rifles fired pellets roughly the size of a BB. The rounds were of very small caliber, but when accelerated they packed a lot of kinetic energy despite their size—equivalent to a traditional nine millimeter bullet.
The best feature of those bullets by far was that they didn’t need a casing or any kind of explosive to fire. Since the magazine held only pellets, not cartridges, ammo was plentiful. The assault rifles essentially worked like traditional weapons, but they could spray on full-auto for a long time without reloading.
The alarming part was that Cooper had run out of ammo at all. A ghost specialist typically carried one reserve battery and magazine, meaning Cooper had managed to fire two thousand rounds in the span of a ten minutes.
“At first,” he said, “we thought the townspeople were trying to escape. We didn’t fire on them, even when they didn’t respond to our calls and challenges. But when they got closer… we realized something was wrong.”
“What was wrong? Are they people or not?”
“No—not exactly. I mean, I think they were once human, or that parts of them were—but not anymore.”
I looked at him, checking to see if he was joking. I could tell by his expression that he wasn’t.
“They’re not men,” Cooper explained. “They have flesh parts—the muscles that move their limbs, mostly. Sometimes you can see a neck or a ribcage, but there’s a lot of metal too. They’re cyborgs, I think.”
Frowning in confusion, I tried to contact Natasha. She was my number one tech. All our radio signals were out now, however. She couldn’t hear me.
Using my feet instead of my tapper, I took Cooper by the arm and led him back a rank to where the support people were marching behind us.
Natasha was among them. I had him repeat his story.
She looked upset. “A grim thing—there were thirty thousand people in that town. Thousands more were out in the surrounding countryside.”
“What are you saying?” I demanded. “That they aren’t human?”
She was flipping through a few shots Cooper’s body cam had taken. She showed me a few choice examples.
The creatures—I say that because they certainly weren’t men anymore—walked on two legs. They had two arms and a bulbous head. But that was where the similarities to humanity ended.
Each of these things was armored in metal plates and plastic. Here and there, you could see exposed muscle working under there, bulging and relaxing, propelling these nightmarish hybrids of meat and electronics.
“You can tell they aren’t human anymore,” Cooper said, looking over my elbow. “Just by the way they walk if nothing else. They’re not in a hurry. They’re kind of out of it. They just keep coming at you, and if they catch hold of you, you’re done.”
“How do you know that?”
Cooper shrugged and bared his teeth for a moment. He didn’t meet my eye. “I saw them catch a few of us. Our ghost suits—they didn’t do shit. I’m not sure what kind of sensory systems these guys have, but they homed in on us like we were standing there naked.”
“They may not see in the same visible spectrum that we do,” Natasha said.
“Anyway,” Cooper continued, “when they got close I panicked and unloaded on them. I’d been crouching and hoping they would wander by, but they kept turning to follow me as I sidestepped. That’s when I realized they could see through my stealth, and I started blasting them.”
“Good move,” I said. “How hard are they to kill?”
He shook his head. “They’re incredibly tough. A hundred rounds at point-blank range—that might put one down. But he’ll probably get back up again. They don’t talk. They don’t shoot at you—they just come at you and reach for you.”
“Did they catch anyone out there?” I asked.
“Yeah… Della got it. There were three on her. I knocked one down over and over, she did the same to a different one. But they kept getting back up, see… Anyway, the third one just walked up behind her and tore her up.”
My face was like stone. “You sure she’s dead?”
He nodded. “Sorry Centurion. I’ve seen dead before—there’s no way.”
I pointed back behind us, toward the rear lines. “You go that way until you’ve got a signal. Report Della’s death, with photos if you have them, along with any other confirmed KIAs you’ve witnessed. Then you come back here. Soon, we might have more casualties to report.”
He ran off, and I went back to marching with grim determination. Della and I weren’t together anymore, but anyone who killed her pissed me off.
“James,” Natasha said. “Maybe we should retreat. We don’t know what we’re facing.”
“Sure we do. We saw similar things back on their ship. The town is gone—or most of it is. The sooner we get into Hammonton the sooner we might rescue survivors.”
“But we don’t have good comms down here. We might get killed and permed.”
I shrugged. “I didn’t sign up to last forever—that’s just a side-benefit. These aliens—whatever the hell they are—they like to build armies out of machine parts and biological flesh. That’s sick, and I’ve decided to kill them all.”
“Single-handedly?”
“If necessary.”
Natasha shook her head and took off, moving back to the rear ranks again. She knew me well enough not to bother arguing.
“Sargon!” I shouted.
He came over to me a few minutes later. “Sir?”
“You got any of those shotguns left—the ones the Rigel boys use?”
“I’ve got one, so does Moller.”
“Good. We might need them.”
I described the creatures Cooper had met up with, and he whistled. He scanned the grass and the shimmering force-fields ahead of us.
“I don’t see them. They might be farther back in that mess of plasma—or maybe they retreated.”
“It could be,” I said. “Maybe they sensed our ghosts and came out to stand off their advance, and then fell back within their perimeter again—but that’s not going to save them.”
Sargon laughed.
“Spread the word on how these things look and fight. I can’t broadcast to the unit. Move around and do it the old-fashioned way.”
He trotted off, and I got out a new weapon.
It was one of the super-shotguns. Nasty weapons that fired heavy accelerated slugs at short range. They could punch through the hull of a shu
ttle or the armor of one of our walking dragons.
I only had five slugs left, but they should make a good start.
-16-
We nearly made it into the shadowy region between the big landing ships before we encountered the enemy.
In retrospect, I should have figured out what was going to happen—but I was too pissed off about Della and too amazed by the weird environment to think clearly.
We advanced right into the middle of them when the enemy soldiers stood up, right in our midst. We’d almost walked on top of them.
They were humanoid things, part human and part machine. They began getting to their feet right in front of us. They’d simply lain down in the grass and waited there, motionless, until we got close.
When they suddenly rose up, wild cursing and full-auto fire broke out all around me. Snap-rifles from the lights, force-blades, morph-rifles and a few shotguns from the heavies—everyone sent a lot of mass and energy flying at our ambushers.
A few of my troops were cut down by friendly fire.
“Mark your targets!” Moller roared. “If I see blue-on-blue I’m going to return the favor, soldiers!”
The truth was, as seasoned as we were on average, these creatures kind of spooked us. We shook that off quickly, as we were tougher than the usual lot. I could imagine a bunch of hogs breaking and running from this attack—but not Varus legionnaires.
After about two minutes, we had them all down. They didn’t like to stay down, mind you. It took several killings each before a given cyborg lay still.
“You have to frigging hack them apart!” Harris said, coming up to me and panting.
I nodded and hefted my shotgun. “One good blast from this does the trick, but I’m conserving my last two shots. I’m using force-blades.”
The shotguns were alien-made, captured from Rigel troops back on Storm World. We didn’t have ammo to match on Earth, and although I knew the nerds huddling under Central had been working to copy these weapons, they hadn’t managed it yet. They were effectively hand-operated railguns that shot a cloud of depleted uranium pellets rather than normal bullets. However they worked, they were damned effective.
Harris watched me sling the shotgun in favor of my morph-rifle.
“You’re saving your rounds. That means you know something—that something worse is up ahead.”
“Never hurts to be prepared,” I told him and left to go find my favorite ghost.
Cooper had returned from the rear lines, and he wasn’t much use without the ability to stealth. I decided to keep using him as my communications runner, sending him back to report our status to Graves.
Since we’d lost another six men in the ambush, I sent Cooper humping back to the rear lines to report to Graves again.
Carlos watched him go with wistful eyes. “Maybe it will turn out the guys who cashed-in early on this little monster-hunt were the lucky ones. At least those guys won’t be permed.”
“Nope. They’ll be waiting for us in camp when we get back. Let’s go!”
Up until that moment, my entire unit had been standing around, patching up the wounded and marking the dead. So far, no one had taken a single step farther into the force-field. I could tell they were a little freaked out.
Without giving more instructions to my troops, I marched ahead. The flashing plasma loops soon whirled around my armored body as I moved into the depths of the strange barrier these invaders had built.
I was kind of worried my electronics would short out—but I didn’t let on.
Seeing me march into that neon display, my troops took heart. I made a point of kicking dead cyborgs this way and that as I passed, which made my men laugh. Soon, they were following me.
I could hear them bitching and cursing quietly in my wake. I knew they would follow me, the braver ones shaming the rest. I didn’t look back to see who had moved first. That didn’t matter, as long as they all did in the end.
We advanced a hundred meters, then another hundred. At that point, the light-show faded away, and we were in an open field again. It was an odd-looking scene to be sure, but it was just a farmer’s field.
Overhead, there were no stars. Instead, a haze of yellowy-white formed a curved sky. It lit up the grasses with an unnatural glow. Ahead in the distance, I saw rows of dark houses and a few taller buildings. That was the direction I took. If I stopped now, it would be harder for my men to keep marching ahead.
We found a road choked with abandoned trams and trucks. The vehicle doors all hung open, but there was no one inside any of them. I had the feeling the townsfolk had tried to form a caravan and escape—but they hadn’t made it out.
There was something about this place that filled a man with dread. The vacant cars, the silent enemy, even the very fact we were on Earth, not out in space somewhere—all that worked together on the mind.
I told myself that it was nothing. Even a Varus man could get jumpy now and then.
“This light,” Harris said, catching up with me. “It’s like moonlight, but golden instead of silvery.”
He had a weird tone in his voice, so I laughed at him. “You’ve got quite the poetic tongue on you, Adjunct.”
Harris glowered, suspecting I was making fun of him. He was right.
“You scared?” I asked him, slamming a gauntlet on his armored shoulder.
He brushed my hand away.
“Hell no! These things die—even if they seem to be dead already… Anything that dies I’m not afraid of!”
“That’s good. Make sure the troops see that look in your eyes—not the other one.”
Harris met my gaze, and he nodded. Walking away, he made a show of talking about how easy these aliens were to kill. How stupid and slow and downright harmless they were. The troops didn’t say much, but they seemed to listen.
We made it almost to the outskirts of town before we met up with trouble again.
It was the trams in the town—they looked different. Instead of abandoned wrecks left in random positions, they were in a line. A tight line that stretched on for fifty cars or more each direction.
“Um… boss?” Carlos said. “I don’t like the look of those—”
That’s about when the nearest one fired up its engine. Human-looking arms extended then from the windows, which were all broken out and dark inside.
Arms. That’s what they had to be. Each arm ended with a hand, as they should, and in each hand was a weapon. Some of the trams had six, eight—I even saw one with nine arms hanging out of the various broken windows. And in every hand was a weapon of some kind. I saw guns, hatchets, all manner of deadly instrument. A few had strange-looking tubes of sleek metal that I suspected were alien-made weaponry.
I don’t mind telling you I halted, stood and gaped for a second. I didn’t know what to make of it all. It was freaky and then some.
The engines roared, revving, and the enemy line advanced. The trams shook and their treads clacked as they beat the road. They rolled over grass, fences and other things I suspected were lying in the fields. They humped over everything that might lay between us and them, uncaring.
“Spread out, front ranks kneel and fire at will!” I roared when I’d recovered from my initial surprise. “Weaponeers, stand and take them out!”
The lights in front and the heavies in the middle knelt, opening fire at the haunted row of vehicles that approached us. Our guns seemed to have little effect.
Had these aliens really managed to armor-up the front grilles of these vehicles so fast? Is that what they’d been doing down here, under this protective dome of theirs?
Over our heads, Sargon and his weaponeers unleashed heavy beams. Some carried guided missiles too, and flocks of drones swarmed from Kivi and the techs.
A legion unit can release a lot of firepower at short range. My group was no exception. The makeshift armored cars were blown up, two or three at a time. Only half of them made it to Barton’s lights, who danced aside and threw grav-plasma grenades into the broken windo
ws or rolled them under the treads.
Several more of the trams went up, hopping into the air and thumping back down again on their backs. But some of Barton’s people weren’t fast enough on their feet. A few were run down, others were hacked by the bleeding limbs that hung from those windows.
Those arms… they were beyond freaky. They didn’t have eyes that I could see. No heads were in sight—just arms hanging from windows that had the safety glass broken out.
They worked in a frenzy to kill us for all that. The arms didn’t have anything like a sense of self-preservation. They cut themselves on glass, metal shards—anything for the opportunity to slash and shoot at my troops.
Some of the trams made it past the platoon of lights out front. My heavies were up next. We were spread out and ready. Armored up, we were too slow to run out of the way. Some were run over, others bounced off the fenders.
One of the trams came right at me, and I vaulted onto the hood. The machine stopped revving. It seemed insane with a terrible urge to kill me.
Hands clutched my boots. They sawed on my metal armor pointlessly with knives. I slashed their hands off at the wrist, but they still thumped and flailed, splattering dark blood all over my kit.
“Nasty-ass bastards!” I said, shoving my shotgun into the guts of the passenger section.
Boom! Boom!
I released two blasts, and the monstrosity stopped making a coordinated effort to kill me. Some of the limbs still felt the air with trembling fingers, but they appeared to be mindless and blind.
Hopping off the hood, I walked away and checked on the rest of my unit.
After a few minutes of mopping up, the battle was over. But my men—they weren’t the same. They’d been shaken up, and I could hardly blame them.
We’d never fought an enemy like this one. Whatever these things were, they seemed to come in countless evil forms like demons spawned in Hell.
-17-
Harris was the first to confront me. The others were looking on, too.
“Centurion…” he said. “That was just plain wrong.”
“I know,” I laughed. “What losers! Whoever these aliens are, someone should tell them they don’t fight worth a shit. What kind of a half-assed invasion force tries to run trained troops over with trams?”