The Eternity War: Dominion

by Jamie Sawyer

  “Firing countermeasures!” yelled the pilot, as the Cougar jinked sharply. “The locals are waking up.”

  “Looks like several weapons emplacements,” Feng concluded.

  Lopez nodded. “And more in the direction we’re heading.”

  Bio-plasma boiled up from the jungle, tracing a bright blue arc across the sky.

  The dropship banked starboard. The pilot had needle-sharp reactions, but despite his simulated senses, he wasn’t fast enough. I heard the patter of small arms fire against the hull, saw the flash of the null-shield activating as it repelled energy-based weapons. The Cougar spat out flares and decoy drones, and fire chased us lower still.

  “This is Angel One, this is Angel One,” said the pilot. “We are encountering heavy resistance. All Cougars, be aware.”

  The Cougar launched missiles into the jungle. Krell bodies scattered, and the landscape was soon on fire. Other Cougars were dropping in behind us, clustered around the Sci-Div transports. They got the same welcome. In some cases, even worse.

  “Angel Three is hit!” came a squawk. “Angel Three going down!”

  “Angel Four, taking heavy fire. Repeat, heavy fire.”

  “Angel Seven has taken an impact. We’ve lost yaw control, and—”

  The voices bubbled from the Cougar’s console. On my HUD, lights winked out: turning from green, which meant operational, to red, which meant extracted. A list of casualties began to scroll there, too. But even as I watched, some names were deleted from the list, and icons flashed green again. As each trooper died, they were being sent back into combat in a new body.

  Our dropship’s deck lurched as it fired volley after volley into the landscape. The gunfire against the hull intensified.

  DISTANCE TO LZ: FIVE HUNDRED METRES…

  “Kicking in the retro-thrusters,” the co-pilot said.

  “Do it,” said the pilot. “We’re dropping our cargo.”

  The Cougar’s engine pitch changed. The dropship decelerated, and its VTOL engines activated. Those would allow the ship to hover for a limited period.

  “Jackals, ready!” I yelled. “Get moving!”

  The safety-harnesses retracted. Troopers grabbed weapons. We all carried plasma rifles, but other weapons—ranging from Widowmaker pistols to a variety of grenades—were strapped across armoured thighs and chests. It’s fair to say that you can never have enough methods of killing the enemy on a simulant operation. For this mission, each of us also carried more esoteric, non-lethal equipment. Novak had a huge metal tube strapped to his pack, while the rest of us were equipped with shock-batons.

  “Deploying rear ramp in three…”

  “You ready, kid?” I asked Reed.

  He nodded. “I think so.”

  “Two…”

  “Stick with us,” said Lopez, giving the kid an encouraging smile, “and you’ll do fine.”

  I was excited. Damned excited. I’m ashamed to say that war has that effect on me.

  “One!” the pilot completed.

  “EVAMPS ready!” I commanded.

  Each of us carried an EVAMP—an “extra-vehicular mobility pack”. The EVAMP was a thruster unit that allowed for flight in zero-G, or limited “bounces” planetside.

  The rear ramp yawned open, and hell waited for us below.

  A volley of living ammunition peppered the inside of the Cougar. Flesh-ripper flechettes sparkled blue as they trailed bio-energy, and the Jackals hunkered down, their null-shields activating. Reed and his squad were torn apart by enemy fire. The Rippers’ reactions were a second—a fraction of a second, maybe—too slow. Where the Krell were concerned, that was more than enough. The shredded bodies of all five troopers collapsed in the mouth of the cabin, tumbled down the ramp. Life-signs extinct.

  “Reed’s down!” Lopez yelled.

  A primary-form—a member of the Krell warrior-worker caste—erupted from the jungle, and tore through the bodies.

  “Yeah, Rippers is about right…” Feng said, without any hint of irony.

  “Just make sure that we don’t end up like them,” I ordered. “Repressing fire.”

  “Who wants to live for ever, yes?” Novak roared, the words a battle-cry as he launched out of the dropship, his EVAMP flaring.

  All I could hear was Novak’s uproarious laughter, as though it was the funniest damn thing he had ever experienced.

  CHAPTER TWO

  NEST STATION GAMMA

  We emerged from the dropship into a nightmare made real.

  Enormous trees covered the area, but they were twisted, warped, blackened things that barely resembled their terrestrial counterpart. Beneath the canopy of black-green foliage, there was another world; hidden from the spy-eyes and orbital surveillance of the Alliance fleet. The terrain was swampy, dense, with more of the vaporous mist clinging to the ground. Without the benefit of a tactical-helmet, visibility would’ve been shot to shit. Mobility was similarly hampered. We were knee-deep in brackish water, if this really was water, and not some alien equivalent. Beneath my boots the ground was soft and squishy. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the thick vines and roots lacing the forest floor were actually moving…

  “Go, go!” the Cougar’s pilot yelled, over the comms. “Covering fire, keep your heads down!”

  “Copy that,” I shouted back. “On the bounce, Jackals.”

  The Cougar hovered behind us. Its chin-gun—a forty-millimetre automatic cannon—swept the jungle. Krell bodies disintegrated under the weight of fire. The Jackals advanced through the swamp, moving in tandem, using bio-scanners and sensor-suites to pinpoint targets. Shapes loomed out of the mist. I fired from the hip as I moved.

  The Cougar’s engines roared. Backwash from the VTOL unit flattened a ring of trees around our position.

  “We’re taking fire!” the co-pilot said.

  He was right: the Cougar was attracting a lot of fire. The dropship’s null-shields flared as it ablated heavier Krell weaponry. The Cougar was a big, slow target this close to the ground.

  “Missiles out,” the pilot said.

  Missiles snaked across the landscape. The Jackals hustled and hunkered down as the warheads impacted. Clods of earth, tree, Krell and bone showered our location. Our null-shields took the worst of it, although some debris bounced off my armour.

  “Push on towards the objective,” I ordered.

  “The bio-scanner is going wild,” said Feng. “Multiple targets.”

  Krell spilt out of the nest. Using all six limbs, the aliens made rapid progress through and across the structure, or took up vantage points from which to snipe down at us. The Cougar made short work of them. Rounds pummelled the structure, and splinters of black coral rained down on us.

  “Angel Twelve is going down!” someone declared over the joint comms.

  Further down the line, barely visible, a fireball erupted in the sky. The wreckage spun for a second, then crashed somewhere in the jungle.

  TSUNG’S FINEST EXTRACTED, my HUD said.

  “Too bad,” I declared. “Zero, do you copy?”

  “Affirmative, ma’am,” said Zero. “The Sci-Div shuttles are about to go dirtside.”

  “We see them,” I said. I was shooting as I spoke, aware that I couldn’t lose concentration for even a second.

  A pair of Cougar dropships provided close protection to the Sci-Div transports. Those were converted Wildcat shuttles; slower than Cougars, but with a heavier lift capacity. Two of the three shuttles were hit by heavy bio-fire, and went down before they reached the landing zone. The third touched down in a clearing at the foot of the nest. The shuttle’s rear ramp immediately deployed, and more simulant squads piled out. Rather than proper Army, these were Sci-Div security officers. They were armed with TT-5 trench sweeper plasma carbines—higher-powered weaponry, but with a shorter range. Immediately, weapons-fire flashed through the milky twilight.

  “Fuckers are doing it,” Lopez declared.

  The Sci-Div away team was met by a hail of bio-fire, but t
his was a numbers game. Enough of the security force survived the landing, and the initial onslaught, to establish a perimeter. The troopers planted metal rods in the ground, and as each went in, it began to crackle with blue energy. The rods connected to make a domed null-shield that extended over the camp, holding off enemy fire.

  BEACHHEAD SECURE, my HUD updated.

  “Assisting fire inbound,” Zero suggested.

  A piercing whine split the air. Almost immediately, a half-dozen Tac-3 strike fighters appeared on the horizon—their swept-back wings instantly recognisable, engines blazing bright blue through the dense mist.

  “Danger close!” I declared.

  The fighters took a low pass over our location, strafing the upper levels of Nest Base Gamma with their automatic cannons. The infected Krell leapt from their vantage points, tumbling around us. Some were caught by Cougars, as more dropships made planetfall, while others were picked off by simulant squads.

  The tac fighters passed by, their strafing run complete. They were closely followed by a wing of Needler bio-fighters. Their hulls were sleek and seamless, and their prows bone-sharp: the Krell counterpart of Alliance technology. The Needlers chased off the tac fighters, plasma guns strobing.

  “Sweet, sweet Christo!” Feng exclaimed, although he sounded more excited than frightened. “Now we really are in the shit!”

  Lopez howled. “Take that, you infected fucks!”

  ADVANCE, my HUD commanded. ADVANCE.

  “That’s our cue to hustle, troopers,” I said.

  Half my mind still focused on shooting, I identified an opening in the side of the nest. The portal yawned darkly; like the mouth of an organic cave, a possible refuge from the fighting. With a thought-command, I logged it on my battle-grid.

  “Go, go,” I said. “In there.”

  The world still burning around us, the Jackals stormed inside. The open orifice was the biological equivalent of a hatch, and it clamped shut behind us. The interior of the nest was shadowy and dank. My tactical-helmet immediately adapted, and the multi-sense package kicked in: painting the entry tunnel in lurid green light.

  “Deploy drones,” I said.

  Each of the Jackals carried a half-dozen surveillance drones, nestled into our life-support packs. The drones disengaged and activated anti-gravity motors. Their purpose was to map the inside of the nest, to give us intel on the safest and quickest route into the bowels of the facility. As one, they disappeared into the shafts that branched off the main tunnel, their drives whirring softly as they went.

  A sick wail filled the air, loud enough that it was audible over the chatter of weapons-fire from outside. Feng cocked his head, listening, and Lopez shivered. It felt as though the very nest base was crying out in pain: the noise coming from the walls, from the swamp-wet deck.

  But before we could question the noise, Novak was up and firing his plasma rifle.

  “We have the company!” he declared.

  Dark shapes disengaged from the ribbed walls and dropped from the deckheads.

  The Krell were on us.

  There was a smooth action to the process, a sort of rhythm to our attack. It felt a lot like a training simulation.

  Aim.

  Fire.

  Repeat.

  Aim.

  Fire.

  Repeat.

  Through the haphazard arrangement of tunnels and chambers we went, literally pushing against the tide of Krell. Wave after wave crashed against us.

  The walls, floors and deckhead were covered in sinewy, muscle-like flesh. Everything in here was alive, and it was hard not to think of biological analogies everywhere I looked. Tunnels—veins—spread out into the distance. Smaller shafts—capillaries—branched off from them. We passed chambers filled with control consoles—organs—that churned and screamed. The structure hummed and throbbed and pulsed.

  “Fire in the hold,” Feng said, as he pumped a grenade into a chamber. Krell grafted to living machinery disappeared in a wave of fire.

  Military Intelligence and Science Division had estimated that there were likely to be several thousand Krell war-forms stationed at Nest Base Gamma. The planet itself, and therefore the nest, was irrevocably contaminated with the Harbinger virus. It had probably been infected in the earlier stages of the epidemic, perhaps one of the first outbreaks. That explained the black coral, and the tranches of infected jungle. It was Science Division’s theory that such a critically colonised outpost would eventually enter terminal decline. Mili-Intel was therefore reasonably confident that Nest Base Gamma would be a weak target.

  You see the problem there?

  Phrases like “reasonably sure”: they work on paper. They aren’t so reassuring when you’re looking down the business end of a Krell spiker. The Simulant Operations Programme was no stranger to audacity where mission execution was concerned—after all, when you go to war in a body that isn’t coming back, you can afford to take risks—but this was something else. There’s a thin line between courage and recklessness. Looking at the mission statistics, it seemed High Command had very firmly crossed it…

  “Watch that corner!” I yelled.

  Feng blasted apart a Krell thrall—original designation completely unknowable, from the twisted husk of a thing that remained after Harbinger had taken root—and two more took its place.

  “Fucking fishes!” Novak lambasted, taking them out with a frenzied blast from his plasma rifle. He turned to Feng. “Thank me later, Chino.”

  Feng nodded, tossed a grenade back the way that we had come. The Krell were attempting to cut off our escape route, and more bio-signs coalesced behind us. The entire base bristled, its corrupted soul screaming at our intrusion.

  My HUD continued to fill with data. The drones were now well inside the nest. They were flagging hostiles, painting possible targets for us, and the Jackals responded to that data.

  “Push on,” I ordered.

  Sure, if it got too hot we could extract and just come back, but I didn’t much savour the prospect of fighting our way back into the nest. The other simulant squads were getting the same welcome. My battle-net was a clusterfuck of distress signals, of bio-signs, of extraction and transition markers. The sound of conflict—from the pitched scream of exotic Krell bio-weaponry, through to the bass pulse of plasma weaponry firing—filled the tunnel. The structure shuddered with impacts, and I had no doubt that air support was still doing its thing, pouring fire on the defending forces.

  We cleared enough hostiles to reach the next junction.

  “Jesus, this place stinks,” Lopez said, gasping for breath.

  Nausea threatened to engulf me. It receded after a second or so, as my Pathfinder suit dumped a shitload of combat-drugs into my bloodstream. Got to love those sweet, sweet drugs. I checked the rest of my team’s vitals. They, too, were feeling it, and I thought-commanded another dose of combat-drugs direct for each of them as well.

  “Keep your atmo-filters running,” Feng suggested.

  “I am!”

  “You get used to smell, yes?” Novak suggested, as he slammed the butt of his rifle into the face of another deformed thrall. “Is like Pariah’s scent.”

  “P’s smell is different,” argued Lopez. “These infected bastards… I’ll never get used to that.”

  The nest was foetid, rotten. The facility’s living components were choked with floral blooms and infection-nodes. I switched on my shoulder-lamps—throwing bright beams of light across the tunnel walls—and saw motes of diseased matter drifting in the air, like pollen from an infected plant. New growths, composed of black, shiny material, sprouted from the deck, creating weird, asymmetrical shapes. A flash of activity overhead caught my attention. There were shafts along the ceiling, and a shape formed there, lining up with a hook-nosed bio-rifle.

  “Check the ceilings!”

  “I see it,” Feng said, dropping to a knee and bringing up his rifle.

  The Krell raked Feng with barb-rounds; flechettes formed of a compound as hard
as any Alliance munition.

  “Fuck!” Feng yelped.

  His null-shield took the worst of it, but some rounds penetrated the field. An alert appeared on my HUD.

  But I had no time to worry about that. A primary-form burst out of another shaft in the wall, and I opened fire. The Krell was a ragged mess of a thing, covered in lesions and sores. And not just the body itself; the alien’s equipment—from its shredded bio-suit to the plethora of living artefacts grafted to its carcass—was equally riddled. I put two shots in the xeno’s head.

  Feng staggered, one hand to his chest.

  The Krell sensed weakness. As one, they surged towards us. More bio-fire split the air, accompanied by the angry shrieks of the infected horde.

  “Fall back to the last junction,” I suggested.

  Except, I realised, that wasn’t an option either. Bio-signs were massing behind us. Krell thralls scuttled along the ceilings, clutching the ribbed walls with claw-tipped appendages. Novak turned, pumped another grenade.

  “Fuck you all!” he roared, as bone-shards pattered against his armour.

  I twisted about-face. A primary-form—big, armour-plated, with claws outstretched—loomed out of nowhere. It lurched towards me. Reflexively, I slammed my plasma rifle into the xeno’s cranium. The force was enough to split the creature’s skull. It spouted ichor.

  The Krell were all around us.

  “Just… wait…” I gasped.

  A signal appeared on my HUD. Flickering in and out of existence, as though the entity responsible for it could somehow control its own bio-signature.

  Something grazed the edge of my consciousness.

  Burning bright and leaving a trail of fire, what could’ve been mistaken for a comet dropped from the heavens.

  This, however, was no comet. It was a Krell Type 3 bio-pod. Aerodynamic, made for speed, but also armoured, covered in a shell-like carapace that protected its single occupant.

  Although I couldn’t see any of this, I could experience it: both as battle-net data through the neural-link of my combat-suit, and as something far more visceral, through my connection with the pod’s user. Of course, “user” was hardly the correct word. The pod’s sole passenger was snugly encased in living tissue, soft-wired into the actual transport.