Finding the thick blast doors stuck shut, I ordered a set of charges to blow them. We breached the seal into the next hallway, where the advance team had lost contact. Standing in the open as the door swung open, I raised my weapon and scanned the space beyond. All the lights had been extinguished, and I couldn’t see a thing. Thick smoke drifted out all around us and I tightened my grip.
“Standby, team, I’ll go first,” I stated and stepped forward. No one objected.
Taking another step, I heard a crunch and felt spent bullet casings underneath my feet. Two more paces and the texture changed to grit and slime, and the number of cartridges underfoot increased exponentially. I took a deep breath and prepared myself for anything.
“Lights up,” I ordered, and turned on my headlamp. The rest of my squad did the same and bathed the area in eerie reddish light.
The carnage nearly took my breath away. Every member of the missing squad was there, their remains slashed apart, torn asunder, and scattered in every direction. Thousands of casings, empty magazines, weapons, and pieces of equipment littered the deck. Smoking bullet holes and larger divots scarred the walls and floors, wafting slightly from the influx of fresh air. Multiple alien bodies were in the mix as well, but they were outnumbered five to one by our fallen.
“Get us some more light, and see if we can find out what happened here.” My team was speechless and didn’t move. I turned back to them and snapped. “Dammit, stop this BS and do your jobs! They’re dead. Hallelujah, their problems are over. Unless you want to join them, do what I tell you.”
I pointed to the two soldiers closest to me. “Get us some more light.”
To three men behind them, I ordered, “Recover whatever you can, ammo, explosives, I don’t care. Just get it all. This was an ambush, and we’ll need all the help we can get.” I thought for a moment. “Pack the bodies with Claymores. If they come back, we’re going to have the upper hand.”
Two of the men moved out and complied while the third stood shaking in place. I stepped closer to him. “The hell is wrong with you? I just gave you an order!”
“Y . . . You’re insane!” His voice cracked with fear. “Look where you’ve gotten us!”
An overhead light flickered on, and I pulled back my tinted visor. The soldier’s eyes were wide in fear. “You have a problem with it? Do you want to run the next war?”
“You’re going to get us all killed!” he half-shouted, and looked around between the others. “Don’t you know who this is? It’s Sergeant Grant. He led an entire regiment to their deaths!”
Looking back at me, he spoke again. “You got a thousand people killed!”
“Actually, it was four thousand,” I said, stepping closer, “but I could always make room for one more if you want to join them.”
He picked up his rifle and pointed it toward my face, now barely two meters away. “Stay back! Don’t even think about it!”
Seeing I was losing control of the situation, I acted without so much as a thought and dropped my rifle on the deck.
“I will give you one last chance to get your head straight and fall in.” My voice boomed and echoed off the walls.
“You’re mad!” he shouted at me, and then to the squad, “We have to stop him!”
I saw his fingers flex around the weapon just as his eyes strayed. In that split second, I drew my sidearm, slid into a perfect stance, and fired a single shot. It went clear through his visor and smashed into his skull below the left eye. It exited the back and splattered a dozen other soldiers with blood and brain matter. The soldier dropped like a rock, his head smoking all the way to the ground. Without shifting my position, I glanced among the remainder of my squad, all frozen in time.
“Anyone else want to voice an opinion?” I stated and paused. “Yes. We all may die, but only I know what we need to do. If you kill me, you’ll never see earth again. None of you. And that’s not a threat: that’s a prophecy.”
Dead silence gripped the room for what felt like an eternity before someone spoke.
“There’s movement down the tunnel,” one soldier reported from the far side of the room.
I holstered my pistol and retrieved my rifle, content that the problem was solved. “Switch to the powder rifles. It looks like they shocked the room the last time.”
I looked around, picturing the skirmish to come in my head. “Get some of the debris, whatever you can use, for cover on the wall. I’ll stay forward of you and detonate the mines. Where’s the detonator?”
The man across from me handed the remote switch. “Eight mines are armed around the center of the room. The explosion will have a kill radius of twenty meters in every direction.”
“Good. Listen up, everyone. I’ll drop a flash and then hit the mines. As soon as I hit it, open fire. I’ll stay down and kill everything that moves. Turn off the lights.”
It took maybe thirty seconds before my team had moved a few crates to the end of the tunnel and switched their weapons out. I kneeled low along the wall and crawled out to the center, rolling about and covering myself in the blood coating the floor. Whatever came into the room wouldn’t be able to tell me from the corpses. Footsteps approached slowly from the far side and I held my breath. Working only by sound and not daring to move, I estimated their forces at ten to fifteen. They were only a meter or two from me when I backhanded the Flashbang with a twitch of my left hand.
They heard it roll and shifted their stances. The explosion came a moment later. A massive flash of light and smoke instantly filled the space while what sounded like a cannon blast radiated out and disoriented the group. Quickly and silently, I rose up from the floor and switched on my headlamp. I was face to face with my enemy, staring down the aliens’ leader. Before it could comprehend enough to raise its weapon, I grabbed its collar with my secondary hand and punched it as hard as I could in the face, feeling a sickening crunch as I broke through multiple bones. Instinctively, it tried to raise its gun but only fired the weapon to the side. The others ducked to avoid the shots as I held the creature close and drug its body about. Again and again I hit it, switching between the face and body before smashing its head down hard onto my knee. The bones behind its face shattered, and I put a shot deep into its skull. With the last impact, I turned off my lamp and the body dropped like a stone.
The remaining creatures didn’t know what had hit them. Again, they fired blindly into the dark as I crawled to the side as quickly as possible. Hoping I was far enough away, I flattened myself against the floor, held my rifle and hands above my head, and triggered the mines. Eight simultaneous blasts tore the room apart, and the rest of my team opened fire.
Shot and spikes from the mines bounced off the wall and slammed into my armor. They left welts and bounced off while several more embedded themselves into the stock of my M1. I kept my head down until the firing ceased. The room was silent for a good five seconds before I dared to show myself.
“Status!” I shouted to my squad.
“All enemies down. We’re showing no movement. All men accounted for!” another radioed back.
I smiled. It was a small victory.
“Good Job!” I announced and gathered my feet beneath me. “Hold your fire, I’m coming back!”
In standing, pain shot through my back from the mine’s near miss. I could still walk without any problems, so I gritted my teeth and suppressed the urge to curl up on the floor.
In retrospect, it would have been far too easy for any one of my soldiers to shoot me back. In fact, on some level, maybe that’s what I wanted. Amazingly and almost to my surprise, the shot never came, and I made it back in one piece. I looked back and forth between them when I got within sight and they were still visibly shaken, but far from crazed.
“If any more of them come, they’ve got to come through us. Barricade the door and keep them coming. We won’t let a single one through.”
“Sir, we’re being hailed from the surface. Multiple enemy targets are on approach,” my radio op
erator spoke up.
“All right. Tell them to stay in place and keep the aliens outside, and get another squad down here to take our places. I want to see what they’re going to do next.”
I paced along the wall of crates behind the tunnel’s opening while waiting for our relief. There was no sound from the passage, and my men didn’t dare move, lest they miss a movement in the shadows. A minute later, I heard the familiar sound of armored boots clamoring down the stairs. The lieutenant came straight for me.
“Guard this position. Don’t let anything out of the tunnel,” I ordered him. “We already sustained some losses fighting them, but they haven’t sent any more in twenty minutes.”
“Will do,” he replied, nodding in comprehension.
We switched our positions and headed back up the steps. I took the chance to get updates from the surface along the way. Several entrances to the colony were under siege from squads of aliens on the outside, but we were holding steady. Before things got too out of control, I brought my team back up and switched out with another so I could get a better feel for the situation, as well as get better reception to raise the fleet.
11
I joined the radio operator on the same high roof he had been on before while my squad manned a position beneath us. By the time I reached him, he had deployed several scanners and a radio uplink to the local fleet.
“Reception is pretty bad in here. I’m getting all kinds of reflections.”
“Can you get through to the command ship?” I inquired as I watched him type commands on a tiny display.
“Yeah, I can get it. The quality is terrible, but it works,” he replied and picked up the handset. “Mission Command, Mission Command, this is Staff Sergeant Wills, broadcasting from prime node. Requesting status update, over.”
There was a crackle of static followed by silence before a voice cut in.
“Sergeant, this is Major Stine. We have successfully landed and engaged four other sites.”
I took the mic and keyed it up.
“This is Grant,” I cut in. “We’ve encountered minimal resistance so far in the city but can get no readings from outside. Can you see anything from your position?”
“Captain, yes, you have multiple targets incoming on your position from every surrounding settlement. They appear to be heavy vehicles, but we don’t know how many soldiers they are carrying with them.”
“What do you suggest?” I asked.
“We’re not going to be able to do much for you in the near term; our forces are still over an hour away. Barricade yourselves in and don’t let them get inside. We’ll do all we can to assist but you’re on your own for the moment.”
I put the radio down and looked over at Wills.
“What did he say?” the sergeant asked.
“We’re going to be on our own for at least another hour before the ground forces get in range, and we’ve got aliens incoming from all directions outside.”
“Ummm . . . ,” he stuttered, while looking at his scope. Explosions were detected outside of every airlock, and the scanner picked up masses of aliens beyond. “What do we do now?”
“Simple,” I smiled. “We’re gonna hold our positions and kill every last one of them.” I picked up my rifle and radioed the entire ground force. “All men prepare for contact from the surface. Maintain positions, no one retreats!” I looked back at Wills. “Stay here. Keep us in contact with the fleet.”
“Yes sir.”
Leaving him alone, I rounded up my squad again and we reinforced the nearest DFP overlooking a damaged airlock. We hardly got into position before aliens began to pour in.
I instantly knew that this would not be as easy as the rest of the mission. They were all dressed in heavy armor to protect against gunfire and the cold, and they were armed with larger rifles that I had not seen since our last engagement.
From my cover, I fired nonstop into the group of aliens that had breached the door. They scrambled about trying to get out of the kill box, but there was nothing left for them to hide behind except for the bodies of those who had already fallen.
The pile of smoking corpses lay still inside the doors. Finally, no more were coming to join them. The barrel of my rifle was smoking from the rounds I had poured through, and I let it vent briefly before raising the other defenders. As had happened in my location, attacks had ceased at all the other entrances as well.
I didn’t like how the scenario was playing out. Our reinforcements on the far side were still too far off to engage the aliens effectively, and I knew that the aliens would not give up when we were so close. No shots were fired anywhere in the complex. The silence was deafening.
“All forces stay on alert,” I radioed to the entire battalion as I reloaded and trained my rifle on the center line of the door. “There’s no way they’re done with us yet.”
I gave my order at just the wrong time, and once again, I hated being right. Artillery blasts rocked the entire colony from above and shook the ground we stood on. I looked up and saw cracks appear in the roof and spread outward, leaving trails of smoke and dropping debris all over. More shots hit and punched straight through, leveling buildings inside and exploding into massive fires.
No one else was attacking on foot, and I knew the other humans wouldn’t be able to save us. They were going to bring the roof down on us. I looked around, and my men were moving about to avoid the falling stones. We only had one chance.
“Everyone, abandon your posts! Rendezvous in the main tunnel! Move out now, as quickly as you can! We’ve got to get moving before they bury us!” I glanced back at the soldiers around me.
“Let’s go!” I ordered, and we took off at nearly a full sprint back to the tunnel shaft.
I got to the top of the stairwell first and stepped to the side while the others ran down the steep incline. I switched radio frequencies to call the rest of the forces.
“All support forces, all support forces, this is Captain Grant. The aliens are--”
I dropped the call and dove to the side as a chunk of the ceiling caved inward and nearly flattened me. I keyed the mic again.
“The aliens are attempting to destroy the main colony from the outside via heavy artillery. I am not able to hold the location anymore. My forces are currently attempting to get out through an underground service tunnel. Final destination is unknown. Consider all forces encountered at Colony One hostile.”
I grimaced as more pieces of the walls caved in with more shots. Taking a last look around, I saw no remaining humans, so I too descended down the shaft to my waiting men. A dozen were still standing guard at the doors while the others rearmed themselves.
“Any contact?” I asked the crowd.
“None, sir!” a guard responded.
“Good.” I approached the doorway. “Listen up. We’re taking the tunnel. We’re going the entire length on a run. It’s a few kilometers, but we’re not stopping for anything. Engage anything you see, but don’t slow down. The guys up top are going to need us. Move!” I shouted as I kicked a crate out of the way and entered my previous battlefield. The smoke had subsided, but the bodies remained. I didn’t stop to look but ran off into the dimly lit passage leading us deeper underground.
12
We ran for almost an hour before I could see a pinhole of light at the far end of the passageway. The ground shook around us as shots were exchanged above, but no one stumbled.
“I can see something,” I announced. “We’re almost there.”
Even in the chilling environment and lesser gravity, the pace began to take its toll on me. My heart rate quickened, a bead of sweat formed on my brow, and I started to feel pangs in my legs that only physical exertion could provide. I suppressed the feelings and continued for what felt like forever.
The walls and floors passed by, never changing. The patterns in the metal and stone did not change until I spied the tiniest difference in the side.
“Hold up!” I ordered, waving my hand. We stumbled t
o a halt and I could hear the other men’s heavy breathing after the run. I stared at the wall, considering what I was looking at.
The two nearest soldiers approached me. “What do you see?” one asked.
Under my visor, I wore a quizzical expression. “There’s a seam in the rock. I can see the patterns change. It’s a door.”
They cocked their heads, trying to see what I had seen.
“Back up,” I ordered, and yelled to the others, “Take cover! Fire in the hole!” I loaded an armor-piercing grenade into my rifle and shot it into the wall. The blast blew apart the rock and revealed a dark chamber beyond. Kicking out the remaining bits of stone I peered through the dust and could see more than a dozen strange blocks resembling monoliths. They were jet black and covered with intensely detailed inscriptions and symbols that I could not make out.
Turning back to the soldiers, I pointed to the first ten.
“Get in here and figure out what you can with these things. Add them to the record and take what you can carry. You have five minutes.” They followed me back into the room and I gave the crates a closer look. They were alien to me. I had never seen anything quite like them.
The men took pictures of every surface, set a charge to collapse the room, and we were on the run once more.
“What do you make of it?” I asked the nearest soldier.
“Those things were unlike anything I’ve seen our enemy use. Where they got them, I don’t know, but it may be that they are alien even to them.”
“Another species?” I asked.
“I don’t think it can be ruled out. Can you find out from Corps Intel when we get out of here?”
“I will,” I responded, “But we’ll worry about that later. We’ve got work to do.”
Another forty minutes passed before we reached the end. The tunnel’s exit was nearly identical to the one we left before. It widened into a larger antechamber with the same steep, winding stairs leading out of the ground.
MissionSRX: Confessions of the First War Page 9