by Jake Bible
The thought of artillery made Ajax cast his gaze across the hill behind the trench. The Watch Tower was a menacing gun battery that rested inside an armored bunker that had been half-buried in the loamy soil. Rising from just behind the quad-barreled artillery piece was the observation post, an elevated capsule that allowed the Watchman to see the full field, even if he was doing so at some risk, given his exposure.
In the low light, it was difficult to make out exactly what was happening at the Tower, but Ajax could tell that the bulk of the spores were smashing into the ground behind the trench.
“Seems like they’re more worried about the battery than us,” pointed out Ajax as Rama and Boone followed his gaze. “Could be that a shrieker swarm is on the way.”
“If that’s true, then the Garm would have had to learn the difference between anti-armor and anti-air weapons, not to mention have a forward observer in position to make the distinction,” growled Boone before turning back to face the other direction.
“Not even they have a way of piercing this gloom. Why humanity settled any of the brackenworlds in this sector I’ll never understand.”
Ajax was inclined to agree with Boone, and as more spores pounded the trench and the battery, he strained his eyes in vain to see through the palpable darkness ahead of him.
Brackenworlds were second-rate planets that only warranted partial terra-forming and most of them had similar atmospheric conditions to what the marines were even now experiencing. Marginal light from a distant star that was mostly dissipated by the particle clogged atmosphere, unforgiving landscapes, and only sparse pockets of organic life that rose from the brackish and often fetid water that gave such planets their name.
The modest outpost city of Heorot was the only real sign of civilization on the planet that shared its name, home to only forty thousand souls. They farmed energy, using large windmills to take advantage of the fetid winds the constantly scoured the planet’s surface.
It was a testament, really, thought Ajax, that humanity could find something of use even on this backwater world. The planet had little tactical significance, being on the edge of charted space and well removed from the bulk of the besieged human star systems.
A single hive ship had broken off from the main thrust of the extinction fleet and come to terrorize Heorot. The modest city was still a human settlement, carved out of the wilderness by courageous pioneers, so it was worth defending.
A single warship, the Bright Lance, had been sent by Command to counter the enemy, bearing in its hold a legion of Einherjar. A brief star fight had delayed the hive ship’s arrival, giving the Einherjar a chance to make planetfall first and prepare their defenses.
There were now twenty gun batteries that defended the city, each with their own trench networks, meaning that just over five thousand marines had put themselves in the path of the enemy.
The Watch Tower, positioned at a vantage point over the whole of the battlefield, was meant to harass any enemy flier formations that attempted to flank the main Einherjar forces that defended the city.
Hydra Company was in place to protect the Tower from any ground swarms that might appear, though Command expected most of the enemy to take the bait and march right into the teeth of Armor One.
The long war against the Garm had left the forces of humanity with limited battle tanks in operation. There were only a few dozen mechanized war machines that comprised the fighting unit.
Ajax hoped they would be enough to combat the ultra-Garm, horrific creatures that served as the battle tank equivalent for the swarm.
The Garm were known, as a fighting force, to attack the strongest point of any defensive position. It was behavior quite unlike the average predator organisms known to humanity, which tended to attack the sick, weak, old, and alone first. However, as the war with the swarm ground onwards, the forces of humanity began to understand the Garm strategy, and it was a troubling discovery indeed.
It was a psychological ploy, one meant to rob the morale of humanity’s warriors by destroying their best forces at the outset of any battle. In many ways, by killing the strongest prey first, these nightmare predators made it all the easier to mop up the rest of their prey, who were often at a loss tactically without their leader and demoralized by the destruction of their mightiest champions.
The flash of plasma discharges shone from in and around the battery, and Ajax felt his heart skip a beat, as he realized that it could only mean one thing. At least some of the spores had hit their mark, and even now ragmen were causing havoc for the battery crews. He hoped that his comrades could fend them off, else the guns would be deafeningly silent when the swarm broke against the trench.
“First wave!” boomed the voice of the Watchman, a welcome sound that indicated that he had not been overcome. “Flares up!”
Rama pulled a flare tube from his belt and pressed the ignition as he pointed it at the sky. The brilliant round streaked upwards, illuminating much of the area around the marines. Dozens of others joined it as soldiers up and down the line fired their own flares.
At first, the rounds rose as expected, though instead of reaching their apex and arcing across the battlefield to illuminate the killing ground in front of the trench, many of them were stopped in midair by hundreds of alien bodies.
Focused artillery fire against an anti-air battery, in advance of an aerial assault, it was simply too complex a maneuver for the Garm, and for a moment Ajax refused to believe what he was seeing.
The shriekers, like the rest of the myriad lifeforms that comprised the Garm swarms, looked like a cross between the lizards and cockroaches of distant Earth, if each had been the most nightmarish of its kind. They had the bleak countenance and powerfully muscled bodies of reptiles, but were covered in mucus lubricated sections of chitonous exoskeleton. In their clawed hands most of them carried weapons reminiscent of firearms, though each of them was attached to umbilical cords that connected to pulsing glands under their leathery wings.
There were so many hundreds of them that when the flares struck them, it turned the night sky into a burning tapestry of carnage. Shriekers fell screaming from the sky as holes were burned through their wings. Those slain by the searing hot flares simply plummeting to the ground in silence.
In the glare of the light, Ajax could see their dull black eyes, each one a seeming abyss of hive intelligence and relentless biological automation. To witness such a primal hunger in so many deadly and nightmarish creatures would surely have sent any other group of soldiers to their knees, yet the marines of Hydra Company stood their ground.
Many times, each man among them had faced such horror. The days of collapsing and retching in fear were far behind them. Instead, they raised their rifles and began to fire as the swarm descended upon them, each of the Garm weapons spitting death as they dove at the marines.
Ajax wanting nothing more than to select auto-fire and cut loose with his rifle, spraying plasma projectiles indiscriminately at the horde, yet he knew better than to give into that urge.
Early in the war with the Garm, most soldiers had done just that, and while it made for a brilliant display of carnage and firepower, the marine would be left with an empty weapon and yet more enemies upon him. It was better to lean on one’s training and maintain fire discipline, selecting individual targets for confirmed elimination, and only then moving to the next opponent.
The Garm, like the cockroaches of Earth, were notorious for persisting in battle despite being inflicted with grievous wounds. The only Garm you could ignore was a dead Garm. And sometimes not even then.
The marine used his iron sights to draw a bead on a shrieker and squeezed the trigger. The weapon bucked in his hands and spat a super-heated bolt of plasma at the shrieker.
The bolt, despite its tremendously high temperature, held just enough of its solid form to impact against the chiton of the beast. The plasma burned its way through the body armor and as it burrowed into the creature’s flesh, it melted into a thick su
per-heated liquid that rapidly spread throughout the shrieker’s body. The shrieker exploded in midair as all the fluids and gases inside it expanded because of the plasma, raining smoldering pieces of flesh down upon the trench floor…
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