He squeezed the trigger both out of fear and desperation. Thankfully the pulse rifle roared in his hands, and the deafening report of the full-auto weapon in the confines of the ravine snapped him out of the hypnosis that had gotten him killed the first time he met the creature.
The beast screamed and was lost to sight as the ravine was filled with clouds of spore and a hurricane of shattered stone shrapnel.
Ajax fired until his weapon seized up and he knew he had to vent it before the internal parts melted. He scampered up the side of the ravine, caring little for how many times he cut his hands and legs as he ascended. The wind was a harsh companion that met him once he reached the top, but he was happy to have it instead of the thing below.
The marine ran, pushing himself to the very limits of his endurance as he made his way towards the windmills. He was out of ammunition, and unless the Valkyrie woman had more magazines he was unsure how he would fight, but he knew he had to reach them.
Ajax ran until his sides burned from the effort, and his sight was blurry from sweat and grit. It became a struggle to put one foot in front of the other, but he thought he would make it until a brilliant light hit his eyes and blinded him.
DISTRICT 9
The siege had gone poorly and the Einherjar trench network had been overrun. The corpses of man and beast had been taken into the darkness by the Garm scavengers, great shelled beasts that resembled land-roving octopi more than anything else, raked up with their many tentacles to be taken to the Garm ships, providing more meat for the breeding chambers of the hive.
Armor One had pulled back after sustaining multiple casualties and exhausting their supply of ammunition and fuel.
Chain-fires and rifles spat bolts at shriekers and WarGarm that harassed the circumference of the city’s battlements.
Heorot was assaulted from within by ragmen who transformed after sustained bombardment by ridgeback swarms that surrounded the small city.
The walls of District 9 were breached by the suicidal charges of the UltraGarm, even though the living battle tanks were slaughtered in the process and now swarms of ripper drones were pouring through.
In the gloom, it was impossible to guess at the size of the swarms that came screaming towards Heorot from all sides. Atmospheric conditions on the planet prevented Bright Lance from launching attack fighter sorties from low orbit.
Skald Thatcher had taken the Watchman’s place in the Tower, and while he performed admirably, the forces of the Garm were seemingly inexhaustible.
“Shieldwall!” bellowed Jarl Mahora over the company channel. Across District 9 the sound of interlocking mobile flak boards slamming into each other could be heard.
Ajax bent his knees and hefted his own board, holding it in front of himself, his left arm turned at a ninety-degree angle to keep the board positioned where it would protect him from mid-calf to neck. He slotted the barrel of his pulse rifle through the makeshift gun port that had been cut out of the top right section of the shield.
The flak boards were intended to be temporary defenses used in rapid deployment scenarios, where marines could erect a hard point to defend and then move on after a single engagement. When the war with the Garm transformed into a bloody trench grind, the board had been relegated to reinforcing trench perimeters. It was a desperate ploy to use them in a street fight, but with the trench networks overrun there was little choice, they had to use what they could to re-take the city.
The marine knew that once the ripper drones reach them, the flak boards would only keep the alien killers at bay for one or perhaps two direct hits before shattering into pieces.
Upon awakening from his troubled resurrection dreams, Ajax and his comrades were met with the news that two hive ships had smashed their way past the blockade and made planetfall, although one of them was thought to have been badly damaged.
The hive ships had appeared without warning, approaching the planet directly, seeming to twist out of the darkness between the stars as they were wont to do. Bright Lance had scrambled starfighters and brought its own heavy guns into the conflict, wiping out the starborne escort creatures that sought to defend the hive ships.
Though the miasma of the planet’s atmosphere prevented Bright Lance from pinpointing the hive ships, it was clear that they’d already disgorged their initial swarms and were busy breeding more. Swarm after swarm crashed into the Einherjar defenses, and the forces of humanity had been pushed out of the trench network.
The walls of Heorot were stout. They had been built to handle the scouring winds that made the planet so profitable for the windmill operations. Once the Einherjar had arrived and begun their trench network, more reinforcements had been added to the small city, and now it stood as a potent secondary line of defense.
Or so it had been thought.
Sharif stepped up directly behind Ajax and held his board over the marine’s head at an angle that would provide cover from any shots or caustic fluids fired from above, while still giving Ajax enough of a line of sight to observe the battlefield and fire his weapon.
The marine sighted down the length of his rifle and waited, knowing that any second now, the first wave of ripper drones would be upon them.
It was lucky that Hydra Company was here to hold the district, thought Ajax as he flexed his fingers, the unit had been pulled out of Trench 16 after the last engagement. They had sustained ninety percent casualties and with so many in the body forge, the company was the strongest unit not already positioned on the line.
“I feel like I just drank an ocean of Boone’s homebrew before a forced march through the desert,” complained Rama as he crouched in the shieldwall next to Ajax, who was suddenly very thankful that, by some small miracle, marines had no memories of their time as ragmen. Better not to recall killing your comrades and being killed by them in turn.
“Idris had to dilute the equilibrium solutions to resurrect so many of us so quickly,” pointed out Boone, who stood behind Rama, his own shield locked with Sharif’s, “And we’ve only been alive for about an hour, we all feel it, brother.”
A single shot rang out, the unique signature of the sound identifying it as a high velocity sniper round, and the marines knew that the bloodshed was about to begin.
“WarGarm moving up to support ripper swarm, one down, looks like at least two more incoming,” crackled Hart’s voice over the channel. “Be advised, the swarm is dividing its approach, rooftops are in play.”
Ajax took a deep breath and let it out slowly as he prepared for the attack. Hart was on overwatch somewhere above and behind the shieldwall. The sniper was, again, once of the few marines to survive the most recent engagement at Trench 16.
Grendel had once again slipped through their preparations and managed to avoid the multitudes of skalds and snipers who hunted it. Ajax had only been resurrected for a short time and had been thrown into combat scant minutes after making the report of his resurrection dream to Thatcher and Jarl Mahora, but even he had heard the rumors going around that the beast had murdered a full tank crew. Command was refusing to make anything official, and that made Ajax more certain that it was indeed true.
If Grendel had slain and harvested the brains of an entire tank crew, then based on what they knew so far, it was likely that intelligence gained by the observer was why the Garm had been able to inflict unprecedented casualties on Armor One just a few hours ago.
The marine was shaken from his reverie by the sudden, deafening sound of a chorus of inhuman voices risen in a feral howl. Moments later the sounds of scuttling claws and snapping mandibles preceded the first of the rippers as they rounded the corner.
Heorot was a circular city, making each urban block something of a triangle divided into smaller sections by various roads and alleyways. Hydra Company had the entire district covered at each cross-section. If the Garm wanted to spread from District 9 to anywhere else, they’d have to get past the shieldwalls of Hydra.
“Weapons free!” shouted Jarl Mahora. His or
der sent bolts snarling from the muzzles of rifles and streaking through the short distance between the marines and the swarm.
Ajax squeezed the trigger of his rifle and couldn’t grinning savagely as his first bolt struck home, sending pieces of a shattered ripper drone splattering across its brood. The marine moved to his next target and fired, the first round punching through the creature’s knee. As the beast fell, the marine’s second round went wide, though as tightly packed as the drones were, thanks to the compact urban environment, missing one beast only meant that his round fatally struck another.
Despite the temptation to go full-auto, Ajax knew better. His weapon would doubtless overheat and it was faster to swap out magazines than it was to wait on a weapon to cool down while the enemy bore down on him. He fired his tenth round and paused to vent his weapon, only the years of experience fighting the Garm swarms giving him the discipline to hold his fire despite the swarm drawing ever closer.
The marine raised his rifle once more and continued to fire, taking note that Sharif and Boone had both started firing. Ajax risked a glance upwards and saw that scores of drones were skittering over the low rooftops of the buildings.
When there was a sudden, powerful impact against his shield, Ajax turned his head to see that the roadway in front of him was now teeming with gorehounds.
“Frak the collateral! Grenades!” boomed the voice of Mahora. Ajax realized that the other shieldwalls must be encountering a similar situation.
The bulk of the ripper drones had gone over the rooftops, with only just enough of them on the ground level to soak up bolt rounds until the gorehounds were close enough to use their hideous grub launchers.
“So much for District 9,” huffed Boone as he cut loose with his grenade launcher, pumping explosive ordinance into the wall of alien flesh that galloped across the ground towards them.
Ajax pointed his rifle upwards and sent a ripper drone’s corpse spiraling off the roof and into the street with a well-aimed bolt. He could see that plenty of the rippers were being gunned down, but it was impossible to stem the tide. He knew that in a matter of moments the marines would be fighting enemies in front and behind.
His shield was dripping with the broken and wriggling bodies of a clutch of grubs that had been fired at him by one of the gorehounds and he knew that his shield would only withstand one or two more such blasts.
The grenades from Boone tore through the ranks of the gorehounds, sending many of them sprawling and screaming as they died from a combination of the explosion and their own grubs eating them from the inside out. Many of those that didn’t die from the grenades directly were smashed by debris from buildings that were rocked by the explosions. While Boone hustled to re-fill his cylinder, more of the enemy galloped over the corpses of the fallen, spewing grubs as they came, and the shieldwall shuddered from the impact.
Ajax grunted as he held himself firm against the tempest of tiny impacts, keenly aware of the trench spike he held in his shield hand and knowing that it wouldn’t be long until he had to use it. The second the impacts stopped, Ajax leveled his rifle at the swarm and fired. He had to force himself to take the time to aim for precise shots, as the gorehounds were sufficiently armored to turn away indirect hits. He could still feel and hear the impacts of ripper drones as their bodies smacked into the ground.
Yao was behind both Sharif and Boone, flanked by other rifles that were not encumbered by shields, and it was they who kept the ripper swarms from descending upon the shieldwall, though the enemy gained ground with every passing moment.
Men began to scream and die as the gorehounds pressed the attack, their withering hail of grubs finally chewing holes out of the shieldwall.
“Lock and advance, marines!” ordered Mahora, and this time Ajax heard his voice both in the channel and somewhere behind him. The proximity of the jarl himself gave Ajax a boost of confidence as well as adrenaline. In a way, the jarl was like a WarGarm for the human side, as the force of his personality and the unit’s awareness of his combat prowess made the men naturally gather around him and fight more ferociously in his presence.
“Hooah!” grunted the marines as every man on the shieldwall took a step forward, shouting it again as they took another. As moved, the holes in the shieldwall locked into place once more, the gaps made by the enemy fire closed as fallen marines were left on the ground behind the formation. The gorehounds were taken by surprise at the sudden advance combined with a counter-salvo of deadly bolt rounds, and the swarm’s advance faltered.
“Hooah!” shouted Ajax, taking another step forward, squeezing the trigger of his rifle again and again as he and the marines around him shouted.
The gorehounds, like all the Garm, were supposedly incapable of retreat, but with their forward momentum broken they were not able to pour on the coordinated fire that they had moments before.
A gorehound near the front hosed Ajax and Rama’s shields with grubs and the marines were forced to drop them as the voracious ammunition chewed their already battered flak boards to pieces.
Boone responded with another grenade salvo, his ordinance set to airburst, while he and Sharif stepped over their comrades to protect them with their own shields. The shrapnel and gore from the explosions hammered the shields but did not break them.
Rama and Ajax let the marines move another step ahead of them and then stood to their full height, firing their rifles over the heads of their comrades and into the broken swarm.
The shieldwall advanced. The marines had now come far enough that they were walking over the bodies of the enemy. Ajax slammed the point of his trench knife into the skull of a wounded gorehound while Rama finished off a weakly thrashing ripper drone.
Mahora shouted for the wall to continue to advance, and as they did, their rifles dropped the last of the gorehhounds. Ajax drove his knife under the body armor of another wounded gorehound, taking extra care not to tear open its ammunition sacs, and then Yao fired behind them.
“Rippers flanking us,” observed Yao from his vantage point behind the shieldwall, the man’s rifle barking once more as if to drive his point home.
Ajax and Rama turned their guns away from the grisly scene in front of the shieldwall and added their firepower to Yao’s. Ajax could see that several ripper drones had indeed managed to move around to flank the shieldwall. They were close, too close, and Ajax knew it was about to get messy.
He gunned down a ripper drone as it charged him, and then saw from his peripheral vision that another was scampering over a low rooftop to his left. He turned on the balls of his feet, raising his rifle just in time to punch a bolt round into the creature’s chest. The beast exploded wetly in mid-leap, showering Ajax and his comrades in gore, distracting them long enough for a second one to land in their midst.
The rippers were generally cannon fodder, disposable creatures hurled into the Einherjar guns to create opportunities for other, deadlier organisms to close in for the kill. The problem was that the ripper drones were deadly on their own, and being creatures made of muscle and blade, they could wreak havoc if they got close enough.
The ripper drone screamed, ignorant of everything but its hunger, and it swept its blades through Yao’s armor with tremendous force. The marine’s rifle and right arm fell to the ground as the rest of him was pinned underneath the gnashing teeth and rending claws of the ripper.
Rama shoved the barrel of his rifle under the ripper’s jaw and squeezed the trigger, turning the drone’s head into a blossom of meat and blood. In an instant, two of the three rifles were no longer firing at the clutch of drones rushing up the alleyway, and Ajax had no choice but to go full-auto. He sprayed the full contents of his magazine down the mouth of the alley, and while his attack turned the drones into so much quivering meat his pulse rifle seized up from the lack of proper venting.
“High right!” shouted Rama from somewhere behind him, but without a working rifle Ajax did the only thing he could do.
The marine gripped the body
of his rifle and pushed it into the air to his right without even looking, knowing full well that clawed death was descending upon him.
The ripper drone slammed into the marine, the weight of the horrid thing driving them both to the ground. Ajax held his rifle between himself and the ripper and that fact alone saved his life. The beast’s jaws were wrapped around the rifle, having bitten the weapon nearly in half, but better the rifle than the marine. Ajax roared and shoved his trench spike into the beast, ramming the point of it up through the creature’s thorax and into whatever passed for a ripper drone’s brain. The creature shuddered for a moment and Ajax wondered if he’d missed its central nervous system, then it ceased to struggle and its body went slack.
Ajax heaved with all his might and shoved the corpse off so that he could scramble to his feet. With his rifle destroyed, the gore-slick spike was his only weapon and he knew that he wouldn’t be so lucky as to kill a ripper drone with it a second time. Thankfully, in a grim sort of way, Rama had recovered Yao’s rifle and pitched it over to the unarmed marine. Ajax slotted a fresh magazine into the weapon and surveyed the scene before him.
Only humans stood upon the intersection of road and alley and though they’d suffered more casualties than he’d realized, Ajax saw that victory, at least for the moment, was theirs.
The ripper drones couldn’t mount enough of a flanking attack to disrupt the shieldwall and the last of the gorehounds were being put down.
Jarl Mahora stepped away from the formation and began giving orders, his commands made more potent for the gore that dripped from his trench spike as he gestured with it.
“Police your ammo and form a square,” ordered Mahora, then added, “We might have stopped them for now, but we all know they’ll be back. If another Garm wave arrives before the engineers can get the wall repaired we’ll be in for another brawl.”
The marines rushed to prepare themselves, and within a few minutes they stood in a square formation, each man with a fresh magazine in his pulse rifle. They’d all heard Hart mention two WarGarm driving the swarms, but so far, they had not appeared. It was unlike the WarGarm to abandon the attack, unless the swarm required them for more urgent purpose elsewhere. Each man knew this, and as if to answer their silent question, a voice crackled over the command channel.
Extinction Fleet 1: Space Marine Ajax Page 7