by Rob Buckman
“Geeze! That’s a lot to remember in the middle of a firefight Wolfman… Sir.”
“Another old adage for you to remember is the definition of a soldier. A soldier is someone who can do simple mechanical tasks while in flat, pants pissing panic!”
“Simple, like in switching mags, right?” Krista Jackson grinned at him.
“Now you’ve got it. Here's what you are going to do. Form a circle around me and take a knee. That’s the position I want you in when I give the word. Kneeling will make you a smaller target and in a more stable position while you’re shooting.” They moved into position around him and took a knee.
“You have thirty rounds in the mag, and set for three round bursts for ten bursts before you have to reload. This might sound silly, but I want you all to call out, bang – bang – bang ten times, switching target on the wall after each burst and then reload.” It took a few tries before they got into the spirit of the thing, and with all five shouting it got loud. He had them switch places and do it all over again, hearing the grouching in their voices as they shouted out. That was good, so he stopped and had them taking mags out of their belt pouch, changing mags and cocking the weapon as fast as they could; shaking his head at the number of times they dropped them. He started them again and kept it up for half an hour until he had five very angry women glaring at him and sweating buckets.
“Jesus Wolfman, we’ve got it already!” He eyed them.
“Do you? You think you can do that when all hell is breaking lose around you, and the bad guys are shooting back? Or what if the person next to you goes down, do you stop and help them, or keep on shooting?”
“We keep on shooting.” One murmured.
“Too right you do! This is a make or break, with no second chances.” Even as he said it, Decker wondered if he was doing the right thing. Was this worth it?
Risking all their lives just to get a look inside the alien base, but it was more than that. They had to get by this roadblock and onto the next one and the one after that. It was hard enough taking trained soldiers into a possible firefight, let alone untrained ones. If anyone, or all of them froze at the moment-of-truth, they'd all be dead. So here it was, the moment-of-truth.
“Keep those weapons out of sight!” He hissed at CC, seeing the edge of a mag sticking out the side of the robes she was wearing. Several old, tatty blankets provided the necessary material, cut into wide strips like a poncho with a hole cut in them for their heads. They hung down front and back and concealed their equipment and weapons. One of the African American girls stood in for one of assholes team, but he was betting the UFMs couldn’t tell the difference unless they were close up. Unobserved, Decker switched frequencies on his TAC unit.
“How you doing over-watch?”
“In position and watching your cute butt, Wolfman.” He heard Joann chuckle.
“Get serious, girl. This is no time to screw around!”
“That’s what I was hoping to do.” She laughed nervously.
“You’re in for an ass whooping when this it over, Joann.” He growled.
“Promises, promises.” She muttered. “I have the closest mech zeroed in, Wolfman.” She added as the mech stopped and swung around to face the group. This close Decker got a better look.
“Center chest would be the best shot.” He dare not say more just in case the mech could pick up on his transmission. Whatever the devise the UFM put on Burrole chest worked, as the mech didn’t open fire and even the gate swung open as they approached. Holding on to Burrole's upper arm, he guided him through, thanking Doc Mason for the injection of Rohypnol to turn him into an obedient zombie.
“Here we go girls. Time to suck it up.”
The group entered, the girls looking dejected and beaten, shuffling along at the prodding of his rifle. Decker doubted the aliens could read human body language, but they might have become accustomed to the attitude of the people Burrole brought in. As he’d instructed them, despite lots of high-pitched sounds coming from the aliens around the compound they kept walking until they were in the center. At that point, the blue-skinned alien came out of a building and walked quickly over, waving his skinny, insect arms and chittering. The box hung around his neck made an unintelligible sound, and Decker guessed it was the translation device. What concerned him more was more grunts, as Decker thought of them, coming out of several buildings, but how many more were inside he had no way of knowing. Even so, he waited and gave them time to gather in small groups. As he’d seen from the drone, none of them was wearing the body armor he’d seen them wearing on the road, and he just hoped the ammo was powerful enough to punch through their carapace, or chitin, whatever it was. What worried him more was several UFMs walking towards the group with weapons, so it was now or never.
“Drop the hammer!” He yelled, shooting the blue alien in the face. The three-round burst hit, and its head exploded into greenish-yellow goo. Decker didn’t wait and switched targets, going to his knee and shooting at the grunts with weapons. As expected, the first few shots from the girls were a little wild as they screamed their lungs out in fear and excitement, but it did stop the grunts advance for a moment. If he expected them to run as humans would, he was wrong, and they charged straight at the group instead. This close in it was hard for the girls to miss, and they didn’t, slowly chopping them down one after the other. As suddenly as it started, the firing stopped, and they all looked around. Decker took a shuddering breath, and his hand shook as he reloaded. The aliens were a lot harder to kill than expected, and many of their round simply bounced off their exoskeleton. The look on the girl's faces told him they were experiencing the same gut wrenching fear, many down to their last mag.
“Reload!” Decker yelled in an automatic reflex, as he did the same. He shivered slightly as he saw three of the grunts had come within an arm’s length of the group, one even lay with his outstretch claw like hand touching Genie Clements’s boot, the body still twitching, despite being full of holes and minus it’s head. Decker shot them all again, just in case. The one odd thing was, the shorter light green grunts hadn’t charged them or taken part in the action. They simply ran to one of the sheds and stood there as if trying to protect it. Decker didn’t wait to find out if they were planning to do anything nasty, and shot all of them in three, quick short bursts.
“Oh shit! We did it.” Someone shouted.
“WOLFMAN-WOLFMAN! Are you okay?” Joann’s panicky voice yelled in his ear.
“Yeah, me and the girls are okay, how about you? You do any good?”
“Yeah, took two shots to take down that ugly mother fucking mech, but I did it.”
“Return fire?”
“Yeah they did, and boy was it fast and accurate, but as you said, fire and switch positions. I fired and dropped back behind a large boulder. Even so, that thing almost punched a hole through it. I did manage to damage it on the first shot, so the second took it down.”
“And the other one?”
“Same thing, but they are a bit stupid in their response.”
“Why do you say that?” Decker asked, eyes sweeping the compound for targets as he talked.
“’Cuz only one of them engaged me when I fired, yet the other one was only a few feet away and it didn’t bat a mechanical eyelid. It only took interest in me when I shot it… oh yeah, a shot in the lower torso works best. I guess it must have been a boy robot as that’s where the brains were. I managed to take out the second mech with one shot there.” Joann laughed at her own joke despite Decker’s growl.
“Deliberate or accident?”
“Deliberate! What do you take me for, a half blind recruit?” She laughed. “Oh, by the way, the auto guns on top of the walls are still active. Guess they must be for long-range work.”
“Okay, stay on over-watch for the moment, just in case.” He switched to the all hands frequency, telling them what was going on and to hold position for the moment. Bringing them all inside the compound at the same time put them at too muc
h risk with the auto defense weapons on the walls still working.
Decker eyed the auto turrets on top of the walls, seeing them swinging back and forth searching for a target. As he'd thought, for whatever reason the aliens only had them tracking for targets outside the walls, as they didn’t swing more than two hundred and seventy degrees at the most. That being the case, he concentrated on the inside of the compound, first carefully approaching, and searching each building. The moment he got inside and looked around, he got another shock. The long room was divided into narrow cubicles with seats with a kind of control board, but most of them were empty. A slight sound came from others down the room, and tiptoeing up Decker peeked around the edge and he knew what this place was. Sitting in the seat, one of the dark green insect beings was hooked to the control panel by a head covering helmet, and interactive gloves on the arms of the chair. Decker didn’t hesitate and taking out his sidearm, he shot the being through the back of the helmet. The moment it dies the instrument panel went dark, but Decker didn’t wait and went down the room and shot six more aliens through the head.
“What the hell…” Someone behind him muttered.
“Bio-mech units, or ROV’s, remotely piloted vehicles.” He said over his shoulder. Decker shivered. It was one thing to fight a living breathing being, no matter how alien and another to fight bio-controlled robots. They just kept coming no matter how many of them you killed. This place was nothing more than a local command station for an unknown number of vehicles and maybe the destroyers flying back and forth.
“Hey, Wolfman, this other building is full of the same control panels.” Decker shook his head and did a quick count. There were a hundred stations in just this one building alone. If the other was the same that was two hundred stations, but why so few operators? In addition, from what he’d seen so far, there weren’t enough operators to work all the units flying and walking around. That could mean each operator could control multiple units at the same time. That was a frightening thought, and given time to get all the stations up and running with operators, they could be facing an army of thousands of these unstoppable bio-mechs all over the place. He was ever willing to bet those star shaped drones were also ROV’s. Not a happy thought. The one good thing was the auto-turrets had stopped moving, so he was betting they were control from here. With the operators dead, they were just so much useless junk.
Checking the last one, Decker breathed a sigh of relief as no more UMFs were found. Next, he turned his attention to the auto turrets, approaching the first one with caution, just in case. Up close, the cannon didn’t look that impressive, just a four-foot wide half dome on a pedestal with two stubby protrusions on one side. The seams indicated that the weapon had the capacity of shooting up as well as from side to side, thereby protecting the compound from anything coming in from the sky, like RPG, mortar or artillery rounds. Just in case they could be operated from somewhere else, half a stick of PE and a remote detonator jammed under the lower edge of each, took all of them out with the touch of a button.
Now he could bring the rest of the teams in safely. The storage containers came next, and he again searched them with caution. They approached the first one, the one the light green grunts had tried to protect, and opening the door he saw the same long flat boxes he’d seen from the drone. All stacked one on top of each other, from floor to ceiling in the cool, air-conditioned container. Dragging one out he broke the simple latching mechanism, and flipped it open, not sure what to expect. Inside, nestled in protective cups were brown, leathery spheres, and it wasn’t until one of them moved that it dawned on him what they were. These were eggs of some kind, and the light green aliens were their nursemaids, just like an ant nest. Each of these aliens was bred for a specialized job, so the light green ones were nurse maids, the dark green ones had to be their equivalent of soldiers/ROV operators, the blue one sergeants’, and so on up the ladder to the yellow skinned ones, just as Doc surmised. He was betting it didn’t stop there, and somewhere there probably had to be female laying the eggs, on the mothership maybe, or more than one female, maybe a queen even.
“Food?” Krista Jackson asked. Decker shrugged.
“Let’s check the other containers and see what we’ve got.” One look inside was all he needed before he staggered back out and threw up, Krista Jackson and the others did the same.
“Rotten mother fucking assholes!”
The next one they opened was even worse, as a bunch of even smaller green aliens started chittering at them when they opened the door. By the way they were shielding their faces, the strong sunlight was hurting their eyes. Not that the girls cared, they shot them all and walked in to look around. It only took one look before they rushed out again. The answer of why the aliens hadn’t put ‘boots-on-the-ground’ yet was that they didn’t have them. With his guts still heaving, Decker went over and took a good look at the alien grunts, and it all made sense. Looking at the most undamaged one, he could see they were highly evolved insects, probably from a warrior class on their home planet, or the last one they came from. It made sense not to send a troop ship full of soldiers, when you could round up as many of the local inhabitant as you needed, and use them as incubators for the eggs. That way you didn’t have to worry about feeding the troops, recreation, or training while on the way. Inside the container there were row after row of naked humans in shallow tubs, stacked floor to ceiling, each curled into a fetus position on their backs, with one of the eggs nestled against their stomach. Many of the egg sacks were empty, and the larva inside had already burrowed into the victim, eating it from inside out. Decker could have handled that, until he realized the victim was still alive, eyes open and looking up at him, pleading for him to kill them. They knew what was happening, and he couldn’t imagine the pain and horror they were going through.
Whatever the aliens injected them with, kept them alive and conscious, but unable to move or prevent what was happening. He couldn’t think of a worse death than this, and even though Ken Burrole deserved it, he couldn’t bring himself to do the same to him. He needn't have worried, as on checking the man, he found him dead, face down in a muddy puddle where he’d landed when he knocked him down, and knelt on him. It was ironic in a way as the muddy puddle was the result of the liquid run off from the alien equivalent of a latrine. Burrole had drowned in alien piss, and in an odd way, a fitting death for him. He then remembered all the human prisoners near Bakersfield being herded towards similar building to these, and realized the same thing was happening to them. He had no idea how long the gestation period for the insect soldiers was, but by now the aliens could have ten thousand more biomechanical and grunts on the ground searching for more human incubators. The little green ones in that container or breeding shed, must have recently hatched or crawled out from inside their human host, as they were busily eating what remained.
“What do we do with the… um… well, the victims, sir?” Decker turned away and stood there looking off into the distance, feeling tears running down his face, tears he hadn’t felt for a long time. There was only one solution really, but he hated to give the order. He didn’t need too, as when he turned back Krista wasn’t there. Next, he heard the sound of shots, and watched in silence as the girls went from container to container and shot each of the victims.
“Delta team. See if you can round some gas, we are going to need it here.” He radioed.
“On it Wolfman.”
“It’s done, sir.” Krista had tears running down her face. Decker nodded, fearing his emotions would get away from him if he acknowledged the deed. Instead, he simply gave her a hard hug.
“Take you team up the road. There’s a Builder’s Mart and a True Value Hardware store up a ways. Set up a CP there and wait for the rest of the Pack. I’ll bring in the rest of them, as I want all the girls to see this, so they know what we are dealing with.”
“Yes, sir.” A quick motion of her hand had Alpha team fall in around her, and with wave, they took off at a run.
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br /> While he waited for Charley team, Decker poked around the compound. The rest of the containers were packed with supplies of one sort or another, all to equip the grunts when they emerged from the birthing sheds, as Decker thought of them. One odd thing he found was a stack of flat, black, leather like sheets cut in an odd design and crates of helmets. The black sheets were about a quarter of an inch thick, soft, and flexible in one way, but straighten out again each time he bent one in half. There were a lot of them, thousands even, but he didn’t make the connection until he looked into the alien equivalent to a grunt barracks. Instead of individual beds, the barracks had a large round pit in the center of the room, half-full of what he could only describe as sand. This had to be where they slept or rested, and in an odd way, it made sense. They were insects, not humans, and still had racial memories of sleeping this way.
Along the walls were shelving units to place the helmet and other equipment. The most prominent item was their clamshell body armor, hanging on what looked like a suit hanger, and it took a moment a connect the two. The flat sheets were designed to form into body armor, but he was more interested in how efficient they were. A close look showed that the quarter inch thick material was made up of several layers of the black stuff. One side was smooth and shiny, while the other soft and cushiony to the touch. An even closer examination of the shiny side with a magnifying glass brought a grunt of surprise from Decker. The material consisted of tiny octagonal segments that stretched and contracted as he pulled the material. This was way beyond any body armor here on earth, and he was betting the material was composed of nannies and a true, reactive armor. When hit it would tighten to stop the round, then relax back into its pliable state once the pressure diminished.
“Charley team reporting as ordered, sir.” He turned to look at Ruth Chandler. At 50, she might be one of the oldest women, but tough, competent and no nonsense.