Bug Hunts

by Mark Latham

  Regardless of the aliens’ origins, the marines had been trained to do but one thing – squash bugs. With that in mind, despite the odds, they opened fire with everything they had. Lycea, so long a frozen, desolate world, suddenly felt the heat of battle. Flamethrowers scorched the bugs, and carbines tore swathes through their endless, scuttling ranks. For a moment, it looked as though the few marines who had landed would be enough to turn back the swarm; but only for a moment. In the next instant, a flock of winged bugs swept from the snowstorm, hacking at the marines with scythe-like talons and battering into them with their full weight. Sergeant Idaho, a veteran of the Io infestation, authorized the use of the marines’ experimental grav-packs, taking to the air with four of his men and deploying their suits’ countermeasures to draw the winged creatures away from his team’s heavy weapon specialists.

  With Idaho drawing heat from the main force, the remaining marines began a fighting retreat to their dropship. However, the warrior-bugs were relentless, seemingly growing in number until they were like a huge writhing shadow looming from the snowstorm. As soon as they drew to close range, the strange weapons opened fire with a barking, screeching sound. Globules of glowing plasma energy lit the air like tracer fire. The organic ammunition, whilst insufficient to punch through the marines’ armor, did begin to melt it. Where the glowing ooze struck soft joins in the environment suits, it burned through in moments, opening the marines’ suits to the freezing, oxygen-free air. A few were dragged bodily into the dropship, their respirators keeping them alive. Others froze to death mid-battle, their sudden deaths a blessing in disguise as the monsters swarmed over their bodies, hacking and tearing them apart in seconds.

  Elsewhere, Sergeant Idaho and his small team successfully shook off the winged bugs and found themselves a defensible position to fight from while their grav-packs charged up for another burst. Unfortunately for them, time was one thing they did not have. Idaho’s comms-link crackled to life – the marines who had made it back to the dropship were under attack from something big, and they were prepping for launch to avoid having the crate destroyed by bug firepower. Realizing that he had allowed himself to be drawn too far from the dropship, Idaho ordered his team to pull back as soon as the grav-packs had charged. That’s when the ground began to tremble, and one of the big bugs that his men had mentioned came for him.

  The creature towered over them, six enormous legs holding up a muscular body; two powerful arms ending in scythe-like claws beginning to smash apart the glacial cover the marines had been sheltering behind. The monster’s head was protected by a broad bony crest, giving it the appearance of a hammerhead shark. Bundles of fleshy tubes drooped from its gaping maw, leading to a massive funnel-like protrusion in the beast’s chest. And that protrusion began to glow and spark as a super-charged ball of plasma built up inside it, ready to be discharged at the marines.

  The grav-packs lit green just as the bug prepared to fire its plasma weapon at the team. Barking an order to the others, Idaho hit his pack and boosted high into the air, as a massive surge of energy ploughed into the glacier behind him. One of his men was burned alive by the glowing green energy, and then Idaho felt the pain surge through his body as he realized he’d been hit. The spray from the monster’s chest-weapon had hit him on the leg, burning it off below the knee and knocking out his grav-pack’s stabilizers. He corkscrewed to the ground, hitting the ice as the monster bore down on him, claws slashing. The remaining two marines boosted clear, looking back in time to see Sergeant Idaho unloading his carbine into the monster, even as a swarm of smaller bugs swept into the narrow defile. That was the last anyone saw of the Hero of Lycea.

  Deadly Pursuit

  The dropship jetted from the planetoid’s surface, battling the howling storm and coming under intense fire from the sea of bugs below. Plasma weaponry melted holes in the ship’s wings, almost bringing them down; but the pilot skillfully brought his crate under control and initiated the thrusters to send them clear of the alien weaponry’s effective range. As the storm cleared and the dropship entered Lycea’s upper atmosphere, blips began to appear on the ship’s scanners. Above them, thousands of orb-like, luminescent creatures floated gracefully, trailing tendrils 100 feet long towards the thin clouds below. There was no time to take evasive action. As the tendrils contacted the ship’s hull, the jellyfish-like creatures latched on, pulling themselves in towards the fuselage even as the ship rocketed outwards towards space, collecting dozens of the creatures as it went.

  By the time the dropship appeared on the MSS Bodega’s viewscreens, the horrified marines could only watch as the drifting spores detonated, reducing the dropship to mangled debris, their comrades aboard it killed in an instant.

  The remaining marines set their vessel on high alert, and led an emergency council which also included the captain of the research vessel DSS Belladonna, and the lead scientist of the expedition, Dr. Albertus Kafka. Even as they discussed pulling out of Lycea’s orbit and regrouping with the second engineering team at Pallas, the Bodega suffered an impact from an extraterrestrial object, causing massive damage to the Faster-Than Light (FTL) drive. Helm reported incoming meteorites, slingshotting around Lycea as though they were intentionally being guided towards the cruiser. When a distress signal came in from the crew of the DSS Augustus in orbit around Pallas, the marines knew they were facing no ordinary bugs.

  In the ensuing chaos, the remaining marines used their cruiser’s weaponry to deflect the trajectory of the incoming meteorites while they evacuated to the Belladonna. Commandeering the research vessel, they steered away from Lycea’s orbit as the Bodega was destroyed in their wake and dozens more meteorites flew towards them. Refusing the pleas of the civilian crew to mount a rescue of the stricken DSS Augustus, the marines entered hyperspace as soon as they were able, leaving Lycea in the hands of the bugs.

  Araknyd Warrior strains utilise a strange type of bio-energy weapon, labelled a ‘stinger’, which draws power from the creature’s own body via a series of organic tubes.

  A Relentless Foe

  Using vid-captures and comms recordings from the battle on Lycea, STAR Command was able to piece together some information about the eight-legged bugs that Sergeant Idaho’s team had fought. When training videos began to circulate around marine bases, the new bugs quickly became known as Araknyds, due to their spider-like appearance, or officially Xeno Aranea Onocentaurus. The Marine Corps science and tech division theorized that the creatures did not originate on either Lycea or Pallas, but probably migrated there in the form of spores, locked in frozen meteorites that cycled through Hell’s Reach. These meteorites would have been trapped by the gravitational pulls of the many red super-giants in the region, and only by chance would they impact the occasional planet or moon. Perhaps, it was said, the aliens needed some form of atmosphere to develop from tiny spore to fully functioning monster, and the conditions on Lycea – while not ideal – were good enough to allow for the bugs’ rapid growth. On airless moons and volcanic worlds, the alien spore would likely be trapped in a form of undeveloped stasis indefinitely.

  The idea that the icy meteorites were somehow controlled by the Araknyds was laughed off. The creatures documented on Lycea displayed no means of achieving such a feat, after all, and the apparent intelligent redirection of the meteorites against the Bodega, Augustus, and Belladonna was put down to a freak meteor shower, the presence of which must have been disguised by radiation from solar flares. However, STAR Command declared Hell’s Reach a quarantine zone – even if the bugs couldn’t pilot meteorites like spaceships, they were still likely to be infesting any number of planets, moons, and asteroids in the region. The numbers observed on Lycea alone made open military action in the sector a practical impossibility. Better to leave Hell’s Reach and its denizens alone, at least for the time being.

  Twenty years passed before the Araknyds were encountered again, but it was not in Hell’s Reach. Further coreward, in the Wild Duck Cluster of the Scutum Reaches,
a STAR marine patrol of the fringe colonies received a distress signal from a herculanium mining colony on the planet Barnard-E32. When the marines arrived at the planet, they found it surrounded by the giant, floating spores that had previously been described in the outer atmosphere of Lycea. An unmanned probe to the planet’s surface confirmed the worst – the factory complex, stretching over 5 cubic miles, was infested with Araknyds. Before the probe was destroyed, it had scanned more than 100,000 alien life forms within the complex. Within hours, huge ice-meteorites began to encircle the planet, slingshotting around the orbit of Barnard-E32 and into the path of the marine patrol. A light-squeezed transmission from STAR Command sanctioned the use of a nuclear bombardment of the planet, and ordered that all potentially infected meteorites be destroyed. A vital work colony, 50 years in the making, was wiped out virtually overnight, because the risk of the Araknyds spreading to other worlds in the system was too terrible to think about. When more – and larger – meteorites were detected heading into the system from beyond the sub-sector, a semi-permanent taskforce was assigned to patrol the valuable assets of the Wild Duck Cluster, and STAR Industries sub-contracted the building of Sobieski’s Shield – the most widespread early-warning defense grid ever built outside the Sol system, covering a vast area containing nine systems.

  The Norma-36 system contains one of the oldest outer colonies, having been established during the very first wave of interstellar expansion. It is not the most advanced colony, having relied on generation ships to bolster its population over a long period of time. However, its people have successfully terraformed two worlds, and live a simple lifestyle in one of the great agricultural experiments of the interstellar age. In 2268, scientists on Norma-36 F22b, “Rylos,” detected a large band of unidentified bodies approaching from the outer system, some of which impacted the moon Yanto, knocking out the remote communications array on the moon’s surface. Upon investigation, colonial engineers were attacked by a swarm of vicious bugs. This time, abandoning the moon was not an option, and the STAR marines were called in to cleanse the comms facility on Yanto. This was the first time a prepared force had taken on the bugs with the odds in their favor, and despite high casualty levels, the marines were ultimately successful. The marines’ Demeter-class cruisers took out as many of the spore-meteorites as they could, although some were fired deeper coreward, beyond the sensor arrays of the colonies, headed for some unknown destination. Again, it seemed as though the Araknyds were working to some dire plan. In the years to come, battles would be fought on vast derelict ships, turned into little more than drifting hulks by the Araknyd meteors, and infested with hatchling bugs. The hulks themselves acted as transportation for the Araknyds, ultimately crashing into moons or barren worlds and unleashing an infestation of fully developed bugs onto previously untouched worlds. Since their discovery on Lycea, each new battle with the Araknyds shared a common feature – they were all closer to Earth than the last.

  The idea of the Araknyds enacting some sort of vendetta against the human race quickly became the subject of a philosophical debate rather than a scientific one. No-one in the Authority wanted to believe that the first truly intelligent life encountered in the galaxy was a species of murderous, xeno-morphic bug. However, any debate on the subject was soon to become moot.

  NO-ONE WOULD HAVE BELIEVED…

  Professor Harlan Forrester of the DSRS Goodwill was reputedly the first man to discover the nature of the Araknyd threat, though his work did not garner public attention until many months after the Lycea incident.

  Forrester was one of the scientists tasked with studying Hell’s Reach, using state-of-the-art astronomical equipment and relying largely on the data gathered from dozens of unmanned probes. Alone amongst his team, Forrester became convinced that an advanced form of life was present in the RSGC2 cluster – life-forms that were moving freely between the planets and moons of the region by riding upon meteorites and directing them on controlled trajectories through space. These observations were derided by the other researchers, who believed that the anomalous nature of the data was due to unidentified gravitational effects caused by the number of red super-giant stars in the sector.

  Following the Lycea incident, Forrester was mysteriously reassigned to a top-secret facility back on Earth. His colleagues on the Goodwill station did not even get a chance to say goodbye before a squad of STAR marines bundled him away on board a military transport. What became of the professor – and what role he now fulfils in the STAR Industries scientific branch – remains a mystery.

  Winged Araknyds use their forelimbs to make slashing, hit-and-run attacks. They usually carry small explosive spore-bombs on their bodies, laying them like eggs as they soar over the battlefield.

  Invasion: Earth

  The war against the Araknyds raged throughout the galaxy, with new pockets of infestation being discovered on remote space stations, planetoids, and distant colonies throughout human territory. While the Authority dithered on exactly how to address the threat of a space-faring race of bugs, the reality of that threat came knocking at their door.

  Five years ago, in 2283, the Araknyds’ plan – if it can be called such – finally came to fruition. How long the spore-infested meteorites had been traveling towards the Sol system was unknown, but when a cluster of them, thousands strong, appeared on long-range sensors based in the asteroid belt, the domestic fleet was dispatched immediately. Made up of SolNav (the Sol system naval defense force) and the USD Coastguard, the fleet quickly identified the gigantic rocks as Araknyd spore-carriers, and quickly set about destroying them. Fragments of ice-bound rock scattered across the system, landing who-knows-where. Some of the meteorites made it through wholesale, and, after weeks of desperate action by the domestic fleet, five meteorites passed through the defense grid and impacted Earth.

  Huge tidal waves crashed into the USA’s western seaboard, while impact damage ravaged eastern Europe and parts of central Asia. The meteorites dispersed their deadly payload of tiny Araknyd spores instantly, poisoning the immediate atmosphere and rapidly evolving into Centauran warriors. Every STAR marine sortie within 12 light years was recalled to Earth, as the Terran Army and national defense forces struggled to contain the threat. By the time the STAR marines put down the threat, over 120 million citizens had been reported killed worldwide in the disaster. The world was united in its mourning, and searching questions were asked of the Authority. The response was a declaration of war on the Araknyds. Plans were put in place to expand the STAR Marine Corps, drafting in volunteers from the Army, Navy, and Coastguard, and even from colonial security forces. New training facilities were built; vast resources were diverted to STAR Industries’ shipyards and weapon factories to bolster the fleet. Now, five years after the attempted invasion of Earth, one of the largest STAR Marine Corps task forces ever assembled is en route to the Centaurus Arm. Its mission – to find the source of the Araknyd threat, and erase it from the galaxy.

  Combating the Threat

  Perhaps the most difficult factor to overcome in actions against Araknyds is the aliens’ ability to “terraform” the surrounding environment. The spores that herald the arrival of an infestation multiply rapidly, in a nano-biological attack on a planet’s eco-system, blotting out the sun and slowly transforming the world into a barren, icy rock. Even after extensive clear-up operations on Earth, the areas most affected by the Araknyd invasion remain horribly polluted, with climate changing to arctic conditions and biological and radioactive contamination rife. Whenever Araknyds have gained a foothold on a world, they have instantly set about changing it to suit their needs, making the environment incredibly hostile for STAR marine operations.

  Marine platoons fighting Araknyds are almost always accompanied by specialist teams equipped with flamethrowers, thermal detonators, and incendiary-loaded grenade launchers, as extreme heat appears to damage the creatures more than any other offensive measure. In mature Araknyd eco-systems, sealed environment suits are essential kit, to
protect combatants from both atmospheric conditions and airborne bio-hazard. Close-quarter fighting against Araknyds is ill-advised; damage to environment suits exposes marines to a variety of fatal bacteria, while the creatures’ strange plasma weaponry is devastating at close range. The Araknyds also use some form of synaptic feedback system both to communicate with each other and to receive orders from whatever intelligence guides the swarms – at close range this feedback can cause severe neural pain in humans, and sometimes incapacitation. In sub-zero conditions, exo-suits have proven unreliable, while dropsuit troopers are prone to engagement from vicious swarms of winged Araknyds and airborne explosive spores.

  Thankfully the Araknyds do have other weaknesses that marine fireteams can exploit. Unlike Xeno-Parasites, Araknyds hunt mainly by sight, using motion-based vision in the thermal spectrum, as well as a form of bat-like echo-location – as such, thermal shielding and adaptive camouflage can conceal troopers from the bugs, especially at long range, while baffler grenades can sometimes cause mass confusion within a swarm. Anti-chitin ammunition has proven highly effective at stopping Araknyds when applied in mass volleys – using sentry gun emplacements to “herd” Araknyd swarms into the teeth of mass carbine volleys is one of the few tried and trusted tactics against Araknyd Warriors. Finally, Araknyds tend to lie dormant when a planet is at its hottest, hiding in vast subterranean burrows. Using pheromone traces extracted from slain bugs, anti-grav “smart nukes” have proven highly effective in penetrating these tunnel networks and detonating from within, often eradicating whole nests in the process.