More hounds were being created every day, hundreds of men who were dispersed throughout the vast military forces of the All-Father, and their newfound powers had proven highly effective.
In this case, a spine frigate had hurled itself against the meager orbital defenses of Odessa and created an opportunity for the hoard ship to enter the planet's atmosphere. Now as the All-Father's warship, Reaper's Lantern, chased the spine frigate through the nearby system, it was up to the legions of marines deployed from the holds of the Lantern to purge the alien menace from the planet's surface. If they moved quickly enough and engaged the garm with sufficient force, they could destroy the hoard ship before it made its escape. That was the devilish brilliance of the Hive Mind's stratagem, as the spine frigate was indeed far too dangerous to leave unattended, and yet with the Lantern drawn off to fight it, the hoard ship, once its hold was full, had a significant chance of escaping into orbit. It was a bloody grind of a strategy, the Hive Mind gambling that the caloric expenditure of the raid would yield a positive return after it consumed what was seized.
The same scenario unfolding on Odessa was playing out across human space, with nearly every planet in modest proximity to the battlefront being subjected to such raids. While a planet like Odessa might be only worth the weight of its ink-rock deposits to the UHC, to the garm it represented a world teeming with biomass. The garm likely cared not at all about the ink-rock, or the massive drilling operations and penal work force. Who, by the way, had chosen now of all times, Jorah laughed to himself grimly, to revolt en masse.
"You find present conditions to be amusing?" asked Hart, the skald special forces operator assigned to accompany Gorgon Company on their sweep of the southernmost quadrant of the vast wetlands region.
"Human space is being hit all across the battlefront by garm raiding parties, which increase in size and daring with every new assault, with all signs pointing to a pending attack of titanic proportions," observed Jorah as he used the barrel of his pulse rifle to move aside a low hanging tree branch so that he and the skald sniper could continue forward, "And yet, while Gorgon Company marches into the jaws of our enemy, a common prison riot is what occupies the time and attention of the UHC."
"Odessa Corporation has no interest in halting ink-rock operations over something so pedestrian as alien invasion," Hart laughed, the sound of it striking Jorah as rather affected, as if the sniper had honed his sense of humor in the mirror, for the sake of fostering camaraderie, rather than it being genuine mirth. "Let the Einherjar battle the beasts while UHC troopers shoot rioters until the convicts lose their appetite for revolt and return to their duties."
"Skald, I cannot tell whether you were making a joke or observing the truth, and I am distressed that either is perfectly appropriate," snorted Jorah as he recalled the sight of several dozen UHC troop transports sailing overhead during Gorgon's initial deployment, each of the ships heading for different penal compounds with a belly full of UHC troopers on a mission to quell the riots and put the convicts back to work. "It if were me, I'd put a gun in the hand of every man on this planet and point them at the enemy."
"Men are ill-suited to combat with the garm," responded Hart, his affected mirth gone in an instant as he unslung his rifle and peered down the scope, keeping it impossibly steady as he continued to trudge through the swampy terrain. "Better to do this on our own and let the UHC play the game of civilization without distraction."
"Good men fought and died with us on Tankrid, had I not seen it for myself I would be inclined to agree with you," said Jorah before checking his flanks to make sure that he and his fourteen man fighting force was keeping pace with the rest of Gorgon as the company marched in a broad formation across the quadrant. "I think in our years of war we have forgotten the strength of men."
Hart remained silent for a moment as the marines pressed onwards, as if considering Jorah's statement. After several moments, with only the sounds of insects and the sucking slush of armored bodies moving across the bayou, Hart turned slightly to speak.
"Do you recall much of your life before becoming a marine?" asked Hart, his voice having lost some of its usual hard edge.
Jorah did not have an answer at first. He found that as he attempted to delve into his memories, there was little to be found there but his time as an Einherjar. That, he quickly realized, was likely the reaction that Hart had been going for. Jorah was no different from the rest of the men who wore the mantle of humanity's defenders. Who and whatever he was before the war had been lost to the body forge, and there was no telling what he'd given up. Perhaps he'd been in love once, as a great many of his fellow marines yet clung to tattered memories of wives and girlfriends, though he could not recall. Certainly, he had family and friends, and likely a career, and yet all such things had been overwritten with military stratagems, combat tactics, and skill with the equipment of war. All but the basest elements of his personality remained, the rest of him was simply a marine, a walking rifle, a paper target, a war machine with only the most rudimentary of emotions and unique characteristics.
"You grasp my point then, Jorah, of Gorgon Company," said Hart, the edge having returned to his voice. As the sniper returned his attention to the ground ahead of them he added, "We have but one purpose, and no matter what horrors we face, the body forge awaits most of us. When a man dies, a real man, humanity has lost something, lost someone that it can never get back."
Jorah let Hart's words hang in the air, as he had no rebuttal or disagreement. The sniper was right of course, as so few of the marshals who went into the tunnels with the Einherjar on Tankrid had emerged from that battle alive. Other than poor and doomed Ajax, every other marine awakened in the body forge, ready to fight again. The marshals stayed dead, their loss felt by those they'd left behind. Perhaps, thought Jorah as he suddenly caught movement out of the corner of his eye, it was a blessing that so few human beings possessed the precise psych profile and physiology required to be a marine. Even with the right physical and mental properties, only a select few humans were able to cope with the body forge, and many of the aspirants ended up as simple warrior drones aboard ships and the star fortress Bifrost.
Gorgon Company had been dispatched to purge the southernmost quadrant of the Odessan wetlands, and Jorah had no doubts that if a UNC detachment had been assigned to accompany them, that plenty, if not all, of the human troopers would meet their deaths in this stinking bayou.
Hart was right, best not to waste the lives of men who still had them to live; better instead to march the Einherjar into the nightmare. His own death would count for little, thought Jorah, and humanity did not have the lives to spare.
"Well, hound, what lies ahead?" asked Hart, the question almost feeling rhetorical as the sniper peered through his scope.
Jorah flexed his fingers on the grip of his pulse rifle and drew in a breath. He let it out slowly as he focused his mind. Instantly, the dull ache of the garm presence in his mind was there. He breathed again and concentrated, letting his physical senses take in what was around him, including the movement in the bayou ahead. He could feel the garm out there, the pulse of alien life sliding against the edges of his consciousness, though it was a distant thing, almost faint.
"I don't know, there's a kind of, hmm, static that is layered over my sense of the beasts," stammered Jorah, working swiftly to acclimatize to the radically new sensations that were divergent from his only slightly less new awareness of the alien presence. "Almost like too many people talking at once, making it impossible to hear one voice."
"The garm only have one voice," observed Hart, pausing in his forward march to toggle his range-finder. "Something is wrong."
Now the sniper was talking about it, Jorah agreed with him, as if he'd been aware of it since making planetfall, but it wasn't until he was out in the thick wilderness did he recognize it for what it was.
In past raids the hoard broods were like beacons to his mind, and Jorah, along with the other hounds, were able to
move on instinct directly into contact with enemy elements. It usually turned into a race to fight their way through the defenders and destroy the ship before it could launch, and yet here the static was obscuring everything. If it had been over his headset the marine would have sworn his coms were being jammed.
Then it hit him.
Jammed.
The thick foliage of the bayou parted, and two uniformed men emerged from the tangle of vegetation. They bore the deep blue uniforms of Odessan security forces, though they were covered in blood and the fabric was tattered from tears and rips. They fell to their knees at the sight of scores of armored marines trudging through the swamp, and Jorah acknowledged that any man unprepared to witness two hundred or more pulse rifles pointed in his direction would fall to his knees. Jorah tapped two of his men to press forward and secure the security staffers, and he turned to Hart.
"You saw them long before they emerged," stated Jorah as he slowly moved forward in formation with the rest of his warriors, "Were you testing me? Seeing if I'd pick up on garm following close behind?"
"Partially. I have been notified through the skald channel that the penal facility in this quadrant has gone radio silent. There was a raid in progress, along with a UHC response. All non-responsive," answered Hart, "I was not fully convinced that those two men were, in fact, men at all. Thank you for the confirmation."
Jorah said nothing but checked his field map to see that the facility was only a few miles distant. He could see that one of the fleeing men had already expired, having bled out from what Jorah could now see were multiple gunshot wounds. The other was babbling somewhat incoherently about men that weren't men, though his words slurred into silence as the sedatives administered by the medic kicked in.
"Apologies, sirs," said the medic to Jorah and Hart, "It was knock him out or risk him exerting himself to the point of death. He's been injured severely, but I've got the internal bleeding addressed. Just have to keep him stable."
"Stretcher him and port him at the rear of the formation," Jorah said, and then, as the medic went about his duties the marine turned to Hart. "Men that are not men?"
"Let us make haste to this facility, before whatever nightmare is unfolding has ended, leaving us with only questions and corpses," answered Hart before he slung his rifle and began double-time marching through the muck in the direction of the facility.
Jorah motioned for his men to follow, and as word traveled down the line, Gorgon Company began pushing through the bayou.
After a swift mile, Jorah was able to hear the muffled crack of gunshots and knew they were getting close. The sound would have been much sharper had the fighting been outdoors. As it was the marine realized that most of what he was hearing had to be indoor fighting, indicating that whatever was happening inside the prison wasn't over yet.
The marines closed in on the facility. Just as they were able to see the outer edges of the rooftops sticking out above the swampy treeline, a flight of Ravens soared over them. In seconds the shooting started, and this time it was loud and clear.
"Contact! Contact!" came the call of the lead Raven, and the throaty roar of pulse rifles joined with the higher pitched staccato of conventional small arms. "Shooters in the towers and on the walls. UHC troopers pinned down on the launch yard."
"Copy Raven, neutralize the towers and we'll come through the wall," responded Jorah, thumbing the activator on his pulse rifle, his heart surging as the gun's plasma core thrummed to life. "Fire Team Theta, on me!"
The marines burst out of the thick swamp and stormed across the open ground between the murky treeline and the outer wall of the southern end of the complex. Their approach was anything but silent, as the men splashed noisily through the shallow water that surrounded the complex. Jorah could see clouds of three inch long leeches swirling through the churning water, and was thankful that none of them seemed able to graft onto his armor. Had a man without plate armor, like an escaping prisoner, tried to cross the fifty-yard wide leech moat, they'd have been overwhelmed. The marine would not have been surprised to discover a skeleton or two half-buried in the mud, the remains of men who had tried and died.
On his left, a Raven streaked across the sky, blazing away with its mounted pulse rifle and the cement guard tower, which was really just a glorified sniper's perch, exploded in a rain of debris. On his right, a figure in the tower fired a carbine rifle at the Raven. The flier banked hard and disappeared over the other side of the wall and Jorah could not tell if the man had been hit or not. The marine raised his rifle to return fire when a loud report rang out and the man with the carbine fell from the tower as his head exploded from a high-velocity projectile passing through it.
Jorah had two thoughts at that moment. The first was that Hart had slipped away without him noticing and set up a sniper position somewhere behind the treeline. The second was that the corpse that fell from the tower did not look quite right. He didn’t have time to dwell on the thought however, as the concrete wall loomed tall in front of him, topped with several more apparently human shooters. His men began exchanging fire with the defenders as the fire team moved forward, and Jorah winced as one of his men collapsed in a heap from several well-placed carbine rounds to the throat. Such was the cost of blitz tactics, though Jorah was certain he and the rest of his team would make good.
"Bring it down! Follow my line!" shouted Jorah, and he began firing bolts into the wall, starting at the base of it just above the water and working his way to the top, marking where he wanted his men to fire.
As he did, another boom came from the swamp and a shooter above was carried backward and out of sight from a high velocity round. As more marines focused on the wall the skald sniper dropped a third wall defender, giving the marines a reprieve from the hail of bullets.
Two men of Gorgon were now laying on the open ground, each one now covered in a writhing mass of leeches and insects as the swamp rose up to claim its latest meal.
A dozen other marines opened up, and the super-heated plasma tore and burned great chunks out of the wall. The prison complex was built to handle the harsh weather of the planet and keep prisoners inside. It was not built to cope with the concentrated fire of pulse rifles and yielded quickly under the sustained punishment. A second fire team joined them, and as Jorah's men vented their weapons the next group of marines pounded the widening gap in the wall.
Jorah racked the slide of his rifle and sprinted forward as soon as there was a space wide enough for him to fit through blown from the formerly solid piece of concrete. Had the Odessa Corporation thought the facility would suffer such an assault, they might have used a rebar skeleton for the wall instead of just a pre-fabricated slab of cheap concrete that stood upright.
The marine leaped through the gap and sprinted into the landing yard, sweeping his rifle back and forth across his field of vision. There were two UHC troopships in the launch yard, one of them buried nose down in the ground at a steep angle, enough to reveal that many of the troops inside had been crushed on impact. The other, thankfully, was in a standard landing position, though both mounted guns were silent, each with a dead gunner strapped to the mount. The landing yard was littered with bodies, a mixture of convicts, security staffers, UHC troopers, and something...else.
Five UHC troopers were still alive, pinned down on Jorah's side of the troopship. Now that Ravens were making strafing runs, and Hart's rifle continued its steady song, much of the outer walls and towers were cleared of hostile shooters.
Jorah pounded across the landing yard as he and his marines laid down fire against the central guard tower, the remaining threat to the exposed troopers and marines. It was reinforced with armor, and had several gun ports, though the punishing fire from marines and Ravens had temporarily silenced the guns. Whoever was inside had taken cover behind the already bent and smoldering armor, though at any moment they could emerge again and fire on the exposed marines.
"On your feet, troopers!" shouted Jorah as he rushed past the cr
ouching UHC men, "We have to clear this area!"
The marine leveled his rifle at the main access door and drove several bolts through the hinges and lock. He did not want to chance being exposed any longer than they were, especially if the shooters in the tower had anything heavier than the carbines they'd been using. He was already three marines down, and there was no telling what awaited them within the compound.
Jorah vented his weapon as he ran. Two marines sprinted past him to hurl themselves shoulder first into the doors. He brought up his rifle just as the marines battered the doors off their hinges. He turned on his mounted light and plunged into the darkness within.
Jorah's lights displayed a primary corridor painted in an off-white that almost glowed in the illumination from the marine's weapon and body lights. More marines poured in behind him and used their pulse rifles to blast away the barred metal sets of doors, all three, that were designed to manage the flow of convicts to and from the yard. If the hostile shooters had hoped to hold the facility, they were in for a significant disappointment.
Jorah moved into the central chamber of the prison complex, where he could see that there had indeed been a riot. However, as he looked more closely, it appeared to have gotten much more violent, more like a battlefield. Blood and gore were everywhere, though not a single body in sight.
“Fan out in pairs, sweep the facility," said Jorah as more and more marines began to pour into the compound.
He knew he should acknowledge the UHC troopers, though as they entered the chamber it was clear that they were still in a state of shock.
Jorah had to remind himself that most human soldiers had not seen much combat outside the occasional police action or separatist insurrection, and both were usually rather short-lived. Hart appeared by his side, the skald not even breathing heavily despite his likely sprint across the distance.
"No bodies, but perhaps an indication of where they were taken," said the sniper flatly as he pointed towards several thick smears of blood.
Space Marine Apocalypse (Extinction Fleet Book 3) Page 8