The marine pulled back the slide of his weapon, being careful to point the breach away from himself and his comrades to that when the white-hot jet of excess heat rushed out of the weapon there were no injuries. More than once a marine had been forced to use the vented heat as a weapon when pressed by hand to hand combat and struggling for time to get his weapon back online. Thankfully, Mahora was in the process of buying Ajax and the others a few seconds to vent and reload, and the marine knew that it was likely the last clean reload he was going to get.
The barricade felt as if it nearly buckled from the multiple shockwaves of the grenade launcher. An instant later, clouds of shrapnel and torn garm bio-armor impacted against the surface.
Mahora staggered backward and dropped the grenade launcher, prompting Ajax to look up as the jarl fell onto his back. Ajax jumped to his feet, risking a second glance at the jarl before turning towards the enemy. Mahora was still moving and alive for the moment, but his armor was dented in places and shorn away in others, not to mention covered in alien gore.
With a split second to react, Ajax snapped his rifle to his shoulder. The ridgebacks were right on top of them, and all that kept Ajax alive was the swiftness with which he drew down on the beast in front of him and squeezed the trigger. The marine's bolt went into the creature's open maw and down its throat, causing it to trip and slam its bulk broadside into the barricade before its lower half was blown apart by the plasma round.
More ridgebacks smashed into the barricade, many of them shrugging off the bolts from marine rifles, their chitinous armor holding strong. The sheer force of the impacts, made more powerful by the weight and momentum of the beasts, broke the hasty welds on the barricades.
Ajax scampered backward and fired at a ridgeback that was attempting to haul itself awkwardly up over the bent front of a civilian vehicle, even as another bashed its head over and over into the front of the vehicle. Ajax could see that in another second or two the barricade would fall, but he and the others had to make a stand. That was the plan, and so he kept shooting.
A scream of pain from behind him caused Ajax to glance over his shoulder, looking just in time to see a ridgeback plow over the chain-fire's position. The beast, already missing huge chunks of its torso and hindquarters, drove its face into the barrel of the weapon. Though Silas blew a hole neatly through its skull the body's forward momentum knocked the chain-fire off its tripod and sent the marine sprawling. Ajax pumped several rounds into a ridgeback that attempted to push through the fresh gap in the barricade, though before he was able to make the kill something heavy slammed into his side.
Ajax kept his grip on the rifle, but the impact sent him tumbling. He blinked and shook his head as he flailed back and away from whatever had hit him. As his vision cleared he realized that he'd been struck by the broadside of a vehicle.
The ridgeback swarm poured through the gap. The marine pushed himself to his feet and put his back to a section of barricade that remained firm. Suddenly, Mahora was at his side, his ravaged armor even more battered and broken. Ajax realized that the jarl was missing his left arm.
"Aren't you glad to be back?" rasped the jarl, and though much of his faceplate was spattered with blood from the inside, Ajax was pretty sure the man was smiling, "Another day in paradise!"
With that, the jarl raised his service pistol and began firing at the ridgebacks that spilled into the makeshift courtyard created by the barricades enclosing the four-way intersection. The other four marines protecting the two streets that had yet to be attacked had turned from their positions and were shooting at the alien beasts, drawing the enemy deeper into the intersection.
Ajax breathed deeply and drilled three shots into the haunches of a ridgeback that rushed past him, the beast ignoring Ajax in favor of charging one of the fresh marines on the other side of the intersection. The beast's lower half exploded, and Mahora finished it off with a shot through the eye as the grievously wounded beast relentlessly crawled forward with a single-minded hunger.
In the press of alien bodies, Ajax had lost sight of the other marines and he knew that he only had seconds to live. Ridgebacks were everywhere and without any cover between his body and their appendages, it would be over soon.
Mahora shouted and continued shooting and Ajax wondered if the jarl himself was drawing close to the blackout. Ajax felt it come in waves, the darkness that sought to swallow him whole and fill his mind with unending violence. He had been able to manage it with Hart's help, using breathing and meditation to calm himself when he could, and while it seemed to be working for him, something about Mahora made Ajax think the jarl was an unlikely candidate for meditation.
Ajax shot his tenth round and took a knee, maintaining his fire discipline with the practiced grace of a thousand such battles. He saw out of the corner of his eye that a ridgeback had set its attention upon him, and the creature roared in fury as it charged him.
Rack the slide.
Vent the heat.
Eject the spent magazine.
Settle the fresh magazine.
Insert the magazine into the feed.
Rack the slide.
Ajax rose to his feet and looked down his iron sights at the oncoming ridgeback. He was about to die, again, but he would go out shooting.
Before Ajax could squeeze the trigger, the ridgeback's head exploded. An instant later the report of a sniper rifle reached the marine's ears. The force of the high-velocity round put the dying beast off balance, and its front limbs collapsed, sending its bulk slamming into the pavement and sliding to a stop in front of the marine.
The sniper's shot was followed a second later by a barrage of gunfire as muzzle flashes illuminated the city gloom from every nearby building. The trap was sprung, thought Ajax, and now was the time to make good.
The ridgebacks went down hard as their swarm was chewed to pieces by sustained fire from all sides. The marines had paid a heavy price to set up this ambush, from the shriekers to the hybrids, and now this.
It was glorious.
The beasts stampeded across the open ground, unable to escape the withering fire, and in a few minutes, every garm lay dead or dying in the street.
There was little time to celebrate, however, as the company channel erupted with radio traffic.
"Ravens just sighted a burrower north of the refugee checkpoint," announced Jarl Mahora as he slotted in another carbon magazine and started sprinting down the broken street in the direction of the checkpoint while announcing, "Hydra Company bounding to intercept!"
Ajax was exhausted, as were most of the marines, but he pushed himself up from his kneeling position where he'd been resting and started running. Under normal combat conditions, they wouldn't rush so heedlessly across contested ground, but with the lives of so many civilians hanging in the balance, there seemed little choice.
"I thought you died!" said Ajax as Rama appeared next to him, covered in alien gore and missing his right arm from the elbow down, his pupils dilated by the combination of the pain he was enduring and the stimulants that were keeping him in the fight. "Lost sight of you back there."
"This particular batch of space bugs appear to be horrible at their jobs," laughed Rama as he kept pace with the other marine. Then he held up his damaged arm, "But they are getting better."
Ajax couldn’t help laughing at the man's relentlessly cheap gallows humor, and oddly he found it helped him keep his energy up, so he stayed at the breakneck pace set by the jarl.
It was a solid ten minutes of movement before they reached the refugee camp. On the left, Ajax could see the makeshift barricades and wire fencing that other marines had erected to pen in the refugees. They had to make the checkpoint process as efficient as possible to screen out the handful of hybrids that launched continuous suicide raids on the camp. At this point, it seemed like the hybrids just wanted to kill and feed, much of the higher thinking and planning having left their minds.
"Burrower ahead!" said Mahora as the Raven spotter soared
over them and fired a flare down into a building that had been riddled with artillery and half burned.
The marines fanned out in a wide line and approached the building. Off to the side, Ajax caught a glimpse of the ponderous beast bashing its head through a buried section of wall as it attempted to create a new tunnel. Dozens of marines moved up to start shooting at it and he could see that all the infrastructure had it trapped. The burrower would have eventually been able to smash through the underground tunnels, pipes, and walls to make a new tunnel, but it would have taken valuable minutes that the beast did not have.
As the others shredded the massive creature, Ajax began to feel like something was watching him from behind. He turned and saw the destroyed building. At first, he couldn't see anything, then he noticed what appeared to be a rising dust cloud. That was odd, given that it was inside the shattered walls. The marine took a step towards the building, and that was when the ripper swarm erupted from the building.
"On the right!" shouted Ajax as he shouldered his rifle and opened fire, his bolts tearing into the enemy as they emerged in tightly packed groups.
Other marines joined in, and it became clear that the beast had already dug out a muster burrow under the building. Ajax kept firing, the knot in his stomach growing tight. The rippers were ignoring the marines who cut into their ranks, and instead, were surging towards the refugees. Normally the garm were beasts that attacked the strongest enemy first, and to see them going for the easy meat was galvanizing.
A chorus of alien howls sounded behind him, and as Ajax turned around, he realized why the others weren't coming after the marines. Another burrow opened up on their flank and gorehounds began pouring out of it, their weapons already spitting deadly projectiles. Ajax dropped one of the gorehounds with four swift rounds and then vented his weapon. He did his best not to think about the sound of screaming and tearing metal fencing coming from behind him, and focused on raising his weapon to fire.
His iron sights were filled with the body of a gorehound as it rushed him while aiming its own bio-weapon. The muzzle of the enemy's weapon flared with a sickening green light even as Ajax squeezed the trigger of his pulse rifle. The last thing the marine saw was the gorehound's head exploding.
The last thing he felt was the hideous sensation of voracious grubs eating their way through his body and exploding wetly inside him.
ALL IS MIST
Ajax was still shaking off the haze of his latest resurrection when Hydra Company made it dirtside.
The pace of the war had reached a tempo that all but guaranteed slain marines an excruciating recovery from the body forge. When recovery was measured in hours and not days, the mind of even the most hardened marine had to adjust to the new body.
Considering that the flesh he now inhabited, or had been awakened within, as it were, was less than a day old, Ajax assumed that the splitting headaches were the least of the possible side effects. Next to him in the shallow trench, Silas had his faceplate open and was retching into the loamy soil. Ford had not spoken a word since they were loaded into the transport for launch from orbit down to the surface, and Ajax knew that like him, the marine was doing his best to maintain his composure.
It was a risk, pushing their bodies and minds so hard, but one that had to be taken. Ajax could not recall the details of his most recent death, his torc having been left on the field when the Einherjar were forced to abandon the resort world of Balor.
It was a loss that stung the Watchman deeply, according to the talk aboard Bright Lance, as it was a planet rich in biomass. Rather than yield it to the enemy, to provide much needed organic matter for the garm breeding chambers, the Watchman had ordered the warships Bright Lance and Storm Chaser to sterilize the planet with nuclear ordinance.
Ajax, of course, remembered nothing of that chapter in his life, but as he was re-briefed in transit from the warship to Ageron's surface, he was almost glad of it.
A significant battle group from the extinction fleet had pushed hard into the Ursine quadrant, and stout Einherjar and UHC resistance had broken the group into several pieces in a titanic space battle and bloody ground war centered around the trading hub world of Ursine Maximus. Somehow, Ajax had survived the entire two weeks of intense combat without dying once, though afterward, the Bright Lance had pursued a hive ship to the nearby resort world. Ajax had died there, along with most of Hydra Company, in a trench along the third parallel of the Einherjar line. The retreat was sounded before any torc recoveries could be made, and then the planet was nuked from orbit.
Weeks of his life gone, the entire Ursine Maximus campaign erased from his mind, existing only as a modest report in his service record. Ajax was like every other marine and had suffered this way before, which is what made a marine's service record so important. The record was the story of a marine's life, written down in history so that even if his own memories failed him, there were his deeds, etched in a tablet of titanium bearing his name.
Ajax took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. Since his return to duty, he could still sense the sinister pulse of the garm. When he'd been slain on Tankrid by the traitor, Skald Thatcher and his squad of rogue skalds, Idris claimed that he was somehow rendered comatose upon resurrection, despite numerous attempts. Though Ajax had no knowledge of Thatcher himself, now referred to as Loki by most Einherjar, the eyewitness accounts of UHC marshals and surviving marines who had caught glimpses painted the picture of a vile enemy indeed. The monster had been out there, operating in the shadows, orchestrating this epic conflict between garm, hybrid, and mankind.
Idris had been correct in his thinking that the Einherjar forces would take the return of marine Ajax as a sign of the potency of the narrative strategy. Though his memories of his return to battle were gone, it had become clear that his presence in the ranks once more was a significant boost to morale.
For all the good it had done, thought Ajax grimly as he looked out at yet another battlefield and wondered if they would be able to hold the ground.
"I think the Watchman has it out for us, brothers," mused Rama as he thumbed the activator of his pulse rifle, the snarl of the weapon coming to life snapping Ajax out of his reverie. "We haven't pulled escort duty or rearguard in a long time, in fact, we've been the tip of the spear since Rakka. Wouldn't it be nice to pull security on a nice convoy or maybe babysit an artillery position?"
"He just doesn't like you, Rama," retorted Silas, his own rifle tucked neatly into his shoulder so that his view of the ground before them was through his iron sights. "The rest of us are collateral damage."
That got a muted chuckled from the marines gathered in the shallow trench, a response that Ajax thought fitting of the battlefield they found themselves upon. In truth, the general consensus was that the Watchman had come to believe in the now discarded narrative strategy, be it through critical analysis or desperation, and wasn't being honest about it. It was conspicuous how relentless the Watchman had been with the deployment of Hydra Company and by extension the Gorgon, Cerberus, and Manticore companies.
Those groups of marines, Hydra chief among them, had been at the center of the conflict on Heorot, and then the core of Task Force Grendel. Once they had returned to regular duty the Watchman had made no efforts to hide the fact that he was intentionally hurling the marines into the worst parts of the war. After the Bifrost fell, the Watchman had seemed to double down on his commitment to putting the marines at the vanguard of the bloodiest conflicts.
If he was as he was waiting on Ajax to transform into some legendary hero, thought the marine as he continued to breathe, nursing his headache as best he could. As before, during his days on Task Force Grendel, the marine could focus his mind and sense the presence of the higher garm organisms. The WarGarm creatures that ruled the individual brood swarms could not hide from the man they still called the Bloodhound to his face, and Beowulf behind his back. The enemy was drawn to him, as if he had a beacon in his mind that broadcast to the Hive Mind, and it had become c
ommon knowledge that wherever Ajax stood his ground, the garm were surely to come. That, apparently, was a quality that the transmuted cells harvested from Ajax by Idris could not replicate amongst the ranks.
The Watchman had, it seemed, begun to use that unique quality in Ajax as part of a greater strategy that was quite beyond the marine's understanding. All he knew was that when Hydra took up a position, the garm were not far behind.
Soon the thunder of hooves and the flap of leathery wings would sound, Ajax told himself, and the swarms would appear.
The wind-swept landscape of the planet Ageron was a gloomy place, even if one of a somewhat primordial beauty. The small planet had little in the way of biodiversity, and only parts of it were above the churning dark waters. A land of volcanoes and glaciers, where fire and ice were at constant odds with one another. The island they found themselves upon was Ageron Primus, the largest of three tremendous islands far north of the equator.
Why they were here was still a mystery. Command had been conspicuously tight-lipped about their mission here and had only issued the most basic of orders. Seize and fortify Ageron Primus, then hold position.
Jarl Mahora had been furious at the orders, especially given that much of the rest of the Ursine quadrant was being consumed by the extinction fleet. Ageron had no strategic value, being far from the established shipping lanes, bereft of natural resources that would yield enough tonnage to justify the extraction, and with volcano and glacial formations that were unpredictable enough to prevent long-term settlement.
Why push marines through the resurrection process mere hours after nuking Balor and then go screaming across the void to reach the orbit of Ageron?
Even if the extinction fleet shattered the blockade of ships that still fought to protect what was left of the Ursine quadrant, there was little here for the garm. Much wealthier worlds were near their last point of contact with the enemy, and yet, here they stood.
Space Marine Apocalypse (Extinction Fleet Book 3) Page 14