Marines on the outside had scrambled to follow their commanding officer, and the order had been passed on inside the tube. Marines were pouring out of the breach in the tube and rushing towards the two demons riding the sheath being deployed over the tube. The sheath had by this time crossed the point where the tube split into two, going around either side of the sphere. One half of the sheath had split and gone one way and the other half of the now semicircular sheath had gone the other way.
The fighting Marines and the demons were now past the split point, and as they rode the sheath they were going around the sphere along with the tube. The two demons riding the sheath, being on opposite sides of the tube circumference had split in two different directions. It was one of the reasons why it would have been difficult for the buddy demon to come to the aid of the demon fighting Desmond. So, it had to be the suited demons who had to come to the aid of the demon fighting Desmond.
One of the suited demons jumped on to the wire mesh sheath, leaving the other to finish the deployment. The demons without suits were surefooted on the wire mesh surface of the sheath, probably because the sheath had been designed for demons to walk on them. The suited demon wasn’t as sanguine about its footing on the sheath. It progressed relatively slowly, occasionally taking a short hop using its suits jets. Before the suited demon could reach its comrade though, two Marines had reached the spot to join the fight along with Desmond. Between the three of them, the Marines had the demon cornered.
The other two Marines hadn’t been able to latch their cattle prods to any of the limbs of the demon, but every time they thrust it towards the demon, it was extra wary of the device and moved away defensively. It was the turn of the humans to suffer the consequences of distraction. The three Marines were so engrossed in their fight with the demon, that they failed to notice the approaching suited demon from behind.
The approaching suited demon didn’t waste any time. He deployed his suits retractable blade that emerged from the tip of the forelimbs. That retractable blade had given a lot of grief to the Marines when fighting the suited demons outside their Goliath ship. It had wounded Lt. Col Chichi Jiǎng - CO 5th Battalion, Desmond’s fellow officer, putting him temporarily out of action.
The demon used its considerable momentum as it approached the scene to drive the blade straight through the back of one of the Marines. It was a gruesome sight! The blade pierced the Marine and emerged out of his chest along with some of the internal organs stuck to it. The scream did not come from the assaulted Marine, who was dead within seconds. The scream came from his comrade, who was shell shocked by the gruesome sight.
The scream and the gruesome sight had the opposite effect on Lt. Rohit Sharma. He was shocked out of his trance. From the time Desmond had jumped off the hatch of the sphere, asking him to ‘figure it out’, Lt. Sharma had numbly watched the Marines fight the demons without a clue as to how to go about sabotaging the massive mechanism in the sphere. After watching his brother Marine die so terribly, something snapped in his brain. He made his decision.
“Push me in.” He said to Pvt. Rama Songathorn.
“Sir!” Pvt. Songathorn said in surprise.
“I said help me get inside the hatch, Private! The hatch is tight with the suit, and I will not be able to get in without you pushing me in.” Lt. Sharma explained.
“Sir, that is sure death! You are asking me to push you to your death!” Pvt. Songathorn protested.
“Look around you private, we are all going to die if we don’t do something fast… I would rather die fighting, in my own way. I am not a fighter like them, but I can do my bit in the fight. I would rather die fighting… trying. Those Marines are sacrificing their lives to protect us, they are depending on us. Do you get it Rama? I am not asking you, that is a direct order. Help me inside.” Lt. Sharma shouted at Pvt. Songathorn.
“I understand sir. Here, let me latch my tether to yours, that way you can pull me inside once you are through.” Pvt. Songathorn replied.
“Rama, I am making wild guesses here. Even I don’t have much hope that what I am trying will work or make any difference. That is alien technology way beyond anything that humans have wrapped their head around. The chances of success are dismal. You want to give your life for that?” Lt. Sharma asked.
“I have done the math too, sir. You will not be able to cut enough cables to make a difference by yourself before you…” Pvt. Songathorn left the words hanging. Then in a more optimistic tone he continued. “It will work sir, I trust you. No. I have faith in you, and in Buddha!”
Lt. Sharma didn’t say anything more. He simply started positioning himself to enter the hatch. Pvt. Songathorn was right. He had a twelve to fifteen-minute window to function inside the sphere. He wasn’t sure how many cable he would be able to cut in that time. Maybe the cables were made with some super tough alien technology. The Goliath ship’s computer may be able to compensate for a few cables cut. They might have to cut a lot of cables to make the thing non-operational. Another hand would help and increase the chances.
It was a hard wriggle getting inside the sphere even after being pushed from behind. It was easier to pull the Private with his tether relatively. Once both were inside. Lt. Sharma motioned Pvt. Songathorn to get to work, point to the nearest cable that he intended to take first. “Remember, the rotary cutting head is not big enough to cut from one side, you will have to turn yourself around the cable. Anchor yourself well before starting, you will go faster that way. Otherwise you will waste too much time recovering from lost footing. If after the entire turn, it still doesn’t cut, try banging it with the cattle prod. Good luck!”
While the engineers got busy cutting cables, the Marines fighting the demons on the wire mesh sheath were experiencing see-saw change in fortune moment to moment. After the grisly sight of the Marine being gored, Desmond and the remaining Marine were fighting for their lives avoiding the suited demon who had deployed blades on both his forelimbs. Within a few seconds though, four more Marines joined the fight tilting the balance a bit in favor of the humans once more. However even six e-Marines were no match for two demons.
One of the Marines was badly injured with a blade piercing one side of his torso. Only his enhanced state allowed him to stay conscious and alive, but he was out of the fight. He had a different fight now – the fight to stay alive. The synthetic blood corpuscles were working overtime to stem the blood flow, but Pvt. Ningoyo knew that some of his critical organs were likely to have been damaged.
Just as the demons were gaining upper hand, the suited demon did something strange. It abandoned the fight, and left its injured comrade to die! One of the independently roving eye stalks of the suited demon had noticed something that the human fighters with their eye fixed inside their skulls had missed. The suited demon had noticed humans getting inside the hatch of the sphere. The demon let out one of those ear-splitting banshee screams to register its alarm and then simply jumped off the wire mesh sheath, using its suit jet to move towards the open hatch of the sphere. The other suited demon, who had finished the deployment of the sheath and was rushing towards the fight, also gave up its effort to save its comrades and instead jetted towards the hatch of the sphere.
Desmond was too busy in his fight with the other demon to immediately realize the importance of this move. He along with the Marines continued fighting with the injured demon, gladly accepting the turn in the tide as a lucky break. The injured demon was slowing down, and one of the Marines managed to approach from behind and clamp his cattle prod on to the disproportionately large folded hind limbs of the demon. When he turned on the rotary cutting head of the cattle prod, something amazing and at the same time frightening happened.
It was not clear to the Marines whether the cattle prod’s cutting through the exoskeleton triggered the startled response, or whether the cattle prod cut through the restraint on the hind limb that held the tightly wound muscles in place. Whatever the case, the result was that the hind limbs released with an
explosive snap and the demon jumped upwards at a fantastic rate. The Marine holding the cattle prod got pulled along, but his tether retrained him after a point and the cattle prod slipped out of his hands. The demon just kept going towards its death, as it got caught in the rotating artificial gravity of the ship, spiraling down to the inner surface in a curve that beautifully demonstrated the Coriolis effect.
It was only a few moments after that dramatic jump that Desmond could get himself to bear on the fact that the suited demons had sacrificed their comrades to protect something that must be higher priority to the demons. It was obvious what that higher priority objective was. One of the demons had stuck one of his forelimbs inside the hatch in a futile attempt to try and drag the humans out. The humans were well inside cutting cables, while the hatch was too small for a demon to get inside. The hatch was meant for maintenance drones to be pushed through. It wasn’t meant for demons or any organic creature to get through it.
The other demon had latched on to one of the hand rails next to the hatch using one of its walking limbs. It was jealously guarding the hatch. Now with its back to the sphere, the demon did something that the demons hadn’t done yet. The demon fired its needle gun!
The results were astounding and horrific to the Marines at the same time. The demon had fired the gun towards the breach in the tube, through which Marines were still exiting. The needle caught the first Marine floating outside the tube in front of the mouth of the breach. The needle went right through him to the next Marine who was at the breach in the process of exiting. The needle went through her as well to the next marine waiting to exit the breach. There was no one behind this Marine, so the needle continued its journey hitting the inside of the central axis tube at an angle, singed through the material of the tube and made an exit, leaving a keyhole sized hole in the tube wall!
It was becoming clear why the demons hadn’t fired their weapon on the Marines till now. Whether their needle gun would be able to penetrate the two-meter-thick wall of the sphere wasn’t clear, but irrespective would have caused a fair amount of damage to it. Now that the demons had their back to the sphere, they could safely use their deadly needle gun.
Desmond figured it out in moments. None of the Marines would live long if the demon kept firing its gun. The demon had to be stopped immediately. There was no time to think of the consequences of what he was about to do, so he just did it. He unhooked his tether and jumped! The deploying sheath had carried Desmond along with the curving central axis tube towards one side of the hatch. When he jumped, he was to one side of the hatch and approaching it and the firing demon from the side. At the distance Desmond had made the zero G jump, his chances of hitting his target, even one as large as a demon was less than fifty percent. By Desmond’s reckoning, that was better odds than his odds of survival if he did nothing.
If Desmond had been approaching a human opponent, he could have reasonably hoped that the human looking out in front towards the breach would miss seeing him approach. However, he wasn’t fighting a human opponent! The roving eye stalk of the demon could look in every direction, with each of the eye stalks roving independently of each other. The two eye stalks only focused on the same object together when it needed to judge distance stereoscopically.
One of the eye stalks caught Desmond approaching. The demon made a slow and clumsy zero G turn towards Desmond, aimed and fired. It wasn’t the lousy aim of the demon that saved Desmond. The demon was still in floating motion when it fired, and that screwed up the needle’s trajectory.
If the demon had gotten the chance to pull off another shot, Desmond wouldn’t have survived. Fortunately for Desmond, he slammed into the demon before that. With the momentum Desmond was flying towards the demon, he couldn’t have held on to it by latching on to some part of its body with his arms. Desmond knew it, so he didn’t even try. Instead he used the momentum to his advantage.
He flew into the demon with his short sword drawn out, aiming to jam the tip of the sword into the separation between overlapping armored plates on the underbelly of the suit of the demon. It wasn’t as risky a maneuver as it may have looked, once Desmond was certain that his jump had been accurate enough for him to bang on to the demon.
Desmond had seen one of his Marine’s sword stuck in the underbelly section of a demon’s suit while they were fighting the suited demons on the outside of the ship. The underbelly of the demon suit had to bend quite a bit to give freedom of movement to its wearer, while protecting it at the same time. The demon suits were designed with overlapping armored plates at many places, but the underbelly allowed the plates to not just slide over each other, but also separate out from each other to let the underbelly bend. The underbelly plates were held together using softer, pliable material that allowed them to move but made the suit airtight. From the direction Desmond approached, the sword would naturally wedge itself into the overlapping gap between two plates if he was able to ram the tip into any point on the underbelly.
The sword found its target, and as a bonus ruptured the soft connecting material between the two plates. The tip lodged itself shallow into the chitinous underbelly of the demon. It wouldn’t hurt or injure the demon much, if at all. However, the demon’s suit was no longer space worthy, although that didn’t make any difference inside the ship at that moment. Desmond was praying that his sword would be strong enough to take his weight, especially given the momentum he had generated with his desperate jump. The sword held, but for a reason and with consequences that he had not anticipated before he jumped.
Although the demon had anchored one of its walking limbs to the grab rails, the rest of its body was free floating. When Desmond wedged his sword to one side of the body of the demon, his straight-line momentum was transferred to the demon as a twisting torque! The body of the demon twisted such that the angle at which the sword had embedded into the armor of the demon opened, threatening to dislodge the sword from the suit! Desmond watched in horror, but there was nothing he could do, but to hold on to the sword for his dear life. It was the demon who saved Desmond by involuntarily resisting the twisting motion by stiffening its anchored limb, and grabbing the rails with another of its walking limbs.
Desmond may have succeeded in stopping the demon from shooting any further, and he had certainly managed to draw its attention. That was about as much he had managed on the upside. On the downside, he was untethered with both his hands occupied in holding on to the sword for his life, while the demon slashed and lunged at him with its blades and at the same time shook itself violently to dislodge the sword that, as far as Desmond was concerned stuck tenuously to the suit of the demon.
Desmond was helpless in either defending himself or attacking the demon. The only saving grace was that Desmond was lodged on to the only part of the demon’s anatomy, where its eye stalks couldn’t reach – its underbelly. The demon was lunging and slashing wildly, but blindly. A few of the glancing blows had managed to land on Desmond, but his armor had been able to protect him. What the armor couldn’t protect him from was the violent jerks of the demon to shake Desmond off. Only the enhanced strength of his enhanced muscles as an e-Marine allowed him to hold on to his sword. A normal human would have been thrown off almost immediately.
As if Desmond wasn’t in enough trouble already, the second demon turned its attention towards him, possible hearing radio calls of cry from his comrade. The second demon had decided that there was no way it could pull humans out of the sphere, so it turned and came to the aid of its comrade. The demon had its blade drawn, and it didn’t have any problem in spotting or aiming for Desmond stuck to the underbelly of its comrade. Desmond instinctively closed his eyes as he anticipated the blade of the second demon piercing his body.
It didn’t happen, so Desmond opened his eyes to see that the second demon was no longer next to him. It had strayed away a few meters, but the picture didn’t fill Desmond with relief. Just beyond the second demon was a Marine, desperately trying to grab hold of the second dem
on. When he failed and slipped past the demon, he desperately tried to reach out for the grab rails, but in vain. The horror of watching the Marine float out into the void and to his death made Desmond forget his own predicament for a moment. The Marine had tried the same stunt as Desmond, but on the second demon.
It was the bad luck of the Marine that the second demon had twisted and turned towards Desmond, while the Marine was still half way into his jump. The Marine had still managed to bang into the second demon, momentarily saving Desmond’s life, but had lost his own for not being able to latch on to the demon.
The second demon turned back at Desmond, intending to finish the job. This time though, the demon was more vigilant, and one of its roving eye stalks caught another Marine approaching from the side. This was one of the Marines who had fought the other unsuited demon on the other side of the fork of the central axis tube. Six Marines had finally managed to kill that unsuited demon, but not before losing one of their own.
This Marine hadn’t been as reckless as Desmond or the poor Marine still hurtling towards his death. This Marine had retraced his steps coming closer to the hatch, anchored his tether to the wire mesh sheath at a point close enough so that his thirty-meter tether would enable him to reach the scene of the fight, and only then had he jumped. Unfortunately for him, the second demon was vigilant this time and on the lookout, while the Marine was a sitting duck midair with no way to maneuver.
The second demon could have easily finished off the Marine with a single needle gun shot, but it waited for the Marine with its blade drawn, intending to gore the Marine with his own momentum. To a demon, that would be a more satisfying kill. The Marine had other plans however. He wasn’t going to timidly play the role of prey. He looped his tether around his hand a few times to shorten it and held on to it with all the force his enhanced muscles could generate. The Marine came to an abrupt halt a meter before he would have rushed on to the tip of the demon’s outstretched blade. Slight elasticity of the tether then started pulling him back and out of reach of the demon. The demon felt robbed of his kill, the way a human would feel on having to withdraw before an orgasm.
Game Reserve: Earth (Shaitan Wars Book 5) Page 31