Desperate Measures

by Michael Anderle

The dire wolves were close enough now that their outlines were distinguishable from the underlying terrain under normal optics. At this distance, their size was a design flaw when facing trained soldiers. Smaller monsters could have continued to blend with the forest.

  “Fire!” Erik bellowed.

  The twelve exoskeletons launched their grenades before he finished the word. Their all-but-simultaneous explosions ripped through the yaoguai line, sending a storm of flame and shrapnel slicing through their bodies. The loud noise swallowed most of their death yelps as the dire wolves tumbled forward in bloodied, burned masses.

  For all their size, speed, and camouflage, the dire wolves couldn’t stand up to the cruel ingenuity of human explosives.

  Erik’s gaze darted to a data window showing the forest far to his left and a growing heat signature. He checked to his far right. Another heat mass grew in front of him as well. He’d been worried about that.

  The monsters might not understand military strategy, but they retained animal cunning. He would remind them again why humans ruled the Earth and had spread out to the stars. As long as the exos had ammo, these monsters couldn’t win.

  “Diamond,” Erik ordered.

  The squads rotated and spread out to produce the new formation within seconds. Erik was glad he’d practiced this sort of thing with Jia in their training sessions. Now, the exos’ rifles and launchers pointed in every direction.

  “It looks like the bastards are trying to flank us. I’m sure those monsters have big enough claws to tear through our weak points, so let’s not give them the opportunity. Maintain your fields of fire. Don’t use more than a third of your grenades for this engagement. I have a feeling this is just the start.” Erik flexed his fingers. “Anything useful on your end, Emma?”

  “I’m not seeing additional enemies, gun goblins, or marauding monsters emerging from the main building,” Emma reported. “Admittedly, doing this with long-range cameras in this environment is less than ideal, but it’s as if the yaoguai are emerging from the forest near the mansion rather than the building. I should note that not all of the yaoguai were initially deployed near your position, but they are all converging on it now.”

  “It was a general alarm response,” Jia suggested. “They released them everywhere to look for us, maybe from underground passages. They wait until they see something and start howling, then the rest of them show up.”

  “I don’t care all that much about where they’re coming from,” Erik replied. “I mostly care if Emma’s seeing them ready cannons or surface-to-surface arty. I’d rather not get surrounded by these dire wolves and stalled out so they can start blowing the shit out of us with plasma artillery.”

  “I have yet to see anything like that,” Emma offered. “Incidentally, my drone squadron is down to seventy-five percent strength. I’m rather unimpressed by their antiaircraft response. It’s far less accurate than I would have believed.”

  “They might be panicking.” Erik aimed his grenade launcher. “But if they haven’t finished you off yet, all we need to do is survive.”

  Howls sounded from all around, louder and more insistent than before. There were more of them, too. The exo squad had taken out the scouts, and now the main force had arrived.

  It was time to see which products of humanity’s scientific hubris would triumph.

  “Wait until they’re twenty meters out and then send them back to Hell.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Erik had once told Jia that the difference between a good commander and a bad one was the latter felt the need to micromanage every part of a battle.

  Properly trained soldiers needed direction in the form of orders, nothing else.

  She might not be a soldier, but she constantly trained with Erik, and they’d fought together for years now. Jia didn’t need careful direction either.

  That was why Erik hadn’t issued another order despite the change in enemy tactics. Unlike before, the dire wolves didn’t immediately charge. They approached from three sides but then formed a circle, loping through the undergrowth and howling. The monsters might have been the ultimate soldiers in that they didn’t need any orders.

  They simply needed to be unleashed.

  Jia wondered if they’d been trained that way, or if they were somehow adapting after seeing the charred bodies of the other yaoguai. The monsters outnumbered the raid team, but Jia wasn’t worried. Being large and fast didn’t count for much when they weren’t also bullet- and explosion-proof.

  Their creators hadn’t accounted for the kind of equipment a military team might bring. At the same time, a huge horde of monsters seemed excessive to keep the forest clear of casual visitors who might stumble upon the mansion.

  Jia tamped down her thoughts. How and why the conspiracy chose their monsters wasn’t relevant as long as her team could destroy them. If exos could win against the Hunters’ creations, they could win against whatever the conspiracy unleashed.

  The new circle didn’t last long before the dire wolves broke toward the exoskeletons. If the unit hadn’t already formed a diamond, it might have been a concern, but there wasn’t a single soldier who didn’t have a weapon pointed in their direction.

  The yaoguai rushed toward the exos, their huge jaws open, salivating. Did they want a meal, or were they created with nothing more than the desire to kill or maim?

  Another salvo of frag grenades blasted the advancing monsters, ripping some apart and flinging others into the air. The dire wolves farther back didn’t flinch despite the wave of destruction that annihilated the front line, the bodies stacking up around them.

  The monsters didn’t ignore the attack, since they staggered their next advance. Jia frowned. The line between instinctual adaptation and intelligence could be thin, but she didn’t want to think about the conspiracy creating self-aware monsters from something other than human or alien stock.

  Adaptation helped the dire wolves. The next wave of grenades didn’t finish off the entire charging line. Growling, the bloodied survivors charged the exoskeletons, making it closer than before. Three survivors neared Jia’s squad, growling loudly.

  “I’ll pick off the survivors in the front,” Jia announced, firing her rifle.

  The quick shots tore through the charging dire wolves but still didn’t finish them off. Her follow-up rounds ended the monsters’ lives, however.

  Although the team had loaded extra ammo in anticipation of trouble, she didn’t want to waste a single bullet. It was like Erik had said; this was one engagement in what might be a long battle.

  The conspiracy wouldn’t fortify a mansion in the forest with air defenses and hordes of monsters if there wasn’t something important there. She hoped they could rescue the informant, but taking the entire place appealed more.

  She understood the danger, but the simple solution to that was to wipe out all resistance in the base. Taking out the dire wolves would be a good start.

  If this was some sort of trap for Erik and Jia, they would do what they always did and reverse it to make the conspiracy pay dearly. They needed to be punished for the people they’d hurt, including Cutter. They needed to understand there would be no negotiation, no way to come out of this short of abject and total surrender.

  Every Tin Man or yaoguai who fell was a step toward that. Every defeated plot was a significant leap forward.

  Their efforts weren’t an investigation anymore. This was war. She wasn’t a cop, she was a soldier in the war against the conspiracy. Stumbling into the war didn’t make it any less important.

  More dire wolves tried to close in, but she blew off a leg and then delivered a round that pierced the entire length of the body. The monster collapsed and rolled a meter before stopping.

  Erik and her squadmates trusted her. They aimed past Jia’s newfound friends to deliver more pain to reinforcements. Wave after wave of dire wolves stretched into the distance, all closing on the team. Jia could scarcely imagine the resources that’d gone into producing such an
army of the monsters.

  The amount of money and technical expertise was staggering. They could have applied it to many different causes, but instead, they sat in the forest working on new illegal monsters they could deploy for their sick, misguided cause.

  Jia didn’t have time to worry about anything but picking off the survivors. She lined up a headshot and loosed another round. This time, the bleeding dire wolf dropped at her first shot. Two more shots finished off the two closest targets, now less than five meters away. She almost pitied the monsters, but she knew what they would do if they got their jaws on any of the soldiers.

  Jia snapped her rifle toward other monsters penetrating the line and fired. Two more dire wolves fell in rapid succession. She had her rhythm now. There could be five or six, and they wouldn’t get their chance to attack.

  Calmly standing in front of a rampaging horde of gigantic genetically engineered camouflaged dire wolves would have been impossible without the exoskeletons. Some poor soul lost on vacation might have wandered through the area, only to be blown out of the sky by an antiaircraft barrage or screamed for mercy in the final moments of their life as the yaoguai horde descended on them. Jia, Erik, and the soldiers would protect those unfortunates.

  The last remnants of pity left Jia. The yaoguai were wrong, not only in their creation but in their presence on Earth. They were a living embodiment of the corruption she wanted to drive from the UTC.

  The existence of a handful of monsters in a hidden lab in the Scar had been disgusting enough, but this wasn’t polluted, corrupted shadows in a place no one dared travel. This was the beautiful landscape of an ancient country on the home planet of humanity.

  If they could be here, they could be anywhere.

  Jia gritted her teeth. The yaoguai horde was the conspiracy announcing their contempt for the values humanity had adopted. They would accept no limits in their power. People like her had to make an example of them so no one would follow their dark lead.

  As she blew the head off another charging dire wolf, Jia realized something important. Knowing the goal of the conspiracy was only important insofar as it helped to fight them. Otherwise, it was irrelevant.

  Everyone thought they were the hero in their own twisted story. The men and women behind the conspiracy had likely concocted a convoluted explanation for why their actions were perfect, moral, and for the best. It didn’t matter if their plans involved the brutal deaths of thousands or risked an advanced alien species killing millions.

  She wouldn’t be able to get their leaders into a room and talk them into understanding what horrors they had wrought. There was no way people with that much power and influence didn’t know exactly what they were doing, which was why they were hiding it.

  Their tactics didn’t strain only conventional morality. They blew past all the restraints and common sense humanity had adopted after the hard-earned bloody lessons of post-industrial history.

  The deaths of millions in incidents like the Summer of Sorrow would be for nothing if the conspiracy had their way.

  They would kill, maim, and corrupt. They were more like demons than people, and there could be no peace with demons.

  The greedy criminals Jia had dealt with as a detective were angels compared to the conspiracy. They might kill for money, but not blindly run roughshod over all forms of basic decency. No mobster would destroy an entire city.

  Jia took down another dire wolf, imagining she was killing a high-ranking member of the conspiracy rather than a feral tool. Erik had brought her into the hunt, but it’d stopped being about him a long time ago.

  Times like this served to remind her of that.

  The crack of the heavy exoskeleton rifles overlapped in an oddly soothing staccato rhythm. Every squad had adopted a variation of the strategy Erik’s and Jia’s squad was using. The wolf bodies began to pile up.

  The enemy gave no indication they cared about their fallen comrades, though the volume of corpses challenged their continued advances. In some cases, the dire wolves took the path of least resistance, leading to funneling or slow climbs that made it easier for the team to pick them off.

  Grenade explosions grew sparser and rifle fire more common. Soldiers were hitting Erik’s one-third limit, and the newly arriving enemy reinforcements were fewer.

  “Drones down to sixty percent,” Emma reported. “The lower numbers are allowing more ease of evasion, so it’s growing harder for the enemy to hit them, but the distraction won’t last forever. Please keep that in mind.”

  “Understood,” Erik replied. “We’re almost there.”

  He nailed a dire wolf in the distance with a burst. The rounds blew off a leg and passed through the chest. The monster managed to make it a couple more meters before collapsing in a bloody pool. At least they had the decency to bleed red.

  Jia kept to single shots. She could down a wolf with a single shot half the time, and it only took two shots for the others, saving bullets compared to Erik’s bursts.

  The whole process had become detached and mechanical. It felt less real than many of her training scenarios. There was something absurd about standing in the middle of a French forest fighting off a horde of massive wolves.

  She would have never imagined this sort of encounter before Erik came into her life.

  Envelopment wasn’t possible without decent numbers, and whether the monsters understood that or merely were giving in to instinct, the dire wolves gave up circling the exoskeletons and instead gathered for a final massive charge. The wedge of snarling teeth and pumping legs bolted through the charred and broken plants and bodies before them.

  “Inverted wedge and fire,” Erik ordered.

  Their rifle fire never stopped as the exoskeletons shifted position. The front lines of the dire wolf formation fell, tripping some of the others. It was only a momentary delay before the wolves were back on their feet and loping desperately toward the exoskeletons.

  With all twelve soldiers aiming at the same group of wolves, their gunfire produced a curtain of high-velocity rounds that was impossible to dodge. Volleys produced a shower of blood and chunks of flesh.

  Jia narrowed her eyes for a shot. She’d been concentrating on shooting, so she’d almost ignored the obvious.

  The large size and camouflage coats of the wolf-like yaoguai attacking them was not the most obvious evidence of their corrupted, manmade existence. There were stranger things in nature, including the Local Neighborhood races.

  Predatory pack animals were brave. They could accomplish great feats, but they weren’t callously stupid like some humans. Normal animals would not relentlessly charge into certain death like the dire wolves.

  Something about that sickened her. The conspiracy had taken basic self-preservation away from the lives they had created, taken the essence of what being alive was about.

  The teams’ fire reduced the charge to a modest group, then constant, careful fire from the soldiers cut them down to a group that could have been a single pack. In the end, the last survivors of their brave but futile charge ended in a fusillade from the exoskeletons.

  Nothing remained except mounds of dead monsters and thick smoke. Explosions in the distance reminded everyone the battle wasn’t over.

  “Anyone got any movement?” Erik asked after a deep breath.

  The battle hadn’t been long compared to some she’d fought, but it’d been intense. A momentary lapse in concentration could have resulted in the monsters scattering their formation.

  Jia swept the area, looking for hidden enemies. There might have been one dire wolf gifted with more intelligence than the others, but there was nothing.

  “We used a lot more grenades and ammo than I would have liked,” Erik continued, “but I think our friends made their best play. The bastards should learn attrition is a crap way to win.” He lifted the exoskeleton’s arm to point through the forest in the direction of the mansion. “Let’s go while Emma is still distracting them.”

  They kept their wedge
formation as they stomped through the forest, climbing over their fallen foes without further consideration. There wasn’t time to mourn the monsters.

  It was time to punish their masters.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Erik expected more on-the-ground resistance the last few kilometers as the forest began to give way to the vast field of grass surrounding the mansion.

  While the conspiracy’s penchant for attempting to overwhelm with sheer numbers was consistent with the dire wolf horde, he suspected there was something more to it. His worry that this battle was personal hadn’t left him.

  In a battle against other humans, one side might win or lose based on running out of ammunition, but monsters’ teeth and claws didn’t go away. Exoskeletons and tactical suits were good protection, but he didn’t want to go up against a yaoguai at close range.

  He’d seen plenty that could get through tactical suits.

  The outline of the mansion was visible in the distance, along with the bright flash of AAA emplacements firing into the sky. The trees were growing sparser and the booms louder. Manicured patches of lawn filtered into the forest more, the increasing number of obviously artificial clearings.

  “We’re going to proceed with the second phase of the ops plan,” Erik announced. “We’re going to join together to form Alpha and Beta squads. Beta, you’re still responsible for clearing out the AAA and doing whatever pest control we need outside, including holding the LZ for our exfil. All Alpha soldiers, you’re with me. We’re going to go crash the house party.”

  Initial intel indicated the bulk of the AAA was deployed at the front of the mansion. Erik and the colonel both worried about getting cut off from retreat, so they would decide on the final details at the last moment. If things went better than expected, and they cleared out the rest of the enemy without too much resistance, then all they’d done was be overly cautious.

  The exo formation broke into two groups of six, with four soldiers joining Erik and Jia as they changed course to head toward a side entrance of the mansion. He’d kept one rocket exo on their team, but he wanted the bulk on Beta Squad to help rapidly take out the AAA.