The Cephal could do that – build things we didn’t have real names for. They could build this place, or steal it and make a bubble to keep air in. It felt more like something natural that was adapted for some unknowable purpose. It wasn’t a ship, like the Boston. Rock, some kind of hard top soil, and grass a weird hue of green and bluish hues that didn’t wave because there was no weather. No trees, no real landscape. Monotony all the way. Like they’d taken a chunk from a planet, maybe steppes or plains, made it float out to space and forgotten to take the weather with them. It wasn’t hot, or cold. There was air.
Everything was alien, and we didn’t understand much. There we were, with rifles and blades and combat suits that’d stop our bullets, but not their bolts. If we’d decided to shoot it out with each other, we would’ve been at it ‘til we ran dry of ammo.
Those were my first thoughts, going through the portal to this crazy world. A mile later and Cartwright, Okinado, and maybe a thousand of us were dead. I wondered if the demiworld were a cosmic snow globe. Someone might turn it over, and it’d snow bodies.
It’s hard to hold tight to wonder in war, and this was war.
48.
Squid
Vidar Dawes
After the jellyfish and the deaths of so many friends I found myself running like a maniac on some paranoid nightmare freak-out trip. An ugly grey hunk of metal span through the air over my head and took three men’s lives in an instant. A guy whose name I never knew was just a pair of legs and hips. Those parts left to him swayed and somehow remained upright. Someone laughed, looking at the swaying half-man. It wasn’t a happy laugh, and there was no humour in it. It was the sound of a guy breaking. I’d heard it enough times to recognise the particular cadence, the underlying tone of insanity let loose. It was crazy that’d just been chained up too long and couldn’t take the carnage one moment longer.
One of the Zoan trilobite creatures, spines hidden in the grass, sprang out and blew the laughing man from his feet. He may as well have been hit by a thousand volts in the centre of the chest. The blast threw him in the air as though gravity took a minute off. He hit heavy and hard and I heard something crack over the constant cacophony and hearing loss. Something else blew behind us, and the wind pushed me forward but I was going that way anyway, and a little help didn’t hurt.
Part of a guy’s face landed, a broken bowl, near me as I rolled and took a knee. Nunez.
Hey, Nunez, I thought. I might have smiled at him. I liked him pretty well.
I had liked him. He had a way with a tall tale.
We were just a mile from the taunting, golden presence of the Cephal’s Citadel bastion when I heard Jake Blight’s high-pitched voice urgent, panicked.
‘Dawes!’
I heard it – a clicking, ratchet kind of sound.
Fuck.
I thought it was a crab-mine about to scuttle up from the blue rock and latch on to my foot, but it wasn’t – crab mines couldn’t burrow through rock. It was something worse. Fighting the Zoan and their Cephal overlords, there was always something worse.
A turret rose up – a thing like a cephalopod, a five-foot high land-squid. Maybe it was, or that was how it’d started out, but it wasn’t completely organic. Either way, that’s what I thought, and it was good enough. That’s about all I thought. You don’t have time to ponder things when you’re under fire. Lord Death’s right there, and when he’s on your shoulder you’re busy enough.
Tentacle-guns spewed out muctile, acidic projectiles from articulate arms even as it came out of the rock shunting the surface aside in jagged slabs. Hard pan cracked under it as it rose, like breaking hard dirt or rock was no effort at all. Just a weed coming up through summer-dry mud. Hellish quick, though.
I swear the thing saw me. It wasn’t an idiot turret, a brainless trap like a crab-mine, but a smart thing, sensors and some processing, thinking unit inside, assessing and prioritising threats. Might even have had a brain, or some kind of augmented CPU in there. I’d often thought of the Cephal’s warriors as rudimentary, dumb warriors slaved to their masters’ whims, but perhaps that was only because I wanted to think that. Thinking of them as lesser creatures wasn’t logical, but it helped me kill them and I didn’t want to think that they might not wish to fight at all.
The cephalopod turret had waited ‘til we were all around it – Patriot Company, running in. Maximum damage and perfect timing. No amount of training, no hard-ass dogma, nothing’ll save you but luck when you’re caught on the hop like that.
I was down on my knee anyway from being blow forward by the same explosion that had parted most of Nunez’s head from his neck, now I slid the stock of my LMG Coil up to my right shoulder, left elbow on my left knee. I fired, quad coils cycling and whirring and barely any recoil at all. I hit the turret and others hit it. It had done plenty of damage already, but our magnum rounds, our high-velocity tension bolts, magnetic cartridges from coil and gauss, those tiny hypersonic case-less darts from the ceramic small arms of those poor bastards with nothing but side arms left to them – every type of ammunition we had hit the thing. Tentacles blew away to fall writhing on the rock, bleeding and sparking, smoking and small gouts of fire and acid steaming and burning pits in the rock.
Samantha Dolores went down in the cephalopod’s dying burst of fire. One of her legs was blasted from beneath her and she was screaming but she was the shit – she fired back, blood from the wound spraying out even while she grabbed the severed limb and rested her rifle on it, using her own leg for cover.
That wake-plasma from ammonites and chelons ahead, forming a battle line against our ragged formation, was hitting just ahead of us while the D-Guard soaked it up and paid them back in kind with their rear-mounted mortars. I saw plenty of bloodied carcasses that used to be human hanging out of those armoured suits, too, dripping red.
In the next moment, I remembered why attachment and giving any kind of shit beyond the next day was a waste of effort.
I didn’t see it – just felt it. That death-thud. A heavy shell impact smacking down with thunder right in the midst of us. Pieces of rock and cephalopod-gun and marine and KES units filled the air.
When the smoke cleared Samantha Dolores was gone.
I remembered looking at her on the drop ship, before she put on her helm. I remembered how her hair was cut short, she had freckles all down her neck, wondering if they went any lower.
I looked behind, deaf but for a hard and nasty whine in my ruptured ears, and saw a tank rolling on. There was no choice but to get out the way, because this tank was computer-run, worth millions, and did a hell of a lot more damage than a Patriot stomping in combat boots.
‘Fuck you!’
Our own tank had killed Dolores.
I don’t know if the tank heard me. It was blown, stupid and winding down. That was the last of the MK-VII Calf tanks we brought with us.
The citadel loomed now, closer, hanging over us like it was watching and finding us wanting.
Fuck you, too, I thought to the citadel.
I walked on through smoke and down a crater, all the while pulling something wet and red fouling the barrel of my gun free. I never knew how far Samantha Dolores’ freckles went, but I didn’t find any.
49.
Cephal
Alante Brockner
Hard Dog yelled, her anger amplified by comms, ramped up by honest rage at their situation. Screwed they might be, but Alante Brockner didn’t take weakness from herself, and she was damn sure not going to take it from this bunch, most of whom outweighed and outgunned her.
‘This is where we stand or fall. I’m the big dog. Hard dog, and I say hie on, you better get moving! Open ‘er up and slam it in!’
Her men roared out, she swung into her Dog and slammed down her foot heavy boots in the edge of the steppe, then again, and again.
One miles out and their drive to the citadel was stalled against a mad enemy they didn’t understand. How many left? Hardly a battalion had come throug
h the conflux. Now?
How many have we lost already?
The numbers on Earth, on Zoa...those things weren’t real anymore. Here, now, this demiworld, Velasan, was all that mattered.
Three thousand troops had come bearing the gift of nuclear fire. It was twenty-seven hours since they came to this place. Maybe they’d lost a thousand already, perhaps even half of their force to the relentless defence of the Zoan before them.
How could Alante know how many remained? Communications were sketchy beneath the dome and they were engaged in pitched battles with no beauty as they battled toward the citadel ahead.
Might not be Earth, might not be the Zoan’s homeworld, but it was here on this back-ass place where the Cephal were, here where Patriot and Bear Division would fall.
But we’re taking them with us.
It wasn’t the Zoan she hated most. It was the Cephal, their bony skulls, their faceless heads. The way they were always silent, like their commands, language, thought, their power, all came from their domed heads.
The Citadel called them on. That edifice might have stood for a million years, or a decade. Didn’t matter.
We’re taking it down.
Hard Dog stamped her feet and her Heavies stamped in time.
‘On!’
Their roar met her command and they broke into a servo-assisted run across the fake-looking grass toward their objective; to end the Cephal and to wipe them out so completely that nothing remained but entries in the annals of history.
Alante’s 245th charged on with tons of steel and guns, cannons on backs, and forearms, and mounted on shoulders.
This was it. No more. Do or die.
The forward units smashed through lighter Zoan units until they were maybe even as close as a half a mile from their goal. Those units dropped to their knees like a dog might stretch out, and then they brought the huge cannons on their backs into play - rear-mounted mortars that loosed giant round impact explosives in a high arc, up and across the plains at the Cephal’s siege creatures.
What else could you call such things as the augmented chelon and ammonite units they faced? Those rolling, lumbering machines of war with hard exo-shells fired their thick burning plasma from what looked like tails.
Other creatures – everything the enemy could field, it seemed – rushed from the citadel to meet the humans’ fiercest advance yet. Those creatures Alante saw were shelled, too. Arthropods, maybe. Things with armoured shells of some exotic metal that looked a lot like hermit crabs. Lobsters with guns mounted on shells and fore claws – nephropids – reared on sharp grinding legs. Close up, they’d tear any suit Bear Division had in two, just as easily as their horrible, effective claws would cut through a marine in their combats.
The cannon ball mortar fire from the forward rank of D-Guard hit the enemy. The balls bounced, rolled, exploded. Clods and plumes of superheated dirt, shelled creatures blown to pieces, rained down chunks of flesh.
Then, the moment Alante had been waiting for...hoping for.
There.
One of the Cephal, at last, stood before a dark portion of the citadel which could only be an entrance.
The Cephal controlling this monstrous army was pale with thick golden armour Alante knew could turn aside a bullet, if not a coil round.
The Cephal had no discernable eyes, but when they brought their long hard beam laser rifles to bear there was a sense that they zoomed in, as though their senses were scopes on weapons Alante knew first hand did not have scopes.
This is why we’re here. Not squid looking fuckers, or whatever else. They’re...candy. Distractions.
The Cephal were the reason Earth burned.
A plasma blast burned up a line of grenadiers at the fore of the D-Guard ranks.
Marine were engaged in an untidy battle at her back, but she couldn’t worry about that right then.
Take the Cephal leader down and the Zoan’ll be aimless as ever.
Without further consideration for her battalion, or the fate of Patriot, Alante urged her D-Guard up to full speed and bolted forward through the hail of weapons’ fire in front. Her shoulder cannons were powering up.
‘Cephal!’ she yelled into comms. Any Cephal was worth taking out. They were far more dangerous than any heavy units.
Alante’s D-Guard wasn’t built for speed, but to take and dish out hits. When a chelon’s fat bright shots splashed and burned the field around her and her force, Alante didn’t falter but drove her dog on even harder. She was the tip of an arrow loosed toward the head of the enemy. Her soldiers fired on the Cephal where they could and covered Alante’s furious advance. A withering barrage of missiles, mortar fire, small arms, .63 caliber fist and shoulder cannons blazed and began to cut Alante a path through the enemy to the one she really wanted.
The Cephal saw her charge.
Light, sharp-blade grass was smashed beneath the heavy footfalls of Alante’s dog, which moved like a greyhound – fore and rear legs in concert drove her on in powerful thrusts. The servos in the haunches were loud enough to blot out the noise of her battalion and all the orders, questions, answers bellowed in calm or panicked voices through her comms. She was aware of her breath steaming against the thick crystalline glass of her helmet, of the dog’s artificial limbs crunching, of the stench of her power cells venting in her wake. Mostly, though, Alante focused on closing the gap to the smooth-faced Cephal.
The Cephal seemed to understand her intent.
Alante let loose with both her shoulder cannons, .63 rounds bursting out like bright darting orange fire in her peripheral vision. The Cephal fired back. They only ever carried those long, light-bolt guns and the Cephal’s weapon of choice had great penetration, a fast fire rate, and phenomenal range. Alante’s dog was sturdy, though. It took each hit because the Cephal never seemed to miss, but she was close. At the last instant the Cephal discarded its long gun and the psyche-blade sprang from the device on its right wrist.
The Cephal leapt to meet Alante and swung in mid-air. She forced the dog’s charge aside hard, like she’d been kicked while she was running. The psyche-blade whistled past and with her fist cannon she fired into the alien’s armour from such close range its golden armour couldn’t save it.
She groaned and righted herself.
There was absolutely no coming back from that amount of bullets. It was as dead as anything Alante had ever made dead.
The fight carried on but it seemed aimless, without structure or plan, from the instant the Cephal died. The Zoan units fired, still, but as individuals. Without strategy and the overriding orders of their master the Zoan were falling fast. In the minute following Alante’s small victory, hundreds of Zoa’s heavy, ungainly and strange corpses covered the field.
For Alante, the true battle was done. Not all battles, though, are fought with bullets.
50.
Day of Death
Vidar Dawes
True war is panting, heart rending fear, adrenaline, panic, calm, hatred, running, hiding with the smell of your own shit on you, guilt. This, on Velasan, was barbarism refined. It was trench warfare and bombardment. Two fighters not ducking and weaving but trading blows and tasting blood. Men and women were crying with terror and tiredness and hopelessness in foxholes from artillery across a strange field not just behind enemy lines, but in a rough line of aggression that was scribbled over by enemy lines, like both sides were misspelled words crossed out by a messy child.
Space marines? We were fighting no better or smarter than a thousand men with moustaches charging over a trench into a hail of gunfire from an enemy on the fields of France nearly four centuries before. We were Hussars and cavalry and pikes, muskets and cannonballs like the century before when the Americans fought themselves the first time.
History returns.
No matter the tech we have, the marvels of each future of mankind we stumble into, it comes down not to machines, and greater weapons. It comes to that base, primal core we cannot escape. The roar of us w
ith a stick trying to survive against the beast greater than us. The drives we feel are not led by peace, no matter what some accord might say. Faced with threat, with danger, with extinction, we do not first seek to hold and embrace. We rage. We ravage.
I was half choked from smoke and nearly entirely reliant on Pain’s voice because of the constant chatter of weapons. Yellow bolts from the spry Cephal shot out. Sickly acid bombs with an acrid and disgusting stench burst near to me. That hissing acid-smog made our eyes stream and our chests heavy.
Day and night were in our minds only. Here, they didn’t exist. The light came from the dome above us, and it was constant, and we could see stars through it. Smoke obscured it, and explosions drowned every other sound out.
I took a breath – a moment – in the middle of the void. A battle was a full plate and an empty one at the same time. A meal half eaten, too. A thing you couldn’t define in neat lines and thoughts. But here, on Velasan, I found a still moment at last.
I held the ring around my neck. My reminder of times I had to believe were better than this hell. The fact I didn’t know who the ring I’d taken from a severed hand didn’t seem to matter anymore. Did memory matter when Death comes knocking? I would only find out when I opened the door and let him in. Perhaps, then, looking into Death’s uncaring, dispassionate face, I might know all that I had lost.
But I’d already lost it, hadn’t I?
What else was there to lose?
I glanced up, in a dip in the rock blown clear by our own artillery as we’d advanced. I saw a D-Guard two or three hundred yards ahead, charging, and I just knew it was Brockner. Who else would be so calm, so careless, as to charge into the maelstrom?
Me, I thought, and brought my gun to hand and charged to be at the front, where the action, and perhaps oblivion, waited.
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