Twelve days post-impact.
Cataclysmic destruction. What we thought was hell come to earth.
We couldn’t have been more wrong.
Comms were noisy, lots of static and interference. A synthesized voice came over the channel. Male, authoritative, making zero attempt to sound more human than it was.
“BRAVO, DELTA, ECHO, FOXTROT. DANGER CLOSE. NINE SECONDS.”
Drop into the biggest hole you can find and grab your asshole.
It wasn’t hard to find holes, trenches, and gullies. The landscape was almost purely crater and pulverized rubble. I tucked and rolled into a depression you could have parked a truck in with room to spare. Echo Two and Five came flying in a half-second after me, splashing and spraying muck water. The three of us lay with our backs against the walls, up to our necks in water. I wiped mud off an optic and saw Two gripping her rifle like it owed her alimony.
A sound cut through the cacophony. A low, steady drone rapidly increasing in amplitude. Warheads the size of buildings weren’t quiet.
I whispered a prayer to Ten’s data and Twelve’s aim. The sky to the north flashed, and the shockwave traveled through the ground and rattled my skeleton so hard I feared it would delaminate. But my exo held, the adaptive cushioning reducing the shock to something resembling non-lethal.
Stay in place until the count of ten.
Chunks of rock rattled down on my suit, a big one landed near dead center in our crater and blinded the three of us.
I mentally keyed the squad transmitter. “Echo one, advancing towards objective.” Three red status indicators. A quarter of my squad dead, we hadn’t even made it to the line of contact yet. I crawled up the side of the crater and got moving with Two and Five.
“Two o’clock!” Five’s voice.
“I see it. Remind it whose planet this is!” I barked back.
I shouldered my RCS-2 and braced. Burst fire, maximum power.
You couldn’t see shit past 25 meters with the sheer amount of water falling out of the sky. Multi-spectral was the only vision mode that was remotely useful. Thumb-sized hail bounced off my suit and rifle. The sensors outlined the xeno in artificial color.
Legs, some like tree trunks, some like spiders. Tentacles everywhere. Teeth and claws everywhere. It walked, it thrashed, it flowed, flipping direction and attacking in fractions of a second. When they got closer, you could see the eyes glowing and filled with rage. When they had eyes, that is.
I braced, the suit compensated, and I was still gouging foot-sized furrows in the mud. The ammunition counter in the corner of my HUD was spinning like a slot machine.
It took obscene amounts of concentrated fire slung downrange at these fucking things to stop them. You could blow them into multiple chunks, and they’d act like dying was an obligation they weren’t ready to fulfill, not without taking their weight in human lives with them.
Two dropped to hound configuration on the ground to my right. Her back-mounted cannon barrel leveled, and the blast wave blew mud in every direction. Chunks of tentacle, tail and shell rained down all around us. High-explosive was more effective, but the brass was telling us to conserve as much as possible.
A week now since the xenos started popping up on the perimeter. The wall guns had been firing around the clock for the past six days. My squad was operating on about twelve hours of sleep total since the opening salvo. Thank god for red-tab stims.
An exhausted voice came over the channel. “Echo One, this is Alpha Actual. You are to immediately pull your squad and regroup with Foxtrot at the following location.” My map pinged with updated coordinates. Three hundred meters back in the direction of friendly territory, but traversing this slop wasn’t a quick process, even in suits. “Await dropship pickup, you’re being redeployed.”
“Sir?”
“Transmitting the brief. Move it, Echo One!”
“Echo One copies, wilco.”
I relayed the orders to my squad and we got moving as fast as our suits could move us. We had minutes before arrival, and air support out here didn’t wait.
We reached the landing zone and lit non-viz beacons. Now it was just a matter of waiting.
The cloud layer was unnaturally low, and near-constantly lit from within by arcs of lightning. Hurricane-level rain and hail, dumped by a storm that never ended. Hyperstorms, they called them. The storm cell was bigger than the entire North American continent. Winds were erratic, varying between strong storm and gale-force without pattern. The water and ice were sometimes clear, sometimes as black as pitch. Foreboding orange glows streaked through the sky behind the flashing lightning; impact ejecta burning up on reentry.
The entire Greenland ice sheet had been vaporized on impact and was now overhead. The whole global atmospheric system was destabilized. Eggheads were working with Ten around the clock. Initial estimates were that we’d be out of ‘apocalyptic weather patterns’ within a decade, but it’d be many decades before anything approaching normal weather returned.
Somehow, this was one of the best-case scenarios. The impact yield had been significantly lower than what was estimated, and nobody fully understood why yet. If the doomrock had hit elsewhere, there wouldn’t be a humanity left to pick up the pieces.
Ark Three weathered the impact, intact and operational. The city was on Red Alert, full lockdown status until the xeno threat was neutralized.
Jets of flame broke the low cloud layer overhead, and the roar of the approaching dropships was rising over the din of constant thunderclaps and mechanized warfare.
I knew they were blue and gray, but they looked black and menacing under the current conditions. Side bay doors already open, and the quartet of jets angled away from the central body as they hovered a couple of meters off the ground. They looked a bit like someone had cross-bred a puffer fish and a hedgehog, then squished it in an industrial press. The front, back, sides, and tail were bristling with weapons. Three dropships would carry our two squads. Five showed up.
We clipped on and were hoisted aboard, the bird already in motion before we had our feet firmly on the decks.
Flying out here was borderline insanity. Twelve cut precise flight corridors for us in real-time while artillery and interceptors filled the sky with burning tracers. No human could operate the Ark’s full defense systems like an Axiom could. Thousands of batteries operating in perfect synchronicity, no shot wasted, no miscommunication, no mistakes. Ten pointed, Twelve shot. The two combined were wielding more firepower than any nation had ever fielded.
The brief I’d been forwarded deserved the title.
Ten has detected anomalous activity at the following coordinates. This activity does not match existing incursion patterns. Battlefield conditions are not favorable for drone observation or backup. Your squads are to redeploy and investigate the source and nature of this activity and report back.
Be aware of megafauna activity in the area.
There was a topographical map of the location with minimal markers and notation. A blurry aerial shot that was borderline useless. A blue blob surrounded by points of light of varying colors. Two big red circles overlaid on the map, each with a color-gradient cone indicating direction.
Detected megafauna and predicted movement patterns. One was two and a half clicks out from our investigation site, expected to head away from our LZ. The other was just under five clicks out and expected to pass within a few hundred meters of the investigation site.
The airframe shuddered under my feet, and the guns opened up with a sound like someone tearing sheets. I minimized the brief with a flick of my eyes. The flight crew came in on proximity comms.
“BRACE, BRACE, BRACE!”
The deck lurched under me, the entire space rotating nearly forty-five degrees. Several of my squad were left hanging from their wires. I’d deployed hooks with the first brace and was now effectively bolted to the deck with the rest of my more nimble-witted squad.
We pulled hard gees, and my suit's inner liner crushed me like a vise.
The sky outside the open left-side door lit brightly from an orange fireball, and the flaming skeletal remains of one of our dropships went spinning out of control. The fireball scattered as a winged monstrosity came flapping straight at us.
Two red lines of tracer fire wove figure eight patterns over the thing as the gunnery crew opened up. That firepower would shred a dropship into component parts in seconds. It just seemed to piss the xeno off, the tracers deflecting off its harder parts in every direction.
The airfame shook once, and the flying abomination exploded in a spray of gore and shell. Alarms blared, and strobes flashed inside the dropship. My suit pinged with a damage report on my left side. We’d caught shrapnel from the cannon shell detonating maybe twenty meters away.
The dropship banked again, then righted. The front left turbine was spraying fire from places it shouldn’t have been. The flames cut out with a spray of white foam that blew out the back of the engine, and the aircraft tipped.
I prepared to bail. The engine sputtered, then roared back to life. The alarms cut off with the strobes, but amber lamps lit in their wake.
The radio erupted in noise.
“Echo One, Foxtrot One! We’re down to five, and we have to bail! See you on the other side!”
“Thirty out! Prepare to drop!”
The amber cabin light started flashing.
“Copy Foxtrot One, good luck!” I shouted to my other squad lead. We were dangerously low for an emergency bail. Wasn’t anything to be done. When a bail call came, you jumped, or you burned. The aircrew would be ejecting in the middle of making the call. It was automated if the ship’s VI assessed landing as non-survivable.
The deck pitched once again, the front of the cabin rising up like a tsunami. The guns were still stuttering.
“Echo squad! We’re dropping in spicy style!” I counted out the drop timer in my HUD. The cabin lights went green, I retracted my hooks, held my rifle to my chest, and leapt out of the door. The fall arrest kicked in on the way down, and I punched the release two meters up.
My indicators for the squad confirmed each of their landings. We were sprayed with mud, and the dropship was gone.
“Five, Six! Launch drones! I want every ounce of awareness we can squeeze out of this shithole!”
“Yes, sir!”
Not far in the distance, one of the dropships, visible only by the jet cones of fire, suddenly flipped end-over-end.
Twelve, guide them home in their time of need.
There was a war to fight.
“Two, you’re with me, rest of you pair and get in formation! We’re moving!”
“Sir, are we going to rendezvous with Foxtrot?” Two asked.
“Negative, we have MFs close! They’ll meet us there! Keep those optics maxed and clear! We don’t know what we’re walking into, so keep to ROE!”
Suit servos whined as we waded through tarry shit. Our heavy load was turning every step into a battle.
I was reminded of suit basic.
Rangers don’t cry, they bleed! Are you bleeding yet?
No, Instructor!
Is that exo showing red?
No, Instructor!
Then move your ass, trainee!
Yes, Instructor!
Visibility here wasn’t any better than it was before redeployment. You could throw a mag further than you could see. False color images and VI processing cleaned things up marginally, and the drones were expanding our sphere of awareness. They wouldn’t last long in the hail, every ping from a hailstone a reminder of borrowed time. It was a miracle of engineering that they worked at all.
We approached our destination in tight formation. Moving quickly, but not so quickly that we’d arrive unprepared.
Beams of different colored light were lancing out from the location at irregular intervals. There was no blue ball to be seen.
Sensor artifact, or gone already?
Human figures were coming through on thermal. No IFF codes.
Civilians? We’re still taking in refugees, but how the fuck did they get out here?
“Squad, eyes peeled, we might have civvies. Move in,” I ordered.
Affirmatives echoed back. Drones were all dead. Visuals only.
Rifle held at low ready, I moved forward with my squad in a chevron behind and to my flanks.
A group of people who were either wearing costumes or had just stepped out of a time machine came into focus. Several were facing us, looking as if they were out for a casual stroll.
Red and blue-skinned demons with glowing eyes, horns, and tails included. Metal and leather armor, full and half plate, chain mail in between armor sections. All of it polished, enameled, and painted with crests and decoration. All carried weapons that looked well-maintained, if hilariously out of place. Swords and bows, staffs and spears.
Literal museum shit.
They were loosely grouped in a ring formation around a wooden shipping crate.
“Sarge, you seeing this?” Two asked me on a closed channel.
“Yeah, I’m seeing it. Haven’t a clue; wasn’t in the brief. Orders are orders. Sniff around and report back,” I replied.
“What are we doing?”
Hell if I know, it’s not like the regs cover xeno war, either.
“Finding out if they speak English and need assistance.”
I approached what seemed like one of the more important devils, based on positioning and level of decoration on their armor alone. She also wasn’t wearing a helmet, unlike the rest of the grunts. That was usually a good sign of command.
“I am Staff Sergeant Wilcox, Ark Three Ranger Exo-Corps. Who am I addressing?”
I patted my suit’s torso armor for emphasis.
They spoke something fast and vowel-laden.
I pointed at myself and tried again. “Wilcox.”
The female nodded and rested a palm on her breastplate. “Vayesh,” she said, or something like it.
“Vayesh,” I repeated, and she smiled. The ground shook regularly, and lights flashed in the darkness. The city’s fire was diverted away from this area, but not far enough to ignore.
“Wilcox.” She pointed at me, then stepped to the side and pointed at the crate with one hand. With the other, she pointed off to the distance. I followed the gesture. HQ.
It was the size of a half-conex. There wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell we were moving that, through this, to there. If that’s what she even meant in the first place.
“We have incoming!” Six announced.
Two xenos came tearing out of the darkness on an intercept course for their rear. We didn’t have a line of fire.
One of the devil-women in a suit of plate mail hoisted a giant-ass sword off her shoulder and stepped forward. She swept the blade in a wide arc and bisected one of the creatures, pivoted, and decapitated the other. The blade clinked back against her shoulder.
Cursing and rapid-fire exclamations on the squad channel.
“Cut the chatter,” I barked, then turned back to face Vayesh.
She pointed at the crate again, then brought her hands together and pantomimed something flapping its wings, pointed at me, then up in the air. “Wilcox.”
This was above my pay grade. I radioed Twelve. Jumping the chain of command was generally a career-limiting move. Wartime was the exception, and Twelve quite literally ran the show. As an Axiom, it didn’t need delegation.
It also knew my ID, but habits are hard to quash. “Twelve, this is Echo One. We have made contact with intelligent and non-hostile xenos. We have a language barrier. I believe they are requesting transportation to HQ along with a wooden crate, half-conex size, roughly, over.”
“CONFIRMED. STANDBY.” The response was instantaneous.
Six stepped forward. “Command wants a scan of the object with my suit.”
One of the devils wearing leather nocked an arrow in her bow. It lit up bright white, and she released it into the darkness. A screeching roar sounded from the distance, followed by a major crash.
I reached over and touched the specialized sensor pod on Six’s shoulder, then pointed at the crate. I mimed holding an optic to my eye.
Vayesh motioned to another devil, and they led Six over to the crate. Lasers swept back and forth over it.
“ECHO ONE, HOLD POSITION. TRANSPORT INBOUND, ETA 4 MINUTES. KEEP THE LOCATION CLEAR OF HOSTILES.”
“Affirmative, Twelve. Echo One out.”
I attempted to relay the information to the leader. They nodded.
Foxtrot squad arrived two minutes later. They were as wary as we were and had wounded. One of the devils took an interest in the wounded strapped to the back of Foxtrot One. The squad closed ranks to stand between their downed squaddie and the xeno.
“Wilcox,” Vayesh said, trying to get my attention. She pointed at one of theirs, then the clump of pissed-off grunts, and said something. Another exchange, and the other xeno broke off and came over.
Vayesh pulled one glove off her hand, pulled a knife from her belt, and sliced her palm open in one continuous motion. Red blood welled up from the slice.
“What—” I started to say.
Green light condensed into a coating on the other xeno’s hands, and she touched Vayesh. The leader wiped her hand on a cloth the other offered and showed me her uninjured palm.
“Foxtrot One, Echo One. This one is a medic, or something. Just did some voodoo and fixed their boss’s hand instantly.”
The response came on a private channel. “No way. We’re getting evac any minute. They can treat Bradleys at HQ.”
I pulled up Foxtrot’s squad status display. Foxtrot Four, Specialist Martin Bradleys. Vitals indicator was so dark orange it might as well have been red. They were skeleton crew after their trip over. Our medic had been dead from before redeployment.
“Bradleys is critical, Echo One. Moving them isn’t smart, and the suit’s the only thing keeping them alive at the moment. Call a spade a spade. He’s fucked either way.”
“We really going to trust a bunch of smart xeno freaks on a ‘what’s the worst that can happen?’”
“Best I got, Echo One, over and out.”
She didn’t move for a long moment. Then the squad parted ranks, and Foxtrot One knelt down so Foxtrot Four was easier to access. I gestured with an open hand, my other hand on the grip of my rifle.
The xeno did her thing while the dropships approached in formation. The group of xenos gathered around and were pointing and chattering among themselves.
I tried to tell their boss to tell her people to cover their faces from the downwash.
One of the ships opened fire into the darkness about the same time the archer fired off another light arrow. A moment later, a twisted shape smashed into the mud and skidded to a rest.
“I’ve got to get one of those,” Two said on the squad channel to a few snickers. Tensions were still high, but I could tell news of evac to HQ came as a relief to the crew.
We strapped the crate and attached it to two heavy lift cables from a dropship. The xenos helped, so I was glad my translation skills weren’t horribly wrong.
I was hoping this wasn’t an H-bomb and I wasn’t about to doom the city. Twelve would have certainly scanned it with every tool at its disposal before authorizing it, and was always watching through our suits directly. It was only a marginal relief to know that Twelve would shoot us out of the sky the nanosecond our cargo started looking problematic.
I tried to explain how to sit in a lift strap to the xenos, but they kept waving their hands and shaking their heads. We clipped on and were hoisted up.
The group of xenos, maybe ten total, all stood below, shielding their faces. We couldn’t land as the risk of debris or getting stuck in the mud was way too high. We were hovering at a ten meter altitude with the cargo suspended below.
The bow xeno held her hand out. The mud flash-froze. One by one, the xenos walked onto the ice and then casually hopped up and into the dropship.
Add that to the list of shit to put in my memoirs if I make it through this.
“Aircrew, we’re fully loaded back here,” I informed them.
I attempted to get the xenos to hold on to the hanging straps. They seemed more interested in pointing at pretty much everything inside the transport and chatting among themselves.
Vayesh, rather than take the hand strap, stuck her hand into mine and laced her fingers between the digits of the suit.
She said something and smiled at me.
Then she blew me a kiss.