Myrmida
Nightfall was only going to make this nightmare worse than it already was and we all knew it. Richardson cursed in pain and gave the angry red disc of the rapidly setting sun the finger as he limped along on one leg and a rifle, his hardsuit half-melted in places. Dean Franks covered our six, clenching a pair of assault rifles in his meaty hands while DeLana took point, leading our ragged group. From time to time the roaring report of her pump-action shotgun would sound in our ears as she eradicated something from existence ahead of us.
There was a whole host of insectile predators swarming about, all eager to devour us if given any chances, so Delana took none. I gripped my own gun with the kind of grim, desolate courage that comes from knowing you have only a fluke chance of surviving the next five minutes, to say nothing of the next hour, or day--or the possible weeks it could take for Alliance ships to respond to a distress beacon. If we could even get to the distress beacon.
Shepard, John Frederick. Lieutenant Commander.
They hit so hard! Erupting from the ground beneath our feet in a macabre mockery of the comic villains from old arcade whack'em games, all teeth and mandible and writhing acid-dripping tentacle, the abominations with tooth-studded mouths wide enough to accommodate a modest roadside diner swept away our whole defensive perimeter with breathtaking ease. What was left of the settlement was now an upturned charnel house; enormous furrows leading to sinkholes miles deep, giant pockmarks the size of cars and shifting piles of displaced soil, sod, and rubble.
The worst were the bodies, though. None were intact, we found them in little bits and pieces, as if the colony's entire population had been put through a meat grinder. The devastation was splattered with a thick, stinking mud soaked through with blood, acid, and pools of saliva lined with fragments of bone and partially dissolved flesh. A slaughterhouse distilled and slopped into the drunken gouges in the landscape.
It was hellish. Hellish because I think this is the closest our temporal existence can come to that place of eternal damnation.
Service number five-niner-two-three-alpha-charlie-two-eight-six.
I stated the obvious. "Sun's setting." Behind me, Franks muttered something obscene and rather fitting.
"Gotta get to the beacon," Richardson said between the strings of curses that accompanied his every pained step. I'd deliberately shot him to free his now-wounded leg from a monster's slavering appendage. He was alive because of it, unlike Ben Harvey, whom I hadn't had the guts to shoot."
Night fell.
Akuze has no moon.
The utter darkness took away our last hope; that we would somehow be able to see when a maw was coming up right under our feet to swallow us whole. Spotting a bore worm bursting from the side of a berm or a floss beetle scuttling sideways at us through the reeking sludge would be almost impossible.
I was gripping my rifle almost hard enough to put indentations into the metal grip.
Moving through this swamp of rapidly decomposing flesh and tarry acid-saliva was slow going. By nightfall we still hadn't reached the beacon somewhere in the center of the wrecked outpost. We would be lucky if it was still on the surface and not in a lair somewhere at the bottom of an abyssal tube in the earth.
But we were nearly there. The wreckage of the communications center was still recognizable and we moved toward it laboriously but steadily. Richardson was getting worse. We'd done what we could for his leg, but infection wasn't out of the picture. Though he'd refused to be helped by either me or Franks, I feared we would soon be carrying him despite his protests.
"Stop for a second," DeLana whispered. We all crouched with our guns at the ready, knee deep in the liquefied remains of our friends, and heard that terrifying sound we didn't want to hear. Inhuman, unearthly shrieks from beneath the ground.
Such a sound should not carry underground, at the very least it should be reduced to a rumbling growl. But it is the same whether heard in the open air or from beneath miles of hard-packed soil and bedrock: like the noise of cement blocks grinding against each other amplified ten thousand million times and with feedback thrown in. Franks' eardrums had already been shattered by one such scream.
Akuze garrison. Shepard, John Frederick.
Something boiled in the mud at my feet. Panicked, I opened fire at a pair of floss beetles and a smallish bore worm that were wriggling toward me. Insect shells cracked and burst, spilling bug juice and guts into the filmy mud.
"Where's the gorram thing coming from?" Franks barked overly loud from the rear.
"Keep moving," DeLana ordered.
The earth seemed ready to split open it was shaking so bad. The shrieking continued sporadically and we trudged on, seemingly numbed to the horror, waiting for our doom to strike at us out of the blackness. The lights on our guns did little to light our way, illuminating only a tiny circle of ravaged land filled with pools of blood and acid venom between chasms that we had to dodge with the regularity of potholes on an asphalt road. Embedded in the shredded landscape were pieces of the outpost, and like the mounds of earth, these fragments of walls, a doorframe, rooftops, shifted and moved with the insane vibrations from the maw's scream. One step in the wrong place and we would be swallowed, not by the murderous creature below the earth, but by the churning earth itself.
The shrieking twisted to new earsplitting heights and the thing surface. Not more than eighty feet away from us, it was one of the biggest I'd seen yet. With teeth longer than two men, bulbous red and yellow eyes growing like tumors above its cavernous mouth, two tentacles stretched for the four of us, whipping the air angrily and spattering thick gobbets of acid everywhere.
"Restrain him!"
"Lieutenant Commander. Service number five-niner-two-three-alpha-charlie-two-eight-six!"
I stood and fired. Franks tossed a grenade at the thing as he went to ground. Chuck Richardson just wasn't there anymore.
A split second before the other thrashing, writhing appendage could wrap me in a corrosive embrace, DeLana hit me from the side and sent me sprawling, just barely dodging its grasp. A stinking drop of burning saliva stuck to my shoulder as the tentacle flashed by, but I counted on my armor to keep me safe.
A roar sounded from the maw. Richardson had disappeared down its gullet, a tasty snack. Now, like Peter Pan's crocodile, it wanted the rest of Captain Hook.
DeLana and I took to our knees and fired everything we had at the creature. Franks joined in and our three streams of bullets managed to bisect the second of its bony joints and a chunk of monster flopped to the ground. It roared again, then reverted to its customary shriek and slashed its other arm at me. This time I dutifully dodged to the side, giving DeLana and Franks a good few seconds to pester it with bullets while it was distracted.
Spitting mud, I started in surprise as a bore worm emerged from the slimy ground directly beneath me. My gun fell somewhere in the muck as I rolled out of pure reflex. I did not want this thing anywhere near me.
The worm reared up on its hind segments, the snakelike abomination hissing invertebrate rage as it spread wide its six separate telescoping jaws, displaying thousands of tiny razorlike teeth. While I fumbled for my sidearm, it launched itself at me.
Bore worms are heavy for their size, especially fully mature ones over a meter long, and this one hit me dead on. As I tumbled to the ground, worm plates scraping against my armor, the thing clamped its jaws around my shoulder. I twisted, but two of the worm's double-jointed jaws locked on and held tight, crunching through weakened armor plates. That whole side of my body exploded in pain as hundreds and hundreds of worm teeth sank into my flesh. My body jerking in spasmodic agony, I added my own scream to the maw's enraged shriek as it flailed its deadly limb at DeLana and Franks, who were doing everything they could just to keep it at bay.
I was on my own.
When I felt two more of the worm's jaws find purchase, felt it digging deeper into my arm, I knew I was trouble. I managed to pull the trigger, but my round caromed uselessly off the worm's tail sections, and the recoil from firing one-handed in an awkward position only fanned the flames of pain further.
Something was happening to my arm, because by the time I finally brought the gun around, it was strangely numb though all six ravenous jaws were hard at work stripping meat from bone. I put three rounds into the worm's head and rolled in the mud, crying and shivering.
The furied shrieks of the devil and the thundering roar of God's judgment screamed all around me.
I spotted my rifle lying a few feet away and used it as a crutch to lever myself upright. DeLana and Franks were still unloading on the frenzied maw. I saw Franks drop to a crouch and curse.
"I'm out!"
"Stick with me, Dean!" DeLana shouted to him over the cacophony.
Franks didn't seem to pay attention. Yelling something I could barely make out over the din, he stood up in plain view and pulled his last two grenades from his belt. "You want a taste of some good old fashioned Earth Boy you bloodsucking alien monstrosity? WELL COME AND GET IT!"
The monster paused for a second, as if confused by Franks' sudden change in tactic, and DeLana screamed at him to get back behind cover. But Franks just chortled a psychotic laugh devoid of fear and stood there. DeLana leaped for him but it was too late. That thing's thrashing arm scooped him up like a netted fish and he laughed like a man possessed as the beast pulled him into its mouth, just laughed, never struggled.
I could still hear his laugh when, a second after he disappeared down its gullet, the grenades exploded. The twin cracks of high explosive charges were muffled, but their evidence spectacular as hot monster blood, brains, and pieces of carapace erupted in a violent outward spray--Franks' funeral pyre. Headless, the maw sank down into its own hole, leaving only a trail of foul-smelling smoke behind in its wake.
My shoulder throbbed with inconsolable pain. I collapsed into the reeking filth, unable to go on.
Shepard, John Frederick. Lieutenant Commander. Service number five-niner-two-three-alpha-charlie-two-eight-six. Akuze garrison.
DeLana appeared over me. "Come on, we have to move."
I shook my head, too spent to do more than grimace in pain. "Can't."
And then she saw it. "Shepard, you're hurt!" Immediately she shouldered her rifle and rummaged about for one last packet of biogel, which she used to field dress my wound, drizzling the gooey salve over the ragged, gushing rent in my arm where the bore worm had attached itself. It stung like having the inhabitants of a whole beehive let loose on my arm.
"What happened?" DeLana asked as she took my other arm over her shoulder and hoisted me to my feet.
"Bore worm," I managed to answer.
"Gotta get to that beacon," she said.
"Yeah," I replied with a pained gasp. Neither of us wanted to talk about Richardson or Franks.
We had only a short way to go from there, but it was sheer torture for me with my injured arm. The biogel helped somewhat, but I was still in so much pain that I could barely move my hand and the motion of walking, let alone the trudging through the thick and heavy slop, was brutal.
DeLana climbed alone into the twisted ruins of the comm building because I physically couldn't do it. With all the dubious protection my wimpy sidearm would provide, I played lookout while she went in and activated the emergency distress beacon.
I spent eternities by myself under Akuze's black night before she finally came back.
"Now what?" I asked.
DeLana looked back the way we'd come and for a minute she hung her head in her hands, apparently feeling much the same way I was; that it was totally hopeless, that we were going to die no matter what we did.
But we couldn't go out resigned to defeat. Even I knew that, and I think she did too, though she wasn't feeling it right then. We had to believe there was a way to get out alive, because belief was all we had left.
"They're coming from underground," she said, thinking out loud. "What does that mean?"
I thought it was obvious. "They live there."
"Right, but then how do they move around?"
My arm hurt too much for me to have to think. I couldn't understand the importance of her asking these questions, I just wanted to lie down and feel sorry for myself. "Push dirt out of the way like earthworms, I guess. Maybe they eat it, I don't know."
"But what would a worm do if it was blocked by a big rock or something?" She was getting excited now.
"Go around it?"
Suddenly, slapped her knees in triumph. "Shepard, the cliffs--the cliffs!"
Finally it hit me. The outpost was built close to a series of folding ridges, some hundreds of feet high. What she was saying to me was that if we could get back to those ridges, those high cliffs, then maybe the tunneling monsters couldn't follow us, or at least it would slow them down considerably. Neither of us knew much of anything about these ravening maws except that they'd killed all of our comrades in arms, but I doubted they could punch through solid rock without a whole lot of effort.
"All that rock, it's got to slow them down." Somehow, I managed a grin. I believed her. "It could even work!"
"Let's go."
"Love you, DeLana."
"Love you, Shepard."
Voluntarily, I stepped back into the human swamp with DeLana.
"Sir, he's not responding. We need help down here!"
I lost all feeling in my arm. Not even the tingling sting of the biogel registered with my brain anymore. The limb hung heavy, deadweight. DeLana had to help me across the rough, uneven ground. We went at a grindingly slow pace, compounded by my injury, painstakingly scouring each new path ahead with the flashbeams mounted on our guns.
Barely had we passed out of sight of the wrecked comm building when the noises started up again. It wasn't one of the monstrous maws letting loose its tectonic scream, but the more insidious music of clicking carapaces and lazy sloshes beneath the mud. More of the deadly bugs, gathering in swarms.
In my one steady hand I gripped my rifle, ready to shoot over DeLana's shoulder if it came to it. We listened to the ticking-squirming-scurrying noise with dread as it grew louder but more indistinct at the same time. Neither of us could get a fix on its direction, so we had no idea where the bugs might come from. Bore worms might be tunneling beneath our feet, floss beetles could scuttle in from the side, and at any time a maw could swallow us from below.
Somehow, I saw it out of the corner of my eye. Blacker than the moonless, overcast night sky, a floss beetle launched itself at us.
"Duck!" I screamed in DeLana's ear. She dutifully dropped me and swung her shotgun into both hands, blowing away the abominable insect almost before I had even hit the mud-slick ground, where I was no safer.
Bore worms started seething from the ground, and I could hear the legs of a dozen or so more beetles coming at us. I twisted to the side to bring my rifle to bear, split the worm in two with a burst of bullets into its gaping mouth as DeLana simultaneously pivoted to face the oncoming crush of black insects. Her shotgun roared to life, blasting away at the ravenous beasts as I tried to get to my feet to aid her.
My arm was not getting better. It was beyond numb, and I thought I could feel the acid eating away at muscle and connective tissue. As I gained a tentative vertical base, I took drunken aim with my rifle and annihilated the closest group of beetles. But even as their shells cracked and spurted colorful bug guts, a quartet of bore worms poked their eyeless, tooth-studded head from the mud and growled at us, slithering like legless centipedes through the sludge. DeLana shouted, calling my attention to another batch that surfaced a few feet away, and I realized what they were doing.
Boxing us in.
I fired my gun in frenzy, eviscerating worm after worm, but they kept popping out of the blood-soaked ground. Dead worms blanketed the mud as DeLana and I did our best to retreat, hoping to circle around the bloodthirsty things. There was a sudden stab of not pain but vague unpleasantness in my arm, I looked down to find a beetle perched on my forearm, gouging its wicked mandible into my biceps muscle.
The thing's single fang hit bone and ignited one of the few nerves I had left in that arm. Roaring in pain, I thrashed my body trying to dislodge the giant bug, but I only ended up on the ground again as it dug itself in deeper. A ligament parted before DeLana's boot crushed the remorseless arthropod.
She grabbed my good arm and started literally dragging me through the mud, her gun still blazing at the voracious worms. I miraculous managed to keep hold of my rifle, but what remained of my left arm was never going to be useful again.
I don't know how far she got us before her adrenaline burst or whatever it was ran out of steam and she couldn't pull me any farther, but we had gained a brief reprieve.
"Shepard, I need you to get up," she pleaded. "I can't keep carrying you. You need to get up."
"The little freak cut off my arm," I groaned, fresh throbs of pain hammering in my side.
"Your legs work fine," DeLana growled, snapping me out of my self-pity "There's more worms coming our way and I can't keep them away from us and carry you at the same time. Not if they come at us like that again." To punctuate her point, she wasted a threesome of floss beetles with an angry blast of her shotgun.
"Alright, I--I think I can walk."
"Great." DeLana hoisted me upright and I nearly fell again, but at the last moment I was able to gain balance. I gave her my rifle, since there was nothing I could do with it anymore. "Let's go."
For what seemed hours we ran-jogged-limped-cursed-stumbled-crawled-willed our way through the gory, muddy mess, at times beset by wave upon wave of ruthless, insectile predators. DeLana sprayed down swarms with the two rifles, while I with my service pistol took shots at some of the slower worms tunneling just below the surface.
We had to be close to the edges when we heard the dread shriek of a maw.
Cursing bitterly, I swiveled my flashbeam, futilely probing the darkness.
"DeLana..."
"I hear it, Shepard!"
"I can't see a thing!" I was panicking. Something tall rose up before my flashbeam, but after a hard start I realized it was a blue pine: a tree. And then it surfaced. I heard its roar, felt a blast of hot ammonia and a spray of pulverized dirt hit my face. It had to be mere feet from me.
DeLana's flashbeam finally found the monster less than fifteen feet away. She aimed the light straight at its bulbous eyes, causing it to hiss in anger and buying precious seconds. "Shepard, move!" She screamed at me.
But I couldn't move, I was petrified. DeLana was in the process of yanking me out of the way by my one good arm when the monster's questing tentacle caught us both. With a yank of its appendage, the beast had us on the ground, DeLana's rifle crushed between our bodies and my pistol lost in the mud.
This was a smaller and weaker maw than the one that killed Richardson and Franks, and it had trouble pulling the two of us as easily as it might have just one. Instead of none, our chances were merely slim, so I scrabbled frantically in the mud as we were dragged ever closer to the gaping mouth. Miraculously, my hand snagged a tree root and I held fast, stopping our slide.
The maw roared its displeasure and pulled harder. For a minute I thought my shoulder would be ripped out of its socket, and then I slipped from its grasp like a melon seed.
"Shepard!" DeLana's scream sliced the night. To my horror, I realized the maw still had her.
Scrambling to my feet as quickly as I could, I cast about in the pitch darkness, fumbling for my shotgun and its flashbeam. Once I clicked it on, I found myself facing the massive trunk of an oak tree and DeLana was nowhere in sight. My heart thundered with desperation, knowing I had only seconds to find her before it was too late. Using my shotgun to light the way, I dashed toward the noises of a body dragging through the mud, the angry exhalations from the maw, and DeLana's frenzied screams.
"Shepard!" she shrieked again and I found her with my flashbeam, just a few feet from the mouth of the thing's burrow. It was retracting back into the ground and pulling down with it. In a matter of moments she would be gone.
DeLana had managed to free one of her arms, and as she reached for me I could see the terror stark on her face. I leaped for her, stretching my arm beyond all reasonable limits. Her fingers were mere inches from mine.
And then she was gone. With a final, despairing scream, DeLana vanished.
I was numb. Completely, totally numb. Crawling to the edge of the sinkhole where the maw had retreated I probed with my flashbeam but there was nothing to see. So I just sat there and stared into the deep, DeLana's scream echoing in my mind.
Everyone was dead.
"I'm Rear Admiral Mikhailovich, son."
"Shepard, John Frederick. Lieutenant Commander. Service number five-niner-two-three-alpha-charlie-two-eight-six. Akuze garrison, sir! Admiral, it's not safe for you to be here, hostile creatures have overrun the outpost. Colonel Pickens and his squad are already dead. They've destroyed our defensive perimeter, the outpost is gone. Everyone's dead."
"Commander, it's alright, you're safe now."
"No, we're not safe, we need to get to the cliffs. They can't get near the cliffs. We'll be safe there."
"Shepard, it's alright. You're aboard the SSV Jutland, an Alliance vessel. We picked up your distress signal. You made it, son."
"DeLana didn't think we'd make it, but she said to do it anyway. Harvey, Richardson, and Franks died getting to the generator. The Alliance needs to know what happened. DeLana and I—no she's dead, Admiral. Everyone's dead."
"You're alive, son. You're alive."
"Is he sleeping?"
"Yes. He'll be out for a while."