The chaos was overwhelming for the average citizen of Earth, Hawaiians and tourists who had been trapped by the current crisis running and screaming as orbs of red hot plasma slammed into already damaged buildings. However, they did not scream for mercy. Curses left human lips as they damned their attackers, even in death. The planet had been under siege for over a month and even the general populace fought by throwing chairs, fruit, umbrellas, and anything they could get their hands on back at the six mercenaries tailing them.
The mercenaries moved professionally, each of them a former soldier of the Galactic Federation that had defected to join Jumba Jookiba and his allies, not just for survival but for power. The reptilian creatures were displeased with peace, and reveled in each death caused by the green plasma bolts shot from their weapons, chasing down the civilians at a measured pace, slowly dispersing from the genetic experiment they were escorting, exactly as their enemies had expected.
Hidden in the bushes behind the back alleys, Cobra Bubbles made a hand gesture that told the nearby soldiers to initiate their attack. The sound of a rocket launcher firing came from somewhere beyond the trees, a laser guiding the rocket into one of the engines of the elegant and sleek transport vessel that hovered behind the genetic experiment. Another followed from the other side and the ship was felled, crashing into the street below as twenty human soldiers surrounded the creature that looked almost like it was made of molten lava. The thing was nearly indestructible to begin with, but it also had an orange combat vest that protected its vital areas while allowing the three biological plasma mortars growing out of its back through three respective holes. It had a similar weapon for a nose, but because of its position the nose cannon was a great deal more useful against ground forces such as those the creature now faced. It was experiment 620, an improvement on the 619 design using elements from 502.
Simultaneously a squad of seven with two drum-loaded grenade launchers between them moved in behind the saurian aliens. The armor of the mercenaries could easily repel most bullets, so the launchers were quite necessary. Two explosions killed one mercenary and scattered the others as they separated to take cover in the alleys, but one of them was too slow, being tackled by a Hawaiian surfer named David. The human soldiers advanced, taking up firing positions and waiting for the aliens to break cover, unable to help David for fear of friendly fire.
The mercenaries were on the defensive and the high priority target was completely isolated; the plan seemed to be working.
That's when experiment 620 began to laugh maniacally, shooting down one of the humans with an orb of plasma that disintegrated his chest and torso completely. The humans were already firing as they approached, and the experiment was battered by explosives and projectiles. At first it seemed unfazed, forcing the soldiers to roll away from falling plasma and killing three more with its nose-cannon, but the humans knew to expect durability and continued their attack, alternating fire so they could reload without granting the alien any respite.
Meanwhile, David Kawena struggled to pry the plasma weapon from the saurian alien beneath him, but it had the advantage of superior strength and had regained its senses. Its knee connected with the man's gut and it rolled on top of him, but David held stubbornly to the weapon, keeping it aimed away from everyone.
A screaming maniac named Nani Pelekai ran in the opposite direction of most of the crowd, brandishing a broken rake and stabbing the sharp end down on the alien's back.
The material that could resist weaker plasma weapons was not punctured, and a swinging tail knocked Nani off her feet.
Two of the alien soldiers were looping around to help the surrounded experiment, but Cobra spotted them and drew his radio to contact the snipers in the trees. "Don't let them regroup. Fire on anything that moves." Two simultaneous shots hit the visors of the aliens, and Cobra was genuinely surprised when the armor-piercing rounds actually broke through the otherworldly glass and splattered maroon blood over the grass. He heard a third shot as an enemy he couldn't see was killed somewhere on the other side of the little tourist trap, and got three kill confirmation pips from the respective snipers. Considering the first pip from the assault team with the launchers there were only two saurian soldiers left.
"We've got trouble on the street, Bubbles." The sergeant watching the brawl spoke into his radio when Nani fell.
"Hey meanie!" Lilo Pelekai was on the verge of tears, still unaccustomed to the ruthless raids from the alien mercenaries, but since the various military powers of Earth had regrouped to fight back she found the courage to throw her ice cream cone. The alien's visor was obstructed by the dessert, and it instinctively reached up to remove it without thinking, his guard dropped by the absurdity of the situation. David took the moment to yank the plasma weapon from the loosened grip and open fire. The first bolt slammed into the protective suit, some of the plasma back-splashing and burning David's skin. the assault team opened fire with their assault rifles to give David a chance to squirm out from under the concussed mercenary, and their bullets punctured the suit where the plasma had weakened it.
The humans ceased their fire as the saurian stared down at the gaping hole in its torso, only for Nani to step between it and the guns, stabbing her broken rake through the wound and up into the saurian's brain. After the savage display of protectiveness for her sister, Nani ran to Lilo and scooped her up, running from the scene. David stayed behind with a few others who were cheering, clutching his new plasma weapon uncertainly.
The sergeant sent the kill pip before Cobra responded. "There's only one left. Flush it out with grenades and we'll finish it off."
"The priority target is no longer firing back," another soldier reported from the team surrounding the experiment. "I think we got it."
"Don't stop firing!" Cobra responded. "It could be a trick, or simply recharging. These things have survived much worse. Don't assume it dead until you've blown it in half."
626 saw 620's distress signal light up on the monitor for his interstellar fighter craft, which was currently in atmosphere over Australia. 626 had gleefully been dueling with several fighter planes while avoiding fire from anti-air tanks, but immediately twisted his ship around and fired up his mach 40 in atmosphere drive. He would arrive in Hawaii in a little more than ten minutes from his current position. This was not the first distress signal he had received from his fellows, and he was beginning to think that this particular backwater planet would put up an annoyingly good fight.
"Why won't this thing just-" and the speaker was dead.
"We're running out of armaments!" a sniper shot rang out and the last saurian was felled, freeing up the assault squad meant to distract them.
"Team Beta," Cobra began with surprising calm. "Collect the plasma weapons and join team alpha in the attack on the priority target."
"Now we're talkin', yeah!"
"Snipers, open fire on the target from your positions. We have to keep hitting it until it breaks." Several minutes passed by as Cobra's orders were followed; he was one of the few humans who had encountered aliens before the siege and the information had been passed to those now under his command, so his words were taken quite seriously. Several soldiers ran out of assault rifle magazines and drew their sidearms, tossing their grenade belts with their off-hands as the grenade launchers also ran dry. a plasma weapon nearly overheated and began an auto-vent cycle, causing the soldier using it to drop it in alarm, but still the beast refused to just die.
Suddenly frothing at the mouth, 620 charged directly into the fusillade of bullets and plasma, releasing a storm of plasma orbs in all directions. It was a last act of defiance in the face of death, the desperation of a crazed predator, and uncalculated vectors of attack were random and ineffective. Most of the soldiers had to stop firing to avoid death and a few were grazed, but one of them managed to land a plasma shot directly on the experiment's right eye. The eyes were the physically weakest points on an experiment of Jumba's, and the organ exploded in a spray of pink blood and super-heated matter particulates.
In an instant a sleek spacecraft appeared in the sky, much more elegant than the downed transport. The sound of its approach was scattered behind it in flickering waves of weirdly ambient noise, and the humans gaped up at it in disbelief, one of them screaming out: "Redship!"
"Abort mission and retreat into the forest!" Cobra ordered, sounding panicked for the first time since the attack began. "Scatter and run as quickly as you can until Redship leaves!"
The first thing 626 noticed was his fallen kin, its life-signs weak, surrounded by human soldiers. The next thing he noticed was that they were turning to flee. His mind was as fast as a super-computer, and he registered every threat his ship could detect as the camouflaged snipers were targeted by the ship's computer. He tapped a few keys to make the ship auto-fire on the furthest targets first and typed a seven digit passcode into a holopad to open up the floor between his seat and the control console. He dropped down, his four arms each pulling a plasma pistol from the space-bending compartments on the opposite wrists of his red combat suit. He blinked his eyes to focus his sight on the infrared spectrum, allowing him to see through the dust and ash from the recent explosions and place his shots with perfect precision. He was also unbelievably fast, three of his four weapons forced into emergency energy venting modes within the two seconds 626 had taken to kill everyone around him and 620.
The blue-furred monster turned to face his predecessor, falling to his knees and speaking in their own language, one that had been created and programmed into every experiment by Jumba to make their coded messages even more difficult for others to eventually decipher. "six-two-zero?"
"I… I didn't expect…" 620 coughed violently, pink blood spilling from his mouth, the same color 626 would see if he were to bleed. "Federation troops don't fight like that…"
626 cooed softly, looking deeply into 620's only remaining eye as he reached down to reverently lift the other experiment. He was more than an ally, he was family, another member of the 600 series, a paragon of destruction and conquest brought low by primitives.
They were brothers.
Two rockets slammed into the ship's shields where Cobra guessed the targeting computer would be, not breaching the energy barrier but jarring the ship enough to scramble the auto-targeting system, giving the remaining snipers and civilians a chance to escape, while Cobra himself threw an experimental sticky grenade at the pilot of the infamous Redship. It clung to the fur on the creature's neck and released its hundred thousand volt charge through both it and the wounded beast it held. As they screamed in shock and pain, Cobra snatched up a fallen plasma rifle and fired on them as quickly as he could, tossing the weapon at them when it began to vent. When the overheating weapon came in contact with the super-heated matter around the pair of aliens it exploded spectacularly, collapsing Redship's shields and shorting out its computer, its engines cutting out as it fell atop the wreckage of the transport ship before it.
Redship had fallen, but to Cobra's dismay its pilot was already standing. Cobra turned and ran without fanfare, having accomplished as much as he could have hoped to, but he grabbed two more plasma rifles as he passed them, certain they would be useful for researchers later.
626 groggily got to his feet, his head pounding and his ears ringing. He could see pink blood on his arms and his suit was ripped and charred, the space-bending compartments severely damaged and their connections with their pocket dimensions permanently severed. His weapons were lost.
He turned his vision forward, lamenting his fallen ship before his memories hit him hard and he began searching for something smaller. The explosion had thrown him several yards away, so it took him a moment to spot what he was looking for in his dazed state.
It then took him another moment as he located 620's other half.
He stumbled toward the scene, standing somewhere between the pieces near the largest stain of pink. The red blood of the fallen humans meant nothing to him.
His brother was dead.
620 was the first of the 600 series to die, and he had been killed by primitives.
He had been killed by warriors, warriors that 626 had underestimated. Granted one of his brothers and three of his cousins, 626 had begun his mission as though it were a game, dispersing his meager forces to terrorize the populace with the expectation of a swift surrender. It had worked on five other planets before this one.
Ignoring the tear that rolled down his cheek, 626 screamed a promise of vengeance to the entire planet. He scurried into his ship and pulled the emergency long-range communicator from its compartment, telling his remaining forces to immediately withdraw and regroup at his position. He would call for reinforcements from Jumba to deal with this threat fully, but first he would ravage the speck of land that killed his brother. Hawaii would be a radioactive wasteland when he was finished with it.
His orders given, 626 crawled to the part of 620 that included his head, wrapped his upper arms around his brother's neck, and his lower pair under 620's shoulders. He clung to half a corpse with surprising gentleness, and he cried.
David tensed and simultaneously tried to look like he wasn't tense as soldiers marched past him on their patrols, breathing a sigh of relief when they were gone and continuing on his way. The bandages on his arms and torso covered his burn marks, and earned him nods of recognition from some of the other survivors of the attack. It took him quite a while to find the Pelekai sisters, but when he did they were playing Checkers, trying to put the incident out of their memory. Well, the violence of it, anyway. Lilo was stubbornly fascinated by the aliens, despite all the deaths they caused, and always seemed willing to discuss them.
"So…" David took a seat as he spoke, studying the game board closely. "Whose winning."
"They are," was Lilo's distracted response. She was likewise focused on the board, and didn't notice that David was doing the same. "Four small groups and one ace pilot? They just weren't expecting a fight. Now that they've got one they'll call for backup. If I could just drop thirty more of my pieces all over the board then I'd do that, so it's the only thing that makes sense."
"I can't stop her from watching the news," Nani confessed with some humor in her voice, giving David a thankful smile. Lilo had trouble making friends her own age, but she got along just fine with David and a few other adults to Nani's relief. "It's like the real world has become one of her favorite movies. You know, because of all of the space aliens."
"Eeyep," Lilo confirmed, finally making her carefully calculated move and taking two pieces in one go. Nani stared at the board for a moment before realizing her earlier mistakes to lead to such an opportunity, performing a dramatic facepalm. "After the scientists here find out if we have space rabies we're going home to tune in to the latest updates."
"But no one got bit," David protested innocently.
"What?"
"Rabies is the thing you get from being bitten," Nani explained. "Just like zombification, only without the 'walking around after dying' part."
"So… what's the one you get from getting blood on you?"
Both David and Nani immediately thought of STDs, so they kept quiet until Nani thought of something. "Zinc poisoning."
"Really?" There was an obviously skeptical drawl to the short question. That skepticism was dangerous.
"Well," Nani made a broad hand gesture and leaned forward a bit. "If their blood has a lot of zinc in it then its possible."
"I think you made that up," was Lilo's dismissive declaration as she returned her attention to the board, waiting for her sister to make a move.
"Well I don't know anything about zinc poisoning or space diseases in general, but in regards to the updates: do you mind if I tune in with you? They aren't exactly calling me in to work these days." David noticed Nani giving him a sweet smile and nervously returned it.
Still staring at the board, Lilo decided to give a verbal answer. "I don't see why not. It's hard to decipher the motives of the invaders with just two people."
"Hey Bubbles, you might want to hear this." A communications officer passed Bubbles a headset, and it was obvious why she was avoiding using a less private device to relay the message with as soon as the message was heard.
"This is an alert to all Hawaiian bases. Every extraterrestrial contact is converging on your position. I repeat, All three remaining kill teams are converging on the island of Kaua'i." Cobra removed the headset and returned his attention to the soldiers nearby, and it was obvious they knew what was happening.
"You've dealt with aliens before… why the sudden change in tactics?"
"They thought Earth was just a playground; we've changed their minds."
