Short Story #5 - Without Number

By: RanmaChan

The turret roared, spitting high caliber death into the ranks of the enemy. Mines exploded, rockets fired, smoke belched from barrels as massive battle cannons were fired. Heavy weapon emplacements and pintle mounted guns fired nonstop. Shell casings fell to the ground in the thousands, and spent clips dropped in piles. Guns bucked in human hands. Aim no longer mattered, every projectile fired at the enemy would find a target.

There were so many of them. Horrible, chittering, clacking, bug-lizard things, covered in slime drenched living armor. They hopped, leaped, crawled, walked, ran, and some even flew. Their weapons spat death back at the defenders, using bio-weapons built directly into their bodies. Acidic spit, razor sharp bone fragments, flesh eating maggots, and even more nightmarish and horrid weaponry was directed upon the defenders.

Hundreds of the creatures fell as every defensive turret came to life, blasting huge holes in the chittering mass. The holes were instantly filled with more of the creatures, scrambling over their fallen to reach the fresh meat ahead of them. Two more appeared for every one dead.

They appeared to be without number, filling up the horizon with their uncountable masses.

The human defenders stood upon a vast bulwark, with a massive plain before them. The field was filled with deadly traps for the vast enemy horde. Incredibly deep holes filled with spikes and explosives were prepared, mines were planted, and vast amounts of razor wire was set up in front of the defenders. The bulwark the defenders stood upon was a massive wall of ferrocrete, reinforced with plasteel. Hundreds of tanks stood behind the vast ranks of human guardsmen, with turrets built into the wall separating the squads.

Every mine had detonated, the holes and pits had filled up with trampled and burnt dead. Razor wire cut the first creatures to shreds, and soon hundreds of bodies covered the field. The horde of creatures could not reach the defenders on their massive battlements, and the plasteel was too hard for their claws to cut into and climb. The killing went on for many minutes, the humans firing downwards at the scrambling enemy, and the tanks firing at the horde still approaching in the distance.

The creatures started to walk on a platform of their dead. As the pile at the base of the wall grew, and grew, and grew, the creatures were soon climbing over a ramp of their dead, slowly coming closer to the increasingly worried defenders. Humans started to fall forwards into the increasingly large pile of the dead as bio-weapons fired at close range. Soon the smaller aliens were leaping upwards and into the close press of men, cutting and slashing, adding more human bodies to the ramp.

Bayonets were readied, and Chainswords revved up. Soon the forward lines were cutting and stabbing at anything that moved, with men firing over their soldiers into waves of enemies. Massive lumbering creatures appeared out of the horde in the field, firing spore mines at the defending tanks. Acid and bone fragments flew everywhere as the anti tank bio-weapons detonated among the defenders.

The first line of men were cut down, then the second, then the third, as tanks and turrets detonated from the heavy weapons of the aliens. The nightmarish creatures soon overran the defenders lines, cutting down the routed soldiers, and destroying the retreating tanks. The aliens continued moving forwards, hundreds of them leaping, crawling, and running over a massive layer of their dead, up a ramp of bodies, and towards the now defenseless human city.