Chapter Six: The Stand
"Give me something to shoot."
Terran Marine, Starcraft
Zerg Territory, position H-6
Pfc. Kit Ashley was still staring at his buddy's decapitated, grotesque body one hundred meters away from him, sprawled in an awkward position, a stump replacing his head, which was no where to be seen.
What the hell is going to happen now? He looked at his chronometer, and then at the disappearing sun. There was still light to be seen, but after an hour or two, it would disappear. Zerg would replace light. He could feel it. They were massing, longing for blood as they watched intruders invade their territory.
Ashley started to sweat, clutching his gun closer. He had fought Zerg before and seen how they could scare the most veteran of soldiers; especially during the night. Demons from hell...
Like all mercenaries, Ashley had his own story to tell. He had been a Morian miner, a member of the Kel-Moria Guild that specialized in exploiting the numerous worlds of the Koprulu sector of its vast mineral and gas deposits. After the new anbot miners replaced human miners, Ashley and thousands of others were laid off. And with a wife and kid back home on Moria, Ashley had no choice but to enter the most widespread profession: becoming a mercenary.
He joined a company called "Black Hands," specializing in urban warfare. After a short training session and basic camp on Antiga Prime, he was shipped off to his first assignment, fighting for the Confederacy on Dylar IV. It was there he fought Zerg, and watched his new buddies die under claws and spines. He was lucky, knowing when to survive and when to fight. Because of his experience fighting Zerg, the Umojan Protectorate, with one of the best professional fighting forces (but virtually unskilled in fighting Zerg), hired him along with thousands of others veterans, shipping off to Aiur with Raynor's Raiders. And here he was.
But they still scared him. They would always scare him, those goddamn Zerg.
"Ashley!" Nacdle's loud voice startled Ashley out of his memories and back into reality: Campbell, the marine poisoned by Zerg spines was dead, his lungs filled with his own blood. Communication had been established between the dropship and the troops outside the ground, but it didn't matter. Hell, everyone was scared.
"Yessir!" Ashley turned around and saluted Nacdle, pressing hand over heart. His face was only showing a person scared shitless, he thought.
"Scout the area."
"Yessir."
Shouldering his gun, he trotted with a wariness, over the Creep. The land was much like his home, gently sloping, the dirt soft and moist. Not made for these CMC suits, he grumbled. A small patch of trees marked a location where the Creep had not invaded, though the green bark and red leaves were dying, however slowly, as the gelantious substance invaded its roots. Skillfully, he climbed up one of the trees, giving him a clearer view of the land. The land around the dropship was flat, a clear landscape clear of Zerg except for the creep that grew. Like towering fortresses, Ashley could see the spike-encrusted structures of Hives hidden behind hills. The only thing in view that was Zerg, besides the colony underneath the dropship was...what the hell?
Ashley's wandering eyes looked beyond him, and to a Zerg structure that was only fifty or so meters from the men. It had a cavernous opening, and it was glowing an ominous green. Ashley's eyes widened as he remembered what building it was from debrief. Why the hell haven't we seen that? Damn, did they just grow one here?
Through the ICD he told Nacdle.
"Ashley here. Sir, there's something to the west of the ship I haven't seen before."
"What are you looking at, private?" Nacdle's loud voice turned soft. He followed Ashley's directions to the structure. Holy mother of God, a Nydus Canal! Looks like it just finished morphing. Maybe we could use this...
McAllen reached the crash site before the firebats. His first instinct was to go to the ship and start helping men out, but he ran over to the dozen or so marines, standing with guns raised, fully alert. The Ghost probed the crashed ship with psionic skills, and he felt it. Jesus, there's a colony under there! No wonder...
McAllen embraced his psionic mind and reached out to feel what the other men were thinking. They turned around to him as he looked at each one. From a blue armored man, a squadron commander by his insignia, he felt fear and helplessness. From his squadron he felt the same thing. He looked at the mercs, easily distinguishing those men from his fellow Umojans by their armor. He didn't care much for mercenaries either, but at least they wouldn't shit their pants like the Umojan commander was doing.
One looked at him with a curious gaze. He turned to him: a man with grey, piercing eyes and a hawk-like nose: He's blocking me! He has psionic talent too. I can't read his mind. No wonder I was drawn here. Damn, I thought Feds scoured the whole system for psionic talent...guess they missed this guy.
"Are you Nacdle?" he asked, shouldering his gun.
"Yes. Are you the assistance that was supposed to come, sir?"
"Yes and no." McAllen debated with himself, wondering if he should tell the marines about his other covert mission, even though its contents were still classified.
He decided it didn't matter anymore; the goddamn mission wouldn't work. I'll wait until the flame-throwers get here.
"What do you mean?"
"I'll tell you when the other squadron gets here. Now, why are you-"
"Look, we've got a hundred men in that dropship. A Sunken colony underneath it. Zerglings surrounding it. Night's coming, and the Zerg launching an attack. You gonna fucking help us or what? Sir." The other marines looked at Nacdle shocked, never hearing anyone talk like that to a Ghost.
McAllen at Nacdle, masked, goggled face staring at a pair of eyes. "Nydus canal? Here?" McAllen was surprised. Why Zerg would need to transport troops from the Cerebrate to here is...his mind suddenly clicked.
"Holy mother of..." McAllen's sudden calm, cool composure disappeared under a blast of sudden excitement.
Nacdle was surprised, arcing his eyebrows up. "What do you mean, Agent?"
"I'm mean that your asses are all going to be saved."
Aboard crashed dropship T-34
Jonson, one of the men still inside the ship, was talking to God about deliverance when something lifted the dropship up. At first, he thought the two pilots had gotten the ship to miraculously fly again, but it wasn't it: he saw a massive tongue like object lift the ship up from the bottom. Black's body was also lifted onto the tongue, as shrill screams informed him that the Zerglings had been thrown off. Then the ship went down again, as well as the body.
Men were screaming again, as they realized what the ship was sitting on: a Sunken colony. The Zerglings climbed up on the ship again, resuming their attack to get inside the ship. O'toole, who had somehow managed to get out of the metal trapping his legs, hobbled on both legs as he grinned crazily at everyone, pointing down and saying: "No rescue now boys, we've got a friend underground!" He turned around to Jonson. "Where's God now, boy?"
Jonson closed his eyes. No wonder they aren't rescuing us, they can't! A marine, out of fear or anger, lifted his Impaler and sent bursts of spikes into the creature beneath him, as the bullets savagely cut into Black's body and the colony. The structure bled red on the ship's interior. Acrid smoke rose up and made Jonson and the rest of the men cough, and the ship's metal plates vaporized into black, burnt metal.
"Stop firing!" Another squadron commander, second lieutenant Allison Carter smacked the man with an armored fist and took away his gun. "Listen..." The men stopped wailing and listened as a metallic clomp was heard on the ceiling of the dropship. The Zerglings stopped growling. The burst of a rifle firing was heard, followed by a thump of soft flesh. More thumps and shrill screams of Zerg. Zerglings clambered away, yelping as they were hit by metal slugs.
Then the hatch opened.
A snaky, dry voice questioned the men, as they squinted at the sight of darkening sunlight. "Anyone alive down there?" It seemed like no one was there, but Jonson could see a shimmering, almost invisible form of a Ghost. Cloaked from the Sunken colony...how brilliant, Jonson thought.
"Sir, this is squadron commander Allison Carter of Zulu-1D squadron. We're requesting your assistance, please."
"Can you see the Sunken colony from there?"
"Sir, the roo' is directed underneath us, and we can see the head of it, where the root sprouts"
"I'm on it."
The Ghost jumped down, landing lightly on the uneven dropship, balanced by the bulk of the Sunken colony. He walked on it carefully, as it was centimeters off the ground. Hoisting his C-10 'Frag' Canister Rifle shoulder high, the marines back away from him, minds swirling with fear and curiosity as he surveyed each one. Odd bunch of troops. They've been inside here too long.
Their faces seemed weird in the darkness, covered by visors. He decloaked, carefully letting his gun down as he looked at each man with his scoped eyes. One displayed a curious mixture of delight and curiosity, but no fear...there was something quite unright about that one. All the other marines, disheveled mercs and haughty Sarians, displayed fear seeing a Ghost, only recognizing them from theater cinematics.
Better look out for the crazy one, he thought, looking at the curiosity of a marine's eyes, as the man hobbled around.
He turned to the man that talked to him, a blue-armored man with a Impaler gripped firmly in his armored glove.
"Intelligence Officer Spc. Ethan McAllen," he said, his voice raspier than it needed to be. The myth of the Ghost had been perpetuated by the Confederacy, but Umojan Intelligence Operatives, as Ghosts were called by Umojans, were spies, not ruthless assassins.
"Sir, yes sir!" Carter responded, saluting to the Ghost.
"Where's the root?"
Carter pointed to the opening in the dropship, where a side of a dead marine laid, crushed when the dropship landed. Besides him, an odd looking tongue was lolled out, almost waiting for another victim. The portion of the tongue, McAllen knew was connected to the rest of the structure underground, along with its other grotesque parts. All he needed to do was sever to root from the rest of it.
"Stand back, this won't be pretty." The marines edged back to the sides of the circular dropship, as the Agent hoisted his gun. He could see the root was already bleeding, spewing spurts of blood on the corroded dropship floor.
He took an aim, and fired. The canister, which was really a massive, cylindrical bullet one and a half centimeters wide and six centimeters long, blasted into the root, as the Sunken colony flinched and lifted up a few centimeters, rocking the ship. More blood came out. He fired another canister, this time completely severing the tongue off the colony. A gallon of blood poured out on the remains of the marine and seeped back into the ground, as the Creep began retreating from the area of the dropship, decomposing at a light-speed rate. The flesh from the rest of the structure began to melt, as its weapon and nutrient device was severed off.
"McAllen here." He talked into his ICD. "I've killed the colony. It's safe to come down here now."
He turned around to the other men. "Assemble outside," he said, looking at them. Now it's time to fulfill your end of the bargain.
At T-34's crash site
Firebat squadron commander Hancock shook his blackened head for the thousandth time as he put his visor down and lead a squadron of men to the dropship. Bait...they used us as fucking pieces of bait! After his company had arrived, the Ghost had conferenced with the squadron commanders of Zulu and Yankee, and debriefed them on what them weren't supposed to know about the Cerebrates, Nukes, Dark Templar, and so on...one marine commander had simply emptied his stomach after the Ghost told them the whole story. It was sickening. He couldn't believe Raynor would send thousands of boys out here to die, just to provide cover to Agents and Protoss that now couldn't do their job. I thought we could trust that man. Goddamn, we've been with him since day one. But he just uses us like rhydons.
A few hundred men were assembled here now, with all medics lifting the wounded and dead from the ship, while other marines and firebats patrolled the perimeter. For almost a kilometer, a flat, peaceful landscape, devoid of anything, stretched, surrounded by Zerg structures.
Hancock had grown up in Mar Sara, with Jim Raynor, his next door neighbor. Why he wasn't safely tucked in as a battlecruiser commander like all of Raynor's other friends was his own doing. He had simply enjoyed the thrill of burning things; pyromaniacs were like that.
When Raynor, one of his best buddies, decided to become a Marshal of the rural farming region of New Delta on Mar Sara, Hancock enlisted in the Confederate Gamma Squadron, as a marine. A few months of pain and suffering, he joined the 21st Heavy Assault Battalion. He slowly worked his way up, and finally became a Firebat squadron commander.
Bait! Why the hell...
Jones also felt the sickening sense of getting tricked into a mission that he didn't want to do. Raynor did this shit on us. We trusted him because he was like the rest of us, hicks from a backwater planet, and he just shitted on us. Who the hell can we trust?
Even more surprising though, was the Ghost's plan to fulfill his mission. And the two companies would help him.
He debriefed them on the plan. A Nydus Canal was the fastest transportation mechanism the Protoss and Terran had ever seen, able to rapidly transport a small Zergling or a massive Ultralisk through an underground network of tunnels. Once one Canal had been successfully implanted in the ground, it spread its roots to different directions, and could grow more Canals to link each Zerg base together, forming an organic subway system. The Canal's main point of departure laid in the center of a Zerg base. The Cerebrate was also strategically in the center of the base, the point hardest to attack.
McAllen's plan was to launch a Interplanetary Medium Ballistic Missile (IMBM), from a space station orbiting Aiur on the Cerebrate; to do this he would have to crawl through a few hundred meters worth of Nydus Canal underground tunnels to get to a point to set a launch time by the Cerebrate, launch the missile, and wait for denotation underground. The blast above would level millions of Zerg into their own hell. He could not destroy the Cerebrate himself, but he could wipe out the millions of Zerg packed into the Cererbrate's defense zone (in this case, Jormungand brood's Cerebrate, Araq), so that the Dark Templars could sneak in and do their job. Once one had been killed, the whole Zerg chain of command would collapse for a few minutes, allowing other Tango teams to kill the other Cerebrates too.
The infantry's job was to protect McAllen as he crawled through the Canal and launched the missile. The Canal, located a few hundred meters northeast of the crashed dropship, would have to be protected by bats and grunts so that Zerg would be blasted if they tried to get in or out of the Zerg transportation building. If the Zerg took control of the area they were in, they would surely send Overlords out to detect hidden units, and even worst, stop to check if there were any intruders in their buildings. McAllen wanted the grunts and flamethrowers to keep the Zerg busy, until he could get in and launch a nuke. Other men had to be stationed inside the ship to provide another line of defense for the incoming Zerg from the west, while a recon unit would be stationed even farther away to provide intelligence on the whole situation. Nacdle, Hancock, and McAllen had agreed on one thing: if the Zerg were launching a counter-attack, they were going to launch it pretty soon. The Aiuran sky was darker now, and McAllen could feel the psionic presence of Zerg readying for an assault.
Nacdle tried to communicate with any other squadrons and ships to help him, but the signals were jammed by Overlords. Just me and my men now.
Near Jormungand Brood's Cerebrate, Araq
Aragas, Zami, and Jin of the Tango team were looking at the movement around the Jormungand's Zerg Cluster. They were moving everything, as Overlords were sent to scout, Hydralisks popped out of the ground and disappeared into waiting Overlords, as other of the beasts moved deeper into the base. Zerglings scrambled around, waiting for something. And Zami could feel the massive presence of more troops still underground, waiting for any strike at the Cerebrate Araq.
We will never accomplish this task! Forgive me, my fathers, I have failed. A device underneath his cloaks beeped once.
Curse these infernal Terran devices! Zami said, fumbling into his cloak and pulling out a communications device that McAllen had given him. Dude, I'll call on this thing if I need you for anything...Zami remembered the lips of the human move as he talked. It was odd...
Zami pointed the device to his center of his neck, where a machine was implanted into his voice organ to translate Protossian speech to Terrans. Most of the time, the Templars liked to use their gifted minds to communicate psychically, but other times they had to resort to this.
Yes, Ethan?
"Is that you, Zami? Look I've found a way to kill this Cerebrate. There's a Nydus Canal here. If I crawl far enough into the tunnels leading to the main Hive Cluster, I'll eventually reach where the Cerebrate is. I'll launch a nuke, massacre all the Zerg burrowed or guarding the Cerebrate, and then your people come and kill it. That way, the other T-teams will be able to slip into their Cerebrate's place and kill them, too."
How do you propose getting through the Zerg that are going to be inside the Canal? They are launching an attack, Terran.
"I'll need a costume...one of the marine commanders here told me about some Hydralisks that they killed. They're not very far from here; we could go get one and I'll don it on like a costume."
A dead carcass as a costume...sickening how these Homo sapiens do everything in their will to get the mission done-his thoughts were interrupted.
That is why they have survived so long, Zami. They persist. Jin spoke up for the first time, not looking at Zami as he polished his dry, pebble-like skin, blue surrounding hard, gray flesh. I heard the message and your thought. The plan is worthy enough, we must do everything in our power to stop this...infestation.
Zami turned around. And how do you think that a dead flesh of a Zerg can look even similar with a bulging human inside of it?
"I'll explain that, man. We've got a guess on how the Zerg see. Their main use of sight is to see heat-signatures. Zerg only see in outlines of heat, the more heat the thing is giving off, the more red they see. And they'll see blue if the think they're looking at doesn't radiate heat. They don't see in the world of flesh and color like we do. Or you guys. Anyways, organic things resonate their heat, right? And inorganic things don't. Zerg have been trained to attack anything not organic, that's why we're so easy targets in our armor even if we are camouflaged. The Zerg won't attack me because I'll be in a Hydralisk flesh; they've been engineered not to attack their own troops. When they see 'me' squatting, they'll just think it's just an injured Hydra limping it's way back to base. And if they do attack," Zami heard a Terran machine being cocked. A gun? "They'll have my Zerg Popper pistol to deal with."
And our mission, Ethan?
"You just stay there and inform us when the Zerg are moving, and then, when you see the nuke, kindly cover your mouths and don't look directly at the explosions. Then kill the Cerebrate."
We go through with this plan, Ethan,
He clipped the device into the folds of his cloak.
At crashed dropship T-34
When Nacdle had been asked by his men as he helped men out of the ship what the hell they were going to do now, he told them: "What we were hired to do."
Jones provided a clearer debrief for the marines, the survivors who almost were bursting with joy as they filed out of the ship. Their glum resumed as Jones told them what they had to do: defend the ship.
At position H-5
Pfc. Kit Ashley nervously ran with seven other men to the trees they had initially climbed right after the crash, three kilometers east of the ship. No Zerg gave chase as the firebats accompanied them. Nacdle's right, they are massing to launch a massive assault.
He had been picked to be ALPHA-Recon, leading the best snipers of the company. He had asked his squadron commander why he was picked...
"Why me?" he asked.
"You're the best goddamn sniper I have," Nacdle responded. "I need you to pick off incoming units and inform us how many are still coming towards us."
"Can I leave my armor then too, sir?"
Nacdle turned around as he helped another marine off the ship. "Why?"
"It'll slow me down, sir. Firing a big gun isn't easy with all this armor."
"Alright."
"Thanks, sir."
"One more thing. Some squadrons of firebats are going to be accompanying you. Once you snipers are in the trees, they'll be done on the ground, flaming up everything that comes."
"Yessir."
Ashley had started picking men. Sounds of sniper rifles loading and blasting Zerg with a bone-crushing impact danced in his head...
At crashed dropship, defending position H-6
Specialist Mac Damly had his hands full. He had been ordered by Nacdle, one of the merc commanders, to make the dropship "a bunker." His job was to make the crashed, half balanced, deformed craft into something that would stand up against Zerg attack. They would be attacking from the east of the dropship; already eight sharpshooters were three miles east, climbing up dead trees with three firebat squadrons. They would inform the rest of the men about the Zerg advance. Men would be holed up in the ship to kill the approaching Zerg, while another band of 'bats and marines would stationed right by the Canal, blasting Zerg.
Most of the marines that had just gotten out of the ship groaned at the thought of having to get in again. Most had volunteered to be stationed by the firebats by the Canal.
Unlike most of the Sarians fighting in Raynor's Raiders, Damly was one of the few who were from Chau Sara, Mar Sara's wealthier brother planet. He had been an engineer in the city of Dinkar, working on various building projects for the bustling city of 500,000. As rumors swirled of an alien attack on his planet, he thought he could wisely move his family to a safer place, on the relatively isolated world of Mar Sara. But the Zerg came down there too, and incinerated Damly's wife and son. Damly was already in the Confederate's Gamma Squadron then, but ran away to join the Raiders when he heard about how the Feds had not lifted a finger to save Chau and Mar Sara from destruction. His squadron commander, Staff Sergeant Bob Zyner had told Nacdle about his engineering skills, and now here he was...
Damly lifted up a piece of metal while he and five other marines worked inside the ship, the only light showing from a crudely improvised wire connected to the dropship's battery; on the end of the wire was a light bulb. He watched as the metal he was carrying slowly melt, the end of it tipped with the blood of the blasted Sunken Colony. Quickly, he moved to the side of the ship, letting the bloody piece of metal burn itself on the iron side, making a hole. Acrid metallic smoke filtered into his nose through his opened visor. He took his gun and inserted it into the hole he had just made into the ship's east side. The nozzle of the Gauss rifle fit perfectly through the hole. I'm making it a bunker!
Through his sound receptor on his helmet he could hear the marines assigned to work with him drilling and unscrewing the nuts and bolts that held the ceiling of the dropship together, slowly taking it off. The interior of the ship would be made into an operating room for the sixteen medics that were attached to Yankee and Zulu. Wounded infantry would be taken care of here as the battle roared around them.
All of the SHW gunners had survived, providing an amazing array of lethal firepower. They, along with other marines, would be stationed on the top of the ship, while others would be shooting inside it from the holes Damly was making, almost as in a bunker, where men could be stationed inside a protective building and could shoot at enemies approaching the building.
"What's the time?" Damly asked, to one of the corpsman laying his stuff carefully inside the ship, avoiding the corrosive blood of the Colony.
"29:58:45, sir."
"They'll be attacking pretty soon."
"Yessir."
"Get on with your work."
While Nacdle shouted instructions and infantrymen worked feverishly, Jones was counting the dead.
It took Jones and two his men fifteen minutes to ripped off the glass of the cockpit that held the two female pilots. There was a minute chance they were still alive, still stuck in the cockpit five or six hours after it crashed. Besides...Jones was a Sarian, a self-proclaimed hick that was a gentleman; he wouldn't leave ladies inside to be gnawed by Zerg.
The pilots were definitely dead though. One of them had her neck in a crazy angle, no doubt from the bone-crunching impact when the ship crashed. The other had dried blood staining her visor and face; her broken body was sprawled, hands still on the controls. Jones closed the eyes of pilot who had broke her neck.
"Damn."
"Jones?" His ICD crackled again. The Overlords jamming apparently didn't affect men that were only a few meters away.
"Yeah?"
"Are the pilots still alive?"
"No."
"Get back here, we've got work to do."
"Alright."
Jones turned around to his men. "If we get out of here, we're giving these two a proper burial. I'm not fucking leaving them here for some hungry Zerg. Goddamn Raynor! He left us here to die."
Casualties from the dropship were amazingly light. Only Pfcs. Campbell and Smith died from the squads that managed to get out of the dropship; Black's body was still smashed underneath the ship. The pilots were dead as well, but the Company Zulu-1 had only suffered three casualties out of 120 men. Yankee-1 had another 110 men to spare. Two hundred and twenty-seven men would be defending a grounded ship from thousands of incoming Zerg, buying time for a Ghost. Two hundred and twenty-seven men that thought they were wrongly cheated, sent to die by a commander they had been loyal to. But now only fighting for survival.
Spc. Maxwell lifted his SHW-5 gun on the dropship, settling into a crouching position on the top of the ship along with the other marine gunners. His heavy, black gun was mounted on a portable tripod. It was darker still, as he closed the visor on his helmet, automatically going to night-vision. All is quiet on the western front...
A hand rest on his shoulder. He turned around to see Nacdle smiling, somewhat handsome and regal. He didn't look like the other mercs, Maxwell realized.
"No fear," he said, quietly, dropping his visor down.
Maxwell repeated the Zulu slogan. "No fear."
The men of Zulu Company, a band of motley mercenaries, hicks, and men from dead worlds, were ready to fight. Only a few hours ago, they had experienced the crashing of a dropship and surrounding of hostile forces eager to kill them. Without the leadership of Nacdle, (who had assumed virtual position of Captain of Zulu), a merc so pitied by some of the men in Zulu because he was paid to fight, Z squadron would have been massacred. But now they were ready to kill, eager to kill, to avenge and wreak havoc on the biological bred killers that had mutilated families, made a ghost land of their planets, and stripped away their honor and dignity.
McAllen made the last preparations to his masquer, from the carcass of the Hydralisk. Several of the Hydra's parts were missing, and all of its deadly spines had been pulled out. He donned it on, cold, slimy, and wet. Only his gun showed. He still need it to pinpoint the missile to a launch point. He walked, dragging the Hydra's swishing tail with him, parts of its flesh missing. It was heavy. The Agent focused his psionic energy to make himself surge with adrenaline, giving him a welcome boost of energy.
A band of marines, surrounded by firebats in their heavier CMC-660, looked at him. Over a hundred in all. One of the firebat commanders, Hancock, gave him a cold salute. He still didn't like what the Ghost told him, about Raynor. McAllen nodded to him.
Hancock, all of Squadron Y, and almost half of Zulu would defend the Nydus Canal until the Ghost completed his job. Their mission was to protect the Canal from destruction or invasion from incoming Zerg forces, although, as Hancock saw it, the Zerg would be coming out of the Canal too.
"Sir." The Ghost turned around, looking at the psionic marine.
"Lieutenant Nacdle."
"Good luck, sir. We'll hold out here as long as we can."
"Hopefully that will be long enough."
Nacdle watched as the Ghost slipped off into the glowing Canal. He wondered if he would see him again.
"Uh, Lieutenant?"
Nacdle turned around, annoyed. "Yes, Corporal Yates?"
"I have to go."
"Go where?"
An embarrassed silence. "Go to the bathroom."
"Do it in your freaking suit, bloody hell!"
Nacdle heard a relieved sigh from the marine.
He ran back to the ship, climbing on top with the help of Maxwell. He realized he had to go too. It'll have to wait...
His ICD crackled again. "Commander?"
"Yeah Kit?"
"They're coming. Heading to your place from the east, like you said."
"Alright." He ordered his ICD to go to the Public channel.
"All troops, respond to check-in."
Hancock's voice responded. "ALPHA Canal, hot and green." One hundred and ten marines and firebats were there, Nacdle thought, as he looked north at the mass of troops not far away from the ship.
Kit's voice responded. "ALPHA Recon, ready to kill." Another fifty-three marines and 'bats waited there.
Nacdle responded last. "ALPHA Ground Zero. Nacdle out." The rest of the marines, sixty four of them, arrayed inside the ship through crudely made bunker-like slits would fire their rifles, as well as gunners on top.
He heard the rumbling, earth shattering shakes of the approaching Horde. No fear...