Halo: Feet First

by MikeDice

Halo: Feet First covers the story of a team of UNSC Orbital Drop Shock Troopers of the 7th Battalion, 105th Shock Troops Division. The main character, Duncan Iris, faces the full horror of the covenant war effort against humanity as well as the brave retaliation of outnumbered and outgunned UNSC forces. However, he also witnesses the turning of the tides as the war progresses.

188. Battle of Reach - Chapter 61 (Dis)

Chapter 61 – Dis

May 23rd, 2526 - (09:16 Hours - Military Calendar)

Epsilon Indi System, Harvest

Edda, planetary capital of Utgard

Harvest Parliament Building

(26 Years Ago)

:********:

The air within the corridor held a stagnant quality that stunk of old smoke, cement and something else. There were other scents Don couldn't quite get a fix on. He could hardly bring himself to describe them outside of an ungodly mixture of bodily fluids, fresh leather and something like a fart. Methane perhaps? Whatever it was, it was overwhelming his helmet filters and stinging his nostrils so strongly that he could almost taste it.

Above him, the ceiling was marred with holes both great and small, exposing glimpses of the dark upper reaches of the structure. His view was occasionally broken by rays of light from somewhere further up. To either side of him, the plaster walls were similarly dotted with a variety of abscesses and cracks that hinted at some measure of seismic activity having taken place in the immediate vicinity. Below him, his boots moved over the frayed and tattered remains of what was once a carpet that had covered the passageway with its now faded designs. The intricate floral patterns that ran throughout the fabric possessed a regal appearance, one that might have once welcomed planetary dignitaries from nearby colonies like Alpha Corvi II or Madrigal. Today it was welcoming a platoon of wary ODSTs to a meeting that was promising to be anything other than cordial.

The twin stacks within which 1st Platoon currently moved through the ground floor of the parliament building stuck close together. Being at the fore of the advance, Ray and Frost-4 took their duty as point men to heart by making regular stops. They both halted at corresponding doorways which lined the full length of the passageway in matching pairs. Few of them had any actual doors. Those that remained were hanging halfway off their hinges or were splayed out over the threshold where whatever guilty elements involved had either blown them away or, as Don was slowly beginning to suspect, kicked them down. Sunlight was allowed to pour in freely from either side, intermittently covering the interior of the corridor with rectangular patches of light.

Ray and Frost-4 took turns pivoting into each one in turn, leveling rifles into arid spaces whose walls peeled with the rusted tint of melted paint. They were offices from what Don could tell. Passing them one by one, he glimpsed tossed over filing cabinets and broken office tables that were often either caved in beneath the weight of fallen ceiling fans or buried beneath pileups of debris from above.

They made sure to inspect each room thoroughly as they went by.

It paid to be cautious, especially after encountering not one but two unknown species, both of which had cost them their first operational casualties, a list that now included the captain. All the same, there was little time for an abundance of caution. They had already lost too much time breaking through the enemy defenses outside. They were behind schedule. At any moment, Don expected to hear shooting coming from the other side of the building. Their friends in 4th Platoon might encounter the rest of the holdouts before they did, and after the experience of the last several minutes, God only knew what else they might happen to run into.

"I've got the southside foyer in sight." Ray reported. "Ten meters up."

"Looks empty." Frost-4 added. "Too empty. Ferret-1?"

Not far behind the advancing pair, Sergeant Major Eversman nodded. "Let's check it. We need somewhere for Fox-4 to hold up with Frost-3. Frost-6, once it's clear, you stay behind, pull security for the doc. We'll need a triage point before the hour is out."

"Roger." Frost-6 replied.

"Moving in." Ray said as he went first to step into the larger area. Frost-4 shadowed him inside while the rest of the platoon trickled in behind them, mirroring their example as they peered over their weapon barrels to scan every nook and cranny.

The foyer was a rectangular space that offered a lot more room than the network of adjoining corridors trailing away from it. A four storied atrium sat above, creating a general concourse for the upper floors while leading up to a similarly shaped hole in the ceiling. Don glimpsed the plentiful pieces of glass shards glittering across the ground floor and guessed that the hole overhead used to be a skylight.

The platoon dispersed as impromptu pairs moved to cover the surrounding corridors while others crouched against the walls to train their weapons on the upper floors.

Don stuck close to Foss as the latter rested Frost-3 gently on the ground, setting his back against the wall. Around them lay the shattered remains of a wooden table, one of several throughout the foyer that had seen better days. Frost-3 laid his head to rest as Foss resumed his work.

Don felt someone tap him on the shoulder. He looked up into the inquisitive mien of the Sarge who was looking down, not at him, but at the thing on his back.

"That's a nice piece you got there trooper. You mind?"

"Not at all." Don reached around with his freehand, being careful to grab his trophy on one of its bulbous ends in order to pass it over. "Took it off one of those Gator things that came at me earlier. It killed Ferret-2 so...I figured taking something back just made sense."

"Gator?" The Sarge asked as he carefully took the weapon by its other end and held it up for inspection.

"They look like lizards up close." Gad said as he walked over, having swapped out his launcher for the close quarter necessity of his MA37. "We'd know."

"They're not as bird-like as the Buzzards though." Don pointed out. "More like something you'd pull out of a swamp on Eridanus."

The Sarge huffed a little at the thought but quickly went back to examining the plasma rifle. It was so large that he almost had to cradle it with one arm simply to have a good look at the rest of it. He ran a cautious hand over the top as if he were brushing off some dust from a delicate collector's item, and in Don's mind that was exactly what it was. Even then, his sixth sense told him that the Sarge was already operating on a different wavelength. He could see it from the slight gleam in his eyes. He had an idea.

Whatever it was, it appeared to spark with inspiration as his venturing fingers brushed against one of the middlemost grooves in the central handle, prompting a reaction of blue lights that suddenly sprung across the two ends of the rifle in scintillating, wave-like motions. Don, Gad and even Foss instinctively flinched, and more than a few curious heads turned from their vigil of the neighboring passageways to see what was going on. The Sarge was by far the least phased. A gentle hum began emanating from the device like the purr of a cat.

"I think it likes you, sir." Don said, smiling hesitantly.

The Sarge shook his head. "No, I just figured it out is all. This right here," He pointed to the innermost groove and the ornate piece of metal that jutted out from it like a filed down tooth. "Is the trigger, and if I had to guess, it looks like it's still got some more juice left in it. Which means..."

The crunch of glass beneath boots caused the four of them to turn as Sergeant Major Eversman made his way over. "What you got there, Fox-1?"

The question, while obvious, prompted a less obvious answer. "A plan, sir. I can run it by you if you think we've got the time."

Eversman stopped to stare long and hard at the weapon, glancing between it and the Sarge. "Ole Terry Tinnitus isn't really being my friend today, but if you've got something that works then I'm all ears."

"You saw what happened back there. We all did. Similar to what we know of their ships, these bastards come with personal energy shielding, and they seem to like using them to get in close. On average, it took at least five of us to pop the shields on just one of them. Even then, that was only if we were firing on them for a few seconds already and if they were standing still, and they don't seem the type to really stick with that last one. But what if this," The Sarge used both hands to fully shoulder the weapon, "can break them faster?"

Eversman lowered the polarization on his visor to expose an arched brow. "You think their own weapons might be better at killing them?"

"Not killing. Once their protection is gone, anyone with a gun can handle that part. No, what I'm thinking is these guys, these 'Gators' are one tough nut, and what Fox-9 got his hands on here is one hell of a fine nutcracker."

Eversman's other brow finally arched, not in confusion but in revelation, and Don saw that same spark of inspiration dawn on his face.

"When you think about it, these things have probably fought each other at some point in their history." The Sarge added. "If everyone's got shields, wouldn't it make sense to have weapons that specialize in breaking them?"

Eversman seemed to be seeing more of the light, nodding slowly at first then with more and more enthusiasm. "Yeah, yeah it would."

"I saw that those smaller pistol thingies they have can fire some kind of overloaded bolt." Ray said from a nearby door. "Those might do the trick too if we can get our hands on one."

"We can." Eversman agreed. "But what that leaves us with is whether or not we know how to use them." He turned again to the Sarge. "If we're to go forward with this, I'll need a demonstration. I know that gun definitely works on humans. Now I want to know if it'll work with us."

"Won't that draw some attention?"

"The fighting outside is loud enough to drown it out."

His own intrigue in the conversation had caused Don to momentarily forget the sounds of rattling gunfire and booming explosions echoing in from the east, causing regular downpours of dust to rain down over the foyer.

"Copy." The Sarge stepped forward, walking over the glass-strewn floor until he entered the morning rays streaming down from the shattered skylight. Keeping their heads on a swivel, everyone that could either watched or snuck a glance as he spread his feet apart into a strong stance. Then he raised the rifle up at the skylight and at the dusty clouds overhead.

Don watched him tighten the muscles in his gun arm a second before squeezing the trigger. He winced at the succinct trio of plasma bolts that flashed from the weapon and into the air, briefly illuminating the foyer and everyone in it.

Just as quickly, the Sarge released the trigger, recovering from what looked like an above average amount of recoil.

Lowering the gun, he let out a light laugh as he walked back over. "In terms of kick, I'd put it on par with the M90, but it's tolerable."

"Then it's exactly what we need." Eversman said. "I'll need someone to be the platoon's experimental weapons specialist, a human bunker-buster if you would. Since you have the weapon, Fox-1, I assume you're volunteering."

"Not me." The Sarge shook his head as he walked past. "My shoulder isn't quite as young as it used to be."

"Then who do you have in mind?"

Don hadn't quite pieced together that the Sarge was walking towards him until the man had already stopped in front of him, holding out the plasma rifle.

"Step up to the plate, Fox-9. You helped to take down the owner. Now you're the new one."

It took a moment for the news of his new position to settle in. Once it did, Don swallowed the lump in his throat and slapped his MA5B onto his harness. He stood up, taking back the plasma rifle with both hands, and even then, he almost wondered if he needed a third one. The weapon was already heavy on his back and yet he was sure it possessed twice the heft in his hands once he was actually on his feet.

"Think you can handle it, trooper?" Eversman asked.

"She's a big girl, sir, but I should be able to manage."

"Good man. Now...what was that word I heard you guys using? You were talking about these new aliens, right?"

Don shrugged. "I got up close to the one I took this from. They're like Gators, sir, real fugly looking bastards, though compared to the Gassers, I'd say they're on the prettier side of things when it comes to what we've seen so far."

"Gators..." Eversman thought, walking in from behind the Sarge. "What do you think, Fox-1?"

The Sarge nodded. "I like it. It fits, not to mention it's easy to remember."

"Alright then, from hereon out, that's what we'll call'em if and when we run into more of them. Congrats, Fox-9, you just named a whole new species."

"They've killed a few of our buddies already, sir, so I'm not so sure how I feel about that."

"Don't worry. You named them, and now the first thing we need you to do is to help us kill'em. That sound good to you?"

"...Yessir."

"I hate to interrupt," Frost-8 cut in. "But I just got word that 4-Actual breached the north wing. He wants to converge with us at the Parliamentary Chamber in the center. He's figured if there really is an operational nerve center in here, it's bound to be there."

"Then he's got the same idea as us." Eversman said, casting a glance at the plasma rifle. "At least I hope so. In any event, we've been here long enough. Platoon, we're rolling out down the north corridor. Frost-6, like I said, stay behind to watch Fox-4 and Frost-3. Fox-3, Ferret-6, Frost-7, you three stick to the middle of the lineup. We'll need you to pull out the rockets in case we run into those big guys again. Frost-4, Fox-8, I need you back on point." He turned to Don. "Fox-9, you'll be right behind them. If we engage any Gators, I'll need you to take the opening shots. You break their shields; we'll break the rest."

Don nodded while trying to hide a newfound sense of unease. His nerves were working themselves up again. He was being asked to move to the front with a weapon that he had virtually no experience with beyond a cursory test drive. Though he was happy to help, he was starting to reconsider whether picking up his latest trophy had actually been a good idea.

:********:

The northbound corridor was by far the most contiguous. From what Don could see, it ran for a 50-meter stretch from the foyer to a set of large double doors that marked the very end of the passageway. The doors there were in suspiciously good condition for objects made of burnished cherrywood. The same could not be said for the many breached public servant offices scattered across the length of the passageway. Neither could it be said for the many snaking cracks and crevices that marred the walls and ceiling from one end to the next.

Despite their armor, Ray and Frost-4 were surprisingly light-footed. By comparison, Don felt like he was making a racket behind the former every time his boot brushed up against a chunk of loose polycrete. It was a difficult task keeping one eye on the ground and another on the way forward.

Between them and what had to be the doors to the Parliamentary Chamber was a four-way intersection with a perpendicular corridor leading east to west. Just past it was a matching pair of doorways, one on either side of the passage. Don used his visor magnification to make out the signs mounted above them. Each one read the same: 'Statutory Observation Venue'.

On his HUD, two Nav points appeared over them both.

"No point in kicking in the front door." Eversman comm'd. "Platoon, break up. Left stack take the left doorway. Right stack, take the right. We'll need to have the drop on whatever they've got inside."

Don agreed. In a situation like the one they were in, with so many unknowns, it was best to have the high ground from the very start.

Not even a few steps later, Ray and Frost-4 stopped in their tracks one after the other. Ray held up a fist, prompting both stacks to halt.

No one needed to ask them what was wrong. They could feel it.

For Don, the rhythmic vibrations in the ground came to him in a moment of terrible recognition. He pressed his back to the nearby wall in an attempt to shrink his own profile. Others were doing the same, crouching down while trying their best to shrink into the shadows, but it was already too late.

The approaching footfalls were echoing down from the intersection, each one an overlapping ensemble of pounding masses that punished the ground itself. For whatever it was worth, and it probably wasn't worth very much at all given the events of the last five minutes, Don pulled up his plasma rifle and took aim.

Several seconds later two looming shadows crossed the threshold of the westbound corridor. The first of the armored juggernauts emerged with a stomping stride. It let out another one of those eerily deep groans as it crossed the intersection. Its partner wasn't far behind. It clomped after it into the eastbound passageway, heading towards the main action unfolding at the front of the building.

Don winced.

The pair hadn't so much as turned in their direction.

Were they really that single-minded or had everyone else stayed so perfectly still that they hadn't even noticed anything amiss? Taking note of the shallow impressions that their boots had caved into the floor tiles, he was left more baffled by the fact that he was now drawing breath because of a basic lack of awareness.

Everyone remained statuesque, listening intently to the receding footfalls until they faded away into the distance.

Eversman whispered over the comms in a cautioning tone. "...Frost-4, Fox-8, check those corners."

The two point men stood back up and took a couple of well measured steps towards the intersection. Upon reaching the edge, they signaled to one another with a final nod before pivoting around either corner.

"Eastbound clear." Frost-4 reported.

"Westbound clear." Ray added.

"Platoon...move out." Eversman ordered. "Nice and slow. Frost-8, send an update to Neptune-Actual. He's got some more bad news coming his way and he needs to know."

"Copy." The radioman replied.

1st Platoon rose as one and resumed the trek. Crossing into the intersection, Don felt uniquely exposed. A quick peek from left to right confirmed to him at least that the Giants were gone. That did little to allay the fear that they had been there, that there were more of them besides the two they encountered outside and that there might be even more lurking around the corner. If meeting just two of them out in the open had pushed the platoon to its breaking point, then he shuddered to think what they might be capable of in close quarters.

The troop carried on into the next stretch of the northward passageway, ever more mindful to stick close to the walls. They soon reached the two doorways which themselves lacked any doors. Looking at the torn appearance of the hinges, it was likely that something strong had torn them out wholesale, yet another reminder that some of the threats here were best handled from a distance.

Ray was the first to start up the rightward staircase. Don came up after him with the rest of their stack on his heels. He calculated every movement he made on the steps so as to turn each one into a soft-footed advance. He rounded the landing and joined Ray up the last flight of stairs leading to the next bulldozed doorway at the very top.

There was a pale purple light, or perhaps a collection of lights beyond the threshold. It was clear by its intensity that the glow was coming from somewhere just out of sight.

Ray went in barrel first, leading with his battle rifle. He peered out and panned his scope across the vicinity. "Upper venue looks clear. Frost-4?"

"Confirmed." Frost-4 replied. "No visual on hostiles. Moving in."

A series of wary steps brought Ray out into the open. Don went next, keeping his weapon raised.

The Parliamentary Chamber held a roughly square orientation. Comprised of two separate floors, its upper level served as a seated venue. Several long rows of wooden pews ascended one after the other from an encompassing railing. Beneath the picture-like frame of the banister, a set of high redwood walls went down to mark the boundaries of the primary chamber. There a semicircular arrangement of a dozen rows of cushioned chairs occupied most of the ground level whose floor was covered by that same carpeting pattern that seemed to be popular throughout the rest of the building. The crescent assortment of seating eventually pinched against the western wall where two elongated tables curved around one another, hemming in an elevated podium and a distinctly large seat. Behind that, the wall was emblazoned with Harvest's colonial coat of arms. A pair of gold and red roosters with leaves in their beaks each pressed a taloned foot against a crest, a spear-shaped pennant on which was displayed a male and female farmer out in a field. Both were helping each other to hold up the same bundle of hay while a pair of children waved welcomingly beside them. The parents might have been waving as well were it not for the scorch marks that had burned away most of their upper bodies. The same went for the children's faces. The crest had been vandalized, and Don didn't have to look far to find the culprits.

Several more floors overhead, the jagged remains of what might have once been a domed skylight allowed the rays of Epsilon Indi to compete with the artificial light emanating from the numerous and ornate technologies below. The rows of seats meant for political representatives of the planet's many rural constituencies had been mostly pushed out of their alignments to make way for several clusters of alien furnishings. Kidney-bean shaped console stations stood on insectoid legs, their surfaces glimmering with strange interfaces and holographic displays with even stranger data feeds. Something like storage crates whose rotund frames resembled that of beetles were interspersed across the floor, interior lights illuminating the matching groupings of Covenant weapons housed within.

The clusters in turn surrounded a kind of central station, a crown-shaped array of displays and interconnected consoles that sat in the very middle of the chamber.

With his VISR on, Don watched as over 20 contacts were highlighted in a hostile red. A balanced mixture of Gassers and Buzzards were complimented by five more Gators, four of which were dressed in an orange armor, perhaps an indication of a higher rank. The enemy were scattered either behind hastily erected barriers made of the parliament's own chairs or at the various consoles. Most were watching the main entrance to the east wing with weapons bared.

A sudden discharge of plasma drew Don to the central command station at the exact moment that a Gator in a new, pale white armor was firing off a plasma rifle. As it did, an airborne mass wriggled and writhed, blue tentacles flailing as a burst of bolts blasted into it. In the split-second that he had to identify it from the threat catalogue, Don recognized it for what it was.

It was a Technician.

By the time he made the connection, the shrieking, fluttering creature collapsed to the ground. Its tentacles splayed out on the floor as steam hissed from its rapidly deflating corpse, but it wasn't the only one. The simmering remains of several freshly slain Technicians were sprawled out all around it; their bodies shriveled up like popped balloons.

With the last of the floating organisms dead, the white Gator that appeared to be a commander of some kind turned towards the eastern doors. Its mandibles parted in a series of resonant words and clicking syllables. Don had no way of knowing exactly what it was saying but he was able to gather that the thing was giving orders. It was even more confirmation that the figure he was already beginning to think of as 'The White Gator' was indeed their commander...and a priority target.

Working more on operational rote than any request or direction, Don had quietly followed Ray down one of the short stairways that led past the venue's seated rows to the railing. The rest of the stack was coming behind them. Across from them, Frost-4 and the rest of the platoon were doing the same on an adjacent stairway. Despite their numbers, they moved with a light-footed swiftness that elicited only minute moans from the wood beneath their boots.

The platoon streamed down to the railing where they crouched within its shadows. The angle in which the sun's glare beamed through the sundered skylight ensured that most of the light that fell on the statutory venue did so on its northward side, not theirs.

While Don, Ray and a few others stayed behind the banister on the south side, Eversman led a larger portion around the bend. Backs bent and rifles held at low ready, they shuffled down along the length of the railing that lined the western section of the venue, getting into position one careful sidestep at a time.

Don propped his contraband on his knee to take some of the strain off his arms. The fingers of his right hand drifted slowly down the curve of the handle. His eyes lingered on the White Gator, his ears twitching at every shout of forceful gibberish that came out of its mouth.

He gauged the distance at about 30-meters between him and his quarry. In the last engagement, he had seen these plasma rifles cover that distance easily. Though not as fast as a bullet, their plasma seemed fast enough to come at a close second, able to deliver more than a good deal of damage and especially against a target caught by surprise.

Ray settled in on his left while the Sarge, Chris and Gad stooped into cover on his right.

Don watched the squad's marksman slowly ease the barrel of his battle rifle through a gap in the railing. All the while, the Sarge propped his DMR against the banister in a way that would allow him to spring up and use it to support his aim. He traced their lines of sight to the same point, the apparent leader. Right then he knew for a certainty that they were all of the same mind.

The leader, he would pop its shields and they would burst its skull.

Once it was neutralized, they would be able to better capitalize on the ensuing chaos.

On the edge of his peripheral vision, he noticed a cessation of movement from the rest of the platoon that had maneuvered themselves along the westward railing. The longer end of their L-shaped ambush was now in place.

"We're in position, hold your fire." Eversman whispered on the comms. "Frost-8, connect me to 4-Actual."

"Copy."

"Ferret-1 to 4-Actual, we've located what we believe to be the command hub in the parliamentary chamber. We've got the jump on these guys, sir."

A crackle of static precipitated the arrival of 4-Actual's strained and half-focused voice on the comms. "This is 4-Actual to Ferret-1, we've arrived outside the doors to the north wing, encountered minimal resistance. Looks like they've overcommitted to the action on the east. Do you have any elevation in there?"

"Roger that, we have the high ground. Just waiting on you. I suggest planting a breach on the entrance on your side."

"Copy your last, trooper. Give us a sec to set up. We'll blow it five seconds after you engage. Let's give'em a good uppercut."

"You got it. Tell us when you're ready."

Don sat on his haunches and waited.

He listened to one of the orange Gators responding to their leader, tuned in to the sounds of fighting coming from outside and noticed that it was getting closer by the slight tremors reverberating through the building itself. His heart began to race a little faster, pounding on his ribs and threatening to clog his throat. He forced his breathing into a steady rhythm in an effort to slow it down as well as to make his aim that much sharper.

"Charges set." 4-Actual announced. "Greenlight, Ferret-1. Ready when you are."

Across the way, Eversman nodded. "Platoon, prepare to engage. On my mark."

A collective tension spread across the ranks, a squaring of shoulders and a tightening of grips.

"Five...four...thr-"

A commotion below pulled Don's focus to a Gasser standing guard near the northern doors. It was squealing out a frantic line of alien language as it raised a trembling finger at the southside venue, at them. Quickly, more of its comrades began turning in their direction.

"Engage!"

The word had hardly left the sergeant major's mouth before the entire platoon was up on its feet and opening fire, unleashing torrents of lead from over the banister and between the railings. Enfilading fire washed across the ground floor in a blink and almost immediately began taking its toll. Several of the Gassers and Buzzards fell dead while twice as many twitched and jittered in sprays of blood as they struggled to bring plasma pistols and arm-mounted shields to bear. The personal shields of the Gators flared as their owners flinched and tried to react. One of the orange ones only got a chance to reach for the weapon on its belt before a sniper round punched it with enough force to lift it off the floor. It landed spine-first, mandibles parted as the very brains that would have allowed it to speak seeped out of a hole in its helmet.

Don was already standing and firing his plasma rifle, bracing with his shoulder against the outrageous recoil of a long burst, each shot feeling like a blast of buckshot. His first four bolts had landed at the feet of his target and by the time the creature had turned about, he had found his mark. Its shields rushed into crackling visibility at the rapidly increasing rate of plasma now striking at its chest. It was working, the envelope was flaring faster than when he'd seen it up against ballistics. He spotted the slight lean of its left shoulder and predicted its intent, shifting in tandem so that as it tried to leap leftward, the bolts merely swept ahead of it, adding blow after blow on the brightening energies until they finally collapsed in a belch of electricity. The leader stumbled back. With a shake of its head, it bellowed and pulled out a weapon that looked oddly like a sperm whale. Its weapon only continued to rise as a three round burst sliced its throat, turning its battle cry into a gargled shout. A single DMR follow-up punched through its helmet to silence it. The weapon spiraled out of its hand as its owner toppled to the floor.

Despite a rush of elation, Don didn't stop to gloat, swiveling his still firing gun towards the closest of the orange Gators. The alien was letting loose with a rifle of its own at the western side of the observation venue when his first bolt splashed against its shielding. He only got three more blows in before his rifle suddenly reared up in his hands like a defiant horse, a pair of components shooting out from either side like fish gills to expel a breath of cerulean gas. Electrical energies flashed through the exposed innards of the device as a wash of intense heat pierced his armor and clamped its jaws on the skin of his forearms. The prickling sensation was so strong that he was almost tempted to drop it altogether. Perhaps he might have were his life not on the line.

He dropped into a crouch, gritted his teeth and bared it, mounting a swift examination of the hissing weapon. The unexpected change didn't last long. He immediately took notice of how the blue markings on the side of the upper barrel were no longer blue. They had dimmed from a baleful red to a less menacing orange before finally draining back into a stable hue of blue. The gaseous release ended abruptly, and the newfound protrusions slid back into either side of the barrel.

He made a mental note to keep a close eye on the color of the markings. Just as he was about to start firing again, a blitz of light burst through the northside doorway, triggering a split-second detonation of the nearest Gasser's methane tank as several others were blown over in a wave of splinters. A wall of smoke rolled forward and running shadows pushed through the vapors. The troopers of 4th Platoon emerged onto the ground floor with guns blazing, over two dozen ODSTs quickly pouring in and fanning out, a rush of black BDUs and blue visors that brightened with each flickering burst of rifle fire.

More of the Covenant forces dropped. Gassers bled as much blood as methane as rounds tore through their meager cover. Buzzards failed to reorient their personal defense equipment and crumpled into squawking bullet sponges. Even one of the Gators, shields already flaring from Don's last attempt, was pushed to its limits by a squad that rushed in on it, using the surrounding seating to maneuver the creature into a maw of encroaching tracer fire.

It ran backwards while returning fire, forcing a pair of ODSTs to shelter behind a few chairs that spewed gouts of simmering shards with each impact. With its last step, it set a three-fingered hand to the ground to anchor its weight as it swung itself behind a nearby console.

Where bullets began to ricochet off the smooth metal refuge, Don saw an opportunity. The alien had left itself completely exposed to him. He rose up again, leveled his plasma rifle and saw that his target had also targeted him. An oversized bolt of emerald energy raced from the pistol in its other hand. He ducked at the last second. The bolt screamed over him and struck one of the upper viewing seats with enough force to bite out a chunk of the backrest. With a rain of splinters dinging off his armor, he scrambled again into a standing position, but his opponent was faster. It had already risen to point its tremulous pistol at an ODST who had the misfortune of being the first to flank around its position. The massive bolt crashed into her and bowled her over, knocking her to the floor in a steaming heap. A guttural scream rang out from her shattered visor. Her cries were quickly ended by a succinct plasma burst to the chest.

Don fired, managing to pepper its recovering shields with a few shots before it wised up and rolled aside, dodging the crisscrossing attentions of Izzy and Chris. It came up with both weapons firing at its groundside pursuers. It let out a full-throated roar, one last act of defiance over the exchange of munitions that stabbed at its defenses. Don waited a beat to let his weapon cool before correcting his aim. He squeezed off a five-bolt burst that struck it in the back, finally blowing its shields with an electrified pop.

He waited a second to let it cool again, watching worriedly in the interim while the Gator's pistol began rattling, a miniature sun broiling at its tip. A three-round intervention from Ray blew away both gun and trigger finger. A renewed volley from its groundside attackers kicked the alien's legs out from under it. It threw out a knee to avoid falling on its stomach and simultaneously brought up its last good hand for a final reply with its plasma rifle. The action only gave it a few more bolts before the gun reared up in its grip in a familiar reaction of protruding components and hissing gases. Right then a trooper side-stepped from behind a chair with the perfect angle to finish it off, but the Gator saw him coming. It let him put a few bullets into its chest as it reeled its overheated gun back and cast it sideways in a powerful throw. The device tomahawked into the trooper with a sickening crack, hammering him into the ground.

The Gator pulled a grenade from its belt that ignited into an azure flame in its palm. By then, however, more and more bullets were piercing through its armor. Don's renewed attempts on its life were blackening its back. It coughed up a spat of blood yet still found the wherewithal to twist its shoulders, preparing for another throw. At that moment, the same trooper it had knocked to the ground whirled around to fire his sidearm. A trio of rounds caught its exposed hand and made it falter mid-toss. The grenade fell from its grasp and hit the floor beside it. A growing whine and a brightening glow elicited one last twitch of movement from its mandibles. Whatever sound it made was smothered beneath the detonation of forking energies that kicked it clear off the ground. Don watched its corpse spiral through the air for several meters before crashing down onto one of the rows, crushing several chairs beneath its weight.

He waited another second for his rifle to simmer then turned to the center of the chamber where he found the last two Gators making their final stand. On either side of the circumference of the central console, the pair exchanged fire with the approaching threat of 4th Platoon. The furthest away utilized a rifle to dish out an excessive stream of plasma each time a trooper moved from behind a scorched seat, console or ammunition crate. All the while, the closest of the pair did the same but with a different kind of weapon, one with a nest of pink, quill-like objects jutting out of its top. When it fired, it unleashed a flurry of crystalline projectiles that moved noticeably slower than either bullets or plasma. Its advantage didn't become obvious until Don saw its latest burst curve mid-flight after a running ODST that only barely reached the safety of a crate, causing the munitions to shatter against the other side like glass.

Another trooper tried to advance while a comrade laid down cover. Though Don had started his first burst on the alien, he couldn't stop it from responding. A few steps shy of a row of seats, a new flurry of crystals closed in on the trooper, several of them stabbing into his stomach. With a pained groan, he automatically reached for the wound. His skewered form hadn't hit the floor before a pink flash thundered through his being, consuming him in an instant. Bits and pieces of viscera splattered the vicinity as a severed leg sailed across the chamber.

Don didn't ogle at the gory display but even seeing it out the corner of his eye left a nauseating combination of shock and anger swirling in his gut. He abandoned well-paced shots for an onslaught of plasma that added onto the growing consortium of bullets beginning to batter away at the creature's shields. His own contribution provided the final thrust they needed to collapse them.

Motion elsewhere immediately made him switch from the two-meter-tall profusion of blood and metal to its neighbor on the other side of the central console. Its partner, the final Gator had tossed its overheating weapon aside to dexterously withdraw an ornate handle from its belt. It launched into a sprint, the device in its hand activating into a two-pronged sword.

It ran at a squad of troopers firing from covered positions at the northside entrance. Don didn't have to look to discern that the 4th's platoon commander was somewhere among them. His senses warned him of an impending disaster, one that the reddening indicator lights on his rifle told him he could no longer prevent.

Powering through the wall of suppression beginning to glitter off its personal barrier, the Gator raced towards the squad, and a rocket raced after it. Don hadn't noticed when Gad had raised his launcher, but he was no less relieved the moment the well-timed fireball stomped into the ground behind its target, hurling it off its feet. Its shields collapsed and it crashed face first onto the floor. Even then, its hold on its sword remained unbroken. Just as quickly, it threw itself back up and took a few steps forward, preparing to take off into another sprint. A sniper round tore through its thigh, stopping it cold. It fell forward once again and landed flat on its stomach. Still, it reached out a hand to try to claw itself along. It dragged its useless leg behind it, unaware of its own peril.

The very same squad it had tried to charge were now on the move. They had fanned out into a semicircular formation that was closing in around it.

The Gator finally looked up at them. In doing so, it seemed to grasp the full scope of its new predicament. It pushed itself up enough to raise its sword. The entire room prepared to fire on it again. Then the blow fell, and the twin tips of the blade pierced through the back of its own wielder, hissing from the evaporating touch of its own lifeblood. The Gator made neither a sound nor any indication that it was ready to stop. Ignoring the gore that seeped over its fingers, it drove the blade deeper and deeper until it was buried up to the hilt in its chest. A twist of the wrist caused a slight jolt in its frame. More blue ichor spilled from the wound and began to pool beneath it.

Having finished the deed, the alien let its hands fall to its side. A deep exhalation escaped its mouth as it bowed its head and ceased to move altogether.

His squad alongside him, the 4th's platoon commander, Captain Reaver walked up to the bent over body of his would-be-killer. He stopped to scrutinize it for a moment.

"Sure," he said, his voice coming through the comms as he planted a boot on its shoulder. "Save us the ammo why don't you."

He gave it an unceremonious push, causing it to collapse onto its back, limp and lifeless.

Don allowed himself a small sigh of relief. Around him, the others were doing likewise.

With the death of the last Gator went the last of the fighting. Beside every other piece of furniture, whether human or Covenant, was a sprawl of alien dead that covered the ground floor in a chaotic tapestry of blue and purple blood. Weapons lay where they had fallen next to broken gas masks. Semi-avian jaws remained ajar in pained shrieks that had been rendered permanently silent. Among the organic debris, blast marks and bullet holes, he spotted three or four ODST casualties. He hated to see it. However, he could at least live with knowing that they had made the enemy pay for it several times over.

Even the sound of the fighting outside was growing quieter by the second. It was a good sign.

"Troopers," Captain Reaver said, turning to his own Helljumpers around him as well as those of 1st Platoon standing above. "...Well done."

No response was given.

The appreciation was felt rather than voiced.

"This is 4-Actual to Neptune," He said, switching to the company frequency. "The Covenant command hub has been neutralized. I say again, the enemy command hub is neutralized."

After a short wait, the gruff voice of Major Bowman sounded back in reply. "Neptune-Actual to 4-Actual, copy your last. Clear the rest of the building then move to phase two, over."

"Roger that. Alright, 1st, 4th, you heard the word." Reaver circled an urgent finger in the air. "Ole Bowie Knife needs us rolling so let's get to it."

:********:

The double doors moved with a groaning creak as Gad and Chris shouldered them open, causing the seam of light in between to expand into an onrush of sunlit scenery. The easternmost wing of the Harvest Parliament Building was by far its most decorative, likely because of the main entrance on its other end which made it the first thing visitors would see upon walking in. It hosted a wide lobby of pristine marble. The space was fringed on both its left and right sides by a sweeping interior colonnade of limestone pillars, beyond which lay high vaulted windows that would have provided an excellent view of the parliamentary gardens beyond. Though most of those same windows had been reduced to maws of jagged glass, they allowed the sunlight to bounce off the reflective marble flooring inside, illuminating it in such a way that it appeared both underwater and immaculate. Submerged beneath the glowing sheen were intricate paintings of individual stocks of wheat bending this way and that in an imagined breeze. The morning glare made them shine a bright gold, giving off the feel of walking into one of the vast fields of grain for which Harvest was once so well known.

With the Sarge in the lead, Foxtrot jogged through one of the double doors leading into the room. The route brought them out alongside the tall heights of the main staircase, a stately ascension of granite steps that travelled up to the western wall before terminating at an upper landing. Ahead of them, several ODSTs from 4th Platoon were dispersed around the lobby, climbing the granite steps or examining what was left of the windows. Two of them were standing around the semi-pulverized remains of a glass chandelier, a large one at that. They weren't examining it so much as trying to see how best to balance the weight of an AIE-486H machine gun on its uptilted side.

"Where'd you boys get the Yeller?" The Sarge asked as they passed by.

"Outside." One of them answered. "The Flyboys have been dropping these in like candy."

"They know what's up." Gad said. "Think logistics thought far enough ahead to throw some M19s in there?"

"Probably." The Sarge replied. "They know and we know that we can't afford to run dry on anything just yet. We're only halfway through this thing."

They carried on across the rest of the lobby to the main entrance, or rather where the entrance should have been. In the place of a threshold with a three-meter-tall set of doors was a ragged breach in the eastern wall. Resting on the ground were bits and pieces of ruined plaster and broken wood that had been partly cleared aside to make a path. They stepped through the remaining debris and emerged outside.

The parliamentary porch was covered in various types of rubble, both architectural and organic. Chunks of blown out polycrete littered the rectangular stretch of marble that spanned from one end of the east wing to the next, ranging from the size of bowling balls to the size of cars. Multiple explosions had torn into the line of pillars at the very front of the porch which rose back up to support a large portico overhead, leaving bits of bent rebar jutting out of holes like broken bones as streams of cement trickled out from the structural wounds. Amidst all of that was a disorganized lineup of alien corpses, Buzzards and Gassers as well as several Gators. A force likely able to hold back a full platoon lay dead and almost as many living ODSTs had come to replace them.

Troopers that had to be from either 2nd or 3rd Platoon were hard at work setting up more machine guns, AIE-486Hs as well as the stockier M247s. Tripods were set down first before the accompanying weapon systems were lifted onto their mounts. They were putting them in place primarily between the pillars. In all, over half a dozen machine gun nests were being established.

An equal number of ODSTs traveled to and fro up the front steps leading down from the porch, ferrying boxes of ammunition. Don followed the black armored trail down to the driveway that curved up towards the bottom of the front staircase from the main road. There seemed to be no shortage of alien wreckage left smoldering on the asphalt either. The circular wrecks of Covenant turrets and the crown-shaped tatters of observation platforms lay as heaps of burning metal whose debris fields covered the ground all the way down to the parliament's two main gates. A staggering amount of Covenant dead followed along in a similar fashion before diffusing outward.

Further on were the dust bowl remnants of the gardens surrounding the eastward face of the building. Just like what they had found on the south side, it was a maze of broken tree stumps, crumbling fountains, leafless hedges and trails of scorched pavement. A multitude of green smoke grenades had been deployed, their emerald clouds slowly floating along in the morning wind. Dispersed beneath their shade was a forest of cylindrical ordnance pods that had embedded themselves in the ground, their tilting entry vectors having given them the force needed to penetrate the vitrified surface of the soil. Most of their hatches had been removed and the various weapons and crates of munitions within were being gathered by a regular inflow of troopers.

The loudening sound of fusion drives turned their heads skyward. Right then, a pair of Longswords raced above the ruins to the north. They dipped down and leveled off onto a low flight path above the gardens. As they zipped over the perimeter, their drop bays flew open to allow each to release a single ordnance pod. The delivery vehicles soared down a short distance before slamming into the ground near the northernmost gate. The Longswords flew up and away into the south. All the while, men were already jogging towards the two rolling puffs of disturbed earth where their latest delivery had just landed.

Beyond that, past the patches of ironwork fencing, even the surrounding streetside was full of activity. Those of 2nd and 3rd Platoon who weren't on parliamentary grounds were busy creating new positions. Across the three main streets that made up the eastward approach to the building, ODSTs had turned blast craters both large and small into defensive strong points. They stared out over the lip of their makeshift fox holes with rifles ready as ammunition runners went from one spot to the next, transferring fresh magazines and grenades from shoulder mounted duffels to waiting hands. Present in near equal abundance were deeper dugouts which their neighbors had turned into ad hoc machine gun nests as well as launcher-held positions that the battalion colloquially referred to as 'rocket pockets'. Past their lines, some of their personnel were roving out and about. Don could tell by the way they routinely bent down while moving across the streets that they were planting anti-tank as well as anti-personnel mines, placing the former closer to the center of the roads and the latter closer to the sides.

The layout of the defensive network seemed to conglomerate around the nigh pyramidal ruins of the collapsed building that had served as the crux of the main push. There, several squads had turned the skeletal detritus of polycrete walls and steel girders as well as the frozen mudslide of miscellaneous debris into a kind of redoubt. Don spotted just as many machine guns, explosive weapons and snipers being set into formidable placements in the rubble. It was a tactic he had often seen used whenever the Insurrection sought to leverage urban settings against them. He knew what kind of casualties they could reap like that, even against the likes of shock troops, so it was refreshing to see it being used against someone else for a change.

"Is that Foxtrot?" A voice asked.

The squad turned to find none other than Major Bowman walking towards them along the porch, a two-man guard in tow.

Foxtrot stood a little straighter as the Sarge nodded, naturally remaining careful to avoid saluting in case any hostile observers were in the area. "Sir, we've finished securing the building. 4-Actual sent us out here to lend a hand. Where do you need us?"

Bowman briefly looked them over, seeming to take particular exception to Don's plasma rifle.

"We need cover for the heavy hitters." He gestured over to the machine guns before pointing to some of the Covenant corpses. "Help us stack these in front of the guns. We don't have any sandbags, so we'll just have to settle for them. After that, I'm going to need you to find a roost and stick to it. Our satellite reconnaissance confirmed that we have plenty of enemy armor inbound from everywhere but the west. They must've figured out what we're up to over here. Seems like every Covenant vehicle on this side of the city is on its way to tear us a new one."

Don took the news about as well as he could have, keeping on his best poker face despite his visor still being polarized. Inside, he was just about ready to scream. They had been told prior to the drop, and by Colonel Heath no less, that their objective was going to be the hardest to take as well as the hardest to hold onto out of the whole battalion. Being on the precipice of finding out firsthand what that really looked like was another matter entirely. He snuck a sideways glance at the defenses in the streets to the east and couldn't quite shake a creeping sense of doubt.

The Sarge nodded, outwardly more composed than Don could ever be. "I hope you don't mind me asking, sir, but what about 5th and 6th Platoon? Are they still in play?"

"That they are. They're watching the northern and southern approaches respectively. They'll see anything coming on those ends, but I need you and anyone else from your platoon who can to set up shop out here in the front. We've still got another 20 minutes before our own backup arrives. Until then, unless I hear different from Delta, we're all we've got."

"Roger that, sir." The Sarge waved the others on. Together, they followed the major and his small entourage to the closest patch of Covenant bodies near the edge of the porch. Without any heed for his own rank, as was always his want whenever it came to a man like Bowman, the major squatted down and grabbed the legs of the closest Gasser. The Sarge slapped his DMR on his harness and moved to help.

The rest of the squad echoed his example and set about grabbing alien ankles and wrists. Don was the most hesitant. It was with no small amount of reluctance that he placed his plasma rifle against one of the porch's pillars. He kept one eye on it while he walked over to help Gad and Chris with a Gator sprawled out over the steps. Together, they heaved it up and through a series of ragged breaths and heavy steps were able to bring it to the nearest machine gun nest. At the direction of the crew, they maneuvered it onto its side to use its width for cover before placing it beneath the triple barrels.

"Now there's a face I could wake up to every morning." The gunner said, kneeling down to pat the creature on its cheek as he finished loading a belt of 7.62 into the turret's firing chamber.

"Congrats." Gad huffed, stopping to catch his breath.

Chris shrugged. "I've dated worse."

"Can confirm." Don agreed, smiling as Chris shot him a 'mind your own business' look.

They went back for a Gasser, then a Buzzard, laying them two at a time in front of the next few guns. Don tried to hold his breath the entire time. Despite having died less than a few minutes earlier, the bodies were already beginning to stink. The Gassers in particular had a sweaty stench that offended his nose. The subtle hiss of the methane seeping from breaches in their tanks gave him unintentional flashbacks of his worst gym locker memories. There was just no way that these things decomposed that fast, and he soon realized with some level of trepidation that each species might very well operate on entirely different levels of olfactory sensitivity. To them, a pile of garbage could possibly smell the same as a fresh bouquet of flowers. Though they might have evolved over long periods to be more conscious of other aromas, it could have also left them unaware of their own natural body odor, or perhaps as far as Occam's razor went, they could have been aware that they stank to high heavens and simply didn't care. Perhaps it was a cultural thing. Whatever the case, it made his job that much harder.

As he worked with Chris along the edge of the porch, he caught a glimpse of what was going on behind the closest emplacements. A section of the porch's north side had been cleared of debris in order to make room for a collection of friendly casualties. Two even lines of ODSTs had been laid on the floor one above the other. A quick headcount put their number at 14. Their eyes were closed and, for those that had them, both of their arms were set at their sides. A trio of troopers picking over their lines had arranged them that way while they worked. Each of the three medics would crouch at a body to remove the dog tags from beneath the bloodied, paling faces. Then they would reach into their BDUs to extract the still useful magazines from their ammo pouches and the grenades from their belts before dumping them into a set of nearby duffel bags.

Carrying a Buzzard over to one of the guns, Don watched a medic pull out a handkerchief for a casualty that he hadn't gotten a good look it. The personal article, quickly staining red, formatted awkwardly to the head, bulging only over the chin before draping down over the rest. It took him an uncomfortable second longer than it should have to realize that everything above that was missing. Then the medic got to removing his supplies, stuffing the last of them into a bloated duffel just as another trooper came bounding up the steps. He handed the bag over and sent the man on his way to the frontlines.

It was a sobering sight, namely because the casualties here were not the only ones the company had suffered in taking the building. Just how many more it would take to hold it was an even heavier thought to consider.

The image of Captain Teague's final seconds in that gazebo came to mind and Don remembered that 1st Platoon had yet to recover their own dead. They were still out there in the southern gardens. They would eventually come back for them of course, but they would first need enough people to survive whatever was about to get thrown at them next before they started the recovery detail.

Tossing the most recent Buzzard corpse into a manageable wall before the northernmost turret, Don suddenly became aware of voices shouting off in the distance. They were human voices, warnings and callouts, and they were being immediately seconded by a growing choir of staccato gunfire.

He whirled around to see what was going on and promptly saw far more than he'd bargained for.

At first his lizard brain made him think that several fire hydrants in the surrounding streets had burst all at once, but what came gushing out into the air wasn't water. Several dark pillars of smog had fountained skyward, ascending, slowing and eventually plateauing, arcing back down into black clouds that began to move. They spread themselves around the parliamentary grounds in fluttering and skittering movements that quickly betrayed their true nature.

Being made of neither water nor smoke, the creatures moved as fluidly and as synchronously as though they were, fanning outwards from their points of origin in organized patterns that resembled the rolling waves of a storm-tossed ocean, chaotic yet somehow controlled.

In all the commotion, Don picked out their individual shapes, squat forms akin to the Gassers that were simultaneously sleeker, more segmented and covered in spiked appendages. Countless wings beat furiously behind scores of golden-brown carapaces, the triangular heads atop them punctuated on either side by eyes that glowed a luminescent amber.

He remembered the threat catalogue Foss had shown him and matched the picture he'd seen to the fourth species on the list:

Wasps.

There had to be hundreds or even thousands of them.

They were too fast to count, their sheer numbers causing them to block out much of the encompassing ruins on the northern, eastern and southern approaches. What came to him easily enough however was their definitively hostile nature, the way in which they had engulfed the frontlines in their vacillating shadows and the reality that they had the parliament building almost entirely cut off from the rest of Utgard.

In the five seconds that it took him to piece everything together, natural muscle memory had already made him snatch his MA5 off his back and take aim. Even then, he wasn't sure where to aim. His reticle frantically changed color from red to blue to red with the living blizzard of contacts that zipped across his sightline.

The dozens of ODSTs directly below them didn't seem to have the same problem. They were unleashing the full scope of their personal arsenals into the unfriendly masses overhead. Beyond the fence, a constellation of muzzle flashes rose up to meet the threat. Rifles fired frantic bursts as gunners threw themselves onto their backs to hastily reorient their machine guns, voicing their protests of the hordes above with furious leaden tirades. Many of the insects careened out of the sky with missing wings or sputtered as bullets tore through thorax and abdomen, causing them to drop into the streets in scattered diasporas of frozen limbs and dying wing beats. Others flew apart, turning into explosions of yellow gore that were being outshone by their military grade counterparts. Grenade and rocket launchers were adding to the carnage by sending their munitions into the air in elongating trails of fissile exhaust and pressurized propellants. The hordes shifted as individual Wasps rushed to get out of their way, causing rockets to sail for some time before either striking an unlucky straggler and taking out several bystanders or shooting straight on through into the sky. The 40-millimeters had a much easier time, going off at the exact moment that their grenadiers chose and reaping a fearsome toll of half a dozen aliens each time.

But in the grand scheme of things, given how large the swarm actually was, the frontlines were barely scratching its surface.

Most of the insects fortunate enough to be above those unlucky misfortunates at the very bottom went almost completely unmolested, untouched and undeterred.

They were poised to strike, and they did.

There was no single unified response, but rather a series of coordinated responses that manifested as protrusions of Wasps emerging from the larger swarm. They continued outward along serpentine vectors that curled and extended, looping earthward like the probing tentacles of a predatory squid. They soared across the streets, over the remnants of the fence and into the gardens.

Troopers who only a few moments ago were out gathering supplies from the ordnance pods were now forced to throw themselves behind them, using them for cover as they laid into the advancing hordes.

The rattling bark of multiple machine guns snapped Don out of his daze. The porch-side turrets had opened fire en masse. So had the rest of his squad and everyone else who had found themselves beneath the comparative safety of the portico. Wising up to the situation, he bounded the rest of the way up the steps, slid himself behind the protective width of one of the pillars and focused on chipping in wherever he could.

Flickering columns of machine gun fire crisscrossed the air above the gardens in arcing sweeps as they tracked the encroaching tendrils, drilling into their individual components. The efforts of a larger multitude of small arms fire did well to keep up. Handfuls of eviscerated corpses rained down from their larger amalgamations. They plummeted or spiraled into the dirt, creating a steady downpour of dead insectoids that sprinkled across the zone. And still the tendrils seemed to lose neither mass nor velocity, soaring onward regardless of an ever-growing downpour of losses.

The first tendril to touch down did so in the north. Surging just above the ground, it beelined for an isolated machine gun nest that had made their roost in a deep blast crater. The crew at the helm could do little more than fire into their ranks for the few seconds that they had before the swarm locomoted into them with the speed of a freight train. Their position disappeared beneath the blur of soaring wings and chitinous armor. A moment later the flash flood of bugs rose up and away, leaving no sign that there had ever been anyone in the crater, that is until Don sighted several distinctly armored body parts falling amid the swarm's own dead. They hit the ground in bloody impacts that caused limbs, torsos and heads to bounce and cartwheel with the last of their momentum, falling behind the tendril's wake like splinters cast from a woodchipper.

Fighting down the feel of bile rising in his throat, Don poured a full auto barrage into the synchronous tentacle. He had no way of knowing how much damage he was actually doing, only that he kept the trigger pinned beneath his forefinger as his reticle suffered an epileptic seizure of red contacts. So long as he kept firing, they would keep dropping and that would have to be enough. But then he noticed at least that wherever gunfire became thick along a particular section of a tendril, the Wasps would thin themselves out, breaking away from the larger groups now harassing the streetside defenses to become their own individual swarm. These in turn would lunge and swerve through the sky like airborne serpents.

He felt a familiar click, swapped out his spent magazine and righted his aim to the closest of the tentacles, one that was now coming from the southeast, heading directly for the porch. A few of the turrets took notice as well and redirected their fire, triple-barrels spooling an endless spat of suppression fire out into the onrush of targets. However, the outgoing ensemble was soon competing with the chittering screeches of the Wasps as they came within the last 50-meters. Losing dozens of their own with each maneuver, the host of aliens swerved far to the right then looped down into a deep dive. More of the turrets turned to pour into the heart of the assault, but by then it was too late. The tendril recovered from its dive in a slithering ascent that just as quickly shot leftward, cutting across the front steps of the porch.

The world beyond the pillars disappeared behind a leaning tornado of fluttering shapes that suddenly glittered with green muzzle flashes. Bolts of emerald plasma lashed out in a chaotic spray, slashing against the pillars and pelting the porch in bursts of vaporized marble, splashing into the corpse barricades with sizzling impacts. Though they kept up the return fire, most of those on the porch had no choice but to scramble behind whatever cover was available. Don was no exception, having pinned his back to the same pillar as several others that had rushed to its shelter. Plasma whizzed all around them, always threatening to land a lucky blow. Nevertheless, he saw the gunners continuing to pour into the tendril as it zipped past in a seemingly interminable flow. On his right, one of the gunners took several bolts to the chest and another straight to the visor. Such was the speed of it that Don couldn't tell which had killed him, merely that it knocked his steaming body to the floor, silencing his turret.

Another gunner flinched when a plasma grenade flew from the horde and latched onto the barrel of his M247. He managed to leap away ahead of a whining explosion that blew the turret clear off its mount, sending it crashing through what was left of one of the windows and clattering across the lobby floor.

Then daylight returned.

The tendril finished its pass and slithered off into the larger fight that raged over the rest of the gardens, having been reduced to half its original size.

In the short window of calm, the others risked spreading back out into their old positions.

Don struggled to catch his breath. Anxiety clutched at his chest in a way that it rarely ever did.

"Medic!" Bowman shouted.

Don saw him grabbing the downed gunner under his arms and dragging him back. While doing so, he nodded a nearby medic over, not to take care of the gunner but to take his place at his still functional turret.

Don shook himself out of the shock of the moment. He peered around the pillar and spotted a similarly large flight of Wasps swirling down above the hardpoint over at the collapsed ruins. The defenders there found themselves being showered in plasma by the swarm whose many participants wheeled above them in a north to south current.

Securing his rifle on his harness, he broke into a jog and was able to beat the medic to the emplacement, cutting in front of him to grab the Yeller by its twin handles. "I got it, sir!"

The Major looked at him, nodded and waved the other guy off.

"Good luck, man!" The medic gave him a thumbs-up before rushing away to help the major with the body.

"You know what you're doing!?"

Don turned and saw the Sarge sliding in beside him, pulling the dead weight of one of the Gassers back into place.

"We're going to need that guy to take care of the wounded." Don replied, pulling the handles into a firmer grasp.

"That's not what I meant!" Without needing to be asked, the Sarge reached over and ripped the attached ammo box from the left side of the gun, a box that was almost completely empty Don realized. The Sarge picked up a fresh one from a nearby pile and attached it.

Don yanked open the top of the chamber. He pulled out the nearly spent belt, fed in the fresh one and slammed the chamber shut. "Thanks-"

"Just shoot!" The Sarge emphasized his point by firing off at what Don saw to be the same swarm swooping around for another pass.

It wasn't like he had never used a '486 before, but he understood what he meant by the question. Regardless of his past experience, never once had he looked into the wide circular reticle of the gun and seen a swarm of lethally oversized bugs jetting towards him. Not until now.

He had no choice other than to focus on their center of mass, locking onto the point of greatest density and squeezing the trigger. Instantly, the triple barrels kicked up into a whirring spool, belching out a stream of lead that quickly built up into a heavy jet. He was rewarded with spirts of yellow-green blood and bursts of anatomical confetti. As more bugs fell out of the throng, the swarm commenced a new round of serpentine maneuvers, swerving left then right then left again before coiling upwards with speed. Don kept pace with each movement, exacting a death toll of several or more with each motion. As the swarm arced upward, they curved back down to within 30-meters of the porch and took to spreading themselves out. By then they were no more than a third of their original number, but even such attrition couldn't stop them from arranging themselves into a sprawling veil of guns and claws. They opened fire, turning their plasma pistols into a full-blown fusillade of emerald bolts that struck at their position, dotting almost everything beneath the portico in spouts of searing vapor.

Don ignored the many close calls zipping by. He turned the Yeller to the far right of the airborne firing line and began working his way left along the formation, directing quick bursts into targets in a zigzagging pattern. It usually only took a half second of sustained fire to send an individual Wasp falling to the ground or exploding into pieces, so by the end of five seconds he had thinned out their upper ranks. To their growing disadvantage, the other turrets on the porch refocused their attention on them and started ripping through the heart of the swarm. After another five seconds, so many of their kin had either fallen or were falling out of the formation that the last dregs of the swarm dispersed with a series of alarmed chitters. The few survivors split this way and that in a bid to flee. Their escape attempts were cut brutally short by directed lines of 7.62-millimeter rounds that blew heads from bodies and wings from backs. Few of them ultimately managed to join other formations, but their retreat meant that at least one of the swarms had been neutralized.

One out of ten if Don's count was correct.

The tendrils from earlier had mostly broken away from the initial host that had taken to assaulting the outer defenses, dividing their forces in half. ODST positions across the gardens were now lashing out at hundreds-strong swarms that wormed through the air above, slithering under, over or around one another in a level of high-speed coordination that was both awe-inspiring and terrifying. One or two of them at a time would rise up or dive down over an increasing number of isolated positions, bathing them in rolling rainfalls of plasma that buried them from sight beneath countless plumes of dirt and smoke. Rarely did anyone continue to fire back from within the haze. When they did, the swarms often angled around for another pass.

Don switched to providing cover for a crew manning an LAU-65D missile pod from a blast crater in the eastern gardens. Their key position amid a cluster of other craters manned between the two main gates gave them a commanding view of the exterior cityscape. It also made them prime targets for the pair of swarms flying towards them from the north and south. While two other gunners focused on the one coming from the south, Don and another turret pitched their fire into the one soaring in from the north, blasting into the lead organisms in the hopes of possibly decapitating their leadership and forcing them to break off. The four fountains of fire stitched a path of bloody destruction across the front of their advances, dipping and rising with each erratic maneuver from the swarms. Though the bullet-riddled and dismembered corpses of their constituent members continued to spiral out of their groups, the overall formations forged on. Like molting snakes shedding their skin, the batches of dead at the forefront were falling up and away, continuously tumbling past their still living counterparts that carried on where they left off, only to die as well and make way for those coming behind them in a determined cycle of death and progress.

The crew securing the LAU became aware of their predicament as well, identifying the northern swarm as the most immediate threat and turning from their efforts against the throngs assaulting the frontlines. Redirecting their fire, they launched ASGM-4 missiles one after the other which shot high into the air and banked down sharply into the encroaching mass, pounding the head of the hive serpent with explosions that tore chunks of obliterated cadavers out of their horde. Yet still the swarm advanced, diving beneath the detonations that now ripped up along its hunching back. However, it touched down well short of the LAU crew and bounced back up. It lunged over the cluster of emplacements, creating a living river that arced above them in a turbulent flow. Most of the troopers caught in their shadow were quick to capitalize by unloading their rifles into the formation's underbelly. As their comrades fired up into bugs that returned the favor in kind, a few others were focused elsewhere. Two machine gun crews in craters at the edge of the cluster were slowly whittling down the southern swarm which, like its neighbor, was also touching down short of their position. It lunged across the ground, rushing past them in a living gale that blew along in a relentless course even as hails of lead blasted Wasps out of their swarm in a cascade of bloody evictions.

The southern swarm curved around the collective positions as the other vaulted over it, causing every ODST below to vanish within the maelstrom of insects. Don did his best to break through by raking them up and down. He was so dead set on the task that he was hardly aware of the stream of spent brass casings that gushed from his turret's ejection port in an arterial flow, falling into a steaming pool at his boots that he could feel slowly roasting his toes.

Eventually the two swarms curved up and away from the ground. They twirled side by side into a helical pattern that soon joined both groups together at the apex of their ascent. The last of their ranks melded into a swirling halo that now hovered above in a counterclockwise rotation. What then ensued was a veritable hailstorm of plasma that deluged the cluster of emplacements below. It was like looking at a giant magnifying glass that had come to channel the fury of a green sun onto a hapless huddle of ants. The latter's nascent 'nests' sparkled with plasma impacts that were far too numerous to dodge, so they didn't try to. Troopers stood up to squeeze off rounds at the enemy or shoved their backs into whatever cover their craters could still offer. It was a fight where neither side needed to aim. They simply had to keep shooting, one until they had to reload, the other until their overwhelming waves of ordnance inevitably hit something.

Don centered his aim on the middle of the ring, fired and kept firing. By now the barrels of the '486 were beginning to give off a slight glow. The air above the gun was starting to take on a wavering mirage-like quality due to the intensity of the heat wafting from them. There was no helping that, not when there were troopers in desperate need of the support. He stayed on it, not letting up on the trigger for even a moment. He was garnering a decent toll of perhaps three or four alien dead per second which rained down from the halo in an ongoing trickle. The combining attentions of three of the turrets helped to further whittle away at its circumference, bleeding it of both mass and quantity. For Don, each beat of his heart saw a dozen Wasps tumbling to their deaths. The rate of damage increased by another factor once two more of the turrets on the porch started barking up at the now rapidly thinning halo. A simultaneous barrage of missile pods from below persistently blasted into the inner eye of the storm. Their efforts working in tandem, the explosions soon blew breaches into the extinguishing swarm that saw them break up into smaller formations. These they continued to wear down as well, not stopping, not relenting until the groups were a mere shadow of what once was. Seeing this, the surviving aliens finally broke from their encircling attack and diffused across the area, only to be dogged by small arms fire that began picking them off with ease.

Don checked on the troopers below. Two of the machine gun nests within the cluster had been wiped out to a man. The bodies of the crew smoldered beside the broken remains of their equipment. A few of their neighbors had at least made it. Near the center only a single survivor of the LAU crew was still standing to keep the missile pods going.

That was three swarms down, he noted. There were still seven more actively careening over the gardens.

He felt a hard pat on the shoulder.

"Hold it!" The Sarge ordered before proceeding to dump water from his personal canteen over the barrels. The reaction was intense and immediate, an eruption of steam that hissed from the simmering surface of the metal.

"Lift!"

Don snapped out of the frenzied trance that the fighting had left him in. He nodded and lifted off the top of the firing chamber. He had just four bullets left. The Sarge tossed the almost finished belt away, detached the empty ammo box and slapped on a new one. Don was fishing the belt into place when he caught movement out the corner of his eye.

Another swarm was surging over the southwest grounds towards a machine gun crew hacking away at them from within a bombed-out pavilion. Don finished loading and slammed the turret shut. However, he didn't have enough time to turn and could do little more than watch as the horde crashed headlong into the structure, shattering most of it on impact as they broke through to the other side. When he finally brought his gun to bear on the concentrated current, he was stunned to see his reticle flash green if for the briefest instant. He witnessed the Wasps carrying up two ODSTs into the air with the rest of the swarm. One of them was being dragged along by multiple. They grasped at all four of his limbs and yanked on them like petulant children fighting over the same doll. His legs ripped free first, then his arms. Though Don couldn't hear it, he imagined that the man spent the last second that he still had his head on his shoulders screaming in blinding pain. Then a Wasp wrenched that free as well and tossed the limbless corpse aside, apparently no longer interested in the leftovers. His partner wasn't much better off. Though the two Wasps hoisting him up by his shoulders didn't tear him apart, they had seen fit to carry him far higher than his comrade. Upon reaching 100-meters or so off the ground, the winged pair released him and let him drop. Don bent his knees to stitch a bloody path of devastation across the swarm's passing underbelly. All the while he prayed under his breath that the ODST was already dead. He willed himself to dismiss the way the trooper's arms flailed about as he plummeted to the ground as being nothing more than a trick of the light. He didn't stick around to watch the impact, but even at that distance he could still hear the bone-crunching thud.

"INCOMING!" A desperate voice shouted. "RIGHT SIDE! RIGHT SIDE!"

Don swiveled to the right and realized too late that it wasn't what they meant, not until his sixth sense screamed in his skull as he felt a gale of wind billowing behind him. He released the turret, tried to pivot around and was caught mid-turn by a mass that cannoned into him. He was swept off his feet and crashed onto his back, catching glimpses of movement above as he rolled across the floor. He reached out, caught ahold of something and arrested his motion. He looked up to see a blizzard of Wasps blitzing through the space beneath the portico. They were close, almost right on top of him. They were moving fast...and so was he.

Something had grabbed his boots and was dragging him across the floor. With sparks flying from beneath him as his MA5 scraped across the marble, he intuitively grabbed his sidearm from his belt and lifted his head. Two Wasps had him by the ankles and were trying to speed away down the porch. His quick trigger finger got off two rounds that forced one of them to release him, falling away with only half a head and freeing his foot to kick at the other. The blow broke its grip and he dropped to the ground. His aggressor fluttered its wings in a hasty retreat. A burst from a battle rifle caught it in the back before a follow-up swatted it out of the air.

Someone grabbed him by the arm, not to help him up but to drag him aside. He looked up again and saw that more of the swarm were whipping over the porch. He raised his pistol and squeezed off more rounds until whoever was carrying him let him go beside a machine gun crew. The gunner was in the middle of getting a good grip on the forward handle and proceeded to wrench the weapon off its mount. Don crawled out of his way as he whirled around to unleash the gun's fury into the surging throng.

Don emptied the magazine of his M6 then stowed it away and grabbed the assault rifle from his back. He repeated the example by spewing lead into the creatures rushing by, joining his fire to many others doing the same.

For what seemed an eternity the Wasps gushed above the porch like a burst water main. Don watched his ammo counter dwindle away, the rifle vibrating in his hands.

Without warning, he saw a pair of Wasps ascending back towards the swarm. They were carrying Izzy with them, holding onto her shoulders with their clawed feet. She was fighting to get them off of her with everything she had. Alarmed, Don swung his rifle in their direction.

Click.

He would have cursed his luck were it not for a three-round burst from a BR that took apart one of her abductors in a spray of guts. The last one struggled to get a better hold on her. Wings fluttering harder, it made the mistake of grabbing her breastplate and pulling her in close, close enough for her to press the barrel of her M6 to its chin.

A single shot blew out the back of its head.

The alien seized up, its wings giving one final spastic beat. Then it fell, taking Izzy along with it. Though it wasn't a long fall, a bad landing could break a few bones. Luckily Chris was able to run in. He lifted his arms for a catch, missed and bore the full brunt of her crash. The two hit the ground one on top of the other. Don winced at what looked like a hard landing. Regardless, seeing them still intact enough to start scrambling to their feet was reassuring.

He fed his MA5 a fresh magazine. He was too late to kill everything else, however. The last dregs of the passing mob were in the process of being shot out of the air. Most of the swarm was gone and he was free to use the nearby corpse of a Gator to pull himself back up.

All around him a carpet of slain Wasps covered the porch from one end to the next. In some spots he could barely see the ground. In others, they had fallen on top of one another in meters high heaps that shifted under so much dead weight.

He checked to see who was left. To his shock, most of everyone who had been there earlier were still accounted for. Like him, they were rising from where they had thrown themselves against the pillars as well as the far wall in order to escape the unexpected flanking maneuver.

Two troopers ran across the landfill of insectoid body parts to a spot near the main entrance. There, Major Bowman was only just picking himself off the ground. The pair helped him the rest of the way.

"Fox-9!?" The Sarge called.

Don looked around, finding him almost on the other end of the cadaver-strewn porch. It took an unsettling moment for it to sink in that the Sarge hadn't moved an inch. He had simply been dragged that far.

He was about to answer when he registered a sharp pain in his right arm. Glancing down, he laid eyes on a ragged gash in the fatigues between his shoulder and neck seal. He recognized the claw marks for what they were. It made him grimace. The Wasp that knocked him over had probably been aiming for his throat. It had missed, and though the wound was shallow, that didn't make it any less ugly.

He swallowed the pain and started jogging down the porch to his old position. It was no easy feat given how many corpses and pieces of corpses were left in his path. He had to make knee-high strides to get past the piles here and there.

Upon reaching his spot, he discovered that he had already been replaced. Gad was holding his machine gun two-handed. Having torn it free of its mount, he was using it to monitor their immediate surroundings.

The Sarge gave Don a quick once over and was immediately drawn to the gash. "It's not pretty but you'll live!"

"That's what I figured!" He turned to Gad. "You took my gun!?"

Gad looked back at him and sized him up. "Only because something else took you! Enjoyed your flight!?"

"No!"

"They're coming around!" A trooper shouted.

Gad swung about and The Sarge brought up his DMR.

Don crouched behind a Buzzard that was close at hand and peered skyward.

The same swarm that had blindsided them was now turning towards the south again, banking around. Don raised his rifle and paused.

There were bodies falling out of the swarm

Human bodies.

Perhaps eight or nine ODSTs were being dropped by the horde, the same one that had just attacked the porch. But almost no one was missing. He stared at the cascading troopers as they tumbled through the air like the payload of some demented bombardier, twisting and twirling in their freefall. Yet unlike the last person he'd seen die that way, they weren't flailing about. Well, at least one of them was, but only one.

"Is that-," A trooper on his left shook his head. "Wait, when did-"

The ODSTs crashed across the gardens in a series of cracking impacts that made Don's skin crawl. Two of them simply burst apart into bits of flying gore, little better than human water balloons.

Then with a rising dread, Don swiveled around to the north side of the porch.

What he saw confirmed his own horrified suspicions.

The swarm had taken one of the medics, and not just him. Of the 14 Bravo company casualties that had been laid out on the north side of the porch, he counted only six.

The aliens let out a collective screech as they banked again on a westbound vector, putting them on a direct course for the parliament building. Don didn't speak their language, if that even was a language, but he didn't need to for him to understand on some primal level that they were mocking them.

'We took your dead. Now we'll take the rest of you.'

Too many emotions warred for his attention. The one that ultimately won out, the one that stiffened his shoulders and flexed his forefinger was rage, cold and unyielding.

He opened fire once again, and the entire porch along with him.

The ballistic firestorm that cut into the horde did so with such ferocity that dozens of Wasps pitched out of the front of the advance with every second. As seemingly was their want, the rest of the formation powered onward regardless, resembling once again a serpent shedding its skin in their deepening descent.

Don stayed at it. He slinked closer to Gad in case the corporal would need someone to quickly grab an ammo box. His larger squadmate was handling the turret with virtually no trouble, keeping the triple-barrels tilted upward while they spun out an acoustic laundry list of death sentences.

They kept shooting.

Wasps kept dying.

The swarm kept coming.

After several seconds the formation angled up in such a way that left no doubt as to its intent.

They weren't going to make another pass at them.

They were going to ram them.

Don realized at that very moment that there was nothing more he could do, nothing aside from what he was already doing.

The impact was so jarring that he nearly lost his balance. What he did lose, however, was his sight. His world became a wild display of flashing lights and blurring movement as the swarm flooded outward up the steps and past the pillars. Gad was firing into the very center of it, dropping more and more of the aliens as they parted before them like an unending curtain.

Two things happened at once.

Don felt his MA5 run dry.

In near perfect tandem, the swarm parted enough to expose a single Wasp standing on the stairs, a sphere of roiling energy in its hand.

Someone ran into him and knocked him over. He hit the ground hard, feeling an overcharged bolt whizz overhead for what seemed to be the eightieth time. He ejected the empty magazine, pulled out his very last one and slammed it home. A twist of his waist allowed him to twirl off his elbows and onto his back, leveling his rifle at the latest foe that was already trying to do likewise. A five round burst shredded its thorax and ripped off an arm. Two more well-placed shots blew through its head and sent the body bumping its way down the stairs.

He fought back a new wave of pain pulsing in his arm as he saw Chris rush in beside him, crouching down to provide cover with his MA37. In all the chaos, the insects hadn't stopped coming and Gad hadn't stopped firing. He was still mowing them down, but Don worried that at any second the Yeller could tap out. He put aside the onslaught of segmented bodies continuing to dart mere meters above him, instead getting on hands and knees to feel around for an ammo box. A quick yet frantic search bore fruit when his fingers brushed up against a case that had been left near a pillar. He grabbed it and stuffed it under his good arm. Turning back around, he threw his legs out in front to get himself into a seated position, using his closeness to the ground and the body of a Gasser to lower his overall profile. Setting the rifle stock against his waist for the smallest bit of stability it could offer, he fired one-handed at the oncoming whirlwind of threats.

He was halfway through his last magazine by the time his own luck kicked in and the last of the swarm flew into range, a handful of the creatures that Gad, Chris and himself had little trouble mopping up.

As the last bug flittered and fell, two more swarms came into view, both of which were arcing up and away from the parliament building. These were much smaller than any he'd seen so far. The sheer number of bloodied individuals among them as well as the lack of overall size made it clear that they weren't two new swarms. They were both part of the same horde that had just taken a swing at the porch and judging by the chittering noises as well as the sounds of gunfire that Don heard behind him, they hadn't all retreated.

Gad and Chris spun around. Don did too and saw for himself that the porch had become a target rich environment.

They were on the pillars and on the walls, crawling up and down from one vantage point to the next. There were so many of them that in some places he couldn't even see what they were crawling over. It was as if they were replacing pieces of the building itself with their own bodies. A new wave of nausea threatened to bring up his breakfast as his mind imagined an infestation of cockroaches the size of people. Many of them were flying about in the plenteous space beneath the shade of the portico. Alongside a score of their kin that had drawn their plasma pistols from their holds on the wall of the east wing, they were firing down at those below who were now left with no choice but to maneuver with little or no cover, shooting upward at anything as everything shot back.

Gad and Chris started cutting down the aliens covering the two closest pillars.

Don was on his feet the moment he heard the machine gun's fire sputtering out. "Fox-3!"

Gad turned in time to catch the ammo box that he'd thrown him, letting the Yeller's triple barrels hit the floor. "Cover me!"

Don skidded to a stop beside him. As Gad took a knee to reload, Don grabbed the MA37 off his harness, planted his own MA5B in its place and used the former to get to work. He picked his way upward along the height of the pillar on his right with one well-trained three-round burst at a time. He prioritized those Wasps that had stopped to open fire at the porch, using their stationary elevation against them by aiming just above their center of mass, peeling them off the support with a series of careful headshots. As the sixth and last shooter fell from its perch with more shoulders than cranium, six of its crawling compatriots leapt from the underside of the portico and flew down, hazing him with a chaotic flurry of bolts. He responded by unloading full auto into their leader. It dropped easily enough, arms writhing and wings locking up. The two descending behind it had suffered a similar fate when his ammo counter hit '0'.

He reflexively reached for his pistol. An arcing column of tracer fire beat him to the punch, scything clear through the fourth then turning the torsos of the last two into implosions of ichor. Gad stepped up with the newly loaded turret in tow. Barrels steaming, they nevertheless released a trail of flickering havoc that tore across the right-side pillar as its new gunner tilted its weight.

Don ignored the rainfall of alien viscera spattering his armor as well as the bugs crashing down around him. He ran straight for Gad. Reaching for the man's ammo pouches, movement on the edge of his periphery made him grab his MA5 instead, tearing it off the corporal's harness with his freehand to open up on a pair of Wasps. The two had tried to fly around into Gad's blind spot and were greeted accordingly. Don blasted through the first with everything he had, having spotted its overcharged plasma pistol. Before it had even dropped to the stairs, he twitched his arm and showered its friend from claw to antennae.

Neither of them got the chance to pay him back.

He watched them tumble down the front stairs then tossed his empty MA5 right along after them. He turned again to Gad and started opening ammo pouches, stealing their contents and stashing them away in his own. Gad didn't protest, staying still while he cleared away the few remaining holdouts on the upper part of the support. Slipping the last magazine into his new rifle, Don gave his squadmate a grateful slap on the shoulder and whipped around to help Chris with the pillar on the left. Thankfully the latter seemed to already have a handle on the situation. Despite not having a machine gun of his own, he had managed to clear away half of the support. Most of his kills lay in a pile at his feet that grew with each arthropodal carcass that came plunging into his collection.

Don sighted a similar attack pair cruising down from the ceiling towards Chris. Still under fire himself, he took his time reducing one to a yellow mist and turning the other into a bloodied flesh missile that exploded against the pillar. With two problems taken care of, he switched his attention to lending a helping hand, only to find a pair of unfriendly claws latching onto the barrel of his gun. He hadn't seen this next assailant coming and nearly lost the life-or-death game of tug of war that he suddenly found himself in. He held onto his grip as the Wasp strained its wings, attempting to fly off with his rifle. He resisted, fighting to keep his own feet on the ground.

After a moment of struggle, he discerned the creature's change of tactic from the shift in its body language. It tried to raise its pistol, but he slammed his foot down, giving it a bit of whiplash that jarred it enough to cost it its balance, giving him a window to shift the barrel. He got off a single shot before it reaffirmed its hold, catching it in the abdomen. Though dazed, it still held on for a heartbeat longer. Again, it tried for its pistol and took two rounds to the thorax for its trouble. It let go and collapsed to the floor.

Don glanced over his shoulder.

The Sarge jogged over. Seeing that he'd saved him, his squad leader turned his DMR to the crisscross of airborne threats that were taking pot shots at Chris.

Several buzzing wingbeats drew Don back to his attacker. Its mandibles shifted in an eerie shriek that rang in his ears. Its gun arm raised a little off the ground but stopped when its wielder's field of vision was filled with the underside of a boot.

Don curb stomped its head, raising his knee and bringing it down again and again and again, feeling as chitinous crunches quickly gave way to bloody squelching. By the fifth stomp, the thing had stopped moving altogether. He gave his foot a final twist before lifting his gore-soaked boot from the caved-in wreckage of its skull.

Chris was nearly done with the creatures on the leftward pillar. Don moved to help by lending his fire. The Sarge joined in as well, accelerating their progress and lighting up the pillar from end to end. In short order, the last bullet-riddled carapace slammed into the ground. Then, with Gad by their side, they turned their efforts to helping whoever they could.

Most of the others, those who were left alive and able to fight, had mirrored their actions by clearing away sections of the porch. Neighboring pillars, once charred and blackened by the orbital bombardment, received fresh coats of yellow blood as their generous donors fell free from their perches. The walls of the east wing, oozing with smear marks, produced coughs of vaporous polycrete as several detached machine guns pocked its surface, hosing down Wasps in droves. Despite their mounting casualties, there were stubborn holdouts that refused to give up so easily. They continued to fly through the lead storm that came up to meet them as they replied in kind.

Within the general mayhem, Don was able to spot the rest of the squad fighting together further towards the north side of the porch. Ray put three-round bursts into those Wasps flying at them from above while Izzy remained crouched in front of him, using her carbine to swat down the ones that tried flying in low. He was happy to see them up and running. It was a miracle that they were all still alive, that any of them were still alive. Anyone who was able was busy sending up their own little miracles into targets that often moved too fast to do anything other than spray and pray. It turned out to be more than enough, however, and he soon discovered why.

The Wasps weren't the only ones with numbers on their side.

The veil of gunfire and plasma had been so thick that he was only just coming to grips with seeing an enfilade of muzzle flashes coming from the upper windows of the parliament building. He had no idea when the rest of both 1st and 4th Platoon had arrived on the scene. Whether he was aware of them or not, they had been making their presence known by illuminating the air itself in a squall of tracers. Some of them were even outside, chipping in from the ruins of the entrance as well as from the lobby windows.

More relief flooded through his mind alongside the tentative notion that they might actually survive the next few minutes.

More and more attention was turning to the last major vestige of Wasps still hanging onto the underside of the portico. Many of them had anchored their feet to the ceiling so that they stood upright but inverted. Being upside down apparently made them no less capable as they switched between unloading their plasma pistols at troopers in the surrounding windows and at those now turning to address them from the ground. With the pillars mostly cleared, those below started huddling against them for cover against the hostile activity overhead. On the other hand, the Wasps above were increasingly finding themselves on the back foot of the fight. The quantity of fire they were dishing out was quickly being overtaken by what was coming at them. Slowly but surely, the two-way exchange became a one-sided massacre as the ODSTs in the windows threw shredder rounds into what had been, up to that point at least, a full metal jacket affair. The specialized bullets splintered on impact to deal the equivalent damage of a half-hearted blast of buckshot. Individual Wasps flinched at the shrapnel that burst from their stricken counterparts to slice through the hardened exoskeleton of those nearby. The wave of shredder rounds caused more and more of them to lose their grip.

Don detected an eviscerated corpse falling towards him and took a step behind the pillar he was using. The Wasp hit the ground, not with a thud but with a crackle. Stopping to reload, he risked looking down and realized why the creature hadn't hit the floor. There was quite plainly no floor left to land on. What he guessed was the overwhelming majority of the parliamentary porch was buried beneath heaps of bugs that were beginning to form an uneven layer of odd-colored guts and twitching limbs.

He returned to the assault on the ceiling. However, there weren't many targets left. Most of them had fallen into the quagmire beneath them. Barely more than a dozen remained to continue the fight, which was no longer a fight at all. So many guns were either barking up at or firing off around them that what final resistance they were able to offer amounted to a couple of stray bolts.

With its kin dying around it, the last Wasp leapt down from the ceiling and directed its desperate flight towards the outside world.

A single gunshot rang out above the clamor and the straggler fell like a brick.

It landed at the feet of none other than Major Bowman. Aside from his bearing, it was almost impossible to tell that it was in fact the major. Having been baptized in as much blood and grime as everyone else, he lowered his pistol and graced the back of the creature's twitching head with two more shots, calming it for good.

There was no lull to be found in the shooting, however. As some of the survivors on the porch moved to pull out the wounded as they called to them from beneath the blanket of slain insects, those in the windows now redirected their fire out towards threats at Don's back. He remembered the larger battle and turned again to see what was going on.

Past the cadaver-covered steps, the wider parliamentary gardens were no better. There was no shortage of dead Wasps no matter which way he looked. They were numerous, a frozen spillage of alien organisms that coagulated around the spots that had seen the heaviest fighting, fighting that hadn't subsided in the least.

Geysers of friendly munitions continued to scan across the sky like destructive spotlights, dealing out death against large slithering hordes that seemed both deathless...and endless.

Unless Don was mistaken, and he doubted that he was, there were twice as many large swarms swirling and curving through the local airways than there had been a mere minute ago. Except he was. He was both right and wrong. The bugs hadn't received reinforcements. Instead, they had turned the bulk of their forces from the outer defenses on the frontlines to the inner defenses in the gardens. From what glimpses he could catch past the living typhoon, there were few ODSTs on the front that were still visible. They were nevertheless continuing to put up a fight with turrets, rifles and even sidearms. Their positions were surrounded by hundreds of enemy dead, turning them into archipelagos of flickering gunfire within a sea of blood and guts.

It wasn't a good sign.

Not even the strongpoint atop the ruins of the collapsed building had been spared. A mere third of the personnel he'd seen there before were still actively engaging the clouds of creatures flowing above them. Around them, he saw almost as much debris as he did fallen Wasps.

Don swallowed hard.

It would be some time before the 31st Marine Expeditionary Force pulled in from orbit.

At this rate, they would soon be overrun.

He didn't dare voice that last thought, at least not verbatim. "What do we do?"

He was hoping for an answer.

All he heard was the building renewal of gunfire coming from the porch. Nevertheless, he hunkered down behind a Gator laid at the edge of the steps and waited for an answer, a strategy, something, anything.

There was nothing.

Then the boisterous silence was broken by the voice of the major over the company comms.

"Bravo Company, this is Neptune-Actual! Find shelter where you can! I repeat, find shelter and do it now! I've called in close air support! We've got Jailbreakers inbound, 30 seconds out! I say again, Jailbreakers inbound! Get yourselves some cover and hold fast!"

Every muscle in Don's body tensed in a spasm of emotions that came too fast to process, chief of which was pure disbelief. His body had to leave his mind behind. A general tumult rose across the porch as everyone outside rushed to take cover behind the pillars. Don threw himself behind the closest support with the Sarge, Gad and Chris. His mind on the other hand was still at a complete loss.

The aptly named 'Jailbreakers', ASGM-10Bs were a variant of the typical ASGM-10 missiles that weren't well known to the general public, and that was entirely on purpose. They were the kind of munitions that the UNSC preferred to deny even existed, that Waypoint journalists loved to speculate on and that rebels tended to fear for the few remaining seconds that they had left to live.

He peered out over the parliamentary gardens and shook his head. Scores of ODSTs were doing what they could to protect themselves. Some had jumped out of the blast craters that had seen them through most of the fighting and made a run for it. They ignored the occasional barrage of plasma bolts from the passing swarms as they dove beneath what protection there was, whether it was the relatively intact bark of a fallen tree, the plumed roof of one of the gardens' larger fountains or under the chunks of wreckage left strewn about from the crash of the cargo ship. Others pulled pieces of equipment over themselves like shields or pressed into small alcoves in their makeshift foxholes left by the dead roots of former trees. Out on the encompassing streets, more troopers had done much the same by fleeing for the refuge of nearby ruins or dragging pieces of car wreckage over their hovels.

Don had his doubts about whether any of it would be enough.

Above everything else going on below, thousands of Wasps continued unbothered and unphased. Their swarms maneuvered up and over one another or dipped low in search of their quarry, their amassed ranks casting giant shadows that soared across the ground.

They had no idea what was coming.

They had no way of knowing either.

"Poor bastards." He heard Chris whisper. "I hope they all got under something sturdy."

At first Don thought he was talking about the aliens. That last comment made it clear that he was far from the only one worried about what was coming.

As the last word left his mouth, a new sound started to rise over the whine of plasma bolts and the fluttering of wings. It was a dull roar, one that resembled something close to fingernails scraping over leather.

Fusion drives.

It wasn't Don's first time hearing them for the day, but it was his first time hearing so many.

It was far more than two, more than four and perhaps more than six.

With that much ordnance...

Don pressed himself deeper into the shade of the pillar. He forgot about the rest of the company for a moment and wondered if they were even going to be okay on the porch.

At the 20-second mark he was able to see the first pair of Longswords coming in from the east. They were flying side by side at an altitude that set them well above the skyline, possibly two or three kilometers. He peeked into the skies in the north and saw the same thing, two more Longswords flying at the same altitude. He looked to the south and spotted a third pair. He could vaguely hear what he guessed to be a fourth duo coming in behind them from the west.

He bit his lip and waited, eyes darting between the fighters he could see.

"Never thought I'd die to friendly fire." Ray snickered over the squad comms.

"Don't joke about that kind of stuff, 8." The Sarge replied. "Not right now."

"Later then?"

The Sarge didn't respond, and even if he did, Don wouldn't have heard him anyway.

The roar of the Longswords' drives became a sharp howl as the aircraft dipped down into a steep dive. They were gunning it towards the parliament building.

He braced himself.

Out in front of him, the Wasps continued on in complete ignorance, turning this way and that in total domination of the local airspace.

He counted in his head.

Five...four...three...two...

The Longswords in the east were the first to open fire. A single missile dropped from each of their wings. The fighters nosed up and away as the missiles shot on ahead of them on trails of snowy exhaust. He listened to the high-pitched scream of their approach and held his breath.

The Wasps finally seemed to hear it as well. Several of the closest swarms started to move more hesitantly, many eyes turning to take in the strange objects speeding in their direction.

Their curiosity left two of the swarms as little more than slow and curious targets as the first missile streaked through the skyline and down one of the main streets. They were just beginning to turn away when the Jailbreaker detonated 20-meters above them like a thunderclap. The immediate shockwave washed through the insects like a ripple of water, pushing them back and loosening their formations. It was nothing compared to the small sun in front of them that died as soon as it was born, collapsing into a miniature supernova that expanded out along the path of its initial momentum. Tendrils of chemically dense smoke trailed ahead of it like claws before an outstretched hand, spreading itself over its victims as a net over a school of fish. The swarms were instantly engulfed, vanishing within the fiery curtain in the second and a half that it took to reach its apex.

The second missile streaked towards another two swarms that, seeing what became of the others, turned and flew at desperate speed to the north. They might as well have been snails. The missile simply corrected its course, its tracking system causing it to curve after them before detonating directly above. In a flash and a rush of descending flames, the swarms were devoured from sight. Their screeches faded beneath the thunderous clamor then returned with a vengeance as hundreds of them broke through the veil of fire. They were burning, their movements unstable and jittery. Few of them lasted longer than a moment before gravity turned them into shrieking meteorites. But unlike them, the deluge of flames left by the initial detonations never touched the ground. The volitant infernos rapidly dimmed and dissipated into the wind, leaving nothing to touch the surface of Harvest save for the chemical smoke that curled and twisted into the streets.

The Longswords in the north were the next to drop their payloads.

This time the remaining swarms in that sector tried again to escape across the gardens, splitting off in two different directions. The two Jailbreakers swerved after them and refused to let them get far. Both detonated at the same time and vomited similarly hellish cyclones that swallowed up whole hordes. These also dimmed, the fires dissipating quickly save for the hundreds of alien embers that screeched in pain as they fell to their deaths. In quick succession, the twin blasts of two more Jailbreakers bloomed across the southwestern gardens, sweeping over another swath of the now screaming swarms.

The accumulating blasts were so loud and so powerful that Don felt his hearing dampen at the sudden upsurge in air pressure. His ears nearly burst when the last two missiles streaked over the parliament and burst over the swarms that had been corralled into place. The ensuing conflagration ballooned down through their ranks in a series of overlapping waves that came awfully close to touching the ground. They dissipated just in time, however, sparing whoever might have been seeking shelter in that area.

Don hardly made out the diminishing roar of the Longswords as they left the airspace. By contrast, having his bell rung by the explosions didn't stop him from taking in a new sound, one so loud that even a deaf person wouldn't need to hear it, only to feel it.

The air itself trembled with a cacophonous vibration of shrieks and chitters. It was like listening to a million crickets chirping together in perfect discord.

Beneath the clouds of chemical smoke that now stretched across the battlefield, a vision of divine judgement played out as thousands of fireballs began to plummet from them. Each drop of the literal rain of fire was a Wasp that had been reduced to living kindling, arms either lifeless or thrashing about in vain attempts to put out their own flames. None of those who tried seemed to succeed. They slammed into the ground, bombarding the parliamentary gardens as well as the nearby streets with their own blazing carcasses. Some exploded into blasts of bodily fluids on impact, liquids that the fires were eager to spread to as a source of fuel. Others thundered into the ground head first or skidded across it. Their hard landings kicked up small walls of dust which slowly drifted across the dunes and mounds of burning dead that now surrounded the building.

There were a few survivors here and there that had somehow managed to escape with their lives. They flew off with haste in no particular sense of order or coordination, heading away from the gardens and towards the safety of the ruins of Utgard. Don counted less than a dozen. They were no longer a threat worth caring about, just a nuisance that would probably be cleaned up later on by some patrol once the invasion force gained full control over the city.

The only reason Don had comprehended everything that had happened was because he had seen it before, at least on human targets. However, to anyone else unfamiliar with the spectacle, the enemy had been burnt alive by a breath of flames that vanished within seconds.

Jailbreakers had been designed to do just that.

The incendiary mixture of volatile petrochemicals and specialized gelling agents was the illicit love child of what was rumored to be a not-so-infrequent affair between a naval weapons contractor and the Office of Naval Intelligence. Whatever they had done in secret, whatever laws of nature that they had to bend or break, they had figured out a way to create an airborne incendiary weapon that viciously expanded when exposed to an oxygen rich environment, only to continue burning if it managed to make contact with a select range of organic materials. If the latter condition was not met, then the chemicals involved in the oxidation process would rapidly extinguish the flames, leaving behind little fire damage to attest to an explosion or even a relatively uncontrolled blaze.

While nuking one's enemies to death was relatively legal, something the UNSC had more than proven at Far Isle, slowly burning them to death en masse was considerably less so. The Jailbreaker and its use, under certain stipulations of the UEG legal codes, counted as a war crime. Many believed that the mainstream Innie sympathizers in the inner colonies would probably sacrifice an arm to put whoever made it in prison. For those frontline UNSC personnel who had seen grievously troublesome rebel strongholds brought to heel by them, however, it was commonly accepted that they would gladly give up both arms just to bust them right back out. Hence the colloquial misnomer that the weapon had earned over the years from the servicemen that witnessed it in action. It was an excellent tool for dealing with stubborn Insurrectionist positions in urban sprawls but had the potential to be a real dealbreaker for the war-weary public if the details of a trial ever brought it to light. Civilians, Don thought, especially that same segment of the population more open-minded to the Insurrectionist cause would probably call it inhumane, plain and simple. He didn't see it that way. He preferred to call it what it was:

Airburst capable, collateral friendly napalm.

He watched a couple of flaming Wasps come tumbling off the roof of the portico to crash down amidst the gallery of burning corpses on the front steps. He looked out at the extensive debris field that crackled in all directions. It was a macabre vista, closer to a landscape of the less attractive side of the afterlife that medieval artisans were so fond of painting.

Thousands of candles with arms, legs and wings, he thought.

The idea made him smile, but that same smile slowly faded once his own memory intruded on the moment, reminding him of the reason why Bravo Company had been in a rush to establish its defenses in the first place, a reason that hadn't included the Wasps.

Dis – Push