---Sizhsas’s perspective---
---[Saturday, 30th of May, 2685 Terran Calendar]---
---Eastern Pangaea, New Australia---
My eyes are not able to make out much detail of the enemy camp that we've located at all, in this darkness!
Turning my head slightly back, however, allows me to, with relative clarity, resolve the nearest two deathworld sentries’ heat signatures with my sense pits.
The fallen forest of warmbloods behind them are less clear, their heat being distorted by the sides of their tents… Though, their burned out firepits shine like beacons!
My tongue flicks from my mouth with my excitement as I issue the slightest, whispered *hiss*.
Instantly, the smaller sentry wheels on my exact location and brings her gun up to point it my way.
Her large comrade follows her lead nearly instantly!
She couldn’t possibly have heard me, could she!?
A sound that quiet!
At this distance!
With those ears!
After a few seconds of being frozen in place as I watch the pair stare down my hiding place, the small one suddenly has her hand in the air, holding an unfamiliar device.
A deafening (even at this distance), high pitch blast issues from the noisemaker as the woman screams “KONNTAKT SOWTH!!!” and every heat signature, in the tents behind her, begins moving in a scramble.
---Oskar’s perspective---
Esme and I dive to the earthwork that I’m suddenly very glad we took the time to build, yesterday!
Without the armour we would usually be wearing, the only other defences we have are our open faced sentry helmets.
I suddenly feel very nude!
Our guns light up the darkness as we fire at fast moving shapes, without seeming to hit any.
Something’s wrong with the sound of the fire that’s returning.
It takes me a few seconds to work out that it’s because it’s explosive!
Most gardenworlders simply don’t have the fortitude to fire chemically propelled weapons but… I saw enough of them to know that what’s out there isn’t Human!
A flare is fired South from within the camp, confirming my suspicions.
The red, scaled, fanged, reptilian faces staring back at us, lit by the ghostly flarelight, hissing snarls with their (far too wide) stiff mouths, are Sahas!
One of a half dozen that have been identified from the testimony of POWs as ‘roughworlder’ species!
Species that occupy a space in between gardenworlder and deathworlder in terms of their physical capabilities, meaning that some of them are able to wear practical durasteel armour, some of them are able to fire firearms as opposed to the recoilless kinetic pulse and laser weaponry most GU forces favour and some of them are even, reportedly, able to best some Humans in hand-to-hand!
The guns don’t sound particularly powerful but, then again, they don’t particularly need to be, with us out of our armour!
“Fall back!” Esme shouts, as we simultaneously realise we’re about to be overrun at our current position.
We sprint the 10m or so that separates us from the second line of fortification, the mules, our baggage trolleys, piled high with crates and low value supplies, arranged defensively around the camp.
I hear the buzz of subsonic rounds as they pass close by me but, mercifully, we both make it to the nearest mule with neither of us seeming to have been hit.
We both spend a ½ second checking ourselves, once we’re behind cover, just in case shock kept us from feeling being hit.
We’re both clean.
At this point, reinforcements arrive from within the camp with the identity of the soldiers that join us, behind the 1.2m tall, metal sides of the mule we’re using as cover, not being immediately apparent in the darkness, though their Humanness is!
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
We watch as hundreds of the roughworlders charge our rampart with their legless, serpentine bodies!
I don’t see any that actually impale themselves on the stakes but the care they need to take to avoid doing so slows them down enough to make them much easier targets.
As they overtop the earthwork, they keep their heads, arms and chests barely off the ground, their powerful tails propelling them forward in a chillingly fast glide, across the sandy earth.
The fact that these are creatures meant for the desert in a way that Humans just aren’t would be obvious from the way they move, even if I didn’t already know it!
Shots issue forth from my gun.
I don’t know how many I kill.
There doesn’t seem to be any end to the tide of snakes!
Suddenly, strength in numbers doesn’t seem so laughable in its tactical simplicity!
My gun runs dry.
I draw my plasmasverð and ignite it, ready to meet the first row to reach the mules as they ignite their strange, impractical polearms with 80cm blades, glowing white hot, on each end.
My sverð meets the blade of one of their weapons but, rather than immediately disarming him and throwing him to the ground, the momentum of my swing is only enough to slightly stumble him (as much as someone with no legs can stumble!)
He quickly regains his composure and swings at me, withdrawing the blade mine was blocking to swing the one on the other side at me with startling speed!
I move my blade to block the strike and feel the power behind it!
This guy is no Human, but his species have definitely earned the distinction of a class of their own, among the GU forces!
His body twists and coils unpredictably as we fight, our blades screaming objection at us each time they collide!
There is a battle all around us but I can’t allow my attention to slip from this man! Any momentary loss of focus might create an opening for him to exploit!
Then, the Sahas does something strange… he pulls back… It’s subtle but…
He smirks…
Someone punches me in the back, hard, and an explosion of steam bursts from my chest.
I look down and see 10cm of glowing blade protruding from my solar plexus.
‘Oh…’ I think as I dully register falling to my knees ‘…that’s not suppose to…’
My wife’s scream is the last sound I hear.
Darkness falls.
---Nathan’s perspective---
The dawn light breaks over the camp as I nurse a left orbital, missing its eye.
The pain of being a freshly minted cyclops doesn’t compare to the other kind of pain I’m feeling right now, though.
I look at the face of the woman, who’s shoes I now have to fill, since she took a bullet through the neck, yesterday.
Something that never ceases to be present in your mind, when looking at a dead person, is how unlike the actors and dummies used in films, plays and on television they are… There’s, seemingly, some quality to a real Human body bereft of its anima, its soul, that is just unreproducible with makeup or props…
I reach to LtCol Wallace’s face and close her eyes.
“Rest well, Commander…” I say, getting up.
I walk along the line of bodies, my expression grim.
One of our unit’s embedded Humanitarians approaches me.
“I found you a patch, Sir.” she says, holding out the loop of elasticated cloth with an orbital sized piece attached.
“Thank you, Beaumont.” I answer the nurse as I take the article from her hand and gingerly don it.
The wailing sobs of a woman, drenched in red (though not Human) blood, serve as a background to the entire exchange.
My eyepatch in place, I approach the weeping woman.
At her knees is the body of a large, dark haired, muscular man with a charred hole burned cleanly through his chest… One of 127 other such casualties our battalion suffered in last night’s attack.
Around five metres away is the single most mangled body of any I’ve ever seen, the weeping woman having bayoneted the reptilian creature what looks like more than a hundred times!
I look at the woman, sobbing incoherently over the corpse of the husband I married her to, just over a year ago.
I want nothing more than to comfort her. To give her a hug and tell her everything will be OK.
Unfortunately, I don’t have that luxury.
“Esme… you need to let us put your husband on the transport now, OK?” I say, gently but with little kindness, gesturing at the mule we’re using as an impromptu corpse carrier “We’ll give him a funeral once we’ve taken New Canberra and a cemetery gets designated…”
I gesture to Mears and Walters, waiting with a bodybag to go ahead.
“DINNAE TOUCH HIM!” snarls the woman, with a ferocity that startles the pair back “DON’T YOU DARE TOUCH HIM!!!”
I sigh and wave them away to deal with something else while I deal with her.
I crouch down, facing the woman’s tear filled eyes, across her husband’s body, making no move to touch him.
“Lieutenant…” I say in a low but stern voice “…you need to pull. yourself. the fuck. together!”
My profanity startles the woman out of her whimpering and she looks up at me with a horrified expression.
“Do you want me to put you on respite camp duty, Lieutenant?! Do you want me to send you back to Earth at the earliest opportunity? Because you’re not acting like a soldier right now!”
“He wis ma husband, Captain!” says the aghast woman (currently seeming unable to moderate her heavy natural dialect).
“And this moment is the risk you took when you fell in love with a comrade in arms.” I point out, flatly and with no sympathy “Now, what are you going to do about it?… Are you going to let me send you home with Jenkins and the others?… Or are. you going. to fight?!”
There’s something uncanny about the expression that spreads over the woman’s face.
Animalistic and spiteful.
I’ve never seen a Human look like that… or any other sapient being for that matter!
“Ah’m gonnae fight!” she answers, her voice chillingly level.
“If you want to fight, you have to let us put Oskar on the mule.” I say, not allowing myself to sound perturbed.
A few seconds of calculation follow. Then “Gimme the bag, Ah’ll dae it.”
“Esme… he’s got to weigh 100kg! You’ll inju…”
“Ah says, Ah’ll dae it!!!”
We stare eachother down for 3 seconds… then I shrug.
I stand and beckon Mears, holding the bodybag.
He hurries over to me.
I hold out my hand and, after a moment’s hesitation, he hands it to me.
I turn back to the redhaired woman and hand her the bag.
She takes it and I walk away, not staying to see her struggle as she bags and moves the body she’ll let no one else touch.
“What do you want us to do with the enemy dead, Sir?” asks Mears, following me, gesturing vaguely at the plethora of red, scaley aliens around us and seeming to be glad to be out of Esme’s vicinity.
“We can spare neither the time nor the calories on burying them and we have no idea what their culture considers a respectful burial… Leave them.”