Neb slapped a magazine into his rifle and took his position upstairs at the missing chunk of roof, heart racing. Cold night air rushed in on him. The moon was bright, drawing the town in crisp lines and dark shadows. The statue on the old fountain no longer seemed like a lone watcher but a hostile commander, urging his soldiers forward. The broken roofs and shattered walls of the village offered an infinity of places to hide. Over it all loomed the broken church spire, stark in the moonlight. Bring them to me, it seemed to be saying. Bring me your dead. Flames rose where Mallory’s explosives had detonated, casting a dull orange glow over the town.
‘Game time, Doc,’ Meathead said quietly, without taking his eyes off the square.
‘Any visual on what triggered the mines?’
‘Negative. We’re on this journey of discovery together.’
Meathead seemed bright and alert and… happy, was the only word for it. The plasma cannon he held was short and squat, a heavy black lump with only a slight tapering at one end. Neb could easily imagine that it had been designed to be mounted on a vehicle, and only lightly modified to be carried by someone like Meathead.
‘EYES!’ Buzz barked from downstairs, making Neb jump. It felt as if Buzz was right behind him.
But all in the town was quiet. Were it not for the burning fires of the perimeter mines, they might have been imagining things.
Neb’s heart thumped and his hands felt clumsy on his rifle. He wished he could find even a hint of Meathead’s focused stillness. He scanned left and right over the streets and rooftops and broken walls, looking for a hint of movement.
Then he stopped. He wanted to gasp and cry out, but he made no sound at all.
‘I see it,’ Meathead breathed. ‘Ugly fucker.’
The thing was tall, black scales glinting in the moonlight. It had four arms that reached almost straight outwards, giving it an unsettling insectoid appearance. Its head was huge and triangular, topped with two long antennae. As it moved on the rooftop Neb could see a long trailing body with four long legs, like a scorpion’s body crossed with a spider. Two of its front arms ended in spikes, and two of them ended in pincers.
It was close enough to register in his overlay:
Yemishery soldier, quasi-sentient. Native to the Marisent cluster. Commonly referred to as scorps. Dominant race on the former Indient homeland. Altered evolutionary line.
‘I think the overlay is saying this thing was designed,’ Neb whispered. ‘That it’s a weapon.’
The creature dropped and scuttled down the roof on all its hands and legs at terrifying speed just as Meathead fired the plasma cannon. The world lit up brightly as the plasma traced an instant line of brightness. The house on which the scorp had been standing exploded as though from within.
Then by the light of the burning house, Neb looked down and saw the worst sight of his life.
Scorps were flooding towards the humans in a black wave of scales and arms and legs and pincers, making a rushing clicking sound like the wash of an incoming tide. The streets were crawling with the things. They piled over each other, flowing through the village like a dark wave. Neb ran to the south window and saw the same hideous picture. There were thousands of the things, and they were completely surrounded.
‘Well,’ Meathead said, ‘I guess we know why the Game gave us all these toys.’
Downstairs Buzz snarled: ‘Light’em up!’
Everyone fired. Mallory’s rambolt whined as it spun up to full capacity and then unleashed a wave of destruction. Meathead’s plasma cannon brightened the world, seeming to fire shafts of pure sunlight into the darkness. Layered over the wall of sound of the heavy weapons were the rasping bursts of the automatic rifles. Neb braced himself against the edge of the wall and fired burst after burst. The heavy-caliber rifle rounds ripped the scorps apart. Carapaces exploded and arms and legs and heads and gunk rained down. The sweeping bright line of the plasma cannon blossomed into a river of immolation. The bolts from Mallory’s rambolt penetrated far back into the lines of the approaching wave, punching through body after body before finally running out of energy. Scorps exploded and burned and died by the hundred.
Seen from above it would have been beautiful, Neb thought, the bright lines and arcs of destruction cutting into the black wave. On the ground, it was a massacre. But for all the power and violence and destruction unleashed by the humans, it was also nothing. The scorps just kept coming in waves that grew larger and thicker as creatures beyond counting formed one vast attacking mass, all bent to one task: Kill the humans.
Upstairs in the house there was the sound of claws scrabbling on stone behind Neb, then the sharp smack of pincers snapping. He turned to see a scorp at the window. The thing was comically enormous up close, its front legs scraping at the walls with enough power to knock chunks out of the stone. It forced half its triangular head in the window, making its harsh, rasping cry.
‘DOC STOP FUCKING STARING AND SHOOT IT!’ Meathead roared without turning, as if he could see Neb with some sixth sense frozen in the moment. Neb fired, the deep mechanized thrum of the rifle almost reassuring, and the thing’s head exploded in a cloud of white liquid that spattered the two humans wetly. Another scorp appeared at the window immediately and screamed, a long rending metallic sound. Neb fired again, and then again.
At the other end of the room the things were clambering upward in a clawing mass from the house next door, piling up their bodies unthinkingly to form a ramp to the upper floor. Meathead was methodically burning away the ramp with the plasma rifle, the blast at such short-range searing into the ground below. More scars for this town, a quiet part of Neb’s mind thought. Scorps screamed and died in the fires, but were replaced at once by the endless inrushing tide.
‘MEATHEAD, STATUS!’ Buzz yelled from downstairs.
‘Forty percent remaining, sir,’ Meathead called back, with that same focused calmness.
To Neb the fight seemed as endless as it did pointless. The scorps just kept coming, kept getting mown down only to be replaced by more. He fired robotically, using magazine after magazine. He thought of the armory at the military base and actually smiled. The Game really did have a sense of humor of a sort.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
‘Twenty percent,’ Meathead called out.
Neb heard Buzz shouting orders downstairs, rearranging his forces. Mallory ran out of rambolt ammo and switched to the thumper. The heavy rounds exploded in the sea of scorps like little blooming suns. The rifles of Neb, Anna, Gray and Buzz chattered slightly out of phase, like the grindings of some ancient industrial machine. The tip of Neb’s rifle glowed red hot.
But despite all of that, it was clear they were going to be overwhelmed. Where the fuck had all these things been hiding, Neb wondered? Maybe they lived underground, or maybe the Game has just cheated reality and instantiated them infinitely, so that the wave could attack forever.
‘Plasma cannon out,’ Meathead shouted. ‘Switching to the SPUR.’
The four barrels spun up with a whine similar to the rambolt and then there was a sound like a saw biting into wood. A long conical flame leaped outwards, brightening the night. Yet another wave of scorps were ripped apart.
Neb’s ammunition was almost gone. He clipped home his second-last magazine without any emotion. He got a glimpse of Anna at the window below, as focused and unperturbed as ever. Buzz had run out of ammunition for his first rifle and was mowing down scorps with the second. But still the scorps came, relentless, unstopped. Unbeatable, it seemed. Taking the direct road was now looking like it had been a fatal error.
Neb looked down the stairs and saw Buzz and Mallory talking, then Buzz nodded and took the thumper from Mallory. Mallory started to set up a tripod weapon that he took from his inventory. Buzz fired the thumper into the wave of scorps and the heavy explosive rounds sounded to Neb almost like words in some strange language of drums.
Mallory worked fast with quick, controlled movements until he had the tripod set up with a single small rocket launcher on top. It seemed to Neb more like something industrial or scientific than martial, like a model of a deep space probe or a planetary mapping system.
Mallory had a launch controller in his hand and he stepped back. He looked at Buzz, who was still firing the thumper, and the commander nodded.
‘Fire in the hole!’ Mallory yelled, and pushed the button.
There was the screaming whine of the engine igniting and then the rocket hissed out away from humans to impact a few hundred meters away. There was a moment of calmness.
‘OH FUCK! TOKAMAK!’ Meathead shouted upstairs, looking up from the SPUR. ‘MALLORY YOU CRAZY FUCKER!’ He dived away from the opening in the roof, pulling Neb down with him. ‘Hold on to something!’ he yelled at Neb.
‘Why what’s a tok --’ Neb began.
The whole world rumbled and shook and lit up brighter than midday. Then the brightness stepped a whole other level to being painfully bright. There was a roaring sound of fire and air rushing over them. Neb felt the incredibly-wrong sensation of the whole house tilting, like a ship on a raging sea. In his overlay the HP of his protective shield ticked down and disappeared, and he felt the heat painfully even through his fire-resistant uniform.
There were cracks and snaps from the house, and the sound of stone grinding on stone. Then the whole building yielded, falling over in the storm of flames. ‘FUUUUUUCK!’ Meathead yelled as he and Neb fell with it, the building disintegrating around them. ‘GODDAMMIT MALLORY!’
Neb got a glance of the world around them as they fell. In every direction scorps were burning and exploding and screaming. Then Neb gasped in pain as they hit the ground and bits of the house landed on top of them. He escaped the worst of it, with only a clatter of bricks and broken pieces of wood giving him some cuts and bruises. But a huge chunk of roof landed on Meathead, crashing down in a pile of shattering tiles and splintering wood.
‘Goddammit,’ Meathead growled. He flung the pile aside with one huge arm and struggled to his feet, still holding the SPUR.
Mallory’s near-suicidal tactic had bought them a short reprieve. They were standing near the center of a scorched, flattened area, as if it had come under orbital attack. All the nearby houses had been leveled. Gray was stuck under the rubble of what had been the house next door, but Anna had almost freed her. Buzz was handing out healing orbs. Mallory was standing beside the tripod and was loading another heavy-looking rocket into it, looking very happy with himself. The scorps had been pushed back to the flaming edge of the circle of destruction, but already the next wave was starting to push through.
‘Mallory you crazy fuck!’ Meathead snapped. ‘You nearly killed us!’
‘Anything for you, big man,’ Mallory said, and slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Got one more ready to rock.’ He pushed a second rocket home into the launcher, and hit a button on the outside of the tube. A whine started to build.
‘Everyone -- weapons status,’ Buzz ordered. He had been painfully burned on his arm and neck in the flamestorm, but had not used an orb and it was not clear to Neb whether Buzz had even noticed the injuries.
The plasma cannon and rambolt were out of ammo. The SPUR and the thumper had about twenty percent remaining. They had used almost three-quarters of their total rifle rounds. They had twelve healing orbs remaining. The heavy armor Meathead and Mallory wore was mostly gone -- it disappeared when it had taken its maximum damage. Neb and Meathead’s belt-shields were fully used, though the belts remained.
The scorps were screaming in the near distance, scrambling towards the humans over the blackened ground.
‘Last stand,’ Buzz ordered calmly.
They stood in a tight circle, back to back. From all sides the scorps raced towards them, pincers snapping, making their machine-like cry, so many of them together that their cries built into a scream. Neb stood with Meathead to his left, Anna to his right. The four barrels of the SPUR gleamed, Meathead’s huge arms bulging under the weight. Anna seemed small and slight in comparison to Meathead’s great bulk, but Neb knew how misleading that was. Both of them were calm and focused. These were the moments they lived for.
Anna felt Neb’s gaze and turned to him. He thought she was about to turn away again without a reaction, but she smiled. ‘Hell of a first drop, Doc,’ she said, and then refocused herself on the battle.
‘Hold,’ Buzz said. He wasn’t shouting any more, Neb noted with some isolated part of his mind. The situation was impossible, and that reduced the set of options down to something small and manageable.
Neb planted his feet and triple-checked his rifle. The weapon was fully loaded, but those were the last of all the rounds he had taken from the armory. That fucking room. They should have known. They had known. But what else could they have done?
‘Hold,’ Buzz said again. ‘Use the orbs when you need them.’ Everyone had two of the blue spheres, the last of their supply.
They were silent. The raging wave of scorps raced towards them, raising a cloud of black dust.
‘Meathead,’ Mallory began. He couldn’t quite see Meathead without turning, and had to talk back over his shoulder. ‘I just want you to know that serving with you --’
‘Mallory,’ Meathead started to answer at once. ‘If I had to walk into the fires of hell with anyone --’
‘-- has been one of the great disappointments of my life --’
‘-- I’d rather it be literally anyone other than you and --’
‘-- and I’d rather be dead than have to listen to your --’
‘-- it’s a relief to know that finally --’
‘Shut the fuck up, both of you,’ Buzz said. But there was no venom. He added: ‘It’s been an honor serving with you all.’
Again Neb pictured them from above, their little circle of humanity surrounded by a vast field of gnashing screaming horror, bugs in the tens of thousands swarming down on them. This fucking Game.
Mallory had the thumper in his hand, and the tripod for the tokamak rocket beside him. Buzz was looking at the rocket, and Mallory caught his eye.
‘Just saw the word, sir,’ he said quietly.
Buzz nodded. ‘Our last act.’ He looked out at the scorps swarming and climbing over each other, scrambling and getting tangled in their rage to get to the humans. He paused for just another instant, but it felt to Neb like a long time.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Light ‘em up!’
They fired as one, side by side in the circle, the night brightening from the gunfire glare, their weapons ripping through their enemies. Neb felt the deep thrum of his rifle in his hands and watched scores of scorps fall, and yet the advancing wall did not even slow. There were too many of them by orders of magnitude. But Neb felt no despair. Instead, to his own surprise, what he thought was: This is a good way to die.