Extinction Fleet 1: Space Marine Ajax Read online

  The marine was only one man, but Hydra Company would feel the sting of his loss, as they would the others who had already died and the many more who were yet to do so on this grim evening.

  For the swarm, however, life was cheap. As individuals, Garm casualties were just bodies to be recycled. The embodiment of the end justifying the means.

  Ajax and Rama harassed the clutch, each of them firing bolts as fast as they could while maintaining a careful aim, as they were firing back down the trench in the direction of their comrades.

  The light of the disrupted flare salvo had begun to die down, so when Boone cut loose with his launcher, the trench lit up brilliantly. The grenadier had selected a fuse mod that effectively turned his incendiary rounds into air-bursts. As he pumped shot after shot at the clutch, they exploded among the creatures to create a hurricane of shrapnel that wiped them out.

  Yao screamed wetly.

  Ajax whipped his head and rifle around to see that the fallen marine Yao had attempted to assist was now on his feet attacking Yao.

  Each marine had their name etched into the breastplate of their combat armor, though the ichor of the spores had obscured the man’s name. Ajax realized he must have either been struck by one of the spore artillery rounds or been standing nearby when one impacted. Nearly half of the marine’s body was covered in the slimy spore mass.

  From this distance Ajax couldn’t see how the spores had breached the marine’s armor or respirator but they clearly had.

  The spores had transformed the unknown marine into the murderous psychopath commonly referred to as a ragman.

  As Yao struggled against the babbling marine, a man who only moments before had been his comrade, his assailant managed to stab him in the throat with the titanium spike they all carried for close quarters fighting.

  “Meat!” howled the ragman, trying to pull the spike from the wound in Yao’s throat. The fierce marine held the ragman’s wrist in place, causing the two of them to fall to the ground at the bottom of the trench.

  Ajax did not hesitate and leapt from the firestep. His boots sank into the mud that had been created by the blood and spores that had been pouring from bodies and falling from the sky. The ragman looked up from his struggle and roared at Ajax as the marine strode toward the pair. Ajax raised his rifle and put a bolt through the armored visor of the marine’s helmet.

  The plasma rifles had been designed for use against the Garm’s natural body armor, while the marine standard issue combat armor had been designed to protect them from the Garm’s own weaponry. The hardened ceramic armor of the marine’s visor shattered from the impact of the bolt, though the ragman within was shielded from the heat behind the plexi-glass faceplate underneath the visor.

  “Meat!” cackled the ragman in a sickeningly jovial voice as he charged Ajax, who then began firing rapidly, each bolt tearing away another piece of the ragman’s hardened armor and pushing him back, yet failing to stop him.

  Suddenly, the ragman howled in pain as Yao appeared behind him, having risen to one knee so that he could drive the point of his own trench spike deep between the ragman’s shoulder blades.

  The attack gave Ajax a critical moment to aim his weapon at one of the exposed parts of the ragman’s body glove, where the armor had been blasted off. Now that there was no armor to save him the ragman’s body exploded just as messily and swiftly as the shriekers when Ajax’s bolt bit into him. Yao was thrown back to the ground by the wet explosion. He did not rise again, his life finally spent.

  Ajax looked down as his fallen comrades for a moment, watching with transfixed curiosity as the polished steel torc around Yao’s neck crackled with an electrical discharge. It was by this discharge that he knew Yao had expired and it made Ajax involuntarily reach up to touch his own torc, suddenly keenly aware of its tightness around the base of his neck.

  He was suddenly knocked to the ground as a body smashed into him. He thrashed in the mud beneath its weight until he was out from under it.

  A shrieker lay near him, half its body gone and its various entrails spilling out across the churning mud. The sight of it drew Ajax back into the battle at hand, and he raised his rifle to the sky once more.

  There were few shriekers left now, only dozens streaking through the darkness where scant minutes before there had been hundreds. The unique chum- chum sound of the quad-barrel anti-air battery filled his ears and Ajax realized he’d been hearing it for a while now. The crew of the gun battery must have successfully eliminated the ragmen that had been transformed in their area by the ridgeback artillery spores.

  Watch Tower was back in the fight and was in the process of clearing the skies with extreme prejudice. It was chilling to consider that had the spore barrage eliminated the battery with a combination of impact casualties and ragmen transformations, a portion of the shrieker swarm would likely have been able to pass over Hydra Company and assault the rest of the Einherjar forces with deadly effect. There wouldn’t have been enough of them to turn the tide on their own, but perhaps the enemy had something else in store, a diversion within a diversion.

  Ajax shuddered at the prospect and did his best to take his mind off such musings as they were too terrible to consider.

  Bodies continued to fall from the sky over Trench 16 as Ajax made his way back to the firing step. He saw up and down the parallel that while the marines had indeed suffered casualties from the shrieker swarm, they were recovering from the assault and reforming the defensive perimeter.

  Ajax knew that had Watch Tower not gotten the battery into the fight there would be many more dead marines in the trench, possibly most of Hydra Company, as without the protection of the big gun their defenses were vulnerable to air assault.

  “They’re learning, the bastards,” grumbled Boone as Ajax joined the grenadier and Rama once more on the firing step. “That move to strafe the parallel, pretty advanced trench warfare tactic for a bunch of space bugs.”

  “They adapt,” intoned Ajax, almost absent-mindedly as he ejected his spent carbon magazine and slid another into place.

  “I hate that saying,” spat Boone, “Kinda gives them power, ya know.”

  “Respect your enemy, that’s all it means,” responded Rama as he watched the last of the shriekers plummet to its death. “They’ll keep attacking until the whole swarm is dead, but just like us they learn from those deaths, and they come at us in a new way. Honestly, we should have expected something like that. Target our battery, smash the trench from the sky before moving on to flank our brothers. There would be hardly any of us left here to fight when the rippers and the gorehounds come.”

  “A forward observer, who knows our weapons? Seriously, Rama, I don’t want to think about that. I just wanna kill things,” argued Boone, his worsening demeanor reminding Ajax that the grenadier had been displaying a growing number of warning signs since their arrival on Heorot.

  “Second wave!” said the resonating voice of the Watchman, snapping all the marines to attention again. “Flares up!”

  “Hold that thought, Boone, I think someone is knocking on the door,” said Rama as he ignited another flare and fired it into the darkness above.

  This time the dozens of flares fired from the trench rose without incident and reached their apex high above the defense perimeter. Once they hit max height they began to burn, illuminating the area as they sailed in a slow arc over the battlefield in the direction of where it was supposed that the enemy lines were positioned.

  As soon as the light shone down, the oncoming nightmare wave of flesh and claws was revealed. They were legion, many thousands of darkly colored chitonous bodies, slavering jaws, and primed projectile weapons of all kinds.

  And they were close.

  “Hydra Company, swarm advancing!” sounded the deep voice of the Watchman in the earpiece of every marine in Trench 16 who still drew breath. “Stand and deliver!”

  On the trench line, there were two chain-fire gun emplacements, each of them a rotating multi-bar
reled weapon that fired the same plasma bolts that the rifles did, only with an incredible rate of fire. As with the tanks, it had been a long war, and resources were stretched thin, so that Trench 16 even had two such support weapons was a boon.

  From his position, Ajax, could see the hundreds of bolts ripping into the wall of alien flesh that roared towards them. Like most ground swarms, the enemy creatures leading the charge were ripper drones, seemingly mindless monsters with multiple limbs tipped by scything chitin blades. More than any other Garm brood they most resembled the cockroach of Earth, armored and voracious, each one was two meters in length and bipedal. They always charged directly at their enemies and carried no projectile weapons, so they usually died in droves as they pressed towards defended positions.

  As expected, the chain-fires were tearing a bloody swathe through the legions of ripper drones illuminated by the flares. As brutal as the massacre was, every marine on the line knew that if any of those creatures reached the trench there would be a grisly price to pay, not to mention the fact that behind the rippers would be other swarms, equally deadly and eager for the slaughter.

  Ajax leveled his sights at the oncoming enemy and waited for them to hit the first range marker. Each marine trained endlessly to be able to judge distances with the naked eye, an especially useful skill when fighting on various worlds with such varied atmospheric conditions. The war with the Garm had been a brutal thing indeed, with catastrophic losses on both sides, and yet humanity had all but halted the advance of the extinction fleet in the Vorhold system.

  As a common soldier, Ajax was not privy to the full complexities of the vast galactic conflict, though he had gathered over time that humanity’s back was against the wall and if the Vorhold system fell there would be precious little to keep the swarms away from Earth.

  Vorhold was a long way from here, thought Ajax, as he watched the ripper drones being gunned down, but to the people huddling together in the city behind him this was the only front that mattered.

  The bulk of the ripper swarm was willingly slain to exhaust the ammunition of the chain-fires and advance the other Garm formations under the cover of their sacrifice. That was the way of the swarm, each part of it fulfilling a specific role without fear or regard for individual survival.

  In the pale light of the flares Ajax saw the next swarm come into range, and his heart pounded in his chest.

  They were gorehounds, monstrous creatures roughly the size of a human being, only they were stooped creatures that ran on four hoofed feet. With two other limbs that sickeningly resembled clawed arms they carried projectile weapons. Like the shriekers and all the other Garm they had both reptilian and insectoid qualities, but to Ajax they looked like sub-machine guns on four legs.

  Their weapons were extensions of their bodies despite how similar they might look to the weapons carried by the warriors of humanity. It was as if the creature’s entire body was designed to allow it to rush an enemy position and then empty the magazine, which happened to be the internal contents of their bodies, into the defenders.

  “Gorehounds,” sneered Boone as he toggled back the fuse mod of his grenade launcher. “This is what they get for keeping their ammo on the inside.”

  Boone started squeezing the trigger of his launcher, which made a coughing sound every time an explosive round left the barrel.

  Ajax held his fire, not wanting to waste bolts, and watched as the rounds punched into the line of enemy creatures.

  While some of the rounds hit into the hoofed feet of the gorehounds, the creature’s heavily armored heads and shoulders deflected most of them.

  Boone had anticipated as much, however, and as the fuses sparked, the grenades ripped holes in the Garm formations. The explosions and shrapnel of the grenades that had landed just behind the oncoming gorehounds were most effective, since the creatures had little armor on the rest of their bodies. As the explosions tore through them, the living ammunition inside each of the gorehounds was exposed to open air.

  As had been discovered the hard way by marines in past engagements, the larval ammunition of the gorehounds were inert until they were exposed to breathable air. Once they were awakened, the larvae were voracious and would chew their way through as much living tissue as they could until they literally burst from overeating.

  In the blink of an eye Boone’s incendiary assault was made even more devastating as many gorehounds who had only been wounded by the blasts were eaten alive from the inside by their own ammunition.

  Other grenadiers had made similar choices with their fuse mods and in an instant the swarm had been dealt a mighty blow.

  Ajax lost no more time in selecting a target, and fired a bolt through the chest of a gorehound that died as it exploded into several grisly pieces.

  The other marines up and down the line began to fire their own plasma rifles. Everyone knew that while the swarm had suffered heavy casualties, behind those gorehounds were yet more horrific creatures, and once the enemies reached the trench the fight would be on the Garm’s terms.

  Ajax and Rama maintained a steady stream of fire, each marine working the action of their rifle to vent chamber heat after every tenth shot. As rifles they trained hard to make the operation of the weapon as seamless as possible. Against the swarm there was a risk of overheating the weapon, and after every tenth shot the marines vented the heat to keep the rifle operational.

  Ajax knew that every time he vented that was one less bolt he fired downrange, one less enemy slain on the field, but it had to be done to be effective for the length of the engagement. Like the prohibition on full-auto spray that was a natural urge in moments of raw fear, the vent on the tenth shot was a rifle discipline drilled into each marine until it was as natural as breathing.

  He did his best not think of the innumerable waves of creatures that awaited behind the ripper drones and gorehounds and forced from his mind the sickening realization that a swarm of this size and complexity was not what Hydra Company had prepared to fight.

  The Garm had modified their strategy and the rifles of Hydra Company would not be enough to stem the tide.

  Ajax drew in a breath and let it out slowly, re-gaining his composure, his only thought was on shoot, vent, and shoot again. It was only through strict rifle discipline that Trench 16 would hold, and hold it they must.

  “Hydra Company tactical retreat to the second parallel! First unit, time now!” shouted the voice of Jarl Mahora, the leader of Hydra Company, second only to the Watchman, through everyone’s earpiece, “Second unit hold the line!”

  Ajax and Boone both stopped firing as soon as commanded and looked at Rama, who briefly nodded to them before returning to aiming his rifle at the enemy.

  Ajax and Boone were part of first unit, while Rama was second unit. Everyone knew after much experience fighting the Garm, that a significant portion of second unit would not survive the retreat. They were more of a rearguard who would buy first unit time to escape and re-position.

  Ajax leapt down into the mud of the trench bottom and moved as quickly as he could through the thick soup towards the connecting trench. The second parallel was just as fortified as the first, but even though it occupied a smaller swathe of ground, the marines still had to sprint down roughly eighty meters of trench to reach it.

  There were only three connecting trenches, spaced evenly across the first parallel, so the two marines had a treacherous distance to cover to reach the connection.

  Ajax tried to maintain a good speed while struggling against the sucking mud and the carnage the covered the bottom of the trench. What ground wasn’t covered in treacherous mud was littered with the broken bodies of shriekers and more than a few marines. As the two marines picked their way down the trench, the men of second unit kept firing into the oncoming waves of Garm.

  Ajax was passing near one of the chain-fire emplacement when the gun overheated and suddenly went silent as the action of the weapon slammed into place, a security feature that kept it from exploding.<
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  It was an odd feature, but a useful one. When the chain-fires were first introduced to the battlefield they had a nasty habit of exploding when they overheated. They had been created like the pulse rifles of the infantry, and relied upon individual gunners to manually vent the excess heat caused by firing the weapon.

  However, the limits of human control over the instincts of fight or flight was limited, and it had been discovered that in the thick of battle most gunners were incapable of choosing to stop firing if they were in a desperate situation. When facing the scuttling horrors of the Garm, all they could do was keep shooting, so the automatic safety action had to be placed on each weapon. If the gunner did not pause to vent the heat, after a while the gun would just shut down, preserving the weapon.

  Ajax could hear the gunners cursing in frustration as they raised their rifles, each knowing that the gun would have to cool for several minutes and by that time this trench would be lost. That was the element about the shut off that Ajax found most strange, yet cruelly effective. If the gun was pushed to such limits that it shut down, one could safely assume that whatever position being defended would be overrun. With the gun shut down it was unlikely to be damaged by the swarm, for it was not organic or operational. If the Einherjar could turn the tide of battle and retake the position, the gun would be waiting for them, cooled off and ready to fire in an instant. One of the many bizarre tactics learned by the Einherjar during this seemingly endless war against the swarm.

  Ajax reached the connecting tunnel, with Boone right behind him and they picked up the pace on more solid ground.

  The connecting trench had been cut into the loamy soil and then reinforced with flak-boards just like the first parallel, though it had not suffered from the battle with the shrieker swarm. Only a handful of rifles stood guard in the trench, and so there was little to attract the attention of the creatures. The marines raced down the trench and were about halfway to the second parallel when they heard Mahora’s voice over the company channel once more.