Space Marine Apocalypse (Extinction Fleet Book 3) Page 3

  The armor was twisted and warped as if he'd been splashed with acid, which in effect the man had. Then the marine stirred, and the jarl's heart leaped into this throat. Maybe he could save them both, as command needed all the intel they could get from their memories. The jarl suspected that any moment now the corrosive fluids would reach one of the bio-fuel pods and the whole ship would detonate. As the two standing marines continued to cover their corridors the jarl settled Poole onto the deck next to the first marine.

  "Rama, where's my extraction?" snarled Mahora as he slung his rifle around and slid a fresh carbon magazine into place, hoping that the robust weapon's exceedingly simple construction and heavy alloy would prevent most of the corrosive fluid's ravages.

  "Rama is dead sir, swarms converging on crash site," said a marine unfamiliar to Mahora, his voice somewhat garbled with static, "Abejide, Cerberus company, the jarl moved thirty of us up to support Hydra. Dispatching extraction now."

  Mahora opened his mouth to answer when his comms went full static, and he realized he could not send or receive. The jarl turned to use his peer-to-peer and saw that the marines on either side of him were no longer standing.

  On the right, in the corridor that sloped upwards, the marine handling that end was leaning against the wall with his guts spilled out across the decking. No more enemies seemed to be coming from that direction, but the man's life was measured in but a few scant moments. On Mahora's left was pitch darkness and no marine in sight.

  Mahora tried his peer-to-peer again and when he looked back he could see the wounded man tapping his helmet and shaking his head. Only static was making it through.

  The jarl ripped his helmet from his head, partly out of frustration, and partly to relieve himself of more garm bile burning his face. His instincts flared with alarm and he raised his weapon, pointing it unconsciously back down the artillery wound in the side of what he now thought of as the digestion chamber.

  The jarl risked holding his rifle at mid-guard, tucking it into the crook of his elbow so that he could reach his belt with the other hand and grab a flare. All his joints were screaming with near mind-numbing pain, to the point that his fingers quaked with palsy as he thumbed the activator on the flare.

  He fired the burning projectile into the hole. From the ragged explosion of light, something so horrible emerged that even the hard-bitten veteran couldn’t help screaming as he pulled the trigger.

  No! We killed you! I watched you die on Heorot!

  At first, the only thing he'd been able to see was the elongated head of a WarGarm. Mahora had faced down a number of them in his long career against the alien menace, a few times even on his own, but as the creature's jaws opened he knew this was something different.

  The serpentine body undulated, propelling the beast across the deck, its movement unhampered by the remaining digestive slime that was still at least a foot deep.

  The creature's roar boomed in the tight confines of the ravaged vessel and the sound of it joined with the report of Mahora's rifle to make the jarl's hearing flatline from overload. His first bolt spanked off the plates protecting its enlarged skull, deflecting that and several more indirect hits.

  Mahora took a shaky step back and slipped, whether from the various fetid substances coating the deck, the pain, or just the shock of it all, he could not tell. His back slammed against the far wall and he slid down, the haphazard stumble the only thing that kept him alive as the alpha garm's two bio-bladed fore appendages tore into the empty air where he'd just been standing. But for the most minute of circumstances, Mahora would have been impaled. He was still screaming with a mixture of fear and fury, but his soldier's discipline empowered him to continue firing his weapon.

  Bolts pounded into the beast, the close proximity of the muzzle to the monster's body enabling the plasma projectiles to overwhelm the creature's thinner underbelly armor. The jarl felt a cold pain in his side and the sickening sensation of a foreign object scraping against the base of his spine. An instant later the alpha garm exploded, its insides expanding as they were super-heated, filling both the corridor and the jarl with chitinous shrapnel.

  Mahora's eyes fluttered open, and he reflexively wiped an armored hand across his face to clear the gore. He was concussed, of that he was certain. His vision swam as he struggled to get his bearings. The sound of boots landing on the decking took his attention away from the remains of the beast and he saw Abejide's extraction squad rushing towards him. He could only have been out for a few seconds as the viscera of the beast was still hot on his skin and the digestive fluids he was covered in still burned as it ate at several parts of his body.

  The marines were lifting Poole onto the shoulders of the largest of the Einherjar as Mahora turned to look back down the corridor. Next to him, just in arm's reach, was the beast's head, mostly intact. The jarl ignored the pain that threatened to take his unconscious again and grabbed the head by the bloody stump of its neck. He dragged it to him, though he was too weak to pick it up, and turned the face towards him.

  "Grendel," snarled Mahora as he beheld the alien visage looking back at him.

  Minutes later, just as the extraction team managed to get Mahora, Poole, and the alpha garm's head out of the crater, the alien vessel exploded. Whatever secrets it still held in its dark corridors had gone with it to the grave.

  MEAT

  Ford activated his helmet's ocular assist and sucked in his breath at what his augmented sight now beheld.

  The sloping hills in this region of the agri-planet were known for having rainstorms, such as the one they were now in, and vital pastures in equal measure. The sensors from Bright Lance should have given them at least some manner of intel data through the cascading sheets of rain, though the garm had found a way to baffle such orbital devices. Thankfully, whatever method the garm were using to do so had not been fully perfected, as the baffle only covered a small portion of the region. While they might have been able to cover up exactly what they were doing down here, they were unable to obscure where it was that they were doing it.

  Ford and the others had been sent in blind, though that was to be expected, as the marines were much more expendable than vehicles. The target area was a pasture and livestock complex, with grass-covered acres and a modest yet efficient shelter pen and loading dock.

  Farming operations were simple on this world, the industrial processes having been long abandoned in favor of a more hands-on approach. While it might mean higher priced meat for the citizens of the United Humanity Coalition, it was sustainable. It was the same for most food producers in the UHC since it was the only way to feed many trillions in the long term.

  Ford himself had never been concerned with where his food came from, nor had he thought much about the economics of agriculture. For him, food was only sustenance, fuel for the fight, and he imagined it was the same for the enemy he fought from one end of the universe to the other.

  Sharif had split their small force into three groups of five so that they could sweep the pastures while Jarl Mahora secured the complex. The hard-bitten bastard was hunting something Ford had realized when the marching orders came down. The marine was reminded of the bird hunting of his youth.

  After the battle on Rakka, he had awakened in the body forge beside many of his brothers and had been given leave by Idris to return to his unit just as the attendants had brought Jarl Mahora to the facility. He'd been burned, stabbed, and blown up, but the son of a bitch was still alive. It was the first time Ford had ever seen a marine euthanized in order to speed up their return to battle, instead of allowing them to heal. The jarl was in deep shock and talking to himself about Grendel, the alpha garm from Heorot, or perhaps he was speaking to his family, the names he uttered were unfamiliar to the men present. In that moment the euthanasia seemed like a kind of mercy.

  Ford had never married, so did not carry the burden of a lost love on his shoulders or the name of a half-remembered dead wife on his lips as so many of the other Einherjar
. While some thought, perhaps, that was good, Ford regularly found himself jealous of such scraps of their former identities. He could barely recall anything of his former life, beyond the impression that it was something very average, rather pedestrian. Ford was positive that he'd been some kind of salary man, an office worker type, though instead of a specific home planet he only had vague notions of a multitude of space stations. He decided he must have been with a traveling company. No family, no relationships, just a guy and his job.

  It was not the business of the All-Father's army to provide details about the former lives of the Einherjar, and in many ways, that was best. It prevented further psychological trauma. Better to have super-soldiers without emotional baggage seemed to be the official position, and for the most part, Ford was inclined to agree. Maybe if he'd had a family he would have felt differently, but alas, that was not the case. For him, all that remained was the hunting, which seemed to have been a cornerstone in Ford's former life. It made sense, given that he was a working bachelor who probably had cash to spend, and the fleeting glimpses of memory painted the picture of an enthusiastic sport hunter. Perhaps it was the hunt, and the kill, that stayed with Ford because that was all about his former life that served his current one. The glove seemed to fit, he thought to himself as he knelt down to examine a set of prints.

  They'd found nothing but churned up mud and uneaten grass, not a single bovine organism in sight. They'd pressed deeper into the pasture lands, and Ford stood now with four other marines, mouths agape at the horror before them.

  They had found the cows.

  The bovine livestock had been heaped into several large piles, each of the animals appearing to have been killed by traumatic strangulation, judging by the lesions on their throats.

  A deep sucking sound came from the other side of the piles, and instantly rifles were at the ready, each snarling to life with menace. The five small beams of light from the mounted devices on their pulse rifles illuminated the great heaps of bodies. Just behind one of the piles a thick tentacle rose up and wrapped around one of the cows lifting it up into the air.

  Their lights followed the cow's body upwards.

  The thin beams straining to cut through the pouring rain were enough to allow a glimpse of a many-toothed sucker mouth envelope the cow's body in a single swallow. A brilliant flash of lightning bathed the scene in a near blinding light giving the marines a shockingly clear view of what had appeared to eat the cow whole.

  It was a garm organism, its body resembling a cephalopod, though it had the same chitin body armor and sloping angles that the other variants had evolved with. It hung in the air just above the piles of bovine livestock and Ford presumed that the undulating bladders that inflated and deflated just beneath its mass of seeking tentacles were filled with a gas of some kind that gave it buoyancy. They were called feeders by the common soldiers, though most of the marines had never seen one. The skalds had given enough recon reports over the years that every man had been provided with a basic briefing on them.

  "Kill it!" shouted Ford, snapping out of his paralysis and squeezing the trigger of his rifle, pumping several hastily aimed rounds at the feeder creature.

  The beast howled as rounds tore into its bulbous flesh, though it could have just been the hiss of escaping gas from its bladders as it rocketed backward into the night.

  The marines, now emboldened by the need to purge this world of the garm terror, surged forward and continued to fire. Ford knew he probably wasn't hitting anything out there in the night, but it felt good to drive the beast away. He'd been struck dumb at the sight of the nightmare, as had his comrades, and though that was common enough for marines when they faced new broods, it shamed him to a degree that he'd given pause. The garm swarms had evolved little since the extinction fleets first appeared from the abyss of deep space.

  Another scream filled the night, this time human, as a shape streaked out of the rain to plow into the squad of marines. Ford turned towards the sound quickly enough to see a marine yanked off of his feet by a garm organism that looked completely unfamiliar.

  It was a spindly beast, easily seven feet tall but didn’t possess even close to the same levels of tightly packed musculature or body armor of the typical garm creatures. It reminded Ford of the praying mantis insects that lived on plenty of the more lush UHC worlds, yet in place of the great claws of such an insect, the garm beast sported a multitude of sickeningly articulated tentacles, each ending in a barb that appeared to weep fluid that he had no doubt was toxic.

  The marine it had snatched was already convulsing as the creature attempted to drag him away into the night, his body spasms probably a result of the toxins. Before the creature could make good its escape, the marine, unwilling to die so easily, lashed out with his trench spike, burying the point of it into the wet ground. The dying marine put all his strength into gripping the handle of the spike. It didn’t stop the beast from dragging him across the ground, but it slowed progress enough for Ford to line up a shot.

  When he squeezed the trigger Ford's finger felt resistance and realized too late that he'd fired his ten shots and now the weapon had seized up from overheating. It had been a long time since Ford had failed in his rifle discipline. He dropped his rifle with a growl of frustration so that he could reach for his pistol.

  The beast's eyes shone black and he was sure it realized what had happened. It responded by letting go of the dying marine and fleeing, melting into the dark by the time Ford and the others brought their weapons to bear.

  "Ocular assist should ping on it!" snapped Silas as he swept his rifle back and forth over the piles of dead cows, "There's nothing to hide behind but grass."

  "Circle up," responded Ford as he slotted his sidearm back in its holster and vented his rifle, "Something out there is jamming our tech. My company channel is all static, just the close-range peer to peer is working."

  "On the left!" barked a marine, and Ford turned to see the tentacled stalker rushing at them.

  This time his rifle was ready, and concentrated bursts from him and the marine who'd spotted it tore the creature apart with surprising ease.

  What it had gained in speed and agility thanks to its elongated body and thinner body armor was less protection against the deadly rounds that pounded into its flesh. The creature's body blew apart as the bolts caused rapid expansion of gas and heat, coating the muddy ground with a thick layer of scorched gore.

  A gurgling sound on his right made Ford turn. His eyes were met with the sight of Silas hovering in the air about a meter off the ground. Another stalker had taken advantage of the distraction and engaged. The barbs of its tentacles were buried in the marine's body, one having been driven up underneath his chin and the other punching through the seam in his armor where thigh met groin.

  Ford and the remaining two marines opened up on the beast, though their shots were spoiled as the creature hurled the body of Silas at them. The marine's corpse smacked into Ford and he went sprawling into the mud. By the time he'd shoved the body of his friend off, the enemy had vanished behind one of the heaps of cows and was blasting great blossoms of gore out of a nearby stack.

  He sprang to his feet and raised his rifle, feeling rather than seeing that another stalker, or perhaps the same one, was rushing up behind him. By the stars, they were quiet, he thought as he filled his iron sights with alien flesh, no battle cry and footfalls barely audible. Ford shredded the stalker's fragile body with fire and snarled in satisfaction as he watched its steaming remains splatter in every direction.

  Ford and the other marines stood back to back and continued to fire as another stalker attempted to ambush them. With their ocular modes ineffective, it was difficult to see them coming, and there was no hearing them. Fighting by sight alone as the rain fell in thick sheets, the marines fired anytime they caught a glimpse of the enemy.

  "Are we surrounded or are they just that fast?" asked one of the marines as he fired a volley which hit nothing but mud, filling
the air with the smell of burned dung and dirt.

  "They're probing us to hide their numbers, if they had a full swarm they'd just rush us," said the other marine in answer.

  Ford said nothing, as his mind was racing at the thought of a new brood of garm and the fact that they fought with some degree of tactical awareness. He and the others had all been briefed on the strange swarm encountered in what had come to be referred to as a 'hoard vessel' on Rakka, and these enigmatic beasts certainly seemed to fit the profile.

  It might not be the smooth and deadly grace of a soldier, but there was something to it, a hunter's patience that made him think of sharks and wolves at the same time. This was indeed something new and had to be reported. Given what had happened to Ajax and the others down in the sewers on Tankrid, where their torcs had been intentionally damaged by the traitors in order to rob them of their memories, it was no longer wise to assume that their torcs would be recovered after their deaths.

  His rifle hit its heat max and the marine paused to vent, and as he took a knee to do so, a tentacle swept through the air where he'd just been standing. Two stalkers had attacked this time and as the marine to Ford's left blasted one to pieces the other tore into the marine on Ford's right. Ford scampered backward across the slick mud and fired from a prone position as his remaining comrade unleashed a burst from his rifle. The stalker's body was shattered by the concentrated fire, though its death served as an opportunity for yet another stalker to come up behind the standing marine.

  Blood sprayed across Ford's visor as multiple tentacles ripped into the marine's body. Ford saw in the distance, just beyond the carnage of battle, that the feeder beast had returned, and with two others. The marine lurched to his feet as cows disappeared into suckered mouths and then began running. Four marines dead in a matter of moments, and though they'd taken their pound of flesh from the garm, they'd done nothing to stop the feeders from seizing a feast.