Terms of Enlistment (38 page)

“You have
got
to be shitting me,” Corporal Harrison says next to us.

“Rocket launchers,” Sergeant Becker shouts from the central position. “Ready, aim, and fire on my mark.”

The autocannon is still hammering out its streams of tracers in long, steady bursts. The alien is walking right into the incoming barrage, tracers bouncing off its hide as if the creature is wearing ceramic composite armor. The Marine gunners are raking its torso, trying to probe for a weak spot, but there doesn’t seem to be one. The autocannon’s standard round is a dual-purpose shell, an armor-piercing penetrator with a piggybacked high explosive fragmentation warhead, and those rounds pack enough of a punch to take out an armored vehicle at a thousand yards. Against the tough hide of this creature, the shells burst in a shower of sparks, like oversized fireworks. The creature is clearly annoyed, screeching its earth-shaking wail, but it’s still coming at us.

Along the edge of the roof, Marines shoulder the stubby tubes of their MARS launchers, and draw a bead on the approaching creature. I only have the rifle and its low-pressure grenade launcher, which will barely reach out this far, but I open the launcher’s breech and feed it a fragmentation grenade anyway.

“In three, two, one.
Fire
!”

Half a dozen rocket launchers boom at the same instant, and half a dozen missiles leap out of their launcher tubes. They streak toward the alien creature, their exhaust nozzles glowing like a swarm of very large and angry fireflies. One of the missiles lands short, hitting the ground in front of the creature and throwing up a geyser of dirt and rocks. Another one streaks past the alien, missing its left side by a few feet. Then the other three warheads explode against its torso in huge fireballs that light up the night in the distance.

The simultaneous impact of three MARS rockets manages what the fire from the autocannon failed to accomplish. The alien creature is knocked off its feet. It tumbles to the muddy ground, screeching its nerve-racking scream. The Marines start shouting and cheering in triumph.

The autocannon ceases its relentless fire. I look through the optical sight of my rifle and switch to maximum magnification. The creature is flailing on the ground just three hundred yards away. There’s smoke rising from its hide where the MARS rockets slammed into it. The limbs of the alien throw up mud and dirt as it thrashes around. Then it manages to steady itself and slowly rise back to its feet. It takes a step as if to make sure its legs are still working, and then continues its march toward the terraformer, albeit a little less steady than before.

“Fuck me,” Halley says in astonishment. I can only shake my head in agreement. The creature just absorbed enough explosives to tear a drop ship into fine shrapnel, and now it’s back on its feet, looking only a little worse for the wear.

“Launchers, reload!” Sergeant Becker shouts into the common circuit. “Load the armor-piercing shit. On the double!”

The MARS gunners load new cartridges into their launchers, shoulder the rocket tubes once more, and aim their weapons. I would grab one of those launchers myself, but our reinforced squad only has six of them, with three rockets each, and they’re all in the hands of Marines right now. All I have is my rifle, whose grenade launcher shoots wet firecrackers in comparison, but I bring up my rifle anyway and put the ladder of the launcher’s aiming reticle over the creature that’s now again approaching with thundering steps.

“On three, two, one,
fire
!”

Again, half a dozen launchers send their payloads downrange with a muffled bang. This salvo is a little more precise than the last one. Only one of the rockets goes wide, and then rest connect with the bulk of the alien’s torso. One of the missiles clips the shield-like protrusion at the back of its head, and I can see chunks tearing off as the high-speed penetrator of the armor-piercing rocket tears into it. The other three rockets slam into the center of its torso, with far less pyrotechnic drama than before.

This time, the creature falls forward with a wail, carried by its own momentum. I only realize how close the alien has come to our position when I see its head digging a furrow into the ground a mere fifty yards at most from the landing pad where our drop ship crouches like a resting insect. The roof under our feet shakes with the force of the creature’s impact. The alien wails again, and starts flailing, this time less vigorous than before. Something about it reminds me of a bird twitching on the ground with a broken wing—panicked, frenzied, mindless desperation.

“Fire at will!” the Sergeant shouts, and the space in front of the administration building turns into the Seventh Circle of Hell as a dozen Marines start firing their weapons at the same time.

To our right, the autocannon opens up again. All along the edge of the roof, flechette rifles start chattering their hoarse reports. I aim at the downed creature, and start firing grenades. Next to me, Halley follows suit. Our little reinforced squad is firing every weapon on the roof at the downed alien, and the noise is deafening. I go through the few grenades in my harness one by one, firing them as fast as I can stuff them into the breech of the launcher, and then adding the contents of my rifle magazine when I’m out of grenades. At this range, the huge form is impossible to miss. I fire one magazine after another, two hundred and fifty rounds at a time in three-second bursts, pumping out needle-tipped tungsten darts as fast as the technology will let me.

Then there’s no movement from the figure below, and all we’re doing is shooting at dead matter. Still, I keep my finger on the trigger and my aiming reticule on the target until the bolt of my rifle locks back on an empty magazine.

“Cease fire, cease fire,” someone calls over the common channel, and the gunfire gradually ebbs. For a few moments, there are no sounds other than the rain falling on the rooftop all around us. Down below, the alien creature lies motionless, sprawled out in the mud just a few dozen yards in front of the admin building. I eject the magazine from my rifle and search for a new one in the pouches on my harness, only to find that I’ve burned through my entire supply of rifle ammunition and grenades.

A whooping cheer rises from the ranks of the Marine squad.

“
Nailed
the motherfucker,” Corporal Harrison shouts, and I hear similar exclamations from all sides. Halley merely exchanges a wary glance with me as the Marines celebrate our victory by slapping each other on the armor and pumping their fists into the air. I look down at the alien creature, lying still in the dirt. Its skin is still smoking in a few spots where the grenades and cannon shells have spent their explosive payloads against the alien’s incredibly tough hide. We brought it down, but we had to throw just about every piece of ordnance in the armory at it, and the thing made it to within a hundred yards of our rooftop position.

Next to me, Halley squints down at the creature and gives me another weary look.

“That was too damn close,” she says, echoing my thoughts.

Underneath our feet, the roof of the terraforming station vibrates faintly, and there’s a familiar rumbling in the air that’s making my stomach clench once again. I look up, and by the expression on Halley’s face, I can tell that she felt it as well. All around us, the laughter and cheering ebb as the Marines notice the new tremors as well. This time, the vibrations are strangely dissonant and out of phase, not steady and rhythmic like before.

“Oh, shit,” Halley says.

“Reload those weapons,” Sergeant Becker shouts from his position fifty yards to our right. “Get those launchers back up, right the hell now.”

There are small ammunition stashes at each fighting position. I open a box of rifle magazines, and find it half empty, twenty out of forty magazines already used up. I take out a magazine, slap it into my rifle, and stuff two more into the pouches on my harness. One of the Marines puts down a MARS launcher next to me, and grabs a rocket cartridge from a very small stack of them.

“That’s all we have left?” I ask.

“We had three per launcher,” he says. “I used up two just now, and the rest ain’t even armor-piercing.”

I hear shouts of alarm, and turn around to see not one, but four more of the huge alien creatures ambling out of the fog a few hundred yards away.

“Oh, shit,” Halley says again.

The newcomers don’t simply follow the path of the previous visitor. Instead, they pause at the very edge of the mist line and then fan out in a widely spaced line abreast, as if they are aware of the fate of their fellow traveler and the limitations of our hand-held weapons. When they finally start to cross the rocky terrain toward the station, they fan out even more, until there are several hundred yards between each of the approaching creatures. Their battle line now takes up half a mile, and they advance in a more urgent stride than the one that came before them. With only fourteen troops split up into three teams, and three quarters of our ammunition already expended, I know at once that we don’t have a chance of stopping this new assault.

On the right side of the roof, the autocannon crew opens fire again. The big ammunition canister attached to the gun is made of see-through polymer, and even from a hundred yards away, I can see that the level of remaining shells is very low.

“Left flank!” Corporal Harrison shouts. “Shoot the one all the way to the left. Fire at will!”

With the newcomers spread out, our teams are forced to split up their fire. Our fire team around Corporal Harrison starts pouring rounds into the creature on the left flank of the approaching line. Like before, I switch my rifle to fully automatic mode, and start dumping my magazines into the advancing alien.

“Don’t you fucking miss with that rocket,” Corporal Harrison tells his MARS gunner. “Wait until he gets closer. Cohen, grab that last rocket and reload for him as soon as that tube’s empty. Make ‘em count.”

To our right, a cheer rises from the location of the autocannon team. We look over to the right flank and see that the cannon crew is aiming at the legs and feet of their target, instead of trying to score a hit on the torso like before. Their effort seems to be working. The creature’s sure and steady gait falters as the tracer rounds start slamming into its lower extremities. Some of the tracers deflect off its hide and careen into the darkness like embers in a breeze, but some clearly punch through. The creature lets out an awful, eardrum-shattering wail, and stumbles. Then it crashes to the ground with all the grace of a collapsing building.

“Shoot the legs,” the call goes out over the common channel. “Aim low and shoot the legs!”

We shift our fire and aim at the legs of the alien that’s striding across the plateau toward our corner of the building. Through my optical sight, I can see our flechettes and grenades churning up the dirt in front of the creature’s huge, three-toed feet. What worked with the high-velocity cannon rounds doesn’t seem to work with our pitiful arsenal of small-bore weapons, however. I know that most of my bursts are finding their target, but the alien strides on, undeterred. Then our MARS gunner launches one of his two remaining rockets. I hear the familiar popping of the launcher tube’s caps, and raise my head over the sights of my rifle to observe the flight path of the rocket. It strikes a glancing blow to the outside of the creature’s upper leg, and then bounces off to explode in the mud behind the alien.

“Fuck!” the gunner exclaims. Another Marine lifts up the last rocket cartridge, and shoves it into the back of the launcher, performing the fastest MARS reload I’ve ever seen. He pops the locking latches shut, and pats the gunner’s shoulder.

“Up!”

The gunner takes aim once more. By this time, the creature is so close that I could hit it with a well-thrown rock. The launcher booms again, and the rocket leaps out of the tube. A fraction of a second later, the explosive warhead strikes the left upper leg of the alien dead center between what looks like knee joint and hip. At this range, the pressure from the blast is enough to make me stumble back a step or two. The alien falters, and goes down on its injured leg with a shriek. It hits the corner of the building with its shoulder as it falls, and I get knocked off my feet. The surface of the roof is lined with mercifully soft rubber, but my head still hits it hard enough to make me see stars. When I regain my senses a moment later, my rifle is gone from my hands.

“Get the fuck back,” one of the Marines shouts. “It’s getting back up.”

The Marines scramble back from the edge of the roof. A pair of hands grabs the collar of my borrowed Marine fatigues, and I turn my head to see Halley crouching over me.

“Let’s go, Mister,” she shouts.

To our right, the two other fire teams failed to duplicate even our modest and temporary little victory. The two creatures that made up the center of the alien line have reached the building. The shield-like tops of their heads just barely clear the edge of the roof, but their long forelimbs can reach way beyond it. I see a three-fingered hand coming over the rooftop ledge and clawing into the rubber coating of the roof, the structure underneath yielding to the grasp of the enormous hand like the metal foil cover on a meal tray. The other creature doesn’t even bother with such a probing approach. It merely brings down a huge arm on top of the roof, where it lands with a bang that sounds like an exploding artillery shell. This time, everyone left standing on the roof is knocked to the ground. Over to our right, there’s suddenly a trench in the roof between us and the spot where Commander Campbell and Sergeant Becker’s fire team took up position.