“You can see for yourself that there are relatively few contacts up there, it’s only a small outpost at most. You will land there, destroy any resistance, and begin firing on the nest immediately,” boomed Mai Lee. The imposing head of her battlesuit swung to regard him.
“And what will you be doing?” asked young Zeel Zimmerman, his face pinched in suspicion.
“While you bombard the nest, we will broadcast noise on the preferred alien communications frequencies. They will be under a heavy surprise attack with their communications jammed. Their command control will break down. We will wait for the nest to be breached. When the breach is wide enough, you will stop the bombardment while I will lead my troops into the nest and exterminate the queen.”
Zimmerman’s face took on an expression of great surprise. Even Zeel looked impressed. “You mean you personally will fight the aliens in their own nest?”
The battlesuit seemed to stand a bit more erect. “Correct.”
The Zimmerman command walked out of the dome, muttering among themselves. They didn’t like the plan, if only because Mai Lee had suggested it, but they couldn’t come up with a better one.
After they had left and mounted their lifters to lead the assault on the peak, Mai Lee returned to the graphic she had just displayed. She pressed a key and the battlecomputer instantly displayed an altered image. A tight mass of tiny lights appeared, buried beneath the peak she had sent the Zimmermans to. A long conduit of lights led from the mass beneath the peak back to the central mass of the nest.
Inside her encasement of steel and collapsium, she chuckled.
The battle began exactly as planned. Smoothly, the blue-clad Zimmerman knights swooped down on the peak and brushed away the few killbeasts that were stationed there, tossing their blasted corpses from the cliffs. The weaponeers unlimbered their heaviest equipment and sighted on the innocent-looking patch of forest that covered the nest site. The first barrage ripped through the still air, sang for a moment, then broke apart into a hundred thunderclaps. Horkwoods a thousand years old split apart and disintegrated.
Simultaneously, the parabolic radio dishes mounted on her lifters focused on the nest and began broadcasting. She imagined the turmoil inside the fortress of her enemies and wriggled a bit in pleasure.
The bombardment and the jamming continued for several minutes when the nest was finally breached. The upper galleries vanished; the aliens caught near the surface were vaporized. Mai Lee ground her teeth, considering using the one or two tactical nukes she had hoarded and hidden from Nexus inspections for so long. In the end she forbear, they were too much like her own children-in fact, she considered them even more useful and dear. Spending them in this battle when more conventional weaponry could do the job seemed frivolous.
A twisting cloud of culus squadrons rose up from the blasted nest like a swarm of enraged bees. With alarming speed they flew to attack the source of the jamming, directly at Mai Lee’s lifters. Gouts of plasma and long lines of tracer slugs leapt out to meet them. She ordered her lifter to beat a spiraling retreat. She didn’t withdraw, but rather lengthened the time the enemy must suffer under her guns before closing.
Even while the culus horde approached, there was a slowdown in the bombardment. The firing slowed, became sporadic. Zimmerman called in a state of great distress.
“We must pull out!” he shouted at her, red-faced and sweating profusely. “There is a tunnel network beneath this peak. Aliens are sprouting out of the ground like fungus.”
“You will hold your position at all costs,” snapped Mai Lee, cutting off the connection abruptly. She wheeled the battlesuit and strode out onto the deck of her command lifter. The time for action had come.
With intense personal satisfaction, she called the commander of her helicopter gunships and ordered them to destroy the Zimmerman lifters.
She watched the graphics over the holo-plate tensely as the helicopters roared to the attack. Caught completely by surprise from behind, the Zimmerman lifters were blasted to fragments before they could get airborne. Only a few of the weaponeers even managed to return fire.
Mai Lee had been concerned that a few of the Zimmerman weaponeers would turn their artillery on her lifters, but she realized now that her fears had been groundless. Realizing that they were now trapped on the mountain peak, the Zimmermans fought a desperate struggle against the seemingly infinite number of aliens that now boiled from beneath the trees and boulders. They had no concern but for their survival. The fighting was hand to hand and to the death.
Before she could really savor the sweetness of having finally ridded herself of an ancient enemy, the culus squadrons were among her lifters. Although greatly reduced in numbers, they still managed to wreak havoc, dropping shrades among the troops, slashing open weaker human flesh and crushing men inside their own armor. The pilot of one of the lifters was stricken by a shrade and the lifter sagged down into the forests. A great explosion shook the deck beneath Mai Lee’s feet.
Soon, however, the attackers had been destroyed and with triumph Mai Lee’s forces moved to assault the nest. Lifters set down in the cratered forestland, disgorging hundreds of heavy troopers in full battlegear. Mai Lee marched with them, but had the caution to hold back, entering the smoking hole only after the bulk of her forces had cleared the way. Her heavy metal claws sank into piles of blasted alien corpses.
The throne-chamber, located at the deepest point of the nest, was built to last. The upper galleries and tunnel networks were forced open like cracked mollusk-shells under the bombardment, but the roof of the throne-chamber held. Sixteen layers of complex polymers (incredibly long molecules built from chains of simple molecules) buckled and sagged downward, but didn’t break. Thousands of pounds of explosives were spent in a few minutes. The hests had done their work well.
“Mom?” croaked Bili, his voice a gasp. He coughed up grit and inhaled more.
Sarah was lying on his chest, but at first she didn’t hear him, and she didn’t know he was there. The explosions had stopped, but in her head they rang on and on, with a sickening repetitiveness.
She simply rested her head on her son’s hitching chest, aware only of the pressure and the texture of his dirty shirt. He put his arms around her neck awkwardly and hugged her.
She tried to raise her head, but a great weight pressed her back down. Shooting pains ran down her side. She stopped moving. Better.
Her movement elicited a reaction from Bili. He stopped hugging her and leaned forward, shouting something in her ear. “I thought you were dead, Mom.”
They rested for a time, their senses slowly returning.
Pain returned with her senses. Sarah found her voice after several minutes. “Bili, what’s on top of me?”
There was a pause while she felt Bili’s hand reaching above her, probing in the blackness. “An alien. A dead killbeast, I think. I’ll try to get it off.”
There was a pause, then a wrenching pain from her back. A great weight shifted, rolled away. “I got lucky,” Bili shouted into her ear. “The damned thing shifted easy.”
Sarah found she could move now, although movement wasn’t without its cost in pain. She reached down and felt around with her right hand. Bruised, tender flesh met her probing fingers. She reached out with her left hand and bones grated in her wrist. She loosed a rasping scream. Fire ran up her arm. Clearly, her wrist was broken.
“What’s wrong, Mom?”
“Bili, help me up,” Sarah said, reaching for her son. Together, they managed to get her into a sitting position without causing more damage to her wrist. Bili rubbed blood back into his legs, which had been under her body and that of the killbeast’s.
Suddenly, something came up and softly touched them both. A delicate hand brushed her cheek.