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“Hank?” Beth asked. “Got time for an update?”

“Sure, honey,” he replied, “but keep it brief, I got incoming.”

“Okay. Jenkins, Anderson and Wright have deployed and engaged, they’re all dealing with their own first clusters…Peters, Donaldson and the Singhs are en route, but their gates are all over the place and they might need a hand with clean-up once we’ve got the main clusters dealt with.”

“Okay,” Graves said as he triggered off another burst that dropped a clump of half-dozen aliens as they cleared a fence-line 500 metres in front of him. “You sound like you’re coordinating with the other wives. “

“I am,” Beth replied. “We’re trying to keep each other updated on the back channels, just in case there’s a breakthrough somewhere.”

“Good.” Another burst, another clump falling apart under the autocannon fire. “I’m almost done with this group, moving south soon.”

“Roger. Be careful, honey, the next group are bigger gates and they’ll likely be fully deployed before you get there.”

“Will do!” He triggered his last burst, splashing the last of the deebees across his eastern paddock and then turned the exomech south to deal with the next group.

The eastern paddocks were fallow this season, and if nothing else the alien corpses would make good fertiliser when he got around to ploughing them into the soil.

Wright Farmstead, Tau Ceti IV

Jake Wright hated his exomech and was pretty sure it hated him. Carnigore sounded ferocious, but the ‘carni’ wasn’t named after a predator’s eating habits — the suit was a built on a mobile amusement park ride, and the old red and white paint job made it look far more ‘carnival’ than he would have liked.

If maintaining the suit in its original condition hadn’t been part of his old man’s will, he’d have had it redone and renamed a decade ago.

“Jake,” his wife said as he fired his own autocannon into the creatures moving towards him, “you need to get the lead out, that second cluster of gates is opening.”

“Helen, I’m doing this as fast as I can,” he said, gritting his teeth as he fired another burst. Carnigore wasn’t a well-padded suit and he swore he felt every jolt of recoil through his bones. “Last group coming up now, I’ll head to that second cluster in a moment.”

“I hate to nag” she replied, though Jake didn’t believe that for an instant, “but Graves and Jenkins have cleared their first gates and are already on route to their second.”

“For Christ’s sake, Helen, it’s not a contest!”

“It never is with you Jake, it never is…”

Wright flicked the mute button on his communication piece and cursed, long and loud, as the last of the deebees died in front of him. He swung Carnigore south and headed towards the river, where the second cluster of gates was already opening. He threw in a few curses towards his exomech for good measure, bracing himself for every bump and jolt the insanely grinning suit was going to pass on to him.

Anderson Farmstead, Tau Ceti IV

‘Crazy Bill’ Anderson was the old man of the colony, a silver-haired widower in his 70s. He’d built his suit himself, turning an obsolete agricultural exomech into a formidable fighting machine. It was a blocky, hulking brute that lacked the sleek lines of newer suits, but he and his Grampage had weathered decade after decade of deebee raids without showing any signs of slowing down.

He’d dealt with the first cluster of gates easily enough and was perched on a low hill overlooking the slowing blooming forms of his second cluster. The three gates were very tightly bunched, much tighter than he’d ever seen before, and he waited patiently as they grew. Close-packed like that, the deebees would run out into a withering hail of fire, and he certainly had no problem with that.

Still, the sight bugged him. Gates were always spaced apart, likely to stop them interfering with each other. The energy required to cross the dimensional barrier was stupendous, even if the colonists didn’t have a clue as to how it all worked. Anything might happen if the gates actually overlapped.

Graves Farmstead, Tau Ceti IV

“Hank, we have a problem.”

“Talk to me Beth.”

“The wormholes on the ridges, they’re getting stronger.”

“How strong?”

“Off-the-chart strong. The satellite view shows them growing every minute.”

Brutiful was nearing the second cluster of gates, and in the distance Graves could see them spiralling closed. Whatever deebees had been using the gates had already been dropped off and were spreading out across his property.

“Keep an eye on them, honey, while I deal with this second group, and then I’ll go take a look,” he said. “And keep the others in the loop; I don’t want any surprises coming our way when we get around to mopping up.”

“Roger that,” Beth replied. “I’ve got one of the crop-duster drones headed that way, should give us some eyes on the ridge in about ten minutes.”

There was a sharp ‘ping’ as Brutiful’s sensors picked up something moving his way — fast — and Graves zoomed his suit’s cameras towards the motion.

A dozen deebees were headed right for him, and they were close.

“Okay Beth, I have some unwanted guests heading my way, need to focus a little,” he said. “I’ll let you know when I’m done here, but let me know if anything super-important happens.”

“Will do, honey,” Beth said. “Be careful.”

The deebees swarming towards Brutiful were closing from a wide arc, too far spread for his autocannon to sweep them all. He fired a few bursts at those on his right side anyway though, dropping three of them while he got himself ready.

His left-shoulder weapon was a heavy-barrelled, semi-automatic shotgun, if you could call a weapon with a 4” bore a shotgun. Twin ammunition belts fed the beast, allowing Graves to fire either fin-stabilised slugs or heavy loads of 8-ounce buckshot. He thumbed the selector for buckshot and put away the autocannon as the aliens closed.

It always disturbed Graves that the deebees looked nothing alike. They were mostly four legged, or six, or occasionally eight; their heads were usually long-snouted, like dogs, though many were round-faced like great cats or sharp-beaked like birds; and their skin was typically thick hide, though many had feathers like soft down, or slabs of chitin that provided some slight armour protection. Some of them had combinations of all of these things, and Graves had long given up wondering how and why the deebees had evolved the way they had.

One thing they all did have in common though was a serious hatred of humans, and every deebee they’d ever seen wanted to do nothing but kill anything human within its reach.

Brutiful’s shotgun aligned briefly on a deebee closing fast on the left, and coughed a swarm of tungsten balls…the creature was fast, dodging aside as the weapon spoke, but the spreading cloud of balls covered too large an area. Struck by three balls the creature went down, chest and head ruptured completely, the deebee’s equivalent of blood gushing into the dirt.

The creatures continued to close, and Graves backed his exomech away slowly, sending out a cloud of tungsten every six seconds or so — it took that long for the belt to feed the next round, chamber it and align the heavy barrel onto the target. At a kill every six seconds, that was ten dead deebees a minute, but it was going to take them a bit less than that to get to him, and there were more than ten of them out there.

The first of the deebees launched itself at him, a four-legged beast that shimmered with the residual energy of the alien dimension. Its mouth opened wide, showing row after row of gleaming, serrated teeth, and Graves swung his suit’s right arm to block it. More by luck than design, he managed to catch it in mid-air, and squeezed the creature as hard as his exomech could.