Bolt rifle in hand, I counted ten ticks before triggering the blast door. The heat hit us the instant it creaked open, steaming my face mask with a thin coat of mist before auto-temps took over and cleared it. I ran through the cramped space of the Cradle and dropped into the massive corridor beyond. My boots landed in a clingy wetness, and I pushed aside the thought that I stood in Shalarouse’s remains; the blowback rig on his blastpack had liquefied him to minimize damage to the raidcraft. The man hadn’t made it three feet from the Cradle.
I scanned down the passageway and saw the shattered remains of Saaart defenders, their mechagel guts splattered across the walls, floor, and ceiling, oily green-black fluid dripping down over top of us and coating the deck. Spider-like limbs twitched among the wreckage, still receiving pulse commands to repel the enemy, but Shalarouse had done his job well. None of the defenders held their trans-forms enough to be a threat.
“Clear the hall and form up,” I barked through the comms. Khaladan command had designated me lead on the mission. It was a hollow promotion by dint of me being the only one with experience aboard.
To their credit though, the troopers did as ordered, spreading out across the corridor and sweeping forward with precision, guns leading the way. I joined the squad of twelve, and we stomped across the ruin left by the bomb, smashing the last of the defenders’ carcasses so they couldn’t report our actions to the hive. Seconds later, we were down the corridor and headed for the engine room, what had been dubbed the nidus — key areas where Saaart multiply. The longer we lingered the more resistance we’d come in contact with. The sooner we’d die.
Our boots clanged down the empty corridors as we marched. My knuckles ached from clasping the stock of my rifle, tendrils of throbbing pain shooting up my arms in anticipation. I’d never run across a Saaart ship with so few defenders, especially this close to a nidus. The mausoleum stillness of the craft unnerved me, but our mission was scheduled to the kron, every tick accounted for, as the Worldbreaker edged toward Zeti 5. Failure of the burrower teams meant more than death for just us; it meant the death of everyone planetside and the Saaart gaining a foothold in the Tullane system from where they’d stage a larger scale invasion. I’d seen it happen at Zanth, my first burrow — a failure, despite my survival. The planet died while I watched from space, waiting for a drone to scoop me up.
I growled, bringing myself back on task, just as we reached the nidus’s entry portal. A burrower whose name I didn’t know — and probably never would — slapped a shapecharge on the maglock and triggered it. The charge sizzled and burned its way through the locking mechanism, acrid smoke billowing from under its vent hood. I put my boot in the center of the door and slammed it open as soon as the lock gave way, dropping to my knees so those behind me could fire without hitting me. The narrow, thrumming chamber was empty.
I hesitated to issue orders in the wake of no resistance, and the quiet stretched on, only the kron in my helmet clicking at me with angry insistence, driving me forward.
“Damn it! Place wrecks,” I called out, using the slang term for the gelatinous cubes we used to take out the Worldbreakers, each a mix of white phosphorous and volatile plasma capable of searing through the hardened walls of the engine casing and razing the systems inside beyond repair, spreading through the ship much like the Saaart intended for the planet below.
Six men charged into the room and made it halfway across before the sensors in my helmet detected an electrical surge.
“Retreat,” I screamed, but it was too late. The trap was sprung.
Blue-black sparks rippled across the floor, lightning across steel gray clouds, and the men were engulfed. Their screams were cut short as the current arced through their bodies, smoldering points of char where each furious tongue lapped. The burrowers stiffened and kron slowed as I spied the first of the wrecks toppling from a soldier’s rigid hand. I raced forward, careful not to touch the sparking floor, seized the big metal door, and yanked it closed just ticks before the first of the wrecks ignited.
The explosion blew the door from the hinges and flung fire into the corridor. The steel hatch clipped me as it blew past, triggering my armor’s kinetic shields. I tumbled end over end, grav sensors shrieking, and barely felt myself strike the far bulkhead. The ground rose up to embrace me, the hatch buried halfway in the wall above, and I watched as my helmet display shrieked red warnings. Something inside me felt wrong, broken. Then the stims kicked in, flooding my veins with painkillers, and I felt nothing.
I swept aside the display so I could see how the others had fared. It wasn’t well. Two of the remaining six had caught the full brunt of the explosion and were little more than blobs wreathed in glowing phosphorous, suits and flesh melted into one. Indistinguishable. The others had been out of direct line of the blast but they stumbled drunkenly from the concussive force, struggling to remain standing. One failed and dropped to his knees. Blood stained the inside of his visor.
I crawled my way back to my feet and steeled my voice against the tremor that ran through me. “Status?”
“Kin-shield 12 %, otherwise okay,” the first replied, sounding almost honest. He swayed unsteadily.
The second tapped his helmet, signaling comms down and gave a shaky thumbs up. The third, Rawlins as I remembered, barked an A-OK. The last, the trooper on his knees, said nothing, eyes wide and staring at the crimson that darkened his viewscreen.
Grateful for the magclasps that kept my rifle firmly adhered to my forearm, I stumbled forward and put the barrel against the kneeling man’s helmet. “A warrior’s boon,” I offered, then pulled the trigger. He slumped to the floor as the bolt tore through his head. The others stared in silence, likely believing me cold, but I’d offered the man mercy. He was dead before I put the rifle to him.
“Move,” I called out and started down the corridor. We’d scored the nidus but the Worldbreaker crept on unimpeded. “We’re not done yet.”
The men followed after, keeping a distance between us. I didn’t bother to call them on it. Rooks on their first burrow, they’d no understanding of what they’d signed up for. The glory and honor the Khaladan brass sold them was just smoke and ash in their mouths by now, a soldier’s wet dream turned nightmare as reality sunk in. It was too late to turn back; all that was left was the mission. We had a ship to scuttle.
I marched on, ignoring the slosh of liquid inside my chest, my suit’s enviros working overtime to filter the blood from my lungs. The scent of copper teased my nose as I led the remaining burrowers toward another target. Two nidus’s and a forward disbursement point — where the first of the Saaart would be injected into the atmosphere — pinged on my display. I chose the nearest of the former, the latter a last ditch effort, and veered down a side corridor toward the blinking red dot of the nidus.
The Saaart found us about halfway there.
“Contact!” Rawlins shouted over the comms, the burst of his bolt rifle nearly drowning out his voice.
I spun to see the defenders spilling through a conduit in the ceiling, their arachnid trans-forms creating a black cloud against the manufactured sky of the corridor. Serrated legs wriggled with deadly intent as they fell. The whirl of their red-orange eyes were hypnotic, thousands of photoreceptors casting a sheen of malevolence. Rawlins fell beneath their mass as I raised my rifle and blasted away, mechagel flying.