Rannu and Mudge triggered their propulsion fins, shooting backwards towards our position at dangerous speeds. The cavern was full of rocket contrails as Balor emptied both his shoulder batteries. My railgun ran dry. I ejected the power lead and let the now useless weapon drift away in zero G. Rannu touched down and Mudge sort of skidded in on his arse. The back of the cavern was now filled with plasma fire.
‘Through there now!’ I pointed at the plasma flames back where Rannu and Mudge had just come from. They never would’ve survived the blast but our Mamluks might survive the flames. Another feed flicked on in my internal visual display but I didn’t have time to pay attention to it.
‘The suits will never-’ Pagan started.
‘Now!’ I screamed. The five of us took off. The jets on our propulsion fins at near full burn, pointing in the direction our navigation systems remembered the cave mouth to be. Time seemed to slow down as we entered the lake of fire. It was beautiful. I barely noticed the heat or the smell of my own flesh cooking. I ignored the warning symbols coming through the interface from the Mamluk. It was like flying into a sun. This I decided would not be a bad way to die.
‘I’m sorry…’ I wasn’t even sure I’d heard the comms message through the heavy interference, it was so faint, but I could’ve sworn it was Gregor’s voice, and then I was in the cold of space again.
Below us the small tethered asteroid in which we had sheltered was crawling with Them. It looked like someone had stamped on an ants’ nest: every square inch of it was covered with the aliens. The space surrounding the asteroid was full of Them vessels and Their flight-capable organic mechs. According to the diagnostic readings I was getting, the Mamluk was in a bad way. My comms were barely functioning; the Mamluk still had integrity but much of the armour was slag. The joints on my right arm and leg had melted solid and I couldn’t move them. Other than lenses, the majority of my sensors were down as well. I was just lucky the heat shielding on the propulsion fin had held and the jet fuel hadn’t gone up. I put the internal repair systems to work on the comms system. I don’t know why – I was probably about to be erased from existence by black light.
Balor, Mudge, Rannu and Pagan had made it out. All of their mechs looked partially melted where the armour had run and then solidified again. We were lucky they hadn’t just shattered from the sudden temperature change. Mudge and Rannu’s Retributors had melted beyond use. Pagan’s looked usable from where I was, but that meant nothing. Below us the cave mouth was still burning.
‘What the fuck!’ Mudge’s voice came over faint and through heavy interference.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Pagan said.
From the cave mouth a huge, thick, burning tentacle flicked out of the flames. Then another. What had once been Gregor pulled itself out of the cave mouth. He looked similar to before but bigger. I could see all over him the individual forms of Berserks and other Them-forms melding with his flesh. They were being sucked in, forming thicker chitinous plates or other stranger features like screaming mouths – these must have been a reaction to the burning pain from what had once been Gregor’s subconscious. The fact that he was still burning made him look all the more demonic. On the surface of the asteroid They surged towards this monstrosity.
‘No!’ I shouted uselessly. The mass of writhing tentacles on its back shot out, piercing Berserks, and again the chain reaction of biological connection spread through them. Tendrils even shot into the void, piercing Walkers and small spacecraft.
Pagan fired his Retributor at Crom’s demonic form, a long wild burst. I triggered both the missiles on my back. Warning symbols appeared on my internal visual display – both the launch tubes were too heavily damaged.
‘Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!’ I triggered the explosive bolts on the tubes and jetted away from them before the warheads exploded. I saw Rannu doing something similar. Mudge managed to get one away but had to eject the other. We were only taking light fire; most of Them in the area were either connected to Crom or concerned with dealing with him.
I heard Balor screaming over the tac net, but reception was intermittent at best. Mudge’s missile exploded against Crom but it barely seemed to stagger him. Balor dived towards Crom, firing round after round from the mass driver. These did affect him, driving him back, dragging his network of attached Them with him. The mass driver ran dry and Balor switched to the 30-millimetre railgun, firing it on full automatic as he got closer and closer to Crom.
Balor’s Dog Soldier mech impacted into Crom’s central mass, bouncing both of them off the asteroid. Crom didn’t go far as he was tethered by all the Them he was attached to. The Dog Soldier still had a grip on him. Balor re-established contact with the asteroid with one boot. With the other he slammed Crom back down against the asteroid and brought the railgun round to bear at point-blank range.
‘… to the Spear, we need immediate fire support on this grid reference, over! Gibby, we need you. Gregor is Crom. We need the area completely sanitised, do you copy?’ My comms system had suddenly come back to life. It was Pagan’s desperate voice I could hear over the tac net.
A whipping tentacle cut Balor’s railgun in two before he could fire. Crom stood up, easily pulling the Dog Soldier off the asteroid and lifting it into space before slamming it back down against the rock. Both of them were being hit by high-powered, black-light beams and heavy-calibre shard rounds. Missiles were flying towards them but the burning Crom’s black-light, anti-missile defence system was still active, and he was growing more and more of the gristly nozzles with every moment.
Pagan, Rannu, Mudge and I were effectively useless. We could do nothing but sit around and take fire until something got through. The only reason we weren’t dead was that They were far more concerned with Crom.
I heard it first. The singing, like I’d heard in my vision. But it was different, more human somehow, and it was coming through our tac net. I saw the new feed. It was coming from Morag’s mech. She was surrounded by pale bioluminescence. She seemed to be hovering in the centre of Maw City. She was broadcasting the singing. All around her were various Them craft up to about light cruiser size and various flight-capable Them. Several of the huge tentacles that we’d seen earlier writhed around her but did not touch her.
Balor’s Dog Soldier mech had Crom by the neck with one hand and was pounding him repeatedly and rapidly with its other huge metal fist. It didn’t seem to be doing much except stopping Crom from taking other action. Over the tac net I could still hear Pagan begging for fire support. God knew how many of Them were now infected by Crom.
Suddenly Crom grabbed the hand that was pounding him, pulled it off at the wrist and stood up, towering over Balor’s Dog Soldier. With a wrench he pulled the Dog Soldier’s hand from around his neck and then broke the joint in that arm. The Dog Soldier’s laser anti-missile defence system was firing point blank into Crom with little effect. With what seemed like agonising slowness Crom grabbed the front of the Dog Soldier’s chest and dug powerful claws into it, piercing and tearing armour plate.
‘Christ,’ I barely heard Mudge whisper over the net. Crom tore off a large piece of foot-thick armour plate, exposing Balor to space. We all watched as Crom pulled Balor’s impossibly still struggling form from the ruptured Dog Soldier. I could see Balor moving within Crom’s grip. Almost involuntarily I zoomed in on him. Balor’s heavy cybernetic conversion enabled him to survive briefly in a vacuum. I saw him reach up for his eyepatch. Terrified and fascinated I had to watch as he lifted the patch.
There was a very bright light. Before the lenses on the Mamluk burnt out, their flash compensators overloaded, I saw Balor as if in X-ray, his flesh transparent, the machine inside silhouetted by the light. All my systems went down briefly, which should not happen in a mech that was EMP-hardened like the Mamluk. My internal visual display went dark. It flickered back into life as replacement lenses slid into place. I had no idea what had just happened, and there was no concussion wave. I was still hovering where I had been. There was a huge crater in the asteroid, as if a chunk had been bitten out of it. Crom was lying next to the crater, the right side of his body gone. Silent, screaming mouths seemed to cover the left side of his body. Balor was of course nowhere to be seen.