“There’s too many of them!” Tanner screamed, pumping grenades into the room. When they hit a Demon dead center they’d kill it, but the light fragments barely slowed them down. Some of the Demons had guts hanging down but they just kept coming.
“We can hold them, Marine!” Samson screamed. “Just hold your position! We can—”
“Sergeant!” Revells screamed as the rock floor under the sergeant’s armor gave way, Demon claws scrabbling at it.
“Aaah!” Samson said, dropping into the hole. “Behanch—”
“Sergeant!” Tanner yelled, firing grenades down into the hole. But the fire taken away from the Demons on the stairway let them charge up and Tanner was covered in a wave of bodies.
“Gunny! Second level’s down!” Revells yelled, backing towards the stairs. “I need cover!”
“Grapp,” Gunny Hedger said. “Alpha, cover Revells’ retreat.” He paused for a second then nodded. “Bartlett?”
“Here, Gunny,” the master sergeant said. He was covering Dr. Robertson, who wasn’t even in armor for grapp’s sake, on the top level.
“Dr. Beach said something,” Hedger said. “About readings. He said Runner would know what he meant. Something about mining and readings. That’s all I got. He thought it was important enough, it was his last words.”
“Not ‘oh, maulk’ or ‘grapp me’?” Bartlett said. “I’ve got it. I’ll try to retrans it to the ship. Because it don’t look like I’m going to be telling him in person.”
“We’ll hold ’em,” Hedger said. “We’ve got the stairway covered and… Aaaaah!”
“Dr. Robertson, did you get that?” Bartlett asked.
“Yes, I did,” the biologist said. “And, no, I don’t know what it means.”
“All teams,” Lieutenant Mark Van Groll said calmly. “They’re coming up through the floors. Second level is—” The platoon leader of Third Platoon was cut off in mid-sentence.
“Grapp, grapp, grapp!”
The Marines were boiling up the stairs and taking positions around the room.
“They’re tearing through the floor!” Revells yelled. “They’re—” The stone floor under him erupted and he dropped into the hole, screaming and firing his Gatling at the monsters that were tearing at his armor.
Captain MacDonald looked out the window at the courtyard. No joy, there; it was covered in Demons. As he watched, a beetlelike head erupted, looked around, then most of the courtyard punched up as the massive beast surfaced.
There was, however, a roof below. It wouldn’t hold the Wyverns, but…
“Dr. Robertson,” the captain said, holding out a hand. “How well do you jump?”
Clay felt the ground under him give way and he shook his head.
“This is a grapped-up place to die.”
“No maulk, man,” PFC Smith said, turning to present his back.
The two went back to back and as they dropped they stayed together, arms locked. The Gatlings didn’t need arm controls, being controlled by eye movements.
The Demons had stacked on top of each other to tear at the floor and the two descending Wyverns knocked the pyramid over. The Demons just scrambled back up and started tearing but the two Gatlings tore into them, ripping them to shreds. The two suits of armor were still against a wall and for a moment they held the horde off.
Then one of the ripped Demons pulled itself forward, its guts trailing on the floor, and ripped up into Clay’s armor.
“Sir, if I may,” Top said.
“Go for it,” the CO said.
“Join arms if you will, sir,” Top said. “Bartlett! Roberts! Marines! Circle up, face out!”
The Demons were coming up the stairs as well and when Staff Sergeant Rocco tried to retreat from the door they swarmed him.
“Concentrate fire on that, please,” Top said, even though he was facing the other direction. “Right, now, hop!”
Two hops was all it took and the overstressed floor gave way.
There were Demons waiting on the level below, but when two tons of rock and fourteen tons of Wyvern dropped on them, they weren’t doing much fighting.
The group not only fell through that level but the one below and, floor by floor, into the basement.
“Right,” Top said, clambering out of the rubble. “Down the hole.”
There was still a trickle of Demons coming out of the hole, but most of them seemed to have been in the upper floors. Quite a few of those had fallen with the group, but they were in a daze from the rocks and fall, those that weren’t killed by it, and the group finished them off, then darted to the hole.
“Top, this is where they’re coming from,” the CO pointed out.
“And there is a rather large one in the courtyard, sir,” the first sergeant said. “But we will fight our way to the courtyard, then hunker down. How long until the ship gets here?”
“Mac, you still there?”
“Some of us, sir,” the captain said.
“We’re on sight. Clearing the courtyard… now.”
“We’re going out of commo,” MacDonald said. “But we’ll be back in a moment.”
“Bailey, Holland, you have point,” Top said.
“Roger that, Top,” Corporal Chris Bailey gestured for his rifleman then got down on elbows and knees. “Let’s go, Holley.”
“This really sucks,” PFC Holland said, squeezing into the narrow tunnel next to his team leader. Immediately, he saw a Demon headed for them and bit down on his fire circuit, blowing it to pieces. They were big pieces, though. “How we getting through that?”
“More power,” Bailey said, firing his Gatling and ripping up the Demon even more. “Now we push.”
“Bartlett, Roberts, you’ve got back door,” Captain MacDonald said.
“Roger that, sir,” Bartlett said. “You first, Garrett.”
“No arguments,” the staff sergeant said, backing into the hole.
A Demon dropped from the upper floors and Bartlett blew it against the wall, then started backing into the tunnel.
As he did, a rock rolled aside and a Demon reached out with one claw, ripping into the back of his Wyvern, severing his ammo feed and piercing the back of his armor.
“Grapp,” Bartlett said. “Gun’s down and I’ve lost containment.” He turned his head and saw the claw ripping into his armor.
Another and another dropped from the still uncleared upper floors. The two Demons approached the trapped SF master sergeant cautiously, but he couldn’t fire.
“Right,” Bartlett said. “Gary, you well back?”
“What are you going to do, Ed?” the staff sergeant asked.
“Just get the grapp out of here,” Bartlett said. “I’m going to close this grapping hole. Get way the grapp back.”
“Top Sergeant, we gotta move!”
“We’re moving as fast as we can,” First Sergeant Powell said. “Why do we have to move faster?”
“Because this place is about to blow!”
Smart people in the military are a joy and a pain. The problem is that military life creates a great degree of boredom. And smart people try to find ways to become unbored. Certain types of smart people play practical jokes. Others act up. Still others, though, tinker.
Master Sergeant Ed Bartlett was a tinkerer. So when he’d gotten a Mark V Wyvern, he had tried to discover everything that a Wyvern should and should not do.