Dead Worlds (Necrospace Book 2) (10 page)

While certainly, most modern cities in corporate space were constructed without defenses from ground invasions, most of their defense coming from orbital batteries and warships; it was a standard tactic to create fortifications during occupation.

Though all of the Reapers knew of the anomalous conditions of the mission, given that planets almost never remained at the same coordinates for more than a few days or weeks on the other side of the Ellisian line, it was still a sign that they were the first to properly explore the target site since whatever catastrophe befell it.

One platoon far to the north of Samuel’s reported observing grooved pathways underneath a damaged section of building, the wall having been knocked down by what appeared to have been a tiny meteorite. Other groups, as well as Samuel’s, had found standard meteorite damage, which was common on most all planets that had been floating through the void without the advantage of air shields or defense batteries, and it was a common part of the planetary life cycle. Photos were uploaded of the damaged wall and the Reapers instructed their platoons to look for corresponding grooves in the streets, only to find that they existed through the city.

At first they’d appeared to be a sort of open sewage system or guttering network, though with the new evidence from the damaged building it looked as if most of the buildings were slotted into the grooves and capable of moving along them. It was thought that perhaps the city was even older than they’d thought, and the grooves were there to help thousands of hands to push the cyclopean buildings into place as they were built block by block.

Most of the buildings looked to Samuel to be a cross between a pyramid and a sphere, and though they did seem to be constructed out of a conglomerate of molded beams and smooth blocks, he just could not pinpoint exactly how any of it was physically possible.

The blocks were a mix of smooth metal and some kind of glassy stone that registered as unknown in the Grotto databanks. Each platoon had a portable mining lab which allowed them to take samples and upload analysis as they passed through the city, and nothing they sent back could pierce the mystery.

As the platoons plunged deeper into the city the buildings became larger and more complex, until after a few hours it seemed as if the physics of the planet must be wrong somehow, as the increasingly bizarre designs of the buildings could not possibly be built by any process or laws of physics that was known to Grotto, possibly to humankind at all.

Samuel knew that the other Reapers were thinking the same thing he was, that despite the growing sense of dread there was a spark of greed that had begun to grow hot in the breast of the professional salvage soldiers.

If their salvage tools were able to be modified so that they could harvest even the raw building materials, it was indeed possible that this would be one of the greatest finds in Reaper history.

Samuel found that he was counting his fortunes before the city was secure, and worked to control his breathing and manage his expectations.

Shoot first and salvage second was a common phrase among the marines, though it was difficult to maintain that mental discipline when he and the other squad leaders knew that if they could secure the city, the sheer tonnage of the find would keep them earning those elevated hazard wages for months.

Grotto had indeed found an excellent motivational tool for the veteran salvage marines.

Just as Samuel was beginning to daydream about the pristine cabin on the edge of a great forest where he and Sura and Orion lived in peace and health the real nightmare of UK1326 began to unfold.

NO EASY DAY

Suddenly one of the shoulder cameras of a legionnaire began to move strangely, and his vitals spiked into the red. His voice was muffled as if something was covering his mouth, but Samuel could tell through the legionnaire channel that the man was screaming.

A second legionnaire’s camera swept up to reveal something with a humanoid torso and too many legs descending from the fog just as their camera went dark, vitals spiked red, then to black.

“
Shoto, you’re under attack! Both flanks!”
Samuel yelled into his com-bead as the Line Warden swept her gaze from left to right, her camera revealing nothing but empty city and confused convict soldiers, Samuel shouted, “
Back-shadows! Back-shadows!”

“
I see them! What the hell-
,” Shoto’s voice cut off as her camera revealed a bizarre hostile carrying one of her legionnaires up the sheer side of a building and into the thick fog above.

Samuel sat back in his seat as his mind struggled to comprehend what he’d just seen. The Reaper had, in his time, faced everything from mutants to marauders and it seemed like every stripe of scavenger the universe had to offer, not to mention Helion elites and security troopers. Nothing up to now had prepared him for the barrage of images he was seeing through the cameras as Shoto bellowed for her troops to form a defensive circle with her in the center.

Another legionnaire’s vitals spiked then blacked out. Gunfire erupted as convicts began shooting at the hostiles. Another legionnaire’s vitals went black as bullets riddled his body. Through the camera feeds Samuel could see sparks and scraps of metal flying off the arachnid body of a hostile that was attempting to drag away the man’s bloody corpse. The Reaper didn’t get the best look at the hostile, though he could tell from the fleeting images of it before the hostile dropped its prey and fled into the darkness that it was at least part machine.

He guesstimated that it was roughly two meters in size, so in order to scale the sheer walls of the buildings while carrying the full weight of the legionnaire it had to have tremendous strength. The humanoid torso had a head with a sunken metal face, more like a mask, and the arms of the hostile looked as if they had several small gun barrels mounted on them in addition to sharp hooked edges that enabled them to kill and haul away the bodies of their prey.

More gunfire from the circle took Samuel’s attention to the camera feeds of those legionnaires and he could see that their bullets seemed to have little effect on the strange walls of the buildings themselves. He made a mental note that for better or worse, it looked like at least small arms fire would cause little in the way of collateral damage.

Unsurprisingly, it looked like the discipline of the legionnaires, still green from their training, and experiencing a truly terrifying first taste of battle, was breaking down swiftly. Most of the soldiers were firing blinding into the fog, blasting away at shadows with no effect before fumbling to swap out magazines.

It was during those shocked moments of vulnerability that the gun spider creatures seemed to strike; leaping out of the fog and shadow to wrap metal arms around their victims and pull them away in a spray of blood or to rush the legionnaires and rapid fire their projectile weapons with deadly effect.

Samuel watched from Shoto’s camera as her vision tracked one of the gun spiders climbing up the wall with a convict in its grip and could see as he zoomed in on the feed that there were tiny green pulses of energy that rippled through the blocks of the buildings as the machine spider’s legs ran across it. It seemed to Samuel that the building itself was somehow aiding in the gun spider’s apparent defiance of gravity and the opposing mass of their prey.

Shoto shouted for her platoon to maintain firing discipline but her cries fell on deaf ears as the platoon fell apart. They’d already lost eight of their number in the last few seconds, while those that weren’t attempting to flee were being divided into smaller groups by the swift attackers.

In another handful of seconds, most of the lone soldiers who had been separated from the larger groups of legionnaires were picked off by the creatures, falling to the scything limbs or hails of bullets from the hostile machines.

From Samuel’s vantage point he was only able to see through the live feeds from the cameras of the legionnaires still in the fight, as the feeds from those who had been killed were limited at best.

The repeated bark of Shoto’s shotgun brought Samuel’s attention to the Line Warden and he watched in horror as she gunned down two convicts who were attempting to flee. That fatal show of force galvanized the remaining convicts to stand their ground as Shoto approached them with grim authority.

“Line Warden Shoto, this is happening across the whole damn city, pull your people back to the landing zone!” ordered Samuel while the observatory exploded with activity as hostiles were being engaged by the full legion. “We can rally there and wait for further orders; at least you won’t have it coming at you from all sides. How copy?”

“Form a square and fall back on my command!” she shouted as she brandished her shotgun at another soldier who looked as if he was about to run. “We retreat properly or die right here!
Form up!”

Shoto snapped orders as the legionnaires rushed to form a tight square, standing shoulder to shoulder so that each soldier’s line of fire overlapped the other. The shattered and smoking bodies of several gun spiders were strewn across the streets, though far too few in comparison to the heavy casualties sustained by the legion so far. Shoto stood in the center and shouted for them to move out, insisting that they maintain tight fire discipline.

“We’ve only got the ammo we came with and your ammo is your life! Keep it tight, only shoot when you know you can hit something,” she growled as the remaining soldiers moved briskly back down the street.

The hostile attacks became sporadic as the legionnaires rushed towards the landing zone. The convicts did their best to fire only when a hit was assured. However, the legion had pushed deep into the city and it was a long way back to the landers.

Once they’d cleared the main skyscraper section of the city, Shoto’s platoon of twenty-nine had been reduced to a mere eleven soldiers in addition to the Line Warden.

Though Samuel had a hard time following the camera feeds through the fog he was positive that they’d eliminated at least four more hostiles. It was likely that others lay destroyed in the fog and shadow beyond the camera’s view.

These creatures seemed to have been built for stealth and lightning assault rather than a stand up fight and he was confident that had it been a platoon of Reaper veterans down there the tide of battle would be flowing in the other direction.

The legionnaires weren’t equipped with the kind of battle armor and multi-functional helmets that the Reapers used, much less the security forces and elite troopers of the greater Grotto military. Had the legionaries been better equipped, with infra-red and low light vision settings on their faceplates, proper rifles and more than just a few weeks training then perhaps the fighting would have gone  differently. By the time they reached the lander Shoto’s platoon had been steadily whittled down to only the Line Warden and three convicts with empty rifles.

Throughout the city the scenario had been similar, with the legionnaires being relentlessly assaulted by the gun spiders, with many of the legion’s corpses being carried off into the darkness toward fates unknown.

Samuel saw many of the squad leaders get up from their chairs and storm out of the room while others gathered around the work stations of squad leaders like himself who still had active soldiers on the ground.

A shout from Shoto brought Samuel’s attention back to the fight at hand and he saw Shoto squeeze the trigger of her shotgun and blow a convict off his feet as he swung his rifle at her, presumably to get at her weapon for himself and she’d killed him for it.

Gun spiders took the last two convicts in a hail of bullets and Shoto broke into a dead run towards the lander. A metallic chittering sound filled Samuel’s ears and he saw through the feed as Shoto turned around to face three of the machines that were rushing across open ground to reach her.

Shoto bellowed a war cry and unleashed the full fury of her repeating shotgun. The hurricane of shot from her weapon shredded two of the hostiles but the last one kept coming. Shoto dropped her shotgun, drew her pistol and started firing at her remaining attacker. When another hostile appeared on her flank she quickly ran out of ammunition trying to track two separate targets, but managed to take out one. Her weapon clicked dry as the last hostile was bearing down on her. Dropping her weapon, she turned to flee, making it only a few steps before the hostile leapt on her and her feed went dark, her vitals spiking red before going black.

Samuel sat in silence for nearly five minutes as the observatory thrummed with activity. After another twenty minutes the observatory was mostly empty, most of the Reaper squad leaders having left the room to prepare themselves for the coming battle.

All of them, including Samuel, knew that Grotto had invested too heavily in the mission for such an overwhelming defeat to alter their plans. The entire purpose of the penal legion had been to reveal the enemy and give the squad leaders a chance to study the enemy without risking marine lives.

The mission clock had not been altered by Command, and that meant that in a few hours the Reaper units would make planetfall and move into the city. Most all of the convict stats were black across the board, with the few red bars moving to black by the second as five thousand men and women died in the city. Saying “this is the job” seemed to Samuel an insufficient sentiment given the situation, though the marine knew that little else applied.

The penal legion had served as intended, providing Reaper Command with highly valuable intelligence that would enable the actual invasion force to be more combat effective. Though the size of the force that awaited the Reapers was as yet unknown, the hour long engagement had visibly yielded multitudes of hostile casualties, and the marines could expect to face an enemy that was at least marginally weaker than it had been previously.

With a heavy heart, Samuel stood up, removed his headset, and left the observatory with one last glance at the mission clock. He’d known it would go badly. No salvage this big came without the cost being paid in blood.