Androids and Aliens (Star Runner Series Book 3), page 15
As we three humans—Jort, Droad and I—advanced toward the entrance, we became increasingly concerned.
“How come no aliens are coming out to shoot at us?” Jort demanded. “Where’d they go?”
“Jort’s right,” Droad, said. “It does seem unusual. Something’s wrong here.”
Thinking it over, I decided I agreed with them. Rather than marching my column of troops into the open mouth of the great mine, I called upon Colonel Stumps.
He came hopping up to me with surprising alacrity, even though he was going uphill. I looked him over. “Stumps, who would you say is the most expendable individual here?”
Stumps did not think it over for more than half a second. “That would be me, sir,” he said. “I’m the most expendable because I’m damaged.”
I nodded. I’d known it was the correct answer before I’d asked. I’d wanted to see if he would admit it, or if he would attempt to preserve himself the way a human might.
“All right,” I said. “I want you to lead an expeditionary force into that mine. You will take one hundred troops. You will not be the first one in there, but you won’t be the last either. Your mission is to proceed into the nest, make contact with the enemy, and then return with a report of what you find.”
Colonel Stumps stared at me for a while. “Am I going in now, sir?” That was his only question. I wouldn’t say that he was eager to go in there and die, but I would definitely say that he was not at all concerned about the prospect of his own destruction. I found that interesting by itself, and I nodded.
“Go, Stumps. Go, and good luck to you.”
He hopped away, furiously pumping his single leg and waving his single arm. He soon gathered exactly one hundred guardian-level androids. Together, the group marched up the rest of the slope and disappeared into the yawning mouth of the mine. While this was going on, Major Cringe came up to stand near me.
“Sir?” she said.
“What is it, Cringe?”
“Sir, if Colonel Stumps does not return, who will take his place?”
I looked at her, interested in her thought processes.
“Do you want it to be you?” I asked her. Cringe looked down for a moment as if considering this question very carefully.
“I would not say that this is a desire of mine, but I am curious about your judgment in the situation.”
“Thank you, Major,” I said. “If Stumps doesn’t make it out of there alive, you will become Colonel Cringe.”
“Very good, sir,” she said. “May I ask one more question?”
“Of course.”
“Why me?”
I smiled. “Because you had the presence of mind to ask the question. These other five officers didn’t say a word.”
She glanced around at them and then looked back at me, and she nodded.
“Very well, sir,” she said, and she walked away. She began inspecting the remaining troops who were straggling up the mountainside. They gathered around and formed ranks in case we needed to go in with more force than just one hundred men—which I suspected we would.
Before I could even get worried about whether Stumps would come back out, or what might be happening down there, we were attacked.
It made perfect sense to me, in retrospect, that the enemy were not quietly dozing inside that copper mine. Nor were they completely taken by surprise and befuddled by our presence so near their important nest. Instead, they were planning a counterattack all along, and they’d spent the time we’d given them since landing to get their forces in position to jump us.
That’s how these aliens thought, I realized—they very rarely defended anything. They attacked, they attacked, and then they attacked some more. That’s how they defended in the end. If their attacks killed everyone in our military, there would be no need for a defensive strategy.
“Dark things!” Jort shouted. He was pointing high into the sky. “Dark little things—flying toward us, sir!”
Turning around, I lifted my rifle all in one motion. I stared off to the south where Jort was pointing to a wooded area in the mountains that was somewhat higher than the nest entrance itself.
The enemy’s flying form was called a “culus” and there were few things more terrible than seeing thousands of them coming your way.
A cloud of flapping alien creatures rose up over the mountaintop and swooped down upon us. It was like a vast flock of gigantic, ugly birds, but these birds were the size of farm dogs. Birds without feathers that had leathery, gargoyle-like wings instead. They came on as might an invasion of demons.
“Major Cringe, have your men pick targets. Fire into the mass of beasts when it comes within range.”
She relayed the orders, and my three thousand-odd troops shouldered their rifles as one. Not one of them fired prematurely, another benefit of android troops over humans. The enemy was not yet in effective range for their rifles, so no one panicked and wasted ammo.
This was not true for me, however. Having the only Sardez out here besides Jort and Droad, I adjusted my sights and loaded a special round that was developed to cast tiny flechettes in a wide spray in the enemy’s path. I ordered Jort and Droad both to do the same.
Cursing and rattling ammo out of their pouches, they thumbed the rounds into their respective breeches. They stood to either side of me, and we all lifted our Sardez rifles at once. Three shots cracked the still, mountain air almost as one.
Holes were punched in the approaching flock—not huge holes, mind you, but holes nonetheless. These quickly closed-up as the enemy brought their ranks back together again. We fired again, all three of us releasing a second volley, and it was only then that the aliens reacted in a coordinated fashion. Their tight cloud became more a flat disk. Still, we continued to fire, dropping hundreds of them.
As they drew closer, the androids joined in, but now that they were not so densely concentrated, our shots did not do anywhere near as much damage. The android guns used normal munitions that didn’t spread out and punch large holes in the enemy air formation. All they were able to do was get lucky now and then and knock one out of the sky.
I began to feel good about this attack, as we were definitely winning the fight. The enemy was losing thousands of flapping little monsters per minute, and by the time the survivors got to us, we should be able to make quick work of them.
That was when a cold finger of dread ran down my spine. I stopped firing and wheeled around, eyes sweeping the landscape. Droad saw this and turned with me.
“You guys are missing all the fun,” Jort shouted over his shoulder, firing again and again at the attacking culus swarm.
Droad’s eyes met mine. “Do you see them?” he said.
“No,” I said, “but they must be downslope somewhere.”
He nodded, and he pointed down low toward the base of the mountain that was serving these aliens as their nest. There, I spotted stealthy movement.
It was as if the rocks themselves were in motion. Shadows under the trees shifted as if there were a wind moving the branches around—but there was no wind, or at least not enough to explain that massive, rolling, humping knot of shadows.
“Killbeasts…” I said. “Major Cringe!”
She came rushing to me in an instant. Her eyes were fixed on my face.
“It’s time to change targets, Major. Take two thirds of your men, wheel them around, and attack downhill into those trees immediately.”
Again, unlike a human commander, she did not question my orders. She did not say, “But sir, we’re not yet done shooting down all the culus swarms.” She simply charged away, dividing her forces into three and having her sub-officers work to obey her. Very quickly two thousand troops, two thirds of my force, turned, reloaded, and advanced to different firing positions. Aiming downslope instead of up, they made ready to shoot into the shadows under the trees.
Realizing they’d been spotted, the boiling mass of killbeasts broke free from cover and charged us. There were thousands of them. How many thousands I wasn’t sure, but it had to be close to ten.
My heart sank as I realized that while I had believed that going into the nest was almost certainly a death sentence, I had also falsely believed that waiting out here on the slopes outside the nest while sending scouts inside was a safe move. This was quite clearly not the case.
“Sir, sir, sir!” Jort shouted. He was thumping me on the shoulder with his massive hand. “Sir, those bird things—they’re almost here.”
“Jort, you stay focused on them. Put your back to ours. Kill every alien that flaps closer. Put them all down with your android troops in front of you.
His eyes were wide, almost bulging. “What are you going to do, Captain?”
I pointed downslope at the charging mass of killbeasts. “I’m going to kill all of those things.”
Jort’s jaw sagged. He looked horrified. “We’re trapped,” he said. “We’re stuck on this mountain. We’re all gonna die right here.”
I nodded. “Yes, that’s quite possibly true, but if you don’t start firing your weapon and killing every one of those bird-things you can, then it most certainly will be true. Pull it together. Keep fighting.”
Jort swallowed hard, turned around, and he did as I’d ordered. Oh sure, he cursed, he complained, and he raged at the advancing enemy—but he kept on firing.
When the culus flock landed among my troops on the upper slope, they revealed that each concealed a shrade. Every culus had a snake-like shrade tucked under its belly, and together, the alien teams fought to rip my men apart. They only stopped when they were destroyed.
Turning back to the downslope situation, I saw that the battle was playing out quite a bit differently. This enemy force was coming toward us, but they had not yet reached close-range.
I was alarmed to see they were carrying rifles just as we were. Were they Conclave rifles? I suspected that they were. They cracked, snapped, and whined exactly like the weapons my androids were using. Had they been taken from fallen androids? Or had they been taken from the dead colonists?
I didn’t know, and honestly, it didn’t matter. What I did know was that we had to kill thousands of them before they killed all of us, or this battle was going to be my last.
So, we fought. We fought hard. The battle seemed to go on for an hour, but in reality, it was no more than fifteen to twenty minutes.
The short version of the story was that they overwhelmed us. They came in ravening hordes and destroyed countless androids all around us.
Eventually, it came down to me, Droad and Jort. We all stood back-to-back, firing our Sardez rifles. We killed more than our weight in aliens every minute.
Things seemed beyond hopeless, but we did not despair. We were angry, desperate, and mean. We had vastly superior weaponry. We were in a good defensive position, having placed ourselves in a cluster of boulders, and we were quite determined to literally fight to the death—as we had no other choice.
All around us, thousands of androids were systematically destroyed. Parts of them still crawled and writhed, wriggling and moving erratically. Their dying servomotors whined and sparked. The weirdly-colored yellow-orange oils they seemed to use for blood dribbled and oozed everywhere.
For some odd reason, the aliens did not charge in to end the fight. Instead, they circled around us without going for the final kill. They could have sent in the snake-like shrades—slithering through the boulders. They could have flown in a couple of fresh, flapping culus monsters to dive down from the skies and rip our faces off. Or simpler still, a hundred or so killbeasts could have charged our little circle of boulders and killed us before we could have killed more than half a dozen of them.
But they didn’t do it. Instead, they moved to where we could not get our sights lined up with them, and they went quiet. We still knew they were out there of course, moving around, shuffling, muttering to each other in their weird languages of clicks, squeaks and chirps—but they did not attack.
Hours passed. The aliens kept their distance, rarely giving us a chance to shoot at them. We spent our time huddling among our cluster of boulders, lamenting our fate. Eventually, the day began to fade into night.
“They’re waiting for darkness,” Droad said.
“Do they really need the cover of night?” Jort demanded. His eyes had never been so wide, so alarmed, so full of the knowledge of his impending death. “I’m almost out of ammo. Why don’t they end this?”
“I don’t know, Jort,” I said wearily. “Maybe they’re getting out the steak sauce.”
“That’s it!” Droad said suddenly.
We turned to him, and his eyes gleamed wetly in the dying light of the day. They seemed to be lit by an internal madness.
“That’s definitely it,” he continued, staring into the gathering dusk without seeing it or us. “I doubt they’ve had many humans to eat here at this isolated nest.”
“What?” I said. “Are you serious?”
“Absolutely. You see, these aliens have a hierarchy of their own, and unlike the androids, they have emotions and preferences and… tastes.”
“Tastes?” Jort demanded. “That’s a bad word. That’s a terrible word. Why would you use that word, Mr. Governor? What’s wrong with you?”
Droad smiled grimly. “What’s wrong with me? I said I’ve experienced these aliens before—on several occasions. I’ve been inside their nests. I’ve watched them feast. Their most advanced forms are true horrors.”
Jort and I exchanged glances. We weren’t happy to listen to Droad, but we couldn’t help ourselves.
“The queens are gigantic monstrosities,” he continued. “They sit upon thrones of spit and slime hardened into a structure that looks like running wax. They like to taste many different meats, rare and unusual meats—and I mean living flesh, mind you. They prefer to keep their food alive to truly enjoy it. Because of this, I think they mean to capture us, to take us into their nest and consume us.”
I looked around, horrified. I could not deny the logic of his words. It made too much sense. Why had they destroyed and dismembered every plastic man on the side of this mountain but left the three of us alone, despite the fact we had more dangerous weapons? Why had they encircled us but not advanced to make the final kill?
“They must want to capture us alive… What are we going to do?” I asked Droad. “What should we do? Should we kill ourselves?”
Droad nodded thoughtfully. “That is a very rational option.”
“No, it isn’t!” Jort said. “It’s not rational at all. It’s insane. Jort isn’t killing himself. I’m killing these aliens. I’m gonna make them tear us apart.”
“We shall see,” Droad said.
Listening closely in case they were sneaking near, we hunkered low with the barrels of our rifles stuck out at three random angles. We sighted on everything that moved, shuffled, or flapped around on the mountain outside our shelter. Now and then we cracked off a shot. Occasionally, we got lucky and nailed something, but usually we missed.
The enemy was still out there, and they had us surrounded, but they weren’t coming close. They weren’t giving us easy shots, either.
Over time, the sun dropped behind the mountain range and disappeared. Darkness fell, and the glorious stars of the Conclave wheeled up into the sky overhead.
Still, we lay in our rocks, hiding—hoping against hope that the monsters would go away, even though we knew in our hearts that they would not.
Naturally, we frequently attempted to contact B-6. We requested rescues from the ships that waited in the skies, but none of our long-range communications equipment was functioning after the battle. None of the androids who knew how to use the equipment had survived anyway, and so we crouched, and we waited, and we listened, and we prayed that we would somehow make it to see the dawn.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Long before the sun rose again over Ailoth, the stalemate changed. We three humans in our tiny cluster of boulders, surrounded by countless alien predators that slunk and slithered and crawled around us did nothing unexpected—but those who hunted us did.
“Captain Gorman?” Jort whispered. “Captain Gorman, look. Look!” He pointed desperately into the dark. I squinted and peered. My eyes were blurry, sore, and tired, but I saw something—something dark, something that humped and slid over the ground.
I fired at it as did Jort. A moment later, Droad joined in. The shrade was hit more than once. Big chunks of it were blown apart, but it seemed to be doing something odd. It wasn’t really attacking, but instead almost seemed to be suckling upon a rounded rock near the center of our position.
At last, it slumped down in death, curling up like a leech that had been plucked from a human body. It left behind a chunk of itself—a scrap of meat, a dark blob like a slug that had adhered to the boulder where it had died.
“We should destroy that,” Jort said. “We should shoot at it until there’s nothing left but a smear.”
“No,” Droad said. “Leave it alone. I think I know what it is. Let’s just wait.”
So, we slumped back into our makeshift fortress. We waited several long minutes.
Then, a strange, wheezing voice began to speak. At first the words were whistling and incomprehensible, but after a minute or so, we were able to understand them.
“Meat…” it said. “Meat, listen to me...”
Disgusted and worried, Jort and I exchanged glances. I looked at Governor Droad, and I noticed he didn’t look surprised. He had those crazy, wet, staring eyes again.
“Is this what you were expecting?” I asked him.
He nodded grimly. “Yes, I’ve seen them form mouths before in order to communicate with us. They have an organic form of technology for the most part. They grow the things they need rather than building them out of inanimate metal, plastic and steel.
“Okay,” I said, nodding. “What shall we say to it?”
“I’ll speak for us,” Droad said. He turned toward the blubbering thing on the rock, and he called out to it. “Who is it?”
“I am the parent of this colony,” the weird, floppy mouth said. “I command all the armies in this region. I am sovereign on this mountain. The slope is an extension of my body, and the nest beneath the ground is my womb.”
