NIGHTFALL PREVIEW IX

PICK UP YOUR WEAPON, TROOPER

PICK UP YOUR WEAPON Part II

BY PETE NEALEN

Ulgar’s pulse rifle went dry, and he dropped below the lip of the trench. He needed to reload, but first he grabbed Jerigan’s pulse rifle and slammed it into the younger man’s chest. “Get up! Or we’re all dead!”

Jerigan blinked Aubrian’s blood out of his eyes and finally tore his gaze away from the trooper corporal’s corpse as Ulgar hastily reloaded. For a brief moment, Ulgar saw the other trooper’s mind start to come around. His eyes were still wide with fear, but his jaw clenched, and as Ulgar got back up onto the parapet, leveling his pulse rifle, the frightened man joined him, blazing away with his pulse rifle, dumping the magazine in seconds. He probably didn’t hit many of the oncoming battle thralls, but he might have dropped a few.

Ulgar wondered, as he held tight to his pulse rifle, smashing rounds through unarmored aliens, even striking one of their weapons, causing the beam rifle to explode violently, blasting the reptilian’s torso apart in a flash and a spray of red mist, tearing into a dozen others clustered around it. Wondered if anything was going to stop this wave of flesh and weapons short of killing every last one of the Charul thralls.

And there were not nearly enough Phalanx troopers to do that. Especially as more fell limply into the trench to his right and left, and the outgoing beam cannon and pulse rifle fire slackened as the number of men behind weapons shrank. Even as it looked almost as if the waves of thralls were unending.

The line of thralls running forward, most shooting wildly from the hip, was getting closer, even as the Torremaddans gunned them down as fast as they could press their triggers. They collapsed as the bullets tore through them with an eerie silence, even the faint screams when a few overcame their conditioning to realize their imminent deaths nearly drowned out by the roar of continuous gunfire.

Ulgar kept firing, despite the seeming futility of it. Thralls fell, holes punched through vitals, heads pierced by bullets, and were trampled by their fellows. The advanced had slowed, choked by the rising mounds of bodies, but still it came on, and the beam fire continued, exploding the dirt in front of him when it didn’t simply ionize the atmosphere over his head.

They were close enough he could see the fear in their eyes now, at least the handful of humans still alive in the rushing wave of bodies, even as he killed them, and Remus suddenly slumped, a smoking hole through the back of his neck marking how he had died.

“Grenades!” The only reason he’d thought of it was because his pulse rifle had just run dry, and the enemy was now so close that he imagined he could smell them, if the air wasn’t so charged with ozone, smoke, dust, and blood. He wanted something to fight with that wasn’t going to take the few moments it would require to reload.

Of course, pulling the grenade took a moment, but the enemy had advanced only a few more paces before he lobbed the short cylinder of destruction toward them, followed by nearly half a dozen more.

The rippling explosions momentarily blotted out the sight of the oncoming tide of bodies, black clouds blasting out from the detonations, carrying deadly fragmentation and ripping apart limbs, heads, and even torsos close enough. Several more of the beam weapons exploded sympathetically, actinic flashes in the billowing dust and smoke, doubtless adding more destruction to that wrought by the Torremaddan grenades.

He ducked back below the lip of the trench to reload again, finding that he was far calmer and more detached than he had ever imagined he would be in this situation. He looked around to see that nearly half the squad was dead, but Jerigan, Daskand, Marrhus, and Fohrand were still fighting, Jerigan pouring fire into the drifting smoke, trying to kill more of the battle thralls while they were still staggered from the explosions.

More beam fire was still crackling into the Torremaddan ranks on either side, but here, where they had momentarily devastated the Charul thralls’ advance, they seemed to be in the eye of the storm.

“How many magazines do we have left?” he asked. He was no higher ranking than any of the other survivors of 3rd Squad, but no one else was taking charge with Trooper Corporal Aubrian’s blood still flowing out into the mud at the bottom of the trench.

“Not nearly enough!” Daskand bellowed, spraying pulse rifle fire wildly over the top of the trench, barely even bothering to aim.

Ulgar rose up and grabbed Daskand. “That’s why we have to make every shot count!” He blasted a staggering battle thrall that appeared out of the smoke. “There’s no running away, here, boys! We hold or we die!” Or we hold until we die. He brushed the thought aside with an ease he never would have imagined. “Every shot should kill one of these soulless puppets!”

He suited actions to words, shifting his aim and putting another shot through the skull of a sprinting lizard man, sending the alien tumbling into the dust.

Then Marrhus went dry and dropped below the lip of the trench to reload. “Ulgar!”

“What?” Ulgar kept shooting, killing three more in quick succession. He was low in the trench, his newfound clarity and detachment not enough to make him want to risk Trooper Corporal Aubrian’s fate.

“There’s a support beamer over there! The crew’s down, but it looks like it might still be functional!”

Ulgar spared a glance, seeing two other troopers from the weapons platoon, whose names he couldn’t remember, slumped in death with their support weapon still on its mount, though its barrel was pointed uselessly at the sky. “Do you know how to use it?”

Marrhus, though, was already moving toward it, scrambling over the bodies choking the trench. More enemy beams blew glowing fragments of rock and fused dirt over him as the fire increased again.

Ulgar shook his head as he kept up his own fire. Maybe it would work. Maybe they would all die in the next few minutes.

He knew, with a suddenness that unnerved him, that he would not surrender. Not to become one of those brainwashed, expendable pawns out there.

The wind was blowing the smoke and dust from the grenade explosions toward the trench, and his eyes smarted even through his goggles as more of the battle thralls came charging through the murk to die closer and closer to the trench. He saw another come out of the swirling smoke, closer than he’d expected, and he swung his pulse rifle toward the lizard-man, breaking his own order and shooting it five times before it fell on its face, its beam weapon flying from its clawed hands to smack into the ground only a few yards from his position.

They were about to be overrun.

“Fix bayonets!” He shot more of the thralls until his magazine was empty, then dropped back into the trench, yanking his broad-bladed bayonet out of its sheath to fix it to the pulse rifle just beneath the muzzle. I thought these were remnants of some ancient tradition out of time, once.

Then Marrhus opened fire with the support beamer, slashing a line of sun-bright destruction across the oncoming line of battle thralls, exploding those it touched and sending white-hot fragments of bone flying from the detonations with the force of shrapnel from the earlier grenades. Dozens died in the first second of his fire, even as the remainder of the squad huddled in their little dogleg of the trenches, bayonets clicking into position, waiting for the inevitable.

Marrhus ceased fire, as the beamer’s power supply cycled, and the rest surged up into their firing positions. The leading thralls had not yet plunged into the trench, so there was still some hope that they might kill some more of these abominations before they were overrun.

Except their eyes were met with a cloud of smoke. A few beams lashed through the dimness, but they were unaimed. A few silhouettes moved in the obscurant, and Jerigan and Daskand fired at them. Ulgar held his fire, hoping for a better target to more worthily spend his remaining ammunition, but he didn’t chastise his squadmates. Let them try to kill as many of the enemy as they could.

It may only be grasping at some phantom of hope, but in the end, perhaps all they could do was to kill as many of the Charul’s thralls as they could, deny the aliens their victory for as long as possible.

Daskand stopped shooting. The rolling thunder of the battle had not abated, but they were once again in seemingly an island of calm.

Ulgar didn’t trust it. “Stay on that beamer, Marrhus! The rest of you, start gathering what ammunition you can from the dead. This isn’t over yet!”

As if to punctuate his words, an explosion shook the ground, dirt and rocks fountaining in a black volcano of debris from somewhere down the trench to their right. Smoke billowed and beam weapons crackled, answered by far too few pulse rifles.

Then troopers, their eyes wide, some unarmed, others still clutching their weapons, staggered out of the dust and smoke around the next turn in the trench system. “They’re into the trench! They’re coming!”

To be continued…