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  “Fuck. Yes.”

  Dustin looked to his left and right as the marines who weren’t already at the defensive line piled into their cobbled-together fortifications. With shaking hands they slapped full magazines into their caseless, ammo-fed carbines and pulled on the charging handles, chambering rounds.

  Look at their eyes. Half are the better part of the way asleep from too many shifts out here and the other half are wired straight out, doped up on stims and scared shitless. Flip a coin. Maybe not for the scared shitless piece.

  Hauptman crashed down into their firing position. He latched his helmet on and went over both Dustin and Waren’s armor head to toe, ensuring their seals were secured properly and that there was no gap for any fluids to enter.

  “Dude, what the fuck?” Waren said, slapping at Hauptman’s hand as it checked his waist.

  “Balashov thinks these things are biohazards. Sealed suits are happy suits.”

  Hauptman lay down in their trench. He stopped talking as Punisher One’s massive main cannon fired again, blasting apart a chunk of the distant, mixed swarm.

  “Happy suits. Where’s B-team?” Dustin said as he watched more carnage unfold. The cannon fired again, obliterating a handful more rock bugs. As they exploded, more came from the forest. Their numbers seemed endless.

  “They just came off rotation. Theo’s getting them ready but they’re dragging ass. The Armadillos are on their way from the back side of Stahl as well,” the lieutenant said as he looked around at the building chaos. Each and every military human was there or heading there and several of the science team members were standing nearby, readying food and water for what could be a lengthy stand.

  “Hey, uh, A-team?”

  The three marines looked over their shoulders to see Phillip Eckstein–weatherman extraordinaire–crouched at the edge of their shooting position and looking a bit more than nervous.

  “Yeah?” Hauptman replied.

  “I can’t find an infantry sergeant who can help me, so I’m here,” Phillip said.

  “What can I help you with?”

  “I’d like to help. Is there a spare rifle and body armor anywhere?”

  Dustin looked at his lieutenant, then at the ex-active duty marine who wanted to help.

  “A marine is always a marine. I say give him a gun.”

  “Mr. Eckstein you’re a bit of a hero to these kids,” Hauptman started. “I think if they saw you taking up arms we’d see a small boost in morale. That alone seems important. You’re familiar with the operation of the M-three-one?”

  Phillip puffed up, proud. “Qualified expert, once upon a time.”

  “Good. Punisher One, this is Vigilant One,” Lionel said.

  “Punisher One actual, go.”

  “You got a spare M31 and some magazines in that wide body for Weatherman to borrow?” the lieutenant asked. “His inner killer is forecasting trigger time.”

  “Send ’em over. I heard he was calling for heavy rain.”

  Hauptman looked back to a grinning Phillip. “Tank crew has a spare weapon. You take your orders from the commander. I appreciate you doing this. Aim for the big guy’s eyes.”

  Phillip stood up from his crouch. “Thank you, sir. Never thought I would pick up a rifle again, let alone shoot one.”

  “Selva is a strange and wonderful place, Weatherman,” Waren said. “Brings all kinds of change and opportunity to people.”

  “Got that right. Good luck,” Phillip said walked away.

  “Five bucks says he puts a round in the back of someone’s head by accident,” Waren said.

  “Waren go fuck yourself. Maybe it’ll be your head and we won’t have to listen to your shit anymore. Always negative about life,” Dustin said as he returned to his position behind his rifle’s scope.

  “Maybe I’ve got a lot to be negative about.”

  The tank’s cannon fired once more, and again more creatures of Selva were eradicated in an explosive brush stroke.

  Deeper inside the thick jungle the subterranean spitters stalked, shoving and pushing their lessers about like the generals of the first Selvan army. Here and there one would grab a mutated subject and spit directly into his maw, sending the blue metamorphic saliva straight into the digestive system where it could bring about greater change, faster.

  The smallest creatures–thousands and thousands of them–leapt from bush to boulder, stump to tree branch, as they sought out more of the precious taste of what made them stronger, and bigger.

  Larger creatures than the humans had seen came from the deeper south of the peninsula, pushing aside small trees and sending all other life scrambling. Double the size of elephants and with twice as many limbs, the grasshopper-like creatures lumbered with a silent, multi-eyed malice. Like the smallest of Selva’s creatures they abided by the wishes of the four-legged, four-armed brown and black carapace-armored creatures with the strange and vile spit. Subjected and enslaved all bowed to their masters.

  Then stillness came.

  Each creature stopped and read the motions of the largest of the slavers, comprehending on a primitive level what the next few minutes would be. The message came in razor-sharp mandible clicks, hisses, snaps of thick limbs and the stomping of blunt, powerful feet.

  Message delivered, the forest came alive, and the charge was set loose.

  Hell had come to Selva. Or perhaps Selva was Hell all along.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Defensive positions outside Stahl, planet of Selva

  1 October 163 GA

  Nearly three meters tall and over a hundred wide, a wall of life burst onto the battlefield from the darkness inside the southern forest. Running at a pace that made the eye struggle to focus, they crossed the field in a line too straight to be random. At the edges the smallest of insects broke away on their own army of spindly legs, spreading their straight line into a deep crescent that threatened to surround and envelop the meager defenses of the human settlement.

  They were met with a chorus of guns that shook the clouds and made the stones tremble.

  The Bingham tank’s rail gun screamed loudest, and reaped the most life, firing its booming shells four a minute as the crew skinned their knuckles on sharp metal, banged their heads on low armored ceilings and tried their best to ignore the pain of going deaf. They would heal later if they survived.

  The boxy Armadillo troop carriers with their sloped hulls wheeled in. Each had one crewman out of the top hatch with their hands on the pintle-mounted machine gun, triggers depressed, letting loose a stream of bullets that sawed down what little grass remained, and many of the monsters that stalked toward them. The smaller tanks braked, shoring up the flank of the human defenses with infantry to their interior sides, the men and women shooting their rifles as fast as they could.

  The manmade carbines barked out with an unending scream of loud cracks. The cacophony of the battle vibrated and roared until the only sound was ringing in the ears of the men and women who prayed and shot and prayed again.

  Underneath all of it were the nearly silent, gentle coughs of the First Expeditionary Marines and their shoulder-fired rail guns.

  As the younger, less-trained marines fired in indiscriminate bursts into the field, Dustin used his powerful optics and equally-matched rifle to line up a shot at the eye of a staggered behemoth. He exhaled, depressed the trigger, and watched the beast’s face pop open. Runners of ichor and flesh fell to the ground as the two forelegs flailed and the creature fell on its face, concealing its strange red underbelly and leaving a corpse behind that looked like the stones atop the earth around it.

  One shot, one kill. One shot, one kill, strike hard, strike fear, Dustin thought over and over as he watched his teammates’ digital firing reticles move from large bug to large bug. He watched in his peripheral vision as their symbols flashed, noting a shot. There were many flashes, and the bodies of their foes were piling up like hardwood logs in a Pacifican lumberyard. He prayed the bodies would build a protective
wall.

  Behind it all at the forest’s southern edge, a tree snapped in half at head height. Rather than falling, the trunk spun in the air until horizontal to the ground. Something held it aloft. Dustin zoomed in, risking a break from his constant, steady fire to discern what was happening.

  The shit is going on . . . ?

  The tree advanced forward, hovering above the field of battle, held up from behind by an arm the length and width of a construction crane. The body it connected to at the shoulder spread as wide as an Armadillo tank and had the same hard shell and gray-green sheen. Its head was as wide as a Spartan’s shield. It trudged forward on legs as tall as small pine trees. The ten meter long tree bobbed in the monster’s giant grip as it strode behind a pack of a fourth form of creature.

  Taller than Dustin by a head, and long, with a thick tail like a lobster’s, the eight-legged creatures stalked forward, gesticulating with small arms low on their torsos at the army of creatures on all sides. One of the new creatures instructed the tree-holder with a longer, powerful arm just above its smaller limbs. The bigger pair of arms on the new monsters ended in a hooked claw long enough to eviscerate a man. It had the hook embedded in a gap in the tree carrying creature’s exoskeleton and it steadily spat small globules of bright blue, sticky fluid into the wound it kept open. Each mouthful of spit sent the behemoth forward another tilted step and made it shudder with a demented kind of pleasure.

  “Spitters! Look at ‘em run the fucking show!”

  Dustin spoke on the wide network as he tagged the creature that led the biggest monster emerging from the forest.

  Hauptman wasted no time.

  “Punisher One link to Vigilant Two’s marker and fire immediately.”

  “Roger that, Vigilan–holy mother of God.”

  The expeditionary Marines fired at the rock bugs. Dustin took a shot at the spitting creature and lanced the arm holding onto the biggest creature off. The limb hung from the wound in the tree-carrying creature like a fish hook and the leading monster backed away, angry at the world around it.

  The beast reared the tree-holding arm back and, like a trebuchet, snapped the arm forward with more force than Dustin could’ve imagined. The human side of the battlefield stopped at once as the tree soared up into the air a hundred meters. The tree turned slowly the long way at the zenith of its flight as the leaf-adorned branches at one end acted as an air brake, turning it until it became a giant’s javelin.

  A javelin that reached terminal velocity and fell to the ground like a bolt of lightning.

  Punisher One’s main gun belched out a round, destroying the massive insect that threw the organic missile. Gore flew in all directions as the beast and two of its eight-legged handlers were wiped off the face of Selva. The gun and its shot did nothing to stop the fall of the tree.

  The marines to the left of the Bingham tank screamed and ran, their gunfire and fight abandoned. Some escaped.

  The tree slammed into the ground trunk first, but not before it smashed a young man into a dozen bloody pieces. Its momentum unhindered, the tree toppled forward lengthwise, crashing down on a handful more of the scrambling warriors. Their bodies cracked apart–bone and flesh alike. The screams of pain came immediately. Others didn’t scream; they died from their injuries. Still more were hurt and trapped and would die from blood loss or the approaching wave of monsters, without assistance.

  “You two return fire, you three help get those men out,” Dustin heard LT. Pastilli bellow from nearby. He imagined the squat officer directing his panicked, injured men to render aid and return fire. If the lieutenant didn’t organize his men fast, the line would break at the flank and the defenses of Stahl would disintegrate.

  In the shallower depression to Dustin’s left, almost beside the Bingham’s tank treads, Theo Wendell stood up. Dustin noticed the man’s helmet wasn’t on top of his head but he dismissed the oversight. Theo had joined them quickly, and he and his men had put accurate rounds downrange. The giant left his two Marines in their firing position and slid around the back of the tank to join the infantry on the other side.

  “On me!” he screamed as loud as a titan. His presence would bolster them. The line might hold.

  Suddenly, Dustin’s world went dark.

  He felt a new vibration rattle his jaw and shake his chest. His visor burst off a string of data from his gun’s density estimator, telling him the world had not lost the sun after being swallowed by a black hole, but he had in fact been blinded by an avalanche of earth. Something massive had hit near their position, and kicked up a mountain of dirt. Some of the dirt fell off his visor, and he saw some light.

  “What’s going on?” He asked as small pebbles falling from the sky clinked off his faceplate. He used his off hand to make a visor on his forehead to return his vision.

  “Another one of those big things hucked a fucking tree at us. Two of them. Check that, three,” Ping-Pong said. “One of them just threw a rock the size of my mom’s sofa at an Armadillo. I just healed. If they break my leg again, I’ll pull it off and shove it up their bug asses.”

  “Punisher One, focus all fire on the catapults,” Hauptman said. “Take ’em down fast!”

  The tank commander didn’t reply, but the giant gun belched out a round that split one of the massive artillery creatures in half. Nearby, three of the leading species of insects stormed forward, picking up speed as they grew angrier over the loss of their heavy artillery. The tank turret turned, and prepared to fire again.

  A shadow dashed over them as a descending boulder blotted out the sun. Somehow the men had missed one of the colossal grasshopper creatures ratcheting up the rock and flinging it at them. It would fall where it cast a shadow. Dustin covered his head and thought of his unborn baby, and the love of his life.

  A metallic groan ground its way into his ear. A chest-shaking thud came an instant after. Dustin felt more dirt and debris spray up and onto his body.

  He looked to his left and right, finding Waren and Hauptman- alive. He popped his head up and looked to find where the stone had fallen. In the depression to his left, he saw Ping-Pong and Remy. Ping-Pong shook his helmeted head free of dirt.

  “Oh no,” he said out loud. The main cannon on Punisher One had taken the boulder’s mass straight to the tip of its barrel. The cannon had been almost crimped shut. If it fired with the gun barrel blocked. . .

  Dustin wasn’t able to yell in time.

  Dustin felt the gun’s magnets pulse a fraction of a second before the shell fired, and he went face down in the sandbags and dirt before it finished the cycle. He’d no more than felt the ground meet his faceplate when the gun triggered, and the shell exploded at the tip of the barrel, sending back-blast into the firing chamber, ruining the gun. Hunks of steel rocketed out in every direction, tearing up grass, earth, and more than one marine. The tank’s interior survived, though the tired crew still paid a price. Smoke trickled out of the open top hatch and a moment later the men inside scrambled out, gasping and choking. Snot ran from their noses and their eyes were reddened and overrun by tears. They fell to the tank’s top and the ground trying to find air.

  “Vigilant One to Epsilon Actual, Punisher just lost its main cannon,” Hauptman said as he got to his knees. He fired repeatedly from the shoulder into the field of battle as the swarm of creatures grew closer, and neared an overwhelming point. “Crew has exited. It’s a lost asset.”

  “This is Epsilon Actual. Thank you Vigilant One. Give ’em everything you got.” The voice of Major Duncan sounded hurried and worried. Dustin tried to forget that.

  As marines went to aid the tank’s crew, Dustin returned his attention to the fallen boulder that gave him cover from the right side of the battle. He watched as more giant bugs at the rear of the enemy’s mass picked up rocks, boulders, and trees and flung them with impunity into the human forces at the commands of the strange creatures at their feet.

  Their masters, their enslavers. The spitters.

  Massive p
ieces of debris rained down faster and faster as the catapulting monsters grew closer and more courageous. Without the tank’s heavy gun to equalize the situation they realized they had little to fear.

  The top-mounted machine guns of the Armadillos raked fire back and forth across the sprinting lines of the smaller creatures, keeping their advance at bay for the moment. The flood of teeth and claws reached twenty meters from the line of human warriors and closed despite hundreds of their kind exploding apart. The massive beasts and the spitting, eight-legged leaders had to die for the humans to survive the battle. Dustin fired twice at the oddly triangular head of the closest spitting creature. It staggered and stumbled, but regained its footing in a pool of its own blood and continued on, picking up speed.

  “It’s like a praying mantis got knocked up by a fucking lobster and a mosquito. This is what happens when the Devil is allowed to fuck around with genetics.” He said and fired again, and this time when the bug stumbled, it stayed down.

  “Incoming!” Waren screamed and then covered up in their firing position.

  Lionel dove into the space beside Dustin as he, too, covered up. This time the impact felt immediate, shaking Dustin off the ground while burying his body in several centimeters of earth and knocking him on his side. Dustin’s legs, chest and arms hurt from the shock wave and before he even opened his eyes he felt stiff, unable to move.

  He felt a flare of pain in his left shoulder and opened his eyes. His view plate streamed red emergency text faster than he could read it. Beyond the words projected on the glass Dustin saw the nightmare of the information real, in the flesh.

  Lionel had been hit in the hips and legs by a massive quartz-flecked stone as big around as he was tall. Dustin locked eyes with the lieutenant–his lieutenant–and saw the man’s eyes wobble as his skin grew pale. His faceplate had been cracked, leaving a jagged line in the ballistic glass drawn across his face. He looked like a reflection in a broken mirror. Lionel’s mouth opened and closed reflexively as his brain tried to catch up to the horror of what happened to the lower half of his body.