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  “L.T. don’t move,” Dustin said as he listened to his own advice. Dirt fell off the side of his head and obscured some of his view. He felt like he was being buried alive. Each breath brought another handful of dirt down atop him. “Don’t move. It’ll be okay. Just got something heavy on you is all. We’ll get up in a minute, and get you right. Just stay still.”

  The ground rumbled. Pulsed. More dirt fell onto Dustin’s faceplate, almost finishing his burial. Fuck I’m getting claustrophobic. Don’t move. Don’t move. They’ll be here in a second. They’re right . . .

  The blue Selvan sky along with the bright yellow sun went dark as an ocean of tiny horrors washed over them. Legs like daggers clicked and clacked on Dustin’s armor and hard faceplate as the small, mutated beetles poured over his buried body. They ignored him; his suit was false, inorganic. He and it were inedible, unchangeable, and no more useful to them than the sand on the beach a short walk away.

  Lionel’s broken armor and faceplate however . . .

  Five of the bugs clustered around his head. They scraped and clawed with barbed arms and pincers at the opening in Lionel’s helmet. Their claws came back red and bloody over and over as they ripped at his leader’s face. A punctured, bloody human eye came loose and fell in the dirt. Only the glass visor kept the dismembered eyeball from touching his flesh.

  Waren’s voice came. “We’re covered in these things. Why aren’t they trying to eat us? Or spit at us? What’s going on over-”

  “Shut up,” Dustin whispered to Waren. “Shut. Up.”

  Waren did.

  Lionel tried to defend himself from the alien assault but he had nothing left. His pelvis lay in ruins under the boulder and he lost liters of blood as the seconds ticked by. He’d lost as least one eye and his uncoordinated–silent–flailing did nothing to stop the voracious little bastards that pecked away at his cheeks, eyes and forehead. Dustin felt emotion boiling as he watched his friend die.

  Then they stopped.

  Dustin felt the ground shake.

  Thud.

  Thud.

  Stronger now, closer.

  Thud.

  The sky grew dark again as the gunfire on all sides began to diminish. As those sounds became intermittent, the screams of the marines came more often.

  The massive form of a catapult-bug’s body blocked out the sky above. From below, its belly looked like a smooth caterpillar’s, segmented and soft, the color of an empty shell on the beach. The very innermost edges of each segment were pink and irritated, as if it were straining against the shell that held it together. One of the thing’s giant legs came down just a meter away from his face and he felt his teeth rattle.

  God please don’t let it step on me. Step on Lionel. End his suffering.

  Thud.

  Thud.

  Thud.

  The monster passed over, and entered Stahl proper.

  The sky returned to blue, backed by the golden orb of the sun and the smaller insects scattered. They left a horrid mess of Lionel’s face for Dustin to see. His proud lieutenant had been shredded. Not eaten and consumed as a meal, but tasted–sampled and discarded–by the little pests. His eyes were gone; empty sockets of gore remained below his bright blood-covered eyebrows. Lionel’s mouth moved reflexively, spelling out silent pleas Dustin couldn’t decipher.

  Another shadow loomed.

  In the corner of his eye Dustin saw a spitting thing appear between him and Lionel. It leaned its long and overly segmented torso and its delta-shaped head over Lionel’s bleeding face in an almost delicate, caring manner. It had a way unlike the other smaller bugs. The thing was in control, making decisions based on the moment, not reacting on primitive impulses. A short arm reached out, unfolding until a smallish dewclaw caressed the raw flesh on the lieutenant’s face. Lionel jerked away as much as he could but another claw came down–this one violent and uncaring–and grabbed the back of Lionel’s helmet to hold his head still.

  Don’t do it. Don’t do what I think you’re going to do.

  The creature leaned closer and a proboscis came out of its face just below its too many eyes. The probe unfurled sensually, slowly, like the extended fingers of a lover entering an embrace.

  A blast of blue fluid sprayed, spattering Lionel’s exposed flesh, armor, and Dustin’s faceplate alike. The creature looked over, locking face to face with Dustin through his glass. It assessed the thing that Dustin was, then it stood tall on its mass of armor-plated legs and left, its job done.

  Lionel screamed with a cracked, childlike voice. Dustin looked back to his leader as more and more beasts streamed over, leaping atop the tanks and punching at the marines with arms that moved too fast to see, and too powerful for their armor. Men fell and where they didn’t die, they ran to be knocked down and smashed apart.

  Dustin kept still, listening to sound of his own voice, listening to the sound of Waren’s voice as the blue fluid ate its way inside Lionel’s face and skull like some form of demented organic acid. He watched as Lionel’s living flesh melted like tallow, and bone reshaped like clay in the hands of an invisible sculptor. He watched as his lieutenant’s jaws split apart at the center into mandibles, and cried as the muscles that once chewed food and helped make jokes and give orders reshaped into the alien mouth that formed right before his eyes.

  Worst of all, Dustin watched as new eyes–lidless, black as the depths of midnight and just as soulless–grew in the empty sockets of his friend’s skull.

  Dustin watched as those eyes regarded him with that same inquisitive malice he’d just seen from the monster that did this to his friend.

  Dustin’s lungs burned inside his chest. He dared not risk a breath with the . . . thing that Lionel had become looking at him from just an arm’s length away.

  Is he still in there? Does he know I’m inside this armor? That I can be killed? Eaten . . . Or turned into one of those fucking things?

  The sergeant felt the slight tremor of movement caused by Waren’s fidgeting, prone body at his back. The taller marine shifted his body to get a better look at what caused Dustin’s fear.

  “Stop. Moving.”

  His voice underneath the sounds of the raging battle managed to still Waren but inflame Lionel. The split-faced lieutenant, with a legion of new teeth that didn’t fit in his mouth and a lashing tongue that looked hollow and prehensile, let slip a broken screech that pried a tear of pity from Dustin. His transforming–transformed–friend flung his still relatively human arms about, lifting them up to his head and pounding them against the sides of his broken helmet.

  “Top’s dead isn’t he?” Waren asked in a low whisper.

  Lionel once again flew into a new phase of frenzy, smashing his gloved fists into his own head at the ears. Lionel tried to stand, to move or get up, but the boulder pinning his lower half to the ground kept him from doing so. He smashed an errant fist at the giant rock in anger.

  “Not exactly. He isn’t really... Top anymore. Stay still,” Dustin said as he watched his former leader continue to attack his own head and the stone.

  Oh shit, Dustin thought. It’s our voices. He has comms and can hear us inside his helmet. He’s trying to kill what he hears. Holy shit.

  To prove his point, the lieutenant-thing calmed as the expeditionary men remained silent. His limbs fell to the ground, despondent. His glassy black eyes moved around in a slick, predatory crawl side to side as his jaws unhinged and clicked apart. He looked hungry to Dustin, though for what he dared not think.

  “Remy’s dead,” Ping-Pong sighed.

  Lionel flew into a rage again, but not one brought about by sadness.

  “One of the leader-bugs sprayed him right in the face. He wasn’t wearing his helmet again. It picked him up and pulled his arm off like a goddamn kid with a butterfly. Then it walked away with him as he started to mutate. His unit comms died out a few seconds ago. I could hear his bones breaking. I can’t hear him scream anymore.”

  “Steve, damn it, stay quiet and
still. Let them pass over us,” Dustin said sharp as a skitterer’s claw tip. The ground trembled again. Rhythmic and deep, the thudding of heavy alien footsteps came closer. Dustin watched as Lionel’s bloody and torn face became serene and aimed its blacked-out eyes upward. Dustin dared a look up as the massive form of a second catapulter ate up the sky.

  The creature of mythic size stopped and reached down with the peculiar arm it used to fling projectiles. Bent at one too many joints and easily as large as the workings of an industrial digging machine, the arms toward powerful pincer lifted the boulder that crushed Lionel. The beast did so without a grunt, and with only a minute pause in its enormous-legged step. The boulder lifted high into the sky and balanced in the center of the triangular opening in the claw. It ratcheted back until it reached a point where it looked like it could bend no further, then it sprung a few feet more, coiling its limb. Dustin watched the creature’s massive, faceted eyes. They never moved, never searched, never showed soul or sentience. It simply did as it had been bidden without question.

  The arm let loose with an uncoiling that drove its rear legs into the earth. The inverted V shape of the catapulter’s limb snapped straight and sent the blood-soaked boulder into the sky, deeper into the settlement. Dustin knew not where the stone would land, but he knew the creature’s aim was terribly good.

  Almost casually, the monster lifted its legs out of the dirt and thundered away, vibrating the chests of the men hidden under a few centimeters of dirt below. Dustin watched as Lionel flailed about in strange exultation. He looked at his lieutenant’s shattered and smashed lower half and the strange, idiotic obliviousness his friend had for his own plight.

  Using his gloved hands, Lionel maneuvered the remnant of his upper body around in the dirt. His bisected form trailed the dirty stump of his spinal cord alongside a mass of intestines that looked as much like tentacles designed for movement as they did organs designed for digestion. Dustin’s stomach twisted and shouted that it was ready to vacate its contents. He gut-checked his rebellious insides and watched as his lieutenant crawled out of their firing position and over the prone form of Steve Ziu. To his credit the marine remained frozen still as the newly-born monster crawled over him, leaving a trail of leaked bile, shit, and blood. The lieutenant sought to join his new family in their assault on his old one and he dragged his dying carcass behind the catapulter as it headed deeper into the fray.

  “Instantly brainwashed. That’s insane,” Waren said. “How can that be possible?”

  “Who fucking cares. Who fucking knows. I know I don’t,” Ping-Pong replied.

  Dustin watched from his near grave as the marine line became more disorganized and ineffectual, and collapsed. Men and women who had fired accurately from behind cover stood and backed away, firing from the hip instead of the shoulder. Some ran, shooting behind them without regard for their fellows’ safety. Gunfire became sporadic, haphazard, desperate.

  The tiny skitterers leapt and jumped with reckless abandon as their wanton lust for flesh sowed chaos amongst their prey.

  Dustin watched as the first of the stocky and powerful rock bugs reached the armadillo tanks not far away. He stared as the huge fists of the bearish beasts cocked and punched equipment off the sides of the tanks, punched their tracks right off the wheels and punched a sealed hatch open like a field ration tin. The sound of metal warping set free a screeching noise that overwhelmed his suit’s audio system, and then his ears. The men inside the closest Armadillo succumbed to a flood of skitterers that climbed up the side of the tank and fell into the open hatch as if it were a sinkhole in the middle of a piranha infested lake.

  Dustin watched the slavers move amongst their army of mutants and the humans, dead and alive. He watched as they ignored the dead and focused on the living. He watched as their mantis-like heads snapped about and assessed, aiming their strange mouths at humans with wounds, and how, with great care, they sprayed the injured with their vile blue spit.

  Dustin experienced an epiphany. This wasn’t the chaos of a battle for them. He thought of his wife, and the fear he had of watching her give birth. Watching her in a moment he couldn’t control or protect her from. Watching her in the greatest moment of fear and greatest moment of triumph. Watching her would not be war to him, no matter how much blood and pain there was.

  This wasn’t war to the insects. This was something else entirely and Dustin knew. He saw the chaos for what it was.

  “Dude?” Ping-Pong posed. “You okay? We need to make a plan. We can’t just lay here.”

  “Yeah I’m good,” Dustin lied, gathering his wits.

  “You’re ranking. Malevolent isn’t responding to comms and neither are the brass asses in the command tent. We already know what happened to Vigilant,” Steve said as he pointed at the trail of blood and slime on his chest. “You’re king shit of turd hill now. What do you want us to do?”

  “Dude, he asked you a question. What the hell are you thinking about?” Waren asked.

  “We can’t win this fight,” Dustin said without forethought.

  “No shit,” Steve said in a whisper as a massive rock bug thudded its many feet along beside Punisher One’s hull. It smashed its fist into the turret and spun the machinery a few meters around before continuing on in the wake of its slaver masters.

  “No, look. They aren’t doing this to kill us. They aren’t doing this to eat us either. This is about something worse. This is how they procreate. This is how they make more of their kind. This is their way of life. Not their way of war.”

  “How do we . . . ?” Waren said as he listened to the screams and assembled the meaning of the horror of what happened on all sides.

  “We regroup. Plan. See who can escape this and join with them. Find a safe place. There has to be a safe place, otherwise everything on this planet would be just like them. At least find cover. Some high ground,” Dustin said. He looked over the decimated field that used to be the no-man’s land between Stahl and the slaver army’s forest. Monsters of all sizes surrounded them. “Wait . . . I bet they’ve left the nest empty. I bet they’re all . . .”

  “Make for the trees?” Steve asked, sensing Dustin’s thoughts.

  “Like a monkey on amphetamines. We’ll crawl on our bellies as far as we can. Stalker-style. They think we’re as useful to them as a fucking stick as long as we don’t look like something they can spray with that blue shit. So let’s look like a fucking stick.”

  “Has it occurred to you that the things they can’t mutate or eat they’ve been punching to hell or throwing all over the place?” Waren said. “They’re like multi-legged, fanged toddlers from Hell.”

  “Do as you’re told, Sotan,” Dustin said, trying his best to keep a sense of humor. “If we can get to the taller grasses we should be okay.”

  Dustin kept flashing to the black pits of Lionel’s eyes, staring back into his, vacant as the space between the stars above. Then the image of his friend trailing his own intestines came, and the laughs went away.

  With minimal movement, the three marines gathered what little gear they could find in their firing holes and started the arduous, snail’s-pace exfiltration from the tragedy of Stahl.

  Thirty meters behind them, a lone skitterer swiveled its head and watched them, its tiny, limited brain struggling to comprehend the alien creatures. It wondered if they could be eaten, or made into more of its kind. The small monster clattered its limbs in excitement and took off running after the movement. It would watch, and see what the curiosity under the ground did.

  Chapter Thirty

  No man’s land, planet of Selva

  1 October 163 GA

  The skitterer struggled to understand as it ran between the feet of the larger creatures from its hive. Piecing together anything more complex than primal urges and base instincts wasn’t a skill set the brain it had hatched with was suited for. Thinking was harder when it needed to avoid being trampled as it followed something that piqued its curiosity. The original skit
terer species had evolved over millions of Selva’s years to leap atop rocky coastal outcroppings, bushes and in the branches of trees and ferns strong enough to bear it. Its two front limbs were sharp piercing spikes to impale small prey, and its eyes had slid further and further apart to help the creature hunt.

  Its brain had remained uncluttered with portions dedicated to higher-order problem solving or emotions. Find food, eat food.

  Slaver genetic manipulation had changed that.

  One spray of the blue slime and extra limbs sprouted alongside a skitterer carapace. The rational fear of being eaten by the much larger slavers also disappeared. The skitterer brain recognized the giant monsters as one of its own.

  Two sprays and the digestive tract duplicated, creating an immature series of ducts and glands to create the system to create more of its kind. The miniscule brain formed new frontal lobe regions as well. Regions that wanted more.

  Three sprays and all those new parts began to work in concert to mimic the slaver way, including the way they processed Selva, how they behaved and how they hunted/infected.

  Slavers had no thought that uniquely meant hunt or kill. They fed on prey, or they made more of their kind.

  Just like this confused insect wanted, halfway through the full change to be more like its master.

  The misshapen beast used all of its legs (including the two new ones it had grown the day prior) to slink along behind the moving ground. Its primal brain struggled to reign in the urge to run away and join in on the infecting of the strange fleshy creatures nearby. Many of the long and tall animals covered in patches of hard plate and soft, smooth fur were up and walking now. The skitterer’s masters had given so many of them the gift of their kind. Most of the new things were covered with the viscous fluid that ate away at the very essence of what they were and remade them as the new thing they would be. And how fast it happened to them! Just one spray seemed to have given them new faces, harder skin and the eyes of the overlords. They couldn’t walk well; their legs were not made in the way they should’ve been–bent forward at an alien angle–but they followed the mass of the colony as it headed into the densest area of food/procreation. The small insect danced around the stumbling feet of the newest of its kind and headed toward the patch of ground that had interested it. Flashes of hunger and the overwhelming urge to make more made the moving ground less and less interesting with each moment.