Two Worlds – Chapter 136

Eve Berg

Location: CWS Hoplite, Rogue Island System, United Commonwealth of Colonies

“HOLD THE FUCKING LINE!”

Three rows of soldiers stood between the scavenger bots and total annihilation. Over the last few hours the marine detachment onboard the wounded Hoplite had been reduced to a handful of squads. The bots had done a good job of killing off the crew and its defenders. Hoplite had been kneecapped in the retreat from Rogue Island, but the bots had broken its back. Now, they were just trying to survive.

“LET THEM HAVE IT YOU LIMP DICK MOTHERFUCKERS!”

If Eve wasn’t so busy concentrating on sweeping her Buss back and forth across the corridor she would have been in utter awe. Half a squad of marines were in the prone position firing as fast as their M3s would allow them. A second half-squad was in the kneeling position, and another half-squad – including SGM Queen and Eve – made up the final standing defense.

Everyone was in full armor and giving everything they had, except for one woman in the center of the second row of kneeling marines. GYSGT Cunningham was wearing nothing more than her CMUs. She had no armor, no helmet, so she had no advanced optics or STRATNET and TACCOM to rely on. She was doing it old school with the scope on her rifle and big fat balls of courage.

“KILL ‘EM ALL BOYS!”

She was like some ancient war god in the flesh. Sweat streamed down her face which was starting to burn from having the Rangers’ laser fired so close to it. She squinted with each shot but she kept on letting the enemy have it. She wasn’t even at full strength. Her STRATNET medical code was yellow. She still hadn’t recovered from her injuries in defense of the PDC, but that didn’t mean anything in the here and now. They were the last thing standing between the bots and the engine room where the techs were frantically trying to restore power.

Eve raked the oncoming bots with a wide beam of energy. They sparked, stuttered, and collapsed to the floor in a heap. It was like black snow falling in space, but they just kept on coming. They were a never-ending swarm of locusts straight out of ancient Egypt and they didn’t look like they could be stopped.

“VENT, ELEVEN O’CLOCK!” The GYSGT and two other marines shifted fire to keep the bots from scampering into an air duct and flanking the ship’s defenders.

All that was left were the marines and techs around the engine room and a similar compliment holding the bridge. The CIC, armory, crew quarters, and shuttle bay had already been overrun. A battleship like Hoplite had a standard crew of fifteen hundred spacers and one or two companies of marines. After the battle, and the bots savaging them, they would be lucky to come out of this thing with a hundred survivors.

Normally, a ship would have its own compliment of nanites to fight off scavenger bots, but you needed power to program, activate, and release them. If they lived, Eve was going to write a strongly worded message to her mother to have the engineer behind that design feature assassinated with extreme prejudice.

<What a stupid fucking design flaw!> she growled as her laser nearly overheated and she had to rotate her barrel.

“Grenade!” she yelled over TACCOM.

The marine next to the GYSGT patted her on the shoulder for her to get down as a loud thump sounded from Eve’s Buss. The explosive flew halfway down the hallway before detonating at the front of the onrushing horde of bots. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of the small robots were consumed in fire and high-speed shrapnel. Thankfully, the grenade was programed as a shape charge with the blast directed away from the marine guards so they didn’t get the any flying debris. They did get a bit of the back blast, and the GYSGT grunted as the shockwave hit her.

“WHAT ARE YOU DICK LICKERS WAITING FOR? KEEP FIRING!” No sooner had the NCO yelled it than the swarm burst through the smoke and fire to continue its charge.

“Fuck!” The SGM slashed his laser at a forty-five-degree angle through the bots before his nearly overheated. He rotated to the 3mm plasma round barrel and unleashed hell.

If Eve could have seen anything through the black swarm threatening to overrun them she would have seen the complete and utter destruction of the Hoplite around them. The interior of warship was sturdy and built to take a hammering – especially battleships – but the constant battering by the 1mm and 3mm rounds had torn huge holes in the ship’s corridors and poured lethal munitions into adjoining spaces. Any of the SGM’s round that didn’t find a bot went nearly a thirty meters forward before finding the next bulkhead still intact and even that was starting to crumble under the weight of fire.

Not that it really mattered. Hoplite was FUBAR already, so a little gunfire wasn’t going to hurt.

The bots crept closer and closer. They pushed against the wall of duro-steel, high powered lasers, and the occasional grenade like a demon struggling to grab their souls and drag them to hell. Centimeter by centimeter they were gaining ground no matter what the marines and rangers did to stop them.

“Reloading!”

A quarter of the defenders ran out of ammunition at the same time. Behind their lines the techs who weren’t hurriedly trying to restore power were on ammo duty. They were sliding the magazines forward to the waiting marines, and making sure their meager supply of grenades was ready for action.

“AH SHIT!” The bots surged forward as the defensive fire was drastically cut.

They were within thirty meters now – spitting distance.

“Fall back by squads!” The SGM bellowed the order as he read the situation. “Back squad, GO!” The three marines standing beside the rangers stopped firing and retreated behind the thick engineering compartment door. “Middle squad, GO!”

The four marines around the GYSGT got to their feet and scrambled backward while staying low to avoid the fire still coming from the rangers. One tapped the GYSGT on the shoulder and she followed them, but didn’t retreat back into the compartment. She stood shoulder to shoulder with Eve and the SGM laying fire into the bots as they fell back.

“Front squad, GO!” The last five marines got to their feet and scrambled for safety.

“NOW!”

The SGM and Eve had worked out a plan for just this scenario. The bots surged to within ten meters of them when they rotated their barrels to the grenade setting and let loose with everything they had. Eve didn’t bother being gentle. She shoved the GYSGT back into the room as they went to rapid fire.

Hellfire, shrapnel and pressure waves rebounded through the corridor as half a dozen grenades slammed into the bots. Eve could have sworn she heard an uptick in their buzzing – almost like a shriek – as the grenades tore deep into them.

“GO!” The SGM gave Eve the signal to fall back as he rotated back to his laser setting and started tearing into them.

The grenades had bought them precious seconds, but the bots were raging forward now that only one ranger stood between them and victory.

“SET…MOVE!” Eve settled just inside the door and took over so the SGM could retreat.”

It was an awkward shot with the SGM’s armored bulk blocking half the doorway, so she concentrated her fire where she could. As the SGM passed her she widened the aperture of her laser and brought the rest of corridor into range. When the blast doors finally slammed shut in front of her she didn’t need her LACS magnification to see the serrated little teeth of the bots.

“Fuck me.” She mumbled to herself. That was all the downtime she got.

“EVERYONE OFF YOUR ASSES. IT ISN’T TIME FOR A CONGRATULATORY CIRCLE JERK. WE AREN’T DONE YET.” The GYSGT was reloading her M3 and waiting for orders.

“Guard the intake points.” The SGM lit up several locations on everyone’s HUDs. “We bought maybe fifteen minutes with the door, but they’ll try to find the path of least resistance, and I’m sure there is already damage that’s going to allow them easier entry than through a meter of duro-steel.”

Assignments went along with the locations and Eve found herself looking up a large open tube of some sort not far from the reactor the techs were scrambling over like a bunch of worker ants. Even from her spot near the back of the room she could hear the bots hitting the door like a rainstorm.

“We’re so close.” The lead tech – only a Specialist Second Class – answered when the SGM asked him how much longer until they restored power. “Thirty more minutes and we’ll be able to get our own nanites into the fight.”

“You’ve got maybe ten before we’re dead, so make that work.” The SGM made his curt response before checking in with the bridge team.

The situation was basically identical. They’d held the corridor as long as possible before retreating behind the thicker blast door of into the bridge.

“Congratulations,” the SGM’s tone was as rough as sandpaper. “You’ll live about ten minutes longer than us.”

Eve couldn’t stop the giggle from escaping her throat. She was overtired, overworked, had been fighting, killing, and watching people die for days now. She was close to snapping, but she could hold on for a couple more minutes. Right now, all she needed to do was look down this tube and make sure none of those bots made it in here to eat the techs and marines alive.

“Focus, Berg, I trained you well. All these grunts are looking at the three of us. If we break then they break. Stay calm, collected, and fuck up anything that peeks its head in here.” It was like the GYSGT knew Eve was fraying around the edges, and surprisingly the little pep talk helped.

Things were relatively calm for the next four minutes, but that was all the respite they got. It started off as a soft buzzing that slowly grew to a howl. It wasn’t hard to figure out what it was. The scavenger bots had eaten through something to get into the shaft she was guarding. The shape of the shaft enhanced the buzzing sound until it came out as the howl of an angry animal determined to tear into human flesh.

“Incoming!” she yelled. Immediately, the SGM and GYSGT were at her side.

“Everyone else hold position.” The SGM ordered. He didn’t want them to get hit from ten different directions if they broke through somewhere else.

Orders still went out if shit really hit the fan to cover down on them, but everyone knew that wouldn’t save them all. There were just too many bots. Tens of thousands of the little shits had been in those missiles that had hit them, and they’d eaten enough to increase their numbers a hundred times over. It was basically the perfect shitstorm to hit the injured Hoplite.

<If this is where I go then fuck it.> Eve steeled herself as the howling grew louder.

A lot of things ran through her mind in those last thirty seconds: her mother and their crappy relationship, her brother and their not quite as crappy relationship, her dead dad, the weekend-long copulating she and Coop had done after Basic, and all the training she’d received on that god-forsaken planet the Rangers called their training grounds. She’d turned nineteen in the middle of training, so all she got was a few pats on the backs from her fellow trainees, and a crap-ton of pushups from the instructors.

All in all, it was an interesting nineteen years.

The moment they saw movement in the blackness they opened fire. The SGM and Eve used their low-powered lasers to avoid breaking anything if possible. They still had a slim chance of getting power back, and that would go down the shitter when they started firing 3mm and 1mm rounds into the equipment. They blasted away for thirty seconds. The tight space was keeping the bots contained and it gave them just the time they needed.

“We’ve got some juice!” Things around the room that had been dead started to hum weakly back to life.

Eve took over responsibility as the SGM shouldered the tech aside and flashed through the menu to get the things they needed to stay alive. Five seconds later pouches around the ship birthed a hundred thousand little gray bots that leapt to Hoplite’s aid. One of those was in the engineering room.

A loud ripping noise filled the space as the little critters leapt into the air and search for targets. It was right on time, because Eve’s Buss overheated and melted the laser components into slag. Without her holding them back the scavenger bots flooded into the room.

“Hold fire!” The SGM yelled as the gray and black bots crashed into each other.

It sounded like a hissing, feral alley cat fight. Gray and block bots started falling from the sky above the marines and techs. The techs hunkered down as best they could under desks or anything else they could fit under. The marines took cover as well. The only people that stood under the sudden downpour of little robots was Eve and the SGM.

Both were very pleased to see that there was a lot more black than gray tumbling out of the sky. In the end it all came down to programming. Hoplite’s defensive bots were only programmed to kill invading bots while the scavenger bots were programmed to target everything. When the enemy bots had their attention split between everything in the engineering room, the gray bots only had one thing to focus on.

It still took time, and there were casualties. Three more techs got overrun by the scavenger bots despite everyone’s best efforts. After the first tech got burrowed into, Eve glued herself to the GYSGT’s side to ensure she didn’t share the same fate. She was one of the easiest target in the room, but she came out of it unscathed.

It took a few minutes of fierce fighting before the gray overwhelmed the black and shot back up the same shaft they’d entered. The SGM had everyone hold position and see to the wounded until the sound of the scavenger bots eating the blast door stopped. Even after that, the rangers and marines had to move carefully through the ship. There corridors were filled with ankle deep pockets of gray and black dead bots. It was creepy as fuck to walk through, especially when a few were still twitching.

Within an hour of the defensive bots coming online Eve and the SGM made it to the bridge. The GYSGT was back in sickbay organizing the triage and ignoring everyone’s orders to get checked out. The bridge crew was partially slaughtered despite the defensive bots’ best efforts. Only six marines were left from the guard detachment. The captain was dead, along with three department OICs. The XO was trying to organize things the best he could, but the CMDR was still traumatized by seeing his friends eaten alive by enemy robots. It was one of the worst ways to go in spaceborne combat, and it hadn’t been this successful in a while.

“FTL footprint!” The two words cut through the bridge like a fart through a wedding ceremony. Everyone’s face fell as they all thought the same thing.

<What now?>

“It’s coming in at three-two-two degrees about sixty million kilometers away, Sir.” The new operations OIC was a fresh-faced lieutenant. “CIC is…” he stopped.

Normally the combat information center would refine the information and pass along their analysis to the bridge crew. Unfortunately, everyone in the CIC was dead, so it was up to the LT to figure it out.

“It’s small, Sir.” The LT stated after a minute. “Likely an FTL-capable drone.”

“A search party?” The XO dared to hope.

The whole ship collectively held their breath until the transponder codes synched with Hoplite’s battered systems and identified the drone as friend or foe.

<Please for fuck’s sake give us a break for once!> That was the extent of Eve’s praying.

It paid off.

Two seconds later the icon blinked friendly-blue, and a cheer rang up from the survivors of Hoplite. They’d been found. Rescue was on the way. They were going home, but more importantly, they’d live to fight another day.

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