Boom goes the cannon

“Five minutes out.” Freya called over the command channel as she glanced at her damage control center.

“Thank you.” Mother replied. “Okay, people listen up. New standing orders. No suicides. Maddog, I’m looking at you. I don’t care if you have to tape a gun to one of my marines, you do whatever it takes to keep them alive and shooting.”

“Yes, Ma’am.” The Naval Hospital Corpsman replied.

“Magic, how far can you go before you lose connection to the ship?” Mother asked Freya.

Freya put the ship on autopilot and minimized her screen. “I’ll have to do some work before I can leave the interior, but best guess…” Freya said, pausing to think of her max range if she accessed her ship through the wires inside the bulkhead. “...About two miles.”

“Can you slave the weapons control over to my console?” Mother asked.

“Yes, ma’am.” Freya reluctantly said. She had hoped that Mother wouldn’t think of doing that.

“Get it done as soon as we land.” Mother replied, turning attention away from Freya. “Drake, as soon as we land, take your squad and secure around the ship. Unicorn, break out the security devices and set them up.”

“We are down ten marines.” Mother said, scanning what was left of the platoon. “Expect the enemy to find us, bringing a fight like a wave mission. The only difference is that we are out in the middle of nowhere, and we have to protect the ship as long as possible. With that being the case, once we got our defences up, I want my heavy assaults in the front encircling the ship. Behind them I want my scouts, drone operators, and demo teams spread out with at least twenty feet between them.”

Mother continued “Based on how many enemy units we have seen hiding in the ocean, I expect to get completely overrun. We have seen millions of enemy units crawl out of the ocean. I expect once the shooting starts, we will lose air superiority. Based on that, there will not be any fallback positions. We will fight to the last man. If for some reason we have a chance to run, we will make plans in the air. No one is to retreat unless the order is given by the highest-ranking surviving leader. Honestly, I don’t expect any of us to survive this fight, but by Tom we will show them what a spec ops platoon is all about. Oorah!”

Freya joined in with the rest of her platoon. As she cried out oorah with the rest of her platoon, she noticed a bulkhead compartment that was missing the metal sheeting. Confused, she looked around trying to figure out why someone vandalized her ship. She spotted the reason pretty quickly though when she looked at the hole that the enemy had blown through her ship. Someone had taken the metal sheet, and welded it against the bulkhead that had a hole in it. They had dismantled parts of the damaged pod and locker to do it, but from what Freya could see it was a pretty good job. Nodding at the patch she turned her attention back to flying her ship.

Freya took the ship in for a landing. She circled the LZ to make sure her ship was facing the shoreline, which was about two hundred miles away. She did it so that the artillery cannon was facing where she expected most of the enemy would come from. Once she had the ship landed, she extended the stabilizers so that Mother could fire the cannon. She could hear the other marines disembark as she did so, but she was too focused on the holo screens to see them as they left.

Once the stabilizers were burying themselves into the dirt looking for bedrock, she started working on slaving the weapons controls to the command and control center. It was shockingly easy to do it. There was even a tab under the ship’s access to the command and control center for it. Telling herself that one day she would fire the cannon in combat, simulated or not, she switched over and gave Mother control of all the ship’s weapons, which included the missiles and autoguns.

Once that was done, she increased the transparency of her holo screens, got up and walked towards the back of the ship. As she did so, she realized everyone had already disembarked except her and Mother. Mother, who looked very busy at her station, looked up when Freya walked up to her. The platoon leader gave her a nod before turning away to look back at all the screens that made up the command and control center. As Freya looked on she noted that Mother had several screens set up with everyone’s feeds while at the same time she was still patched into the feeds from the October’s spy satellites.

Freya also noted an icon on everyone’s feed that told her that Mother had cut all return signals from the platoon to the October. If this was a real world combat mission, then the October would have been blind to what they were doing. Again if this was a real mission instead of a sim mission, Mother would have a lot to answer for when they got back. Not that she could get in trouble, just that she would really have to have a good explanation for doing what she did and why she did it.

The bulkhead she needed access to was below the command and control center, and she moved over to the far right-hand side of the command and control center, not wanting to get in Mother’s way. She pulled off her backpack, and pulled out her sabotage kit which was buried at the bottom of it. Once she dug out the sabotage kit, she pushed her backpack further away from the console and ducked under it. She saw Mother;s feet move away from her right before she scooted deeper under the console to get closer to the bulkhead.

A few screws unscrewed later and she was in. It was much easier to give her tablet full access by using her AI to bypass the security and let herself in. She attached the correct attachments, and less than five minutes later she had her AI drop access. She pulled out her tablet, still under the console, and turned it on. She opened a few windows and, boom, she had access to her ship. Smiling, she pulled herself out from under the console.

“All done, ma’am.” Freya told her boss as she pulled her backpack towards her and stuffed her sabotage kit back where it belonged.

“Good work. Get back with your team.” Mother said, not looking at her. “Stay within thirty feet of the ship, though. I want you close in case we need to bug out.”

“There’s a chance we are bugging out?” Freya asked, as she slung her backpack back on.

“I doubt the enemy will give us a chance, but I want an out in case the enemy is stupid.” Mother replied, this time turning to look at her.

“Yes, ma’am.” Freya nodded, and turned towards the ramp, following Mother’s orders.

Freya exited the ramp to find that her platoon had been very busy. While half of her squad were in positions to guard the ship, the other half, plus all of Second Squad were digging trenches. With their strength mods they were making easy work of it. Freya sometimes forgot just how much stronger her fellow marines were compared to her, outside of out-running her. Watching them plow through the ground like it was made out of feathers reminded her just how much stronger they were compared to normal people.

She also noted that some of the teams with active camo were carrying active camo machines outside the range of the dropship’s active camo. That made her look further out, where she noted people setting up machine gun nests. They weren’t connected to the trenches, because the guns didn’t have the range, but if they only put strength-modded heavy assaults there she thought they might be fast enough to retreat if the enemy got too close.

Shaking her head, she went over to where Lurch was laying on his stomach. Monkeyman and Cannon were digging beside him creating a branch of the trench. They were making dog legs in the trench in case an explosive landed inside it. A dog leg was a sharp turn in the trench. It was designed so that people could jump away from the explosive to escape from shrapnel as well as funneling the explosive force away from them.

Freya pulled off her backpack, intending to help, but Cannon interrupted her. “Yeah, you have less strength mods in you than Tom’s little sister. Keep us covered. We got this.” Freya shrugged and put her backpack back on. She laid down next to Lurch, knowing that Cannon wasn’t trying to be mean - she was stating facts, or at least Freya hoped she was.

She set up her rifle and adjusted the range to the maximum, as she aimed at where she guessed the enemy would come from. Not that she could see the ocean - it was several hundred miles away. Way beyond the curve of the planet and so far out of the range of her gun it wasn’t even funny. Still, she knew there had to be spy constructs somewhere hidden below the snow. They needed to die and die fast or the enemy would find them much faster than she and her fellow marines wanted them to. According to her mission timer, they had only been on planet for a little more than a day now. They still had five plus days until the mission ended.

Roughly two minutes later, Monkeyman and Cannon finished their part of the trench. Both she and Lurch slid down into it. Freya noted that they had a step from where they could shoot from, and still be able to drop down to avoid enemy fire. She absently nodded her head at the addition and started to set up, but Cannon waved her off. Frowning, Freya turned to look at her team leader, confused.

“You’ve been flying the ship for a while. I seriously doubt that the enemy will attack this early. Take a break, and get some sleep. If anything happens we’ll wake you up.” Cannon said, turning to face Freya fully.

Freya wanted to object that she was still wide awake, but Monkeyman nodded his head by Cannon’s side, telling her that he thought Cannon was right. Looking away, Freya nodded. She left her rifle leaning against the wall and pulled a nutrition drink out of her backpack. Once she was done, she put it away before laying against the dirt wall. She crossed her arms over her chest and closed her eyes. She fell asleep almost instantly.

She woke naturally sometime later. She looked to her right and saw Monkeyman snuggled up beside her. He was fast asleep. Past him she could see Cannon guarding them both with her huge machine gun. From where Freya lay, she could see Cannon’s tired face as she stared off into the distance. Freya turned around to look to the other side of her only to see that Lurch was also fast asleep. She carefully extracted herself from Monkeyman and stood up. Cannon must have heard her because she was looking right at Freya when she got to her feet.

“I got this. You get some sleep.” Freya told her, pulling her rifle up onto the top of the trench.

“Thanks.” Cannon muttered, and took Freya’s place against the wall. Freya noted that Monkeyman had already set up his mortars and had his ammo out and ready to go. Taking a deep breath to chase away the last bit of sleep from her body, she set the butt of her gun against her shoulder and looked through the rifle’s scope.

Looking through her scope, she took in the snow-covered land in front of her. It reminded her of the hunts she used to take back home with her grandfather. During the hard times that came with the winter, when their food stores got low, she would go with her grandfather to hunt elk or brown bears. If they saw some small prey then, as long as they weren't on the trail of bigger game, they would take them down. If they were on the trail of bigger game, then the small game often was ignored for the promise of more meat from the bigger game. Looking at the endless white-covered landscape reminded her of times when they were on an ice shelf hunting. There were some differences though. One of them was the trenches.

She could see the dark scars of the trenches in front of her, where the marines had dug out around the ship. They had piled snow up in front of them to hide the darkness that would mark the trenches. With snow piled in front of the trenches it would hide the dark, exposed dirt behind it. For the marines, this was standard practice against normal humans, but she was not sure just how effective it would be against the Ketica and their bio constructs. She wondered about how they saw the world around them. The bat constructs didn’t have eyes, but had echolocation to see like their namesake. She assumed lizards used their eyes, but did the warriors?

After a while Freya got bored, and checked the October’s satellite feeds. Even though she knew she couldn’t trust what they showed her, she still took comfort from the fact that the enemy didn’t seem to have found them. At least not yet. She paged through all the feeds from the drones that were flying around the ship and as far out as five miles. None of them showed anything. Just to be safe, Freya launched her own sensor drone, telling herself better to be safe than sorry.

Time dragged by even slower as Freya waited on something to happen. She knew that the longer nothing happened the better it was for them, and their mission. Still, she hated waiting. It wasn’t as bad if she had a target or was waiting on one, but just sitting here waiting on the enemy grated on her. Still, aside from digging a series of holes underground to hide in, they didn’t have any ideas on how to change things. She knew that digging a series of tunnels underground, while it was an option, was a bad idea. They needed the dropship to slip away once the invasion started.

Roughly two hours later, according to her mission clock, Monkeyman woke up and took up position beside her. She took that time to sit and rest. Not that she was tired, but it was draining to sit there on watch and be alert all the time. She gave herself an hour, and during that time she listened to some music and finished her paper before going back on watch.

Monkeyman stayed on watch for another hour before he took a break to fiddle with his mortars. Freya had no idea what he was doing, but gave him the benefit of the doubt because he was the expert. She just scanned the surroundings and waited for something to happen. Roughly an hour later Monkeyman returned to the trench wall and they stood watch as their fellow teammates slept.

Lurch woke up next, but, unlike Freya or Monkeyman, he didn’t take watch. Instead he launched two drones. Freya decreased her HUD transparency so that she could take a better look at the feeds from her platoon’s drone operators. She saw that one of Lurch’s drones was headed out to do a long-range surveillance while the other one joined in with the rest of the drones that were slowly circling the ship.

After not seeing anything different in the feeds, she returned the transparency on the feed to almost completely washed out. She could still see the feeds, but she had to really focus on them to see what they were showing. It was a trick she had learned this past month during training. It was one of a few things the people in her new platoon had shown her. There were a few others, but that was one of the ones she used the most.

She and Monkeyman took the same rotations on watch while Lurch stayed where he was watching his dones. A few hours later, Cannon woke up and took her position in their watch rotation. The way the rotation now worked was while they still took an hour off they stayed on the watch for two hours. That way one person was always off while two people were constantly standing watch. Lurch still didn’t join in with the watch, but that wasn’t his job. His job was to monitor the drones, and he wasn’t able to take time off like Freya and her other two teammates did.

The sun slowly set and the night began. They changed their watch rotation again to let people sleep. Freya was the first one to be given four hours of sleep. Like before, she found herself asleep not long after she had sat down. When she was awakened by Monkeyman, she took his place in the watch rotation. Sometime while she was asleep, Lurch had also been given time to sleep by the other drone operators.

While she was on watch, Maddog came walking up, checking on them. He took a few minutes to talk to Cannon before he left, passing on information about the other teams. It was nothing too important, mostly funny gossip about mistakes others had made. Like someone’s armor had malfunctioned and released their waste into their portion of the trench. Maddog thought the guy had done it on purpose, but couldn't prove it. Aside from seeing it, it really didn’t affect the guy’s team’s operation at all, since they were all stitched up in their armor. Still, Freya thought it was funny if a little gross.

A few hours later, Cannon woke Monkeyman up and took his place on the ground. It was well into the night now, and, aside from the increased wind speed and cloud cover, nothing had changed. Time slowly passed with them on watch until everything changed.

Freya was watching the mission clock countdown while waiting to wake Cannon up when Mother’s voice came over the radio. “Enemy spotted. Small horde headed our way from two seventy-four. Estimated time for them to intercept us is about three hours.”

Two seventy-four was an angle on the compass. If you use north as zero then break up the entire compass into three hundred and sixty degrees that would leave two seventy-four pointing at the northwest direction. That meant the horde was coming from behind them. Freya cursed as she turned around to see if they had an angle to shoot at them when they got in range.

To her relief she did have a pretty good angle. The direction two seventy-four was from where they were in the trench came out to be in front of the dropship. As long as she avoided one of the stabilizers for the artillery cannon she would have a pretty good shot. The only bad part was that there was a possibility of firing over the heads of at least two teams, possibly three, depending on how accurate that angle was when they attacked. That could be a very big concern depending on how the battle panned out.

As she was figuring this all out, Cannon had woken up and took her place on the wall. “Magic, we got some time - get some sleep. I got a feeling that, after this, there will be very little time to rest.” Cannon told her,e putting her hand on Freya’s shoulder.

“Sounds like a plan.” Freya replied, knowing that Cannon was right. She sat with her back against the wall while hugging her ASO. It took her a few minutes, but it wasn’t long before she fell asleep.

She was woken up by Mother, who called out over the radio. “All marines to their battle stations. I say again, all marines to their battle stations.”

Freya, who was still leaning up against the wall hugging her rifle, pulled herself up and took up a position by Cannon. “How far out are they?” Freya asked, as she set her gun down and adjusted it so that it was comfortable against her shoulder.

“Well within range of the dropship’s weapons.” Monkeyman replied. “They’ll be within range of our guns soon.”

“Gotcha.” Freya replied. She knew that when Monkeyman said that they’d be within range of ‘our’ guns, he meant everyone else's, not hers. She decreased the transparency of the drones’ feeds to find the enemy. Most of the feeds from the drones stationed around the ship were focusing on the incoming enemy. It wasn’t all that hard to find them. One of the drones even gave her the wind speed and direction. She didn’t need it because her ASO scope had that built in, but it was nice to see in case the other scouts didn’t have that.

She scanned the area, but the enemy was below the horizon. She could have used the drones’ feeds to get in a shot or two, but knew that, unless Mother cleared her to fire, she didn’t have permission to start the battle off. Tactically, it would be a very bad idea, since only she and maybe one other scout had the ability to shoot that far. She also knew that Mother was watching their feeds, so she had to see that Freya had a shot.

Freya kept her crosshairs on her target as the enemy slowly got closer and closer. She waited patiently as she awaited the order to shoot. She knew it wouldn’t be long. The world around her disappeared as she awaited the order. Then Mother spoke again.

“Tracking has a high probability of passing us by. No one is to shoot until I give the order. Understood? Respond by teams.” Mother said over the command channel. Freya sighed, removed her finger from the trigger, and placed it over the trigger guard as Cannon called in that their team understood.

Freya checked out all the drone feeds. On one of them that was really high in the sky, giving them what was called god’s-eye view, someone had drawn a line to indicate the direction in which the enemy was traveling. The line passed to the north of the ship by roughly a hundred feet. Freya sucked in her lips in annoyance even though she knew it was good news that the enemy would miss them. Even so, Freya kept her scope on target even if it was projected that the enemy would pass them by.

The enemy was traveling slow, about twenty miles per hour, and that meant that they had slightly more than nine minutes until the horde reached the ship. Freya peeked from time to time at the feeds, but mostly she kept her eye on her target. It popped over the horizon not thirty seconds after Mother gave the order not to shoot. Freya zoomed in until she could see it with her naked eye. She fell in love with her new scope again as it was able to zoom almost all the way in so that instead of looking at a very faint stick figure she could actually see the warrior that she was aiming at.

She couldn’t see enough detail to pick out its kill area, but she felt comfortable aiming for a headshot at this distance. She watched as the warrior got bigger in her scope, and as a consequence moved all around her scope faster. It wasn’t moving faster, but the area of her scope was zoomed in so much that a single step seemed like it was jumping in her scope. She dialled the zoom back a bit so that the movement wasn’t so bad as she looked the warrior over for the kill area.

She spotted what she thought was the kill area. There was some extra armor around its middle. It was very faint, but it was there. She examined the rest of the warrior looking for any other signs, but she didn’t spot anything. She went back and gave the stomach another look. It was the only thing that was different from the rest of the trunk of the bio construct.

“Possible kill area around where the belly button would be.” Freya said over the command channel. None of the constructs had a belly button, but it was as good a way to describe the kill area as anything else.

She kept tracking the horde as they got closer and closer. She had to readjust her scope more and more as they got closer. As she did she saw that whoever had tracked the horde forward was going to be correct. Freya could easily see that, if they didn’t change direction for some unexpected reason, their path would pass right by them about a hundred feet or so north of the ship.

As they got really close, Freya had to move down the trench to keep an eye on the horde as it passed them by. She crouched down and ran towards the far end of the trench before she set her gun up again. It took her a couple of seconds to find the horde again in her scope, but, once she did, she aligned her crosshairs on the same warrior she had been targeting since she had spotted it on the drone feeds. Freya watched as they slowly passed them by. She smiled as they passed their position. She pretended to pull the trigger of her gun and whispered ‘pow’… and at the same time one of the bunkers full of heavy assault marines exploded in blackness that was filled with flying bio constructs.

Freya, her eyes wide, watched in complete surprise as the entire horde suddenly shifted right towards them. It was only when she heard Mother shouting on the radio to fire that she came back to herself. She pulled her rifle butt closer to her shoulder while trying to find the warrior she had been tracking a second or so ago. She found it charging a bunker. The marines in the bunker unloaded on the warrior, but the thing took everything they shot at it and kept on going. She absently noted that, while the marines were shooting the thing in the stomach, it ignored the damage.

Then it was in the bunker. Freya pulled the trigger, and hit the construct just below the neck in its chest. The warrior dropped like a rock, but not before Freya spotted body parts from what she assumed had to be some the marines inside the bunker. The parts, those she could identify, flew high into the sky as the warrior ripped them apart.

She called out the kill area over the command channel, but it was so chaotic that she had no idea if anyone heard her. She quickly changed targets and found another warrior before hastily pulling the trigger. Luck was with her as the warrior fell backwards right before a bunker. Unfortunately, that warrior had been with several lizards who ignored the fallen warrior and jumped into the bunker. There was an explosion from the bunker and everything went silent in and around that bunker.

She moved on to another target, only to see Maddog running towards the first bunker ignoring everything around him. Freya spotted a group of four lizards charging right at him. Biting her lip she quickly fired over and over. All four lizards dropped, leaving the hospital corpsman free to jump into the bunker.

“By Tom, that guy is crazy.” Cannon spoke from beside Freya. Freya ignored her as she tracked another group of lizards.

Freya quickly pulled her trigger, hitting a running lizard in the side of its chest. It was already dropping as Freya moved her scope towards the next lizard when it dropped before Freya could shoot it. She ignored the dead lizard and moved on to the next one only to see them all down already. She scanned the battlefield, but there was nothing moving.

“Heavy reinforcement incoming. Moving fast.” Mother said over the radio. “Stand by for main cannon firing.”

Freya looked to the right side of her HUD at the feeds, and saw some of the long-range drones had spotted thousands of bio constructs moving out of the water and onto land. As if that wasn’t enough, there were several sensor ghosts heading their way. Freya flipped through the feeds looking for a way to escape, but every drone was showing the enemy swarming right towards their position from all directions. It looked to Freya like the Ketica had been waiting for the patrol to find them and pounced. Freya had to admit Mother had been right. There was no way they were going to survive this.

“Main cannon firing!” Mother called out over the radio. “Firing, now!”

There was a muffled boom and the very planet shook all around Freya. She felt the shockwave roll through her chest as the cannon fired. Her armor reduced it as much as it could, but it still rattled her ribs. She ignored the feeling and went back to flipping through the drone feeds. She stopped as one of the drones captured the falling shell.

She felt the dirt shift nearly a minute after the shell landed. Since she was about two hundred miles away from where the enemy were crawling out of the ocean, Freya knew that Mother had used a ‘heavy’ shell. One capable of cracking a continental shelf. The shifting ground rumbled and moved for several seconds after it started before it stopped. As soon as the rumbling stopped, Freya checked the feeds and swore.

All of the feeds were showing huge brown dust clouds where the shell had landed. The one odd thing she did spot was that all of the cloud cover, which had been pretty thick, was thinned out to the point where there were wide swaths of the sky that were now clear. She also spotted several green, wet, organic-looking ships flying in the sky. They were really gross-looking with thick veins that ran around the ships. They were also moving much faster than the huge hordes.

“Firing main cannon.” Mother called out on the radio again.

“Again?” Freya thought, surprised. She pulled her gun off the edge of the trench and ducked down,taking cover.

“Firing!” Mother called out, as a second muffled boom came from the ship behind Freya.

Freya watched the live feeds from the drones. She didn’t see anything for about a second or so, then the shell tore through the huge dust cloud. The dust cloud blew out as more dust was added to the atmosphere. Seconds later the ground around her started to shake again. This time it was much worse.

Freya fell over, even though she was crouching down, as the ground buckled and bounced side to side. She saw parts of the trench collapse in on itself, but thankfully it wasn’t anywhere near her team. Then, all of a sudden, the shaking stopped. Freya remained where she was - not sure if the ground was going to shake again or not. She hesitantly stood up and looked around. The first person she saw was Cannon, who was about four or so feet away. She was already on her feet and looking around. Behind her, Freya spotted Lurch and Monkeyman getting to their feet. Monkeyman helped Lurch to stand up.

“Enemy air incoming!” Mother shouted and there was a loud whoosh sound as the dropship’s missiles fired. Then there were several loud fart sounds as the Shand’s autocannons started to fire. The noise was so loud that, even with her armor’s external audio off, she still heard it. The fart noise from the auto cannons made the insides of her chest shake violently. Freya ducked back down, hoping the trench around her didn’t fall in due to the noise.

“Brace for incoming fire!” Mother shouted a few seconds later.

The world became a kaleidoscope of noise and dark shapes seconds later. Freya found herself flying through the air for about a second before falling back down to the ground, only to be hit with a blast wave throwing her in an unknown direction. She bounced and rolled once the wave was done with her. She could hear screams of people calling for medics over the radio, but it sounded muffled, like they were talking underwater. There was a loud, high-pitched keening sound that seemed to ring above all the voices.

Completely disoriented, Freya felt someone grab her from behind and pull her backwards. Unable to comprehend anything she was seeing, she let the person pull on her as she lay there limply. Then she was falling again, but it was only a short distance. Whoever had pulled her rolled her over. It was very hard for Freya to see who it was as the person was just a grey blur in front of her.

“Get up and fight!” Someone yelled. She didn’t recognize the voice, but it somehow sounded familiar at the same time.

The person handed her a rifle. Freya looked down as her vision cleared and she recognized it as her main rifle, the ASO. She looked up, hoping to see who handed her the gun, but all she saw was a headless person beside her. Blinking at the corpse, she felt everything come back. Her hearing came back first, as the people on the radio were suddenly extremely clear. Someone was yelling about warriors falling from the sky. Grabbing her rifle, she stood up and turned towards the trench wall. As she did, she saw exactly what the person on the radio was shouting about. High in the sky there were several of the ugly organic ships dropping warriors on their position.

“They really are falling from the sky.” Freya muttered to herself as she raised her rifle.

As she looked through her scope she noted that a lot of the data that it normally showed her was missing. The areas where it told her the wind speed and direction were dark. The distance meter was working, but it flickered occasionally. She did her best to ignore the distractions, but it was hard.

She found her first target, which was a warrior falling fast nearly directly above her. She barely had time to aim and fire, before the warrior fell just outside her trench only a couple of feet away. Freya had to look up from her scope to see the warrior who had landed on its back right in front of her. She waited a second to see if it would get up, but it remained on the ground extremely still. Hoping it was dead, Freya raised her gun again and looked for more targets.

One thing she noticed as she raised her rifle was that there seemed to be a lot of bat-looking constructs flying around. She ignored them as she deemed them too many and too small for her to make a dent in them. Instead she tracked another falling warrior. Hastily, she took aim and fired. It was hard to see if she hit it as it hit the ground soon after she fired. She left it alone when it didn’t try to get up or move after it hit the ground.

She moved on to another falling target and was pulling back the trigger when something big hit her back, throwing her into the wall of the trench. Pain hit her a second later as her right arm dropped to her side useless. She fell to the ground screaming in pain, but somehow kept her gun from falling away from her by holding onto it with her left hand.

Her health was flashing at forty-one percent with her back and right arm, on the outline of her body on her HUD, flashing red. She turned around to see what hit her, and she spotted a bat covered in red blood squirming on the muddy ground. In a fit of rage she stood up and raised her foot, stomping on the bat several times until it stopped moving. It was only after she stopped stomping on it that she felt the pain of doing so. She was about to collapse again when a figure fell into the trench with her.

She looked up to see Maddog pulling off his backpack as he looked at her arm. “It’s ok. I got you.” He told her as he pulled out a medipen that seemed much bigger than a normal one. Instead of slipping it into her suit he attached it sideways on her back. The pain immediately went away and she felt much better. She looked down at her arm as it started to tingle. A few seconds later she could move her fingers again.

“Give it a couple more seconds, and you should be fine.” Maddog said as he slipped his backpack on again. He paused to look over the lip of the trench before he climbed up and was gone. All in all, he had been in the trench with her for about ten seconds.

Once she could move her hand better than just twitching her fingers, she tossed the gun back into position with her left and put her right hand back on the trigger. She looked around and saw a bunch of warriors in and amongst their positions. She absently noted that most of the bats were gone now. She found the closest warrior and pulled the trigger. Her shot took it right in the kill area, high in the chest. It dropped.

Her next target was blocked by the warrior’s dead body in front of her, so she shuffled a few steps to her right until she had a clear shot. She fired and her target dropped. One of the warriors noticed its friend die and tracked its death back to her. She had just enough time to point her gun at it and pull the trigger without aiming. She hit just left of the kill area, but it was enough to stagger the warrior. While it recovered she took the time to aim and shoot. This time it fell to the ground unmoving.

“Brace! Brace!” Someone yelled over the radio. She absently noted it was not Mother as she lined up another shot. “Incoming fire.”

She pulled the trigger and dropped to the ground, not waiting to see if her shot had hit her target. Huddling at the bottom of the trench, she waited. She didn’t have to wait long before the world went crazy again. A shockwave hit her from behind, coming from the dirt wall, and threw her forward down the trench. Her arm flashed in pain before going numb again as the world flashed into blackness. Something hard hit her leg and something else hit her in her stomach. Then she found herself on the ground face up.

Both her legs were numb and her stomach was screaming at her in sharp pain. She raised her head so that she could look down at her body. She was unable to sit up, nor could she use her right arm to help her raise her shoulder off the ground. When she did raise her head far enough to see, she saw that she had a huge hole in her stomach. Ropy bits of her stomach had spilled out and lay on the ground beside her. Cursing, she laid her head back down. She closed her eyes for a second as the pain threatened to drag her unconscious. When she was able to fight through the pain, she opened her eyes again only to see a huge black ball falling right at her from the sky. She had just enough time to swear before the ball hit.