Chapter Fifty-Eight - Burn Silent Into That Good Night

"There's no such thing as an unprepared samurai.

Only a samurai who isn't prepared at the moment...

What do you mean, that's an oxymoron?"

--Longbow, to a new samurai, 2056

***

Walking towards mortar fire was... probably not the wisest thing I'd ever done, but so far the army had been pretty professional, and I trusted them to hit more or less where we told them to, instead of bringing down shells right onto my pretty head.

Gomorrah and I were at the front of the formation, which had stretched out to the sides with a pair of 'wings.' Some soldiers were running backwards towards the trucks and the edge of the forest. They were the ones laying quick traps with resonators behind us. Setting up a route that we could use to extract from when the time came to run the hell away.

I raised my Laser-pointer up and tapped a model four centre-mass with a trio of shots, which sent it flopping down, very much dead. Gomorrah and I were in the middle of the formation and a bit ahead of all the soldiers. They were moving at a very slow, steady pace. Gom and I were moving at a less steady, less slow pace.

"They make walking in the woods look so easy," Gomorrah muttered.

I chuckled. "I know, right? Fucking roots, man."

"Burn the whole place down. See how these bushes and stuff handle being turned to ash. That'll be easier to cross."

"Hehe," I said. It wasn't my most convincing chuckle. "Just... hold off on that until we're through, yeah?"

"We'll see," Gomorrah said. She stomped ahead, and I jogged to catch up. I popped a few more rounds into some aliens that my augs highlighted for me. The light from the soldiers behind and from the pilot light on the end of Gomorrah's flame thrower was useful, but it wasn't exactly lighting up the whole world out here. Some aliens were sneaky enough that I only caught sight of them as they moved.

"You have any ideas for how to get rid of the hive?" I asked.

"I figured you'd want to bomb it," Gomorrah said. "We don't want to alert all of the other local hives to anything going on here, so I'm afraid we'll have to be a bit more subtle with the bombing."

"Right," I agreed. Bombs could be subtle. Sure.

We crossed from the part of the forest that still had some vegetation into an area that was completely cleared of plantlife. Even the trees looked like they had been stripped of their bark, and a number of them had their branches pruned, with what looked suspiciously like little bite marks around the points where those branches met the trunks.

Gomorrah stopped, and I did the same a moment later. She raised her flamethrower, then fired a cyclonic blast of twisting flames into the branches above.

Usually, the antithesis were deathly quiet. It was one of those things that made them so obviously un-Earthly. They never made a sound. No noise, no screaming, no growling.

They squealed as they burned, however. Faint cries that I suspected were more about their lungs boiling than actual screams of pain, but it was still a surreal noise to hear while burning carcases fell from the trees.

I could almost, almost see what Gomorrah saw in those flames.

I raised my own rifle and put a few out of their misery, then I started scanning ahead. The fire wouldn't go unnoticed. Not with the dark of night to contrast against the glowing tornado of flames and the now-burning canopy above.

Just as I suspected, some aliens took umbrage at Gomorrah's actions, and the alert was sounded. Dozens of blurs started to rush out towards us. Some were covered in thin layers of fresh mud, hiding them against the ground as they slithered forwards.

I took aim, then started firing. A moment later, the area was filled with far more noise as the soldiers did the same. Their guns were equipped with large baffles on the end, and those did a lot to quiet them down, but they were far from perfect, there was a constant cracking sound, like a thousand whips going off at once as the first wave of the hive was annihilated.

"Hold!" the lieutenant called.

I put down a last dog-like model three, then glanced around. There were lots of dead aliens, most of them spread out ahead of us, but not too much else. The guns mounted to my shoulders scanned along with me, and I switched to infra-red, then to other forms of vision, just in case.

"Looks clear," I said.

"For now," Gomorrah said. "Let's keep moving. I want to get a little closer in." She stepped ahead, stomping through a fire without a care in the world before I jogged after her. I didn't step right through the flames. Fuck having fire-proof gear on, I wasn't risking it.

I suspect that the main hive is just ahead. You should be within a hundred metres of it already.

"Noted," I muttered.

There were fewer trees as we moved in deeper. There were stumps, however, and it looked like they'd been assaulted by the mother of all beavers too.

"We'll hold here," Lieutenant Moreau said as we came to the edge of a clearing. We could all see the hive ahead, but I didn't know what to do about it.

I'd seen some hives before. They were all dug into the ground though, or tucked away into a building somewhere. This was... different. "What in the fuck is that?" I asked.

A normal above-ground hive.

The hive looked like an anthill, if ants slurped up their body mass in steroids every day. It was a massive brown bump, three times as tall as I was and covered in thick, half-buried roots. The roots had small branches coming off of them, with deep, dark-green leaves covering them. From above it probably looked a little strange, but not unlike a weird tree surrounded by a clearing.

From here, it was clear that this wasn't normal, not natural.

"Stop gawking," Gomorrah said over a private channel. "This is what normal hives look like when they don't have an environment to hide in. Check the entrances."

That made sense, I supposed. The dirt was clearly pulled from all around, and then piled up over the hill. There were small entrances and holes all over. Some were small enough that my closed fist would barely fit. Others I could crawl into without difficulty. Most had roots around their entrance, acting as supports of sorts.

There was some actual engineering going on here. Weird, fucky alien engineering, but engineering all the same.

And I was looking forward to blowing it up.

"Down!" Gomorrah shouted.

I leapt down, crouching on one knee almost too slowly to avoid something blurring past over my left shoulder. Gomorrah had dove aside, missing the blur altogether.

Some poor fuck behind us wasn't so lucky. I heard him screaming a moment before some spines rained down around me. An antithesis artillery ball? I noticed dirt raining down from one of the holes.

The damned hive could shoot outwards? "Is that artillery in the hive?" I asked.

It's likely that there's a model fifteen within, with enough space to manoeuvre. Notice the small wires leading out of the hive. A model seventeen is likely acting as a spotter for it.

I didn't know that was possible at all. Still, we had our own support like that. I sent the coordinates to the mortar team, then raised my gun and took some shots into and around the hole that they'd fired from.

Aliens started to pour out of the ground around us. Mostly smaller models that popped out of hidden tunnels and scurried our way. Some of them weren't the kinds of models I was used to seeing. Headless, monkey-like model tens scampered and tossed themselves our way. Some... tentacled things that I didn't recognize got some rounds punched through them as well.

I saw and heard a few resonators fly overhead while the night was lit up by muzzle flashes and swaying flashlights.

"Myalis!" I shouted as I reloaded in a hurry. "I need something that produces some light! And I need... fuck it, something that'll shake the earth a little. Let's collapse their little anthill right on their ugly heads."

"I like that idea!" Gomorrah shouted next to me before she opened up with her flamer and drew a line of fire across the clearing. "If you're gonna do that, please do so in a hurry."

"Hey, it wouldn't be so quick if I knew what we were getting into," I snapped back.

This whole thing was a disorganised mess.

Still... kinda fun.

***