Old Glory Chapter 3

There was a moment of quiet before Powell lost his cool. He stumbled back into Hotchkiss, his breath coming fast and ragged. “That ain’t wolves that did this,” he blurted, panic threading his voice. “You saw the drone. You saw the arm. Wolves don’t rip up ceramics like that! Something else is out here, something worse, and we’re walking right into it!”

Hotchkiss grabbed him by the harness and shook him once, his own composure cracking. “Shut it, Bert! Get a hold of yourself, before you get us all dusted!”

Powell’s eyes darted from face to face. “Come on man, you saw it! Something went right through that Doberman and ate that guy!”

Sarge’s voice cut through, hard and commanding. “Enough! We don't know what it is or what happened.” His firm tone didn't match his eyes, though. He wasn't feeling any better about it. Truth was, ever since the Ark arrived they had no idea what was out here. He'd heard about the wolves, among other things that command was working to keep from the rank and file, but this... 

Silph’s eyes narrowed. “Powell, knock it off. You want to run your mouth, do it back on the Ark. Out here you stay quiet and keep your eyes open.”

Powell swallowed, but the coiled tension in his frame didn't abate. He pulled back from them, clutching his LMG to his chest like a comfort blanket. The tension held in the air, heavy and suffocating as the twilight cast everything into a dimmer, darker grey. The twins looked at one another, and Doggit was suddenly very interested in his weapon as Hotchkiss sucked in a hard breath, before forcing it out.

They all knew what the signs meant, but only Albrect and Silph carried themselves like it was nothing new. They had lived through the Collapse. Doggit and Hotchkiss had their own scars. But the twins and Powell had been voluntolds, given rifles and skill-loads for soldiering, the unlucky roll of having a 'jack and no usable skills on the Ark. Worse still, the last two ops they were on were smooth as silk, enough to give them a skewed sense of the job. It wasn't hard to tell that they weren't ready for... whatever this was.

The trail only grew clearer the farther they went. Brush was crushed flat by the tromping of exo-enhanced boots, wide bands of undergrowth hacked and torn aside, and branches snapped at awkward angles gave the impression that Heimdall-9 was moving fast, real fast. Splintered trees still oozed sap around rail slugs buried deep within their trunks, the bark splintered in wild angles showing they were spraying with the kind of desperation only terror could give. Grenade craters scarred the earth, dirt flung out in violent sprays, and from the look of it, many had hit... something. Yet there were no bodies, no limbs, no scattered armor or weapons, even with all the blood they found. Not theirs, not whatever they were shooting at, nothing.

The further they advanced the worse it looked. The churn of mud showed gouges where they'd lost their footing, dragged trenches where they tried to pull themselves loose from the muck, and the kind of churning that came with people fleeing. The pattern of fire was wild, arcs and bursts that spoke volumes about how much whatever they were shooting at scared them. Albrect had seen it before, in South America, on the Mexican Bulwark, and on the Homefront, when things had fully gone to hell.

Then the tracks appeared. Pressed into the wet soil were prints unlike anything human. Four-toed and broad, shaped almost like the foot of some enormous possum, they followed close behind the path of retreat. Each print was deep, claws gouging the earth. They had stalked the soldiers, pacing them, keeping stride as the fight collapsed into flight. The mingled signs- the frantic retreat, the feral tracks, the missing dead, all of it painted a dark picture. Heimdall-9 had been hunted, cut down, and dragged into the dark, but the question remained, by what?

Hotchkiss broke the silence, his voice lacking the swagger he was so well known for. "Heimdall fought hard as hell. Has to be a thousand rounds gone downrange over here. Not sure how anything managed to shrug that off."

Marie spoke softly, her voice carrying over comms. “Then where is everyone? Nothing could have survived this.”

“Something obviously did, sis. Something nasty,” Mitch muttered darkly.

Albrect rose, shaking his head. “Speculation doesn’t help us. All you''re doing is winding yourselves up." He cut off the conversation at the hilt, "Doggit, how’s the line?”

Doggit checked his wrist display. “Signal’s degrading worse the deeper we go. The Pandion’s still relaying what we send but it’s dropping half the packets. It's weird, though. I ran a deep scan and there's nothing out here that should be messing with our caster.”

Hotchkiss gave a humorless chuckle. “Makes me miss the old satcom system. One bird in the air and you could talk across the world.”

“It is what it is. Focus on the now.” Albrect said. “We have our orders, and we're going to find them, or what’s left of them.”

The squad pressed on. None of them were happy, and the silence said as much. Every one of them felt it, the oppressive air, the way their helmets seemed too small, the hidden unease that speaking aloud might draw the swamp’s nightmare closer. It reminded them of the Collapse. The tides of infected and the Plaguetouched, of the wall of flesh and claws and clicking, scuttling things. They remembered monsters pulling men from their bunks and the sound of screams in the night, and this... this made them feel like they were right back there.

The signs of battle thickened as they pressed forward. Spent magazines lay half-buried in muck. Blood streaked in dark ribbons along roots and trunks, dried to a brown crust in some places and still tacky in others. Trees were shattered where grenades had ripped through them, shattered brangues and sheared stumps marking the trail. A long stitch of rail impacts scarred an outcrop, a trail of craters marching across the ground in a line of pure violence. The mud itself was thick and clinging, soaked red until it seemed as if the earth was bleeding. Every step sank into the residue of the slaughter, and still Heimdall-9 had kept running.

The swamp gave way to rocky ground, barren and scarred as though life itself had burned away. Their radios fell into near-useless static, words chopped into fragments, and the hope that open terrain might clear the line died the moment they reached open air, and the night sky stretched out ahead of them in a starless, moonless morass of inky black.

Ahead stood a hill, stripped bare. At its crest slumped the figures of men, twisted and unmoving. Sergeant Albrect raised a hand and the squad advanced with weapons ready. None of them had any delusions that whoever was up there was alive-

Then one of them moved. A headless corpse twitched as something inside it shifted. A creature, rat-like and vile, forced its way up through torn flesh. Its snout was slick with blood and half-digested organs. The thing rose to its feet, no taller than four feet, and let out a shriek that split the air.

“Target!” Silph barked.

Hotchkiss fired, his rifle cracking once. The round punched clean through the creature’s skull, dropping it mid-scream. For a heartbeat, silence reigned.

Then the forest answered. Screeches erupted from every side, a cacophony of voices shrill and violent. As the sounds of hundreds of wailing voices washed over the hill, it suddenly dawned on Albrect just what Heimdall-9 had been running from. He wasted no time, ripping the emergency launcher from his belt and firing a flare into the night. The red light streaked skyward, a beacon to the Pandion above.

“Eyes out!” He commanded, tension leaking into his tone, “Here they come!”

Yellow eyes lit the treeline, dozens upon dozens, then hundreds. Shapes rushed forward, ratmen armed with jagged weapons, crossbows cobbled from steel and bone, shields of rotted wood. Their armor was stitched leather and scrap metal, dripping with oil and filth.

“Light them up!” Silph snapped.

Valkyrie-5 opened fire. Rail weapons cracked, bolts of energy slicing through the night. The first wave of ratmen collapsed in screams and gore, but the horde kept coming, shrieking as they scrambled over the bodies of their fallen. The squad fired in controlled bursts, discipline drilled into every movement, but the press of enemies did not falter.

Above, the Pandion screamed lower, engines thundering as it dropped toward the extraction point. For a moment, for a single, desperate, hungry moment, they felt hope. They could make it. They could get out.

Then the night shattered. A bolt of ionized lightning, thick as a man’s torso, lanced from a knot of robed creatures at the treeline. It struck the Pandion square on the wing. Metal screamed as it warped under the heat and fury of the bolt, it's ablative paint peeling away like plastic hit with a blowtorch. The entire tilt-wing assembly sheared off, trailing fire as the craft lurched, the pilots desperately trying to maintain control over the craft, but it was to no avail. The shuttle plunged down, slamming into the swamp, impacted cockpit first into the soupy swamp below. For a moment, it sat there, then, with the force of a two ton bo,mb, the ruined craft detonated, flattening the forest as the smoke mushroomed into the air.