CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Battle
Off to the left, about 75 feet away, Alcheck heard the distinctive sound of the first claymore detonation, followed quickly by another, and then another a few seconds later. One of the soldiers peered around the edge of the sandbag wall and held up a hand signal that indicated visual contact with the enemy had been made, which Alcheck realized was a good thing: the claymores must have damaged its c at least a little bit. Alcheck gripped the handle of his rifle a little harder, and he saw several the soldiers near him do the same.
The scout slinked back towards them to reported what he saw.
“It’s out there Major, but not completely invisible. It looks like electrical sparks were coming off it from everywhere. I could see it in silhouette, not quite visible but not fully cloaked anymore either.”
“Good, I think the claymores damaged its cloaking mechanism. We saw something like that during the first attack. That can only help our odds.”
The other soldiers nodded in agreement. Fighting a nigh-unbeatable alien creature they could see would be infinitely less daunting than one that was invisible to them and dealt death without seeing it coming. Alcheck still didn’t like their odds, but they had just improved significantly, that much he knew.
“Alright, back into position. My bet is it now realizes that we’ve got the perimeter covered with mines and it’s going to try to find its way into this funnel before long. We’d better be ready for it.”
“Yes, sir!” The soldiers immediately returned to their defensive positions, setting up overlapping fields of fire across the entrance of the funnel created by the makeshift barricade walls. The Xe’Tara warrior would be coming through there any time now, and they had to be ready to cut it down to size.
They waited. And waited. It felt like forever to Alcheck, but a quick glance at his watch indicated it was barely a minute since that quick conversation.
A sudden explosion of automatic weapons fire interrupted the thought. It was here.
And it didn’t seem phased by the gunfire one bit, whether the conventional rounds or the plasma rounds that some of the soldiers had been issued.
Bullets ricocheted off its body, plumes of electrical energy erupting with each impact. The plasma shots seemed to just glide across its surface, but not penetrate. What Alcheck and the men didn’t know, what they couldn’t have known, is that with the imminent failure of its cloaking mechanism, the probe in the Xe’Tara warrior was able to shunt a significant amount of energy towards its shielding by preemptively shutting down the cloak. It was now completely visible, but considerably tougher to damage.
The first soldier was cut in half from head to toe faster than Alcheck could register. The rapidly expanding pool of blood and guts below the two halves grew rapidly as the halves fell apart and struck the floor with a sickening thud.
Alcheck raised his rifle to fire but quickly realized that the other soldiers’ rifles were doing no appreciable damage and he didn’t expect his would do any better. The next soldier’s arms were cleaved clean off at the elbows, his rifle falling to the floor as a result. The blood-curdling scream that came from him began to turn Alcheck’s stomach, but it was mercifully cut short as the top half of his head was sliced off by a beam of energy cutting through it effortlessly, nearly striking Alcheck in the process.
The warrior dipped and dodged as Alcheck fired. His plasma reservoir quickly ran dry despite its massive capacity, and before he had a chance to swap in a fresh one, the warrior was upon him.
Alcheck looked up, the creature having a good foot of height on him at least. He saw its chest heaving up and down as it drew breath, the energy of its shielding gently phasing all around it as if it was covered by a glow like the Aurora Borealis he had seen as a young soldier during a deployment to an Alaskan base. Alcheck couldn’t move. It wasn’t fright that froze him; it was a morbid fascination of the thing standing before him. He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that his life was about to end, but this creature, this entity that seemed to be made of pure murderous rage, was strangely beautiful to his eyes. It was a perfect predator, after all, a perfect soldier, and who better to appreciate such a thing than a fellow soldier, and its soon to be prey?
Without warning, the warrior shot out its hand and wrapped it around Alcheck’s neck. He instinctively grabbed the forearms of the creature as it lifted him off the ground. He immediately began struggling for breath, wondering just how long it would be before he passed out. The warrior lifted him by the neck, drawing Alcheck’s face even with its own. Its grip wasn’t as tight as it could be, Alcheck realized. If it was, he knew he wouldn’t be having these thoughts. No, it wasn’t quite ready to take his life for some reason.
It was examining him now, taking stock, recognizing. It knew who he was somehow and wanted to take in every line of his face, every contour, for whatever purpose it had. It twisted his head to one side, then the other, as if scanning every dimension of his face.
Alcheck began hitting the arms of the creature, trying to escape. His strikes began to lose strength though as the lack of oxygen reaching his brain began to take its toll. He knew it wouldn’t be long now.
The creature, finally satisfied whatever curiosity had thus far stayed its hand, squeezed now, intensely. The pain began to grow exponentially as blood vessels began to burst, and sinew began to snap all through his neck. Alcheck’s face was now a bright red, blood being forced up into his skull and into the skin of his face.
The creature increased its pressure, and Alcheck tried to scream in agony, but could not. All he could do was open his mouth as blood exploded out from it in a spray all over the arms of the creature. It didn’t faze the warrior in the least.
Alcheck’s right eye began to extrude from its socket, the pressure building to an absurd level.
Amazingly, Alcheck actually thought: I wonder what it feels like for your eyeball to explode?
It was the final conscious thought he ever had.
He lost consciousness just a second before that eyeball did explode, before the warrior’s other hand raised up, gripped the top of Alcheck’s head and pulled his head clean off his body.
——————————
Alex examined the now complete device that his subconscious had guided his hands to build. It definitely was a weapon of some kind. In fact, Alex realized that it looked a lot like one of the futuristic rifles featured in first-person shooter games set in space.
Well, that makes sense! If we’re gonna fight an alien, we’d want to do it with a space gun!
Alex looked down the barrel of the rifle and instinctively clicked a small yellow button on the left side of the hand grip. Ten feet away, on the far wall appeared a holographic symbol that started out large and then contracted as Alex swept the weapon across the wall, across various objects. The hologram was clearly some sort of aiming system and as it crossed the items on the wall, the jars and electronic components and tools on the shelves on the wall, it locked on to each with an audible tone as the hologram shrank and assumed the form of the object being tracked. It was an elegant system, simple to understand and use but highly accurate. It made aiming a simple matter of pointing in the right general direction.
This was a very advanced gun for certain, the likes of which Alex had never seen before.
His hand glided over the trigger, but he didn’t dare pull it. He had no real idea what this thing was going to shoot and for all he knew he might blow the room to kingdom come if he tried it. In fact, for all he knew, this thing might shoot a small nuke and blow up the whole damned base in one go.
“That might not be the worst thing right now,” Alex joked to himself.
No, he’d have to wait for a real target before risking that, even though he logically guessed it would be silly to have built something that would kill him if he dared fire it. No, it was probably safe, unless you were the thing being aimed at.
Alex charged out the door of the lab and towards the hangar bay where the sounds of battle had raged for the last five minutes or so. He couldn’t tell if his guys were winning or if the Xe’Tara warrior was, but he knew it was a hell of a fight either way. That only made sense: with that many men, win or lose, they would give the thing hell for as long as possible.
The cacophony of rifle fire, yelling and grenade explosions seemed to indicate a massive battle, larger than should even be possible in the hangar bay. While the bay was positively huge by any standards, that many men crammed in made it seem a lot smaller than it was. The acoustics of the building too were probably amplifying the sound making it all sound louder than it really was, though Alex suspected not by as much as he’d like to think. He knew it really was a maelstrom in there, whatever the relative magnitude of things.
But something was wrong, and Alex couldn’t put his finger on it as he ran down the long hallway that led to the bay. Something about the noise sounded off to him, a characteristic he couldn’t quite figure out.
By the time he reached the elevator that would take him up the 50 feet or so to the entrance of the bay he realized what was wrong: the sound was rapidly quieting. There was far less gunfire than before, far less shouting and yelling and screaming of soldiers. In fact, it was quieting so much now that he could nearly hear individual voices and make out what they were saying.
And what he heard chilled his blood in a single beat of his heart.
“Fall back! Fall back! Regroup at the X-100, take up defensive positions!”
“Rogers, how many do you have left on your side?”
“Two, sir! Me and Repgar, that’s all that’s left over here!”
“I’ve got Austin and Babbage, and Simmons is alive but badly injured. Any ideas how to stop this thing?”
“Not a clue! It’s cutting through the last rank of guys beyond the last barricade, but I don’t think they stand any more of a chance than we do.”
“Fuck this, let’s just set C4 charges and blow the fucking thing up the second it crosses the perimeter line!”
“That’ll take all of us right along with it!”
“No shit! Better that then what that fucking thing has been doing to our guys!”
“Alright, yeah, fuck it, let’s do it!”
If Alex was following the conversation correctly, then he guessed that there were no more than ten men total left alive up there. The warrior had slaughtered 140 men?! Even given what he knew about it and had seen first-hand what is was capable of, that still seemed unbelievable. These were hardened soldiers who had set up a proper defense scheme. And that’s not even considering the firepower they had brought to bear on the thing. It had only been about ten minutes or so since the battle began he figured.
That degree of death seemed impossible to Alex. But, if he was right and 140 men had already been killed by this thing, then he had no idea what even his supposed superweapon he was holding in his arms now could do against it.
The elevator door opened, and Alex hopped on, hitting the up button as quickly as possible. The doors would open very near the X-100, but on the far side of the outside perimeter Alcheck and the soldiers had set up. He would find himself almost immediately in the middle of whatever battle was still going on up there, he knew. As the door closed behind him and the elevator began to rise, he knelt down, closed his eyes and calmed his mind.
An image appeared in his mind that startled his eyes open. It was just a cloud of some kind, but not a cloud like you would find in the sky. This cloud was shifting shapes almost as if it was alive. He had no idea what it was or where the vision had come from, but somehow it seemed almost like a message, like his subconscious was trying to tell him something.
More information from Melissa, he figured.
“I really wish you would have given me an instruction manual for accessing this shit better, babe,” he muttered to himself.
The elevator abruptly stopped climbing before he had a chance to figure it out though and the door began to open.
The sight that greeted him was like nothing he could have imagined, like something out of the worst nightmare imaginable.
Human bodies in various states of evisceration and dismemberment were scattered across the floor out into the hangar as far as he could see. Arms and legs and heads, severed from the owners, haphazardly lay in pools of blood and viscera. This creature didn’t just kill its enemies, it destroyed them in a manner Alex could barely fathom. Whether it was evil or just incredibly efficient, he wasn’t sure, but the results were devastating either way.
Smoke rose from craters where grenades had been detonated, pieces of cement and metal littered the battlefield like snow on a field in winter. He could see that some claymores had exploded, the explosion embedding bits of fragmentation on the floor and the makeshift outer wall the soldiers had constructed.
Alex had seen death and destruction before, but nothing like this. The one thing he didn’t see was movement. Nothing aside from the smoke from various explosions and the dripping of blood from severed body parts.
As Alex surveyed his surroundings, he instinctively raised the weapon his subconscious had crafted to his shoulder in a firing position as he began to check the area 360-degrees around him. Nothing. No soldiers, no Alcheck, no Xe’Tara warrior.
It must have already breached the outer defenses. It was inside the security perimeter.
He immediately swiveled towards the opening that had been created, the one entry point to the inner line of defense. He could see the top of the X-100 rising above the walls – it was a rather large aircraft – and he began moving towards the entrance, his senses heightened as they always were in a combat situation.
He entered the funnel area between the two defensive perimeters, and it didn’t take long for him to find the sight he knew must have been awaiting him somewhere.
The dead body, or what was left of it, of Major Alcheck.
Alex walked over to the body, and a sick feeling rose in his stomach as he realized there was no head. The ragged edges of Alcheck’s remaining neck and the bits of sinew and veins that hung sickeningly out of the opening told Alex that this had been a violent, sudden death. He could at least be thankful for that.
As he shuffled his feet around the body, he came into contact with something. He looked down, fearing what it was.
The eyes of Major Alcheck stared up at Alex, a pained look in them evident. His mouth was slightly agape, as if to scream one final silent warning to Alex. The thing that had done this was clearly at full strength and Alex felt a pang of doubt like he had never felt before.
He looked at the face of Alcheck’s severed head one last time, trying to replace this hideous vision in his mind with a better memory of the man he considered a friend as he steadied himself for the fight. The warrior couldn’t be far now, might already be on the X-100.
Alex turned towards the opening to the interior defense, weapon at the ready, and he proceeded through the opening. It didn’t take long for him to find his prey.
About 40 feet away, by the door on the underbelly of the X-100, stood the creature, fully visible. This was a surprise to Alex, but he realized that the soldiers and Alcheck must have managed to do enough damage to destroy its cloaking mechanism. That might be the edge he needed, though it hadn’t mattered for 150 soldiers. It was clawing at the door, which was mated very flush with the body panels of the X-100, thanks to Melissa’s exacting construction standards no doubt. This was a good thing because, for all its strength, there was nothing for it to get its claws hooked into, no way for it to tear the door open. Even it, Alex realized, wasn’t strong enough to tear through the solid metal of the X-100’s airframe itself thanks to the high-strength material Melissa has designed especially for it.
Alex smiled a little at the thought that even though she was gone, Melissa’s genius was still with him by way of her technical achievements.
Alex focused his attention on the creature and began to take aim, still not knowing what this weapon would do, assuming it did anything at all. The holographic targeting system recognized the target, altering the shape of the aiming reticulum to that of the creature as it shrunk down to indicate it was locked on.
Before he could pull the trigger though, Alex was noticed.
The creature abruptly stopped its clawing, spun around to face him and size him up. A look of recognition crossed its face.
“Good, you remember me, you son of a bitch!”
The creature let out a grunt that Alex took as an acknowledgment of his comment.
The creature lunged forward to attack, but even its seeming impossible speed wasn’t enough to avoid the blast of energy that emanated from the weapon when Alex pulled the trigger.
He was right: it was some sort of energy weapon, and it was absolutely unlike anything he had ever seen, except perhaps in sci-fi movies that Melissa had made him watch. It was a beam of brilliant blue energy that seemed to have pockets of red pulsating along it. It was a continuous fire, and Alex worked to keep it trained on the creature. There was no recoil whatsoever to contend with, but it was so bright and, Alex was quickly realizing, scorching hot, that his body was instinctively trying to look and move away. He fought the urges and kept his gaze focused on the creature.
The beam seemed to continue pouring energy into the creature for an eternity, though it was actually less than three seconds in total. The warrior was in obvious agony. It flailed about wildly but seemed to almost be stuck in place, unable to jump out of the way of the beam. Its skin began to glow a sickly reddish color, no doubt from the heat spreading across its skin. Smoke began to rise from that same skin, and Alex began to quickly feel elated: he was, he guessed, cooking the damned thing!
The beam cut off suddenly, as if someone had closed the blinds of a window on a sunny day. The creature continued flailing and screaming as it crumpled to the floor, smoke wafting up from seemingly every inch of it.
A dense cloud of smoke was forming around it, and Alex began to sense something wasn’t right. The creature was still acting as if the beam was attacking it, but if it really was cooking the thing then shouldn’t it either be dead right now or at least starting to calm as it died? Why would it still act like…
A knot formed in Alex’s stomach as the Xe’Tara warrior began to stand back up, shaking off the attack, as the dense smoke cloud ceased pouring out of it and began rising.
Alex dropped the weapon, sensing it wouldn’t fire again even if he thought it would do any good.
Fucking thing didn’t work anyway!
The creature gathered itself, hitting its arms and legs and head, almost like a mixed martial arts fighter psyching themselves up for a big fight.
And Alex knew he would be the opponent.
The smoke cloud continued rising above the creature as Alex prepared for combat. With his right hand, he reached over his right shoulder and pulled out the machete that he had sheathed across his back. With his left, he removed the baton he had on his belt, flicked it to expand it and pressed the button on the side that created a two-million-volt bolt of electricity shooting out from one end. If this was to be his final stand he certainly was not going to go down easy. And he thought he recognized a look on the creature’s face that said yes, I know, this is going to be a hell of a fight, bring it on!
Or, was it a different look? Alex hesitated, unsure what he was seeing. The creature was still hitting itself, eyes trained on Alex, but something was missing from those eyes now. It almost seemed to have a diminished malevolence. Alex wasn’t sure, but it almost looked like…
No, it couldn’t be. That didn’t make any sense. It had already endured the heaviest hit Alex knew he could throw at it with that super-weapon. He had to be misreading the expression. It was an alien after all, Alex couldn’t even be sure it had emotions. Yet, something told him it was…
…yes, he was sure now: it was fear. The Xe’Tara warrior had fear in its eyes. Or, if not fear then doubt at the very least. The posturing and preparation for battle, Alex, suspected, was instinctual. Its eyes though, they betrayed what was really going on inside its head.
It was afraid.
As the dense cloud above it ceased rising the Xe’Tara warrior began its advance, as did Alex. It was time to fight, whatever Alex thought he saw in its eyes.