Author: R. J. Erbacher

He was armed to the teeth. A pulse rifle in his right hand, extra power cartridges on his hips. In his left, a bolt gun, a drum magazine of ammunition plugged in, able to fire one-hundred-forty-four rounds of piercing, fifty-caliber bullets, two spare drums, one at each shoulder. An electric blade, fully charged on his leg. Strapped to the back of his armor suit was a missile launcher, a mini nuke already loaded, in case they found the nest.

It was his job, along with the rest of the other soldiers, to protect the warrior engineers, their gear on roller-sleds, huddled up behind him, a pit crew capable of constructing a temporary shelter, a Garrison Enclosure, in about fifteen minutes that would be fully armed, able to automatically defend a position.

The announcement came over his headset, one minute to touch-down. Two battalions were at each four sides ready to disembark, move the prescribed distance, set up the enclosure, hold the bearing. Once the eight cornerstones were in place dozers would roll out huge sections of spiked fencing that locked together to form an octagon fortress around the transport that would be hard to transgress.

The enemy would try, crawling out of their underground lairs; multi-legged, hardened exoskeleton, oversized claws, pincer jaws, a behemoth scorpion the size of a lion back on earth. Scorchers. Deadly and hard to kill. His team had to move fast, get into place before they had a chance to assemble.

He felt the hard bounce of the landing, the shock absorbers in his suit minimizing the impact. The doors immediately opened, and they dispersed in formation.

Into a swarm. Intelligence had been wrong. They weren’t off in the distance. They were right on top of them. Thousands upon thousands.

He opened up with both guns, destroying two dozen in five seconds, charged into the gap before him of eviscerated entrails and kept firing. Aiming wasn’t necessary. There was so many he couldn’t miss. A single shot of the pulse rifle would tear apart a Scorcher, but a bolt gun blast would rip through four or five in a line, killing some, crippling others. They lunged for his extremities, but he kept them at length and eradicated. Scorchers had one weakness, they fought forward and wouldn’t turn back. Like bugs. He kept moving, clearing a path, giving his men a vanguard to follow.

The surge of monstrosities was endless. His pulse gun voided the charge too quickly and he ejected the clip, smacked a new one off his hip in place and was back firing instantly. He’d loaded a second drum on the bolt gun and gone through most of that before it jammed. He tossed it and started hacking through the throngs with the electric blade while still snapping off pulse beams. Alarms were going off inside his suit as heart rate and health parameters redlined. Never did he stop advancing, stop fighting. Finally, the horde thinned, he’d broken through the mass of Scorchers. The pulse rifle was on the last cartridge, blood-caked blade sizzling in his other hand, he turned and assessed his team’s progress.

He was alone.

Every other soldier and engineer had been annihilated. Not just his direction but the other sides as well. No Garrisons, no fencing. The transport was overrun with Scorchers. His whole army was gone.

He had only one option left. He unharnessed the missile launcher, sighted in on his ship’s core reactor location and fired the nuke. The massive double explosion began incinerating everything in its encompassing path.

He waited for the shock wave to take him.