Bobby didn’t want to die on Mars.
Not like this, anyway. In bed, sure. With a couple of hot bodies around him, even better. With his stomach full and his balls empty - ultimate.
Not at the end of a Xin shoot-out.
“Frag out, frag out!” Frankie was screaming over the comms, throwing plastic attack munitions down the corridor as fast as he could. Shrapnel buzzed and blurred through the smoke-choked air, painting lazy vortices behind them as they caromed off bulkheads. “Frag out, fra…”
Bobby popped back up over the barricade and did a mag dump in the same direction that the frags were going. Something was howling further down the tunnel, shadows and staccato outlines shifting between each explosion and pop. Gunsmoke burnt his nostrils as he remembered to inhale, and his carbine tip was starting to glow red by the time he dropped back behind the jumble of desks and cabinets.
“Second squad, ammo check,” someone hollered from behind them, and two of the new grunts came running, heads down and backs bent almost double under the weight of the ammo case between them. Lexton grabbed one of them before they could stumble into the barricade, and hauled them into cover. Something blue and slimy came arching over the barricade and plopped into the space they had been seconds before, raising acrid acid smoke from the battered insulation tiles in a fraction of a second.
Bobby did a mag check, found himself on his second-last ammo strip, and turned to dash towards the newly arrived ammo crate. He was two steps away from the barricade, already airborne in his leap over the hissing puddle of bio-acid, when something slammed into the barricade from the other side.
Bobby’s world turned sideways, and he went flying down the corridor.
A part of him marveled at the rotation from floor to wall to ceiling, the black tiles becoming glossy white walls becoming pale blue ceiling, and then he was smashing down hard, helmet flying, carbine skittering off in another direction. He bounced, once - fucking Mars gravity, man - and then he came down again, cheek-first into a dead body from Third Squad. His world began to spin even as his body slid to a stop amidst the blood and debris around him.
“Private Bobby! Stop fucking around and get back into the fight, boy, or so help me God, I will feed you to these assholes myself!” Sergeant Kelso’s voice was a roar in Bobby’s face seconds later, blocking out the blue ceiling as the hulking sergeant bent over him. Gauntlets reached down, latched onto his vest, and hauled him back to his feet again in a clatter of gear. “Weapon - enemy - that way!”
Each word was shouted with enough punctuation to be a published book of its own, and Bobby’s drill school training saw him drunkenly scrabbling for his carbine even as the sergeant was yelling at other marines. Shapes were milling around him, trampling the fallen bodies and kicking his carbine this way and that, and by the time he finally got his hands on it the barricade was totally lost.
It was something the scientists called a bio-bot, something bred in a Xin tank somewhere. The grunts called them golems - big, stupid, hard to put down - but it didn’t really matter what you called them once they could get their hands on you.
They had six of those.
They looked like the Xin, just bigger and bulkier - and the Xin looked like humans, just bigger and greyer - so it towered almost a full three metres overhead as it swung and roared at the marines around it. A ceramic carapace covered most of its chest and abdomen, bone white and pocked with bullet impacts, and purple scales flared down its arms and legs. The inverted, V-shaped mouth that it shared with the Xin was wide open, showing crystalline teeth and a glowing purple tongue easily as long as its arms, which it used to lash out at anything that came too close. Bluish saliva spun from its mouth in fat lines, blurring into mist the moment it got close to its hands. Two bulging saucer-plate eyes, marbles of solid black, stared out at God knows what in the tunnel.
Bobby remembered reading about their adrenal output during a briefing, and how the bio-bots burned hot enough to boil water if you could get close enough to them with a kettle. A stupid mental image in the training halls, and an even more stupid one now that he was seeing it in action again.
Its six arms moved faster than the human eye could follow. Double-jointed, cartilage-boned, something-something lab engineered - Command was still figuring it out from the handful they had managed to dissect. Bottom line was simple: this thing was fuck fast.
It had come through the barricade right on the heels of whatever explosion had kicked Bobby’s ass down the corridor, and was now busy laying into the defenders around it in a blur of grey, purple, and high-speed blood sprays.
Everything it struck, crumpled.
Every step it took, shifted it by metres.
Every throaty roar it gave sent steam and blood spray pluming through the frigid installation air.
Marines were firing and hollering, weapons discharging at where the bio-bot was, at where it had been, at where it might be - but nothing seemed to work. It blurred past Lexton and slapped him, sending his head one way and his body the other. Cherk and Gavvy were dumping the squad automatic in the general direction that it was, fire and lightning filling the corridor for five metres in front of their position - and the bio-bot was on them an instant later, ripping the gun apart before laying into the gunners. Cherk went headfirst into a bulkhead and suddenly no longer had a neck, while Gavvy took a kick to the chest that sent a long sausage of blood bursting from his mouth even as he flew backwards and disappeared into one of the neighbouring labs. The wrecked autocannon they had been manning became a club, smashing down Roxley and Ash in a spray of armour shards and shrieks, and then it was moving again.
Bobby aimed in the general direction of the carnage, breathed out, and pulled the trigger all the way down.
Past the semi-only position, past the warning from the training sergeant about wasting ammo, past the friendly fire concerns, and all the way down to the end.
They called it Endgame Mode, in training, and joked about it.
Bobby wasn’t laughing.
Each muzzle flash was a blink, a captured moment frozen in time between flickers of gunfire and the shadows that wanted to fill the corridor.
Blink
The bio-bot decapitated Johnny, hitting him so hard with the autocannon that the weapon’s receiver jammed into the corridor wall and stuck fast.
Blink
Frankie was screaming with a grenade in each hand, and then suddenly had a red fountain where his throat was.
Blink
Sergeant Kelso was racking his shotgun, screaming something wordless, and the bio-bot was reaching for him…
Blink
Sergeant Kelso was standing there with only one arm, already reaching for his sidearm and ignoring the blood geysering out of his torso.
Blink
Sergeant Kelso was gone, just another body on the floor, and the bio-bot was reaching for Bobby.
Bobby screamed and fell backwards, and something blurred through the space where his face had been a fraction of a second ago. Wetness across his cheek, the strange realisation that he could no longer see his nose, and then he was flat on his back on the floor, still screaming, trigger finger still all the way down in Endgame Mode. The carbine barrel was right against the bio-bot’s groin.
Blink
It mewled, lunging down and
Blink
Claws raked the air, shredding the carbine and Bobby’s left arm in a flush of heat and movement. Feet stamped down, smashing his right knee, and Bobby jerked up and slammed his remaining fist into the same hole where he had just put two rounds. He was shouting, pain and fear and elation and heart-bursting adrenaline all at once, blood spraying from the hole that had been his nose, and when his hand felt something squirming, he grabbed it and yanked back.
A kick to the hip spun him like a top down the corridor, his elbow stump fountaining, and it was only when he landed, bounced, and opened his eyes that he realised his hand was still gripping whatever had squirmed under his fingers a second before.
Bobby looked at his hand, saw the purple-red intestine bulging and convulsing, and looked back at where the bio-bot still stood. A line of gut, metres long, connected his hand to the abomination’s groin.
A faintly surprised look crossed its face, and it took a tottering step forward before its knees folded. The floor shook when it dropped to its knees, and again when it keeled over and its chest struck the corridor floor. It curled up, hand after hand reaching down to cover the gaping hole in its groin, even as a flood of purple blood spilled out around it.
It began to scream.
Bobby screamed back, yanking on the intestine and roaring profanities at the top of his voice as he tried to struggle to his feet. His right leg refused to cooperate, and his left arm felt unbalanced - no, it was missing - and his right hand was convulsively clenched around the slimy section of gut, and
Blink
Hands on his shoulders were dragging him backwards, grimy faces looking down at him with a mix of concern and grinning white teeth. The fuck were they smiling about? The corridor was different, the barricade was gone, the bio-bot was nowhere to be seen. His right arm was soaked in purple all the way to the shoulder.
“Sarge! He’s alive, the mad bastard’s alive!” Voices around him, corridors sliding past, more marines sprinting the other way with guns at the ready. Whoops and cheers as some of the marines saw him being dragged by. Fourth Squad?
Where the fuck had they been before?
“Wait, no, stop,” Bobby mumbled, slapping at the hands on his shoulders. Purple splattered and streaked around him. “Lemme go, I need to… finish that fucker…”
Laughs of disbelief around him, the dragging continuing. Someone with a medic armband leaned over him and shone something in his eyes.
“Mild concussion, and major blood loss. He’ll make it, but it will be close.” Medic Armband clapped something over his bleeding stump, and the world
Blink
Bobby was in a forward medical post, somewhere deeper in the tunnel complex. An orderly skipped past between puddles of blood and ammo crates-turned-benches, and almost fell flat on his ass in the slick. Someone was screaming, someone else was farting - or whatever was causing the smell.
Oh - gut wound. Those always smelled the worst.
Bobby was sitting up, propped against the corridor wall. Something padded and silvery clumped across his face where his nose had been. His left arm was bandaged, and a line of duct tape held the stump elevated above his shoulder’s level.
The fuckers had taped him to the wall. Talk about a rush job.
Medic Armband was at his side again, flashlight out and shining for his eyes. Bobby screwed his face up and looked away.
“Fuck off, man.” His right hand came up, purple fingers covering his face. The bio-bot blood smelled of vinegar and copper electrodes.
“I dunno where they made you, marine, but we sure could use more of you.” Armband made a note on his compad, then checked the splint around Bobby’s knee. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
Bobby looked down at the splint. When had that happened?
“East tunnels, section four. We had the intersection barricades.” Something trickled out from beneath his nose bandage and into his mouth. He spat copper and red to the side before continuing. “They blew the barricades and sent a golem in. Fucking thing wiped most of my squad.”
“Do you remember what happened to it?” Curiosity, mixed with concern.
Wait - did this idiot think he was concussed?
Bobby snorted, and blew more blood and snot down his chin.
“I shot it in the balls, and then pulled its guts out. Then I passed out at some point.”
“Ah…” Armband stammered, and started laughing. “Something like that, yeah. The guys that brought you in said they found you stabbing the bio-bot with your bayonet, and screaming about its balls. They had to knock you out to get you off the carcass.”
Gear check - bayonet missing. Bobby patted at his belt just to be certain he wasn’t seeing double.
Nope. The scabbard was empty. Gunny was going to kill him if he found out.
“Well shit, I guess I got a bit carried away.” Bobby looked at his left arm - what was left of it - and then felt between his legs. Everything was still where it needed to be, nice and snug and warm. He smiled.
“Well, I got his balls, and I still have mine. That’s a win.”
Bobby closed his eyes, and passed out.
Cool action sci-fi!
Man I loved this!