Queen of Jarilo

The sound of engines rose over the din of gunfire and the chattering of the Bugs, wind buffeting Walker as something did a low pass, blowing the tops of the trees as it shed velocity and came about. It was a Penguin fighter-bomber, so named for its stubby wings and bulbous hull, with sleek lines designed for atmospheric flight that somewhat resembled a swimming penguin at a glance. Its hull was painted UNN blue, a graphic of a scantily clad woman holding a can of Bug spray adorning its nose. Walker could see the silhouette of the pilot through the cockpit, placed high for maximum visibility. It hovered over the treetops, the thrusters beneath its belly firing to keep it level, a pod beneath the nose opening to expose a gatling cannon.

Walker knew what was coming, throwing himself behind the cover of the wall and bringing his Marine companion with him, many of the troops around them following suit. The Penguin fired its gun, a stream of thirty-millimeter shells leaving the rotating barrels in an almost unbroken line, strafing the Bugs below and kicking up clouds of dirt and smoke as they chewed into the earth. The noise was alarming even through his helmet's filters, the gun firing so quickly that it blended into a loud hum. The Drones were practically vaporized, blown into clouds of viscera or torn apart and thrown across the battlefield, white-hot shrapnel tearing through their ranks as the bullets fragmented on contact with the ground. The burst only lasted a couple of seconds, but it cut a swathe through the Betelgeusian army, the fortified wall the only thing protecting the Marines from debris.

It fired again, this time aiming at one of the Warriors and cutting it in half. While the larger vessels used railguns, smaller craft could not generate or store enough electricity to power weapons of the necessary scale, and so they used conventional weaponry for this role. That didn't make the Penguin's gun any less destructive, it threw out four thousand armor penetrating, thirty-millimeter rounds per minute that were designed to make light work of armored vehicles.

The Bugs must have known that trying to return fire with only their plasma pistols and rifles was pointless, and they began to disperse, scattering to avoid the Penguin's gun as it hosed them in short bursts.

The majority of their forces were broken and fleeing now, but the ones that had made it inside the base were still wreaking havoc. The Penguin could not support the Marines inside the walls. Even with the precision of a scalpel, the danger of friendly fire was too great. Instead, it fired into the forest as it pursued the fleeing Drones, the gatling gun powerful enough to fell some of the smaller trees.

The Bugs fighting in the compound did not seem deterred by the fact that their reinforcements had abandoned them, and they made no attempt to fall back, fighting tooth and nail. There were perhaps three dozen that had made it inside the courtyard, the Marines on the walls taking pot shots at them as the Krell and Borealans attempted to hold the horde back.

It was a bloodbath down there, a carpet of dead and dying Drones, their green bodily fluids pooling in the dirt beneath the metal grates. The Krell were like living tanks, their thick hides making them almost impervious to damage from knives and small arms fire, and the Borealans fought like demons. They used their long, bayoneted rifles like spears to skewer the aliens, resorting to their wicked claws when the Drones got too close. They were not unkillable, however. Walker cursed to himself as he watched one of the feline aliens get separated from its pack members, the Bugs working as one organism to drag it to the ground and butcher it with their knives. It vanished beneath the swarming insects, but their numbers were thinning now, and a lone Drone wasn't much of a match for a Mad Cat or a pissed off Krell.

Warriors were, however, and the second lumbered into view beneath the charred and ruined gate. The smaller Drones parted to let it pass, its massive, lobster-like claws snapping as if they couldn't wait to embed themselves in flesh. Its protective shell looked like Swiss cheese, peppered with plasma burns and bullet holes that were leaking ichor, but none of the rounds had penetrated deep enough to incapacitate it. There was no official UNN policy for taking Warriors down yet, beyond shoot them until they die.

The soldiers on the wall poured more fire into it, the beast unrelenting, half of its damned body must have been made up of tungsten at this point. It lunged towards one of the Krell, swinging a claw the size of an engine block like a hammer, knocking the ballistic shield out of the reptile's hand. The Krell unloaded into the creature's torso at point blank range, its XMR loosing a dozen slugs into the Warrior's carapace, but the insect brought the claw around and back-handed the Krell to send it barreling to the metal grates that made up the floor. Its fellows rushed forward, grappling with the oversized insect and trying to drag it to the ground, the powers at play so beyond human experience that Walker had little concept of just how strong they were. He was frustrated, he wanted to fire on it in order to help them, but he had to turn his attention to the Drones as the risk of hitting one of the auxiliaries was too great.

The Warrior threw the Krell aside, one of the one-ton reptiles landing on top of a Drone and squashing it like a beetle under a boot. The Warrior opened one of its flailing claws and snapped at the prone Krell, shearing off its right arm below the elbow, the wounded creature loosing a guttural rumble as it leaked blue blood from the stump.

One of its friends pulled it clear before the Bug could finish the job, a Borealan ducking in to jam a bayonet into the insect's segmented belly before leaping back out of range of its snapping claws. As the last few Drones were mowed down by the sustained gunfire and the merciless Borealans, the pack was able to surround the Warrior, darting in to stab at it with their long rifles and then hopping back to avoid its swiping forelimbs. The Bug seemed to grow frustrated, picking a target and charging forward, closing its claws around him as it knocked his friends aside like bowling pins.

It pinned him beneath its bulk, its claws working out of sight beneath its armored body, no doubt taking apart its victim as his howls of pain and anger rang out through the compound. The Borealans hacked at it, but to no avail, the cries soon falling ominously silent.

Walker noticed two Marines running across the compound from the direction of the armory, carrying something in their arms. The first dropped to his belly, extending a tripod from what Walker recognized to be a large caliber anti-material railgun, bracing it firmly against his shoulder and aiming down the sights. The second was carrying its blocky battery pack and knelt to hook a thick, insulated cable up to the receiver, the power source so large and heavy that it needed to be a separate component lest the weapon be made impossible for a human to carry. The barrel was enormous, rivaling the length of those favored by the Borealans, tightly packed with electromagnetic rings of far higher power than those commonly used in XMRs. On the infantry rifles the copper rings were spaced at intervals, but here they formed an almost unbroken tube. It would accelerate a three-inch slug to relativistic speeds, punching through armored vehicles like they were made of wet paper.

Once the weapon had been set up, the second Marine ran forward, waving his arms at the Borealans.

"Get clear! Get clear of the Bug!"

They pulled themselves away with visible effort, the desire to avoid being vaporized by a projectile traveling at a significant fraction of light speed overpowering their bloodlust, but just barely. The Warrior rose off the mangled body of their comrade, searching for a new target with its glowing eyes, and then a deafening crack rang out.

The giant creature shuddered violently, the round hitting it like a hammer, passing straight through its body and digging a deep crater into the thick wall behind it. The sniper fired twice more. It was nice grouping considering the recoil that he was dealing with. Walker doubted that even a Krell could have fired that thing while standing.

The Warrior's movements slowed, viscous fluid oozing from the sizable holes in its chest, taking a faltering step forward before falling heavily on its face. It lay still, yellow-green goo pooling in the dirt beneath the grates, and one of the Borealans skipped forward to give it a quick jab with his bayonet. It was dead, as were all of the Drones, a carpet of chitinous bodies in various states of dismemberment and destruction littering the ground. Walker looked out over the wall at the muddy hellscape beyond. There must have been a hundred bodies between the base and the forest, the buzz of the Penguin's cannon still audible in the distance as it pursued the fleeing Betelgeusians.

There were a few wounded Marines, medics tending to their injuries, mostly knife wounds and a few plasma burns. The injured Krell was being helped along by its friends, on its way to the field hospital. There were a few shrapnel holes in the building from the mortars that had gotten through, but it was otherwise intact. There was one dead Borealan, his pack pulling his shredded body from beneath the bulk of the dead Warrior. It looked as if he had gone through a blender. Walker had not seen many Mad Cats die, it was jarring. They always came across as powerful, invulnerable, but when subjected to the necessary forces they were just as mortal as any human. It seemed that they had lost less than a dozen Marines, at least at first glance. Not a bad ratio considering how many Bugs lay dead. They couldn't have hoped for much more.

"W-We won?" the Marine to his right asked, as if it had come as a surprise.

"Yeah, we fought them off," Walker confirmed as he sat down heavily on the deck. A fresh wave of fatigue washed over him, he needed to get to a bunk ASAP, or he might just collapse.

"I've never seen so many Bugs in one place," the Marine stammered, looking out over the cratered soil. "I mean, I've fought Bugs, but I've never seen them throw themselves at fortifications like that before."

"It's not too unusual," Walker muttered, "overwhelming force is their preferred tactic. Outnumber and overrun..."

The Marine seemed giddy, excited, probably high on adrenaline. Walker was a veteran, and the rush of victory had worn thin over the years, now he mostly just felt relieved when a battle was over. He reached across and patted Kaz on her steely thigh, the Borealan standing to look out over the forest.

"You good, Kaz?"

"Yeah," she said through her visor, her voice taking on a synthetic timbre. "Damned Bugs barely scratched me. Either they're getting sloppy, or I'm getting better."

The Penguin flew overhead and drowned out their conversation, returning from its chase, its thrusters kicking up dust as it hovered low over the base. It tipped its stubby wings in salute, the soldiers below waving and cheering before its main engines flared, and it began its slow climb back to space.

There were already people starting to clean up the bodies, two Krell struggling to drag the dead Warrior outside the base, their many-toed feet crunching on Bug shells. Walker was a Sergeant, he could skip the grunt work. All he wanted to do right now was get his head on a pillow.

Below them, some men in white hazmat suits were spraying everything in sight with cleaning chemicals, housed in tanks that were slung over their backs. Walker sighed, realizing that they still had to go through a lengthy decontamination process. The poisonous gas from the Bug shell would have coated every surface and person in the base with toxic residue.

"I hope you're ready to get sprayed with chemicals," he complained, Kaz grumbling to herself under her breath.

"Takes me days to get the smell of that shit out of my fur, but I guess it's better than having all of my mucous membranes melt."

CHAPTER 6: BUG HUNT

Walker stopped on the hill that overlooked the base, so small in the distance now that he could have covered it with his thumb. Kaz leaned against one of the massive trees beside him, the morning sun bleeding through its branches, watching as he brought up a holographic map on his wrist computer.

"Do they have any idea where the attack came from?" she asked.

"Vaguely, the first sensor was tripped...here," he said as he pointed to a location marked with a red dot on the terrain. "The entrance to their hive has to be somewhere close, otherwise they would have tripped some of the other seismic sensors. It's a pretty big area, scout teams three and four will be searching to the North East and to the West, we'll be coming up from the South. If we find something, we report it and haul ass out of there. No shooting, this is observation only. Got it?"

"Yeah, I got it. Just as long as we get to take the fight to them later."

"Don't worry, I'm sure we'll be paying them a house call once we have their address."

"At least we're out in the bush again," Kaz said as she took in a lungful of fresh air, "couldn't get away from the stink of that cleaning fluid."

"Yeah, it's not very pleasant. It smelled like they'd dumped about ten gallons of bleach into the compound."

"If you found it unpleasant, just imagine how it smelled to me," she said as she tapped her pink nose with a curved claw. "Your kind has five million olfactory receptors, mine has a hundred and fifty million."

He chuckled, starting off through the rough terrain, hopping over exposed roots and wading through coniferous shrubs.

"Come on Kaz, let's put that nose to use."

***

Kaz and Walker crept through the undergrowth as they made their way between the towering trees, like gigantic pillars of wood that held up the sky, the velvet darkness above the canopy punctuated by the flickering of stars arranged in unfamiliar constellations. They had been walking all day, and now night had fallen, Walker viewing the world in shades of glowing green through his night vision visor. Kaz could see fine with her feline eyes, but right now she was following her sensitive nose, on the trail of something.

"We've not seen any local fauna for miles," Walker whispered, "have you smelled any?"

"Some, yes, but the scents were old and fading. It's weird Walker, almost as if the whole valley is being slowly stripped of animal life. I can't be sure if they're fleeing the Bugs, or if the Bugs are killing them."

"Why would they do that?"

"Bugs gotta eat too," she replied with a shrug. "They can't have brought enough food with them on their ship to feed that many of them for so long."

"Do we even know what Bugs eat?" Walker mused.

"Nope, and I don't care. All I need to know is how much tungsten it takes to kill them."

They stopped near a particularly large tree, Kaz crouching to brush the bare dirt with her furry hand.

"The trail stops here," she said, "it's too weak to follow any further."

"You're sure it was Bugs?" Walker asked as he took a seat on a nearby root.

"No doubt, and it was strong too. I think I know why that winged Drone followed us for so long without attacking. He wasn't intending to report our location, he was dropping a pheromone trail. That's why he smelled so bad, the little bastard was leading his buddies directly to us from the moment he first saw us. Even if we had managed to kill him, it wouldn't have prevented the attack on Charlie. If he had escaped or not, there would still be a roadmap that would have attracted every Bug in the valley. This is about where we first encountered him," she said as she sank her nails into the bark of the tree, looking up into its branches. "It's no coincidence that the trail ends here."

"Good work, Kaz."

Walker explored the area around the tree, searching for any signs of footprints or disturbed soil, but he found none. There were no animal calls, no rustling of branches, only the gentle sound of the nearby stream as it trickled over the rocks. They had expected to be able to follow the tracks from the fleeing Bugs back to their source, but once clear of the base they had mysteriously vanished. Kaz had posited that perhaps the Drones had taken to the trees, much like their flying cousins, hopping between the branches like squirrels so as not to leave any footprints that might betray the location of their hive.

Their behavior confused Walker. Sometimes they seemed as smart as a human, and at other times they behaved like mindless insects. There was no logic to it, no pattern. He might have been a soldier first and foremost, but his interest in zoology and natural history compelled him to find answers. If first contact with the Bugs had gone better, perhaps he could have been studying them rather than fighting them.

It was so many years ago now, but he remembered it like it was yesterday, the newsreels flashing in his mind as if he had downloaded them into his brain.

A human colony ship had reached the Betelgeuse star system after astronomers had detected a habitable planet there, a prime candidate for a new settlement. Humanity had been expanding under the banner of the UNN for quite some time, never encountering any sapient species. The eager colonists had found the world already occupied, but when they had attempted to make peaceful contact with this new and undiscovered race, they had been mercilessly attacked. Forty thousand people had been lost to space, their civilian vessel defenseless against the Bugs. It wasn't clear if that system was even the home of the Betelgeusians and that was increasingly unlikely, but the name had stuck. At the time it was not known why they had attacked, but as more worlds occupied by their species were discovered and humanity had more altercations with their ships, it became apparent that their default response was violence.

Not long after, a Broker ship had shown up in UNN space, the first encounter with an alien race that hadn't ended in bloodshed. The enigmatic creatures had invited Earth and her colonies to join their Coalition, a collaborative effort between the Brokers and the Krell to ward off Betelgeusian incursions. The UN had accepted, and thus humanity became the third member of the alliance, followed later by the Borealans. It turned out that the Bugs were a problem for everyone, a belligerent race that targeted any planet even remotely capable of supporting them, seeking to take territory by force if it was already claimed.

Walker pulled up his map and switched off his night vision, the amber glow illuminating the tree trunks around him as he checked the three-dimensional representation of the valley.

"We're about a mile from the first sensor that was tripped. Let's stay on our toes, the tunnel entrance has to be nearby."

"Keep one eye on the trees," Kaz muttered, "we don't want a scout taking us by surprise again."

***

They had been searching for ten hours so far, and they hadn't found a single trace of the Bugs. Walker was starting to get worried, and Kaz was becoming frustrated.

"Let's just make camp," she complained, "blow off some steam. We're clearly missing something, and going over the same patches of ground another ten times won't make a Bug hole magically appear where there was none before."

"Cool it, Kaz," Walker replied. While the prospect of blowing off steam was attractive, he wasn't about to let his libido get in the way of his mission. "They have to be here, keep a lookout for disturbed soil."

"I know what a Bug hole looks like," she snapped, "and I'm telling you that I don't smell a damned thing. There are no Bugs here, and there haven't been any here recently."