The Autumn War Vol. 02: Remnants

"Ruza!" Xipa shouted. "Bluejay is hurt!"

The towering feline came lumbering out from behind a wall, the survivors tensing at the sight of him. He was massive, imposing, and they had never seen a Borealan before. He made a beeline for the Jarilan, crouching down to his level as he took the bleeding stump in one of his furry hands, inspecting the injury.

"Can you apply a tourniquet or something?" Xipa asked. "Is there anything you can do to stem the bleeding?"

"He is in no immediate danger," Ruza replied, seeming to share Bluejay's flippancy. "I cannot apply a tourniquet, as the stiff exoskeleton will prevent it from applying enough pressure to close the valves."

"Valves?" Xipa asked.

"Jarilans are arthropods," he explained, releasing Bluejay's arm. "They do not have blood or veins, but rather a fluid called hemolymph that transports oxygen and nutrients to their tissues and organs using an open circulatory system. This is what we refer to as ichor when it discharges from their wounds. The valves that transport the hemolymph will close on their own as a reaction to the injury given enough time, somewhat like clotting in species that use blood. In summary, he will be fine."

"Let's get moving, then," Xipa said as she made for one of the dead Bugs. Most of its face had been melted away by a plasma bolt, its body slumped over beside a planter. She wrested the rifle that it was carrying from its stiff hands, then pulled a couple of spare canisters from shaped recesses in its thigh armor. "Gustave and Nocha are waiting for us."

They took a minute to regroup and rearm, salvaging what weapons and ammo they could from the dead Drones. As they headed for the exit, the scouts stopped beside the body of the Valbara'nay that they had come across before the start of the battle. Xipa watched in uncomfortable silence as the two remaining members of Indigo team said their farewells to their fallen flockmate, the rest of the scouts crowding around to pay their respects. Meca, the woman with the bandaged face, drew some kind of grenade from her belt. As she primed it, tossing it into the body's lap, the crowd retreated to a safe distance.

"What are they doing?" Bluejay whispered, watching as the grenade ignited in a flash of green light.

"Looks like a plasma grenade," Xipa replied, watching dark smoke begin to rise towards the ceiling. "They mentioned that they burn the bodies they can't recover to prevent the Bugs from taking them. At point-blank like that, a plasma grenade is going to vaporize most of it."

"How do they usually do burials on Valbara?" he asked hesitantly.

"The flock and immediate relatives attend a ceremony to celebrate the life of the deceased, and then the body is recycled," Xipa replied. "Usable organs are harvested for transplant, and the rest is usually turned into fertilizer for use in the aquaponic farms. In the old days, bodies would be left out for the carrion eaters to consume. It was seen as a way to give back to nature and to speed the spirit to its next incarnation."

"That's not really all that different from the way the Bugs do things," he muttered. "They also recycle their dead, just in a more direct way."

"I suppose not," she conceded with a shrug. "Still, I think you'll agree that having your loved ones taken away and eaten by your enemies isn't very desirable. Do Jarilans have burials?"

"I dunno yet," he replied. "I don't know any Jarilans who have died. The human colonists bury their dead underground and mark them with a stone or a stick. I guess we'll probably do the same. People won't want to eat our honey if they think it's made of...people."

"Would you?"

"No," he admitted.

The scouts were as respectful as they could have been under the circumstances, but the living had to take priority over the dead, and they soon hurried on. They made their way back out of the office and into the stairwell, descending until they reached the hallway where Nocha had been stabbed. Xipa feared the worst, as they had been gone for a while, but she breathed a sigh of relief when she saw the woman lying exactly where they had left her with her rifle still pointed at the door.

"You're back," she wheezed, Xipa hearing a hiss of escaping air as the medical valve did its work. "When I heard all the gunfire upstairs, I thought you might be done for."

"Can you walk?" Miqi asked as she strode into the room. "We're getting out of this death trap, right now."

Nocha tried to rise to her feet, but winced, sinking back to her sitting position.

"I think I'm done," she replied with a chuckle that made her grip her injured side reflexively. "Leave me. I'll only slow you down."

"I do not speak their language, but I know a would-be hero when I see one," Ruza grumbled as he walked past Miqi. He stooped to lift the woman off the floor, cradling her in his arms like a baby as she groaned in pain. "Take it from me - many martyrs change their tune before the end comes. Tell her that if she is to die, it will be under my scalpel."

"What did he say?" Miqi asked.

"Er, just that we need to move," Xipa replied. "Let's pick up the pace."

They hurried back through the factory floor, stepping around the corpses of the Bugs that they had left among the printers, soon reaching the damaged stairwell. As they made their way down to the ground floor, they proceeded more carefully, their weapons at the ready. Nobody knew what they might find in the lobby. Xipa tried to call ahead, hoping that Gustave would answer.

"Gustave?" she asked, hearing a crackle of radio static over the comms. "Gustave, are you alright?"

She crept down the corridor that led to the lobby, peeking around the door frame to see a scene of total carnage. The entire back wall was charred to a crisp, so covered in plasma burns that there was scarcely an inch of its original surface left. The two elevator doors were peppered with molten holes, and the front desk that had once occupied most of the space had been reduced to ash and splinters. Standing in the middle of it all was Gustave, his cannon leveled at the front of the building. His protective hood was covering his snout, and Xipa could see the burn marks on his armored poncho where several plasma bolts had found their mark. His left arm - which was protected by an armored sleeve - was similarly covered with burns that exposed the ceramic plates beneath the kevlar weave.

As Xipa stepped into the open, she turned to glance at the glass doors that led out into the street. They were gone - reduced to fragments by the exchange of gunfire, along with every window along the building's facade. Parts of the wall had been so damaged that they had collapsed into piles of rubble, streaked with trails of slug holes, and the building across the street had suffered a similar fate. Dead Bugs were strewn everywhere, lying in heaps, their dismembered bodies scattered across the road outside like discarded toys. She counted at least two dozen, easily as many as they had fought on the upper floors, all dead at Gustave's hands. It looked like they had repeatedly tried to breach the lobby and had been repelled each time by the living pillbox.

The reptile turned to glance down at Xipa as she approached, crunching glass and splinters of wood beneath her feet. He pulled back his hood, giving her the Krell equivalent of a toothy smile.

"Circle is complete," he said with a gesture to their new companions, his translator interpreting his rumbling speech. "Welcome back."

"Gustave, you're okay!" Bluejay chimed as he walked into the lobby. "What did you-" He stopped in his tracks, noticing the heaps of dead Drones. "What the fuck..."

"Dead Bugs," he rumbled. He shook the ammo drum that was slung over his back, Xipa hearing a hollow clatter. "Low ammo."

"Yes, I believe those two things are probably related," Bluejay muttered as he stared at the piles of corpses.

"You are hurt?" Gustave asked, pointing a scaly finger at Bluejay's severed arm.

"I'll be fine," Bluejay replied. "They can slap me on a new one when I get back to my ship."

"Like Fletcher?"

"A little like that, yeah."

"We go now?"

Xipa nodded, and that seemed to please him, the towering creature leaving his place behind the ruined desk to crunch through the debris.

"Just what the hell has been happening while we've been away?" Izel demanded. "We go on one mission, and an entire menagerie of aliens shows up."

"There will be time for explanations later," Xipa replied. "We need to get out of here before more of them show up. Bugs don't just quit and go home."

They took a moment to dispose of the body that was lying near the elevators, the survivors of Indigo paying their respects briefly before setting off another grenade that all but turned their fallen flockmate to ash.

"Bluejay," Xipa said. "You want to go check that the coast is clear? It should be safe out there now that Gustave has finished his pest control."

He nodded, slowly making his way out into the street, checking both directions before buzzing off into the sky.

"You never told me that he could fly," Miqi muttered as she watched him vanish.

"You never asked," Xipa replied.

After a moment, she opened the in-picture view on her helmet, seeing a feed from the Jarilan's perspective as he soared up the facade of the factory. He stuck close, the stained, overgrown carbcrete and rows of dirty windows whipping past until he reached the roof. He set down, then moved over to the far side of the structure, dodging around gaping holes created by weathering and structural damage. The raging wind buffeted him as he looked out over the city, scanning the streets from a bird's-eye perspective. Xipa could see the expected ruins and patches of overgrown forest, the city giving way to the flooded residential band in the distance. At its edge, the wall rose high, one of the few structures that had survived the rigors of time relatively unscathed.

A plume of dark smoke was rising above the horizon. Bluejay did a double-take, then used the zoom function on his visor to get a closer look, following it down to its source. The image magnified several times, then stabilized, the high angle giving him a relatively unobstructed view of the base of the wall. The magnification distorted the image a little, and there were some artifacts introduced by the stream, but the holes in the carbcrete were very visible. There were five that she could see, all lined up in a neat row. It looked like some kind of boring machine had tunneled through them, leaving perfectly circular tunnels with edges that seemed melted as if by some incredible heat. Marching through the breaches was a procession of Bugs made up of Drones and some other castes that Xipa didn't recognize. They were moving in formation, spilling out into the flooded residential zone. There were hundreds of them, and it looked like they had already established a secure perimeter, several squads breaking off to move deeper into the city.

There were vehicles, too, eight-legged tanks armed with long gun barrels and rocket pods scuttling their way inside like ocean crustaceans crawling onto land. Some of them had set up on raised hills between the flooded buildings, what looked like anti-air emplacements mounted on their backs scanning the sky for targets.

"Xipa, you picking this up down there?" Bluejay asked over the radio.

"There's a whole army pouring into the city," she snarled, watching as the view from his feed panned across the ever-growing force.

"Looks like some of them are moving deeper," Bluejay continued with a crackle of static. He searched around a little more, then focused on a group of Drones that were moving down one of the far-off streets, an organic tank marching along behind them. The beak-like structure on its prow split open, a long, tongue-like appendage snaking out to scent the air with its antennae. They were searching, leaning into the bombed-out buildings, sweeping the alleys with their rifles. "They're definitely heading this way. They might be responding to calls for backup from the roaches we just toasted."

"They've already reached the edge of the industrial band," Xipa hissed. "That gives us two or three days tops before they find a way into the financial district. Now I know what Izel meant when he said that this wasn't just an op gone wrong. They're massing their forces for a full-scale assault on the city."

"Yeah, let's not be here when they arrive," Bluejay said as he turned away from the scene. "I'm heading back down."

Xipa switched off the feed, and Bluejay landed among the bodies in the street outside a few moments later, hurrying over to rejoin them.

"What did you see?" Miqi asked.

"An army," Xipa replied solemnly. "The city is being invaded."

"We already know," Izel replied. "That's what the sentry who was posted in this district told us before the fucking mealworms got to her. It wasn't the usual clueless scout party that was sniffing around the district - it was some kind of advance recon force, and they came to fight."

"You can give a full report to the Ensis when we get back to the base," Miqi replied. "There's no time to waste. If we don't bring this information back home, they won't know what's coming until the insects are practically on top of them."

"We can use a hardwire from the nearest safehouse," one of the women added.

"Hardwire?" Xipa asked.

"We've run wired connections through the tunnels that terminate in most of the safehouses," the woman explained. "It allows us to communicate with flocks in the field without using radio or wireless signals that the insects can pick up. It's how our teams check in."

"Let's go," Miqi said, heading for the shattered doors. "The nearest safehouse isn't too far from here."

They fell into a loose formation, Ruza still carrying the injured woman, broken glass and pieces of shell fragments crunching under their feet as they made their way out into the street beyond.

***

Ruza lay his charge down on a cot in the safehouse as the rest of the team filed in one after the other. Like the rest, it was an old lounge below street level that had been converted into a kind of bunker, crates of supplies piled up against the back wall. There was a computer terminal sitting on the old bar, and Miqi made her way over to it, switching it on with an electrical hum. A wavering holographic display flared to life, illuminating the otherwise dingy space, and she began to tap at the floating characters.

"How is Nocha doing?" Xipa asked as she made her way over to Ruza's side. The woman was sleeping now, the valve on her abdomen still hissing with each breath that she took.

"She is stable for now," he replied, his head skirting the ceiling as he rose to his full height. "I gave her another injection to ease her pain. We should not linger here for long, however."

"I won't let Miqi and her people get too comfortable," Xipa replied. "Still, just taking a few minutes to rest will do them good. We can't march all day like the Earth'nay can."

"Tell all who are injured to line up for inspection," he added ominously, pulling a fresh pair of gloves from the pouch on his hip. "I will do what I can in the little time we have."

"Sure," she said, watching as he snapped them on. "I might phrase it a little more...delicately, though."

She relayed his request, and soon, everyone with a scrape or a broken arm was lining up to be examined. Most of the newcomers were too exhausted to ask questions now and were just going along with the bizarre situation. Gustave was lying on the dusty carpet on his belly, seemingly none the worse for wear after having fought off an entire Bug battalion, his ammo canister still strapped to his back. Bluejay had sat down in one of the booths and was examining his stump, still seeming more inconvenienced than horrified by the loss of his limb. At least the bleeding had finally stopped, as Ruza had said it would.

Miqi closed down her display, apparently finished with her report.

"There," she sighed. "At least the Ensis will have a basic idea of what's happening now. Maybe they'll have formulated some kind of plan by the time we make it back." She made her way over to Bluejay, who glanced up at her in surprise as she approached his booth. He stood, not really knowing what else to do, looking to Xipa for support. "My flock told me what you did for them," she began. Bluejay glanced at Xipa again, maybe assuming that he was being chewed out. "It's partly thanks to you that the most important people in my life are all alive. Thank you." She stepped closer, leaning into him, embracing him as she had her flock. He stiffened as her scales brushed against his carapace, then relaxed when he realized that it was a gesture of friendship. Miqi brushed her snout against his flat face, a show of affection that was probably lost on him, then stepped back.

"She's thanking you for saving her flock," Xipa explained. "She's very grateful that they're still alive."

"O-oh," he stammered, his antennae waving in the air. "I guess...tell her that it's just my job."

"Miqi, can I talk to you?" Xipa asked. Miqi nodded, following her over to a more secluded booth at the far end of the lounge. They slipped inside, settling into the moldy cushions. Xipa raised the display on her wrist, and after a few taps, it projected a holograph representation of Bluejay's helmet feed. Miqi watched it play, her eyes narrowing when she saw the army that was massing beneath the wall.

"So, that's what we're dealing with," she muttered as the footage came to an end.

"Your position here is untenable," Xipa replied, shutting off the hologram. "You must see that now. We have no choice but to evacuate. A few hundred fighters can't hope to stand against a force of that size. I'm sure that more will pour in by the hour until there are enough of them to roll over the city like a red tide. The Bugs don't do things in half-measures."

"This does...change the situation," Miqi admitted reluctantly. "Was everything that you said true? Do you really think you can get everyone out, even after seeing our base and knowing how many people are living there?"

"To be honest, I wasn't expecting there to be so many of you when I set out," she replied. "But, I have a fleet. If there are around a thousand of you, and our shuttles can carry twenty-four Commandos, that's about forty trips to get everyone into orbit. I'm confident that it can be done. The problem will be holding off the Bugs while we do it. We're out of time."

"We were doing just fine until you showed up," Izel said, the male appearing beside their booth. "We've made a life here for thirty rotations, and the insects haven't made any serious attempts to remove us until now. It's not a coincidence that this new aggression coincides with your arrival."

"I won't deny that we've disturbed the hive," Xipa replied, turning in her seat to look him up and down. "But your understanding of the Bugs and how they think is very flawed if you expect to just be left alone as long as you don't bother them too much. Live and let live is not a concept that they understand, and any truce or peace that you imagine exists between you is purely a product of your own fancy. You are a parasite living in the feathers of a Teth'rak, hoping that she will not scratch as long as you do not bite too hard. This was going to happen sooner or later."

"Then why would they leave us be for so long?" he demanded, his feathers flashing red. As annoyed as Xipa was at being interrogated by someone she just helped save, she understood his pain all too well. He had lost most of his flock, and he was looking for someone - anyone to blame.

"You want my opinion?" Xipa asked, leaning back into the cushions as she crossed her arms defiantly. "They've been farming you, just like they farm some of the other species on this moon."