SNAFU: Future Warfare

SUITS Steve Lewis

It was dark, about midnight, when something woke Henry Graves. He sat upright in his bed and looked around, hearing nothing but the gentle breathing of his wife, Beth. He contemplated getting out of bed to check the security grid in the next room… A few seconds later he had no choice; an alarm screeched out and woke everything within a mile.

He was out of bed and into the farmstead’s security room in a heartbeat, the monitors flicking to life in response to whatever threats the remote ground and satellite sensors had picked up. He was hoping it was just cattle from his neighbour’s property — Jenkins was renowned for being cheap with his fencing — but by the slowing spreading blooms of light on the screens it was clear this was something much worse.

“Hank, what is it?” Beth asked as she entered the room. “Jenkin’s cows again?”

“Afraid not, honey,” Graves replied. “Looks we have deebees coming in.”

“Crap.”

“Crap indeed, honey, crap indeed.”

Tau Ceti IV had taken decades to colonise, and it was a few years after the planet had been successfully terraformed that the aliens had shown up. Coming through dimensional gateways on and just above the planet’s surface, the ‘Dimensionial Beings’ — or deebees for short — had initially wreaked havoc amongst the unsuspecting colonists. If it wasn’t for an armed cruiser passing through for R&R, with heavy screens, armoured hull and batteries of hot lasers, the planet would have been overrun.

The invasion was finally broken, the gateways closing quickly and the deebees slaughtered with no line of retreat… now it was only a raid every few years, more a nuisance than anything else.

“Looks like a wide pattern,” Beth said, looking over Graves’ shoulder at the various screens. “Gates opening up all along the ridge and across most of the farmsteads.”

Graves nodded. “They should be easy to mop up, scattered out like that,” he said. “I’ll go suit up, you get on the horn to Jenkins and the others, make sure they’re up and armoured before the gates open completely.”

He stood and kissed his wife on the forehead as she slid into the seat.

“Looks like we have about 30 minutes before they open enough to let them through, everyone should be ready and mobile by then,” he said.

“Get suited while I make some calls,” Beth replied. “Let me know if you need anything.”

Graves’s suit was built around the chassis of an old, four-armed agricultural exoskeleton. With an upgraded power plant, some welded armour and batteries of weapons added each year, Brutiful was a family heirloom passed down over the generations. Every farmstead had to have one, and the Graves’ family took much pride in the effort they’d taken to maintain their deadly, hulking suit.

As Brutiful powered up, Graves got into his combat suit — a second-hand, naval-grade skin-suit, it provided a degree of life support, body armour and communications gear that made piloting the heavy exomech far less uncomfortable than it might otherwise have been. Plugged in and zipped up, he checked the ammunition drums and ran last minute diagnostics tests before strapping himself into the suit’s cockpit.

“Beth, I’m in,” he said as the heavy armoured glass canopy closed around him. “Systems green across the board, heading out now.”

“You’re showing green across the board here too, honey,” Beth replied, coming through clearly over the suit radio. “Jenkins and the others are all suiting up, should be out before the gates open.”

“Roger that,” Graves said. “Anyone coordinating this?”

“Afraid not. All of them are interested in defending their own property first, and we’ll coordinate a clean-up once the gates close and we can see what’s left.”

“Fair enough… shouldn’t take us long, the gates being spread out like they are.”

“And we don’t want Jenkins trampling down our fences like he did last time he came over to help.” They both laughed, though they hadn’t been laughing at the weeks they’d had to spend repairing the downed fence-line and retrieve their roaming livestock.

“Where do you want me, honey?’ Graves asked as Brutiful got underway and stomped out of the barn and into the night.

“It looks like a cluster of gates will open in the eastern quarter first, counting seven gates. After that, the next opening cluster is another five in the south.”

“Eastern quarter it is, on my way.”

Graves made good time, the heavy exomech eating up the miles at a rapid pace. With no threat, he set the autopilot and then cycled through his weapon and targeting systems to make sure everything was running smoothly — the diagnostics had indicated everything was green, but he’d long learned the value in checking everything twice, just in case.

By the time he got to the farmstead’s eastern fields, some 15 miles away, the gates were beginning to sparkle, the bright inner light of an alien dimension shining through. It was a rare sight, but not one that Graves was overly interested in admiring. Like a lot of things in nature, beautiful also meant dangerous.

He halted his exomech where he could see all seven of the gates — they were closely bunched — and swung the heavy chainguns on his right shoulder down, ready for action. The 15mm multi-barrelled autocannons weren’t his heaviest weapons, but they were dependable, hard hitting, and could deal with most deebees.

Besides, 15mm ammunition was cheap, and anything he fired came out of the farmstead’s operating budget.

“Hank, honey,” Beth said,” I make the gates opening in three… two… one… now!”

On her mark, a swarm of deebees poured out of each gate, scattering around as they cleared the gate for the aliens following behind, and searching for a target. Brutiful’s infra-red scanners picked them out in the darkness and automatically counted them. It had reached 80 by the time the gates’ sparkle began to fade, and Graves decided he should open fire before they dispersed too much.

With a whir, the autocannon barrels began to spin, and as they reached their maximum rotation, he fired. Over 600 rounds per minute poured out of the 5-barrelled weapon, cutting into the creatures around the nearest gate.

The 15mm rounds were mostly copper-tipped hollow points, with every 5th round a steel-tipped armour-penetrating round, and every 20th round a tracer round that marked its flight in a glowing red arc — at 1,500 metres per second, they streaked across the landscape, lighting the night sky and easily punching through alien hide, flesh and bone.

His first burst cut down the group around the first gate, then he switched to the second. The deebees had reacted now and were spreading out as they charged towards him. He fired the autocannon in short bursts of 25–30 rounds, taking down the leading aliens as they closed, confident he could whittle them down enough before they got to him.

“Hank?” Beth asked. “Got time for an update?”

“Sure, honey,” he replied, “but keep it brief, I got incoming.”

“Okay. Jenkins, Anderson and Wright have deployed and engaged, they’re all dealing with their own first clusters…Peters, Donaldson and the Singhs are en route, but their gates are all over the place and they might need a hand with clean-up once we’ve got the main clusters dealt with.”

“Okay,” Graves said as he triggered off another burst that dropped a clump of half-dozen aliens as they cleared a fence-line 500 metres in front of him. “You sound like you’re coordinating with the other wives. “

“I am,” Beth replied. “We’re trying to keep each other updated on the back channels, just in case there’s a breakthrough somewhere.”

“Good.” Another burst, another clump falling apart under the autocannon fire. “I’m almost done with this group, moving south soon.”

“Roger. Be careful, honey, the next group are bigger gates and they’ll likely be fully deployed before you get there.”

“Will do!” He triggered his last burst, splashing the last of the deebees across his eastern paddock and then turned the exomech south to deal with the next group.

The eastern paddocks were fallow this season, and if nothing else the alien corpses would make good fertiliser when he got around to ploughing them into the soil.

Jake Wright hated his exomech and was pretty sure it hated him. Carnigore sounded ferocious, but the ‘carni’ wasn’t named after a predator’s eating habits — the suit was a built on a mobile amusement park ride, and the old red and white paint job made it look far more ‘carnival’ than he would have liked.

If maintaining the suit in its original condition hadn’t been part of his old man’s will, he’d have had it redone and renamed a decade ago.

“Jake,” his wife said as he fired his own autocannon into the creatures moving towards him, “you need to get the lead out, that second cluster of gates is opening.”

“Helen, I’m doing this as fast as I can,” he said, gritting his teeth as he fired another burst. Carnigore wasn’t a well-padded suit and he swore he felt every jolt of recoil through his bones. “Last group coming up now, I’ll head to that second cluster in a moment.”

“I hate to nag” she replied, though Jake didn’t believe that for an instant, “but Graves and Jenkins have cleared their first gates and are already on route to their second.”

“For Christ’s sake, Helen, it’s not a contest!”

“It never is with you Jake, it never is…”

Wright flicked the mute button on his communication piece and cursed, long and loud, as the last of the deebees died in front of him. He swung Carnigore south and headed towards the river, where the second cluster of gates was already opening. He threw in a few curses towards his exomech for good measure, bracing himself for every bump and jolt the insanely grinning suit was going to pass on to him.

‘Crazy Bill’ Anderson was the old man of the colony, a silver-haired widower in his 70s. He’d built his suit himself, turning an obsolete agricultural exomech into a formidable fighting machine. It was a blocky, hulking brute that lacked the sleek lines of newer suits, but he and his Grampage had weathered decade after decade of deebee raids without showing any signs of slowing down.

He’d dealt with the first cluster of gates easily enough and was perched on a low hill overlooking the slowing blooming forms of his second cluster. The three gates were very tightly bunched, much tighter than he’d ever seen before, and he waited patiently as they grew. Close-packed like that, the deebees would run out into a withering hail of fire, and he certainly had no problem with that.

Still, the sight bugged him. Gates were always spaced apart, likely to stop them interfering with each other. The energy required to cross the dimensional barrier was stupendous, even if the colonists didn’t have a clue as to how it all worked. Anything might happen if the gates actually overlapped.

“Hank, we have a problem.”

“Talk to me Beth.”

“The wormholes on the ridges, they’re getting stronger.”

“How strong?”

“Off-the-chart strong. The satellite view shows them growing every minute.”

Brutiful was nearing the second cluster of gates, and in the distance Graves could see them spiralling closed. Whatever deebees had been using the gates had already been dropped off and were spreading out across his property.

“Keep an eye on them, honey, while I deal with this second group, and then I’ll go take a look,” he said. “And keep the others in the loop; I don’t want any surprises coming our way when we get around to mopping up.”

“Roger that,” Beth replied. “I’ve got one of the crop-duster drones headed that way, should give us some eyes on the ridge in about ten minutes.”

There was a sharp ‘ping’ as Brutiful’s sensors picked up something moving his way — fast — and Graves zoomed his suit’s cameras towards the motion.

A dozen deebees were headed right for him, and they were close.

“Okay Beth, I have some unwanted guests heading my way, need to focus a little,” he said. “I’ll let you know when I’m done here, but let me know if anything super-important happens.”

“Will do, honey,” Beth said. “Be careful.”

The deebees swarming towards Brutiful were closing from a wide arc, too far spread for his autocannon to sweep them all. He fired a few bursts at those on his right side anyway though, dropping three of them while he got himself ready.

His left-shoulder weapon was a heavy-barrelled, semi-automatic shotgun, if you could call a weapon with a 4” bore a shotgun. Twin ammunition belts fed the beast, allowing Graves to fire either fin-stabilised slugs or heavy loads of 8-ounce buckshot. He thumbed the selector for buckshot and put away the autocannon as the aliens closed.

It always disturbed Graves that the deebees looked nothing alike. They were mostly four legged, or six, or occasionally eight; their heads were usually long-snouted, like dogs, though many were round-faced like great cats or sharp-beaked like birds; and their skin was typically thick hide, though many had feathers like soft down, or slabs of chitin that provided some slight armour protection. Some of them had combinations of all of these things, and Graves had long given up wondering how and why the deebees had evolved the way they had.

One thing they all did have in common though was a serious hatred of humans, and every deebee they’d ever seen wanted to do nothing but kill anything human within its reach.

Brutiful’s shotgun aligned briefly on a deebee closing fast on the left, and coughed a swarm of tungsten balls…the creature was fast, dodging aside as the weapon spoke, but the spreading cloud of balls covered too large an area. Struck by three balls the creature went down, chest and head ruptured completely, the deebee’s equivalent of blood gushing into the dirt.

The creatures continued to close, and Graves backed his exomech away slowly, sending out a cloud of tungsten every six seconds or so — it took that long for the belt to feed the next round, chamber it and align the heavy barrel onto the target. At a kill every six seconds, that was ten dead deebees a minute, but it was going to take them a bit less than that to get to him, and there were more than ten of them out there.

The first of the deebees launched itself at him, a four-legged beast that shimmered with the residual energy of the alien dimension. Its mouth opened wide, showing row after row of gleaming, serrated teeth, and Graves swung his suit’s right arm to block it. More by luck than design, he managed to catch it in mid-air, and squeezed the creature as hard as his exomech could.

Trapped in the metal grip, the creature swung its hind legs down and began to rake, long claws gouging chunks of armour of Brutiful’s thick torso. For a moment Graves thought the creature might get through, but then the suit’s grip tightened and the creature exploded into a multi-coloured burst of flesh.

He didn’t even see the other one coming. It was big, strong, and travelling at speed, and barrelled the heavy suit over like a man pushing over a child. Brutiful’s gyro-stabilises shrieked in protest as they tried to correct the unexpected fall, but to no avail. With a loud thud, the exomech went down, the fall stunning Graves for a moment.

When he came to, the creature was on top of him, clawing and biting away at the glass canopy, only a foot or so from his face. The heavy glass was holding for now, but wouldn’t for long…Graves needed to end this one quickly and get Brutiful back on its feet.

The creature was inside his reach, so his two heavy weapons would be useless. I Instead, he activated the cutting torch on the exomech’s smaller right arm. With variable settings for welding or cutting through thick steel, the torch was a legacy of the suit’s original purpose, and one he’d never gotten around to replacing.

Pushing the flame against the creatures hide brought a shriek of pain, which did nothing to reduce the creatures frenzied clawing on the glass canopy; in fact, it only seemed to make it worse. He couldn’t quite bring the torch to bear on something that might prove vital, and he had to endure the creature’s attacks for another 30 seconds before he finally managed to find something important. The creature gave one enormous spasm and then died.

Flicking off the torch, he pushed the creature off him and slowly struggled to rise. The exomech wasn’t designed for agility, and it took him a good five minutes to finally get back on his feet. If there’d been any more aliens around, he’d have been dead for sure.

Sweating — the suit generated a lot of heat — he checked his scanners and toggled the radio.

“Honey?”

“Here Hank,” Beth replied. “You okay?”

“Scratched up, a little bruised but otherwise okay. How’s everything else look?”

“Honey, I think we might have a problem…”

Unlike the other colonists that ran one small family unit per farmstead, the Singh family were a polygamous family collective that ran a farmstead twice the size of the others. Graves and the others figured there to be three distinct ‘marriage arrangements’ amongst the Singh farmstead, which gave them a requirement for three exomechs in accordance with the colony’s laws.

Crescent Moon was piloted by Jaswant Singh, the elder of the family. Based on the chassis of an old construction suit, it was well suited for the slabs of thick armour and heavy weapons the Singh family had added to it over the years.

The other two suits were Hawk and Eagle, two much smaller exomechs based on warehousing droids. Fast and nimble, the two light units were built for close-quarters combat only, and spent most of their time keeping Crescent Moon clear of deebees so it could do all the long-range killing.

The three suits had cleared their first two clusters of gates, and were advancing on their third, Hawk and Eagle scouting ahead as Crescent Moon followed slowly along. Putting his suit on autopilot gave Jaswant time to update his tactical display from the various sensors around their property and from the satellite above. His update was showing some unusual activity, something he felt warranted caution.

“Hawk, Eagle,” he said into the radio, “hold on the next hill… something is amiss here.”

“Hawk acknowledging,” replied Agun, Jaswant’s eldest son. “Hill clear, covering left flank.”

“Eagle acknowledges,” replied Kubai, his daughter’s husband. “Will clear the peak in fifteen seconds, will cover the right flank.”

The two smaller suits took up covering positions atop the hill as Crescent Moon trundled slowly up behind them.

“There’s nothing here, brother,” Agun said. “Should we push on to the next hill?”

“No,” Jaswant said. “I need to assess the situation before we get too far from home.”

“The place is barren,” Kubai replied. “There’s nothing to assess.”

“Exactly… but there should be.”

Jaswant’s exomech drew level with the smaller units and looked over the flat, ploughed field below. The next hill was a mile away, and beyond that was the next cluster of gates, which should be opening any minute.

“Our initial reading showed six gates opening beyond that next hill… readings now show only four.”

“Fewer gates are a good thing, isn’t it?” Kubai asked.

“Gates never just disappear,” Jaswant replied. “They open then they close. These ones haven’t opened, yet two are missing.”

“I don’t understand,” Agun said.

“Neither do I,” Jaswant said, “But now sensors are showing only two.”

“Hank, the gates on top of the ridge are disappearing,” Beth said. “Not opening, just disappearing, a few every minute or so.”

“Do we have a visual on the ridgeline yet?” Graves replied. “Something might be messing up the sensors.”

“I’m sorry, honey, something knocked the drone out.” Beth said. “I’ve powered up another three and having them fitted with cameras now, should be airborne in a few minutes.”

“Good thinking, honey. Anything else to report?”

“A little. Jenkins is shutting down his gates, but taking his time about it, and Crazy Bill Anderson wants to know if anyone needs his help…he seems to still have gates open on his property though.”

“Jenkins is just taking his time so he won’t have to help clear the ridgeline,” Graves said with a chuckle, “and Crazy Bill wants to be able to claim ammunition and fuel from the Colony account for helping others.”

“Other than that, the Singhs look like they have their area under control, as always, and the others are mopping up as they advance towards the ridge. Oh, and the drones are on their way.”

Moments later, Brutiful’s sensors picked up the flight of crop-dusting drones as they sped towards the ridgeline. As they passed, Beth switched the video feed over directly to the suit and Graves toggled between the three camera views.

At first there was nothing but the well-ploughed fields he expected to see. As the drones moved beyond his property the vegetation grew wilder, mostly tall trees. As the passed over the first growth of forest beyond his fence line, one of the cameras went out.

“Beth, what was that?”

“No idea, honey,” Beth replied. “I’ll go back over the video feed and check.”

The drones were approaching the ridgeline now, and Graves toggled the controls to make them move in a more erratic manner. Even as he did, a second camera went out.

“Honey!”

“Working on it, Hank, working on it!”

The remaining camera made it to the ridgeline, Graves piloting this one manually now to be as erratic as he could make it. The sight wasn’t a good one.

The gates were disappearing, in a manner of speaking. As Graves watched, two gates slowly expanded until their edges touched, and then they merged into one larger gate. All along the ridgeline, gates were coalescing, and at the rate they were merging they’d be one giant gate before too long.

“Beth, drop whatever you’re doing and take a look at this!” he said, urgently. “Take in as much of it as you can, just in case I lose this drone.”

There was a moment’s silence and Graves could hear Beth’s breathing quicken over the radio.

“Oh. My. God!”

“Patch this through to the others, and make sure Crazy Bill and the Singhs acknowledge…if anyone knows what this is about, it’ll be one of them.”

“Will do, honey!”

“And Beth?”

“Yes, dear?”

“It might be a good time to start powering up the Bunker.”

Carnigore had taken some scratches dealing with the first two gate clusters, but nothing significant. Jake was sure he’d been knocked around more than his exomech, and could feel bruises already forming where his skin had come into contact with hard metal. Not for the first time, he made a promise to himself to get a better combat suit and to put some padding around the cockpit.

He was approaching his third gate cluster, Carnigore set on autopilot as he transferred chain-gun ammunition from the bins on the suit’s lower back to the internal hoppers.

“Jake?”

“What do you want, Helen?” he asked, annoyed at the interruption. “I’m kinda busy here.”

“You’ll be busy dodging deebees if you don’t pay attention,” Helen replied. “I have some video feed from the Graves’.”

“Are Hank and Beth in trouble?”

Jake punched the autopilot’s ‘Off’ button, bringing Carnigore to a lurching halt. Jake had a lot of time for the Graves family, despite Graves setting some impossibly high standards for Jake to live up to. If the two of them needed his help, things were very bad.

“I think we all might be,” Helen replied, some real concern in her voice now. “Patching some video through to you now.”

Jake watched the video feed, recognising the ridgeline that marked the southernmost boundary of the colony area. Deebees often had gates up there, giving them time to spread out and consolidate their numbers, but this was looking weird.

There were only three gates now, each enormous and slowly growing. The middle and left gates touched and merged, and then there were only two. Minutes later, the remaining gate was absorbed, leaving one giant gate that covered the entire ridgeline.

“What the hell is that?” he asked.

“I don’t know, Jake,” Helen replied, “but I’m sure it’s not good.”

“Any word from the others?”

“Jenkins says he’s got gates of his own to worry about, but he’ll help out when he deals with those. The Singhs are finishing up their final cluster and are sending some drones to keep an eye on things until they can get over here, and Crazy Bill is on his way to the Graves’ farmstead right now.”

“He’s cleared his clusters already?”

“No, but he thinks this is more important. He’s sending his kids over to the Graves’ place now, Beth has their bunker powered up and plenty of room.”

“You might want to join them.”

“I’ll be fine,” Helen said. “Besides, you need me here to keep an eye on things while you wander around in your giant clown suit.”

Jake bit back a curse; his wife always knew how to needle him.

“Suit yourself,” he said, after a moment’s pause to regain some control. “But if things get out of hand I want you to out of there and on your way to somewhere safe.”

“Why Jake Wright, that’s the sweetest thing you’ve said to me in years!”

Beth ran quickly from the farmhouse control room to the metal and concrete monstrosity standing in the yard behind the house. Affectionately known as ‘The Bunker’, it was built to military specifications as a fortified command and control facility, a legacy of Graves’ grandparents who had the foresight to see that the war with the deebees would last generations.

With its own internal fission pile, water tanks and food supplies, it could easily house a headquarter staff for three months. Add the communication links and self-defence turrets, it was looking like a good place to be right now.

The screens inside had already powered up, showing clearly the video feed from the last remaining drone, plus Brutiful’s cameras, satellite imagery and live feeds from the various security cameras around the farmstead. She hit the safety switch as she ran inside, dropping the armoured concrete slab that passed for a door into position, and slipped into her own combat suit and command helmet.

“Hank? You reading me, honey?”

“Loud and clear, Beth, loud and clear,” Graves replied. “How’s it looking?”

“Not good at all. That one giant gate is giving off some ferocious readings, completely off the charts for even the Bunker’s sensors.”

“I don’t have much fine detail on the drone camera,” Graves said. “Anything I need to know?”

“I’m getting plenty of flicker, all along the gate, looks like it’s ready to open.”

“I’m not feeling too particularly happy about this one, Beth—”

The gate opened, and deebees poured out. The overhead satellite tracked their heat sources, counting them automatically, and Beth watched open-mouthed as the counter climbed rapidly. 100. 200. 400. 700. 1000… she tore her eyes from it when it reached four figures.

“Beth?”

“Hank, honey? Get the hell out of there!”

She could see from Brutiful’s video feed that it was now moving, walking backwards on autopilot. Graves was too good a pilot to just turn and run, he’d want to keep his guns between him and the enemy.

“Moving now,” Graves said, quite calmly. “Where do you need me?”

“Anywhere but there, honey,” Beth said. “The sensors are showing 3000 deebees and counting.”

There was a moment of silence as that figure registered on Graves…the biggest raid in a generation had been less than 500, and that had stretched the colony to the limit. Many families died that day, and the colony still hadn’t recovered.

“Beth, I need you to patch this through to the others, right now…we’re going to need all of the exomechs together.”

“All right, honey, I’m on it.”

Keith Jenkins was having a bad day. He hated deebees with a passion…or rather, he hated that they made him have to do things he didn’t want to do. He didn’t want to be out of the farmhouse today, and certainly didn’t want to be in his exomech having to fight.

The only saving grace was that Shepherd, once a medium-sized agricultural exomech, was refitted over the years to be big on comfort and big on speed, so he could wander around his farmstead and avoid fighting if he could. Any fool can fight, why be uncomfortable about it?

Shepherd’s main armament was a long-ranged, three-barrelled autocannon, firing high-velocity 35mm slugs in three-round bursts. The long barrels severely affected the exomech’s centre of gravity, so he had to stand still to fire, but the long range meant that he could deal with deebees from ranges well beyond anything his fellow farmsteaders could match.

Right now he was in a standing in a clump of trees on a hill, taking pot shots at a group of deebees milling around his second cluster of gates a mile and a half away. At this range accuracy wasn’t great, but he was getting hits every third burst or so, and the deebees still hadn’t worked out where the shots were coming from.

The crackling of his suit’s video-comm interrupted as his wife, Jessie, came on-screen.

“Keith, I have an update from the Graves’,” she said. “Things are going pear-shaped on the ridgeline, they need you to get down there right now.”

“Tell them I’m busy, got problems of my own,” he replied, firing another burst. He fist-pumped as he saw at least one of the heavy tungsten rounds strike one of the aliens, splashing it across the soil.

“I think they’re serious, Keith,” Jessie said. “Most of the others have acknowledged and are already on their way.”

“They’ve dealt with all their clusters already?”

“Nope, leaving them as they are,” Jessie replied. “That’s what makes me think this is serious.”

“Any word from Crazy Bill?”

“Oh, plenty of words from him…mostly to tell you what he’s going to do to you if you don’t get your arse into gear and join up with the others. Assuming you survive of course.”

Jenkins sighed. Crazy Bill was just that. Crazy. And he hated to have to listen to him. Everything ‘back then’ was bigger, tougher and harder than it was now, and he traded on his age to influence the others. Since when was being old a substitute for being right?

“Tell them I’m engaged right now, will head over as soon as possible,” he said. “I’ve got some suit trouble, don’t think I can disengage safely, so I’ll have to fight my way clear.”

“You have suit trouble? I’m not seeing anything on Shepherd’s feed.”

“No, the suits fine… though they don’t need to know that.”

He fired another burst, missing completely.

“Keith,” Jessie said with a sigh, “this looks serious. You might want to consider doing the right thing, just this once.”

“You’re right,” he replied. “I’ll consider it.”

Carl Peters hardly knew what hit him. He’d had three clusters of gates on his property, and had cleared them out with minimal bother. His exomech, Hamfisted, was a dependable suit with solid armour and reliable weapons, and the deebees hadn’t posed much of a threat. The smallest of the farmsteads, squeezed between the southern ridgeline and the Toolong River, his clusters were relatively close, so it didn’t take him much time to find and destroy the deebees coming out of his gates.

One minute the screens were clear, then suddenly there was a wall of deebees headed his way. Hamfisted’s sensors counted what they saw, and Peters stood in shock for valuable seconds as the numbers registered, but it was too late for him to have done anything with those seconds.

He brought Hamfisted’s chainguns down, firing bursts on his maximum rate of fire, carving swaths through the creatures as they closed. High-speed tungsten carved through alien bodies, but still they came.

So swift was the deebee assault that he didn’t have time to get a shot off from any of his other weapons… the wall crashed over him, knocking Hamfisted to the ground, stunning him for a moment. Something in the swarm was strong enough to drive an armour-piercing claw all the way through his armoured glass canopy and into his chest, and he died without even a scream.

Or a chance to say goodbye to his wife, who watched the whole thing through Hamfisted’s video feed.

‘Angry’ Andy Donaldson was the second to die. His exomech, Mariner, was an old combat droid his grandfather had bought and refitted fifty years ago, heavily built with military-grade weapons, it was the family pride and joy.

It was also expensive, and building it and keeping it running had almost bankrupted the family. The other farmsteaders had long forgotten where he’d picked up his nickname, but they all assumed he was still angry at his grandfather for lumbering him with a white elephant of exomechs.

The Donaldson farmstead was also south, much bigger than the adjacent Peters’ property, and he’d had two clusters to deal with. His primary weapon was a ridiculously expensive battle laser, firing 3” diameter beams that vaporised almost anything they struck. Designed to fight other heavily armoured units, it was a massive overkill against anything unarmoured, and Donaldson hated it.

The wave of deebees that swept over Peters now came for him, and he knew he’d never make it to anywhere safe. He planted himself on top of a low ridge, giving himself a good field of fire, readied his weapons and began firing.

His laser took time to recharge, and spat a beam of death every four seconds, with enough energy to punch right through the first deebee it struck and go on to the next. From his elevated position, a good shot could kill three or four of them before it dug into the ground. It was effective, but not against a swarm that size.

He wasn’t going to make it, and he knew it… time to call his wife.

“Sarah, you there?”

“Yes, Andy, I’m here,” Sarah replied.

“I need you to grab your things and get over the Graves’ place, get yourself into their bunker.”

“Okay,” she said, “swing by and pick me up.”

“Not this time, Sarah, not this time.”

He knew she could see his video feed, could see the wide wall of aliens bearing down on him rapidly, and knew that she knew how this was going to end.

“Andy?”

“Just go!”

“I can’t just leave you…”

“Yes you can! Don’t make me do this for nothing.” He lowered his secondary weapons now, a 4” cannon firing high-explosive rounds, and began targeting tight clumps of aliens with it. He could hardly miss.

Sarah was crying openly now.

“Sarah… say goodbye now, while we still can, then get out.”

“Andy… I love you.”

“And I love you too.” He had the luxury of the battle to keep his emotions in check, but it was all he could do to keep from crying himself.

“Goodbye, Sarah.”

He cut the video feed, knowing that she’d stay there as long as she could while he was alive. He knew he was going to die, but wanted her to have as much time as possible to get to the Graves’ bunker.

Both weapons were firing now, as fast as they could, and he cut the safety overrides on both to keep their rate up. He knew he was burning out his laser and would soon warp the cannon barrel, but didn’t expect it to be a problem for much longer.

At 100 meters, the laser stopped firing, overheated.

At 50 meters, the warped cannon barrel caused a misfeed and jammed.

At 20 meters, he managed to get his close range weapons into action, a pair of 10mm machine guns and a small flamethrower. The machine guns cut a handful down as they closed, but without the instant-kill of the bigger weapons, the ones he hit just provided mobile armour for the ones behind for a few seconds, which was all it took.

Something from his left struck Mariner and knocked him down, and then a swarm of deebees was over him, gouging his armour and looking to get at the human inside. His armour was solid, very solid in fact, but he knew it was a matter of time before something gave.

He had the machine guns on automatic now, but they weren’t protected by armour and lasted a few seconds before a deebee claw cut through the metal and put them out of action.

The flamethrower lasted longer, burning anything on his right side to a cinder. It was well protected, housed within Mariner’s left arm, but a deebee must have sliced deep enough to cut the fuel intake… the flame sputtered and then went out as flamer fuel gushed all around him.

Weaponless now, he could do nothing but thrash around with his armoured fists and feet. They took a toll as well, crushing alien bodies with each solid blow, but the press of creatures above him made it harder and harder to get a decent strike in.

Suddenly, a warning light flickered on. He barely had time to recognise it — something had carved deep into his right arm, striking the laser housing and shorting the small fusion pile — when a spark ignited the flamer fuel pooling around the prone exomech. The explosion was small, but that detonated the unspent high explosive rounds still in his ammunition drums, and that in turn breached the fusion containment cell.

The resulting explosion killed hundreds of deebees, scattering them around the farmstead in shattered chunks. But in a swarm of thousands, it mattered very little indeed.

Graves stood on a low, wide hill, and looked around.

Brutiful was in the centre of a line of exomechs, with Carnigore on his right and Grampage on his left. It wasn’t much against a horde of killer aliens, but it was the best they could do.

“Hank, honey?” Beth said over the combined command net.

“Here, Beth.”

“The Singhs are on their way in, but they’ll be a while, and Jenkins is reporting suit damage, not sure when or even if he can get here.”

“Suit damage my arse,” Crazy Bill said. “He’s either chicken-shit lazy or chicken-shit scared.”

“Either way, we can’t rely on him, so it’s just the three of us for now,” Graves said. “If we can hold out until the Singhs get here, we might have a chance.”

“We could always hole up in your bunker,” Wright said. “Plenty of room down there for everyone.”

“We’d have to come out eventually,” Crazy Bill replied. “Our best chance for the colony is for the exomechs to deal with them now, while we’ve got them in a bunch.”

“I agree,” Graves said. “We kill what we can here then fight as we fall back to the Bunker. That should slow them down a little at least.”

“The command and control suite has some suggestions for fall-back routes, honey,” Beth said. “I’m sending data now for your autopilots.”

Brutiful beeped as the data came in, and Graves quickly looked over it before setting it up as his autopilot program.

“Got it, Beth, thanks,” he said, as both Wright and Crazy Bill acknowledged receipt of their information packets.

“I have all our drones fitted with cameras now, and Helen Wright has sent hers in as well,” Beth continued. “We should have plenty of real-time video coming in, and I’ll punch it through as you need it.”

“What’s the satellite showing?” Wright asked.

“Nothing good,” Beth replied. “There’s a wall of deebees coming your way, should be in sight in a few minutes, and there are some gates still yet to open.”

“Any sight of Peters or Donaldson?” Graves asked. There was a long pause before Beth replied.

“Nothing on the sensors, nothing on satellite, and I can’t raise anyone on the radio.”

“That’s not good.”

“No it’s not,” Beth continued. “And that swarm headed your way would have swept right over their farmsteads.”

There was silence as the three men made last minute preparations for the onslaught to come.

Jaswant Singh stood atop a steep cliff, his Crescent Moon raining death into the valley below him. His exomech’s main armaments were a pair of long-range 3” cannon on the right arm and a heavy rocket launcher on the left. The cannons each spat out high-explosive shells every six seconds, giving him one round every three, and amidst the swarm of deebees headed his way the bursting charges and their tungsten shrapnel were leaving great gaps in the alien ranks.

The rocket launcher was a box-shaped, 6-tube weapon, capable of firing single rockets or volleys of six. It wasn’t as accurate as the cannon, but didn’t need to be — a volley of six rockets had enough scatter and burst to fill quite a large area with shrapnel, and close enough was good enough when it came to big explosions.

Its only problem was that it was slow to reload, and he was getting a volley away every five minutes.

Below him, midway up the hill, Eagle and Hawk waited, both pilots nervous as they watched the swarm approach. Their weapons lacked the long range of Crescent Moon, but were lethal at close range… how lethal, and how quickly they could kill swarming deebees in these numbers, was about to be tested.

The aliens were now 50 metres from the base of the hill, and Crescent Moon had time for one last volley of rockets before the creatures were too close for Jaswant to use his heavy weapons. All he could do now was pick off the creatures following behind, and hope the other exomechs could handle the rest.

As the deebees closed, Hawk and Eagle opened fire. Both arms mounted a pair of linked 15mm machines guns, capable of firing over 800 rounds per minute each and loaded with a mix of solid tungsten slugs and hollowpoint rounds. Each arm could fire independently, and the wall of tungsten that they spread before them stopped the first ranks of the swarm dead in their tracks.

The next waves met the same fate, but as each creature fell it created a small wall for the ones behind. Both exomechs walked slowly backwards up the hill as the wall grew, hoping to maintain some elevation so they could shoot at the creatures massing behind it.

From around both edges of the wall, however, more creatures swarmed, and Eagle and Hawk turned to face the new threat.

Hawk’s heavy weapon was a pair of semi-automatic mortars that fired over the exomech’s shoulder. They only had a range of 50 metres, but were able to empty their 5-round clips in a matter of seconds, generating enough firepower to devastate a large target almost instantly.

Agun Singh stomped the foot pedal for his mortars, emptying the clip at the approaching swarm. The mortars were set to target 40 metres away initially, then increase a few metres for each successive shot… the first three rounds from each mortar, all high-explosive, flattened the incoming wave, while the fourth rounds airburst and scattered shards of white phosphorous around.

The creatures beneath the white-hot halo burned as the hot phosphorous dug into the skin. Some collapsed instantly, the shards deep enough to cook them from the inside, but the rest kept coming, despite their horrible wounds.

The fifth rounds were napalm, splashing across the side of the hill and covering anything it touched with intense flame. Very few creatures made it through, and Agun dispatched those that did with tightly controlled burst from Eagle’s twin machine guns.

Behind him, Kubai deployed Eagle’s own heavy weapons, a pair of flamethrowers, one over each shoulder. Unlike the smaller flamethrowers on other exomechs, these were military grade, emitting white-hot jets of plasma that incinerated anything they touched. His approach was to let the creatures approach to within 20 metres and then spray them all with gouts of plasma.

They died by the dozens, the dead providing no cover at all as they turned to ash under the incredible heat. Eagle’s canopy darkened to protect him from the intense glare, which made Kubai blind to what was happening in front of him.

He toggled the camera feed, tapping into Crescent Moon’s video to get a third-party view of the battle, and adjusted his flame jets to deal with a group that were trying to flank him. They never made it, though the last of them was a charred corpse only a metre or so away.

Jaswant had reloaded his rocket pack now and looked for a target worth expending the high-explosive six-pack on…there was nothing as yet, so he used his time to fire cannon shells into small groups of deebees that were trying to push their way through or over the wall of corpses Hawk and Eagle had made with their machine guns.

Using his command suite, he checked the ammunition states of his small force. Everything was getting low, and he knew it was going to be close. Soon, the plasma jets would be out of fuel and the machine gun hoppers would be empty, and then they’d be in serious trouble.

Suddenly, it was over. The flank attacks proving futile, the remaining deebees swarmed directly up the hill, clumping together to push through the wall of their dead. It took Jaswant a second to align his rocket pack and fire, and the swarm disappeared as the volley of six rockets detonated amongst them.

The three men sat in their exomechs for a moment, happy to be still alive after the onslaught, and then it was back to the business at hand.

“Hawk, Eagle, report,” Jaswant said quietly.

“Hawk intact,” Agun replied. “Heavy weapons empty, gun ammunition at five percent.”

“Eagle intact,” Kubai added. “Plasma gone, gun ammunition at nine percent.”

“And Crescent Moon intact,” Jaswant said. “Rockets gone, six rounds of cannon left.”

“We’re in no state to fight, father,” Agun said. “We don’t have enough ammunition to fight through to the Graves’ farmstead.”

“I concur,” Jaswant replied. “Let’s head for home.”

Sarah Donaldson was still in tears as she left the farmhouse she and her dead husband had turned into a home. She wanted to race to the battle, hoping beyond all hope that Andy was somehow still alive, but she knew it was less than futile…it would be suicide. Andy hadn’t been able to stay alive in Mariner, she’d have no chance in anything less than a fully-armed exomech.

Racing into the shed, she wheeled out a powerful motorcycle, one of the pair that was always kept fully charged for emergencies. Stuffing her overnight bags into the vehicle’s panniers, she climbed aboard and thumbed the starter switch, kicking the electric motor into life.

She had visited the Graves’ place regularly, and swung the rapidly accelerating bike onto the dirt road that ran towards the neighbouring farmstead, paralleling the Toolong River. She and Andy had always joked about the name, inherited from the initial survey report a century ago, and this time it really did seem ‘too long’.

Ahead was the concrete bridge that Andy’s grandfather had built, the old Donaldson crest on all four of the concrete support pillars. As she approached the bridge her eyes misted over again, thinking about grandchildren of her own that she and Andy would never have.

Lost in her thoughts, she didn’t notice the rippling surface of the water or the sparkling gleam of alien bodies as they rose from the depths.

Three deebees leapt out of the river just as she pulled onto the bridge, knocking her from the bike and sending her sprawling into one of the concrete pillars. Even if she’d been wearing a helmet, the impact would still have knocked her out and it would have done her no good at all as a swarm of deebees burst out of the river and tore her body to pieces.

She died not even knowing that she was pregnant with Andy’s child.

The three exomechs held the line as best they could, using their long-range guns to slow down the advancing horde as they slowly retreated along the line of hills. Ammunition was quickly becoming an issue though, and they all knew they had fewer rounds than there were deebees.

“Hank, honey?” Beth cut in over the radio.

“Kinda busy, Beth,” Graves replied. “Unless you got news worth hearing, I don’t have much time to chat.”

“I got news, some good, some bad.”

“Start with the good,” Crazy Bill cut in, “I think we could all use some cheering up right now.”

“Okay,” Beth said. “Helen has re-routed some of her drones your way, carrying ammunition drums. “

“That is good news, honey,” Graves said. “I’ll be throwing rocks at them if this lasts much longer.”

“The drones can’t reload for you, only drop the drums close by.”

“That’s fine, honey, drop them close, we’ll do the rest.”

The three pilots switched to manual control and drew closer together as their sensors picked up the incoming drones. There were six, two each, and they were coming in slow and low… clearly, Helen had loaded them with as much as they could bear.

Which was good, they were going to need it all.

“Jake, how’s your ammo state?” Graves asked.

“Almost out of everything that matters,” Wright replied. “I got some close-in stuff left, but was really hoping not to need it.”

“Okay, you reload first, Crazy Bill and I will cover you.”

“Roger that!”

“And get the lead out,” Crazy Bill added. “I’m down to my last rounds as well.”

Carnigore fell out of the line, leaving Brutiful and Grampage to face the horde. Two drones passed over him, dropping heavy drum canisters into the soft ground within a few metres…one struck a rock and burst open, scattering autocannon ammunition everywhere, but the other canisters stayed intact.

One of Carnigore’s saving graces, as he was just learning, was that it had much nimbler hands than your typical exomech. It was relatively easy to pick up a canister, eject an empty one, and reload the canister directly into the waiting drum feeder. ‘Relatively’ still meant that it took him minutes however, and he was out of battle during a time when mere seconds were critical.

Graves was very aware of his rapidly diminishing ammunition supply, and was firing controlled burst of 2–3 rounds each. It was never going to make a dint in the oncoming horde, but killing those in the lead would buy them some time… no idea what for, but maybe the Singh’s would get there in time to rescue the wives and children locked into the Bunker.

Crazy Bill was firing constantly, preferring his own heavy cannon over his lighter autocannon. The high explosive rounds tore clumps out of the enemy and caused some confusion, which helped slow them down a little. Not enough, but everything helped.

“Hank,” he said over the firing, “something just occurred to me.”

“What’s that Bill?” Graves replied, simultaneously firing a burst from his over-sized shotgun into a clump that was just begging to have a spray of tungsten sent its way. “You leave the gas on?”

“No,” Crazy Bill said, chuckling loudly. “That wife of yours, she never gave us the bad news.”

“You’re right,” Graves said. “Beth, honey? You got something else for us?”

“The bad news? You want it now?”

“Sure! What could possibly make anything worse?”

There was a pause, and Graves could hear his wife’s sharp intake of breath.

“It’s the giant gate on the ridgeline… it’s still open.”

The three men in the exomechs paused a moment as that sunk in. Gates always closed after they’d dropped off their load of deebees. Always.

“Well, shit!” Wright said, trying to push the last of his reload canisters into place.

“And then some,” Crazy Bill added.

The three exomechs stood open, family members working quickly to repair and reload them as best as they could, while the three pilots stood around the tactical display in the farmhouse’s security room. The picture looked grim, and they doubted that Graves and the others would last much longer.

“If we move quickly,” Agun said, “Hawk and Eagle might get there in time to be of some help.”

Jaswant shook his head. “You’d need Crescent Moon to support you, you don’t have the firepower to make much of a difference.”

“We could give them close defence like we do for you, keep the deebees clear while they clean them out.”

“Good idea, brother,” Kubai said, “but that would leave Crescent Moon without support.”

“Someone needs to stay here and guard the families.”

That brought a frown from Jaswant, one that silenced his son. “If Graves and the others fall, there’s no point guarding anything else.” He pointed to the satellite images of deebees pouring towards the distant farmstead. “The colony lives or dies at the Graves farmstead.”

“What do we do, father?” Agun asked.

“The best we can my son, the best we can.”

Brutiful’s autocannon whirred and clicked as they finally ran out of ammunition. He was down to his last three shotgun rounds and then he’d be useless until the deebees got into close range, and by then it would be all over.

“Hank!” Wright’s voice cut over the radio. “I’m reloaded, you’re up!”

Carnigore stepped beside him, its clown-face a garish red grin as it opened fire on the aliens. Wright had no concerns at all about ammunition now and was firing it as fast as he could — there were certainly plenty of targets for everything he had to throw at them.

Graves stepped back out of the line and moved quickly to the clump of ammunition canisters the drones had dropped off for him. Brutiful was a large exomech, with lots of ammunition storage and he knew it was going to take him a while to get completely reloaded.

“Crap,” Crazy Bill cut in, “I’m out too, nothing but close-in guns and my fists!”

“I can hold them,” Wright replied, “But you’ll need to be quick!”

“Bill, grab your canisters, make for the next hill,” Graves said. “We’ll cover you, you reload up there and cover us as we move back.”

“Roger that!” Crazy Bill picked up his ammunition drums and ran for the next hilltop as fast as Grampage’s servo-motors would go.

Graves could hear the sounds of firing behind him as he reloaded.

“Hank!” Wright yelled over the radio, “I need you real bad!”

Graves picked up the remaining canisters on Brutiful’s lower arms and turned back to the line, his heavy shoulder-weapons coming back down, as reloaded as they were going to be.

The swarm was only a few hundred yards away now, and the exomech sensors still showed thousands of creatures out there. True, they could see the swarm was smaller than it was before, but they both knew it wasn’t going to be enough.

Graves started firing, autocannon on maximum rate, shotgun blasting out a spread of tungsten as soon it chambered another round. Beside him, Carnigore matched him round for round, and the slaughter amongst the deebees was incredible.

But not enough.

“Hank,” Wright’s voice came through on a private direct channel. “I don’t think we’re going to make it.”

Graves knew he wasn’t wrong, but really didn’t want to admit it.

“I know,” he said softly, “but we’ll go down swinging, give the Singhs and the others as best chance we can.”

“I guess we will,” Wright said, triggering another burst. “I just hope it counts for something.”

The two men were silent for a long time, firing rapidly and switching fire to deal with the targets that presented the greatest threat.

“Hank, honey!” Beth’s voice cut through urgently, “I need you to both get off the hill, and now!”

“What?”

“Don’t argue, just get the hell off there!”

Graves shrugged and powered Brutiful off the hill as fast as he could, and a moment later he saw Carnigore do the same, with the front ranks of deebees only a dozen or so metres behind and closing.

His suit sensors pinged as they picked up a flight of something coming in fast and low, and he instinctively ducked as something flew overhead. He’d barely made it half-way down the slope when there was an explosion on the other side of the hill, powerful enough to knock both Carnigore and Brutiful off their feet and send them tumbling down the hill.

Jenkins day just wasn’t getting any better. Jessie was sending him the video and satellite feeds and he knew the colony was well and truly screwed over. There was a small chance Graves and the others could hold the deebees back, and he wanted to still be alive when the battle was over, but sitting back and watching wasn’t going to help anybody, including him.

“Keith, I’m picking up movement on the ridgeline,” Jessie said. “Big biomass, headed towards Graves’ place.”

“Well, that’s them screwed then,” he replied. “Might be best if you start packing some things Jessie and we take our chances in the wild until the next ship arrives.”

“Might not be so bad, Keith… that big swarm of deebees isn’t showing up on the satellite at all!”

“What now? That son of a bitch Graves took out an entire swarm by himself?”

“No idea,” Jessie replied. “Might be worthwhile getting over there though, just in case.”

“Good idea, Jessie,” Jenkins said. “There should be plenty to claim from the colony account after this.”

Turning Shepherd southward, he started mentally calculating the claims he was going to be putting in for his defence of the colony… and very, very inflated claims they would be.

Shaken, Graves struggled to get his exomech back on its feet, but whatever had knocked him down must have had enough force to throw Brutiful’s gyros out of alignment.

He noticed the ringing in his ears only when he started to get his hearing back, and only when that died down did he hear Beth calling out for him over the radio.

“Hank! Hank! Do you read me?” Her voice was frantic, and Graves had no idea how long he’d been out.

“I’m here, honey,” he replied. “Quit yelling and tell me what the hell just happened.”

“Oh, Hank, honey!” she said, the relief evident in her voice. “I thought I’d lost you!”

“Nope, still here… what did I miss?”

“You missed a lot! The Singhs came through, the smaller gates are all closed and the two Singh boys are on their way over, should be at the bunker within twenty.”

“Just the boys?” Graves asked. “Jaswant didn’t make it?”

“Jaswant’s fine!” Beth replied. “They stripped the fusion cell out of Crescent Moon and sent it in on a drone, rigged to detonate on command.”

Graves paused as that sank in… fusion cells were expensive and temperamental, and it would have been fast and risky work to take one out of an exomech and rig it to a crop-dusting drone.

No wonder Beth had wanted him off that hill in a hurry!

“Wait… the Singh’s just nuked my back yard?”

“Honey!”

“We’ll talk about it later, Beth,” he said. “Right now, I need an update on everything else.”

“I can’t give it to you, honey,” Beth replied. “The blast’s EMP took out our sensors and all the drones, and our satellite link is going to be down until you get back and fix it.”

“Okay… I’ll look around here and let you know what’s going on.”

“Roger that… I’ll get this place sorted out and see to the families I have here.”

He had to shut down and then reboot the gyros before he could stand up, and then he turned and went back to the top of the hill. The place was a mess.

On the fields below, the deebee swarm was now ash, turned to scorched dust by the force and heat of a fusion explosion. It would take him years to deal with the radiation, and he might have to move to maintain enough land to make a viable homestead, but he was glad to be alive.

He was saddened, however, at the sight of Carnigore, lying shattered and twisted at the base of the hill. The blast must have picked the exomech up and hurled it down the slope, and looking at the torn armour the following wave of radiation must have cooked Wright inside his suit.

Hopefully, he’d have been unconscious when the wave hit and he’d died quickly.

There was movement behind him, and he turned to see Grampage moving towards him. The exomech waved at him, then the right arm carefully tapped the suit’s head, indicating radio failure. Grampage would have been well protected from the explosion, but high up on the next hill it would have been quite vulnerable to the EMP.

Crazy Bill came closer, and Graves could see through the armoured glass canopy that he was waving a hand-held radio at him. The hand-helds were standard equipment for all colonists, and it took Graves only a moment to unclip his.

“You okay old-timer?” he asked, smiling to take the sting out of his words.

“Never been better,” Crazy Bill replied. “You got a lot of dead deebees on your land, Hank, going to be good fertiliser come next summer.”

“Summer in about 300 years you mean,” Graves said, “after the radiation dies down.”

He could see Crazy Bill laughing at him.

“Don’t be foolish, Hank, the deebees will absorb that radiation as they break down.”

“Really?”

Crazy Bill was nodding now.

Suddenly, there was an almighty roar, loud enough to shake them both through their armoured exomechs. Looking around, Graves saw a creature that even his worst nightmares wouldn’t have thrown at him.

It was a deebee, but like nothing of them had ever seen before. His visual sensors were out, but it towered over the trees it was brushing easily aside, and must have stood at least 30 metres tall at the shoulder. Graves counted six clawed legs, could see from the sheen that it was chitin armoured, and the snout was fanged like a hungry cat.

“What… on… earth… is … that?” was all he could mutter.

“That,” Crazy Bill replied, “is as good a reason as you’ll ever need to run the hell back to your bunker.”

Nodding, Graves turned his exomech and moved as fast as he could back to his farmstead.

By the time Graves and Crazy Bill got back to the Bunker, the two light Singh exomechs had arrived, and Beth and Helen were out chatting to the two men. Beth waved happily when Graves arrived, but stopped waving when she saw the state of Brutiful and the urgency on her husband’s face.

“Hank, honey, what is it?”

“Deebee coming, get back in the Bunker!”

“How many?” Agun asked, strapping himself back into his harness.

“Just one, son,” Crazy Bill replied, “just one.”

Agun and Kubai frowned as they sealed their exomechs and powered up their sensors — they’d known when the fusion cell was due to detonate and had shut down their systems to avoid the worst of the EMP — but they weren’t making much sense of the readings.

“My sensors must be fried,” Kubai said.

“Mine too,” Agun added. “I’m picking up one signature, of enormous mass.”

“There’s nothing wrong with your sensors,” Graves said. “Just the one, and it’s the size of a deep-space shuttle.”

The creature appeared at that moment, towering over the trees, and Beth and Helen both ran for the safety of the Bunker. Moving at great speed, the deebee headed towards them and Graves barely had enough time to reload the last of his ammunition canisters before the thing broke through the electric fence surrounding the farmstead. Built to keep out cattle, it barely registered on the behemoth above them.

The Bunker was equipped with a pair of 200mm cannon, capable of firing both high-explosive and anti-armour rounds. The ammunition hoppers were always filled with high-explosive, and Beth was firing them at the rapid rate, hoping to bring the creature down under a hail of fire. Against the thick chitin armour, however, the rounds did nothing.

Brutiful’s autocannon had much the same effect, bouncing harmlessly off or exploding on impact without troubling the creature at all. He didn’t even bother firing the shotgun, knowing the lower-velocity rounds would do nothing.

The Singhs charged in, Hawk and Eagle moving swiftly around the creature, firing their machine guns hoping to find a weak spot. The creature didn’t appear to have any, and the rounds did little more than distract it.

Kubai’s flamethrowers did little better, managing to infuriate it, and the creature reared up on its four hind legs and brought its fore-paws crashing down…

Both of the lighter exomechs managed to dodge, though only just.

The Bunker’s twin cannon were still firing, and still having no effect at all.

“Beth,” Graves said as he moved Brutiful around to the giant deebee’s right side, “quit wasting the hi-ex. I need you to unload as fast as you can and reload with the anti-armour rounds.”

“Hank, honey,” Beth replied, “what do you think I‘m doing?”

Graves conceded that she had a point… unloading manually would have taken much longer than just firing it all off.

“Okay,” he said. “Let me know when you’ve got a few anti-armour rounds loaded, we’ll try to keep the thing off the bunker until you do.”

“Roger that!”

Eagle and Hawk were running between the creature’s legs now, still firing, and it didn’t seem to like it much. It reared up again, this time on its rearmost pair of legs, and brought its whole body down.

This time Eagle wasn’t so lucky, and a descending claw caught it and pressed it to the ground. The giant head came around, jaws open, and then the creature’s teeth crushed and tore into the exomech and the pilot within. Graves winced as he heard Agun’s screams, and then there was silence.

“Brother!” Kubai yelled, and darted forward to avenge his fallen kinsman. The creature was grinding the suit between its teeth, shredding the armour and Agun’s remains. Ignoring his other weapons, Kubai slammed Hawk directly into the deebee’s head, using the suit’s armoured shoulders as a battering ram.

The impact was incredible, and Graves saw teeth fly out of the mouth as the creature sagged for a moment, and Kubai took the opportunity to slam Hawk’s fists into the creature’s head, massive roundhouse blows with power and weight behind them that only an exomech could generate.

The creature’s exoskeletal armour began to break apart, and Kubai dug his suit’s hands deep into a crack and heaved… Armour pulled away, revealing bright pink and yellow flesh beneath. He shoved his right arm into the hole and fired a burst from his twin machine guns, digging deep as the rounds finally punched into something vital.

The creature roared in agony and lifted its body, dragging Hawk with it. Kubai used his left arm to hang on and continued firing as the creature shook his head frantically in an effort to dislodge him.

“Hank, honey!” Beth cut in. “I have six anti-armour rounds loaded, ready to fire!”

“Roger that,” Graves replied. “Kubai, drop clear!”

“Negative, Henry Graves,” Kubai said. “You know the saying about riding the tiger.”

Graves did indeed — there was no getting off once you started.

“Beth, Kubai can’t get clear… I’ll try to turn it so you can get a clean shot.”

“Negative again,” Kubai said. “Beth Graves, take your shot now, while I have it distracted.”

“Hank, honey?”

“He’s right, Beth, take the shot. Try to aim low, and be sure not to miss.”

Graves watched as the twin cannon slewed around and then dropped, aiming right for the creature’s chest, and fired three rounds from each barrel. At that range, they couldn’t miss.

The anti-tank rounds were a tungsten slug with a hollow charge, that turned into a shaped charge on impact…striking the creature, they formed and detonated, with enough heat to melt the tungsten and fire it at supersonic speeds into the target. The six rounds struck in quick succession, each a metre or so apart, and the resultant explosions turned the creature’s torso to pulp.

It rose up in its death throes and thrashed around uncontrollably… Kubai couldn’t maintain his grip and Hawk fell, landing heavily on its back, only to have the creature fall on top of him, its sheer weight crushing the exomech and cracking open plates of armour.

And then it died.

Graves, Jaswant Singh, Crazy Bill and Keith Jenkins stood outside the Bunker as the other colonists cleaned up the mess, which included cutting up and dragging away the corpse of the giant deebee.

With a lot of families dead, there’d be room for more colonists. The Donaldsons were gone, so their farmstead was vacant land, and Peters’ wife and family had decided to leave Tau Ceti and head home to Earth, which freed up that land as well.

They managed to drag Kubai Singh out of his exomech’s wreckage… he was still alive, but had lost both legs and an arm, and would require expensive prosthetics, which the Colony account would happily pay. Likewise, replacement exomechs for the Singhs, who had lost all three of their suits, would come from the Colony account.

Jenkins had put in claims for damages and repairs that they all knew were ridiculous, but no-one had the energy to argue — he’d survived, that counted for something, and they needed everyone to move forward together. Jaswant Singh had suggested giving Jenkins the deeds to the Donaldson and Peters farmsteads, in exchange for his own, as payment for his efforts, and the others had reluctantly agreed — the Singhs had lost too much for them to deny any reasonable requests right now. Graves could see Jenkins mentally rubbing his hands together in glee, and it sickened him.

The really good news was that Jake Wright had survived after all. Despite his complaints about his exomech, Carnigore had one feature no-one had counted on — it had more radiation shielding than any of them had ever seen, likely as a measure to protect patrons from radiation leaks from when it was still an amusement ride droid. It was a wreck and would need replacing, but Jake was okay.

And that left the giant gate on the ridgeline. It lacked the sparkle that indicated an open gateway back the deebee’s home dimension, but it was still there. None of them had any idea what to do about it, other than to arm up, stay vigilant, and invest heavily in defences. It was going to be expensive and hard work, and it dawned on Graves that Jenkins new farmstead would be right in the path of any further attacks… Jaswant Singh was much wilier than he’d given him credit.

With the creature dragged away and the other colonists gone, Graves and his wife surveyed the land they’d fought hard to defend. It never occurred to them to pack up and leave, to head to somewhere safer. This was home, and alien invasion or no, this was where they were going to stay.