Humanity Endures

Part 3 - Light's End | Chapter 7

As the deathly chorus of alien shrieks that echoed throughout the ship was in turn quickly subsumed by the thunderous roar of thousands of approaching alien feet, however, it became clear that the human defenders would not be left waiting much longer. Hefting a pair of Motile Munition Machine-guns — abbreviated as MMMs and being named as such because the potent, AI-guided rounds they fired tracked their targets — and aiming one down each end of the hallway, Korthekar sought to out-shoot all of Velan's other soldiers combined when the time came. When they finally spotted the perfectly synchronized attack of their inexorable alien foe, Velan's crew members on both ends of the hallway opened fire almost simultaneously, meeting the wave of death before them with a surge of lead. How Velan's crew had survived this long was nothing short of impressive, and the prospect of surviving this most recent attack nothing short of miraculous, though Velan, seeing how powerful the aliens were, was not comforted by the idea of survival; even if he lived, Light's End was a mere battle in a soon-to-be far greater war. The horrors that he had seen over the tenebrous skies of Light's End were innumerable, uncountable, and yet, they would doubtless be surpassed in both number, scale, and terrible nature, even if he were to live to fight another day. Confronted with that truth, no small part of him believed that a quick death was preferable to prolonged suffering and a bloody struggle as he watched his species falter, and, potentially, vanish.

Approaching as a dense, writhing black mass, the alien attack, led by dozens of 'fiends' on both fronts with a vanguard of smaller, faster, creatures — creatures that some marines had accurately dubbed "sprinters" — charged forward, moving just ahead of an aggravated tide of the same seething black fluid that had been omnipresent throughout the aliens' own vessel. As the fluid consciously charged the human line, keeping pace with its solid compatriots, it had become clear that this alien "biofluid" was as much an enemy as any of the more conventional alien creatures. As the condensed human force let loose a devastating rain of gauss fire on their nightmarish quarry, they cut down dozens of both the alien fiends and the smaller sprinters that scampered ahead in the vanguard, though any wounded or dead aliens then inevitably fell back into the mass of approaching biofluid, where they were resurrected and thrown back into the fray almost instantly. With the aliens losing only their momentum where they should have lost their lives, their seemingly unstoppable assault drew closer to the embattled human lines with each passing second, and Velan saw that to stop the aliens' assault and have even a shot at survival he would have to stop their regenerative tide of biological liquid. To this end, he ordered that every remaining grenade his force had, most of which were high-explosive ones, be thrown at the approaching horde simultaneously, with the intent of vaporizing both it and its accompanying liquid.

Connecting the detonation software of all his crew's grenades to his own implants, Velan watched as an instant later his tempest of gauss fire ceased, and, in the next moment, dozens of grenades, — their types as varied as the aliens they were being thrown at — hurtled through the claustrophobic hallway. Waiting until his foe had foolishly walked right over most of those grenades thrown at them, Velan then detonated every single grenade that had been thrown; so great was the force of the detonation that it violently shook Poseidon itself, as it engulfed much of Velan's hallway in a firestorm so intense that the aliens' regenerative biofluid was evaporated by the metric ton. The detonation nearly tore a hull through the armor of the vessel, though depressurization was narrowly avoided as the aliens absorbed much of the blast. The sheer explosive force of the grenades proved so intense that Velan's soldiers had to duck, or trust in the strength of their armor, as dozens of blown-off alien limbs — still moving with purpose, as they groped and stabbed at Velan's crew — rained down from above. The grisly onslaught of detached alien limbs tragically claimed the lives of six of Velan's soldiers and sailors, where the appendages were fortunate enough to obliterate a vital area, while dozens more were injured to various degrees by their now-disarmed foes.