The day of battle arrived like a storm everyone knew was coming but could not avoid. Annan and his Squad mates climbed into their ITSVs, powered up systems as they had been trained, and joined over 375 other ITSVs that were waiting in a part of the vessel called Launch Bay.
Nestled in the firm embrace of his cockpit chair, Annan stared out of his window, taking in the wall-to-wall grayness of the Launch Bay. He tried to empty his head of any and everything not related to the upcoming combat. Nervousness clawed at him as it always did before a battle. But this time, his trepidation was amplified by a dread-filled sense of the unknown. Annan tried to shake off the feeling.
The floor beneath the machines retracted swiftly, and with heart-stopping suddenness, the ITSVs were yanked out into a black void.
Annan’s first reaction, had he been allowed to give in to it, was panic. Being in this perpetual vastness called space should have paralyzed him with terror. Indeed, as he dropped toward the planet below, a fright like none he had ever before felt smothered him in a cruel grip. He shouldn’t have been able to function, yet while he quailed internally, outwardly, his body remained calm.
He sat composed and focused while his piloting computer guided his vehicle’s descent. Suddenly, the blackness of space blended into the swirling whites of cloud cover. The sprawling surface rushed at him with breakneck fury, air friction shaking his craft, wrapping the forward section in a thermal blanket. He should have been pissing in the one-piece garment he wore. Instead, a crucial part of him remained strangely tranquil.
It must have been the liquid the Gray Armor healer squirted into his arm. The healer said the liquid would help humans keep their wits in the tumult of battle.
An expanding ball of light and smoke consumed the ITSV flying in front of Annan. A second craft to his left fragmented to superheated splinters when a shaft of brilliance pierced it like a sword thrusting through flesh. The sky blazed with those blinding shafts. The liquid was obviously working. Otherwise, Annan and the other humans would have been unable to cope with the frenetic pace of this type of warfare.
Large, diamond-shaped craft brushed past the ITSVs, scarlet iridescence flickering from their top and bottom mounted ejectors. Wherever those beams struck, enemy defensive positions went up in shrouds of fire. The preponderance of ground-to-air flak lessened as the Conglomerate fighters cleared the way for ITSVs to land.
When Annan’s vehicle set down on a soft grassy plain, the computer granted him manual control. ITSVs dropped around him, until all except the two destroyed in flight were present and accounted for. Annan surveyed the plain, noting with fascination the gold coloring of the tall feather-fringed grass.
Low winds brushed the field and the swaying of the grass presented the illusion of a golden ocean. The sky was amber, bright and clear…clearer than the crispest blue skies of home. The Asante commander would have taken a moment to digest his surroundings, acclimate himself to the fact that he was on another world. On a different occasion, he would have absorbed the sights and sounds of this strange and captivating milieu. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the occasion and Annan had to reconcile himself to the grim possibility that this tranquil valley might become his grave.
Annan’s front view screen scanned the distance for threats. A ridge rose twenty miles ahead. One second, the ridge was barren. The next, it came alive. Thousands of forms poured over the slope, spilling onto the flat plain.
“Here they come,” Kofu’s voice whispered over the Squad channel.
Annan silently concurred. The Gray Armors had briefed the humans on the enemy they would be facing. The humans were shown pictures. But the visuals displayed on Annan’s screen did little to capture the full horror of the live horde stampeding across the plain.
The Gray Armors called these things Otruls…their cyborg variants to be exact.
Annan had no idea why they were fighting these creatures. All he knew was that he had to kill them before they killed him.
They were huge, lumbering, two-legged beasts fashioned from an unholy fusion of flesh and metal. Their metal legs operated like the hind legs of horses. Most of their wide man-like torsos were encased in mottled green metal, as were their bulky forearms and sections of their broad shoulders. The fleshy parts were covered with wavy patches of bluish hair, sprouting out of olive colored skin. Their faces were flat and blocky with severely overlapping ridges almost completely obscuring the dark smoldering pits of their eyes. They had no visible noses. Where noses should have been were marked by moist slits that quivered with exertion. Their wide snarling mouths were filled with metal teeth that glazed razor sharpness. They were armed with wide-barreled projectile-firing tubes, along with an intimidating assortment of blunt and edged weapons. A single blow from one of those bludgeoning weapons would surely have quashed a man as easily as a rock mulching a berry.
The computer ordered Annan to stand his ground, wait for the Otruls to come within terminal range of the ejectors.
Every human had obviously received the same instructions from his or her computer. The ITSVs assembled in a wide formation extending like a chain across the rolling grassland.
A string of calculations which Annan could not comprehend formulated on his status screen. Of course, it wasn’t Annan’s place to know what those flashing glyphs meant. His only function, as the Gray Armors repeatedly insisted, was to obey the computer.
Discharge ejectors, the computer commanded.
Annan thumbed the weapons control, sending a particle blast into a cluster of Otruls. The beams stabbed through fifteen of them, rending flesh and metal. A torrent of particle fire erupted from the ITSVs.
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