The ruins of Tomdara
Two hours later
It had been eight hours since they'd abandoned their position and started walking (well, running first, then walking once they were sure the apocalypse wasn't still chasing them). Six hours since they stopped to watch the skies open up with the wrath of god directly over where home was. Two hours since the bombardment had ceased.
(An hour since they found a cute fireplug of a pilot beating the hell out of her ejection seat and screaming obscenities over her broken leg).
The path ahead of Corporal Shephard didn't inspire confidence. It was a wasteland as far as the eye could see, virtually featureless save for the half buried remains of destroyed war machines, and the irregular depressions of blast craters and what used to be the town sewer system. Not that they could see all that far. The dust was thick in the air.
"Oh, man," Murphy said, muffled through the cloth over his mouth, "Marcel's is gone! They had the best chicken fries..."
Shephard looked back. "Chicken fried what?"
"Chicken fries!" Murphy's face was fully covered by goggles and an impromptu headwrap, so Shephard couldn't see the incredulous look on his face, but it came through in his voice pretty well. "They're the greatest creation in the history of... umm... creation!"
Shephard stopped. "What the hell is a chicken fry?"
"Boys!" Tasha, the pilot, shouted from the rear, hobbling along using Murphy's rifle as a makeshift crutch. "Not the time!"
"Yes, ma'am," Shephard acknowledged almost reflexively. Tasha outranked them, not to mention that even with a broken leg Shephard suspected she could kick both their asses. She was a hot little redhead, but she wasn't a pushover.
Maybe once they were outside of the same command chain again she'd like to get a drink?
"Check the wrecks," Tasha said. "See if you can find survivors, or a radio."
Shephard looked out again over the field and then looked back to Tasha. "So I take the thirty on the left, and Murphy takes the thirty on the right?"
"It'll go faster without the whining, Corporal."
Shephard sighed. "Okay, Murphy, find the Sergeant something to sit on and rest her leg, I'll go check out that Hasek over there."
"Go with him, Murphy," Tasha ordered. "I'm fine."
Shephard shook his head. "As your doctor, I'm ordering you to take a rest." He kinda regretted that Tasha's makeshift dust mask hid any expression.
"Since when are you my doctor, Corporal?"
Shephard shrugged. "I splinted your leg and made Murphy give you his rifle. That counts big time."
"I said I was fine, Corporal," Tasha protested, but Murphy intervened.
"Sorry ma'am," he said. "Doc's orders. I think that great big wolf faced mech thingy looks comfy."
Tasha looked like she wanted to put up a tough front, but she accepted the offered shoulder. "Are you two always like this?"
"It's why we're scouts, ma'am," Murphy responded. "Plus there was all those times Corporal Shephard over there kept asking the women in the platoon for backrubs."
Shephard shook his head as he turned away and started towards what looked like a reasonably intact Hasek.
"That's why he was paired with me, you see," Murphy continued, "just desserts and all that." Even facing the other way, Shephard knew Murphy was staring back at him wistfully. "I mean, Dat Ass, am I right?"
Whatever response Tasha made, Shephard didn't hear it. He liked to think it was vehement agreement, but it was probably stodgy disapproval.
He found it surprisingly hard going navigating though what used to be a small town. Everything was covered with loose soil, stirred up by the bombardment no doubt, and underneath that was more than a few suprises, hidden cavities or pieces of rubble ready to be tripped on. All the better reason for Tasha to be sitting down and resting her bum leg rather than trying to navigate through this mess and breaking her stubby little pilot legs even worse.
As Shephard approached the vehicle, he noticed that the door to the infantry compartment was hanging slightly ajar. That... could mean all kinds of things. Right now it meant he brought his rifle up, approaching the vehicle with a newfound caution. As he got closer, he began to hear the faint hiss of a radio.
Pulling the door open with one hand, his eyes swept the spacious infantry compartment, looking for threats. Instead he saw... a lot of blackness.
A weak voice called out. "Hey, are you human?"
Shephard swung his rifle in the approximate direction of the voice. "That something you ask everybody you meet?" Quick assessment. The voice was female, and she sounded messed up. And she spoke instead of shooting, which meant she was either non-hostile, or unarmed, or kind of stupid. Maybe all three?
"Gimmie a second." A light popped on to reveal a woman in standard AFFS mechwarrior garb laying on one of the troop benches, on the other side of the compartment from the radio. Her sidearm was in her hand, but not raised. "Thought you might be a bug."
"A bug?" Shephard lowered his rifle. "Not last I checked. Corporal Shephard, I'm with the militia."
"I'm Captain Marsin, with the Guards..." she managed a pained laugh. "Whatever's left of them."
Shephard was taken aback. The Marsins were nobility, big nobility, like rulers of the March big. He decided now was probably a bad time to admire how little standard mechwarrior garb left to the imagination. "Hey... can we use your radio?"
Captain Marsin gave him an incredulous look. "Are you out of your mind? Haven't you been paying attention?"
To what? "Ma'am, we've been out of the loop since this started," Shephard said. "The last contact we had with command was right before we had to run down a hill, and we lost our comm gear along the way. And this pilot we came across... apparently somebody forgot to pack a radio in her survival kit." Shephard thought about that for a moment. "But please don't tell her I said that, because she might hurt me."
"There's other people with you?"
Shephard nodded. "Yeah, there's..."
"Get them in here, now! Before a bug finds them!"
Again with the bugs... but Shephard knew better than to argue. He stepped out of the vehicle and waved to Murphy and Tasha.
"Some sort of drones," Captain Marsin explained. "Flying, mansized killing machines, hundreds of them. They see something alive or pick up a radio signal, they swarm it. If the bugs can't kill a target, they just flatten it from orbit. Nobody's been on the radio for an hour or more."
Outside, Tasha tripped over something and fell to the ground, crying out in pain. "I'm not gonna ask if they can hear yelling," Shephard said as he waived for them to hurry. Wasting no time, Murphy hoisted the pilot over his shoulder and set out again.
"Let's not find out," Captain Marsin said, then suddenly winced at what Shephard assumed was a stab of pain.
"How bad are you hurt?" he asked.
"I don't know," Tasha said. "Head's killing me, and I vomited a couple of times. Don't really remember how I got in here, either. Last I remember I was in my mech in the middle of the battle, watching this huge cloud of bugs forming up in the distance, then the orbital fire started and next thing I know, I was here."
Shephard had been punched in the head a lot in his day. Like a whole lot, so he was pretty good at recognizing a concussion. He hoped that was the worst of it as he moved over to examine her.
"Whoah," Marsin said. "Are you a medic?"
Shephard thought for a moment. "Well I did take care of this chick's leg a bit ago, so..."
"Guess what," Murphy interrupted as he carried Tasha into the compartment and laid her down on an unused bench, "her leg's busted up worse."
Shephard looked over to Murphy, then to Tasha, then back to Captain Marsin. "Okay, that," he said, pointing at Tasha, "that wasn't my fault."
"You were the one who wanted her to hustle across a ruined town on a bum leg," Murphy pointed out.
"I'm trying to save you from the murderous kill bots, okay?" Shephard said. "Could you close that door?"
Murphy thought for a moment, then shrugged and pulled the door shut. Then he and Tasha began removing their makeshift dust gear, and it suddenly occurred to Shephard that he could do the same.
"So what's this about murderous kill bots?" Tasha asked. "And why aren't we on the radio calling for help?"
Instead of answering, Shephard turned back to Captain Marsin. "Captain, may I present Sergeant Tasha Bradbury and Private Louis Murphy? I'll let you handle the briefing."
As Marsin began the explanations, Shephard idly considered the situation. Two grunts, a pilot with a broken leg, and a mechwarrior with a head injury, cut off from home and hiding in a busted APC from murderous automatons bent on killing everything.
He idly wondered if anybody else was having this bad of a day.
-----
Various
On worlds across the rimward edge of the Federated Suns and Capellan Confederation, worlds burned, cities lay in ruins, the huddled survivors marched into holding pens by machines without feeling. On Malagrotta a child cried, covered in the dust of the ruined city, desperately wanting to know where her mommy was. On Gunthar, Capellan soldiers were lined against a wall and executed with cold, mechanical precision.
And on Taurus, heart and soul of the Taurian Concordat, VTOL drones searched through the pulverized ruins of Samantha, searching for survivors that were more than willing to spend their last breath just to spit in the eye of their implacable enemy.
What the drones of element 3468764167464u675987916-j38278191 found, however, was not a man. Tracking a cluster of heat signatures located under what used to be a religious structure owned by an obscure sect, the drones were set upon by creatures. If the machines could think, they still couldn't quite describe what they faced. Neither crow, nor mole, nor ant, nor bat, nor rotting human corpse precisely fit these creatures that began streaming in an endless swarm from the underground chambers. The drones did recongize them as hostile however, and numerous of the creatures were cut down by their barrages of weapons fire as they sought to destroy the machines before them. However, each one struck down was replaced by ten more, and the shear weight of their numbers might have overwhelmed the machines, if not for the WarShips above. Acting on protocols buried deep in their code, they identified the creatures and enacted contingency protocols put in place long ago.
A couple minutes later, two dozen five hundred kiloton warheads detonated at the sight, wiping out the creatures in the air and ripping away the ground to expose the vast network of chambers beneath. Another four dozen warheads followed, to cleanse the exposed passages of all life. Then the WarShips went into standby, waiting for any reappearance of the creatures, prepared to repeat the process.
In a sealed chamber on the other side of the planet, two beings considered the moments events. The first, a figure wearing a silken mask and tattered yellow robes, remained silent to any human ears.
The second stroked his flawless goatee as he contemplated what he had witnessed. "Bad timing, that," he said. "Just when the reunions were about to start."
