The Last Flight of the HORNETs

“Gear up,” Paracitica Jin said.

As one, the Hornets afixed their power-suit helmets and stood. Izumi dismissed the low power warning in the bottom corner of her HUD along with the list of empty magazines she had tucked along her thigh. There would be no recharging. No supplies to replenish her stock. She had four thousand rounds, a hundred grenades, and nothing to lose.

Her squadmates buzzed faintly on the edge of her awareness, the power-suits communicating over short distances, automatically sharing data. The team quickly sorted themselves into two concentric rings. The Hornets in the outer ring prepped their suits for close-quarters. Their guns were set to fully automatic. Their suit limits waved in exchange for an extra inch of power. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder–a phalanx of nano and bullets prepared for the worst.

Izumi stood with the inner ring of four counting the Paracitica. Behind them, a small satellite with the Paracitica’s final report and a message for anyone who swung by this accursed planet. It sported an amber LED that blinked slowly in the night.

Izumi activated the scope on her rifle and grinned as her power-suit reconfigured the weapon. In a pinch she could drop the long barrel and fire a spray of bullets, but for now she shouldered a grenade cannon and activated targeting. Green crosshairs appeared on her HUD wherever she glanced.

Both Arai and her twin brother Seo stood side by side in front of Izumi, weapons at the ready. All the Hornets worked well together, but Arai and Seo communicated on another level. It was almost telepathy.

Omori posted up beside Takata. Despite their differences, Izumi had seen the men come to respect one another on this deployment. On Izumi’s left, Tomatsu activated the sniper function on their weapon. The power suit reconfigured the gun in seconds, building out a scope and long barrel for accurate distance shots. Tomatsu sacrificed some protection in their suit for the material, but with Mura tanking in front of them, they could afford the risk. Mura wouldn’t let a single creature past her.

“Here they come,” said the captain.

Izumi flicked her attention across the open purple field. The ruddy sun cast only weak shadows, leaving the entire planet in a half-lit state, but with a blink, Izumi’s power suit cranked up her visual exposure and her entire field of view scaled up in brightness.

That’s when she saw them. Their inky blackness bubbled out of the very earth and assembled, like nanotech, into multi-limbed creatures. Crab-like and hulking in front, meant to absorb the first wave of bullets. Smaller, faster in the rear, waiting for just the right time to strike. Behind them, a beastly wave of tank-like things. They were swarmed by the smaller creatures so Izumi couldn’t get a good look.

Izumi’s green crosshairs found a lumbering crab, focused, and turned red. She fired her first shell.

The grenade whistled through the air and punched into the forgiving morass of the crab’s body. A half second later, the payload exploded. The crab and several creatures behind it splattered in every direction. Arai and Seo fired into the gap, five hundred rounds per second, a slaughter of alien ink across the landscape in a matter of breaths.

A crab shuffled into the gap, its massive claw a shield for the smaller creatures as the line advanced. Slowly. Inexorably.

In Izumi’s HUD, a red projection line flashed once, then Tomatsu’s rifle fired once. Hard. The slug punched through a crab’s shield claw and kept going, through the half dozen hissing aliens behind it and into the lumbering tank-like creatures in the back line. The crab survived, but the hole in its claw left it vulnerable. Omori poured bullets into the gap until it collapsed on its face.

The alien hordes simply flowed around the obstacle like water, and a new crab took the old one’s place, rising out of the ground and assembling in seconds. As the line advanced, one of the tanks reached the fallen crab, opening its massive mouth filled with three layers of teeth that circled like a bandsaw, and carved a bite out of the crab. One step at a time, the tank chomped its way forward until it could march right through the two halves.

Izumi focused her crosshairs on the tank and watched its hinged jaws close on a smaller alien unfortunate enough to get too close. The teeth shredded the creature. She fired a grenade right into the mouth. The tank flinched at the initial impact, then swallowed the grenade. When it exploded, the tank lurched to one side, but only seemed bothered by indigestion. It regurgitated the pieces, then blew additional shrapnel into the field of monsters ahead of it.

Omori ducked. Something pinged off of Izumi’s power armor.

“Are those my bullets?” Omori cocked his gun at the tank. “Fuck you! You can’t fire my own bullets back at me!”

Izumi targeted a four-legged creature in front of the tank for her next grenade. The slug obliterated the alien, then bounced into the face of the tank and detonated. The tank flinched, throwing bullets wide across the field until a wave of smaller aliens turned on it.

Tomatsu fired his rifle. His bullet tore through the head of the tank, exposing black flesh and ink. The four-legged aliens shrieked into a frenzy, scratching and clawing into their own beast until the tank collapsed. Their claws snapped through hard exoskeleton, their teeth drilled holes with the whining, grating sound of a diamond bit chewing threw stone.

On Izumi’s right, the advance crabs cracked against the Hornet outer line and were repelled once, twice, then broke through on the third lunge. Two Hornets were crushed in the crab claw shields, their power armor screaming as it bent and tore. Their icons in Izumi’s HUD flicked abruptly from blue to grey. With the line broken, the four-legged aliens scrambled forward, mouths gaping, tails lashing, claws gleaming in the half-light of the red sun. Their voices shrieked and grated in the way Izumi imagined a car’s metal might scream as it was twisted and torn. It was inhuman. Unreal. And it pierced her protective power-armor with ease.

Paracitica Jin shouted as he fired full-auto into the horde, tearing down aliens as fast as they flowed through. The bodies piled, oozing black ink, and still they came. Izumi launched three grenades into the broken line, then dropped her weapon’s scope and launching barrel. The machine’s cumbersome pieces dissolved away and were absorbed. It was time for iron. Her gauntlets buzzed with the vibration of a thousand bullets a minute. The purple field was soaked in black ink, and still the aliens advanced.

Izumi spared a glance behind her at the mini satellite. Its orange light was now green, and blinking faster than before, a good sign, surely.

Mura screamed. Izumi swung her weapon back around, trusting the power armor to skip firing as she passed over Arai and Seo. Mura was waist-deep in black monsters. She grabbed limbs, jaws, and entire skulls, crushing and tearing whatever she could reach. Her power armor’s LEDs glowed in a field of liquid black ink. A four-limbed creature scrambled up the back of her armor and tore at her helmet, but not only was the piece locked into place, Mura herself had fused with the metals some years ago. The armor was her skin now.

Izumi sprayed and prayed. Her link to Mura’s armor prevented friendly fire automatically, and Izumi flooded the airspace with bullets. The aliens crashed to the wet ground–their twisted-metal screams cut off with a crunch–or backed off, giving Mura a chance to recoup. She cracked a crab’s massive claw shield from its fallen body and hauled back. Izumi spotted several charging lights on the back of her armor. Then Mura heaved the claw through a wall of aliens and darted into the horde just behind, rending limbs and heads once more.

But a reprieve in one corner meant a surge in another. Arai wailed as her brother was swept from the right, then a hundred alien hands dragged Seo away from the Hornet line and deep into the horde. Arai launched herself forward with a massive jump. Her gun morphed as she flew, flowing from thick barrel to sleek, thin blade. When she landed, her shockwave knocked Izumi back a step and rattled the front line. She crushed the bodies dragging Seo, but the rescue came too late. Seo’s icon flickered from blue to grey. Dead.

Arai screamed as she tore into the horde with the bayonet that had replaced her rifle. Inky blood flew in arcs around her, but away from the protection of the line, she was quickly overwhelmed. Too many limbs crawled up the back of her armor, too many teeth drilled into her helmet. The swarm converged. Arai was buried under the assault. Her blade stabbed upward in final glory, striking a creature through the head, where it hung like a flag. Then another icon grey.

Izumi took an involuntary step back. The Hornets had been nine only minutes ago. Now they were falling fast. Mura was surrounded. A tank-creature– hulking forward plates, low and numerous legs, and a ragged slash across the middle filled with more teeth than sense–opened its mouth and simply closed it again over Mura’s upper half. Her legs continued standing without an upper body to support. Icon: grey.

Tomatsu dropped their single-shot rifle mods for the auto-firing safety of a wall of bullets. Paracitica Jin single-handedly plugged the hole of two fallen Hornets. And Izumi was rapidly running out of ammo.

Like cascading dominos two more Hornets fell. Izumi, Rai, Captain Jin, and Tomatsu met shoulder-to-shoulder at the top of the hill, fending off a horde that simply never ended. What had once been an open field of purple was now a writhing sea of black alien bodies, each pushing their fellows forward, piling over each other, consuming their dead and dying as they passed. Screaming into the air with voices made of wrecked machinery. They rose up out of the earth, flowed down from the mountains, and had been set to a single purpose.

Behind them, in the center of the formation, the satellite blinked.

It was just as Paracitica Jin said. This wasn’t a fight the Hornets were meant to win, they were simply here to survive long enough to get a message off-planet. One that would warn everyone else away. If they were smart, whoever received Paracitica Jin’s last reports would drop several nukes as a parting gift. If the planet itself broke apart from the damage, it was the best thing for everyone.

Off-center, the alien horde paused its forward advance when a commotion broke out some yards back. Several creatures seemed to merge, or were devoured, and a two-legged beast rose to tower over the others. Its limbs were too long, it’s body still small, and its head was only large enough to house a thousand teeth. It gaped at the remaining Hornets, then screamed in Arai’s terrified, devastated, dying voice. A human voice overlayed with the strain of tearing steel.

“Hold your fire,” Captain Jin hissed through the com links.

Everything stopped for just a moment. No bullets. No grenades. No growling, or metal-twisting voices, only heaving chaos of black alien bodies. Silence threaded across the battlefield. In the pause, Izumi watched the forward line–now mostly four-legged creatures. They had all seemed identical before, like the drones of a beehive, but now Izumi identified small behaviors that set individuals apart. This one to the left stood up on its rear legs and leaned against its neighbor in exactly the same way Mura would settle against a bar. And that one rubbed its head, maybe common for an insect-thing, but Izumi saw Seo in the motion without a doubt.

“Oh my god,” she whispered, as if keeping the words quiet would keep the secret from getting out.

The tall two-legged thing swept its yard-long claws through the horde at its feet. The aliens scampered out of its way. It scooped several skewered bodies into its mouth, and its body lengthened, its head lifted and sprouted six gleaming black eyes. It was too human. Twelve-foot tall, unnaturally strong, and with too many omni-directional eyes, but distinctly fashioned after a human form. It suddenly spat a lashing tongue out of its mouth.

“Ssssssurrendur… Paracitica.“

It hissed and spat. The words were drawn out and halting, both audible and echoed by grinding steel, but they were words. There is a distinct flavor of fear that arises when something almost human, but clearly not, threatens. Izumi tasted that flavor now, and it wiped her mind of strategy and left her skin cold. There was only survival. She triggered her gun to convert back to a grenade launcher. She was nearly out of bullets anyway.

Her movement caught the attention of the horde. Several four-legged beasts lunged for her. Before Izumi could reorient, the two-legged alien shrieked–high-pitched, like a vocalist trying to shatter a glass– and everyone, horde included, cringed from the sound. An open path parted the ocean of black. Not quite the salvation Izumi was looking for.

“Ho. Ly. Shit,” Rai said.

Izumi flicked her crosshairs to the body of the tall beast. When her icon coiled to target-locked red, she whispered, “Give the word, Paracitica.”

“Two minutes,” Captain Jin said, voice low and tense. “We just need to hold for two more minutes.”

“I have twenty-seven grenades,” Izumi said, double-checking her numbers with a flick of her eyes. “And about nine bullets.”

“Fuck me,” Tomatsu hissed. “I’ve got about thirty seconds worth of iron.”

“I have a very bad idea,” Rai said.

Izumi resisted the urge to glance back at him, keeping the two-legged alien firmly locked.

“T, take the last of my ammo, that should put you over a minute.”

“The fuck do you think you’re doing, Rai?” Paracitica Jin’s question didn’t have the usual reprimand layered into it. They were the last four Hornets on a hostile planet with no hope of survival. Any idea was better than nothing.

Rai circled in front of Izumi, carefully out of her targeting visuals. He lay a hand on her armored shoulder. “What do you think your cannon can do with an extra suit worth of nano?”

“I don’t know.” She did flick her eyes at him now; her HUD kept the target locked. “I let the AI run its own show.” Her gaze narrowed, not that he could see it. “But what are you doing without a suit?”

“Stalling,” Captain Jin caught on faster than the rest of them. “He’s going to talk to it.”

“Arai is in there. Seo, Mura, Ormori… fuck, the whole team is in there. They’re all connected somehow and every mind they devour is shared with the whole.”

“Which means they’ll figure it out too,” Tomatsu said.

Rai cocked his head. “So pretend I’m going against orders. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

Izumi’s suit suddenly stiffened as Rai not only disengaged from his power armor but ordered the nano to slough and reinforce Izumi instead. He dismissed every last particle of his suit and Izumi’s red-flashing low-power meters abruptly rose into the yellow and held steady. For a moment Izumi was simply bulkier than usual, then her power suit began to shift.

Entire panels of material reoriented on the surface of her suit. Additional bracing legs fell from her waist and landed heavily in the dirt. Her cannon locked onto her shoulder, supported by a new tracery of armor and freeing both of her hands. Additional paneling fortified her already impressive defensive layers. A new rifle rapidly assembled in one hand. It sported three barrels, a full-auto function, and its marker of ammo in Izumi’s HUD simply displayed an infinity symbol. Izumi cocked the rifle and a second pair of crosshairs floated through her HUD. She had become a living turret, a grenade cannon with the power of a howitzer, supported by a personal fuck-you factory.

Rai grinned at her. He stood exposed on the hill in nothing but his dark blue skin suit. “Spare a grenade?”

With a thought, Izumi dispensed a grenade for him. The materials existed in her power armor as constituent parts until needed, and Rai turned it over in his hands, flipping the baseball-sized bomb from a rocket-dispensed payload to a dead man switch.

With a final one-finger salute at Paracitica Jin, Rai jogged toward the alien horde.

“Think it’ll work?” Tomatsu asked.

“It’ll take a miracle,” Izumi said.

“Don’t need a miracle,” Paracitica Jin said. “Just another minute and a half.”

Amazingly, the horde remained still as Rai approached. His jog slowed to a more careful walk as he passed the front line and every alien head swiveled to follow his progress. Their jaws opened. Teeth gleamed in the weak red sun. And somehow, Rai had been right. Whatever parts of Omori and Arai and the others persisted inside the hive, the two-legged alien allowed Rai to approach. Its legs bent unnaturally backward and a single too-long arm reached out.

Izumi tensed, both crosshairs aimed and ready, but the claws didn’t swipe Rai into slices. Instead, the giant hand curled open, palm up, and Rai stepped up Iron Giant style. As if ditching one’s armor and greeting hostile aliens in his skivvies was a casual Sunday.

As the creature lifted Rai from the ground and every alien eye fixated on this unique encounter, Tomatsu muttered, “I take back everything I’ve ever said about the rookie, Captain.”

“I’ll make a note in my report,” Jin said, a breath of laughter in his voice.

Rai began talking, but without his power suit, Izumi couldn’t hear a word. His gestures were wide, though, and like a puppet master, Rai began pulling strings. He pulled the hive’s attention away from the hill, the satellite, and the three remaining Hornets. Izumi watched Rai spin some kind of tale that directed every eye in the horde to the distant mountains where three black pillars broke the horizon—the alien’s central compound as far as they knew. Too far to assault, too well-defended to have any hope of surviving. But whatever Rai said had a portion of the horde breaking away and turning in that distant direction. Had he bluffed the hive into thinking the three of them left on the hill weren’t humanity’s only hope of ever knowing what had gone wrong here? An entire acre of beasts sank into the earth at once, reducing the overwhelming numbers to a mere three million strong.

“He’s splitting the force,” Izumi reported.

“One minute,” Paracitica Jin said. “Come on FNG, if anyone can talk the alien’s ear off, it’s you.”

But the reprieve didn’t last. Something caught the tall alien’s attention and all six of its black eyes shifted abruptly to the hill, and their satellite.

“Fuck,” Tomatsu said.

“Hold,” stressed Paracitica Jin.

The alien flicked attention back to Rai and it a blink it crushed the man in its palm. All seven fingers sliced through Rai’s body, and like a glittering, beautiful seed, the grenade Rai held fell from his lifeless hand. The bomb detonated. The tall alien flinched away, screamed as it’s hand simply ceased to exist, and staggered back several steps.

“Fire all!” Captain Jin roared.

Izumi triggered her cannon with impunity. Her power armor whined as it spun up and launched grenades with increasing speed. Every single one of them exploded on contact. She tore the tall alien to shreds, then blew a hole in the earth where it fell. Every thump rattled through her bracing armor, and with a single explosive left, Izumi switched to solid-mass rounds.

The alien horde shrieked as it ran for them like a tidal wave of black death. Tomatsu sprayed bullets into the oncoming wall, but the aliens simply overran their fallen brothers. Paracitica Jin overlapped his spray with Tomatsu’s. Together they slowed the advance.

Izumi strafed the front line with pure nano bullets from her rifle. Her cannon slowly disintegrated as she literally fired her armor away. But the nano didn’t just punch holes in the aliens. It gathered, crawled, and duplicated the alien formats. In seconds, several silvery spider-like creatures had assembled themselves and began slicing through the horde in every direction. With bullets in front and allies among the hive, it almost seemed for a moment that a miracle had, indeed, come to pass.

Then the deployed alien troops returned, perhaps recalled by the death of their two-legged leader, and the tide turned again. Sudden black spikes shot out of the ground, each one skewering a silver spider and rendering it inert.

Tomatsu ran out of bullets, and he rushed the forward line with a scream of rage and managed to slice through several feet of alien enemies before he was swarmed. The creatures peeled his power armor off like a ripe orange and Tomatsu was extracted by bloody force. His red blood misted across the battlefield as he was torn apart. Izumi swore she heard Arai’s alien-altered laugh from several directions at once.

“Thirty seconds!”

Captain Jin threw the timer to Izumi’s HUD where it flashed. She continued to pour nano into the raging mass of the hive. Her support feet dissolved into slugs fired from her rifle and assembled into new alien forms. The horde was distracted managing the eruption of enemies in their midst.

Twenty seconds.

An alien tank, like a mouth with feet, erupted teeth-first into the front line. Captain Jin’s rifle clicked empty. Without hesitation he threw the weapon at Izumi. She barely caught it one-handed. Then her captain charged like a bull at the tank, and with his final breaths he triggered his power armor to overload as he threw himself into the mouth of the beast. The creature popped like a spoiled plumb.

Izumi stood alone on the hill.

Ten seconds.

She absorbed her captain’s weapon for the raw nano.

Nine.

Her rifle began to smoke. The weapon wasn’t designed to be fired continuously for so long, but she had no choice.

Eight.

The horde roared up the hill. Individuals collapsed, screaming as Izumi fired, but the line advanced.

Seven.

She began to eat through her additional outer layers of defense, pulling nano from the very foundation of her armor.

Six.

A four-legged alien lunged over its fallen brothers and raked claws across Izumi’s helmet. She caught the creature with one hand and with power-assist, crushed its head, firing at three more that tried to follow.

Five.

The satellite behind her began its launch sequence.

Four.

Izumi screamed pure rage at the unending horde as their claws tore at her power armor. She instructed the nano to peel off in microlayers, forcing the aliens to unsheath her like an onion. The power armor shrieked with every hit.

Three.

It took four million licks to get to the center of this tootsie pop.

Two.

The satellite fired ignition thrusters.

One.

Izumi dispensed her final live grenade directly into the palm of her hand. When the next alien launched itself at her face, she punched it through the mouth with a smile. “I do like the smell of napalm in the morning.”

The satellite launched behind her, spraying the entire hill with smoke, sparks, and light.

Izumi’s grenade detonated, obliterating the alien and her forearm with it. The pain nearly wiped her out, but her power armor killed the nerves at her elbow, automatically amputated, and sealed in a picosecond.

The hive overwhelmed her a breath later. She was swept off her feet, the power armor cracked and shelled like a nut, her fleshy body quartered and divided among the conquering bugs. Izumi died watching the small rocket the Hornets had given their lives for arc into the morning sun and deploy.

***

They watched the rocket arc into the morning sun, a hundred thousand minds simultaneously identifying the intent and likely message that had just been released into their upper orbit. None of their minds could build and launch a rocket, less a ship to take their consciousness off-planet, but they knew how to learn.

The infection had been destroyed, and the cost high, but the information they gained was worth everything. The hive flexed its collective will and out of the dead and dying they summoned another tall two-legger. Such an inefficient structure, but the better to simulate the new mind they had gained.

It awoke, six gleaming black eyes, two arms, a small, toothy mouth. It looked at its own hand and split the mass into seven or eight digits. There was disagreement in the hive if more were better.

Several four-legged drones climbed up its two legs and perched on shoulders and back. They chittered pleasure. She–she? Yes. This mind was she–chittered back, half-words.

The hive turned away from the hill. A large portion coalesced with the earth to return to the home towers. The rest distributed themselves among the wild.

The two-legged considered the rocket. They would need metals and new tools. A different way of thinking. Perhaps she could offer that unique perspective.

She would need a name.

The hive grumbled in her mind like an ocean some distance away, rolling and crashing. What good is a name?

A name made her an individual. It made her unique. The hive needed something new.

She would name herself: Izumi.