Undying Mercenaries 2: Dust World by B. V. Larson Page B

They looked like squids to me, with a dozen tentacles sprouting from the top of their bodies like incredibly thick strands of hair. These tentacles were thicker than a man’s leg and they radiated from a central knot of flesh where I imagined their organs were. There were no eyes that I could see, nor faces of any kind. But in the center of that ball of muscle that connected those snake-like limbs together I did see something—a beak. That was the only way I could describe it. A mouth built of hard shell or cartilage. The tentacles themselves weren’t soft and wet, either. They were covered in layered, metallic scales, each of which was the size of deck of cards.
    There was definitely a quiet, predatory stance to these aliens. They weren’t stupid; you could tell that instantly by the way they held themselves and the liquid grace with which they lunged forward.
    There was no hesitation in them. We were surprised, but they weren’t. They were hunting us, I realized. They’d turned off our security cameras, moved to this hatchway and then waited for their prey to open the door. Probably, they’d arranged things so our unit was alone up against them. Now that we’d finally opened the hatch, they were all business.
    They rushed us. It was as simple as that. They had to weigh a ton each, but as heavily-built as they were, they still moved with a flowing grace. They ran forward on their numerous tentacles, manipulating them with perfect rippling synchronization.
    Sargon fired first. I have to give him that. He took out the lead monster with a gout of energy that sliced right through it at point-blank range.
    I fired a moment later, as they loomed right up into my faceplate. All I could see was a mass of tentacles with a silvery glint to them, shimmering and rattling as they rolled forward into the range of my suit lights.
    When my weapon went off, the reflection from their scales blinded me momentarily. Two aliens reeled back, smoldering. The rest came on relentlessly. A wave of flesh plowed over me, knocking me onto my armored back.
    When I could see again, I was being trampled. Sargon was down, too. One disadvantage of our weaponry lay in the slow firing rate of our cannons. You couldn’t spam blasts at the enemy. The cannons had to cool down and recycle after every shot.
    My mind tried to take in everything my senses fed me. A dozen thoughts ran through me. First on the list being that I was about to die. Second, I calculated that since we were out of communication with central, it could turn into a perma-death.
    I tried to force myself to focus. I couldn’t get up as more enemies were flowing over me, their massive limbs thundering with crushing force upon my breastplate. If I’d been in light armor, I’d have been dead already.
    Then, one of them fell. A group of soldiers were all around it firing. Thick dark liquid resembling dirty motor oil oozed from the smoking holes in its scales. The two I’d shot were smoking, too. They weren’t dead, but they were sagging and flopping. I felt a surge of relief to see I hadn’t wasted my single discharge.
    My unit was in confusion, struggling with the aliens in our midst. I saw two soldiers fly as an alien lifted them up and smashed them together. The monster seemed to know our faceplates were weak points, and it applied terrific force there crashing both troopers’ heads into one another. The two helmets cracked. Blood exploded an instant later, falling like rain mixed with tinkling bits of starred plastic. The two troops had been rammed together with such terrific force their skulls had been cracked open.
    Graves was somewhere in the midst of this nightmare, shouting a string of words over and over. I finally caught what the command was, as did others.
    “Use force-blades!”
    Every heavy trooper was equipped with a laser carbine, our standard long-range armament. But when things got close and ugly we had a backup weapon: beams of force that extended like knives from