| From: | Paul J. Adam Shadowtk@********.demon.co.uk |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Bug Hunt |
| Date: | Sun, 20 Feb 2000 19:44:10 +0000 |
>>>>>[Plus ca change, plus ca meme...
+++++begin video
A warehouse. Cold and dark, and not well-maintained if the trickles of
rainwater coming through the roof are any guide.
In one of the dry zones, soldiers are checking equipment: buddying up to
ensure everything is properly fitted and secured.
Both Lynch and Lilith wear hardshell body armour, almost unheard of for
them: Lynch is adjusting the way his wife's katana rides across her back,
making sure it sits comfortably over the rigid plates and yet will still be
easily reached if he needs it.
Quinn waits nearby, fiddling with something inside her helmet. Like her
friends, she's encased in a bulky, heavy protective suit: like them, her
equipment includes the discordant note of a sword.
Obsolete for modern warfare, but able to wreak gruesome havoc on some
Awakened foes that laugh off bullets.
Insect spirits, for instance.
Not that the group are relying solely on their wits and their blades,
though: their armour is studded with magazine pouches, grenade carriers,
holsters and other equipment. But, again, where normally these three
might have an interesting mix of elderly-but-lethal weaponry, for these
festivities they have some of the latest products of the armourer's art.
Diesel engines rumble and growl, growing closer... stopping. Lynch raises
his hemet's facepiece, as a dozen more fighting men (it's hard to tell race,
let alone gender, in the heavy armour) enter. Similarly armed - L7 assault
weapons, flamethrowers, shotguns - and bristling equally with equipment
and ammunition. The leader approaches Lynch directly: of similar height,
but with unblinking, unwavering blue eyes.
"Straight in, fast and loud, Major Lynch?"
"You got it, Commander Mitchell." The two seem to find some wry
humour in the exchange. "We'll take point, blast a way in and open the
place up. You guys follow, exploit and clear. If we start getting swamped,
we pull back and hide behind Tank."
"Who's Tank?" Mitchell asks.
One of the hulking shadows in the warehouse glows dimly. The Merkava
IV's searchlight, on minimum power and wide angle, illuminates the
120mm gun and the hull and turret front. "I'm Tank!" Stephanie appears in
the commander's hatch like a Jack-in-the-box. "Or rather, _this_ is Tank,
and you can hide behind or under us if the bugs come out too fast or
something."
Mitchell takes this with his trademark calmness. "Okay. Is that why you
signed out those gas shells?"
"You betcha. Everyone got binder patches?" The SEAL team confirm.
"So you were being literal when you said 'blast a way in'?"
"Jason's a very literal person, Christian, didn't you know that?" Lilith
drawls.
"I allowed myself to forget." Mitchell concedes. "How about our six-legged
friends? What are they up to?"
Quinn might have shrugged, but the armour won't let her. "They're at low
point in their cycle. Night hunting parties are back in, dawn scouts will be
moving in half an hour. Activity's low, but not zero. More than that, I have
to go in and nudge a bug and ask him."
"Good enough." Lynch nods. "Okay, we don't know much about layout, we
guess maybe forty bugs tops but could be lots more, there's fifteen
strikers plus tank and drone support, it's dark and we're wearing
sunglasses."
"Hit it." Quinn latches her helmet in place, snaps the facepiece closed.
Lynch chambers a round in his Alpha. Mitchell and Lilith load their L7s, as
the SEALs fan out and Stephanie's tank starts up with a bellowing roar.
The seventy-ton Merkava grinds forwards, in a squeaking clatter of tracks
on concrete, and the timber-and-corrugated iron warehouse wall tears
and crumples and rips like paper. The turret traverses and the long gun
depresses, and then belches a forty-foot tongue of flame.
The shockwave slams Lynch, though the armour shields him from its worst
effects. The shell seems to have had no dramatic effect; it hit its mark
(another of the warehouses in this derelict district) but there's no
explosion, no flame, no sign of-
Another shell follows it, the orange glow of the tracer in its base very
briefly visible before it punches through the thin wall. If it explodes inside,
there's still no visible sign.
"Five rounds of GZ, Chris." Lynch signals, fixing a bayonet to the muzzle
of his Alpha. The tank fires again. "Stephanie, give us a sixth. HE-FRAG,
proximity fused, you choose where. Blow us a door."
"You got it, Daddy." The tank fires a third shell.
Something dark and winged bursts from a skylight of the warehouse,
glowing warmly in thermal imaging as Lynch switches vision modes. It
jerks in the air, seeing its enemies below, and dives straight at them -
Lynch is still raising his rifle as it explodes in midair, hit by three or four
L7 rockets that blow it apart. The Wasp spirit, a true-form rather than a
flesh-form, continues its homicidal attack, only to be engulfed in an arc of
something that overloads Lynch's thermal imagers and leaves even low-
light struggling to cope. It falls from the sky, as the tank fires its fifth gas
shell.
The spirit is consumed quickly by the fire, writhing and twisting as the
flames consume its very substance.
"Flak team, move up." Mitchell sends, and the Merkava fires again. This
round, though, explodes just short of the warehouse wall, blasting a huge
rent in the flimsy structure and sending thousands of razor-edged steel
splinters whirring into the darkness within.
And Lynch, Lilith and Quinn are moving at once, to the torn edges of the
hole in the warehouse wall. Warnings flare on the suit HUD about toxic
gas, as all three flick on their helmet lights to better pierce the murk
within.
Inside the warehouse, the abandoned barrels of Valvoline grease and
crates of scrap vehicle parts have been arranged into a strange sort of
fortress in the centre of the building. Around it, a dozen nightmare forms
lie thrashing and writhing on the stained concrete: from it, another
winged form rockets upwards, straight at the skylight. Almost as it
vanishes, there's a chainsaw snarl from outside. Mitchell's "flak team"
seems to include a radar-aimed Gatling.
"They're developing resistance to GZ" Lilith says, disapproving.
"Yeah. Back to the fucking drawing board." Lynch replies. "I don't like the
look of that hive."
"Me neither. I think they're zipped up inside, waiting for us."
"They are." Quinn says after a moment. "Thirty-plus. Lots and lots. Alive
and waiting."
"Change of plan?" Lilith suggests.
"Why not? Stephanie, come through the hole, put some frag and flame in
that thing, then drive over it. Mitchell, follow the tank in, we'll mop up
after it. Ready?" The BattleTac indicators show everyone is. "Go!"
The Merkava's engine roars as it lunges forwards, smashing through the
rent it already made: its searchlight now on full power, lighting the scene
like a midnight sun, for a few moments before the main gun fires. A
seventy-pound shell punches through the hive's wall and explodes within,
smoke blasting from every crack and crevice.
Alert to this danger, hideous beings begin to boil out of the structure, and
into gunfire from the troops around and behind the tank. The flesh-form
Wasps are blasted apart, losing limbs from L7 rockets and ten-gauge
shotgun slugs, and though they take a lot of killing the attackers have a
lot of firepower.
But with a hole blown into the hive wall, the Merkava's secondary
armament comes into play. Where once it mounted a 30mm cannon, now
it has a high-pressure flamethrower, and the tank sprays unlit thickened
gasohol into the hole in the structure for several seconds before following
it with a short burst of fire.
The hive roars into fiery life, and the shrieks and screams from inside are
awful. Not just heard, but _felt_, shaking the very astral plane with the
agony of a score of spirits dying, and the rage and pain of the Queen
seeing her children slaughtered.
For a few seconds, the infantry outside are kept busy, as fiery
monstrosities desperately try to escape the inferno that their hive has
suddenly become. (Using barrels of grease in its construction might have
offered protection from bullets, but now the hive's very walls are leaking
fire onto its occupants)
The fire is getting worse, taking hold firmly and beginning to form a
chimney effect: the skylight directly above venting thick clouds of black
smoke, the hive's interior beginning to glow an incandescent yellow as a
firestorm takes hold.
+++++end video
It was nearly an hour before we could get in there and check for bodies,
and there was just ash and a few bones left. For sure nothing got out, but
we can't tell for certain what was in there. Forensics might get something
useful, but they're bitching about did we have to incinerate them _that_
thoroughly?
Good news. GZ still works... pretty much. Maybe two or three months left
before the bugs are using it for nasal spray and laughing at it.
Flamethrowers are still a sovereign remedy for bug infestations.
You can still be active in the vicinity without spooking them, until you
attack the hive directly.
Bad news. They're reacting a lot faster to attacks.
They're building hives to resist attack better, though we can still keep
throwing curve balls at them. If we'd had to storm that place on foot,
we'd have lost a few people for sure. (but, using flammable grease as a
structural component shows they don't understand all the rules of the
game...)
Six months ago, that much GZ nerve agent would have sterilised the whole
warehouse. Now, huddling in the hive let a dozen or two of them plus the
Queen survive it. They're getting resistant and they're learning to make
their nests more airtight.
A very successful operation, anyway. No casualties, and a thorough
cleanup. They might learn and adapt, but so do we.]<<<<<
-- Major J R W Lynch <19:43:24/02-20-61>
Special Operations Command
