I edge closer to get a better look when several people run by me. They head to my right in the direction of the soldier’s infirmary pavilion, where there’s a group of soldiers and people arguing out front.
“There are nagas at the gate! We need back up!” someone else shouts from behind me. I twist around as a soldier runs past towards the entrance.
Nagas?
Krellix?
If he’s here… at the gate?I can barely finish the thought.
But why would he be? He wouldn’t attack the camp…
Rushing after the soldier, I jog down the path, quickening my steps as I pass several dead bodies lined up on the ground,covered in sheets. My jog turns into a run when I hear a shriek outside the barricade. A slew of gunfire goes off and my heart skyrockets into my throat as I sprint the rest of the way.
“There’s several more coming!” someone yells from the lookout tower to the gate’s right.
I glance around wildly, unable to see clearly through the smoke billowing across the camp’s entrance. Hearing hissing, I stop where I’m standing, searching for movement between the soldiers running back into the camp from beyond. Smoke drifts in after them as their coughing fills my ears. It smells like the exhaust of a spaceship.
“You need to close the gate!” I shout.
“We can’t!” someone from the top shouts back.
Several soldiers shoot at something outside from the two lookout points. Needing a better view, I start to climb the ladder of the one closest to me. Reaching the room at the top, I make sure not to disturb the soldiers and peer into the smoke for Krellix. When I don’t immediately see anything out in the murky field, I search around for a weapon and find a pistol on a small table. I grab it, turning the safety off and checking it for bullets. Now armed, I move to the soldier’s sides as one of them begins shooting at something within the smoke.
“Straight ahead!”
I scan the field for movement, wondering why nagas are attacking. There are a few women in the camp, but not many. Did the gunfire draw them?
I check the lumber machines to my left, which are all stalled out. The smoke drifts over them, coming from a fire farther beyond, where the majority of the landed spaceships are. The most recent take-off has left the earth scorched, the ground around gone up in blue flames.
Something moves through the smoke in the corner of my eye and the soldiers beside me open fire. “The right!” one shouts.
I spot the end of a tail but it vanishes into the haze. I try to discern the naga and some of its features in the darkening twilight, but am unable to do so. I only know it can’t be Krellix. It isn’t big enough.
My eyes catch more movement coming from the treeline as several nagas make a sudden rush for the camp. Right then, the soldiers gun down the naga that’s now directly below me and I spot several naga bodies within the smoke as the just-killed naga topples.
My stomach twists at the strange blanched-out coloring of all the corpses.
It can’t be…
“Either help or get the fuck out of here!” the soldier to my left yells as she loads another clip into her gun. “Fuck,” she curses when she turns back, aims, and shoots.
“Aim for the head,” I tell them. “Their bodies can endure far more than we can, but the head will stop them.” I raise my pistol at the closest naga, following its amorphous shape as it stays low to the ground within the smoke. Just as it’s about to lurch for the entrance, I shoot it between the eyes. It stops dead and falls to the ground, but three more nagas appear in its wake and one makes it past us, into the encampment.
“Where are the fucking drones?” I shout, wondering why there isn’t more back up from the machines. Nothing should be able to make it past the machines. “And why can’t we close the gate?”
Spinning around and leaning over the wooden rail, I fire the rest of my bullets into the naga’s back. The soldier beside me twists around just in time to blow the naga’s head off with her rifle. I toss my empty pistol on the table when I don’t find any magazines to reload it with.
“The traitors turned off the server output controlling the drones when they took off with the main spaceship.” Theother soldier wipes his face on his sleeve as he answers me. “Lieutenant Nat, Graft’s second in command, did it. He and a bunch of others fled on it after killing Graft.”
“Fuck!” I curse.
“Fuck is right,” he says, aiming at another naga speeding toward us. “The gates can’t close for the same reason. The mechanism is controlled at the server level. Someone needs to hack them but there hasn’t been time for that. These fuckers arrived shortly after Graft’s death.”
Without a gun, and with no new back-up since I arrived and the sun swiftly setting, I realize that the longer I stall, the more likely someone is going to die. One naga can do damage, but five? Ten? More?
How long can we hold them off with just us? I don’t even have a weapon.
“Who’s in charge?” I ask the soldier, scanning his name tag at the same time.Austin Molin.
