Duty, Honor, Planet

A string of sharp “bangs” marked the ignition of the volley, curiously not punctuated by the screams that someone with combat experience would associate with a grenade explosion. Shannon and Trang leaned out after the last blast and had a brief view of the tableau of destruction that had been the mansion’s living room—the priceless furniture shredded and smoldering, the rug charred and splattered with the blood of the three Invaders that Vinnie’s barrage had taken out—before they targeted the four armored figures still on their feet.

Shannon’s rifle punched through the neck of one of the Invaders, sending it crashing to the floor; but the others retreated to cover under the chattering fire of Trang’s submachinegun and took up a position behind the huge wet bar against the back wall, returning their fire.

“Goddammit!” Shannon rolled back behind the staircase. “We can’t get out that way!”

“We’ll have to chance the front,” Vinnie agreed, reloading his grenade launcher from a pouch of spare mags slung over his shoulder.

“Cover me,” she ordered, getting her feet beneath her and sprinting toward the front door.

She was still over ten meters away and at an oblique angle from the heavy, oaken portal when it exploded inward with a thunderclap of sound, heat and pressure that threw her off her feet and back into the foyer wall. She shook her head clear, a whistling in her ears and a dull pain in every part of her body, just in time to see the Invader trooper advancing through the ruin of the doorway.

Somehow, she’d managed to keep her grasp on the autorifle, and she desperately fumbled to bring it on line with the approaching trooper, her mind still fuzzy from the concussion.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Tom Crossman was sliding in beside her, emptying his machine pistol one- handed at the Invader, while he brought her to her feet with the other. The armored trooper took a blast of slugs in the visor and was thrown backwards through the doorway; before its comrades could take its place, Crossman had her back at the staircase and Vinnie was pumping minigrenades into the foyer to hold the Invaders off.

As the numb ache began to recede, Shannon dimly realized that her left shoulder was bristling with a half- dozen fiery blossoms of sharp pain. A quick glance downward revealed a handful of long, wooden splinters from the door sticking out of her bare skin, and she felt a wave of nausea pass over her. At least there wasn’t a lot of blood.

“What the fuck are we gonna do?” she could hear Jock yelling over the hollow whistling in her ears. That was a damned good question. The upstairs was on fire, and the front and back exits were blocked by enemy.

“In my considered opinion,” Vinnie grunted an answer, firing off another burst at the Invaders at the front door, “we’re gonna die.”

Shannon was about to agree with him, when a series of ground-shaking explosions rocked the front of the house, the crimson fire of the blasts visible through the shattered windows. Stark at first thought that the Invaders had brought out the heavy artillery, but then she saw the charred and blackened husk of one of the armored troopers collapsing through the front door, and more of them running away from the front entrance outside.

Deciding that going forward was the lesser of the two dangers—and frankly curious—Shannon ignored her various aches and pains and pushed herself up, bringing her rifle to hip level.

“Move!” she shouted hoarsely. She began jogging stiffly toward the door, with the others following after her, Jock and the two security guards hanging back to lay down covering fire at the Invaders behind them.

They stepped through the doorway onto the smoldering, shattered remains of the front porch, scattered with the bodies of more than a score of Invaders as well as the bulk of the mansion’s security force. Shannon tried to keep a watch for any further attacks, but her eyes, like those of the others, were drawn to the two vehicles approaching across the front lawn. The lead car was a sleek-lined, heavily-armed scout vehicle, bristling with missile launchers and machine guns, while the trailing machine was a boxier, bulkier APC; both bore the markings of the Fleet Marine Corps, and they were the most beautiful sight Shannon Stark had ever seen.

“Are those ours?” Glen Mulrooney wondered aloud, hope mixing with trepidation in his voice.

“Yeah,” Vinnie muttered ironically, thinking how happy the man suddenly was to see representatives of the same military he had unceasingly bitched about. “They’re ours.”

Tracking a small group of Invaders that was fleeing around the side of the house, the scout car’s 25mm chain gun spat out a burst of high-velocity slugs with a sound like a giant zipper being pulled down, and the explosive- tipped bullets chopped the armored troopers to bite-sized pieces in a tenth of a second. The scout vehicle halted abruptly in a spray of dirt a good fifty meters from the mansion, maintaining an overwatch while the APC pulled right up to the front of the building, braking only meters from their position.

So intent were Shannon and the others on watching the vehicles’ approach that their first warning anything was amiss was Glen Mulrooney’s panicked scream… and the cold hand fastening like a vise on Shannon’s shoulder, jerking her back, sending her rifle clattering to the pavement.

Spinning around, trying to shake the talon-like grasp, Stark found herself looking up into the face of a nightmare. Tinged a pale, sickly blue, the face was at once both too humanoid and all-too-inhuman, with its ridged brows and nose and recessed ears and, God, those horrible, dead eyes! For a moment, Shannon Stark was too frozen with shock to even speak as the thing grasped clumsily at her throat.

Then a blurred, black-clad shape flew out of the shadows and slammed into the thing, knocking it backwards, but not off its feet. The blur materialized into the form of Nathan Tanaka, looking for all the world like some avenging dark angel but for the blood splattered in places across his black clothing.

Staggering away from the—yes, it had to be—alien creature, Shannon noticed for the first time that the thing was badly damaged, probably from the scout car’s missile attack. Its helmet had been torn away, along with a good bite of the left side of its awful face, and there were great, bloody chunks missing from its armored chest and legs. Yet the thing was still on its feet, trying to kill them with its bare hands.

For a confused moment, no one moved. Tanaka, apparently realizing that the thing was too tough to be dispatched without weapons, had jumped back to allow the others to shoot it. But Vinnie and Jock, who had the clearest shots, were carrying grenade launchers that were too dangerous to fire at point-blank range. Tom Crossman’s aim was impeded by his female companion, who was throwing herself against him, screaming, while the view of Captain Trang and his security guards was blocked by the press of bodies as the Governor and Mulrooney swiftly retreated from the Invader.

Then the side hatch of the armored personnel carrier crashed open and a long burst of rifle-fire erased the Invader’s eerily alien visage, bursting its skull and sending a spray of cranial matter over Shannon and Tanaka. For a horrifying second, the thing stood there in macabre headless equilibrium, but finally it swayed and toppled like some base-cut redwood, crashing with a metallic sound to the charred surface of the porch.

“Jesus H. Christ,” a voice boomed in the hatchway of the APC. “What in the hell was that?”

From out of the shadowy innards of the personnel carrier emerged a tall, broad-chested figure, clad in full Marine combat armor but for the lack of a helmet. His skin was charcoal black, his head shaven and nearly polished in its gleam—still close to emotional shock, Shannon wondered if she’d be able to see her reflection on his head if he leaned forward. His face had the strong, hard-jawed, tight-lipped look nearly universal in Reaction Force sergeants, and something whispered through the confused haze of her thoughts that he was exactly that.

“You’re Sergeant Lambert,” she said, coming back to some sense of reality.

“That’d be the case, ma’am,” he rumbled, his voice like a gentle earthquake, stepping out of the vehicle with an assault rifle grasped like a pistol in his big right fist. From behind him, half-a-dozen armored Marines scrambled out of the APC and spread out to form a defensive perimeter around the car, while the Gunnery Sergeant walked up to them as casually as if he hadn’t just blown off the head of possibly the first alien being mankind had ever laid eyes on. “Where’s Lieutenant McKay?”

“We don’t know,” Shannon told her. “I’m Lieutenant Stark, his second-in-command,” she told him, absently wiping blood and brains off her arm. She winced as the splinters in her shoulder began to sting anew from the grip the Invader had exerted.

“Then I guess you’d be in charge, ma’am,” the sergeant said. “But it’d be my professional advice that we get the hell out of here. Those bastards, whatever they are, are all over the city and they were right behind us when we pulled out. I tried to convince Captain Bitch—I mean Deng—to leave, but she was convinced that the armory could hold. Last I saw of it, it was a crater.”

“But we can’t leave without Valerie!” Glen insisted.

“Wherever Ms. O’Keefe is,” Tanaka spoke for the first time since his opportune reappearance, “she is not on the grounds.” From the tone of the comment, Shannon had the distinct impression he’d been over most of the