Regar brought up the Tempest and sighted on the saucer. I had no idea if the pilots knew what it was or not, but something saved their lives. The red light went out and the saucer moved. Just not quite fast enough. The rift in space appeared, but instead of spearing the saucer and turning it into abstract art, it clipped the outer edge of the disk.
The rift rotated, the spacetime distortion buckling the saucer's outer edge. It was clearly fighting to escape the rift and having trouble. That side of the saucer began to fold over itself as the rift sucked it inward. It was then that all of the soldiers and remaining Greys stopped paying attention to me or Kiril and turned to Regar. Hundreds of bullets skipped off his armor, leaving visible marks on each impact. Regar covered his visor with his left arm, his right continuing to hold down the trigger.
Kiril and I took full advantage, reaping the lives of the invaders. Whatever that personal protective shield they had was, it only covered the front arc of their bodies. I mowed down the squad of Greys I had been flying toward with the GN-75 and rocketed toward the next. Kiril was doing nearly as well, leaving Greys and human soldiers in pieces as he danced through their numbers.
The saucer overhead groaned, an alarming noise as the rift continued to eat it. The pitiful noise of a dying thing. It was almost over, and then a bullet hit just the right spot.
Regar's armor was thick and heavy. Heavier even than my own. It would last a long time against the bullets the M4s were firing. But the Tempest was another story. It was tough, and had shrugged off most of the rounds that had hit it without any damage. Until one hit just the right spot. The spacetime rift immediately disappeared.
"No! I'll kill all of you bastards!" Regar cursed. He stuck the Tempest to his back and charged at the nearest squad barehanded.
The saucer overhead was folded nearly in half, wobbling in the air. The edge that had been caught by the rift looked like toffee that had been pulled too far and thin and was just about to break off. With a tortured warble it began to move away, accelerating slowly at first before punching through the clouds in the night sky above and disappearing.
The invading forces’ numbers had been greatly thinned out, but they weren't ready to surrender just yet. Regar was smashing them down with his immensely powerful fists, Kiril was slicing them to pieces, and I was beating them to death with my wrecking bar. I was actually surprised that they hadn't surrendered yet. I shouldn't have been.
"We've got this!" I yelled.
The three saucers chose that moment to return and deposit three more squads, all human soldiers this time. These guys had different rifles, bigger and bulkier ones. One member of each squad was carrying what I could only think of as a bazooka.
It wasn't a bazooka, of course. That was just what I'd always called those portable anti-tank rockets as a kid. I didn't know the real name, and it didn't matter. These guys were stepping up their game, and while they may have run out of Greys to chuck into the blender, there was obviously a bunch more humans to come. I wondered for a moment why that wasn't reversed. Wouldn't the aliens consider the humans expendable, and not the other way around?
A soldier interrupted this train of thought by pointing a bazooka at me and firing.
I shot into the air as my grav plates all pushed hard against the Earth's pull. The rocket exploded where I'd been standing and killed the last surviving member of the squad I'd been engaged with, a human. I felt a bit bad, but screw those guys. They were trying to kill us.
"Jake, I am picking up what looks like V-22 Ospreys inbound, but they are much faster than they should be. There are four of them and they will be here in six minutes."
At that moment I was flying above the battlefield and spraying the newly arrived soldiers with my GN-75, which was running quite low on rounds. I hadn't thought to bring any extra magazines. The soldiers were returning fire and hitting more often than I liked. Each impact was noticeable, the higher-caliber rounds leaving a small divot in my increasingly battered armor.
The rockets they had brought weren't the game-changer the soldiers might have hoped. Kiril and I could easily dodge them, and Regar was just tanking the explosions and using them to kill the soldiers he was fighting.
"What's the status of Redemption?" I asked.
"Ready for departure in forty-five seconds," Brick supplied.
"I'm ready too, Jake," Marty said. "Let's get the hell out of here. Those Ospreys carry something like thirty troops each."
"Fuck. Okay, we're bugging out. Kiril and Regar, back through to Pax."
Kiril immediately disengaged and flitted toward the hidden hangar doors, but Regar kept fighting.
"Regar! Let's go!" I yelled.
"Ferals," Kiril cursed, pausing in the air. "He's lost in a battle rage, Jake. Truly I thought him beyond that. I'll try to snap him out of it."
Battle rage was a perfect description. The plasma pistols at Regar's hips might as well not have been there. His armored fists were all he needed, and he used them like the deadly weapons they were. Near-indestructible hammers combined with his ridiculously high strength tore the poor soldiers apart. They had taken to running when he got close, but he was surprisingly quick on his feet despite his stature. He caught them.
A rocket slammed directly into Regar and the explosion knocked him down. Kiril had seen it coming and aborted his approach, and was weaving erratically through the air as he dodged incoming fire. His armor was light and he couldn't afford to take many hits. His protection had been his proximity with our enemies, and it had been stripped away by his
