“Back to back! Make a circle!” ordered Vlad. Their mission was to distract the Lizzies, not necessarily survive. Keeping them fighting here, meant they were not going to the engine room. The carbines of the marines fired a wall of flechettes, dropping half a dozen aliens in each salvo, but they kept coming. The ring of Reptilians tightened around the marines, as Jones went down with three electro-bolts in his chest. Then, Howard was grabbed by a Reptilian and savagely bitten. Blood poured from his neck as the Reptilian snacked on his struggling body. A single shot to Howard's head by Vlad's pistol, made his body go limp and a second shot to the Reptilian, dropped it.
No man deserves for their last moments to be a vision of being eaten by one of those creatures, Vlad thought.
The Reptilians closed the gap on the marines, too close for carbines. The men pulled out their pistols, but for each alien they killed, two more took their place. And each time a man fell, no relief came. Vlad called for back up on his forearm radio, but everyone had been hit at the same time. The Lizzes knew they were coming and planned accordingly.
As the Reptilians got into close combat, Vlad put away his pistol and drew his blades from their wrist sheathes. He abandoned hope, focusing only on bringing down as many aliens as he could before they put him down. The blades slipped in and out of the chest scales of many a Reptilian, yet they could not touch him. From the back, taunting him with its seeming invincibility, stood the Dragon. Without realizing it, he had left the protective circle of marines and was all alone when the call came over the radio.
“Fall back. Fall back. Mission scrubbed. Engine room compromised.”
The men began to retreat to the dropship, where, hopefully, Deadeye and Nate still lived. Vlad tried to rejoin his men, but the dinner plate-sized claw of the Dragon threw him into the an open drop pod. He slammed against the far wall of the drop pod, its slimy, veiny surfacw drawing a look of disgust from Vladimir. He had little time to think as the Dragon grinned as it entered the small space, its eyes ablaze with hunger. Vlad stood up and tried to stab it, but even his mono-molecular blades could not penetrate its scales. The best he could do, was leave several deep cuts that would scar, but leave no lasting damage.
A loud popping sound reverberated throughout the entire ship and the Dragon tilted its head, distracted for a moment. Vlad kicked the alien and it fell back out into the hallway. At that moment, the door to the drop pod slammed shut and the ship lurched violently. Vlad fell to the floor with such force that the wind was knocked out of him. Over the radio, the panicked cries of the dropship pilots came through loud and clear as they took off.
The popping sound became louder and louder until he could not take it any more. Then, just before his eardrums burst, it stopped. He stood up and looked out the only window in the drop pod.
He saw Earth.
It was right there, yet for some reason, everything he could see was sepia-colored..
Then, the drop pod containing Vlad detached from the ship and plummeted to the home planet of humanity, along with thousands of others.
PART I | PART II | PART III | Part IV
Picture Credit: "UEE marine defending his Vanguard Hoplite on moon Daymar" by Glenn Batuyong is licensed under CC by 2.0. I cropped the picture and resized it.
