The hunk of metal crashed into Cacliocos, sending him sliding across the floor and thunking into the far wall. Atop that dented sheet Betelgeuse could see a quivering and vaguely non-human body lying half-splattered and burbling with the egress of its internal fluids.


    Before he could look closer, a keening wail drew his attention to the entrance.


    A humanoid beast, bald, thin, cadaverous and pale, slavering from an upper jaw bunched with concentric gums and malocclusive teeth, the tongue and lower jaw shriveled and blackened like the smoking char that had been made of it''s left side, its right arm a forked mess of keratinoid blades out of which extended a single double-jointed arm ending in a myriad-fingered hand of dubious functionality.


    It stretched taller than the ceiling and, even hunched as it was, dwarfed Frederica. It gave out a croaking wail as its multipupiled eyeballs swiveled in milky sockets and cried rivulets of beigey tears.


    "Fuck! Shoot i—"


    Where before there was silence now there was chaos. Orange arcs bored into the torso of that creature and then impacted in a profusion of sound onto the concrete wall beside a crusted patch of blood shaped like bison. Thete was yelling and Douglas was screaming and Betelgeuse heard someone cursing over the comms and saw Voke wrangling with the chassis of his railgun out of the periphery of his vision.


    He''d barely managed to snap off two shots when his trigger clicked empty. The beast was bleeding oodles of fluid from the grievous wounds perforating its torso, the blood thick and bluish under their jerking headlamps. With a shuddering suddenness the beast limped forward and swiped with its bladed arm; Douglas lurched backwards, barely managing to dodge, and the blades cleaved into his railgun with a shower of sparks.


    Betelgeuse had retreated several steps and felt into his magazine pouch for a fresh magazine. His perceptions muddied, and there was nothing, not even fear, save for the hyperalertness borne of combat.


    ''Only one left,'' he thought grimly, sliding the magazine into the feeder and feeling it click into place.


    But before he could fire again the monster was in their midst and wailing some mad lamentation from dreams no man was privy to. Thete''s yell was transformed into a clipped yelp as the thing bucked and kicked with impossible swiftness, catching her in the thigh; even with her formidable reflexes she had barely managed to raise her leg so that the force of the kick failed to snap her limb the wrong way, and in the circumstances the sheer strength of the beast sent her somersaulting front over back through the remains of a table and into the wall.


    The thing turned. Its scrunched and grinning face was mere meters from Betelgeuse. There was no time to think; he plucked a grenade from his pouch and pulled the pin, then dropped to his haunches. The beast was jerking madly and Voke''s shot flew wide, boring through the ceiling and showering them in concrete dust. Frederica was swinging her railgun buttfirst like a club and managed a good hit on its leg; Betelgeuse saw it stumble and leapt toward the beast, but the thing was faster by far, twisting around and stepping into his trajectory and ramming into him full-force.


    The world exploded into fragments of perception and a sharp pain blossomed outwards from his chest. Somewhere in that reckless lurch he lost his grip on the grenade and he couldn''t tell where it was or where he''d dropped it.


    "Grenade!" he managed to scream, and he looked up just fast enough to see Frederica swing at it with the butt of her railgun like a golf club, sending it careening toward the ceiling ten or so meters away where it erupted in a flash of concrete dust.


    The thing was chittering in some pantomime of pain and swinging dazedly from side to side. Betelgeuse saw Thete coming up behind it, her headlamps dark, probably damaged, circling it from the left as the railgun-club-wielding Frederica and the one-armed knife-brandishing Douglas stalked it from the right.


    Metal screeched on metal as Cacliocos pushed himself free of the piece of door, and the creature, hearing this, wailed thinly and made to pounce. Thete was there before it could act, smashing her right forearm into its damaged side with so much force it looked like she snapped her own bone, and the beast stumbled drunkenly in the direction of Frederica and Douglas.


    The thing attempted to straighten but hit its head on the ceiling; Voke shot at it, this time managing to catch it in its good leg, and as it fell keening Douglas strafed out of its way.


    It was on the ground and scrabbling with inhuman ferocity, and Betelgeuse thought he saw it catch Frederica with its bladed arm; an inexplicable anxiety gripped him, and he shot from his position, ignoring the pain radiating out from his solar plexus, bracing his railgun and charging into that confusion of dust. His headlamp shunted the darkness and he almost collided with its back. That cliff of flesh was criss-crossed with welts and blasted apart at portions and wriggling on the floor like some oversized centipede; with as much force as he could muster, he stabbed his muzzle into the nape of that elongated neck and fired, almost splitting the head from the torso.


    And the beast yawned and shivered and then was finally still.


    Betelgeuse slung his railgun and picked forward, and when saw the bouquet of blades thrust into Frederica''s stomach, a strange feeling bunched in his throat. He rushed forward. He couldn''t help himself. He found a welter of viscera, and under his headlamps puffs of steam rolled off her streaming blood as it decanted and pooled and mixed with that foul beast''s blue ichor. He fumbled his medkit open and brought out his coagulator and all of a sudden he was at a loss for what to do, so cruel did that wound look.


    Enforce serenity.


    And yet his mind was blank and his hand must have trembled when he traced the contours of that spilling sac he supposed must have been her stomach, and he looked into her eyes to see they were fluttering and grasping at him, her brown eyes lilting in the stuffiness of that place. Blood was streaming out of her mouth in great quantities, greater even than when they had fallen outside the walls of Liberation''s Reach, and his deep-set fears suddenly felt close to fruition.


    Her mouth was gaping wordlessly, and by now Thete and Cacliocos had come up and was saying something about removing her from the beast''s claws and then sealing up the stomach with the coagulator before fixing the breach.


    Betelgeuse shoved his way past Voke and Douglas, skirting that ghastly tableau and coming behind Frederica to hold on to her squirming armpits; Thete placed her hand beside his and they pulled, and he could feel her body shuddering so viscerally he wished he could bear a little of that pain for her.


    She was off the dead thing''s appendage and laid on her side and they worked through the torrential spill of blood, Betelgeuse in front and trying to close up her stomach and Thete behind and spraying coagulator cartridge after coagulator cartridge into that hole.


    "B.T.," Frederica coughed, staring at him through dim eyes, the blood now threading from her nose across her sallow skin.


    "We can get her to Medicae if we leave now," Betelgeuse said, the tremor in his voice barely perceptible, having stuck the flaps of her stomach back together as best he could; and Voke and Douglas was beside him pooling together their coagulator cartridges and going at it with gobs upon gobs of foam as Betelgeuse held the parts of her skin pressed together into each other.


    "... Hu-man …"


    The voice was like a rasp hailing from realms neither human nor real, and it scythed through the stress and fatigue and made all of them, save for Frederica, stand and brace. Alarm flooded through their veins from adrenal glands exhausted two times over.


    "That—" Douglas breathed tremulously.


    "Chimera," whispered Cacliocos, moving toward the still-living patch upon the door-piece he had been trapped under.


    The Chimera was still alive and it was sputtering softly and blowing bubbles where it breathed, its arms bent and flared like origami folds. A dark bead stared out from the crack in its opaque visor, and in it sat a ghostly lantern.


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    "... Virus will… be the end…. but it is curious…" it wheezed softly, its Common accent unplaceable.


    "What are you saying? What are you…" Cacliocos muttered, trodding toward it and knowing all the while it could not hear.


    "... for so intelligent to become… virus… and I want… to know… if it is your own machination… hu-man…" the Chimera heaved and sighed, clinging on to something in its last moments.


    Cacliocos was standing over it and looking down, sheathing that broken thing in a halo of light. Something in that alien eye caught Betelgeuse'' imagination, and he wondered about its words.


    "You… not talk? … Not say? What has made you virus?"


    Betelgeuse saw Voke move up beside Cacliocos and stare through obscured eyes, and he shook his head from side to side as if he owed it a response.


    And its eye, disappointed, glazed over in death.


    <hr>


    He slung her arm over his shoulder and supported her through the dark corridor and down the dim staircase, and as such he could tell that she was becoming weaker with every step that they took.


    By the time Betelgeuse stepped out with Frederica into that dim and corpse-strewn square, the comms static had cleared. Mountains of sound surged in the distance, a conglomeration of rumbling warmachines, sputtery echoes of machine gun fire, and the sporadic collapse of structures concrete and metal.


    The left pincer had breached the walls and destroyed the Chimerae''s jamming facilities, Cacliocos informed them, and command line had instructed them to assemble at the northern wall for the final push past the mouth of the central in-settlement mine and into the southwestern quadrant of Liberation''s Reach.


    The sky over the square was now completely obscured with a thick smog, and very little direct sunlight made it through. Everything looked washed out, dim and pink. Betelgeuse set Frederica against the same pillar they had first found Cacliocos, and the rest of that beaten pack took up behind that cover, crouching low.


    And Betelgeuse heard Frederica''s breath catch over the comms as he lowered himself near to her, and when he inspected her face he found her lips pale and flecked with blood. He knelt next to her, not knowing what, if anything, he could do.


    "Can''t we do a… tactical retreat?" Douglas urged, crouching and laying his hand on Frederica''s shoulder. "She don''t look so good. And if you didn''t notice I lost myself an arm."


    "... That would be the wise thing to do," Cacliocos agreed. "But… I can''t seem to get Major Storr on comms."


    "That makes you Third Company''s acting Company Commander, sir," Thete said, nursing her broken arm, following with her vision an unidentifiable spark, the jagged quarrel bright and orange and shooting through the blanket of smog abovehead.


    "We''re all that''s left of Third Company," Voke pointed out, his face haggard, scanning the square and regarding the asymmetric blobs of viscera that littered it.


    "... I''d rather not appropriate Major Storr''s authority, but you make a good point," Cacliocos admitted, taking a seat beside Betelgeuse and Frederica and laying his head back upon that pillar. Lines more at home on old men''s faces streaked down his cheeks and bracketed his mouth. "And in any case I will not let good soldiers die, if I can help it. Let me try to get command line."


    But Cacliocos'' words had no sooner dropped when the rumbling beneath the earth took on an urgent and frantic aspect. Betelgeuse, placing a hand on Frederica''s shoulder to steady her body, noted that the quaking had taken on a life of its own separate from the general bedlam.


    "What in the—"


    The rest of Douglas'' expletive was swallowed by the disturbance as the ground vibrated with an increasing amplitude that took it from tremor to earthquake.


    The ground cracked and crumbled and fissured with the heaving convulsions; Betelgeuse noted at the mouth of the square a troop of soldiers dashing in their direction then breaking up helter-skelter as the cleft in the earth fractured toward them like a heat-seeking torpedo; that group saw Section Five and began gesticulating indecipherably this way and that.


    The comms crackled and Betelgeuse supposed Cacliocos had said something, but everything was lost to the noise when a monstrous machine rose in the middle of the square like a submarine parting the waters. He gripped onto Frederica''s suit as tight as he could, felt her hands clutch at him in return as he muttered words of vague meaning.


    In the chaos he somehow noticed Entuban up there upon the roof of the quavering residential block opposite, his form dwarfing the sooty figures scrambling about him. With an immense crash that building keeled over backward and Entuban''s destiny was lost to smoke and rubble.


    The contraption was a giant thing of sleek curvature and pointed tip that protruded out of the middle of the square. It canted upward toward the smoggy sky and then a screen on its side shuttered open and a legion of Chimerae came pouring out silent and wraithlike and all of them clad in hard, lustreless matte surfaces and visors of absolute black under the aegis of that smokesky.


    Thete barely permitted their astonishment two seconds to settle before she began yelling for them to "throw nades", and those of them that could began lobbing all of their remaining grenades into their enemies'' midst whilst Cacliocos was roaring into his comms for command line and reciting numbers at breakneck pace; and Betelgeuse saw, as a DUS grenade left his hand, a Chimera whose size rivaled Entuban''s ensconced in the middle of that alien troop, its cloak of dark and shifting colors billowing in the wind. It was almost twice as tall as the other Chimerae, and when it whipped around Betelgeuse observed the deep maroon opacity of its visor striated with luminescent runes and then it and all the others became obscured by dust and tufts of gravel thrown up by the detonating explosives. They threw anything they could find—flares, flashbangs, DUS-nades and frags—and a chorus of explosions ripped up the frontage. Every kind of fog obscured Betelgeuse'' vision, as his range of visibility dropped to four meters at max.


    Armature-rounds traced streams of gold into the fog, shot from secret covers further up the street. There were two or three combat sections aiding them, Betelgeuse estimated.


    "—repeat, gridmap three, approximately seven-nine-seven, six-six-two; we''re right next to the Labcent, give it some leeway—" Cacliocos transmitted, his frantic appeal cut off halfway by the appearance of the Chimerae.


    The enemy was already upon them; Betelgeuse blasted the head off the first one that emerged upon the abutting column, and the thing twitched and fell back into the fog, and as he dragged Frederica from the column two more took its place.


    Thete swiped at their feet with her good arm and they fell over forward. She twisted and jammed that arm downward, slamming her palm into the back of a Chimera''s head, bashing it into the concrete pavement and bursting the top of its skull outward in a lurid spew of pink fluid and gray-white matter. Voke rammed the butt into the nape of the other, snapping its neck and then pounding its neckbones into gruel with repeated strikes like putting pestle to mortar.


    Betelgeuse felt something wrong in the air. A disturbance in his incunabulum very similar to when his superiors had attempted to impose their control upon him. Cacliocos was yelling something like "retreat, now! Toward the Labcent!", his voice''s rising pitch a mix of alarm and hysteria, and they tore down the empty space, Frederica supported by Betelgeuse'' arm, retreating all the way back toward that quivering structure and taking refuge behind the leftmost of its still-standing pillars. When Betelgeuse peeked out the side the smoke had started to clear, and he saw twenty or more Chimerae, their wiry arms bracing their plasma bolters toward Section Five''s cover and several of their muzzles already smoking.


    The smell of death was thick in his nostrils and his mind was almost overborne by the peculiar warping of perception which only mortality occasions. His heart was a welter of bitterness and indignation, and as he saw the rest of his fellows empty their cartridges he let loose the last of his armature-rounds and gave out an apoplectic squall for good measure, screaming himself hoarse.


    The feeling of wrongness had become a heavy pall. That towering Chimera, their superior officer by all accounts, had skirted the fallen column they had retreated from and was brandishing a massive weapon shaped like a minigun, its nozzle pointed at them.


    The feeling in Betelgeuse'' gut dropped like a rock and vertigo took over. He heard Frederica grunting in pain and space itself started to billow violently. He clenched his glutes and every cell of his body raged against him, threatening to tear him apart in myriad directions.


    Space itself shifted before his eyes, and it was a sight which words failed to explain—in its purely technical sense, ineffable. The impressively phallic jut of the Chimerae Earthborer seemed to buckle and invert into a donut, then disappear entirely from his vision, as if the fabric of realspace had been manipulated.


    One moment there was smog, and the next moment there was none. The sky seemed to clear without telegraph. Rays of crimson sunlight suddenly shone bright and blinding as the Desertian high noon, and the whole square had become a crater during the elapse of that interstice between thought and perception. In microseconds, all that detritus of death had gone, and the Chimera themselves were no more; but now the day had shifted again and it was dark as the deepest night, as if Corydon had convulsed and snuffed itself out.


    No, there was some light, and Betelgeuse realized that the night was merely an artifice of the titanic mound of gravel and rock above him. The floor fell away under his feet and he could hear Thete screaming and Cacliocos calling for backup and Voke hiccupping and Douglas asking God knows who "what is this? What is this?", and all throughout that steep descent into the abyss Betelgeuse could not find it within himself to let go of Frederica, and he held her close and felt her do the same and imagined that he could feel her heartbeat even through the padding and plating of their exosuits pressed tightly together.