SECTOR 7 (THE IRON COAST)
MOUTH OF THE HIVE - ELEVATION 3,200 FEET
NOVEMBER 15, 2012
13:10 LOCAL TIME
The cave mouth wasn't just a hole in the rock. It was a wound.
It breathed out hot, stale air that smelled of ammonia and rotting meat. And from the darkness, the swarm poured out like black oil.
"Contact front! Keep the line! Keep the fucking line!" Captain Russo screamed, his voice raw.
The combined force of Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie teams formed a crescent firing line. Thirty rifles roared in unison. The sound was deafening, a continuous sheet of noise that echoed off the canyon walls.
But the spiders didn't care about noise.
Hundreds of hatchlings skittered over the rocks, followed by the hulking, armored shapes of the Warrior-Caste.
Harris Brown stood in the center of the kill box.
He wasn't taking cover.
He walked forward, the HK417 leveled.
Thump. The M320 grenade launcher under the barrel coughed.
A 40mm HEDP round sailed into the center of the swarm.
BOOM.
Yellow slime and shattered legs flew into the air.
Harris didn't flinch at the explosion. He just racked the launcher, loaded another shell, and fired again.
Thump. BOOM.
Thump. BOOM.
GDI HIGH-COMMAND
THE AEGIS, GIBRALTAR
On the main screen, the POV feed from Harris's helmet was a blur of violence.
Sir Malcolm Hayes watched, his knuckles white as he gripped the back of a chair.
"Look at his biometrics," Hayes whispered. "It's not adrenaline. It's... math."
General McCaffrey nodded grimly. "He's calculating blast radius and reload times in milliseconds. He's not angry, Malcolm. He's efficient. It's almost... inhuman."
On the screen, a Warrior-Spider lunged at a Ranger from Bravo Team. The Ranger screamed as the creature's mandibles clamped onto his armor.
Harris didn't turn his head. He spun on his heel, firing the rifle one-handed.
CRACK-CRACK.
Two rounds through the Spider's neck joint. It collapsed instantly.
Harris didn't check to see if the Ranger was okay. He had already turned back to the main swarm, reloading his launcher.
"He's a machine," Hayes murmured. "A goddamn killing machine."
THE MATRIARCHTHE HIVE ENTRANCE
13:20 LOCAL TIME
"Reloading!" Volkov yelled, his machine gun barrel glowing cherry red. "Barrel change! Cover me!"
"We can't hold them!" Sergeant O'Connor roared, blasting a hatchling with a shotgun. "There's too many of them!"
Then, the mountain shook.
The ground cracked open.
The smaller spiders stopped attacking. They scurried to the sides, chattering in submission.
From the main tunnel, She emerged.
The Matriarch.
She was the size of a two-story house. Her carapace was a deep, iridescent purple, thick enough to deflect tank shells. Her eyes were eight burning orbs of malice. Her legs were tipped with obsidian spikes that dug craters into the stone with every step.
She didn't screech. She emitted a low, magnetic thrum that made teeth ache and vision blur.
"Holy shit," Russo whispered.
The Matriarch raised her front legs and slammed them down.
A shockwave of force and lightning ripped through the ground.
CRUNCH.
Three men from Charlie Team were thrown into the air like ragdolls. The rock beneath them shattered.
"Asset!" Rakesh yelled. "She's armored! The 7.62 is bouncing off!"
Harris saw it. He saw the bullets sparking harmlessly off her shell.
Hard shell, the Mask hissed. Soft insides. Break the shell.
Harris dropped his rifle. He grabbed a discarded AT-4 rocket launcher from a fallen Ranger.
He didn't aim. He fired.
WHOOSH-BANG.
The rocket struck the Matriarch in the face. Smoke cleared.
She hissed—an angry sound—but the armor held. It was scorched, cracked, but not broken.
She focused on Harris.
She opened her maw. A stream of pressurized, boiling acid shot out.
Harris dove.
The acid hit the rock where he had been standing, dissolving it instantly into bubbling slag.
The splash damage hit his leg. His suit sizzled. He grunted, rolling to his feet, but the pain was distant.
"She's pinning us!" Russo yelled into the comms. "Control! We are combat ineffective! We are getting slaughtered down here! Do something!"
The Matriarch advanced. The smaller spiders surged forward again.
The circle was collapsing.
They were going to die.
THUNDER FROM THE SEAGDI HIGH-COMMAND
"General!" the Comms Officer screamed. "Alpha is overrun! Casuality rate at 30%!"
McCaffrey didn't hesitate. He grabbed the mic for the direct line to the UNS Alliance.
"Halloway! Do not use the main rails! I repeat, do not use the rails! You'll vaporize our own men!"
"We have a lock, General," Captain Halloway's voice came back, calm and cold. "What is the order?"
"Secondary batteries!" McCaffrey barked. "Five-inch guns and the VLS missiles. Precision air-burst. Danger Close. Drop the hammer, Captain. Drop it on her fucking head!"
THE HIVE ENTRANCE
The sky tore open.
It wasn't lightning this time.
It was the sound of naval artillery.
WHEEEEEEEEE-KRUMP!
The first 127mm shell landed directly on top of the Matriarch.
The explosion was blinding.
The shell, designed to penetrate ship armor, smashed into her carapace and detonated.
Purple armor shattered. Green blood sprayed like a geyser.
She screamed—a sound that shattered the glass on Dr. Kovač's wrist computer.
WHEEEE-KRUMP! WHEEEE-KRUMP!
Two more shells rained down. Then a barrage of smaller missiles from the ship's Vertical Launch System slammed into the swarm surrounding the team, vaporizing the smaller spiders in clouds of fire and shrapnel.
The Matriarch staggered. Her front legs buckled. Her face was a ruin of cracked shell and leaking fluid.
She was blind. Broken. But not dead.
She thrashed wildly, her legs swinging like scythes.
Harris stood up from the smoke.
His uniform was smoking. The Mask was covered in soot.
He picked up his HK417.
He walked toward the thrashing monster.
He didn't run. He walked.
The Matriarch sensed him. She lunged blindly.
Harris slid under her strike.
He jammed the barrel of the rifle into the crack the artillery had made in her skull.
Right into the soft, wet brain-matter.
"Sleep," Harris growled.
He pulled the trigger. And kept pulling.
BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG.
He dumped the entire twenty-round magazine into her brain.
The Matriarch shuddered.
Then, with a final, wet exhale, she collapsed.
The mountain stopped shaking.
THE SILENT BLADEThe silence that followed was heavy.
"Cease fire! Cease fire!" Russo yelled, coughing in the dust. "Check your sectors! Casualties?"
"Two dead in Charlie," O'Connor reported, his voice grim. "Four wounded. But we're alive."
Dr. Kovač scrambled over the carcass of the Matriarch. She pulled out a specialized containment unit.
"The Anchor," she gasped, pointing to a glowing, metallic shard embedded in the creature's thorax. "It absorbed it! That's why she was so big!"
She used a laser cutter to extract the sample. She shoved it into the case.
"I have it! I have the sample! And the flight recorder from Shadow Company is right there!"
She grabbed a black box from a pile of bones.
"Control! We have the package! Mission accomplished!"
"Good work, Alpha," McCaffrey's voice came through, filled with relief. "Extraction inbound. Big Mother is five minutes out. Hold tight."
Harris ejected his empty magazine. He looked around.
The battle was won.
But the Mask was twitching.
Quiet, the voice whispered. Too quiet. Something is wrong.
"Rakesh," Harris rumbled. "Eyes up."
"What is it, bhai?" Rakesh asked, wiping blood from his forehead.
Then, the shadows moved.
They didn't come from the cave. They dropped from the cliffs above.
They made no sound. No impact tremors.
Four figures.
They were clad in sleek, matte-black armor that seemed to absorb the light. Not bulky power armor like the humans, and not the bone-armor of the Exiles. This was high-tech. Or high-magic.
They looked like... Ninjas. Or Wraiths.
"Contact!" Russo yelled, raising his rifle.
He never fired.
One of the figures flicked a wrist. A silver bolo—glowing with blue energy—wrapped around Russo's neck and chest.
ZAP.
Russo convulsed and dropped, paralyzed instantly.
"Hostiles!" Volkov roared, spinning his PKM.
A second figure moved with impossible speed, blurring like smoke. It kicked Volkov in the chest. The impact crumpled the Russian's armor and sent him flying twenty feet.
"NO!" Harris roared.
He raised his rifle to bash the nearest attacker.
The figure caught the rifle barrel. caught it with one hand.
Harris's eyes widened behind the mask. He applied force—force that could bend steel.
The figure didn't budge.
It tilted its head. A smooth, featureless faceplate stared back.
Then, the figure struck.
It jammed a palm into Harris's chest.
A pulse of purple energy exploded.
It wasn't kinetic. It was disruptive. It hit the nervous system. It hit the Mask.
Harris felt his body lock up. The Mask screamed in his head—a high-pitched whine of pain.
He fell to his knees.
He couldn't move. He couldn't speak. He could only watch.
The other figures moved through the team like water.
Rakesh and Rahul were dispatched with precise nerve strikes. The Rangers were netted with the glowing energy-bolas.
In ten seconds—ten seconds—the entire force of thirty elite soldiers was on the ground.
Dr. Kovač was the last one standing, clutching the sample case.
The leader of the black-clad figures walked up to her.
It gently took the case from her trembling hands.
Then it touched her forehead. She collapsed, unconscious but alive.
The leader looked at Harris.
It spoke. Not in English. Not in the Old Tongue.
It spoke in a language that sounded like binary code mixed with glass breaking.
Then, it waved a hand.
A shimmering portal opened behind them. Not a blue Architect gate. A dark, swirling grey rift.
The figures began dragging the unconscious soldiers into the rift.
Harris was the last to go.
As he was dragged backward, paralyzed, he looked at the sky. He saw the Chinook descending in the distance.
Too late, he thought. We lost.
The rift closed.
The mountaintop was empty.
Just dead spiders and silence.
THE GHOST SIGNAL
GDI HIGH-COMMAND
"Signal lost!"
"All telemetry flatlined!"
"Did the mountain collapse?"
Hayes was screaming. "Where are they? Where is my team?"
McCaffrey stared at the screen. The thermal signatures were gone. All of them.
"They didn't die," McCaffrey whispered, dread pooling in his stomach. "The biometrics didn't zero out. They just... vanished."
He slumped into his chair. The victory at the Iron Coast had just turned into a catastrophe.
"We just handed our best soldiers to a ghost."
FOB TRITON (COASTAL BASE)
HELIPAD 4
15:00 LOCAL TIME
The wind whipped off the black ocean, smelling of salt and rust.
Lieutenant "Hooch" Miller sat on the skid of his MH-6 'Little Bird' scout helicopter. He was chewing a toothpick, watching the horizon.
He was the extraction pilot for the secondary recon team. He was supposed to meet up with Alpha Team's Chinook for the escort back.
But the radio had been silent for an hour.
"Hey, Tower," Hooch keyed his mic. "Any word on the Eagle Eye package? My fuel is burning a hole in my pocket."
"Negative, Hooch," the Tower replied. The controller sounded scared. "We... we lost contact. Big Mother is returning empty. Search and Rescue is on standby, but... command is putting a hold on all flights."
Hooch frowned. He stood up, looking North toward the distant storm clouds over Sector 7.
He had a bad feeling. The kind of feeling you get when the bar goes quiet right before a brawl.
"They don't just vanish," Hooch muttered to himself. "Not Harris. Not that monster."
He patted the side of his helicopter.
"Hang tight, baby," he whispered. "I have a feeling we're going to be flying into some stupid shit real soon."
He spat the toothpick onto the tarmac.
The Rescue Arc had begun. But first, they had to find out what the hell just stole GDI's deadliest weapon.