SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest

More corpses were scattered, smoldering from the energy discharge. Brokehorn realized an entire company of Defenders were dead around him. His chain lightning-fork had hopped from foe to foe to the last soldier, and the results were visible before him. It was a stroke of luck he wasn’t going to question.

He turned back to the humans to find Anna driving the truck into the street. He trotted up to them, the ground rumbling only slightly under his steps as he approached. He was eye-level with the driver’s open-topped compartment, and Anna looked past him to the alien wreckage he left behind before gazing at his weaponry. “That one thing did… that?” she asked.

“It did, but it won’t be able to do so for a while,” Brokehorn admitted. Part of what had piqued his curiosity was that the energy drain on the weapon was much higher than normal. His eyes commanded his HUD to bring up the route the task force was taking — they still had a rough trip ahead of them.

“Listen to me,” the Triceratops told her, raising the screens on his helmet so she could look at his eyes. Humans always liked seeing your eyes, he had realized early on in his career. “If I engage something you need to keep heading west,” he explained. “Eventually you should meet up with friendly lines.”

“And what of you?” Anna asked the Lancer.

“What about me?” he replied.

“Will you be all right?”

Brokehorn snorted. “I will live or die. Nothing less, nothing more.”

The human woman looked at him, and then shook her head. “You are very brave beneath the fatalism,” she told him as she put the vehicle into gear.

Brokehorn didn’t respond, but the comment made him wonder what she meant by ‘brave’. He had explained to Ripper his reasons for fighting, but he had never considered what he did to be of that refined act the humans called courageous. They walked along until the vehicle shifted gear, and Brokehorn began to trot.

It was good that he had built his speed up because the Butcher tank turned smoothly as it came into the center of the road and fired its missiles. Brokehorn was able to leap forward and put his body between the weapons and the vehicle behind him.

His anti-missile systems engaged, defeating the Leitani armaments’ countermeasures. Intense, narrowly-directed lasers danced off his armor and fried the warheads, causing them to explode in mid-flight. That didn’t end his problems though, as two armored figures dismounted from the hull of the hovering, wedge-shaped tank.

“Get down a side street!” Brokehorn roared at Anna, returning fire with his machine guns then firing his hip mortars. Smoke rounds burst in the street in front of him as he took his own advice just in time. Powerful energy beams from the Khajali rai’liths blasted craters in the ground where he had just stood, debris raining everywhere.

Turning in the tight corridor, Brokehorn calmed his breathing and waited until he heard the sound of claws scraping the asphalt in the smoke-filled street in front of him. Then he filled it with fire from his flamethrowers, spewing flaming fuel. Shields were no use against the stuff, as it moved too slow to activate them. One warrior flung its arm about wildly, trying to dislodge the adhesive stuff from his arm. The other bellowed as it sunk to its knees — it had caught both streams full-on and was now a humanoid-shaped flaming totem.

Quickly, the Lancer moved to engage the partially aflame Khajali, machine guns firing at close range. The alien’s shield sprung up in response, but couldn’t stop the Old Blood bearing down on him, his rai’lith only notching Brokehorn’s intact horn before being ripped from the alien’s grasp. Brokehorn activated his flamethrowers again, and turned as the Khajali fell to the ground, the corpse hidden behind the thick flames.

There was no time to watch his handiwork as his shield sprang up. The butcher tank had silently approached him in the melee, and it had been joined by another. At close range, the purple light pulsed underneath the black vehicle, the anti-gravity technology a trademark of the Leitani species. An opaque dome rose from the wedge-shaped base, where twin cannons rode either side of it, with a large anti-aircraft gun riding on the dorsal mount. The guns spun up again, and Brokehorn’s shield’s dropped. Pain lanced into him as shrapnel penetrated the exposed thick scales that protected his sides.

The second tank popped up above its comrade, its missile’s aiming downwards toward him. The Lancer realized he had only one option, counter intuitive as it may have seemed. He charged forward and slid his horn underneath the floating tank in front of him and heaved upwards. The tank’s pilot did not respond fast enough to the sudden strike and was hurled into the air. With a crunch of metal on metal the two tanks collided just as the second butcher fired its missiles.