When the Warship hit, the shock of impact rang through the Hok like a deafening bell.

Major Mackennah swallowed, dropped back behind the collapsible barricades his team had hastily erected around the entry point that command had assigned them for grinder duty. Crafted from three inch thick sheets of ceramocarbide composite, the barricades were strong enough to shrug off anything from plasma fire to railgun rounds with minimal damage, and paired with the heavy plasma repeaters mounted on tripods on either side of the entry point, two to a side, they created a portable bottleneck that was considered by the brass and the people back on Earth to be virtually impenetrable. Leaning into the plating from the inside, the Major felt only marginally safer, carefully rechecked the status indicators on his sweep rifle, fiddled with the stream compression settings. For the barest moment, he thought of home, thought of the girlfriend he’d lived with in South Dakota, the girlfriend whose little brother he’d taken to football practice, whose mother he’d kissed on the cheek the day the whole family had come to see him off at Houston Aerospace. Closing his eyes, he could almost see home, could almost feel the breeze– and then the sound of grinding brought him back, reminded him of where he was, that he might never live to see South Dakota again.

“What the hell is that?” Someone asked. Mackennah glanced up, saw only helmets and guns, ballistic plating. He’d ordered his men to stay below the rim of the barricades– only the bravest dared to crouch high enough to peek over. A gloved hand pulled at the safety release on a nearby repeater, primed the plasma discharge array to full yield.

“Coralate.” Mackennah finally said. Someone nodded, another coughed. The noise was getting louder, keener, closer, biting viciously into the ear, cutting with the squeals and shrieks of tortured metal giving way to rending violence, mechanical cruelty. Mackennah swallowed, smacked his own ballistic helmet out of nervous habit. “Stay frosty.” He advised. “Open up on anything that has blue skin.”

“I hear that.” Someone else said, chuckling. Another soldier laughed, further away, more giddy in his anxious unease.

“Come and get it you blueberry bitches!” The soldier yelled, priming his own repeater in the pause. “I got a hot load for you right here!”

“Quit screwing around.” Mackennah shot back, winced as the grinding blasted into an ear-rending shriek. Someone else coughed, nailed down the edge of an escaping chuckle.

“Sorry sir.”

“Can it.” The Major flapped a loose gesture, cleared his throat. “Just make sure you’re ready when the blueskins breech that wall.”

“Roger that!”

“Reyes!” Mackennah glanced vaguely in the direction of where the Corporal was, sniffed, ran a hand briskly once across his nose. “You getting anything on that gadget of yours?”

“Nothing.” Reyes shouted back. “Some static, a lot of interference from the radiation, but that’s it. I honestly couldn’t tell you what the hell is going on out there.”

“Well, fucking–” The Major paused, listened. The sound had stopped, the squeal of metal giving way to a sudden and ringing silence. “What the hell?”

“Sir!” Someone else shouted. “Oh! What the fuck? Holy– holy shit on a fritter. You better take a look at this, sir!”

“What is it?” Mackennah shouted back.

“Something...” The soldier hesitated, let silence drop in to fill the gap between thoughts, words. “Fuck if I know sir.”

“Well, what’s it look like?” Mackennah licked his lips, glanced toward the ceiling. All around him, ballistic helmets were rising, traction-gloved hands curling around the edges of barricades. The Major’s eyes flicked over, watched as the soldier next to him got slowly to his feet, mouth falling open in awe, a mix of shock, horror, wonder, confusion and terror. Someone else sputtered, tried to get a hail of words out, managed only broken fragments of sounds, simple noises. In the pause, Mackennah squeezed his eyes against the reflex in his gut, the instinct that told him to keep his head down and only pop out to fire his sweep rifle when he could guarantee nothing would take a shot at him. Hands flexed, lips mouthed numbers. One, two, three...

The instant he saw it, he froze. Popping up for only the barest second, he’d only caught a glimpse of the thing, but that fraction of a frame had burnt itself so deeply into his mind that he could not move, could only stare inwardly, struck to frightened silence by the sheer alien-ness of the thing. Beyond the barricades, something creaked, the sound of metal on metal. Mackennah swallowed, eyes widening, hair on the back of his neck standing up in fear. If it was moving closer, if it was coming toward...

The rest was reflex. In an instant, he shot to his feat and leapt away from the barricade like a stricken deer, terrified of the approach, the touch he imagined in his mind. Hands moved on instinct, leveled the sweep rifle at the first thing that moved, the first edge of motion to catch his eye– another soldier, awestricken eyes never even registering MacKennah’s rifle, the weapon aimed, primed, charged and alive. Nothing.

“M– Major...” Someone else managed. Eyes flicked toward the frightened soldier across the bottleneck from him, caught instead on the thing that pulsed between them, the tentacle of living chrome that threaded itself through hull and ceiling alike, moving as fluidly as a current through water. Already, it was branching, breaking free into a network of veins that worked themselves into bulkheads and deckplating beyond the main tendril, beyond the three foot across trunk of viscous metal that flowed in from the breech point like some monstrous living thing.

“What in God’s name...” Someone else sputtered. Beside Mackennah, mouths worked absently, fingers rose to point, to gesture. Awestruck, he hardly noticed, wouldn’t have turned to look even if he had. He already knew what they were pointing at, what their eyes had caught on.

Like heavy seeds of corpulent chrome, liquid boils rose off the branching network of aqueous alloy, split into oddly ichorous spheres that dropped a little to hang in the air before smoothing themselves to perfect globes of rippling, mirror-reflective metal. Soldiers looked on in awe, immovable, captured by the haunting, surreal beauty of the tendrils, the spheres of suspended chrome that seemed to hang like cybernetic fruit at the end of a thousand invisible vines. Within seconds, there were dozens of them, fist-sized and eerily silent, hovering with no more movement or sound than the air that held them. Mackenna swallowed, stared blanky. Deep within his mind, a part of him was screaming at him to give orders, to remind everyone around him that whatever this was, it was still Coralate, still dangerous– a weapon beyond anything they had ever experienced, but still a weapon nonetheless. Hands shifted nervously on his sweep rifle, fingered the grip, traced a line across the trigger guard.

All at once, the spheres shivered, creased and flexed so suddenly, so imperceptibly that no one caught it until it was too late. In an instant, there was steel in the air, splinters of liquid chrome that shot toward soldiers like living knives, punching through faces, cheeks, and throats with vicious tenacity, ripping and boring themselves deep into meaty bodies. Somewhere in the sudden haze of crimson and fighting terror, a fragment of liquid steel stabbed into Mackennah’s chest and the sensation of it chewing into him, of the little bolt of living chrome ripping through his organs with demonic speed and intent cut through him, shot unbreakable agony into his tortured brain. He screamed, but there was no one to hear it, no one to notice. All around him, bodies split open like the crimson petals of thick and bloody blossoms, throwing ropes of wet scarlet across bulkheads and barricades. Within seconds, Mackennah was alone, and only the wet gurgle of death was left to compete with the sound of his ragged screams and the encroaching silence. Eyes squeezed closed, hands spasmed, and then the wriggling fragment of bladed chrome found its way into his lungs, eviscerated them with all the cruel efficiency of a pipe bomb.

In that one terrible instant, as breath choked off and blood filled his mouth, the Major’s mind wandered, drifted back to South Dakota, the girlfriend, her little brother, her mother, Houston Aerospace. The urge to swallow played at the back of his ragged throat, passed unsatisfied as sight darkened, faded. Somewhere deep within the ruins of his body, the chunk of chrome was still working, chewing, ripping through untouched tissues, but it didn’t matter, couldn’t matter. Eyes blinked once, hung sluggish, hesitated in the semblance of fight, but ultimately it was the sweet call of darkness that won out, kissed his lids and left them to fall, to drift silently closed for what he knew would be the last time.

8NXCUVVS9TNT