The Freshers party for Border Legionnaires. A Finish the Story Contest - WEEK #21

The Border

In the scant shadow of the guardhouse, a greenhorn Border Legionnaire was waiting for the end of his first watch shift, gasping for the heat.

Below him, there was the stretch of sandy desert that the XIX Floating Fortress patrolled incessantly, moving back and forth in the sky like a surreal and phlegmatic cetacean, with the low and incessant buzz of the managems that powered it.

Behind the line of Fortresses, the Lands of Man ideally began. In that marginal strip, there were meager pastures and stretches of scrubby bushes, attacked for miles and miles by a fine sand, like yellowish talcum powder, that made the desert gain extension every year.

"This year the wind has put so much sand down," the marshal told him, biting a gray mustache, one of the last days before the Duty Beginning ceremony. "And behind the sand, the Those arrive".

He was glad he no longer had just a stunner to defend him from the Those, like the guardians of the border in former times, before the Legions. Once, it was thought to direct the Those into reserves to prevent them from doing too much damage with their insatiable hunger, but then they started to run away, to strip the flesh off every head of cattle, to waste fields and orchards, to devour even the people... and more and more came from the desert.

He had been among the first in his draft class in combat and shooting exercises, but in his heart he was afraid of when he would found himself in front of a real That, and not an illusory image created by the trainers. It took him months to get used to the slouching and snappy movements of those lean and black illusions, all teeth, which he found horrifying.

During that first day of service, however, only an armored convoy had passed, transporting ordered and dull clusters of goleminers to the mysterious and vital mines of managems, on the other side of the desert. The Those did not find goleminers edible, luckily.

The Horn of Danger snatched him cruelly from his thoughts. Intruders in the fortress! How did they get in? How did they pass under our noses?

He grabbed the heavy terminator and ran down the spiral staircase, toward his team's collection point, his heart in his throat.

A scraping noise from a corridor to his right made him stop. Pointing the terminator in the dark, with a trembling grip, he shouted "Who goes there?!?"

The Those came out, completely different from the illusions of the trainers...

Those was a giant snake! It was coiling blocking the passage completely. It was scaled, the dull metallic scratch as it gathered its length was unnerving, He retreated- as fast as he could climb in reverse. Then a ball of fire? hit it from the other side. That's when he saw that a segment detached itself. Yes, more like Those in the simulations ; but all mouth and hands with baby legs and huge segmented toes like hooks. Each of them were moving in perfect sync -in effect a single body. He reached the top step of the spiral as the snake reached the first step.
He hastily fired burst of 5 shots pointing, more than aiming. Luckily the stairway collapsed on top of Those. He locked the door and piled all the movable furniture before it and sat down breathing hard, the shock now registering. He flinched as a boom reverberated through the building.
What next? Signal! He had to signal the barracks and the rest of the fortresses. No No! the captain does it! He got up and ran to the far end where a full length glass wall showed no movement or flares outside. Shit! Shit! The area around the fortress should be covered in defense pods and strobes as the automatic defense systems deployed on the Code Red being activated.
Something banged into the door loudly denting it and sending the piled furniture tumbling away. The only way was up. He ran sucking huge breaths as a second boom sounded. Oh God! if I had the power staff ! or bombs or Wait blue managems! There were in the blue managems Captains shuttle docked at the private slot just a floor below.
He heard the door breaking below as he made the top floor. Here the passage was a corridor Left to right. He rushed to the left end, Bathrooms! He jammed his terminator in single auto fire mode and stuck it into the corner cubicle and rushed back to the far right side and flattened himself around the corner. He could hear the gun firing as he peeked to look at the landing- the snake appeared and turned toward the sound. As soon as it was around the left corner he sprinted down, now running with a purpose.
A single of Those was by the destroyed door but his only chance was to get below before the snake returns; so he rushed straight at the grotesque enemy. The single Those threw something at him but it went wide and he tackled the scaly body right through the door landing on top of him as they fell down a floor.
The enemy was dead his head pierced by bent metal railing he tried to get up finding his left shoulder erupting in pain and his face and his left arm bloodied with multitude of scratches. Somehow he made it to the dock. That's when the fortress shuddered, like an earthquake. He had difficulty removing the armored plates with one arm almost useless. A loud thunk followed by metallic scratching warned him that the snake was back. He had removed two of the three plates and was inside the shuttle trying the void mirror projection when he saw a "segment" moving towards the dock. He retrieved the gun he had found in the Captain's cabin and shot at it wildly. He focused on the mirror and shouted into it "We are attacked. Those have the fortress. Code Red Repeat Code Red"
Time seemed to slow down as he grabbed a parachute from the shuttle and an energy bulb. He lobbed the energy bulb near the managems and ran towards the far glass wall shooting at the glass, he could hear the screech of the scales and click- clack as Those rushed to devour him . He punched through the glass a quarter of a second before the shuttle exploded. He was thrown tumbling a hundred meters away. Still disoriented he opened his parachute to try and land as the alarms started going off and the fortress was tilting one way and then the other as systems shut down.

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