Soul of a Gambler

Part XIII - "Coils Of The Fate-Serpent"

General Tobias Calhoun knew what came next. 

He had escaped facing the Serpent's jaw once, but to run twice against the same opponent would be to invite not only ridicule, but shame. So he drew his battle line here. In the primary hangar lit by foregrip-flashlights and flares that if the power was on would have triggered a torrential rain of fire suppressant foam as though the very factory that produces fire extinguishers went up. 

Shield-Bearers interlocked their shields in long lines, slanted in the hopes that whatever adversary would come pouring in lacked the ability to jump, climb, or fly. Calhoun's gambit was to force the incoming contacts into a killing corridor, and that if any did get into the ship proper they would be confined to this level where stationed defenders would cut them down. 

It would have been a sound plan, if Calhoun were up against a human force. 

He kept his sidearm in a crushing grip, his other hand atop a shield turned on its side that he crouched behind as not to obstruct their firing line. Mounted machine guns clicked, clacked, and slapped as their operators readied up. 

They all watched the blackness outside, waiting for a shape to appear. When it finally did, their first surprise came in that it simply melted into being, like water breaking through a tissue it made itself apparent. Ships of straight lines and sharp edges, easily as big as the largest cargo helicopters that the Blackwatch employed, simply were in their hold. Ramps already down. 

"Don't shoot the vehicles! I have some friends that would love to pick 'em apart!" Calhoun boomed, as though his men's weapons would do much of anything anyway. 

The second surprise that befell them came when the first wave of incoming contact were long arcs of small metal cylinders. 

"Don't! Down! Down!"

His men did as they were bade, and the hangar filled with a discord of sharp bangs like a fireworks stand that fell victim to an arsonist. Bright flashes lit the entirety of the cavernous hold like miniature Suns in seemingly unending series. 

When the explosions stopped, the exchange of gunfire began, the arena bathed in the harsh LED-White of the dropships' floodlights.

Calhoun spotted maybe twenty, only twenty, at absolute most. All of them in the kill-zone. The machine guns started first, tearing into the air like chainsaws as the incoming forces ran to their fortifications. 

Their armor burst in showers of sparks where the bullets hit, leaving little but scuffs and dents at the points of impact. One of the Krazoran soldiers turned to Calhoun and made a motion to his comrades. They got close enough Calhoun could almost see the detail of their grayed-out almost knightly ballistic plate armor, his reflection in the continuous red visor broken only by the hole that the high-velocity round of his sidearm punched into it. 

"Useless!"

He changed targets, squeezing off two more shots with his uncanny speed. One made sparks, and the other missed wide, but the continuous sustained fire of his support gunner drilled a hole in the chest of the humanoid figure that stood easily taller than any average man he had ever encountered. 

On the other side, Krazoran soldiers had flushed his forces out with grenades that left blazing red pools, and blew limb from trunk with weapons nearly as large as the wielders that fired with a reciprocating hiss between trigger pulls. When the grenades would miss, their cannons punched through the shields like they were paper. 

Calhoun stacked up behind a shield after watching his support gunner's arm turn to a splattering of paste, holes more than an inch and a half in diameter burst with inward snarls of metal, the harsh lights dotting the back wall with points of color.