Objective one, Get that tower up. Objective two, find those damn knights. Objective three, take that little lizard alive! And naturally we don't want the civilians to die" Civilians living wasn't an official military objective.
"What if it's at her, sir? "
Laughter
"We ask her politely to lay some eggs!"
Laughter
"Seriously we are three bodies down so let's try and be serious. We gotta count on those choir boys to fill out the squad. Y'all have seen the pictures? "
A shuttle in space is nearly silent aside from the wirr of life support systems. Fuel is only used to start and stop. Once you're at the speed you like, you don't use it anymore.
The click of the ancient communication form, the PowerPoint, was audible to the entire shuttle even the pilot .
"I sent this to you all but I'm not sure you looked at it . So here it is again these are pictures of that lizard and yeah he's a space marine too. We suspect that his horn looking thing on his nose is a weapon Though you wouldn't know it from the video which is too graphic for me to show."
What a drama mama. click*
"These Claws are the only weapon we have seen this thing use and they pack a punch we estimate to be at least 8 tons of punch each. That's over 20 times when you chuckle ducks can. You put on your armor and you might be able to get a quarter of what that machine is documented as producing. My point is that that thing is in a league of its own. We have never fought anything like it before and we are trusting that like all things it dies when you shoot it"
The captain liked talking, which is probably a good thing for leaders of humanity.
"We don't got enough big guns but that's why two of you have anti-material rifles and one of you's got that old church slugger. We have a drone we plan on using as a decoy. We stopped one short of welding claws onto your own damn suits so that you could try and wrestle with it. We don't advise that. Any questions about this thing?"
There were no questions about that thing.
"You are gonna stick to plan A! They say no good plan survives contact with the enemy and they are right. But if you don't stick to plan A we don't have a chance of winning. And now by popular demand, The plan."
An audible click, it was the PowerPoint again.
"This is the bait drone it does nothing but conceal a rocket propelled grenade inside of its chest. He walks like you. He talks a little like you, and with a little luck it wanders away from us a little ways and attracts the beast. With luck it will have time to target and acquire, and then launch its little projectile into the heart of that alien marine. That is supposed to be our first pass at neutralizing this threat."
"If that fails, and there are good odds it does fail for whatever reason. We are going to have to go hot."
Click*
"You are going to shoot at these locations. I have it on good authority that shots in these locations will disable the machine and mind you. We are going to have to disable every limb it's got, including the tail. Because he could kill you even in your armor suit with any one of those. "
"Once all five, and maybe if we include the head, six limbs are disabled, we will approach the machine, and with crowbar and hammer and hands we will rip it apart as best we can. If we are exceptionally lucky, we will find a little cockpit inside there with a little lizard man or if the universe is just, a lizard woman."
The laughter was not so loud this time, but there were some snickers
"Are there any questions? Good because we don't have time for any."
There was a little muttering, and one or two questions, but they were cut short as the roar of the engine blasted to life, and the G forces grew.
It was landing time.
They landed on the deserted side of the station. The escape shuttle was docking on the exact opposite side, and this location has been picked to minimize the interference between the two vessels. The commander had picked the location, it was not a specific criteria of the mission. The Marines were out of the piloted shuttle in an instant. their seventh slightly skinnier member was the decoy drone. The pilot undocked, they had plenty of fuel to burn.
Three of the Marines, the ones without special weapons, got to work assembling on the exterior of the station the communications dish.
The decoy drone made its way through the station, not quite at random, but in a panic to trot in obvious locations
15 minutes later the Marines plugged into power the jamming from home I've been turned off as they landed, and no signal from the decoy had been recorded.
The emergency power flickered as the tower began to broadcast. The Marines were sending live feeds from their location as was the humanoid decoy drone. Any camera that still had power on the station was doing likewise. Encryption safeties had been turned off. Everybody could see everything that was going on on the station if only they chose to tune to the radio station and pay attention.
The pilot reported location of the monster, the captain gave his ultimatum to the knights and any remaining survivors on the station.
The station did not immediately respond. Radiation levels were raising they had been jammed for over 24 hours. At this point they probably didn't trust the first transmission.
The pilot didn't want to shoot on account of possible civilians in the area.
Suddenly a voice popped up over the communicators in the helmet of every marine.
"I shot, it saw me, it's moving."
There is an explosion across the channels as communication opened up. The pilot was moving for a good shot.
It was chaos. There were three different command structures on the station, Station security, The Knights, Now the Marines.
Not counting the enemy, of course who so far had remained silent, god willing.
The Marines sprinted. Clanking aggressively as their boots dented the civilian paneled floors barely strong enough to hold the quarter ton exoskeletons.
There was yelling from station security on the radio. Two of them had died, ripped apart by the monster, one was floating in space. They had attempted to aid the marine captain in cornering the beast and gotten killed for their eagerness to please. The marine captain had gotten in contact with one of the knights named Gabriel. The young man bless his heart was urging security to return to the civilians. A location the knight would not leave. Apparently two of the knights were spacewalking and two of the knights remained with the civilians at departures as a deterrent against the monster.
The monster hadn't killed them for whatever reason.
The marine captain couldn't blame anyone for their actions, he didn't know the complete context.
Monster had fled gunshots, which implied that didn't want to fall under the gun. The pilot hadn't seen the monster reappear and hadn't yet opened fire.
That aside from everyone's location was perhaps the only useful information that was transmitted in the first 30 seconds of chaos.
The marines slowed their roll, approaching three unarmored spaceman in a hallway near departures.
One of them, with an air of tired authority spoke on the proximity channel and identified themselves as the station captain. Now there were two captains.
"It's outside the station" he almost whispered, "Just on the other side of these walls. It can break straight through and that's how it got three men. It wants to throw you into space."
What else could you expect from an alien? It was an alien way of fighting. Like some sort of deranged King Kong
"It's fast."
The statement didn't really have meaning to those who have not seen the creature
Then, with blinding fury, the hallway lurched, The last marine in the group, an assault rifle wielder was engulfed by the metal arms of the beast, the hallway shuttered as the two collided, then it lurched again and a section of the hallway wall fell out from under the massive claws of the bizarre rabbit lizard machine that appeared to be deadlifting one of the marines into the opposite side of the station hallway.
It was supernaturally fast, giving the impression of sped up footage. Marines could barely train their weapons on it fast enough. By the time they had registered the motion, their comrade was accelerating sideways, by the time the instinctive raising of weapons began the monster was punching through the opposite side of the station, punching was the wrong word, it almost "swam" through the station, metal panels bending and buckling as it desperately tried to push/pull itself forward. By the time the weapons were pointed the monster was outside the station with their comrade, the station was lurching again as its long metal tail rushed through the space it had just been. Two massive messy holes, one starboard and one port were depressurizing the hallway, this was why everyone of station security and the marines had basic atmospheric protection. They were large enough to offer two marines a shot. But the power armor, with as much recoil control as it had, could not adjust for the unstable platform the marines were standing on.
The station hallway, one elbow pipe for humanity to live and breathe within, was rotating off axis. A few shots could be heard in the rapidly depleting atmosphere. A few more dully bounced around the hallway as marines fired through once station walls at where they thought the metal monster might be. It was the infuriating problem of combat, bullets that killed were not bullets seen.
The captains yelled for stable ground at about the same time. The Marines hurdled towards the outside of the station through newly found holes in the hallway seeking an external and more advantageous position. Station security and their captain, without the magnetic boots, clambered back towards departures.
The marines or at least 4 of their number and their captain alighted on the outside of the station, just below the biology lab. They spotted the monster bounding away. Four bullets were put down range before it disappeared behind another hallway and another section of the station leaping and scrambling like a spooked cat. It's long semi-stiff tail gave the impression of having fluffed in fear. The 5th marine was on the wrong side of the now disconnected and rotating hallway elbow.
In the distance, they could see the spinning lights of their comrade, the 6th marine and honorary deadlift bar spiral helplessly into the void. All space-born power armor came equipped with some basic emergency thrusters to avoid such a fate, but they must have failed. With nothing to grab or kick or stand on, comrade 6 would endure a long lonely death.
"Pilot kill the monster no matter what, once it's dead we can worry about the men overboard. You have plenty of fuel to save them."
The shuttle indeed had plenty of fuel to save the now two known drifters.
Marine number five joined the rest, all pointed their weapons at nothing. Helplessly they searched for the machine, that one demon, that one a little lizard that had supposedly created this mess. Main hallway #4 was floating into space like a giant lone macaroni noodle in the stewpot of hell. the station captain and his two underpaid goons miraculously made the leap of faith back to a connected station section, they didn't have thruster aid.
Nobody spoke.
The tension in the void suppressed them. Anything they could say would be unimportant in the face of danger.
There was silence until the voice of knight Gabriel.
"We have eyes on it, it's just outside the storage deck, it's burrowed into a maintenance shaft"
T-17 minutes until escape shuttle arrival. Standard power armor came equipped with radiation shielding, but if it didn't the exterior of the station would be cooking them to the tunes of 320 mSv/hr. More if they traveled to the reactor, as their decoy drone had.