Everything was going fine just another text book drilling operation until we hit those damned green crystals. Crystals used in mech construction have color variances from white, to blue, and purple. No one had ever seen green before so they mined what they found and brought it back to base to run tests. They submitted it to the standard battery of tests with energy dispersal and conductivity patterns, resistance to different elemental stresses, and finally niode interaction. It was during the niode reaction tests that things suddenly became a nightmare.
Apparently these things we had mistaken for crystals were actually life forms. Life forms who were in the process of hibernating. Whatever species this was it fed itself upon niode energy, when it ran out of food it went dormant. We fed it, we woke it up. There was a horrid buzzing in the air as the small truckload of crystals that had been brought back started to become agitated. Steam was starting to boil off of them, and that was when we realized they weren’t crystals. What we had mistaken for crystals was actually some kind of cocoon for this insectoid like life form. As soon as they started to steam off these things the creatures inside began to stir and soon were swarming out of the rear of the transport vehicle and covering everything in their path.
Thankfully someone up on the top of one of the refinery machines looked down and saw the mess and put out a general distress signal. We knew help would get here eventually but when it got here it may be too late. These things were everywhere. They looked like some huge mutant descendent of an earth scarab if some mad scientist had decided to cross it with a squid and gave it a quartz shell. They made a horrid shrieking noise as they blanketed everything and everyone that was in the way. They secreted some kind of super-heated plasma from the facial beak looking appendage to instantly melt their prey and slurp up the resulting mess into the suckers on their tentacle like legs. In an instant hundreds of men were simply turned to soup, and just as much equipment turned to so much mush.
We few who had escaped the initial outbreak of creatures barricaded ourselves in the security quarters and glued our eyes to the screens still connected to working cameras. It was then we noticed movement on the screen monitoring the gate onto this planet. The surface of the gate rippled as mecha started to pour through of all shapes and sizes. There were as many mecha as the factory ever made, I think in the assembled small army that came out of the gate.
No transmissions were sent, no status report asked for, as soon as they hit the ground from the gate they took off at a dead run towards the mining operation. We watched their progress as they blasted their way into the refinery, There had to be well over thirty or so mecha assembled here. The bug things must have sensed the niode energy from the mecha as they turned in a single body towards the new arrivals.
They had barely finished their turn to face the assembled machines when the screens lit up with explosions, laser fire and heavy weapon projectile fire. Whoever was piloting these mechs they weren’t fooling around one bit. They never intended to even see what the enemy was capable of. They just swept in and started to destroy everything that moved. By that point though the bugs were the only things moving they had totally devoured or partially digested the majority of the interior of the camp.
We heard heavy fire from Ogguns, the mad cries of Gigus and the screeches of the Skriag, we heard missile launching Shocklites, repeating cannons of Smilidons so many weapons going off at once we feared even from this distance at the perimeter of camp we would go deaf. Then as suddenly as it started it was over.
Silence fell like a curtain. On our screens we watched as the mechas simply turned and walked back to the gate. Before the last one entered the gate we received this over our encrypted network communications.
“You’re welcome maybe you’ll be as generous with your prices in the future when The Brotherhood is shopping for mechs. See you around."
I for one say we give it to them!
Submitted by Pat Willis#224534