Nuke'em

PZZT. An Expander blast singed the left side of his blond crew cut, and nearly damaged his dark sunglasses as well. He pivoted around--BLAM!--firing off a shot into the creature's brain. The pink, many-tentacled monstrosity fell unceremoniously to the ground.

"That's one," said the red vest, blue jeans and boot-clad soldier. He had survived the crash. Which wasn't a surprise to him. It took more than a little heat to take down--

Another Expander blast. He returned fire.

"Two."

The hard-bitten gun-toting warrior made his way along the spiderweb lay out of the concrete-tunneled base, walking briskly despite the weight of the ammo, several guns, and his personal luggage, which he carried over one shoulder in a small-but-hefty black bag.

The eastern corridors, at least that's the direction his map gave them, had already been demolished by the Kalmari. Their mistake. He smirked. They had cut their points of entry by a third, and if he could make it back to the center of the web...

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The Kalmari had destroyed the rockets and communications equipment before he arrived, leaving him stranded. So naturally, he had salvaged the short-range communication equipment off the lagging Kalmari fighter that had welcomed him and sent out a distress signal to the nearby Kalmari fleet. It read: Help. Earth sends destroyers. Battleship. To retrieve weap-- it fizzled out. Suspecting a trap, the Kalmari proceeded with caution, and he used that time to prepare.

He hadn't expected the difficulty. It turned out that the Kalmari attack on the base had caused an--ironically--automatic reversion to manual controls. This made it impossible to open the sealed titanium doors to the base weapons' cache, because the control for the door was behind tons of rubble, and therefore he wouldn't have access to high-powered explosives. Unless, he had realized, he could get some rocket fuel. And there was no fuel left at the CHICK (Cuisine Haute Inter-Cosmic Kitchen) Base.

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Mission accomplished. Kalmari fighters were equipped with personal DNA encryption, so flying away after the fleet landed was never an option. On the other hand, he knew how to siphon a tank. Waiting outside the base in hiding as the fleet landed, he managed to carry away one hundred kilograms of rocket fuel from one of their fighters on a wheelbarrow. Of course by then several dozen Kalmari troops were already inside the base and he had to fight his way toward his goal. Which is where he found himself now, with two--no, make that three--of the enemy down, and who knows how many to go. Not to mention the thousands preparing to enter the base.

"Four," he said, pausing to wipe the sweat off his brow. He opened the door to a supply closet and took one canister of fuel, about fifteen kg, and wired it to the detonator he had prepared earlier. That would lighten his load a little.

He continued along the corridor and into the next, he wired another canister in another supply closet and repeated the process again and again until all but one was gone. He dropped the wheelbarrow, and several more Kalmari, and hurriedly carried the remaining canister toward the center of the base.

At the center lie the reactor core. The Nuclear reactor core. The video monitor showed hundreds of Kalmari flooding the corridors. He clicked the red button of his detonator. The camera went dead.

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Now there was only one tunnel leading to the reactor core. They would all have to come through it. Several hundred were dead already, but there were at least two thousand left. How many of those their leaders were willing to throw at him remained to be seen. He lit the corridor up with his chain gun. The rounds shredded the approaching Kalmari and little bits of pink flesh plastered the walls. Only a few dozen had died when he ran out of chain gun ammo. He pulled out his rocket propelled grenade launcher and cleared out the remaining two dozen and prepared for the second wave. By the third wave he was out of rockets and switched to his shotgun, and was throwing pipe bombs. He had run out of shotgun rounds by the fifth wave, and after taking out the sixth wave with his dual sub machine guns only had one pipe bomb and a single round left in his pistol. That round he would save for the last. For now he backed into the reactor room and shut the blast door. But first he called out the challenge, “Come and get some, you bunch of pink pussies!”

After a little while a drilling sound came from just outside the door; they knew better than to try to use explosives here. He ignored their attempts for the time being and opened the black bag containing the few personal belongings he had brought with him to the base. Inside the bag was another gun, as well as a box of cigars. He lit one up.

Looking at the door, he said, “What are you waiting for? Christmas?”

Just then an air vent above him blew off and a Kalmari marine landed right behind him, grasping his throat and arms with its many tentacles. His cigar fell to the ground. He fought back. Pulling a tentacle away from his throat so he could breathe, he said, “What are you? Some bottom-feeding, scum-sucking, algae-eater?” He brandished only his pistol and a Bowie Knife; the other gun was still in his bag. Cutting one tentacle, he plied himself free and threw the Kalmari marine into the reactor room controls.

The creature quickly regained its tentacling. He stared at him intensely with its one large eye, and said, “Surrender, human.”

“That all you got?” he barked.

“There are thousands of us and only one of you,” the Kalmari marine pointed out.

“Not in here there ain’t. It's down to you and me, you one-eyed freak!” he lunged.

The creature deftly sprung aside, but he was even quicker; he had feinted, and now he about-faced, knocking the butt of his knife into the Kalmari soldier’s giant rubbery head. The soldier fell down and he kicked it several times before quickly tying its tentacles together in knots. Then he grabbed a piece of paper off the reactor console.

“Now,” he said to his dizzied foe, “We’re going to compose a letter.”

To the office of the President of the United States:

In the unlikely event that I don’t survive, he began, dipping a pen he had found into the Kalmari marine’s ink.

“You will never survive!

He jabbed it in the eye with the butt of his knife and then continued, I want you to make sure these bastards never cause us any trouble again. Make them all fry.

Those alien bastards are gonna pay for shooting up my ride!

He folded up the note and hid it in a small heat-proof safe in the reactor room. “Time to turn up the heat,” he said, just as the blast door began to give way. A flood of Kalmari was about to descend upon him. Nevertheless, he maintained his cool. Removing the gun from his black bag—it was bulky and yellow—he then walked to the reactor console and typed a series of numbers into the control panel and an alarm went off. He fired the gun this way and that, a cool blue lightening issuing forth from its tip, until the whole room was surrounded in ice. “Freeze-ray, never leave home without it,” he remarked.

He proceeded from the walls to the floor; blanketing the room, and stepping back further and further toward the center of the room until only he and the Kalmari marine were not frozen over. “Want me to put you on ice?” he asked, pulling out his detonator. He clicked the red button, blowing the final canister of rocket fuel—the explosion could just be heard half way across the base.

“What did you just do??!!” the marine asked.

“I blew the water reservoir. It’s going to mix with the overheated reactor core and bring this whole base to a boil.”

“But we’re in the reactor core!” the marine protested.

“Again…” he ignored the marine’s fear, “…Want me to put you on ice?”

“Y-yes,” the Kalmari warrior decided it would be for the best after all. “But it won’t work! It can’t work.”

“Which part?” he said as he froze the marine. “Nevermind,” he wiped the sweat off his brow. “Damn. It’s getting hot in here.” He froze himself as well, throwing his last pipe bomb at the blast door and detonating it just as he was enveloped by the cool, blue ice. The reservoir water and hundreds of Kalmari troops flooded in and shortly began to boil.

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He shattered the thin layer of ice surrounding him that hadn't melted yet when the reactor core performed the shutdown he had pre-programmed. "Told you it would work," he said to the stirring Kalmari marine. It found that he was right and also, to its horror, that its dead, boiled brothers were floating in the now knee-deep receding reservoir waters. Its tentacles were still tied together as well.

He left the room. He didn't come back for several minutes, and when he did he carried a six pack of beers and a big tub of butter in his arms. He sat down next to the marine and began to eat one of its brethren. "If only they were so tough when they were alive," he remarked. He added a generous portion of butter with his Bowie Knife. "Mmm. That's better." He looked over at the living Kalmari, "You want some of this?"

The marine quavered with a mixture of fear and disgust.

He ignored it and opened a beer. "So long before they send more men in, do you figure?"

Suppressing his desire to regurgitate with some difficulty, the marine answered, "You and your entire species will die soon."

"Not the way I figure it. They probably think I'm dead already. Won't come back in this base. On the other hand, I suspect I have enough DNA samples here to fly one of those fighters back to earth. Not to mention to keep my stomach satisfied as well." He opened another beer, belching and throwing the empty first bottle crashing against the reactor console. "Did you know the only part of your people that isn't edible is the beak?"

"Are you going to eat me too?"

"Hell no. Have plenty of cooked Kalmari already. Just thought I'd keep you around to pass the time. But you aren't much of a conversationalist. Then again, neither am I..." he chuckled and stood up. Swallowing the last of a Kalmari arm, he retrieved and lit a new cigar from the box on the other side of the room and, returning, pulled out his pistol. Cocking it, he stared the Kalmari marine in the eye, and said, "Nobody steals our CHICKs... and lives." An ink blot splattered across the still-frozen floor.

~Now for some much-deserved R&R


Dedicated to 3D Realms. Now get your asses in gear.