Brennan’s mind got stuck on the image for a second or two; then the trained professional in him kicked his system back online and he spun around and barked orders at his men. The gunfire coming from the direction of the other units had all but ceased, and Brennan didn’t have to be there to know the body count had to be rising steadily. By this point, he didn’t care anymore that it had been his men who had inadvertently started this fight; he wanted the aliens dead before they slaughtered the rest of his people.
Baker and Boone grabbed the multishot grenade launchers from the back of the vehicle and the squad was about to split up and come to the aid of the other two units when Harris shouted a heads-up. The remains of the Bravo squad were pelting toward them, four men dripping with sweat and blood, a flash of silver right on their heels.
“Get down!” Brennan roared.
His scream yielded immediate results. His men dropped on the spot, leaving the pursuing alien an easy target. It saw the missile coming, but wasn’t quite fast enough to avoid a direct hit. This time, Brennan saw it all.
The brief stop, the start of a dodge, then a sudden expansion of the armor just before the Spitfire hit its target and enveloped the creature in a fireball.
The explosion looked weirdly muted, half-absorbed by whatever material
the alien was wrapped up in, but the result was the same: a crispy fried critter surrounded by a ring of blackened earth.
Two down, one to go. Heartened by their success, Brennan and his men picked up their bloodied comrades and swarmed toward the southern side of the crater, where Charlie squad was scrambling to stay alive. They ran uphill, panting, high on adrenaline, and then there was this sound, a deep, flat whooomph, and the ground shook once, hard.
Brightness erupted from the crash site, fire and smoke forming a mushroom cloud that eclipsed the sun. It should’ve burned them all, but the edge of the crater shielded them somewhat and the heat wasn’t as extreme as Brennan would’ve expected. He noticed an odd scent in the air, unlike anything he’d ever smelled before, acrid and sweet at the same time, and he thought, way back in the back of his mind, that the aliens must’ve activated some kind of self-destruct mechanism. It was what he would’ve done had he gone down on an alien planet and realized the few of his men who’d survived the crash were losing their battle with hostile native forces and they were all about to become prisoners or worse. There was a moment, brief and almost lost in the roar of the explosion and the stutter-focus of his awareness, when Brennan felt a deep stab of sympathy for the unknown alien commander who’d had to make that call.