God, there are so many of them! All shapes and sizes. Each one ghastly in its own way. Many of them were tangled in sections of barbed wire, but others used the dying bodies to climb over. One creature that looked like an elephant drawn by a child who had never actually seen an elephant used its trunk to pull down one of the towers, casting it sideways over a section of barbed wire. Instantly, others swarmed over it.

Marcus was about to intercept them when he caught sight of movement in the haze too large to pass over. The being he called the Harvester emerged through the rippling vapor, taking monstrous shape all too quickly, moving with its deceptively slow-looking speed. It was even more massive than before, with yet more legs, and a body pocked with hundreds of those torture chambers. One of the tanks shot at it. The shell tore a portion of the creature’s amorphous head away, but it reshaped immediately. It flipped the tank over with a leg and kept coming.

Marcus couldn’t tell if what happened next was planned, or if the other creatures just realized on their own that the walls and barricades and barbed wire would do nothing to stop the giant. Hordes of them rushed toward it. They leapt unto its body. They climbed up using the divots as foot and handholds. Some just grabbed its passing legs and clung on. The Harvester walked right through a section of the fortifications, impervious to the hail of gun and mortar fire it walked into. Its legs crushed portions of the wall, dragged barbed wire and beams forward, and churned through Ana’s earthworks. As soon as they were clearly inside, the hitchhikers began to leap off. And behind them, others swarmed to follow the newly cleared route in.

Jesus, Marcus thought. The “keeping them out” portion of this was over. Now, it was just the fight to survive. He had to keep those he cared about alive for as long as he could. No thought but that one. No action but things to make it so. Clutching his leg-hook, he peeled away from the wall and shifted it as fast as he could back toward the hangar. Toward the villagers and, mostly, toward Olena.

Barbara tapped frantically at the keyboards, trying to keep some sense of the action as it spread out chaotically all over the south end of the complex.

TAP: Near Gagarin’s Soyuz, Earth Witch opened yawning chasms in the midst of the frontal mass of the attackers. Barbara saw the creatures falling, flailing claws and tentacles and flapping wings as they cascaded into the long pit, which then closed over them.

TAP: The trio of massive, twenty-foot-tall robots were Tinker’s, cobbled together from spare military parts, derricks, gantries, and rockets, looking like an invading alien army from a fevered H. G. Wells novel. They strode into the ranks of the hell-creatures, fire spewing from nozzle-tipped, multiple arms, their massive feet crushing those beneath. They cut three burning, smoking, and gigantic swaths through the invaders.