There were more and more of them now, as if they were attracted to anything that could kill one of their numbers.

Bermont wasn’t sure if they had a tactical network of their own and were deployed to cover the hottest spots or…something else, but the net effect was the same. The soldier drones were converging on his and Russell’s location, and with each one either of them took down, several more appeared out of the woodwork.

So to speak, of course, seeing as how Bermont had yet to actually see any wood.

He emptied his own clip, the heavy scramjet rounds blasting from the muzzle of his rifle accelerated by the rail gun to lethal speeds even before the scramjet engines ignited. He felt a warble through his suit as the weapon went dry. Then a flicker of motion from above caught his attention.

He hit the clip ejector with a smooth motion, rising from his kneeling position as he saw Russell do the same. The fresh clip slapped into the rifle, even as he looked up to see the CM chute swoop down over his position.

In a practiced maneuver, Bermont grabbed the chute’s handle in his left hand as it flew past, letting the familiar sensation of giddy weightlessness pass over him as it enveloped him in its field. Then the building under him dropped away as he was pulled into the air.

A few meters away, Russell was already airborne and whooping out some mad war cry as he sprayed fire back in the direction he had just come from.

Bermont watched as the creatures converged on the top of the pyramid-shaped city, milling around in apparent confusion, as their intended targets were no longer waiting there for them. There were some halfhearted attempts to find them, he noted, but they didn’t seem to be looking up.

Bermont wondered how long that would last.

Long enough, he hoped.

“Mortar unit…hold fire,” Major Brinks ordered, watching the scene on the top of the immense pyramid over a kilometer away.

He could see the drone things still arriving, even as the ones already there milled around as if lost. It was better than he’d hoped, and the former marine major couldn’t resist taking advantage of it.

He flashed back to the information they had on these things, thinking about what they had done to the first planet the Odyssey had seen them on. How they had begun taking it apart, piece by piece.

How they had apparently increased their population.

Doubling every three days.

He knew that they had to be destroyed, not merely defeated. That wasn’t enough. Every single one of them that had landed on this world had to be wiped out in detail, without exception. He didn’t know how they bred and thus couldn’t take a chance that one of them might, just might, be able to replenish their numbers in only a few weeks.