Mystic Whales Vs Cosmic Octopi
After I sat, with a cup of warm lemon water nestled between my chapped hands, a pocket came unbidden, and with a little hesitancy slipped in, but only part way. We dropped through the cloud cover, our individual buckets screeching as the super-heated shields burned. Each pod, dropped from the orbiting mother Whale Transport Ship, poked a perfect hole in the cumuli and pulled down hissing trails of vapor in its descent. All the way to the earth. Balloons flated from the cones and like a dance each pod, together, flipped over then impacted the ground. With luck a troop bucket would bounce. What happened next was always an adventure, but the first bounce was key, and lifesaving. If there was no bounce, then either the balloons were not up to the task, or the ground just got the better of them. We had two hundred buckets, and of that all but one survived. Phase 1.
We were from first landfall to the last approx one mile apart. The rendezvous was quick. We each came to earth fully equipped, delivered from cracked eggs complete, mobile, dangerous. Our metal was hard, our teeth were sharp. In powered armor we hit the ground running and coalesced on central turf.
The enemy had gathered beyond and without pause we engaged. I was in the leading group, but as previously stated had fallen back. At the hour I thought the ground had caused my fall, but as I settled deeper into the pocket, recounting the action, I discerned no fault for the earth. Did my suit fail, did my knee buckle? Or did I just lose my nerve? I had been in hundreds of simulated battles and this one felt exactly like those.
Whatever, I hadn't quit on my compatriots, or myself. I kept on, and I engaged. The first foe I met lost their head. The top bit slid from my power blade and bounced off a rock, its ugly head spilled from the helmet. The spiky stubble of an impossible beard and a slimy snout scowled at me from the trampled earth. I snarled back and shouldered the torso out of my way, its multi armed leather wriggling, not realizing yet it was dead. I waded deeper into the melee...
In two chairs in a corner of the cottage the two women reclined. Refugees from a fallen Earth system, they had settled here on Proxima Centauri P-15 alongside tens of thousands, delivered in a hundred Mother Whales. Two hundred years ago the planet was empty, and barely habitable. Now it was a garden, well populated by pockets of human settlements. And host to an invading horde of Octopi-pigs.
I sipped my water while the others finished off a second bottle of wine. The women had no use for clinkers, there was no significant monetary trade in the villages. They preferred the chocolate and flavored cough lozenges we had in our zippered pockets. Their men and grown children had either enlisted in the local militia to guard the village perimeter or had already died fighting. One of the human women fed a small piece of chocolate to the child sitting on her lap. It licked its snout with glee. Its tentacles wriggled with delight.
