decreasing gap in the gate. He could swear he could feel the thing’s breath on his neck making his skin spasm in protest. A few paces from the gate he dived and felt something swipe in the air where his head had been an instant before. He landed in the base and heard the gate clamp behind him, followed by a sickening squelch that he saw was half of the alien’s head when he turned around. Jack knew that he needed to report in and that most of the other marines were staring at him after his entrance. He got up and, instead of walking to his commanding officer, went straight for the nearest ladder up the barricade on the inside of the wall. At the top he could see out over where they had crashed with the buggy. Soldiers lined the top of the wall with crates full of ammunition and extra rifles. They were prepared for the siege but had not yet begun to fire. Jack marched quickly to the nearest crate, picked up a long barreled rifle, and loaded it without even looking at any of his fellow marines. He looked down the scope at the buggy. He knew it was too late for Scott but he had to do something. “Sir, we haven’t been given the orders to fire at the Dross yet. We’re to wait until they get closer.” “I’m not going to fire at them,” Jack grunted back without taking his eye from the scope. Through the lens he saw more of the aliens than he could count. The number he had seen when the pounders were initially activated must have only been a small fraction. A storm of dust followed behind them and from this distance it looked like the aliens had become the ground, one green entity shifting toward them like a tsunami. He focused on the buggy and saw Scott still in the driver’s seat. He was dead and something was eating him. The front runners of the alien army were already around the buggy though the majority were still a few minutes away. At least three of the Dross were eating Scott with a few more tearing through parts of the buggy to get close enough to join in. Jack had to contain the sudden white hot rage that flared up in his chest. He carefully lined the cross hairs on the fuel tank of the transport, inhaled, and squeezed the trigger twice in succession. Even at the distance he was from the buggy, up on the wall, Jack’s face was still bathed in the orange and red light of the explosion. The aliens let out a different screech as they died, only slightly different, but he hoped it signified their pain. He put the weapon down where he found it and climbed back down the ladder. The wall of the base was made of six parts that made a hexagon barrier around the buildings and people within them. The main structure in the center of the base was a pounder not unlike the smaller ones that he had just returned from, excepting that it was many times larger and more powerful. It dominated the base as a tower of their operations and the beacon that would lead the majority of the aliens here. Jack hadn’t felt the vibrations from it yet but he saw that the massive metal cylinder was moving slowly upwards now, warming up to begin slamming into the ground. The walls, he knew, extended deep into the earth to protect them from underground assaults as well as attacks from above ground. He pictured it like a mechanical claw that dug deeply into the earth as if to scoop out a large crater worth of soil, but halted after clamping together. He had heard other soldiers talking that the barrier had a weakness in the center most point, and that the battle would be one against the time it took for the Dross to discover that flaw. Jack didn’t know what to believe. The tower had a secondary wall around it, standing nearly a dozen meters in the air as a last defense if the outer wall failed. Jack saw his commanding officer standing near the only open entrance to the secondary wall. He was clustered with other officers busily barking separate orders into their headsets for the multitudes of squads around the base. He nodded to