Sorry for leaving all y’all on a cliffhanger last
week. Chapter 14 was just too long to snark all in one go. So without yanking
the rug out beneath you any more, here’s the conclusion of “The Third Species
War” from my Aliens versus Predator 2
fanfic.
The
first of the Species Wars had taken place four million years before, on the
same rocky ground of Lv-1201, when Aliens and Predators battled over ownership
of the planet. The second Species war was fought between the Aliens and humans
in 2179, on 1201’s sister planet of Lv-426, where the humans emerged the
victor, but with many lives lost. But now, the ultimate war was taking place
between all three species.
I only have two questions: is it on pay-per-view,
and will Paul Bearer make an appearance?
It was
horrible; Aliens versus Predators, Marines versus Corporate. Body upon body
fell to the ground. In one place, a mercenary Predator lopped the head off a
Warrior Alien. In another place, a Marine gunned down a Company soldier.
“Man’s
inhumanity to man” really doesn’t cover it here.
And that’s
horrible.
Suddenly,
two dropships appeared out of the sky, shooting Corporate soldiers. After
completing a successful gunning run, the two ships landed, dropping off their
APCs. Backup Marines rushed out, shooting Predators and searching for McCain’s
team. When they found the lieutenant, they were amazed to hear that the Marines
were fighting with the Aliens. Reluctantly, the newly arrived Marines turned
their pulse rifles on the Corporates and Predators.
I like to think the reinforcements just shrugged
and went with the flow.
In the
midst of the battle, Jones, Ivan, Duke and Tomiko fought back-to-back-to-back-to-back.
That sounds sexier than it should.
Duke
only just avoided being killed by a Predator, which Ivan shot the Hell out of.
“Thanks,
kid!” the Marine shouted over the gunfire.
“No
problem,” Ivan replied. “But if you call me kid again, I’ll do the same to
you!” Just then, the wave of Corporates around them was killed by friendly
Marine gunfire.
“There
are still to many Corporates!” Jones yelled. “We need more firepower!” Indeed,
Jones was right. Aliens were being blasted away by Dark-Hunter, Assault and the
other renegade Predators.
“A miracle
would be good about now,” Tomiko groaned.
Almost
immediately, as if God had answered Tomiko’s wish, a cloaked Predator ship
suddenly appeared out of the sky. It landed near the POC, and a group of
Predator warriors emerged from its boarding ramp.
God’s on the side of interstellar extraterrestrial
hunters? That’s honestly pretty unexpected.
At the
head of the group was Swift-Death’s father, Wise-One. He strode toward McCain
and handed him a pulse rifle clip from a dead Corporate.
“Our
service is in your hands,” Wise-One declared.
“What
the Hell?!” Shugi exclaimed. “You’re kidding me, right?”
“Drastic
situations call for drastic measures,” McCain replied. “Just kill these
Corporates.”
“I
have bigger game to attend to,” Wise-One growled, eyeing the group of mercenary
Predators. He headed off to the renegades, ripping out the skulls of Corporates
as he ran.
That last sentence is just too priceless. If my
sole contribution to literature at large was those fifteen words, I could live
with that.
…
Wise-One
and his Predator hunters plagued the battlefield. Mercenary Predators and
Corporates fell by the feet of Wise-One’s hunting clan. A few of the noble
hunters even let out tremendous war cries.
Now,
the Marines and Aliens were gaining advantage over their enemies. Duke had even
managed to save Ivan’s butt a few times. In a few minutes, the number of
Corporates and mercenaries was narrowed down dramatically.
12-year-old me: “Tension? What’s that?”
As
Wise-One finished taking the skull from a WY corporal, he looked up to see
Dark-Hunter kill a pack of fourteen Aliens.
That’s… pretty impressive, actually.
As if
Dark-Hunter had a sixth sense, he snarled and turned to see Wise-One staring at
him. They approached each other, and glared from beneath their masks.
Hopefully this sixth sense can pick up on facial expressions
as well, because otherwise I have no idea how they could visually communicate
their mutual contempt.
They
were two enemies with a past unknown to most other Predators; a clan leader and
his follower, torn apart in a horrible incident.
Holy shit, some actual character development!
While
the honoured faced the dishonoured, these thoughts and memories flooded into
their minds. Finally, they both took out their Combisticks, and in a ceremonial
gesture, lowered the weapons to the ground. It was time to battle. Immediately,
Wise-One brought his spear upward, and held it in a fighting position.
Dark-Hunter retracted both ends of his spear back into the handgrip, and placed
it into its holster. He quickly pulled out his sawed-off plasma rifle out and
pointed it at his former leader.
Letting
out a shrill roar, Wise-One charged toward Dark-Hunter. He swung his spear down
at the bounty hunter, but Dark-Hunter activated a button on his wrist computer.
The device on his back-mounted spear launcher lit up, and sent out a huge
magnetic shockwave, knocking Wise-One to the ground. The magnetic field lifted
the mercenary off the ground, allowing to hover five metres above everyone
else. He took advantage of Wise-One’s hesitation to activate an ancient weapon
on his right forearm gauntlet. It was an Energy Flechette, a rapid-firing
plasma blaster located in the gauntlet, in succession with the plasma rifle, he
used the weapons to shoot at Wise-One. The old Predator got to his feet and
reflected the blasts with his spear.
…but since I was 12 when I wrote this, pathos is
supplanted by BADASS FIGHT SCENE OH YEAH*
Dark-Hunter
circled the old Predator firing his energy weapons. Even though he had the
advantage in firepower, Dark-Hunter couldn’t seem to hit Wise-One.
After
what seemed like hours, Dark-Hunter got tired of this monotonous fight and
opened a radio channel in his helmet.
* Well, a strangely tedious fight scene.
“Assault!”
he said in his language. “Kill the old one while he is distracted.”
“Yes,
Dark-Hunter,” Assault replied. He located Dark-Hunter fighting with Wise-One,
and took out his Spear-Gun. He pointed the sniping weapon at the old Predator
and prepared to pull the trigger. It seemed that all was to be lost for the
clan leader.
Not
likely. Morachai the Alien, who had hurried from the Master Hive to the POC
before the war had started, noticed Assault aiming his weapon. He growled and
sprinted toward the mercenary, claws and inner-jaw ready.
“Dishonour
this,” Assault growled in his language, as he was just about to fire.
I can’t remember at what exact age this incident
occurred, but I swear that one night a younger version of me awoke with a jolt,
feeling as though someone had just whacked me in the head with a metal mixing
bowl. I’m not kidding; I could actually hear the ring of resonating aluminum
for the briefest of moments. Since I hadn’t really thought about this phenomenon
since it actually happened I’m starting to think it was current, 23-year-old me
astral projecting back in time simply to smack my more youthful self for
writing the previous quote.
Then
something growled back.
AW FUCK
The
Predator whipped around 90 degrees and came face to face with Morachai, who was
charging at full speed towards him.
Turns out Predator masks have really shitty
peripheral vision.
“Holy
shit!” Assault screamed in his tongue. He tried to switch to the
Electromagnetic vision mode, but he was too slow. Morachai’s barbed tail lashed
out spearing the Predator’s skull. Green blood squirted everywhere, and
Assault’s Spear-Gun fell to the ground. His lifeless body followed a second
later.
Dark-Hunter
tore his eyes away from his useless second-in-command, now dead.
“I don’t care if you’re headless, you’re going to
fight like a warrior, jagoff!”
He
focused on Wise-One. Somehow, he was going to kill this old Predator. He fired
three blasts from his plasma rifle, once again knocking Wise-One to the ground.
“I
always was the better fighter,” the mercenary chuckled.
“Yes,”
Wise-One growled, “but a hunter never lets his guard down.”
It
took two seconds for the mercenary to realize what was about to happen. He
pulled out his netgun to stop the old Predator, but his hesitation was too
great. Wise-One brought up his spear and swung it, knocking Dark-Hunter out of
the air and beneath a dark crowd of Aliens.
Wise-One,
now sure this struggle was over, left the area to fight with the Marines.
So the elder Predator won by… swinging his spear
upward? Like any sentient being would in that situation?
…right on.
Back
near the POC walls, McCain, Duke and the others held their ground as Corporate
soldiers swarmed them.
Dunya,
who had been lying unconscious near McCain’s feet, woke up groggily.
“What
the Hell is going on?” she sleepily asked.
Tomiko
shoved a pulse rifle into the Corporate’s arms. “Just shoot anything wearing
green and blue,” she said.
“Yes,
General,” Dunya dizzily replied.
Did… did Tomiko just hand the shifty Russian black
ops soldier with a concussion an assault rifle without a second thought? I had
these characters make some pretty questionable decisions in the previous
chapters we’ve documented but you would think that Tomiko’s judgement call
might make even these characters raise an eyebrow.
Quite surprisingly, this doesn’t come back to bite
them in the ass in any way shape or form. Or, quite unsurprisingly. If we’ve learned anything from my younger self’s
writing, it’s that Chekhov’s gun is too heavy to pick up most of the time.
…
Dark-Hunter
got up, dazed. His armour had saved him from being trampled beneath the feet of
the Aliens. He looked around as he applied pressure to a cut on his arm. He was
the only mercenary left in his team. Hurt, but nowhere near death, Dark-Hunter
limped around the battlefield. He needed someway to get away from this madness.
He saw it: a dead Predator from Wise-One’s clan, armour undamaged.
He
sprinted toward the corpse and opened the wrist computer on the dead Predator’s
left forearm. Remembering how the device worked, he pushed a few buttons,
setting the timer to seven human minutes. Perfect, he thought. He got to his
feet and ran to his ship.
Just
as Dark-Hunter finished arming the computer, a loud beeping sounded. The
fighting Aliens turned and screamed. They had, in younger days, been told about
creatures like the green-blooded hunters, who made the same noise before
exploding, killing everything near it.
Wait, so if the self-destruct bomb obliterated
everyone near it, how was this story passed along? Race memory? There’s an interesting
discussion to be had about collective Xenomorph neurology here but preteen me
was all like FUCK THAT SHIT EXPLOSIONS
The
Aliens turned and fled from the battlefield.
McCain
asked, “What the Hell is happening?”
“You
must run,” Wise-One said. “You must leave this battlefield, now!” Wise-One roared
to his clan, who ran for their ship. The beeping was getting louder and louder
by the second. Finally, Ivan yelled, “Go!” The Marines, plus Ivan, Tomiko and
the confused Dunya headed for the dropships. They didn’t even care about
retrieving the APC. The throttles were activated and the dropships flew off.
Dark-Hunter,
flying away from the battlefield, viewed the idiotic Corporates examining the
dead Predator emitting the beeping.
Suddenly,
one of the Corporates looking at the corpse saw some strange red digits that
appeared to be - ticking down. As the Corporate, saw the dropships, Predator
ship and Dark-Hunter’s cruiser leave the battlefield. He turned around and
looked at the mini-computer once more. The last digit had disappeared.
“Oh,
no,” he said.
“D’awwww, sandwiches,” were the last words of
Corporal Bill.
Up in
the dropships, an explosion rocked the Marines.
When the troop transports are rockin’, for the love
of God and all that is holy please don’t come a-knockin’.
“What
was that?” Shugi shouted.
“We’ve
been hit by a shockwave,” the dropship’s pilot said over a radio.
“Shockwave?”
Ivan asked. “What the - “ He stood silent as his eye caught something outside
the small rear view port.
“Holy
crap,” Tomiko whispered as she looked out, too.
The
battlefield, plateau and POC had been wiped off the face of Lv-1201 by a small,
nuclear blast. Everything was light up by the huge mushroom cloud. The only
thing that contrasted from the light was the huge swarm of Aliens running away
from the blast.
“What
in the Hell could cause that?” Duke wheezed.
A
Yautja Sacrificial Annihilator had caused unknown to them, the blast. It was
used in the most desperate of situations, when a Predator was soon to be
captured. According to Predator customs, it would be dishonourable to be
captured. Therefore a Predator would kill himself and anyone near him by means
of this weapon.
The
device on the dead Predator had been activated, killing everything in its path.
In other words, all the WY soldiers except Ivan, Tomiko and Dunya. The Marines
stared at the flaming chaos on the ground.
An interesting physical paradox: were an object to
somehow surpass the speed of light, it would theoretically travel back in time;
in this vein, if you were to build a faster-than-light gun, like the Death Star
on PCP, and fire it at another planet, would the planet blow up before the shot was actually fired? and furthermore,
if the gun operator saw the explosion a second before he planned to fire and
decided to abort, would his disruption of continuity unravel the spacetime
continuum?
What I’m getting at is, if there was ever a Chekhov’s
Gun version of whatever bullshit I just described, it certainly happened with
my post-hoc explanation for the Predator’s self-destruct device in the previous
quote.
“Should
we head back to the Verloc, sir?” the pilot asked McCain.
“No,”
the major replied. “We still have a soldier down there.”
Good God, that was more fun than it had any right
to be. Just three more chapters to go, people! Tune in next month for, well,
the next one.
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