The Nature of Predators 169

Memory transcription subject: Captain Sovlin, United Nations Fleet Command

Date [standardized human time]: March 24, 2137

I desperately shoved my paw over the bullet hole on Carlos’ helmet, trying to seal the gap that exposed him to the vacuum. Viscous blood adhered to my suit, slathering over the smooth exterior. How was I supposed to give the human medical attention, when removing his mask would freeze him and strip him of all oxygen? Samantha knelt by my side, her body language distraught. I could see her checking the wrist readout of the male predator’s vitals, while I desperately shook his unmoving shoulder. Despite my best efforts at revival, his form was limp against my touch.

Whatever happens to me, I will be enduring as a tree and fierce as a bear. Our past doesn’t define us, Carlos had told me, while describing the green markings on his arm.

When all of this first began, I couldn’t have imagined how much grief I’d feel, huddling over a predator’s corpse. I could feel the rover trundling along toward the base, autopilot still in gear even as Sam had crawled away from the driver’s seat. Carlos needed to get back up and man the turret; it was a single bullet! An apex hunter, the most powerful creature on untamed Earth, shouldn’t be downed by one lump of metal. Terrans were supposed to be “enduring as a tree” and “fierce as a bear.” I punched at his chest through the thick spacesuit, frustrated that it wasn’t moving.

“Wake up!” I screamed; Sam winced from my volume, as the comm link was still open. “There’s going to be humanitarian missions after the war, the chance to do good in the galaxy like you loved doing on Earth. You can’t just fucking quit!”

Carlos’ form didn’t budge or react an inch, offering no signs of life. I could see the female guard shaking her head, and trying to collect herself. Samantha wasn’t doing anything to help patch our friend up, though I could hear her sniffling. How could she give up on him like an Arxur, not doing a single thing to mend a wounded friend? These were predators with empathy, not callous monsters like the grays and the Kolshians who left their weaklings behind!

And you are not going to refer to me as ‘predator’ again. I could hear his stern voice chastising me, with impatience for my antics toward the Arxur. What Carlos told me a little while ago served as a reminder of how he was my first friend—the one who sought to understand my motives, in spite of what I’d done. I listened to your spiel on torturing an innocent human, and tried to empathize with you.

Every word the human had said to me was rushing back burying me with an emotional avalanche. I remembered the time I’d saved his life on the cattle ship, and first realized that I cared for my guards—an alarming thought, back then. I reminisced when he visited me in my prison cell on Skalga, and had been the only one who could restrain his anger enough to speak to me. When I was at my lowest, thinking Gojids were monsters after the omnivore revelations, it’d been Carlos who asked other humans not to bring that up to me. He’d known how I felt about being a meat-eater, and how my entire life had collapsed in on itself.

“There’s a Tilfish right there. They’re g-going to…give you a hug,” I blubbered, with tears streaming down my face. The guard’s fear of the insectoids had been on display on several occasions, to my prior amusement. “You’ve got to move. It’s very creepy, right?”

I turned Carlos’ helmet from side to side, like I was rolling a ball back and forth on the carpet. There was no resistance; the stupid human wasn’t answering. How hard was it to give any form of response, when he was freaking me out like this? The predator had known the risks, but I couldn’t accept that he was just…gone. Snot bubbled in my nose, as I imagined what he would say about catching a bullet in the wrong place. He’d always been much too calm about potential dangers, while I’d been the panicky one in our sticky predicaments.

We always hope for the best, but no combat situation is a guarantee. Just breathe, buddy, the guard had said on the submarine, when we were trying a last-ditch strategy to evade a torpedo.

“I won’t breathe! I won’t listen to you!” I screeched, as I sank to my knees in despair. If I were being honest with myself, I’d realized the truth the second I saw his wound. “Carlos?”

Samantha’s hands sank deep into my arm, and the human yanked me to my feet with force. I shrieked, swinging my claws toward her in a clumsy gesture; despite the bulky suit, the predator’s reflexes made it easy for her to duck. Her chest was shaking, betraying her own emotions, but I could feel her binocular eyes leveling me with a pointed stare. She prevented me from returning to my attempts to resuscitate Carlos, and stood between me and the fallen soldier.

“Listen! Carlos is dead, Sovlin; he’s gone!” her growling voice had taken the form of a commanding yell. “I checked his vitals. There’s no heartbeat or brain activity. There is nothing—fuck all we can do. We need to keep moving.”

I stumbled back in denial. “No. You’re wrong. I’m not leaving—”

Samantha forcefully jostled my shoulders, and lowered her voice to a sympathetic growl. “Carlos was killed, instantly. If someone doesn’t get back on that gun, so we can defend ourselves moving forward, he died for nothing. Everyone who’s died in this war, died for nothing if we fail here! Plus, we need to make the fuckers who shot him pay. I’d get on the gun myself, but I’m the only one who knows how to run the vehicle’s OS.”

“The gun. Yeah, nobody’s s-shooting it…”

“Snap out of it! I’ll watch our navigations, but keep back here to help you reload; be quicker than you doing it yourself. You make some Kolshians’ heads explode, and we take the fucking base, for Carlos and for humanity. You just need to stand there, head low. Pull the trigger, bullets spray: nice and simple. Can you handle that?”

“Yes. I miss him already, Sam. I…I always hated losing a soldier.”

The predator’s shoulders slumped. “I miss him too. He was more than just a soldier…he was my friend. Our moral compass. When we get his body back to our ship, I’ll see that he gets the burial and the honors he deserved.”

I imitated a human nod in a daze, and tried to move through the grief suffocating me. None of what just happened felt real; it was all so sudden, how Carlos’ life was snapped out of existence. Bitterness hardened within my heart, as I thought about the Kolshian in the base who’d shot my friend. I was going to make them pay with their own life, returning the favor. There was plenty of anger to grant me courage; despite how I’d seen the human sniped out from behind the turret, I moved his gunner’s tether to my suit. It should’ve been me gunned down in the first place, bringing it full circle with how I'd wished to sacrifice myself for my crimes.

I used to think that I don’t deserve happiness, but it’s not about that anymore. Carlos doesn’t have the checkered past I do. It’s a basic equation that I deserved to bite the dust more than him.

My head poked out through the hatch, and my claws didn’t feel like my own as they hooked around the firing mechanism. Kolshian defenders had taken up positions with machine guns along the balconies of their installation, which looked like a glorified tower wedged between expansive weapons. Bullets assailed our rover; though their flight and collision with our armor was inaudible, the blurs of motions blinked across my vision. I could see one make a close shave to my position, while dust ahead of us was churned up by a vaulted missile. Another explosive appeared to be on target for our position, but was snapped off by the vehicle’s automated interceptors.

It was chaos on the lunar surface—hundreds of rovers rolled over the bumpy terrain to our destination, just as I knew was happening at the other outposts. There were a few hundred Kolshians on site to defend the complexes, but they would be overrun if we reached them with these numbers. We needed to keep our vehicle intact for a few more minutes to reach our target; I was thirsting for blood in predatory fashion, embroiled in pain from the loss of Carlos. The fresh wounds drove me to sort out the kinks of the technology quickly. The gun was able to pump out multiple rounds in a minute, and the bullets could clear the miles-long gap without wavering. I set to gouging holes in the balcony, hoping to obliterate those bastards with lead.

“When it’s time to hop out, we’ll join up with the rovers to our left and right,” Sam explained over the comm link. “Your rifle is still strapped to you, right?”

While I’d shifted my gun out of my way to operate the turret, I could feel it tucked against my side. “Yes. I have a visual on the base; I’ll know when we’re there.”

“It’ll be obvious because the rover will stop. Assuming the squids don’t have the good sense to duck and cover inside, we can shoot the outdoor campers from the rover…but I imagine they’re retreating.”

Through my heads-up magnification, I could see Kolshians making a break for the entrances. Scowling with unadulterated rage, I swiveled the turret toward their destination to choke it with fire; bullets nailed several soldiers in the back, liberating them of their violet blood just as they’d spilled Carlos’ crimson life force. The smarter ones were able to crawl inside using corpses as cover, but a few defenders were trapped outside as our tanks rolled closer. They were being peppered by hundreds of turrets, with the balcony wall looking more like paper ribbons. Unable to find an easily available target, I pumped extra lead into the corpses for good measure. If any of those assholes were playing dead, they weren’t going to be playing much longer.

Minutes whizzed by in an adrenaline-fueled blur, as the rover rolled toward its destination. I eviscerated one Kolshian who stood for the briefest second, before they could fire a shot at me or one of our allies. Samantha, meanwhile, was keeping an eye out for any mines through her periscope; she pointed out one metal circle hidden deceptively on the ground for my HUD, which I then set off prematurely. It seemed that the enemy’s missile supply was depleted, but running into the barrier of landmines could upturn a rover and maim its inhabitants. I was grateful the predator’s eyes were keen, because my focus was single-mindedly on revenge.

I can’t wait to get out onto solid ground, and execute these fuckers up close and personal. How many humans…how many innocent people have to die before their bloodlust is slaked? Anyone still serving the Kolshian army is a true predator, and deserves to suffer for everything they’ve taken from me!

Once we were within half a kilometer, the Terran snipers were able to set up shop; their work was quiet and efficient, detectable only through the appearance of tiny holes in the windows. Anyone visible, including the Kolshians with the self-destruct key, was picked off with the masterfulness of a hunter focusing on their prey. Terrans with perfect accuracy kept watch on the door, blowing one foe’s head off as soon as he set foot into the command center. No one was going to be retrieving those arming authorizations. Our enemies were going to face real justice; the damned primates better not take prisoners, this time. Beyond my steaming anger, we couldn’t afford to tote more bodies back to our ships.

I kept my head low as the rover slowed, parking itself by the decimated complex. “Hey, Sam? Something just occurred to me.”

“Hm?” the human offered.

“What’s to stop the Kolshians from blowing the planetary defenses off the map, with us inside?”

“Same reason humanity sent us here, instead of picking ‘em off from orbit. Too dangerous to take a direct flight at the lasers; it would’ve cost us a fuck ton of ships. You gotta have precision bombing to ensure you take out something this small, but I imagine when they realize it’s turned against ‘em, they’ll try. They weren’t expecting us to thwart the self-destruct orders.”

“So it could still blow up with us inside?”

“Only a small number of humans are sticking around to operate the controls, after we clear the place. We’re going to get back in the rover, and catch a drone shuttle back to our ship, at the evac point under friendly-controlled skies. Damned if I’m going to leave Carlos to…decay at the ass end of this moon.”

“He should be brought home. Even if he wasn’t tight with his family, there’s m-many people who will grieve his passing and celebrate his life.”

“A life that should’ve been longer, but that’s a tired story I could say about my ‘dead as a doornail’ husband too. Fucking hell, now’s not the time to get all teary-eyed. Get out of the vehicle. Now.”

I ducked back through the rover’s hatch, and bounced out after Sam toward the exit. The human fell into a pack with other soldiers, before we ascended the balcony stairs in a purposeful formation. Kolshian bodies littered the upper deck, with a handful having been picked off back on the ground. The rovers’ onslaught had shredded any living enemies, especially as UN vehicles armed with grenades got close; as always, the predators’ killing technology from their pre-FTL days exceeded anything seen in the galaxy. The extremity of the wars they’d fought amongst themselves, brutal and bloody, showed in the advancement of their technology. With how quickly the Yotul were catching up without shackles, it raised the question of whether Leirn had a similar history.

What will Onso and Tyler say, assuming we make it back…but with Carlos in a body bag? It’s like every thought brings me back to the fact that he’s gone forever. No more advice, shared meals, or adventures together. Irrevocably gone.

I knew I needed to keep my composure, unless I wanted to bear responsibility for Sam garnering the same fate. The Kolshian command center was kept locked down by snipers, but we needed to flush out any stragglers taking refuge inside the obfuscating walls. As much as I longed to be the one to end these miserable bastards’ lives, the humans were taking charge. A soldier clicked open the door, lobbing a grenade with ease through the lax gravity. Our helmet HUD switched over to night vision, which allowed us to see in the darkened kitchen. A Kolshian was trying to hide behind a trash can, but I fired a shot into his leg. While he jerked to the ground, I stomped up to him and placed a bullet straight through his helmet from point-blank range.

The Terrans were shooting on sight as well, already poking gun barrels into closets and adjacent hallways. There wasn’t time for any unwanted surrenders, to my relief; with how willing the Kolshians were to fight dirty and utilize the UN’s morality against them, it was impossible to trust any attempts to turn themselves in. I fell back in at Samantha’s side, as she kept an eye for any ambushes from behind. We followed a snaking corridor into a mess hall, where a few petrified hostiles shot at us from under tables. One bullet connected with a Terran’s leg, but thankfully, the foes’ low positioning made it difficult for them to fire on vital areas in close combat. I ducked enough to pump several bullets in quick succession, as the predators dispatched the other enemies with breathtaking ease.

“In ground combat, you guys far outshine them—just like you showed you’re not in the same bracket during the ship boardings,” I remarked.

Samantha finished patching the bullet hole in our wounded’s suit leg, securing his air supply. “We’re trained properly and keep our wits. Federation fear and Kolshian complacency don’t make for a good standing army. That’s if they weren’t outnumbered and blown the fuck out by the rovers.”

“I’m glad they were outclassed, because it means we can get control of the planetary defenses. That’ll turn the tide of the battle and distract the shadow fleet…I hope. Carlos’ sacrifice has to mean something.”

“Let’s actually get those lasers in our possession, then we’ll think about winning this shitshow. Just keep your head on a swivel. We don’t need any traps or tricks catching us off guard.”

“I don’t need my head in a swivel. I don’t have binocular vision.”

“Hmph. You still need to look behind you, Baldy.”

I chuckled, before quieting myself with guilt.

“What?” Sam huffed. “Carlos wouldn’t expect me to stop taking swipes at you for anyone’s funeral.”

The UN soldiers finished sweeping the hall, before progressing down the final stretch to the command center; the complex was hardly spacious for its occupants, with few luxuries present. The premises were reserved for packing weapons to fend off raids and invasions. If that fact allowed us to reach the command center and bring the planetary defenses under our control quicker, then it was a blessing. The Terran who’d taken the bullet in the leg was able to bounce after us, having gotten a tight patch secured around his perforation. Given that the command center was under lockdown by human snipers, there weren’t likely to be many more enemies to clean up.

Samantha found a single Kolshian, crouching outside the final entry, and gunned him down without remorse. The Terrans didn’t relax their guard, despite the high likelihood that the vicinity was clear of hostiles. I was grateful that most defenders fell against the rovers, saving me from watching more humans perish at my feet. The senseless losses our side had incurred throughout this battle were staggering enough, just from the overhead skirmish. I waited as we communicated to our snipers that we were entering the command center, so watchful allies wouldn’t pick us off at the first sign of movement. There was no time to waste in redirecting the planetary defenses, for the sake of our fleet.

“Alright, let’s go!” Samantha barked.

I followed the predator soldiers into the command center, and watched a tech specialist work on switching the defenses’ directives. Turning my gaze starward, I wished that Carlos was here to see our mission reach its successful end. There were still a herdload of enemies running amok above us, and we had no update on how our armada had fared in our absence. Nonetheless, I was certain these seized assets could give the United Nations the chance to put the shadow fleet down. Because of our actions on lunar soil, humanity might be able to level the playing field around Aafa’s orbit.

A/N - Chapter 169! Carlos was killed in an instant by the headshot, though a memory-drowned Sovlin struggles to accept this. Our Gojid narrator is snapped out of it by Sam, who sticks him behind the turret, and tries to stop him from getting stuck within his grief. The rover eventually reaches the complex, where human foot soldiers clear out the last soldiers and gain control of the planetary defenses.

Will Sovlin's anger and emotionality following Carlos' death linger? Will the planetary defenses joining our arsenal make a difference in the battle…and how did Onso and Tyler hold up, while this takeover was going on?

As always, thank you for reading and supporting!