Proximal Flame's Fiction

The ship shook. Three – four – times in rapid succession. “What happened?” a junior officer asked, his dirt-streaked face drawn, eyes wide. “Are they firing on us?” Goldstein laid a hand on the cadet’s shoulder. “Steady, lad. And no, they aren’t. Unless I miss my guess, they hit us with breaching pods. We’ve been boarded.”

The Lefu were well over seven feet tall, though Foraker had no idea how much of that was the armour; Concord heavy power armour made its wearers into giants, too. Whatever else they were, the bastards knew how to fight; they began spraying suppressing fire at the heaviest of the militia’s positions from arm-mounted cannons that were bigger than a man’s leg. Some of the aliens had bulky equipment on their other arms, soon revealed to be miniature shield wall projectors. Others appeared to have sensor and communications gear; the rest had rather large, rather unpleasant looking gauntlets that crackled with energy. One of the Lefu knelt behind a comrade’s shield, taking advantage of the cover to ready his weapon – whatever it was, it was bigger and more unpleasant looking than the tri-barreled monsters his companions carried. Or was it a her? An it? Each helmet was stylized into a skeletal visage, betraying nothing about the species that wore them. The kneeling solider fired and a chunk of the building across the street exploded, along with the soldiers that had been in there, burning rubble and dislodged walls and ceilings cascading down into the rubble-choked roads.