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Encouraged by the air support, the Covenant ground troops rushed to enter the jumble of rocks, eager to find some cover, and kill the treacherous humans. They were forced to pay a price, however, as the snipers on the hill picked off five of the alien soldiers before the dropship moved in to exact its revenge.
The Marines were forced to dive deep as the enemy aircraft marched a double line of plasma bolts across the top of the tiny mesa, killing two of the snipers and wounding a third.
Things soon started to get ugly on the rock-strewn hillside as both humans and Covenant hunted one another between the huge, weather-smoothed boulders. Energy bolts flew and assault weapons chattered, as both sides took part in a deadly game of hide-and-seek. This wasnot what McKay had envisioned, and she was looking for a way to disengage, when a wave of new hostiles entered the fight.
A torrent of the bizarre creatures attackedboth groups from the other side of the hill. McKay had a glimpse of corpse-flesh, twisted and mangled bodies, and swarms of tiny little spheres that bounced, leaped, and climbed over the rocks.
The first problem was that while the Covenant forces seemed familiar with the creatures, the Helljumpers weren’t, and three members of the second squad had already gone down under the combined weight of multiple forms, and one member of the third had been slaughtered by a grotesque biped, before McKay understood the extent of the danger.
Even as the officer fought her way uphill through the maze of boulders the radio calls continued to boom through her earpiece.
“What the hell is that thing?”
“Fire! Fire! Fire!”
“Get it off me!”
The radio traffic tripled and the command freq turned into such a confusion of screams, requests for orders, and pleas for extraction, that the Marines might as well have spoken in tongues.
McKay cursed. No way. No way were thesethings going to break them. No way. She rounded a boulder, saw a Grunt running downhill with two of the spherical creatures clinging to its back. The Grunt squealed and spun and she got her first close look at the creatures. A sustained burst from the assault weapon brought all three of them down.
As the Marine worked her way farther uphill, she soon discovered that the new enemy tookother forms as well. McKay killed a two-legged form, saw a private put half a clip into a lumpy-looking monster, and watched in disgust as the dying creature spewed evenmore grotesqueries out into the world.
That was the moment when the third form emerged from between a couple of boulders, saw the human, and launched itself into the air.
Jenkins had the same view that the others did, spotted the Lieutenant, and hoped she was a good shot. This was better than suicide—this was . . .
But it wasn’t meant to be.
McKay tracked the incoming body, sidestepped, and used the butt of her weapon to clip the side of the creature’s head. It landed in a heap, flailed around, and was just about to jump up when the Lieutenant pounced on it. “Give me a hand!” she shouted. “I want this one alive!”