Syren squinted into the sudden glare of the sun as it broke free of the horizon. Wind flicked at her hair.
“They're coming,” she breathed.

Sultan pursed his lips and looked at Syren. Her smooth skin, her golden hair drifting in the cool winds of this strange planet, so far from home. He had seen that skin stained with blood, ashen with soot, slick with the sweat of sudden passion.

“So far from home, my singing Syren. Will this be the place we die?”

Syren squinted into the light and drew a sudden breath. Sultan scanned the sky and grimaced. A sequence of black pinpricks shooting across the ether. Pinpricks. In reality, thousand-ton war machines forged from living steel, each one capable of levelling an entire space battalion. He turned to Syren, placed his arm on her shoulders and smiled grimly.

“Whatever happens my dear, death or glory, remember, our spirits are indestructible. They can tear us limb from limb, boil our blood, freeze our brains and kill our planets, but we will endure. Those lumbercracks are on their way to Point Frozen. When they land our brothers are going to need all the help they can get. Get to Perspolis, take G-Vein with you. He's been idle for a while, spending too much time drinking and dreaming - send him into the fray with a stonesword and boilerplate. When it's over, meet me back at Core. Fight hard, my goldmaiden.”
    
The sky above Point Frozen was blue and freezing. As the sun cleared the horizon the pale moon faded and the stronghold fortifications lay bathed in amber light. The men on the ramparts, warmed by the morning, shivered inside. Anxiously watching the skies and muttering quiet oaths, they waited.

Inside the control chamber, the Capitan smoked a clipaan and listened to scattered reports on the radio. A trio of gorgs had landed on the Crimson Sea and clambered aboard a lone warship, decimating the crew in less than four minutes. Battle sounds and screams echoed on every frequency, channel after channel falling into ominous silence as communication equipment was destroyed, cables sliced and machines crushed. In Perspolis, a space crab had been dropped into the
city centre, the death toll so far over twenty thousand.

The Capitan stubbed out the clipaan and looked through the window at the early sky. A single thin cloud floated in front of the sun, and then he saw them. Black spots against the glare. He rubbed his eyes. The black spots were still there, speeding sideways. Then they changed course, and accelerated. Downwards.

The Capitan yelled and rushed for the loudspeaker, but it was too late. He heard it first - that gigantic droning sound, then the brain-splitting sound of a gorgoroth profanity which ripped through the control chamber like a sun bomb. The last thing he saw as his brain became boiling water was the screaming steel foot of the lead lumbercrack as it crashed through the ceiling, plugged its diambolical cord into the network and turned every computer in the fort into a violent traitor.

Streaking across the desert, Sultan saw the lead lumbercrack hurtle into the fort just outside Point Frozen, followed by five others in close succession. He pushed harder on the throttle and the battle bike screeched into the red, slashing the miles and taking him into battle. He reached behind him and flicked the beacon.

About five minutes away from the fort - too long, far too long. He pulled the stonesword from the bike pouch, activated it and locked it onto his back. The last time he had fought lumbercracks was a month before on a desolate moon in the dead end of Cabbalus. The fuckers evolved fast - too fast for humanity. He pushed the bike as far into the red as he could go, and muttered a prayer.

In the downtown zone of Point Frozen, Millya crouched, peering around the corner of the street to the central plaza. People were streaming through the streets, screaming and burning. Grog howitzers were pouring fire into the city and most of the industrial and commercial districts were already ash.

Millya had left her home an hour earlier, leaving her belongings. Her husband was positioned in the fortress and she was on her way to help him. She took a deep breath and prepared to dash across the plaza, but was brought up short by the sudden arrival of a block of sound the size of a planet. Thrown to the ground with hideous force, she blinked and pulled herself to her elbows. She looked up and watched a black shape streak across the sky, flip upwards and then slam into the ground. Then another - two gigantic legs encased in gleaming silver steel. It was a lumbercrack - something she had only heard about, used to scare her children.

Smoke flooded the square and the screaming increased in volume. She blinked back stinging tears from her eyes and craned her neck upwards - more smoke and acrid fumes. As she gasped, the smoke streamed into her eyes and disabled them. In the blackness, the sounds of death and terror gained an unholy momentum. And for the first time, Millya heard a gorgoroth noun. It started like the drone that accompanied the landing, huge and physical, then gained shape as a long metal syllable emerged. She imagined the rasp of a granite tongue against the roof of a cave mouth and then the thunderclap as the word was bitten off. She heard shredding stone and metal, explosive force and then she was up and running down the back alleys as the screams behind her suddenly stopped.

Lazy in the darkness of the pub, G-Vein grunted at the bartender for more ale. On the big screen behind the bar, football blared. Next to the screen, a radio, tuned to the same channel, screeched with static. Apart from himself, the barman and an unconscious woman, the pub was deserted.  Glasses and tankards remained on tables, some half-full. G-Vein blinked and gazed at the doorway. On a small table next to the door, a clipaan sat in an ashtray, still smoking.

“Where the fuck is everyone? I hate this dead end shithole.” The barman brought over a beer and hung in front of G-Vein, babbling away. His mouth and arms were moving in a most animated fashion, but G-Vein couldn't hear what he was saying. He had done that about five time since G-Vein had come in, and now it was starting to get irritating. He pulled his flak from the table and levelled it at the barman, whose mouth and arms began to flap harder.

Through the fug of alcohol and clip, G-Vein began to hear words punctuated with static.

Invasion. Clugg. Massacre. Crom. Syren. Clik. Syren?

That was like a trigger word, drilling straight into G-Vein brain. He shook his head, leapt across the table, grabbed the barman and pushed the flak deep into the side of his head. Then the fug disappeared and the words of the barman dropped into his consciousness like drops of honey butter.

“Your friend Syren is on her way to Persepolis to fight. She's been calling every bar in town on her way to ask where the fuck you are - her words, not mine.” Pulling the fightskin over his chest and dropping coins into the barman's trembling hands, G-Vein shot through the door, onto his battlebike and into the sudden bloody chaos of the city streets.

Sultan could smell the ash in the air as he skidded to a stop outside the fortress and leapt from the bike, pulling the sword from its harness and swinging it in a wide arc through the air. He closed his eyes and smelled the hot signals emanating from the blade. Stone balls swam through his veins, communicating secrets. He sensed four cracks, one inside the control chamber and four inside the outbuildings. One down - and probably fifty men to do it.

The beast in the control chamber was probably the leader, running fear and interference on the fortress network. He killed the sword's sensors and ducked through the fortress gate, the stench of gas and burning flesh curling his nostrils and inflaming his hatred. As soon as he cleared the gate the ground in front of him exploded with gunfire. Above him in the ramparts a gang of tendrils, left by the cracks as a rear defence.

Jackal-fast, Sultan swept up the steps and confronted the tendrils with extreme prejudice. To a normal human, these things would have presented a significant problem, but it was unlikely that they had encountered a krusader before. The stone sword swept through their alien organs in seconds. Sultan grinned, picked up each hand cannon and smashed it against the stone. Moving to the end of the rampart, he took advantage of his new position to review the situation on the ground.

Syren gripped the handlebars of her customised battlebike hard, slamming the phone shut as she sped towards Persepolis. Where the fuck was that useless drunkard. Behind her she could hear the muffled booms of advanced combat coming from the direction of Point Frozen.  Ahead of her, fifty miles of cold desert, a flaming lake and a city under terrible siege. As she considered the coming fight, she felt the futurescar on her left thigh tingling and leaned down to scratch it. She felt trepidation, doom and a terrible secret in the scratching. The scar has never been wrong and had saved her life on numerous occasions.

G-Vein's sword and boilerplate, attached to the pillion, were slowing her down. Why did that mongrel have to wield such ponderous weapons? And where the fuck was he? She swung the bike hard left to avoid a boulder and gunned it to glory.

Six thousand light years away, in the depths of space, Helsing 235622 was passing a small dead planet out past the Korona Rim.  Then it happened. Somewhere among the countless frequencies being processed by the gnome built into the machine a signal of deadly import appeared. The Helsing slowed to a stop and disabled all non-essential systems in order to focus all of its computational energy on that point. The machine became a single-minded orb, humming and thrumming. Forty-six seconds passed until all data had been assimilated. False positive. Bad data. There was no thousand-ton comatose vampire inside this planet. Record data in log and resume mission. The Helsing's main systems kicked back in and it once again propelled itself forward through the freeze-dead cold of outermost space.

Sultan had fastened his secondary cannon to the ramparts and was busy felling tendrils. He had dispatched over a hundred and was becoming bored. Suddenly one of the buildings below and to the right of him wobbled, toppled and fell and a flash of green light gave away the post-gorgoroth assault behaviour of a lumbercrack. He holstered his cannon, readied his stonesword and leapt from the ramparts. He hit the ground hard, feeling the impact in his bones and running towards the building as it fell. Then he saw the first soldiers since he breached the perimeter. They were pale, their faces wrenched with terror. He had seen that expression a thousand times - like savages coming face to face with their god in the flesh. He yelled at the troopers to make for the gates, to finish off any tendrils he had missed, then he was over the rubble, sword in hand, scanning left to right as the dust settled and the deafening noise subsided. He could sense knots of soldiers behind him, fingers shaking on triggers, frozen to the spot with supernatural curiosity. The sounds of battle were muted - somewhere far off he could hear the persistent bom bom bom of a howitzer. He thought about Syren, wondered if she had hit the city yet, whether she was about to face a similar kind of space demon - then he snapped all extraneous thought from his mind and clicked into crusader mode. The world slowed down, and he heard the crack at the same time as he saw it - a low metallic drone, two legs encased in living steel, a wide exoskeleton smeared with spasm-inducing poision, above that an array of battle arms, some slotted into cannons, others tapering into lethal blades and evening stars.

A normal human being would have been paralyzed with terror at such a sight. Sultan was stimulated. A thousand hours in the training pit facing monstrous dummies, a hundred experiences of actual combat in the field, on lightless moons, in fevered jungles and endless blind caves, had conditioned him to treat single combat with a lumbercrack as a kind of ritual, albeit one from which he might not emerge unscathed, if at all. The sense of ritual deadened his natural impulse to cower and flee, encouraged the kind of outrageous arrogance and self-aggrandizement that gave him a chance. He smiled, ran his fingers down the keen side of his stonesword, and advanced into the smoke-filled arena.

Syren smelled the burning lake long before she saw its golden, burning surface reflected on the stone hills ahead. A flaming trap laid a million years before by a race of star soldiers pursued by an army of dead-fanged moon vampires, the place where they made their last stand and lost. The lake still burned, infused with ancient chemicals, balls of flame leaping from the surface and spiralling into the cold desert air.

As soon as the invasion had started, Persepolis had activated its granite shells, the only kind of force field known to repel lumbercracks. The shells sucked all residual energy from the city, plunged her into darkness, leaving the fire lake as the only possible point of entry. A lumbercrack, moving at full speed and not too close to the surface, might just make it. As might a customised battlebike pushed far into the red.

Syren felt the heat rush against her thighs as she kicked the bike over the lake, swerving to avoid fireballs and gusts of burning air. About five miles ahead through the heat shimmer she could make out the turrets of Persepolis - were those plumes of smoke and ash the result of alien attack, or just more heat storms from the lake? It was impossible to tell at this range, so shrink the range. The needle whined further and further into the red as she accelerated, cursing G-Vein for his tardiness and drunken abandon, but praying for his strong arm and reckless combat abandon in the coming struggle.

The bike shunted and complained, steel surfaces heating to a dangerous temperature. Syren craned her neck down, pushing her forehead against the still-cool upper surface of the bike. It would take two and a half minutes to clear the lake, one hundred and fifty seconds of flame and heat until she was at the city gates. She gunned the engine, yelled at the bike faster, faster. She looked up into the heavens and gasped as she recognised the fell shape of two lumbercracks - unmistakable in their trajectory and velocity. Two dark spots speeding sideways and then lurching downwards, downwards towards madness and mayhem. Downwards towards her!

She slid her hand down to the bike pouch and withdrew the sword. Two minutes to the city - just two minutes and two lumbercracks she hadn't reckoned with. She only managed to pull the entire length of the blade free when the first lumbercrack hit the surface of the lake with a heart-stopping furnace blast. By then she was half a mile away, snapping her head back to see the machine stabilize itself, activate its secondary motors and thrust after her, the second alien close behind. Syren shut her eyelids, knew this would be an unconventional skirmish, prepared herself for invention and creativity in the field of combat.
In the training pit she had been taught to use the environment, coax every ounce of alliance from her surroundings. She mouthed a low curse, just under her breath, and span the bike sideways, kicking the brake spikes down into the burning water, skidding and sliding as the lumbercracks hurtled towards her. Then she pulled the ladypistol from her belt, kissed the barrel, and fired twice.
   
Syren was still telling the story a year later, lamenting the fact that nobody had been there to see it, cajoling passers-by with her tale. The pellets streaked towards the cracks just as they touched wings in order to synchronise for battle. At that exact moment the pellets hit the connected wings and blew a vast hole through the crack armour. The sudden vacuum sucked boiling flame from the surface of the lake which burned through the living steel and whatever awful combination of ichor and venge oozed inside the exoskeleton, and for the first time since Warning, a human heard a lumbercrack scream. The force of their demise propelled Syren forwards, smashing her head against the bike and throwing her into blackness as the war machines span on the surface of the lake, then sank, defeated by fire and the audacity of a full-force crusader. 

Sultan stood, motionless, the stonesword held out level in front of him, breathing slowly. A hundred feet across piles of hot rubble, the lumbercrack watched. Forty feet above the ash-smeared legs and titanic frame, the tiny head pointed two tiny red eyes at the crusader. The thing sensed that this was no ordinary human to be crushed and split. The sword in its hand emitted a curious familiarity. The lumbercrack reported the location of the human warrior back to base and readied itself for combat.
Slimy green organs clicked into place. The great green heart pumped faster, urging gunpowder and napalm around the machine's bloodstream. A gorgoroth curse waited, under the tip of a slippery black tongue. Then the lumbercrack leapt forward and upwards, needle-sharp blades slicing outwards from its battle corset.

Sultan had been trained for this since he was a child - no toys, no distractions, just the endless whine of the practice dummy, slicing blades and burning arcs of green fire, day after day until the battle tactics of a lumbercrack were as familiar to him as his own skin, the beating of his own young heart. Since the time he emerged as a functional crusader Sultan had dispatched sixteen cracks, a hitherto unthinkable statistic. Now for sweet seventeen.

Turbulence. A great arm forged from granite grasped her shoulder and squeezed, squeezed, squeezed, until her skin was bloody. She yelled, grabbed the arm and tried to prise it away, felt the granite melt into a softer, yet no less solid substance and layers of blackness and pain melt away in seconds - then she was back in her framework, could feel the burning air and see the fuzzy form floating before her, bobbing and weaving like an errant star.

“You there? Come on pilgrim, more fighting to come...” She recognised the voice - fury propelled her and this time it was her turn to sink nails into skin.
   
“You fucking...lazy...drunken...”

Then G-Vein's lips were on hers, slick with ale and the promise of adventure, and her ire vanished. She let the kiss unwind, relaxed into it, then coiled away before their passions kicked in. She took a deep breath, rubbed ash from her face and rolled onto her front, looking down a hot incline to the shores of the lake. No sign of the machines - two lumbercracks in fully synchronised battle mode, now nothing more than dust motes and solder. Her bike lay ten feet away, blackened and busted. That bike had been through countless battles, fifteen silhouettes on the fuel tanks signifying the sound and fury of lumbercrack death. Now it was broken. Syren pushed herself to her feet, patted G-Vein on the shoulder and staggered to the edge of the lake. She unsheathed her stonesword, dipped it into the boiling waters, walked back to the bike and rubbed the tip against the bike until she had etched the primitive outline of two malevolent flying machines onto the metal. Then she knelt, leaned forward and kissed the bike goodbye. Bittersweet inside, she let G-Vein pull her to her feet and stared into his deep blue eyes.
   
“Where the fuck have you been?” The rogue crusader grinned and started to walk towards the bike parked further up the incline.

“Carousing...storytelling...bullshitting. Why do you still insist on asking, think I'm a bit too far down the dark road to change my ways now. Where we going?”

"Persepolis," Syren said, brushing ash from her arms.

“Seems they landed a space crab and a unit of cracks in the city centre. Hopefully there will still be something to fight when we get there. You ready?”

“You got my arsenal', G-Vein asked.

“Sword, war cloak and those thunderpumps you liberated from Karousel. That enough?”

“With a woman like you by my side”, G-Vein smiled, climbing onto the bike and offering his arm, “I could fight a fully-grown nightmoth with a fruit spoon. Let's go.” He kick-started the bike engine into life, felt pleasure as Syren gripped his waist, and gunned the machine up the incline and onto the city road, away from the flames and burned, buried machines.

Far above the planet, the war station floated in orbit. Onboard, the mood was tense. On the bridge, Commander Kandel assimilated the scattered war reports coming in with dismay. Half the population had already been decimated, and the other half were fleeing in terror and panic, cluttering up the transport systems and jamming the communication networks. The crusader cube floating in the centre of the room projected a fuzzy red map onto the walls. Sultan was in the midst of single combat with a lumbercrack in Point Frozen.

Syren and G-Vein were en route to Persepolis, where the death toll was the highest. Three crusaders pitted against the cold and horrid might of the gorgon war machine. He picked up a tankard from the table and drained the contents, breathing heavily as a messenger swept into the room and saluted. Kandel grimaced. He hated messengers - the dilated red eyes, skin stretched too tight, the haphazard teleportation. He stepped forward, pulled a memory stick from his pocket and plunged it into the messenger's head.

The messenger stretched, arched his back and the contents of his head poured onto the wall, obscuring the crusader map. Kandel squinted and read the clipped messenger script, translating the symbols dancing across the wall.

“Helsing 2324RF has beamed a high-priority signal back from the outer reaches of Darkness IX5634Q. Signal strength was very high, almost Discovery frequency. For 3.32 seconds the Helsing was plugged directly into the very thought process of the Ungood before it exploded. The 3.29 seconds of signal we received comprised the following - a vast wave of violent hatred forged from unutterable loneliness and dread - a supernatural desire for genocide - and then something more concrete, an idea made flesh. A great weapon, designed and executed in the bowels of a dead moon. A secret weapon, the trump card in this awful invasion.”

Kandel felt a wave of fear vault through his body as the messenger stopped transmitting and fell unconscious to the floor, a thin trickle of blood issuing from his right ear. As Kandel ordered the nearest soldier to take the messenger to the sickbay, he pulled the memory stick from the stricken form and returned his attention to the crusader map. A fourth crusader was fighting on the planet's cold moon. Elsewhere in this domain, humanity battled alone against terrible odds.

Far below the orbiting war station, Sultan had been fighting the lumbercrack for twelve minutes. He rolled in the dust as the machine stamped and smashed its steel legs into the rubble, multiple blades slicing the air around him as he rolled and ducked, stopping every other minute to recover his energy using a variety of lung pulls and muscle spasms. He clutched the stonesword, waiting for the opportunity he craved. Lumbercracks in battle frenzy could carve their way through legions of troopers, dicing them with blades or crushing them underfoot, but they were far too clumsy to deal with crusaders - warriors who had been trained on the cold moons of Erious, survived the slime caves of Meridyen by chewing on morsels of their own skin, men and women who fought on the front line for humankind with no thought for their own lives or their own sanity. As he rolled, Sultan gripped the stone sword, listening to the granite whisper flowing through the edges as the weapon explored the insides of the enemy, released critical information about its makeup and mind.

“This enemy is called Medusamore. It was born on Calamity X and was savaged by a storm tiger during an assault on Regus IX. It is afeared, mightily afeared of cats and dogs”. Sultan yelped with joy and leaned forward to kiss the sword as the lumbercrack whined and whirred above him. He gripped the blade, turned to look upward and opened his mouth to emit a vast, blood-curdling howl, using the energy gained from the lung pulls to blast the sound of a million wildcats into the smoking air. The lumbercrack froze, its blades flipping back into arm holders, its map rampage ceasing, one leg poised above the surface, making the demon appear like a huge metal stork.

Sultan seized the moment, catapulted himself upwards, kicking against the steel legs, upwards and upwards, plunging the blade into the soft spot of the lumbercrack's groin just as it saw the ruse and started to recover. Then he was away, rolling back to the ground and hitting the dust with a crack as he rolled over and watched the war machine tilt above him and fall forwards, a low blood-boiling screech exploding from its tiny head as it fell. There was a stupendous crash and then sudden, victorious silence.
Sultan closed his eyes, muttered an oath, then pulled himself to his feet. He walked to the fallen menace, grabbed hold of the shrunken steel head, and pulled. With a sickening thrunch, the head came free. He picked it up, rolled it in his hands, and shook. The brain chip fell free - he caught it, read the naming on the serrated surface, then reached down and pulled his shirt open. He clipped the chip onto a white string necklace along with the others and turned to start making his way back to the bike. He narrowed his eyes and smiled at the line of troopers standing at the edges of the arena. Pale and fearful, one and all, and awed by the recent combat.

“They can be beaten - remember that. They are just machines. Big, yes, and powerful. But they can be scared, just like us, and once you know that you have the key to victory. Now - can one of you get me my bike?”

Her arms tight around G-Vein, Syren leaned back to listen. Yes - she heard it - a long, curdling howl from across the desert. What manner of beast was that? Every wave, new monsters. Always lumbercracks, the drone soldiers of the undead mind, but always new forms, new nightmares. She tapped G-Vein on the shoulder, he nodded, yes, he heard it too, but then the howl was lost in the wind as the bike hammered on.

They crested a small hill and the biked skidded to a stop. Five miles away, the dark skyline of Persepolis spread out before them. Smoke poured from the buildings, great black columns of flame and death licking the clouds. They were too late. G-Vein spat, pulled a spyglass from his jacket and peered through it. Five gargoyle shadows soared upwards against the flaming sky, blazing green victory flares spraying light from their ankles. They disappeared behind a dirty yellow cloud. Lumbercracks only lit those flares when every single living being in their combat zone was dead. He heard hard breathing behind him, jumped with surprise as he met Syren's eyes and she threw her arms around him, her entire frame quaking with emotion. G-Vein held her, then grabbed hold of her shoulders and pushed her back.

“It's not over yet, soldier. Sultan needs us now, he's on his own. Let's find a lighter somewhere in the ruins and get to him as fast as we can.” Syren nodded, blinking back tears. She nodded at the bike, instructed G-Vein in silence. He smiled, stepped off the saddle and allowed the crusadress to shift herself forward into the cockseat. He grabbed her waist and whooped as he gunned the engine, powering the bike down the hill towards the dying city.

Sultan climbed onto the bike, thanking the dazed trooper. He told the soldiers to get back to the fortress to regroup, to band with any other survivors and wait to be rescued. The troopers hesitated, still dazed from the biblical spectacle they had just witnessed. They had all heard the rumours, the mythology of conquest and victory that surrounded the crusaders, knew that they had killed lumbercracks, but none of them had ever seen it happen. It filled them with terror but at the same time galvanized them with sudden courage and reckless abandon. One by one they shouldered their weapons and ran into the dust. Sultan waited until a single solider remained, a smaller trooper in ill-fitting uniform. He peered at the trooper - he was no more than a child, straight out of the academy. Sultan smiled, winked and offered his hand. The soldier's eyes widened and he looked after his comrades. Sultan nodded in confirmation, and the hesitant young soldier smiled and took his hand. Who knew how long this young lion would last against the heinous onslaught of the gorgon armada? At least he would have one hell of a ride on a crusader battle bike before the end. Sultan felt the arms of the soldier tighten around his chest as he spurred the bike away from the carnage and death rubble, towards the city of Persepolis and a vigorous reunion.

The bike streamed through the silent streets of the savaged metropolis seeking air transport. The streets were filled with the ominous residue of one-sided onslaught. Overturned cars, piles of ash and burning bodies choked the roads and byways. Syren swerved to avoid a molten mess of twisted metal and then they saw it - a downed lighter, intact, nose buried in the side of a blackened tank. Syren powered down and adjusted her clothing as G-Vein sprang from the pillion and raced towards the vehicle - empty-handed.

“Brother!” Syren yelled, tossing the stonesword, thunderpumps and war cloak into the air with a grim smile. G-Vein ran back, slipping into slomo. He grasped the sword and slid it into its eager scabbard in one gelatinous movement. The other hand caught the falling thunderpumps and he turned to let the war cloak fall onto his broad and solid shoulders with a flourish that appeared strangely fey when performed by such a cosmic thug. He looked back at Syren, admonishment in his eyes, then he was up the lighter ramp and out of sight as Syren pulled a fish comb from her jacket and started to comb her ash-damaged locks. She heard the first boom, heard and felt the second, felt the third through her skin and in the pit of her stomach, and then laughed as G-Vein came back down the ramp, covered in green ichor from the waist down.

“How many?' Syren shouted. G-Vein held up two fingers.

“I heard three blasts?” G-Vein shrugged. Syren sighed - gung ho brother was always wasting ammo, firing into corpses and loosing victory salvoes. One day the waste would end him - one day he would need the extra round and it wouldn't be there.

Sultan streaked across the desert, body pressed hard against the bike's hot chrome. He heard the lighter long before he saw it. That wonderful thropp thropp thropp, the beating of the miniature slug drive embedded in the machine, then the silhouette of the vehicle as it cleared the summit of a table mountain and dove towards him. He swerved, riding under the lighter, blotting out the sun so he could view the windows, work out whether it was friendly or a hijacked plane being piloted by a lumbercrack.
As the plane shot past, he grinned. He could recognise the sinewy limbs of ‘G-Vein The Terrible’ anywhere! He powered down and slid from the saddle as the lighter lowered two enormous legs and landed with a thrum that rocked the desert surface for a thousand feet in every direction. A combat ramp slid out of the plane and into the sand, and Sultan rode the battle bike up and in, relishing the cheers of his friends and laughing hard as G-Vein hit the thrusters and sent the lighter upwards and spaceward, away from the raped planet towards the station and a well-earned, if brief, reprieve.

They sat in the downtime room in the war station, breathing softly and feeling the sudden feedback from aching muscles and tissue flooded with decaying adrenalin. Syren sobbed into a crystal handkerchief - she was overwhelmed with dark emotion. G-Vein ran his fingers along the fibrous edges of a fractal blade. For the last two hours, countless soldiers had visited the downtime room to pay their respects. Commander Kandel eventually lost his patience and barked the troopers out of the room and back to their duties. The room was suddenly quiet and filled with omen.

Three perfect globes powered downwards through the vacuum towards the surface of the cold moon. Inside his assault globule, Sultan closed his eyes and intoned a deep and powerful prayer. He considered the godwill used by the space witches and made a mental note to request an audience with the local representative as soon as this particular skirmish was over. This planet was lost, battered and crushed by lumbercracks and tendrils - the only mission now was to save their colleague, fighting hard under the lunar surface.

According to reports, the hydroponic complex that supplied the planet with redweed had fallen in a matter of minutes, hosed by the cluster of crabfreighters that passed by on their way to dump a monster on Persepolis. Soon after, Motion had soared down to the surface in a combat sock and proceeded to join battle with the squad of pigmoles that had been dispatched into the complex tunnels to clean up any survivors.

Syren, Sultan and G-Vein steered the battle balls lower and lower, skimming the lip of a vast crater. The balls hit lunar rock soundlessly and as soon as the claws flew from the sides of each ball and secured the vehicles to the freezing stone, the crusaders were out and bouncing for the rent complex entrance in zero gravity. At the rim of blasted steel, Sultan lit a green flare - a vicious insult designed to taunt the alien enemy into careless frenzy. Then he went down into the tunnel, stonesword drawn, behind him Syren with blade drawn likewise, and then the cosmic thug - war cloak drawn around his frame, obscuring his torso and head, thunderpumps in one hand, fractal sword in the other.

It wasn't long until they found the first denizen. As Sultan made his way over a service hatch, Syren screamed a warning and Sultan rolled as the first pigmole dropped from the tunnel ceiling, death scissors spinning in its furry paws. Tracking the pig through his moon goggles, Sultan swung the stonesword up and out, clipping the scissors away as G-Vein danced forward and threw the thunderpump into the pigmole's eyes. There was a blinding green flash and a head-curdling screech as the mole's head disappeared and the fat body feel onto the rock.

Then the walls were alive with pigmoles and the battle real commenced. It took the crusaders two hours to fight their way to the central nexus of the complex, and by then they were waist-deep in fur and black blood. G-Vein wiped gore and issue from his arms and pulled the thunderbox from his jacket pocket. He devil-smiled and shook the box, then upended it onto the floor. Pigmole eyeballs, claws, noses and feet slid out of the box, every eyeball, claw, limb and tendon incrementing the counter on the side. Since hitting moonside they had salughtered seventy-seven pigmoles. Syren had been badly scratched and was fading fast. There was no sign of Motion. Could he have been taken down by a pigmole army - it was unlikely. Motion was the most famous crusader this side of Saracen. He had once split a megacrack right down the middle with a single blow.

Sultan waved Syren and G-Vein into silence and then they felt it. Pum pum pum - the unmistakeable thump of finger bombs thrumming through the moon rock. Sultan looked up at a service hatch, twenty feet above them  and aimed the stonesword - then threw it. The signature weapon exploded through the metal and for a second they saw a circle of black space pinpricked with stars and then Sultan kicked off against the tunnel floor and sailed upwards through the opening, followed by the amazon and the star vandal.

The trio bounced back down onto the moon surface, momentarily giddy as the vast vista of darkness and starlight expanded above them. Then flickers of red light hit them. Sultan turned, plunging the stonesword into the moon to steady himself, and pointed downhill. Five hundred feet down the incline, a small figure in a space sock turned, explosions of red from scattering finger bombs igniting the black around it. Fuzzy dark shapes, squat and slow-moving, surrounded the figure - pigmoles in battle socks, maybe twenty of them, closing in. Sultan wrenched the blade from the surface and grabbed his fellow crusaders by the arms. He mouthed a victory sign in silent space language and then all three warriors were streaming down the slope, blades and bombs drawn.

Twelve minutes later, on a rock outcrop, Sultan sat smoking a sealed clipaan. Syren finished tying a victory bow in her hair. G-Vein moved through the piles of mole corpses looking for trophies. And, cross-legged in front of Senior Sultan the primary crusader of Melt Francisco, Motion Sense, the greatest crusader in fifty parsecs, drank from a heavy blue tankard. He watched G-Vein pushing furry bodies around and laughed.

“Tell me star vandal,” he said, looking up into the heavens where the ravaged planet hung like a deflated balloon. “Why do you insist on looting the bodies of pigmoles? Behaviour more befitting of a common corsair than a proud crusader, is it not?”
G-Vein ignored the taunting. He hated the pompous hero, his fame, the media attention and posturing. G-Vein was one of the old-school, terror-trained from a baby, forged and hardened in the intense furnace of constant warfare. Crusaders like Motion flitted from battle to battle, picking and choosing their moments of glory. He was a fine warrior, no doubt about that, but a fickle one.

“Jackpot!” G-Vein cried, ripping open a pigmole pouch and pulling forth a fat black blob. Every horde of moles had one, the fattest mole of all, the leader, the piggest of pigs, reared on ultra-rich cave cheese until its liver expanded to the size of an elongated melon, driving the giddy monster into a constant state of driving aggression. The liver of a mole commander was a highly prize delicacy on at least forty of the Outer Worlds. Fine black booty indeed. G-Vein held the slimy lozenge up high so Motion could see it, then slid it into the folds of his war cloak and made his way back to the group.

“Nice”, sneered Motion. “What kind of crusader carts a box of body parts around and steals the livers from dead fat aliens?”
G-Vein started towards Motion but stopped as Sultan raised his hand and pointed to the battle balls, which had detected the end of the fight and rolled all the way from the other side of the crater to pick up their drivers.

“Where's your ball”, Syren asked, quiz on her face. Motion pointed into the mass of fuzzy bodies, where fragments of battle ball glinted and flecked.

“So - I guess I have to share with someone,” Motion smiled.

“You share with G-Vein,” Sultan commanded. As Motion started to protest, Sultan cut him off.

“Syren is wounded, she'll need all her strength to power back to the station. And I think the short trip will be a good opportunity for you and the thug to bond. You are both crusaders, remember that, and we need to fight together - we just lost an entire planet if you hadn't noticed, and this was only the first wave. There won't be much time to rest, and then we'll be in the very think of it - any division, any weakness that can be exploited by the hideous intent of the ultimate hive mind we are facing, and we can kiss it all goodbye. Understood? Good - now let's go crusaders.”

To Be Continued