Thousands of Rats

Space marines attack an enemy planet. Contest entry.

“Sarge, why are we here?” I asked over the local circuit. Sargent Roon turned to look at me, although I couldn’t see his face behind his polarized faceplate. The sun of Cignus 3 was bright enough to blind anyone without eye protection. Well, any human.

“You know why. We’re here because the rats are here.”

“Sounds like a good reason not to be here,” I said, as I looked over the sun blasted terrain. From our vantage point on a small hill, all we could see was a barren landscape, broken up by house sized boulders and dust. There was lots of dust. The wind whipped it all over the place, and even the vision devices built into our helmets had trouble seeing through it.

“What’s gotten into you, Philips? The rats have been raiding our colonies and expanding into our space. We’re here to put a stop to it.”

“It just seems like a pretty useless planet to fight over. I can see why the rats want to leave. Has anyone even tried talking to them?”

“Who knows? Besides, that’s above our pay grade. The politicians do the talking, and we do the fighting. Now let’s go, we’re moving out.”

“The fighting and the dying,” I thought. “Don’t forget the dying.”

Still, if I was going to worry about dying, I shouldn’t have joined the Terran Marines in the first place. Join the Marines and see the Galaxy – or what’s left of it. I shrugged mentally, since I couldn’t shrug in space armor, and headed down the hill with the rest of the platoon.

We moved in standard two by two cover formation, heading into the rocks. Around us, the rest of the battalion was also advancing. This was an infantry only assault on the rat base, as the Goliath hover tanks were too big to maneuver between the boulders. We did a leapfrog advance. My partner Fritz and I would cover Williams and Simmons, the other two members of our fire team, then we would leapfrog them. Sargent Roon would move with whichever group was leapfrogging ahead.

We soon lost contact with the rest of the battalion, and even the other members of our platoon were glimpsed only rarely. The atmospherics made communication spotty, and coordination was next to impossible. We were effectively on our own.

We were about a half hour into the mission when we saw our first rats. They came screaming down off the rocks above us. They weren’t really rats, since they were almost the size of a human and had no tails, but with their small beady eyes, protruding jaws and over large ears on the tops of their heads, that’s what we called them.

The ones leaping down at us were armed with their crystalline short swords, which could even puncture our armor if they hit at the right angle.
Fritz and I saw them barely in time and opened up with our pulse rifles, blasting them apart and getting sprayed with rat guts. Then the rest of the team was firing and we saw they were coming at us from all directions.

“Set up for all around defense!” Roon said. We went back-to-back and kept firing as the rats kept coming. Some of them also had slug throwers. They weren’t powerful enough to get through our armor in one shot, but they had a ridiculously high rate of fire, and multiple hits would chip it away. We could hear sounds of combat all around us. Commands and screams came over the transmission.

Then it was over. The rats were either dead or scattered. We stood panting and looked around. Williams was down with a wound to his leg where a sword thrust had gotten through. Sarge applied a field bandage, and Williams was able to get to his feet. He was limping, but okay.

“Okay, let’s move out,” Roon said. “Williams, you stay close to me.”

It was like that for the rest of the advance. The rats were incredibly agile, and they could leap across the tops of the boulders to come at us from any direction. Because of the dust, we couldn’t see them until they were close.

We lost Simmons when three rats fell on him at once. Williams bought it not long after. We finally came out into somewhat open ground in front of our objective.

It was a tunnel heading down. The rats lived under ground, which is not surprising given how barren the surface was. We lobbed a few grenades down the rat hole as we waited for the rest of the platoon. There weren’t many. We had lost about half just getting here.

Our commander lieutenant Carson spoke briefly with the noncoms on the command circuit, then switched to the platoon frequency.

“Okay, you know why were here. Let’s move out,” he said as he led the way down.

We headed through a labyrinth of interconnecting passages. We were literally like rats in a maze. They kept coming at us out of side corridors, and we had to fight for every inch. Hours seemed to pass, until we finally broke out into a large cavern. It was filled with rats. Small ones.

“Lieutenant,” I said. “These are children. This isn’t a military base. It’s a village.”

It was true. There were some adults, crouched protectively over the pups, but the vast majority were children, staring at us in obvious fear.

“Does it matter? We’re here to kill them,” he replied, although he didn’t sound too sure.

“Sir, they’re not a threat.”

We stood there, facing the rats. They looked back, and we could hear their squeaks of fear. Then an elderly looking rat stood and stepped forward.

“Are you going to kill us?” it asked in passable Terran.

“No,” Carson said. “We don’t kill children.”

The rats ears twitched. “Then perhaps there can be peace between us.”

“Peace,” I thought. “Yeah, that would be a nice change of pace.”