Excerpt: Powers Of Infinity

“Landon!” A voice called from the darkness.

Landon opened his eyes for what seemed like the umpteenth time that day.
A strange biological residue was dripping down his arm. He smelled at it, and it definitely reeked of the vorator’s ichors from his dream. He pushed the crumpled body off of himself. He noticed his ankle was sprained and he had a minor concussion, but nothing that would stop him from saving this world.
He looked up to see the man who had woken him, Darry Dane get impaled between two vorators. He was standing in a square in the middle of a city street, the futuristic windows broken, the skylight apparatus twisted and torn. Desolation within. Bullets and explosions flew around everywhere. But a tide of xenos was lurking down every street. Gradually the violent fighting was growing more and more lop-sided: the all-too present yells and screams were not slowing down but the gunfire was. When one vorator fell it was like the hydra with many heads – another two or three moved in. Where were they getting so many numbers? And how had they migrated so easily?
He had thought monster like this were confined to several planets off-world at the farthest extents of the systems of alien and man—to the furthest regions where only the occasional bounty hunter would go in his last days hoping for that last great kill.
Landon blew away both of the vorators did a kind of jump off a wall as two tumbled in toward him as he flew over their heads using his synth-armours built in mechanisms, along with his own gene-altered speed he was a blur of precision bullets. The attackers fell, then another four more. He backed off down another street He heard fighting at a crossroads behind him and retreated to that point. He was not going to even think of what was currently happening to his fallen comrades – his whole platoon wiped out in that square! He had heard of some regeneration based on feeding… this was not turning out to be his day. Maybe he would just wake up!
But this time it was far more dark and bitter than that!
He stood at a gun-post harboured by three mobile hover tanks and one immobile with enough firepower that cut a swath at two angles, leaving troopers to secure a third street. And there rear open to attack. Landon ran in from the rear. He hoped beyond hope that his training was a match for this battle.
Landon opened his mouth.
The guns continued to fire. Nothing could be heard over them.
Landon opened up the texting board on his arm, “Vorators – behind you!”
Suddenly there was dissension in the ranks about which way to turn. Landon threw his gun down in disbelief, noticing a massive fallen chain gun next to a toppled soldier. While they were allocating, texting, re-allocating. Landon took hold of the chain gun, and remounted it on his own harness. It was an old-style model but he had a lot of respect for these old things.
He fired a stream of fire into the vorators who were lining up across the street in some sort of prey-hunting fashion.
The tanks lay down their fire. The troops fired streams of rapid-fire death. Landon pumped round after round with an implacable precision, and a vindictive rage, he roared with the gun as he thought of his fallen comrades. The vorators came and continued to be gunned down. The streets grew slick and slicker still with green ichors that would run like a river by the end of the day. The human bodies became buried down the side streets. Further in the distance the gunfire churned sporadically down other streets, at other outposts like this one.
There was only one problem with all of this. Sooner or later the ammo was going to run out!