Mack 'n' Me: The Wolves of Alpha 9

it was on fire, so I was looking forward to finally getting inside and sitting down. I was even thinking of sleep, but that was a long way off. I wanted to be back on the Shady Marie with the mission well behind me before I did that—even if it was beginning to look a bit like a fool’s dream.
“Hang in there, kiddo.”
At least Tens was back to normal. Irritating, but normal.
A shout of alarm brought me swiftly back to the present, and I looked for the threat. Around me, Varian and his group were scattering. The woman nearest me grabbed my arm and pulled me behind her as something dropped from the ceiling and landed, hissing, on the floor beside us.
The hiss ended in a sickening crunch, as the woman brought the broad blade she carried down on the center of the creature. I pulled my blaster and scanned the ceiling further out. Sure enough, there were a half dozen more coming towards us. I took aim at the nearest, and pulled the trigger. It took me two shots. The next one took three.
Damn. I hoped that wasn’t a trend.
Nope. I took out the one, after, with a single shot, and the one after that—and then I realized I’d found the sweet spot. It was just under the bottom row of eyes, where the chelicerae, or fangs, hooked in. Those last two shots had landed as the multi-legged monsters raised their forelegs and spread their fangs.
Fuck, I hoped they weren’t spiders.
I didn’t bother stopping to count either legs or body segments as more of the critters came towards us. These ones were accompanied by a larger beast that looked exactly like the rest of them, save that its abdomen was rounder, and it was about four times their size. The thing had fangs on it like a front-end loader.
Momentarily torn between shooting it, and taking out the dozen or so smaller critters accompanying it, I hesitated. Varian and the rest had no such qualms. A storm of blaster bolts tore into the larger creature, making its attendants scatter to attack whatever threat they could reach. That made my decision easy.
I took on the little ones.
It wasn’t long before my partner followed my lead. Together we stopped most of them before they reached the front line of shooters. One got past, and leaping up to sink its fangs into a rebel’s chest. He was lucky. If it had chosen his face, he’d have been in a world of hurt... or not in the world at all. It was hard to tell if these things were venomous, and I didn’t want to find out the hard way.
As it was, if its target hadn’t had friends close enough to shoot it off his chest, he’d have been a dead man—or a sorely injured one. As the biggest of the attacking creepy crawlies fell, I noticed something gleaming among the fallen carapaces and spindly legs.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing it out to Varian, as I worked my way closer.
This took a bit of time as there was no way I was going to wade through the bodies. There was no telling if one of them was still alive enough to take a bite out of me as I passed. I carefully dragged each one to one side—and I blasted it if it so much as twitched. I might have felt stupid about doing that, except everyone else was doing the same.
By the time Varian and I reached the device, I had a terrible feeling the mission had slipped a little further south than it had already gone. If I hadn’t known any better, I would have thought the bit of equipment attached to the creature’s head was some kind of a cross between a camera and some sort of... sort of...
“What is that?” I asked, as Varian brought the grip of his blaster down on the camera, and turned towards me.
He grabbed me by both shoulders, and unzipped the front of my combat suit.
“Hey!” I shouted, but he ignored my protest and tried to peel the suit off my shoulder.
I jabbed my blaster into his stomach. That stopped him.
“Back! Off!” I ordered, punctuating each word with a poke of the blaster’s muzzle. “Back the fuck off.”
He backed up, raising his hands as he did so.
“No offence,” he said.
“Like Hell there isn’t!”
“I just had to see—”
I poked him again...several times.
“I. Am. Not. A. Peepshow.”
He backed up another two steps, and then wrapped his hand around the muzzle of the blaster and turned it aside as he twisted it out of my grip.
“Look!” he snapped, waving my gun in the general direction of the smashed-up electronics on the bug’s head. “That’s a recording camera. Barangail’s like that. He records everything. He tracks everything. We fucking forgot to debug you.”
I looked around at the critter corpses surrounding us.”
“You think they were sent?”
He holstered his blaster, and passed mine back to me.
“I do.” He waved in the direction of my gaping armor. “Barangail likes tagging the ribs.”
Well, fuck. I’d forgotten, as well.
My face must have said it all, as I pulled back the suit, and lifted the tank top to show the still red patches marking my sides. Varian looked down at my ribs, and then back up into my face. I’ll give him this, his eyes didn’t linger anywhere else. Good man.
“You know we’re gonna have to do somethin’ about that.”
He even managed to look apologetic.
I looked around the cavern, and then made a point of nudging a pile of spider guts near my boot.
“You got somewhere cleaner we could go?”
There was movement as two of the bigger guys moved in. I looked from left to right, snagging their eyes, and they stopped, which was when I made a point of putting my blaster back in its holster. Let’s just say that what came next wasn’t fun, and that nan-gel has helpful anesthetic properties when it comes to minor field surgery, but does nothing for the