The creature that burst through the burning rubble was not an agile burrower. It was a five-ton living battering ram of solid, hardened horn and linked iron-gray armor.
A Plated Crusher-Beetle. Grade-3 heavy siege vanguard.
Its body was over six meters in length, supported by six thick, pillar-like legs tipped with curved steel digging talons. Its cephalic armor was dominated by a huge, three-pronged horn of solid bone that protruded eight feet forward from its snout, grooved and notched from years of battering through underground granite shelves. The beast was blind, navigating by the sub-heard infrasound broadcasts of the Hive Gorgon, its head lowered as it charged straight toward the open flap of Triage Bay 9 at forty miles per hour.
If that horn struck Titus’s lateral flank, it wouldn’t shatter the dark rock shell. But the moving transfer would buckle the temporary surgery tables and crush twenty wounded soldiers huddled beneath the back shell.
“Brutus, flank left! I take the horn!” Valerie Koslov roared, sprinting directly into the path of the charging behemoth.
The Trench Hammer didn’t know how to retreat. In twelve years of border trench massacres, Valerie had survived by meeting driving force with greater violence. She had lost her natural left arm to a feral dire-bear in the northern trenches. Just then, she was nineteen. She dragged three wounded conscripts out of a collapsed bunker with her one good arm. She had sworn an oath then that no soldier under her command would die. Meanwhile, she…
