Night draped itself heavy over the desert. The outpost sat like a blister against the horizon, floodlights stabbing outward into the dark.
But the light didn't mark the real perimeter. The true barrier was alive.
One hundred scouts skulked across the dunes, their four-armed silhouettes darting between rocks, climbing walls, and perching high on poles and rooftops where human eyes could not reach. Two hundred workers moved more deliberately, hauling girders, welding frames, stacking crates into makeshift fortifications. Their shadows merged with the night until the base itself looked alive part human, part alien.
From above, the outpost looked less like a military installation and more like a nest.
Inside the garage, Ethan sat against the cold wall, still encased in his armor. The respirator whispered with each steady breath, visor darkened. His gauntlet pulsed faintly, tethering him to every machine he had birthed.
A flicker and his vision wasn't his own.
Through the eyes of a scout, he stood atop a skyscraper in his home city. The tower was broken, jagged like a rotting tooth, but the view remained. Streets lay empty beneath, husks of cars rusting in place. He searched for a light, a survivor, but there was nothing. Only silence.
A blink, and he shifted now through the lens of another construct, its claws digging into earth far below. Sonar pulses rippled outward, mapping cavern after cavern beneath the city's ruins. The tunnels still breathed. Faint vibrations told him the swarm had not been wiped out completely, it had only hidden deeper.
Again he blinked, and he was looking down into a blackened crater in Chicago, radiation still shimmering faintly. Even here, scorched bones of hive-ships jutted like ribs from the ground. Only his automatons could walk these poisoned scars.
Ethan nodded faintly. His work was progressing. The scans fed back into his gauntlet, the data becoming blueprints, warnings, possibilities.
Then, finally, he let his head tilt back against the wall. His constructs remained vigilant, but he closed his own eyes. Even in sleep, his body sealed in armor, the swarm watched in his stead.
---
South Perimeter – The Dead City
Two soldiers trudged down a cracked avenue, boots crunching glass and gravel. The city stretched out around them like a corpse, hollow towers and empty windows watching them pass.
Three scout constructs skittered silently above, silver eyes glowing faintly. Their feeds streamed back to base body cams, GPS pings. Everything monitored. Everything recorded.
But here, in the dead quiet, it was just two men and their thoughts.
"Yow, Dan," Kyle muttered, keeping his rifle low. His voice carried too much in the stillness. "You actually trust those things?"
Dan shifted his grip on the weapon, glancing at the construct crawling across a rooftop above them. Its movements were fluid, too smooth to be mechanical. "Come on, Kyle. They're on our side. You saw Denver. Without them, we'd have been eaten alive. Call 'em creepy, call 'em whatever, but they fight with us."
Kyle let out a low, nervous laugh. "Allies? Man, that's not what I see. Look at it. Four arms, moves like a damn spider. Not even a sound out of it. That ain't no ally, that's a thing."
"They take orders," Dan said, a little sharper now. "Better than half the guys in our unit, if we're being honest. What's it matter if they look weird? They bleed the bugs, not us."
Kyle kicked at a loose can, the metallic rattle bouncing down the street. "You don't get it. Stuff like that advanced doesn't just show up. Not in real life. That's some science fiction shit. What happens when sci-fi turns on us? You gonna tell me you're cool with it snapping your neck in the dark?"
Dan sighed. "Christ, Kyle, you're paranoid. The guy controls them, you think he's gonna waste his own ticket to survival by turning his machines against us? We're all he's got."
Kyle shook his head, lips tight. "Maybe. Or maybe we're just practice."
Dan turned to answer.
And froze.
A sound crawled out of the hollow ruin to their right.
Not the creak of settling beams. Not the collapse of rubble.
Skittering.
Fast, sharp, multiplied. Like a thousand cockroach legs dragging across sheet metal.
Kyle's face went pale, his rifle jerking up. "Dan…"
"Yeah." Dan's finger rested against the trigger. His breath came slow, careful. "I hear it."
The noise grew louder, echoing in the empty street.
Kyle swallowed, whisper tight. "That's not one of his."
The darkness inside the building stirred.
Something was moving.
Kyle's breath hitched. The sound in the ruins swelled until it was right on top of them.
THUNK–THUNK–THUNK.
A blur of chitin burst from the doorway, stinger raised high like a spear.
Kyle and Dan fired on instinct, rifles flashing. The rounds pinged and sparked off its carapace, barely slowing the thing.
"Shit, shit, shit!" Kyle backpedaled.
The stinger arched forward, but it never landed.
A shadow intercepted.
One of the worker constructs lunged from the side, its reinforced arms clamping down on the creature mid-charge. Metal fingers dug into chitin. With a mechanical roar of servos, the worker slammed the insect against the wall. Once. Twice. Again and again until the concrete split with each impact.
The stinger shrieked, limbs flailing, acid spraying but the worker didn't stop. It drove the bug's body into the wall hard enough that gore splattered across broken bricks.
Then, almost fluidly, a scout dropped from above. Its alloy claws flashed, plunging into the insect's neck, then ripping outward in a spray of black ichor. In seconds, the stinger was nothing but shredded meat and twitching limbs.
Silence.
Kyle froze, rifle half-raised, his body trembling. Dan just stared, lips parted.
The two constructs turned in eerie unison, silver eyes gleaming in the dark. For a second, it felt like they weren't allies, but predators deciding if the soldiers were next.
Kyle whispered, voice cracking, "Jesus Christ…"
Dan swallowed hard, lowering his weapon. "…Yeah. That's… effective."
---
Army Headquarters
Banks of monitors flickered in the dim command center, each screen showing a different angle from the constructs' feeds—rooftops, alleys, sewers, even heat-maps of buried tunnels. The stinger's death replayed across three different views at once, soldiers murmuring in disbelief.
"Jesus… it tore that thing apart like it was nothing."
"Those things think on their own?"
The commander, a broad man with deep lines around his eyes, leaned forward, one fist on the table. He didn't look away from the feed. "Send them in. All three. I want that building cleared."
---
The three constructs entered the ruin. Instantly, skitterlings poured from the shadows, their bodies scraping and clattering, acid dripping from mandibles.
The worker construct led the charge. A skitterling latched onto its leg, mandibles gnashing, acid hissing against alloy. The worker didn't flinch it simply seized the creature with its upper arms and snapped it in half like rotten wood.
A scout vaulted to the ceiling, daggers flashing as it impaled two skitterlings in mid-leap, then kicked off the wall to skewer another. The last scout grabbed a rusted pipe from the floor, swinging it like a club, sending insects flying across the room in sprays of ichor.
The soldiers at HQ murmured in awe as the machines adapted, using rubble, rebar, and broken furniture as weapons.
Within minutes, the floor was littered with twitching corpses. Acid hissed against the metal boots of the constructs, but they pressed on, implacable.
Then one scout froze, optical cluster focusing on the floor. The camera zoomed in.
A tunnel. Wide, black, freshly churned.
The commander's voice cut through HQ. "Two more. Send them in. I want eyes in that hole."
---
Five constructs dropped into the dark, alloy limbs clicking against damp stone. Their optical feeds switched to thermal, sonar, and night vision.
Skitterlings tested them, darting from cracks. Each time, a dagger, a pipe, or a drill arm ended the fight in seconds. The deeper they went, the more oppressive the air became.
Then the ground shook.
Rubble slid from the tunnel walls.
Something massive scraped forward.
The feed went dark for half a second as dust exploded through the chamber then cleared.
The burrower emerged.
Six meters of armored chitin, mandibles serrated like chainsaws. Its claws carved effortlessly through the tunnel wall as it surged forward, the entire tunnel shuddering with its movements.
"Contact!" someone shouted in HQ.
The constructs didn't retreat.
The worker in front raised its arms, drill spinning, welder flaring, and charged straight at the beast.
---
The first worker slammed into the burrower's claw, drill shrieking as it carved into the chitin. Sparks and ichor sprayed in the dark. The burrower roared, mandibles snapping down, tearing into the worker's shoulder. Alloy screamed as it was crushed.
A scout vaulted onto the creature's back, daggers plunging into gaps in the armor. The burrower bucked, smashing the ceiling with its bulk. Rocks collapsed, dust choking the feed.
Another scout darted low, seizing a chunk of rebar from the debris, then jamming it deep into the burrower's eye socket. The beast shrieked, slamming its skull against the wall, crushing the scout beneath rubble. Feed cut. One down.
The second worker grabbed the burrower's rear claw, welding torch igniting as it burned through joints. The smell of scorched chitin filled the tunnel as the claw sheared off.
The last scout sprinted up the wall, then launched itself headfirst, both daggers plunging into the exposed flesh beneath the mandibles. With a shrill screech, it twisted, severing muscle fibers.
The burrower convulsed, mandibles thrashing, clawless limb dragging against the floor.
Finally, the first worker half its torso crushed locked its arms around the burrower's head. Its drill spun up to maximum, jamming deep between the mandibles into the skull.
With a final shudder, the burrower collapsed, ichor gushing, body blocking half the tunnel.
Only four constructs still moved.
The feed showed them standing in the gore-soaked dark, alloy bodies gleaming with acid burns, waiting for orders.
In HQ, the room was silent.
Then the commander exhaled. "…Good God."