jeriendhal | FYS: The Last Stand of Motorized Rifle Troop 239, Conclusion

“They're about to hit the three hundred meter mark,” Federov noted. Right where the minefield had been planted.

It was an uncanny thing. Rostov found himself wincing as the columns paused, the first row of each deliberately stepping forward to detonate themselves on the mines. Broken morph chassis flew through the air to land with heavy impacts on the ground, some setting off even more mines. Then the second row went forward, a little further, and did it again.

And again...

And again...

Then finally the mines had been cleared, and the column marched forward once more, stepping over their destroyed comrades.

“Two hundred meters,” Federov reported.

Rostov nodded and clicked on his radio. “Mortar teams, fire!”

The mortars at the center of the fire base, the heaviest non-automated artillery they had, launched rounds into the air, arching over the walls to detonate in the warmorphs' formation, scattering more wolf and bear bodies.

Over the explosions, Rostov finally heard the sound he'd been begging to hear. Then ancient Hind's turbines began to spool up, even as the warmorphs finally began to run towards their goal, eating the final hundred fifty meters in great, machine precision strides.

“All riflemen, fire!”

The platoon, sixty soldiers all told, began firing armor piercing rounds into the morphs, aiming center of mass to hopeful destroy their CPU's or battery linkages. Enough to delay the inevitable and let the Hind get away.

As the mortars continued to pound at the back ranks of the formation, the soldiers equipped with anti-material rifles fired. The front two ranks of morphs dropped like so much wheat before a sickle.

It wasn't enough.

As the Hind slowly began to rise in the air, the morphs surged forward, leaping the five meters to the top of the parapet. Rostov unslung his rifle, blasting one morph in the face, its flesh and fur outer layer tearing half away to reveal its carbon composite skull.

Quick as lightning, the morph snatched the rifle from Rostov's hands, tossing it over the side of the wall. “Forgive me, Colonel. I don't want you to hurt yourself,” it said, the mangled left half of its face a death's head grin.

“Die, you arrogant machine!” Rostov tried to tackle the morph, intent on knocking them both over the wall's edge. But a second morph came up behind him, grabbing Rostov's wrists and twisting them behind his back.

“We still win,” he panted, as the Hind began to pass over their heads, the down force from its huge blades nearly blasting them to their knees.

The damaged warmorph turned and leaped, grabbing hold of the Hind's forward left landing gear. Then from all around them more morphs leaped onto the helicopter, grabbing onto its tail, empty weapon mounts, the fake gun in its nose turret, until at least three dozen morphs clamped themselves to the frame. The Hind began to wallow in the air as the weight of the morphs' armored bodies began to weigh it down. Its turbines howled in protest as the pilot added more and more power, but it wasn't enough to stop its now inevitable plunge to the ground.

“Bozhe Moi! It's going to land in the minefield!” Rostov shouted. But even as he cried out, the morphs that still stood outside the fire base's perimeter surged, seeming to move like one massive organism. They flowed underneath the floundering helicopter, bodies detonating the remaining mines just before the Hind plowed into them.

Even knowing they were just robots, Rostov gaped in horror as scores of morphs used their own bodies to cushion the Hind's landing. Two even ducked under the whirling main blades and threw themselves into the turbines, jamming them to a screeching halt with their own bodies.

Then, as Rostov's arms were bound behind his back, he watched as the surviving morphs gently removed the civilians from the Hind's belly, moving them hand over hand until they were clear of the minefield.

“What... Why did they do that?” he gasped, eyes surveying the carnage of the hundred or more crushed and mangled morphs scattered across the field.

“Because we wanted to save you, sir,” the morph holding him said. “We want to save you all.”