 illy White had been a member of the Marine Corp until she had retired a few years ago. The reason that she'd given to the company founding the colony was that she'd grown tired with all of the travelling and wanted to settle down on a new colony world that could provide her with some of the challenge her life had been lacking recently.
The real reason was that she was fed up seeing all of her friends getting wiped out on bug hunts. She and Sarah, the woman she was teamed with in the search for Sam, were all that was left of an entire squadron that had been dispatched to investigate alleged Dalek sightings on the lush green research world of Corbet Sigma.
‘Alleged' - huh. There were Daleks alright, and they'd managed to overrun the entire planet. The handful of survivors had to evacuate the planet which was then sterilised from orbit wiping out the Daleks and taking out everything else, making the planet geologically unstable and unfit to support life for the next two thousand years. She and Sarah were the only survivors from the squadron on that hunt. They had decided to make a fresh start together and when the positions for security jobs had come up on a new colony world they'd both applied. They had both been accepted which was hardly surprising considering all of their training and experience. And now here they were with the threat of alien encounters once again.
'You alright, Billy?' Sarah asked. Sarah was aware of Billy's feelings towards aliens, her own were not as strong although she had had a healthy dislike of any bug that got in her way. She left the Marines to be with Billy, they'd been lovers for a long time and had married shortly before coming to Minardi Prime.
'Yeah, sure Sarah.' Billy replied but Sarah could hear uncertainty in her voice, even over the environmental suit's radio.
'Stop chattering you lot and concentrate on the task we're here to do.' Harry's voice said over the radio. Billy smiled at the face Sarah pulled behind her face-plate and mouthed the word 'bossy' at Sarah who smiled back easing the tension she was feeling.
The squad had now moved around most of the wall and Billy gasped when she saw the ship in the distance. It was big and sleek, not a design that she recognised. Harry's voice came over the radio telling everyone to keep an eye out and then she heard him reporting back to base what they'd found.
As she was doing so, Billy caught a flicker of movement off to her right and as she turned towards it, she saw the flash and heard the crack of a disrupter as three of the squad collapsed, lifeless. Her mind reeled with terror but years of training and experience kicked in and she dived behind what little cover the landscape offered landing heavily beside Sarah. Billy felt herself tremble as a sob escaped from her mouth. She felt Sarah's hand grasp her own and heard her soothing voice say, 'We've got to keep it together, Billy!'
Billy nodded as she heard the peel of the squad's laser rifles and that same crack of the enemy's disrupters that had accompanied the deaths she had just witnessed. She heard one of the squad scream in dying agony as Sarah leapt to her feet, rifle at the ready.
Billy followed Sarah's actions and found herself confronted by what appeared to be six robots or aliens in strange environmental suits. She however did not recognise the two metre tall creatures. Again, her training kicked in and her rifle snapped up and pointed at one of the creatures. She fired instinctively not knowing how unlikely it was that her rifle would cause any damage to their enemy. One of the creatures raised its weapon in slow and precise movements and aiming towards her and Sarah fired.
Billy felt an overwhelming burning sensation rip throughout her body as each of her cells caught fire. her soulless body collapsed heavily to the floor.
'Billy! Nooo!' screamed Sarah, a fearsome rage filled her as she fired shot after shot against the murders of the woman she loved so much. As her body spasmed with the shock from the disrupter burst that smashed into her, she smiled knowingly that Billy's killer had just exploded under the barrage from her rifle.
'Harry, what the hell's going on out there?!' Jim screamed into his microphone. The control room was filled with the agonising death screams of the squad and their pleas for help. The monitors on the opposite wall showed the life signs of the squad, too many bearing the flat lines that signalled death. Two of the monitors showed the picture from helmet-mounted cameras worn by some of the squad, one of those now showed only a burst of static.
Jim heard the door to his right open and saw Dwight, who he'd frantically called to the control centre only a few seconds ago, enter along with a stranger. Harry's desperate voice burst through the sounds made by the rest of the squad.
'Help us! We're being slaughtered! Our guns are no good, they're too strong!!'
Jim saw the stranger staring at the picture from the surviving camera as he said, in a voice filled with dread, 'Cybermen.' The stranger turned to Jim and said, 'Get them out of there immediately, they don't stand a chance.'
Jim flipped on is transmitter and said, 'Harry? Harry, are you there? This is control to all squad members, pull back, I said pull back!'
Harry's voice again cut over the agonised sounds from the rest of the squad. 'Jim, they'll all around us, there's so many of them! We can't retreat, we've got to fight!'
Jim looked up into the eyes of the stranger which seemed to be full of a deep sadness. The stranger said in a chocked voice, 'Then they're all dead.'
END OF PART ONE
written by
STUART BROWN
copyright 2009
artwork by
COLIN JOHN
JOE McINTYRE
copyright 2009
  
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everyones bad day page4
