The monoliths continued to rotate flat even as the humans peered at the odd xenos in what appeared to be some sort of ancient sarcophagus. Junebugs tried turning her helmet on again to get a better sense of the thing but was rewarded only with the same chaotic mass of conflicting inputs as before.

“It’s dead,” Taya said, her hand held scanner evidently much better able to cut through the weird sensor anomalies. Junebug turned slowly her rifle at high porte taking in the vast landscape of monoliths. If they all contained corpses then the necropolis was vast indeed. In the direction of the center of the domed space stood an oddly asymmetric pyramid, visible now only because the forest of monoliths had flattened. The range finders were as useless as everything else, but the naked eye suggested that it was two or three hundred meters away. Sayeeda glanced at Sven, if the cyborg was struggling with the odd sensor anomalies he gave no sign, his face its usual impassive mask.

“Look this isn’t my rodeo but we have men missing, Neil acting weird, we should pull…”

“No,” York declared, not loud but firm, “If Captain Tiberius can't out maneuver the Chalcedons they will reduce this place to magma.” 

“Seems like another good reason not to …” there was a sudden odd keening noise and everyone spun to face the corpse of the xenos. One of the soldiers pulled his hand away guiltily. Woods opened her mouth to shout something but with the suddenness of a bomb blast the discs spun into motion, slicing the offending marine into blood soaked ribbons. Pandemonium errupted as the humans opened fire at the tide of razor sharp discs. Sayeeda fired one handed, reducing several of the alien artifacts to powder with a short burst. Saxon raised and arm and spurted flame from his cannon, showering the ground with clattering casings.

“The exit has closed,” Sven observed as he batted a darting disc aside with his knife, sending it smashing into another of the flat monolith/sarcophagui. Sayeeda grabbed Neil by the back of his tunic and  gave him a shove in the direction of the pyramid, the pilot made a few stumbling steps before returning to a stop. The whole sky seemed to be alive with buzzing discs as they descended in torrents, consuming another marine in a heartbeat. Sayeeda pulled a grenade from her belt with one hand and seized Taya with the other, throwing the girl bodily towards the pyramid.

“Fire in the hole!” she screamed and hurled the grenade into the thickest concentration of discs, turning in the same motion to throw herself over Taya, protecting the younger womans face and ears. The primer charge went off with a pop that sprayed a mist of hydrocarbon based fuel into the air a heart beat before the igniter charge kicked off the fuel air explosion. The shockwave tossed the humans sprawling and sucked all the available air from the atmosphere in a minature mushroom cloud. Sayeeda’s eardrums were saved only by her helmet but the shock was still literally stunning. As soon as she could make her limbs move she scooped up Taya who seemed dazed but unharmed. A few marines still fires sporadically but that was panic fire rather than anything particularly aimed.

“Pick him up!” Junebug shouted to Saxon, indicating Neil who had been knocked sprawling, he had been a little further from the blast and seemed to be ok if still inactive. The reptile shook his head, though possibly it was more in confusion than in refusal. York grabbed Neil and through him over his shoulder in a pack strap carry and bounded away in the direction of the pyramid, he must have been immensely strong to manage such a feat and he showed more good sense than the rest of them.  In the sky more discs were descending to fill the smoking void that the grenade had cleared, it looked to Sayeeda like water gouts bursting from a dam about to fail.

“Move!” she screamed at the remaining marines but they were already moving back, Woods and her people falling back into a rough semicircle which surrounded York and Neil. Sayeeda half pushed, half carried the stunned Taya, continuing to fire into the approaching storm. One of the marines had what must have been a heavy breaching shotgun that boomed with the rhythmic percussion of a vast drum smashing half a dozen discs from the sky with each report. The air stank of something that smells vaguely like burning lavender mixing with the sweet stink of cordite and the tang of ozone. 

“I’m ok!” Taya screamed pulling free of Junebugs grip and freeing her arm to bring her rifle up to her shoulder. She squeezed the trigger on full automatic emptying her magazine and stripping the clip before slotting home another. One of the marines stumbled over a sarcophagus and lost a hand to one of the darting disc, he opened his mouth to scream a heart beat before three more slice him to offal. 

York, in addition to being inhumanly strong, seemed inhumanly fast having covered half the distance to the pyramid already, even burdened with the weakly struggling Neil. He leaped from sarcophagus to sarcophagus with the grace of a nanny goat. Sayeeda tossed another grenade into the mass of discs and followed, moving further the the flank as the circle around York shrank as more and more discs hurtled towards them. Woods shouted orders to her men but it was only discipline and skill that kept them in a remotely survivable formation. A disc slashed across Sayeeda’s chest and she was pitched backwards by the force of it. Flecks of ceramic splashed in all directions scaring a deep trough in her breastplate. For a moment she thought she was finished but Saxon grabbed her by the collar and yanked her back into the line, turning the air in front of her into varicoloured dust with a long burst of his cannon.

“There is an opening!” Taya shouted, audible only over the comm net, even though she was only a few feet away. York pitched Neil through like a sack of flour and turned like a duelist, his elegant pistol in his hand. He fired twenty rounds in an eyeblink each one smashing one of the discs to ruin. Sayeeda followed Taya through opening, a black hole about two meters tall and fringed by lintels of the same color as the monolith. Two more marines followed her before Sven and Woods, the final two survivors leaped into the gap, Woods’ sub machine gun still spitting on full automatic. She pulled a metal half cylinder fom her belt and slapped it to the ground. There was a momentary whine and then the doorway shimmered with a bluish purple light. Sayeeda had just enough time to recognise a breaching force shield before discs began to slam into the barrier, ricocheting off with weird warbling sounds. 

The interior of the room was another oddly asymmetric hexagon with four hallways leading off from the sides which didn’t parallel a wall. Junebugs mind couldn’t quite figure out exactly how such a arrangement was set up inside the pyramid but it hardly mattered at the moment. The walls were covered with strange symbols which were obviously of a type with the tattoo on Niels hand and others they had seen in the bunker on the equator. There was no natural illumination but the weapons that Junebug and the marines carried glowed with the heat waste of extended firing, ranging from red to white in the case of the man with shotgun. The barrel of the weapon was visibly warped and Junebug wouldn’t have wanted to bet her life that the next round wouldn’t have catastrophically detonated the weapon. The marine obviously agreed with the assessment because he touched a stud and the barrel fell free, hitting the ground and deforming as the almost molten metal struck the floor. He took a spare barrel from a belt pack and slotted it into place. Junebug stripped the remainder of her own clip and replaced it with a fresh magazine, her own barrel was shimmering down from orange to a sullen red and she took a pair of chemical lights from her webbing, pulled the pins and tossed them to either end of the room against the moment when the heat light had completely faded.

“This shield wont hold…” Woods began but York was already pressing Neil’s hand to one of the designs on the wall. A heavy sheet of ceramic slid down, sealing the door with a boom. The sound of discs striking the panel continued for another two or three seconds and then ceased, leaving the survivors in silence save for laboured breathing and the whir of overheated electronics.