War Metal – After the Wyrm

I watched as our rag-tag forces surrounded the body of the Wyrm, their cries of victory echoing across the camps central square. The aerial drones that had come to our aid circled high overhead as the lead Cerberus unit left the formation and began to descend towards the flat ground outside the camp. I headed towards the gate, and as I covered the distance I was aware that I wasn’t the only one who was going out to meet our saviours. Natasha, Anastasia and even Sirius were heading the same way along with a couple of hundred of our own defenders. As the Cerberus unit landed it was immediately surrounded by the cheering crowd and I had to fight my way through to the front, breaking clear just as the side door slide open revealing the tall broad figure of Lord Alexander himself, a stern look on his face as he looked over our camp, his eyes taking in every detail as he analysed our resources. He didn’t look impressed.

I grabbed Natashas arm as we moved towards the craft and whispered urgently

“We need to find out all we can about the resources further North”

“Leave it to Sirius” she replied “I’ve already spoken to him about it. We’ve been monitoring some interesting radio chatter for the last month and I think he has a plan to form an alliance.”

“Well I hope so, we were lucky today but how long can we be lucky for?”

We walked forward together as Lord Alexander descended from the Cerberus, his physical presence impressive even at a distance. Sirius and Anastasia beat us to him by a few seconds and were already in conversation when we got there, their tones hushed, barely audible over the hubbub of the crowd but it seemed that the conversation was going the right way. I could just hear Sirius starting to ask about what had been happening at other camps, and how contact between camps was going. We started to move back towards the camp, the crowd coming with us as we walked back towards the Command Centre. Once inside the real work began.

It transpired that the camps up country had already started to forge links and alliances between each other, sharing information and resources, backing each other up against outside threats and beginning to rebuilt the defensive technology that we had all lost. So far the Northern camps had not been hit by Wyrms confirming our own suspicions that they were coming up from the South, but we got an understanding of why his Lordships forces had re-engineered drones as his next piece of information came as a complete shock.

“We may not be having your Wyrm problem, but there is something else that we have been seeing that is causing us just as much of a headache”

Sirius looked alarmed as Lord Alexander continued

“We’ve been having what we thought were meteor showers for about the last three months coming out of the polar North skies. We didn’t give them much thought at first but about two weeks after the first shower a base about a hundred miles from where the meteors feel suddenly stopped communicating. We sent out a scout party and they found the camp completely destroyed. It was a week after that that we were hit for the first time”

“What happened” Sirius asked

“We were attacked from the North West by a group of flying beasts blasting our camp with fireballs. We managed to hold them off and when we analysed the remnants of some of the creatures that we shot down we found that their chemical profile wasn’t like anything that we had seen before. The only match we found was with the chemical composition of the meteorites that had fallen. We can only assume that these meteorites are transport systems of some kind, something like eggs, from which these creatures hatch. Once they have hatched they swarm up and attack the nearest camp, destroying everything they can. We have called the Hatchling Swarms…..”

There was shocked silence for a moment then everyone started shouting at once until Anastasia cut through the questions with one of her own

“How can we help?”