The Story

  Long shadows claw desperately away from your dusty combat boots, fueled by the relentless sun of a late Texas afternoon. Shading your eyes against the glare, you squint for the thousandth time at the line of soldiers ahead of you. It stretches on endlessly across the rubble, disappearing at last into the cool shadows of a troop carrier. Soon you'll walk up the ramp into the ship, climb into your one-man cocoon, tear through the interplanetary gateway, and smash down light-years away from the blowing sand and blasted ruins that surround the Dallas-Metro crater.

  "What the hell is taking so long?!" you snarl, slamming the battered barrel of your sidearm, your blaster, against your scarred palm. "I've waited long enough. Time to kick some Strogg ass..."

  Slightly rocking back and forth under the sweltering August sun, you spit out of the side of your mouth, rub your eyes, and think back to the day when the wretched creatures first attacked. Like flaming metoers, their crafts pounded into the Earth and unbelievably, these bio-mechanized aliens...these hideous cyborgs...swarmed out while their ships still sizzled with reentry heat. They killed or captured anything that lived. We figured that the Strogg were after our planet's resources: minerals, metals, and water; things like that. But their onboard storage facilities did little to disguuise what they considered to be resources: fleshy limbs and organs for new cyborgs, and of course, food.

  The line moves. And moves again. Into the cool shadows at last. The assembled armies branch off into new lines divided by corps and unit.