“Contact! South, twenty-five hundred meters, cat-size this time,” Ramirez called out.

 

“Mortars, my mark.” Lieutenant Averil said. On her helmet screen, she magnified the seething swarm of centipede-like Squishies surging towards hill K-742.

 

Two thousand meters: “Mark.” Thumps of 80mm mortar fire began. Detonations sent boiling plasma waves rolling across the sea of aliens, searing them to ashes.

 

Fifteen hundred meters: Averil ordered the mounted nine-barrel to engage, eight thousand rpm stitching across the roiling mass.

 

Twelve hundred meters: Gronkowski opened up with his tri-barrel, followed immediately by Averil’s remaining marines, X-101 railgun rifles sending thousands of ferromagnetic slivers downhill. Plumes of shredded legs and fangs erupted. Squishies were almost nothing but legs and teeth; ‘forcipules’ Stillman ‘Brainiac’ Brown called them. Sergeant Cormick, usually unflappable, insisted even the legs had teeth.

 

One hundred meters: Recently laid mines detonated. Then grenades. Then three old-fashioned, still brutally effective, flamethrowers roasting Squishies until the tanks ran dry. The remaining creepy-crawlies quickly overran the barricade of empty crates her twenty-three marines had formed below K-742’s crest. Averil’s helmet computer estimated 98% killed. Frack, she thought, 2% was going to hurt.

 

Zero meters: Boots, fists, and rifle butts. Squishy exoskeletons were quite thin; hence, ‘Squishy.’ But their copious razor-sharp edged legs, and equally numerous neurotoxin-laced mandibles, quickly gouged through standard marine body armor and the underlying anti-ballistic combat sleeves. Encased flesh and bone stood no chance.

 

When Averil’s ichor-covered boot stomped the last Squishy, only Gronk and Cormick, his left arm sheared off, remained. Before Averil could breathe relief, everything snapped to black.

 

* * *

 

Lieutenant Averil opened her eyes and looked down from atop hill K-742.

 

“A-fracking-gain,” Gronk groaned. “We won last time!”

 

“You fracking won — I fracking died.” Ramirez said, “But I tell you man, it’s not a training sim, it’s psychological experimentation — see how long we stay sane.”

 

Another chimed in: “It’s an AI game world. We’re not clearing this level correctly, so keep respawning at the same save point.”

 

“No way! Our minds keep jumping back in time to our current bodies. That’s why we never start tired or hungry.”

 

Brainiac opened his mouth, but Cormick cut him off. “Stow it, y’all.” He pointed at the factory-pristine gear containers always waiting when the marines resurrected atop K-742. “Clock’s ticking.”

 

Right on schedule, one thousand seconds after the marines regained consciousness, “Contact, twenty degrees southwest, twenty-five hundred meters, airborne. Looks like a huge gnat swarm.”

 

“Frack! I hate flyers!” Gronk said.

 

“Set mortars for air detonation. Fire on my mark.”

 

Lieutenant Averil and her marines lost. These Squishies really were gnat-sized — they over-flew the mines. Bullets were useless. Flamethrowers decimated huge swaths of what survived the mortars, but more than enough remained, avoiding swatting hands, to get into eyes, ears, mouths. Averil watched her marines get eaten from the inside out before experiencing it herself.

 

* * *

 

Lieutenant Averil opened her eyes and looked down from atop hill K-742.

 

“How many fracking times already?” Gronk groaned.

 

Everyone looked at Brainiac.

 

“Excluding our actual deployment on K-742, four hundred nineteen.”

 

Averil vividly recalled the first iteration. Unaware donning sleeves and armor was necessary, they’d mostly still been in skivvies amidst partially unloaded crates, trying to fathom what was happening, when a Squishy tsunami skittered up the hill.

 

But that real defense of K-742? Hazy. She’d had her whole forty-two-marine platoon, and a full company, perhaps, around her. Seemed to recall more Squishies and less ammunition. Then a huge concussive thump from behind, like the fracking flyboys had missed their drop zone. Ground suddenly in her face and darkness.

 

Her personal front-runner theory, which she wasn’t sharing: she was dead, in Hell, watching her marines die repeatedly, winning just enough to tease her into hoping she might eventually save them. Still, she was a marine. She’d never give up.

 

Cormick pointed at the crates, “Clock’s still ticking.”

 

They won this iteration — barely.

 

* * *

 

On iteration four hundred eighty, Brainiac, who’d taken to almost non-stop calculation muttering, suddenly sat on the ground, head in hands. Averil raised her palm to stay Cormack’s ass-chewing ‘encouragement’. She crouched next to Brown.

 

“This isn’t us, this isn’t —”

 

“What isn’t us?” she asked quietly.

 

Brainiac patted the ground. “This is them. Same humans, same firepower — test repeatedly against different arrangements of a fixed mass. See how we learn and adapt, until they find a configuration that wins, no matter what we do, with something like a 95% confidence level.”

 

“They’re running this?” Averil said incredulously, “They’re just fracking bugs.”

 

“A hive mind maybe, or something else controlling them. But our fighting and dying incessantly is them figuring out how to beat humanity.”

 

Averil pondered this possibility. It made her private Hell theory look good by comparison.

 

“What happens when they make the level?”

 

“Test over and they eliminate humanity. Or test again with a different mass constant. I don’t know, not enough data points.”

 

“Then we’d best survive this iteration, Corporal.”

 

The Squishies won again.

 

* * *

 

Lieutenant Averil opened her eyes and looked down from atop hill K-742. Before anyone could move towards the crates, she had Brainiac tell the rest his hypothesis.

 

“Do we have options?” Cormick asked.

 

“Win enough so they never achieve their confidence level or do nothing — stop giving them useful data.”

 

“We haven’t been doing so hot lately.” Gronk said.

 

“So you're asking us to just shoot ourselves? To sit down and let ourselves get eaten alive, when we have a shit-ton of firepower? The dying part really fracking hurts.” Ramirez said.

 

Brainiac nodded.

 

“Marines never give up, man!” Ramirez countered.

 

“Indeed, Ramirez,” Averil said, “but more importantly, marines find a way. We have no control over whatever this is. If Brown is right, for humanity’s sake, our best option may be depriving the enemy of information.”

 

* * *

 

Two hundred nine excruciating iterations later, the Hive-Queens judged the experiment inconclusive and unlikely to generate further useful data. They flushed the twenty-four human brains from the biotic matrix connecting them to the Hive’s simulation of K-742. The marines had found a way.