Free So It Begins by Mike McPhail (Ed) Page A

machines. They dropped about thirty per continent to start, and within days 15,000 hungry, newborn Frek bastards shocked the world. What’s worse is about thirty Frek out of every litter were female. Those things mature, mate, and reproduce in a matter of weeks. Soon as we caught on to that, we made hunting the brood-mothers a priority. It wasn’t enough.
      That’s when the scorched earth campaigns began.
      We started with full nukes.
      Freks burned to cinders in the blasts, but the radiation barely slowed the survivors. It did have the benefit of sterilizing them, which made them easier to fight without worrying about picking up some Frek microbe that would blind you or turn your organs to slush. So far the white-coat grunts have identified about thirteen separate bacterial strains the Frek brought to Earth, seven of which are deadly to humans. They’re working on cures and vaccines, but anything better than the crude, imperfect immunization shots they give us in bootcamp is a long way off. You catch a Frek death germ and get sick, you may as well throw yourself in front of a firegun for all the medics can help you. Thank God, the Frek bugs haven’t mutated to airborne or human-to-human transmission yet.
      Centcom switched to skybusters, which had about the same effect as nukes but without spreading as much fallout. The sterilization campaigns began in earnest then.
      They say Africa is clear of Freks now. Thing is, it’s also pretty much clear of humans. No one’s sure we really won that battle.
      The Frek control half of Asia and all of South America. Bombing runs along their perimeter 24/7 keep them in check.
      Australia has fared pretty well with about half the country still habitable and mostly Frek free.
      Europe and North America still hang in the balance.
      That’s where Rook’s Raiders and a million other grunts came in. We were trained in the western deserts where the Frek never landed and then shipped east and north where the Frek are the densest. Now it was time to go see what there was to kill.
      Fighting Frek isn’t easy.
      The children have skin like a beetle’s carapace, and they can launch razor-sharp quills from their upper legs. Shooting the bastards five or six times usually drops them. Grenades are better. The only thing that makes it manageable is they’re stupid and impulsive, and they tend to come running straight at you. They’re fast, though. If you let one through, there’s not much you can do but pray somebody’s got your back.
      The brood-mothers are worse.
      They’re about the size of personnel helicopters. Soon as they finish giving birth, they’re back on all ten feet fighting. They spit streams of the vilest soup imaginable. It’ll burn you bad. Guys who are allergic to it go anaphylactic and drop dead in seconds. The worst of the germs comes from the birther spit. You might survive being doused, but you’ll spend a couple of months in D and Q, shaved hairless and having layers of skin flash-burned off you, while robot medics prick you and pop tubes into all your available orifices three times a day.
      The mothers are uglier than the kids too.
      They lumber around like octopi with stilts rammed into their tentacles. Their heads are flat and stretched into squares, and they got five big, red eyes that never blink.
      I’ve never seen one in person, but they showed us plenty of vid records in bootcamp. Every grunt and officer gets a camera chip implanted in their skull beside their left eye, so every soldier is a cameraman. That’s created a bounty of raw battlefield footage, and the top brass use it liberally.
      That shit’ll give you nightmares.
     
      We made our rendezvous, and my first thought was someone at Centcom has a wicked sense of humor. That’s the only explanation I can muster for why they cloned Peter Lorre to lead the Special Forces team. It wasn’t only him, either. Although the other spooks hung back in the shadows,