“So what do you think John? Asked the Bob-bot.


    “Ah thank Christ!”  all eyes pivoted to Reg.  “Whut?  I was worried ye’d ask me first.”


    The team had appeared near a purple sea.  The coast stretched away to both sides behind them, weirdly coloured waves lapping softly against the pink sand.


    “Well it’s pretty enough?” offered John with a mechanical shrug.


    With the alien coast behind them they were faced with a vast plain of pink, grey and black that gradually rose up to mountains in the far distance.   Evie scuffed her armoured foot, throwing a shower of pink sand a couple of metres ahead of her.  They hadn’t had the option of choosing their own deployment site this time.  After another four months of boredom and cards with the Shrell they’d received ten minutes notice before the system teleported them off the ship and down to a moon of MW-537 to clear a continent infested with void monsters.


    MW-537 was a gas giant and it loomed large in the sky above, partially eclipsed by a series of debris rings orbiting its equator.  The brown and blue giant cast an eerie light across the land they had been sent to conquer.  The briefing had included a short description of the history of the planet.  A sentient species of slug-like things had been inducted into the system, survived their waves but had fallen to the Void.  They had been sent to wipe them all out.


    “Can we just nuke it?” asked Evie.  “Dad can drop some, Vic can toast it, the rest of us will do our bits and then we can all go home for tea, crumpets and medals.”


    “I guess?” replied John.  I don’t have any custom rocks here.  I’ll have to rip chunks out of the surface.”


    “Are you really worried about damaging the planet we’ve been sent here to slag?” asked Vic, one eyebrow raised.  Her face was hidden in her heavy outer armour but her tone made it clear an eyebrow had been elevated.


    “Um-” John began but Bob cut him off.


    “We should try and preserve the world if we can, so no really big rocks John.  I’ve got an idea you’ll like but we need to at least keep the moon intact.”


    “What the hell for?” grumbled Reg.


    “There is no need to destroy unless we have to!  I agree with the robot!” chimed in Felix.


    “Robot!” echoed Felicity.  “What is on your mind tin-man?”


    “I’m not a bloody- never mind.  We can set up another portal.  Drones can come through, probably some of Pete and Shelly’s little pets as well.  This could be a permanent extra-solar colony!  Imagine the resources, the biological samples- hell even Void tech!  We can’t wreck up the place too much!”


    “You would seek to benefit from the Dark?  I am not sure I agree with that.  We must fight for the light,” muttered Felicity.


    “Know thy enemy, girl,” said Reg.  “So we can’t blow up the moon to get this done quick.  John, what’re your magic eyes seeing?”


    John scowled but twisted his vision to see clearly.  He narrowed his perception the the hundred or so miles in front of him and his scowl became a grimace.


    “It’s like an ant hive.  Those surface structures-” he waved at the dark grey towers looming out of the arid plain, “-are the tip of the iceberg.  It’s all one huge nest connected underground.  There’s bloody millions of the things crawling about under the surface.  They won’t go near the water for some reason, the nest starts about ten miles from the coast.”


    “So we’ve got a safe beachhead.  Get a portal going and we’ll set up proper comms with Earth and bring through some support drones,” Bob laughed, rubbing his metal hands together in anticipation of an entire world to exploit.


    Doris towered behind them, shoulder mounted cannons and launch tubes tracking slowly back and forth as Bob pulled data from John’s senses.  The sight was profoundly reassuring.  There wasn’t much outside of very high level enemies that could rush them.  Having your back to the sea was great in a way but it also meant they had very few options if they did need to retreat.


    John reached out and twisted, ripping a hole in reality that linked Earth to this place, somewhere that wouldn’t even be a glint in the sky from their homeworld.  He glanced at his reserves as they quickly began to tick back up.  Being on a new world, infested with an ancient enemy that has had centuries to dig in and being short on reserves left him feeling twitchier than usual.


    Spider-bots began pouring through the portal, laden down with crates and materials.  Bob-prime began moving among the goods being delivered and soon fortified positions were being thrown up with automated weapons coming online and starting to join Doris in her constant vigilance.Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.


    “I’ll send some clones to do some recon?” offered Sam.


    “Thanks.”  A column of B-1945s, outdated models since the tech Bob had stolen from Hagrutship had begun to be incorporated, peeled off and followed the fifty clones of Sam that appeared and began to spread out towards the inland.


    “The air’s good at least,” said Sam.  “Having clones suffocate in waves sucked.”  Raoul reached out and rested a hand on her armoured shoulder for a moment.


    “So can I get out of this suit and go big?” he rumbled.


    “Sure.  Just don’t go stomping around yet,” muttered Bob.  Raoul’s armour cracked open down the right side and he awkwardly climbed out.  As soon as he was clear the armour closed itself and moved over to stand guard by the portal.  Raoul grew to half his maximum size, looking like a child next to their mother as he stood next to Doris.  His armour and weapons appeared and he began glowering at the blank landscape as well.


    “We’ve got some movement,” called John.  He could see slug-like creatures flowing through the subterranean tunnels towards the nearest towers.  Some had already come up onto the surface and were fanning out to secure the exit points.  “The ones on the surface are only level tens so far.  The odd one is a bit higher, up to fifteen but nothing we need to sweat about.”


    “How many?” muttered Evie.  She was a little nervous that her big hitter, the lightning barrage, would even work on this world.  There were no clouds in the sky, either they’d appeared on a remarkably nice day or the water cycle was a bit weird here.


    “Too many to count.  There’s about ten thousand on the surface now.” John grumbled.  “I need to get some rocks in the air.”


    “Nah, look up ye fecking eejit!” scoffed Reg.  All eyes turned upwards.


    “I can’t drop a fucking gas giant on them!”


    “Bloody Sassenach wanker,” Reg muttered.  “What’s going around the planet above us, ye genius?”


    “Rings?  Isn’t that just ice?  I’m pretty sure it isn’t as closely  packed as you’d expect.  It looks solid from a few million miles away but up close it’s all spread out,” said Evie.


    “Go check, Englishman.  We’re not going to be swarmed in the next few minutes are we?” Reg asked.  John checked his reserves.  He once again had a comfortable leeway.


    “Ok.  Be right back.”


    John vanished into the sky and moved close to the orbital ring in three quick blips.  He stopped well back from the streams of frozen rock and ice so he could watch the stream flowing round the gas giant.  He’d never taken the time to blip out to Saturn when he’d been back home but now he wished he had.  The plant below occupied almost three quarters of his vision and he began marking points in the orbit where he would pick up the smaller particles flying round at the edge of the ring.  He was slightly irritated that Reg hadn’t been totally wrong but either way he now had a bunch of coordinates to use to open portals into the vacuum.


    He blipped back to his team and shrugged, armour clattering as the pauldrons moved.


    “No good,” he said.


    “Whut?  Did ye even really look?” demanded Reg angrily.


    “Yeah I looked.  It should work.  It’ll be like turning on a frozen hose or something.  I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of it but it shouldn’t fuck up the planet too much,” John laughed.


    “My planet, thanks very much,” snapped Bob.  “Ok.  Frozen hose the bastards then!”


    John opened a temporary portal linking the outer band of the rings to one he summoned above them and a few miles in land.  He set it up so the ice and rocks flew in one side and erupted into the atmosphere from the side of the portal aimed at the distant towers.  It turned out John and Reg had neglected one minor issue.


    The improvised projectiles retained their momentum.  The same momentum that kept them in orbit above the massive gravity well of a gas giant.  It was almost impossible to track them as they tore out and battered instantly into the land below them.  John tracked the portal upwards, then panned it left and right.  Where the beam of matter erupting from the portal hit the ground it flashed into dust and white hot flames.  The clouds of steam and particles blasting into the sky like mushroom clouds, quickly obscuring the once clear sky.


    John snapped the portal shut and a heavy silence fell over the team.


    “What part of don’t destroy THE FUCKING PLANET WAS I NOT CLEAR ON?” screamed a B-3000.


    “Oops?” said John as Vic and Evie began laughing.


    “Don’t worry love, it was a fixer-upper anyway,” Vic chuckled.


    “It was Reg’s fault, right?” Evie giggled.  Reg turned to glower at her, forgetting that his face was hidden by his helm.


    “It feckin’ wasn’t!  Not my fault yon John is touched in the head!” he complained.


    “John, can you please confirm how much of my planet you just nuked?” said Bob in a tight voice.


    John looked over the devastation he had accidentally wrought.  The impacts had been significant, leaving half mile wide lines cut into the surface where he had tracked the death-beam.  Underground structures had collapsed and anything on the surface had been vaporised across a fifty mile swath of the plains.


    Team Report:


    Void Creatures killed (various levels): 746310


    Essence gained per kill: 0


    Total Essence gained per team member: 0


    “Well I think I thinned the herd a bit.  Kind of surprised I didn’t get anything worth any Essence at all,” he muttered.


    “No Essence for three quarter of a million kills?  That’s bullshit!  What was that?  Did you set the portal to only kill babies or something?” Evie complained.


    “Um… not deliberately?” said John.


    “I don’t think you can get a genocide award from the system for killing little ones, love.  It won’t be on your permanent record,” said Vic, patting John on the back with a clang.


    “They are creatures of Darkness and we are on the side of the Light.  We can do no evil here, do not trouble yourself with worry for the antithesis of life, Saint,” said Felix.


    “Saint.  Anything we do here is good,” added Felicity.


    “I’m not worried about having killed low level Void-things for god''s sake!”  John snapped.


    “Then what’s the problem?” asked Flash.


    “I can see their mum.  She’s fucking huge and looks really pissed off.  I hope Doris and Raoul are up to this.  I’d probably kill the moon before I could take it down.  Well boys and girls, time to face a level fifty two Void monster.  I’m sure it will be educational.”


    He began blipping chunks of rock from the ravaged world into the sky to let them build momentum.  He missed his custom K.E.W.s from home already.